deep into the long tail

According to the Yucatec Maya, Gods made people out of corn. And as I learned while making tortillas in the Yucatan a few years ago, the Yucatecs know how to make lots of things out of corn too. Meanwhile, Iron Chef is all about getting versatile with one ingredient. If flying them into the studio is too costly, Iron Chef could subsidize the cost of videochatting/lifecasting/otherwise inexpensively hacking Yucatec chefs onto the show. And considering their textile design and weaving skills, the same could go for Project Runway. Seemingly unrealistic, but the point is: if these shows are digging deep into the long tail of chefs/designers/whatever, why not dig even deeper and support the littlest guys? At the least, get some free publicity for what's being micro-financed.

brand cliques

So I started noticing brand cliques a few years ago. You know, cliques of companies that cross-promote/subsidize/whatever their products/services. United Airlines gives you miles if you pay with Visa. Solar City gives you a better deal if you participate in Community Supported Agriculture. That kinda thing. As brands develop strategic relationships with each other (United with Visa) and competing brands develop functionally comparable relationships to each other (United with Visa, American with MasterCard), it becomes possible to envision ecosystems of products/services, replete with different forms of symbiosis – mutualism, parasitism, and commensalism. And it becomes possible to envision value-based ecosystems of products/services – for example, since I mentioned Solar City and CSAs, based on the value of environmental sustainability. In fact, this is especially relevant for sustainability, which requires the kind of systems change that would be enabled by ecosystems of sustainable products/services. So come on Solar City, CSAs, City CarShare, etcetera, etcetera: make friends.

the (refreshingly shifting) role of the smagency

[I'm actually referring to the (refreshingly shifting) role of the agency in providing social media services, but I just wanted to write the word "smagency." And I originally blogged the posted on Clear Night Sky, the blog of a smagency called Clear Ink.]

I don't usually post about other people's posts, but this was just too good to pass up. Especially because it directly implicates the work I was doing while at Clear Ink, an online marketing agency, in the fall of 08: developing its social media services. The post I'm talking about is From The Head of Zeus Jones (quite literally), and although it was written back in October, I (re?)discovered it today and attribute it with utmost blogworthiness. Indeed, it discusses the role of the marketing agency in providing social media services:

"If, as I believe, the adoption of social media by all companies is inevitable, what role does the communications agency fulfill?...Clients may not need help talking to their customers but that doesn’t mean they don’t need help. After the channels of communication are established and after the pleasantries have been exchanged, customers will want something to talk to companies about. The best things to talk about are things that the company is doing to make their products, services or experiences better. It seems to me that there’s still a lot of demand for help in improving our clients’ core services and making them more marketable. For applying marketing thinking to operations. Personally I find it’s actually far more rewarding to do this kind of work because you’re actually collaborating with your clients on things that are lasting and have unquestioned (rather than questionable) value within their organisations."

This last bit is why I added "refreshingly shifting" in the subject line - shifting from working with clients on things that have questionable value to things things that have lasting/unquestioned value and actually improve their core services (ooh! actual product development!) sounds, well, refreshing. But this means CI might have to change its approach to providing social media services; at least, as I articulated them. Helping companies implement a blog and produce content for it is part of the story, yes, but only in the beginning. Helping companies improve their products, so that they actually have something to blog about, will have to be part of the story too. If you're still intrigued, check the entire post.

shabbataoke

Ok, it's a terrible name but an awesome idea: karaoke for Shabbat songs, with that little ball bouncing over which words to sing and real bar/bat-mitzvah videos (maybe your own!) as the background. Which would make learning Shabbat songs oh-so fun for kids and adults. I want.

your search did not match any documents

Famous types spend lots of money fashioning their online presence and controlling the rank of organic search results for their names. But I think the converse could make for a pretty fabulous publicity stunt: temporarily abolishing their names from the interwebs altogether. Take Rudolf Steiner, the late Austrian philosopher and founder of Biodynamic Agriculture, among many many other things. Knowing he was nearing the end of his life, he started giving up to four lectures a day on his teachings. Also knowing he was nearing the end of his life, people listened and documented them. But it was after the end of his life, so these stories tend to go, that sales of his work surged. Now take Ken Wilber, the American philosopher and founder of the Integral Institute, among many many other things. Imagine if Wilber hinted he was departing from this world, spoke/wrote furiously for a stint, and then vanished from the web. Not a trace of him to be found by a Google spider.* Granted this would take some seriously expensive hackery. But it might inspire a premature surge in sales of his work, if not attract publicity. This is semi-similar to how Tupac was thought to have imitated Machiavelli in faking his own death, and would return in time, but in the digital universe. And why it's more interesting to me than simply faking one’s death, I'm not sure. I think I like the idea of digital disappearance; of anti-publicity as publicity.

*Update: I just learned from a developer friend that this is kinda impossible because of internet archives, i.e. only recent traces would disappear but anything older would hang out in [relative] perpetuity. Shucks. But I still like the idea, so please just consider it conceptual art.

feel the mouseclick

New media artists these days are too obsessed with interactivity. Lemme rephrase more academically: in Gartner's hype cycle, I'd say interactivity is hanging out at the peak of inflated expectations. But don't you guys get it? Unless you're in a sensory deprivation chamber, everything is interactive. I know I'm brattily spouting at an unidentified crowd of self-proclaimed interactive artists, but I nevertheless predict a backlash against/spoofing of interactivity ('feel the mouse under your fingers, listen to that click-click of the keyboard...'). And I nevertheless encourage interactivity to move along the trajectory of things, from being a binary (yes/no) or spectral (more/less) concept to a typological one. If everything is interactive, what type of interactive is it? Is the interaction meaningful, desirable, fascinating, new? Otherwise I'm just not very impressed if your art, per Wikipedians, "involves the spectator in some [ambiguous] way."

pole dancing to the people

One of the many fantastic things about pole dancing is that there are poles all over the city. I wanna get my pole dancing ladies to dress monochromatically (white? red?), each take a pole on a major city street (Market in SF?), and have us filmed from a low-flying helicopter while dancing. Public performance art therapy at its sexiest.