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. With Flickr Interlude
shrek balloon
Originally uploaded by joiseyshowaa
Originally uploaded by joiseyshowaa
“Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. NYC.”
[Join and contribute to the Murketing Flickr group]
Proper comparison points for Kanye West, Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, and Norman Mailer
Kanye West has a new CD coming out in a few weeks — can you feel the excitement?
Me neither. So I was a little surprised to read West saying this about Justin Timberlake: “I look at me and Justin like Prince and Michael Jackson in their day.”
Right. Only much less popular.
Seriously, what’s he talking about? I don’t know whether it’s a permanent change or just a slump, but pop music is just not the center of pop culture to the degree it was in the Prince/Jackson era, and surely West must be aware of this. I assume part his goal was to backhand 50 Cent, who has apparently vowed to retire if he doesn’t out-sell West.
West ought to be thanking 50, who obviously has a much better feel for the entertainment zeitgeist, and how to game it: Not by making silly comparisons to the past, but by stirring up a confrontation in the present, for no good reason whatsoever.
In fact, I look at 50 Cent and Kanye West like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal in their day. (50, of course, is Mailer.) Mailer and Vidal were trying to sell their products to a nation that had many more entertainment choices than it used to. Solution: Infiltrate one of those choices (chat shows) and make a fuss (possibly even throwing a punch). Same with 50, except he’s infiltrating the Internet celebritytainmentsphere to sell CDs instead of books. I’m not sure whether West just doesn’t get it, or if he’s trying to enlarge the feud somehow — sort of like dragging Truman Capote in.
If they can keep this hype up till the actual release date (Sept. 11), the strategy might even work.
Meanwhile, who is really the new Michael Jackson? The iPhone of course.
[Thanks, E.]
Moratorium
The following terms, whether used ironically, humorously, knowingly, or in any other manner whatsoever, are no longer acceptable:
1. Internets
2. Interweb
3. Intertubes
Please make a note of it.
Clean-water cause
Somehow, the people behind this managed to get my home address (maybe they inquired and it’s slipped my bind) and mailed to me their multipage newsprint piece on behalf of Buyameter.org. The point of it is this:
One in four households in Hale County [Alabama] is not connected to a municipal water system.
Without this service, families get water from sources that can be contaminated with sewage.
It costs $425 to bring clean water to one of these homes.
Help a family. Buy a meter.
I know nothing about the underlying facts here. But it certainly does seem shocking that anybody in America should be dealing with such a basic issue.
More about the project and those behind it here.
“Mad Men” Musings
In one of the handful of scenes in the second episode of Mad Men that was explicitly about advertising, main character Don listens to the ideas his creative team has come up with to sell an exciting new product: Right Guard, in an aerosol can.
The ideas turn on the excitement of this new technology, which the creative gang says ought to be linked to, you know, rockets, and the exciting future. (The assignment is a clever choice by the show’s writers, given that aerosol cans, which no doubt really were seen as a breakthrough at the time, were eventually demonized as an environmental menace.) Don says this approach is all wrong, because plenty of people fear the future, and because while the product is for men, it will be bought by women, and the rocketships & progress approach won’t work for them.
Put aside whether these observations are original, or even true. Instead consider the way Don arrives at them: it’s an instinct, a hunch, a feeling in his presumably golden gut. Read more
Crocs Consumed
Dedicated Murketing readers will recall the recent-ish post about Crocs. Well, this is one of those instances where noodling around on this site led to a Consumed column, on the subject of Crocs, to be published this Sunday. Thanks to those who offered feedback to the earlier post.
Also, I have no idea if this will work but this is a link to the column that goes out to Times Select types.
Please recall
1. There is no Consumed column, and no Journal of Murketing email this weekend.
2. Since the recent design tweak to this site, a constantly updated list of entertaining, distracting, or useful links appears in the sidebar at right.
Thank you.
Sprayable Zen
Here is Recue Remedy, stress-relief spray. Actually, “A Natural Stress Relief Spray.” When you’re stressed, I think you spray it in your mouth. Or maybe if someone’s freaking out in a meeting, you spray it in his or her mouth. Also said to be good for pets.
Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t there something a little Saturday Night Live about this? According to the company site, it’s Yoga In A Bottle. They’ve trademarked that phrase, so watch out. “Your Inner Calm On Call.” It also comes in a liquid form that dose your water with, but I like the spray idea better. I want to be able to spray my inner calm.
Site update (redux)
Okay, I won’t start doing this all the time, but I thought I’d follow up regarding this post the other day about del.icio.us links and RSS and all that. A couple of comments on that post — thank you for those — led me in the right direction. Unless I’ve screwed something up, this is the last you’ll hear of the matter.
The relevant bit for readers is this. If you read this site by, you know, coming to the site itself and looking at it, then you may want to glance over, from time to time, at the sidebar at right. That’s where del.icio.us links will be added, all the time.
If you don’t know anything about del.icio.us, or RSS, etc., that’s fine, you don’t have to. All you need to know is: A rotating and constantly updated series of interesting links will now appear in the sidebar, so check it out if you want to. And you can stop reading this post and go on with the more important tasks of the day.
[I hesitate to bring this up, but: In the process of doing all this, for totally unrelated reasons, I’ve migrated my del.icio.us links from an account named Consumed to a new one named Murketing, which is what I’ll be using from now on. Again, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter. “Interesting links in the sidebar” is all you need to know.]
If, instead, you use an RSS reader, you’ll see those links by way of a daily summary now added to the Murketing feed. [And if you are an RSS reader, you may have been subjected to some double-post shenanigans as I worked all of this out. Sorry. I think that’s over now.]
From my own testing, I don’t think you necessarily have to switch to the Feedburner feed to get the links summary. Still, here is the link to that feed if you want to subscribe to it:
I’ve also put that link in the sidebar, for now at least. I have mixed feelings about the RSS graphic, which I think a lot of people now recognize, but which, because it is orange, is an unslightly blemish on this sight’s delightful black-and-white color scheme. So I may get rid of the icon later. Or try to figure out how to make it black.
The bottom line is, I’m pretty sure I’ve done what I wanted to do, and in a way that you don’t have to do anything. Simply do nothing! Okay?
Now, if you’re curious, this is what I did. Read more
Site note
Regular readers may have noticed that a few weeks ago I started adding del.icio.us links to the site in the form of a daily post. I’m a big fan of del.icio.us, but I started using it before this site really existed, and always thought of it as something useful for organizing my own research, and didn’t give a lot of thought to whether there might be any value (to you, I mean) in “sharing” my links.
Of course I saw that other people were posting ther del.icio.us links, and realized that I enjoyed seeing them. So I finally got around to enabling the “daily blog posting” feature.
However, I don’t like the way the daily del.icio.us post looks. So I’ve turned that off in favor of the “link rolls” feature, which means that my del.icio.us links now show up in the sidebar, and update constantly as I add things. I think is both more useful, and a lot better looking.
The downside of this is people who read Murketing.com via RSS readers won’t see those links any more (unless of course they click through to the actual site and look at the sidebar). I’m not sure, right now, how to resolve that. I’ve noticed that We Make Money Not Art somehow has del.icio.us links in its RSS feed, and in its link roll, but not in the body of the main blog itself. I think that’s the ideal scenario.
There’s no tech staff or even a clever intern here at Murketing HQ, it’s just me, and for a variety of reasons (the biggies being: more pressing things to attend to; impatience; and a disinterest in either reading jargon-filled directions or having any real understanding of coding), I’m very slow and clumsy when it comes to figuring this stuff out. So I tend not to do detailed updates about every little trial-and-error tweak.
But in this case I thought I’d let you know: del.icio.us links in the sidebar if you want to see them.
Murketing Arts: The page
Yesterday’s Q&A with Jen Bekman finally prodded me to put together a new page on this site that I’d been planning for a while: The Murketing Arts. Like the Subculture Inc., International Review of Wine Packagaing and Aesthetics, and Unconsumption pages, The Murketing Arts groups thematically related items from this site into a single and, really, quite convenient, page.
The image above is “I Bought These,” by Kate Bingaman-Burt, “soon to be part of a 20X200 edition,” according to Jen Bekman’s post, linking to this site’s interview with her, which of course also links back to her site. So if you’re very careful, you can click back and forth between the two sites for up to an hour.
The opposite of Twitter
Posting will probably be light this week, because I’m not in the home office. Where I am is, obviously, none of your business.
links for 2007-06-05
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“where does the stereotype of the moody, sullen, sexually irresponsible and financially incompetent adolescent come from? Dr. Epstein says most adults would behave that way, too, if they had no responsibilities, no rights, and money to spend.”
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Kim Fellner's book 
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A