MURKETING

Linkpile

• The Social Media Bubble: HBR blogger takes a business view on “thin relationships” online: “If the “relationships” created on today’s Internet were valuable, perhaps people (or advertisers) might pay for the opportunity to enjoy them. Yet, few, if any, do — anywhere, ever. Conversely, because those “relationships” aren’t valuable, companies are, it is said, forced to try and monetize them in extractive, ethically questionable ways.”
• Talk Deeply, Be Happy?: “People who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier.” Implications for social media version of “conversation”?
• Defictionalized Goods: Examples; clever term. Via @muzellec.
• YouTube your way to college – latimes.com: “Students’ ‘infomercials’ are the latest way to say ‘pick me out of this crowd, please!'”
• Haul videos: Slate piece. Interesting how much attention haul videos are getting. For what it’s worth I talked about them on Marketplace Money a few weeks ago, but that was their story, I’ve never written about the phenomenon.
• Curious Sound Objects: “A detergent bottle gains theremin-like capabilities, a simple canvas shoe amplifies the sound of foot-tapping by tenfold, a messenger bag becomes a cavern of echoes.”

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[I’m bringing this back on a Tuesday/Friday basis. Thoughts?]

• • When Good Companies Choose EVIL Names: “Did the founders of these businesses neglect to do a quick Google search before setting their names in legal stone, or did they hope to capitalize on the intimidation factor of naming their companies after sinister fictional corporations?”
  • Green consumers’ dirty little secrets: “New research suggests that those who make “green” purchases are subsequently more likely to behave selfishly, cheat and steal.” Similar: Goodies behaving badly: “Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice. That seems to be the moral of a fascinating piece of research by two Canadian psychologists, which suggests that the greener people are, the more likely they are to lie and cheat.” Somewhat similar research discussed in Buying In — “the licensing effect.”
  • The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies < Columns | PopMatters: Rob Horning reviews Jaron Lanier’s book.
  • Raiding Eternity: As part of a series called “Memory Forever,” Gizmodo has a rather fascinating piece of writing by Joel Johnson. It deals with our digital legacies, I guess you could say. His approach is unusual, and made me want to read more of his work. Via Listenerd.
  • Product Displacement: Glady Santiago posts a video from an Australian show called Hungry Beast on the topic that she’s been more on top of than anybody. It’s interesting to hear the guy talk about how product displacement (using props that look like a known brand, but aren’t — like UDS instead of UPS; see Santiago’s blog for more) can actually help the real tweaked brand. The idea is that it “engages” the consumer.
  • Will Your College Be Covered in Virtual Graffiti?: “Sophisticated new phones can sense their locations, so people are starting to use them to create a new layer of content mapped to specific places on and around campus. These digital sticky notes can share everything from official tours to student mischief.”
  • Terra Nova: Virtual Goods at GDC: “Virtual goods now a $6b business. … Rumor that US states will begin charging sales tax on virtual item sales within the year.”
  • The revolution was not tweeted – The Irish Times – Sat, Feb 20, 2010: “The Iranian Twitter Revolution meme is thoroughly debunked in Cloud Culture , a new study examining the impact of social media on the way we live our lives. It reports that a third of Iranians have internet access and the number of Twitter users in the country during last June’s unrest amounted to just 0.082 per cent of the population.”

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• • Lord of the Logos: Designing the Metal Underground: “Christophe Szpajdel’s dynamic logo design has helped set a distinct visual tone for heavy metal. Pulling from nature and the art deco, Szpajdel creates strong typographic identities, and with them hordes of fans among the metal faithful.” Thx Cousin Lymon.
  • Online Status Anxiety: “The one shared feature that I’m most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn’t just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn’t just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach.”
  • Your Computer Really Is a Part of You | Wired Science | Wired.com: Study concludes that Heidegger’s “ready to hand” concept applies to computers. (Ready to hand = “People don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.”)
  • What Does an Organic Label Mean? » Sociological Images: The specific wording, and where on the package the statement is placed, is an indication of just how “organic” the product might be:
  • Where does your dairy come from? Look it up on this website.: As in, what farm it comes from. BB link.

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• A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher: “Now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.”
• To Do in NYC: Cyberoptix Show Nov. 14: Devotion Gallery, in Brooklyn. Bethany Shorb (past Consumed subject) featured. Click for details but “complements the hand-fabricated and -repurposed rubber fabrics with several forms of modified lace and tatted doilies.” I’d go.

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• How Luxury Will Survive: “As more individuals in Asia accumulate enough money to satisfy their daily needs and begin to have confidence in their long-term prospects, they’re interested in demonstrating to themselves, their neighbors, and anyone they happen to meet that they, too, have joined the club.” No particular evidence is offered to support this socio-cultural claim. But it might still be correct.
• Book Review — “Curious?” by Todd Kashdan: “Most of us engage in what Kashdan calls passive curiosity. If something odd crosses our path (say, a dog dressed up as a punk rocker), we are interested in learning about it. But there’s novelty everywhere, and it’s very much worth seeking out.”
• Croc Hunting: “Crocs are a symbol for our leisure culture and a symbol of adolescent adults. What is the nature of our current public spaces when we are allowed to and can wear Crocs in them? Crocs are the free plan of footwear. They free the barriers of the floor surface; sand to water to hospital, to home, to kitchen, to 5th Ave. No other shoe can achieve such a diversity of surfaces. They democratize footwear and break gender barriers.”
• Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End: “The main purpose of social networks, once we are coaxed into building them for ourselves, is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital.”
• A history of baseball and chewing tobacco.: Interesting.

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• But enough about you?: “More than six million memoirs sold last year, up from 1,256,000 in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan.”
• TV Finds That a Mortal Foe, the DVR, Is Really a Best Friend: “Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.”
• Culture (Not Just Genes) Drives Evolution: “The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood.”
• Cass R. Sunstein and political rumors on the Internet: “Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.”
• The White House’s war with Fox News: Louis Menand: “The more crowded and competitive this field becomes—more news chasing fewer newsies—the more journalism approaches the condition of coffee beans and major-league breaking balls: you never dreamed there could be so many varieties. But, unless you are an aficionado of political spin, you may prefer to grab the remote and start browsing for “Frasier” reruns. The market for news is narrowing down to people who need an ideological fix.”

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• Contest: Write a Six-Word Story about a “Significant Object”: “Can you create Significance for this Object in just six words? The winning response will be published on the Significant Objects site, and more to the point, on its eBay store. Proceeds from that auction go to the author of the winning submission.” Click through for details. Deadline is Friday.
• Lucha Libre Masks: Astonishing assortment.
• The Rise of Power Jeans: “Chosen well, jeans can suggest the wearer is confident and modern. Traditionally cut blue jeans carry a whiff of the laborer about them, so denim on a leader suggests a willingness to roll up the sleeves and dig in. There’s also something of the rebel in a pair of jeans. In the boardroom, that can read as creative.” Okay.
• The Music-Making Business: “Many of today’s DIY artists are far from strangers in a new land. They’re likely gifted musicians with some level of formal training and well-schooled in how to navigate the chaotic world of popular music. They say a new, leaner industry is rising from the rubble of the pre-Internet corporate model. It will be a place for smart, dedicated musicians who know how to play and do business.”

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• Moral Fiber: Breakfast and believing: Joshua Glenn codebreaks the ads for clues to the Middlebrow soul. Highly interesting, as always. (Bonus link: old Consumed on Cheerios as a “character.”)
• How friendship became friending: Another good essay by Rob Horning on social networking, society, identity.
• The surprising beauty of portraits on gravestones.: Photo essay by by Camilo Jose Vergara
• Sad state of scares when focus is on zombies, vampires: “What about the gremlin? The yeti? The triple-threat ghoul, who robs graves, drinks blood and eats the dead?”
• Flip-Flop Frame | Significant Objects: Story by Merrill Markoe. “This poorly articulated caricature of a foot wearing a flimsy multicolored flip flop sits atop a frame that boldly declares, ‘Whatever I have enshrined here is something I hold in contempt.'” Very exciting to me personally to have gotten Merrill Markoe into the project.

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• Ecko slam-dunked: “Under the terms of his deal with Iconix, Ecko is surrendering majority control of his trademark in exchange for $63.5 million in cash plus $90 million in financing for a newly formed joint venture.”
• What’s a cult?: How governments decide whether a religion is real or not.
• Remember the guy who made the anti-United Airlines video?: He took a United flight recently, and they lost his bag. Haw.
• Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search: Lots of interesting points and thoughts in this essay about information, Google, libraries, and possible futures thereof.

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• Artists plan to encase vacant Detroit home in ice: “To draw attention to foreclosures that have battered the region.” Yeah? is there a big problem with people not knowing about foreclosures and vacant housing in Michigan? I think that info is kind of, you know, out there. Why not do this in Westchester County or somewhere that would actually be surprising. The net effect of this is just to reinforce an existing perception (ie, Detroit is a basket case!) not raise any new ideas or insights.
• Cereal ads might be bad for your childs health: Study: “the least healthy breakfast cereals are the most frequently and aggressively marketed to children.”
• The art of deception: When it’s fun to be fooled: Sounds like a great exhibition. It’s in Florence, though.
• Human Avatars Are Better Salesmen: Study: “The participants perceive human-like spokes-avatars as more attractive, and players who interact with a human-like spokes-avatar perceive the iPhone advertisement as more informative than those who interact with a non-human spokes-avatar.” Now you know.
• Counterfunctional feature of the day: “Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate is blank, i.e. no inscriptions on the keys. Nothing at all.” Um, great? (Thanks Jonah!)
• Musicians call for release of torture soundtrack details: “Famous artists like Pearl Jam, REM, Rosanne Cash, and the Roots filed a Freedom of Information Act demanding that the US government list the names of the tunes that were used as soundtracks in interrogation situations.”
• Valerie Hegarty: “Destruction Art.” Pretty cool. Via Coudal.
• Ad for eyelash drug Latisse goes too far:: Consumer Reports Health Blog: “Its flashy ad campaign has caught ire from at least one other group: the Food and Drug Administration, which in September warned Allergan that promotional materials on the drugs Web site omitted or minimized certain risks.”
• The Uniform Project: Just checked back in on this and wow, the amount raised is now more than $27,000. That’s amazing!
• In One Man’s Garage, Pan Am Still Makes the Going Great: “Mr. Toth has built a precise replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo in Redondo Beach, Calif. The setup includes almost everything fliers in the late 1970s and 1980s would have found onboard: pairs of red-and-blue reclining seats, original overhead luggage bins and a curved, red-carpeted staircase.”
• Inside the App Economy: “At least 100,000 apps have been created. Some startups that staked their claim in the app economy have become large, lucrative businesses in just a few months. Two-year-old Zynga, which makes popular game apps, is already profitable, with more than $100 million in revenues.”

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• Terry Teachout on the Mystery of Music: “It won’t surprise me if neuroscientists eventually succeed in unlocking the mystery of music. I don’t fear that prospect, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don’t know what it means.”
• Going Offline in Search of Freedom: ‘The promise is of infinite knowledge, but whats delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same.”
• Robert Mars: I’m smitten with this guy’s work.

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• Book Review: “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”: This sounds interesting. I’m fascinated to learn (if this review is correct) that the conventional wisdom is that the digital is ephemeral. Apparently Stewart Brand said, “There is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper.” Really? I think the digital world is ALL acid-free paper. Digital is forever. You can wayback almost anything that’s ever happened online. The problem will be Too Much Evidence. Not too little.
• Lunch exposure: “The publicity-loving patrons of Michael’s are getting a bonus with their $35 hamburgers. The staff is using Twitter to alert the world of who’s in the media-heavy eatery. Yesterday, as the lunch crowd arrived, ‘In the house: Howard Rubenstein and Robert Morgenthau.'” I’m assuming these people don’t actually mind. But there’s a blurring of the line here between public and private that I find creepy. Is anyone who might be recognized by an stranger at all now a de facto public figure?
• The Cellphone Refuseniks: “Though many cellphone owners express growing displeasure about cellphones intrusions into their lives, according to Pew, a tiny and most likely shrinking number actually manage to resist them completely.”

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• Whence Middlebrow?: Wherein, among other things,hilobrow.com explains what it is up to. More or less.
• Facebook and Google Expected to Offer Song Sampling: NYT story.
• New authors produce sequels to famous books written by others: “Writers are commissioned to breathe new life into orphaned characters.”
• Art & Politics of Prescription Pill Bottles: Interesting box vox post.
• Baseball Cap Maker Adjusts to Fit the Times: I missed this when it ran: Overview of New Era, which has seen something of a sales slump. Beyond that it’s mostly just a recap. (Recap! Ha ha!) June 6, 2004 Consumed on New Era here.
• Pandora: Music’s Genes vs. Musicians’ Jeans: Interesting, although vaguely hostile, for reasons that are not made apparent, reaction to my story. I’m guessing this’ll be the last link to a reaction to that piece, you’ll be relieved to hear.

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• Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook: “These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS,” lilted the auteur, who couldn’t be bothered to usedare it be saida journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree. On The Onion, via Moleskinerie.
• Compulsive Hoarding: “Experts estimate that as much as 2% of the population meets the criteria, a group that spans all education and income levels.”
• Sales of ‘The Beatles: Rock Band’ aren’t so fab: Says USA Today. Game was expected to sell 1 million in first month; sold 595,000.
• Pandora and authentic taste: “One possibility is that these two ways of conceiving musical taste are incommensurable, irreconcilable, what Žižek calls a parallax. It’s not that one explanation is an ideological cover-up for the other, real reason—these are two separate explanations that are perhaps operating simultaneously, and we oscillate between them in comprehending ourselves, forming our consciousness of what we want to appeal to us.”
• Tweets about Pandora story: From other people, not from me.

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• Fake Banana | Significant Objects: A comic by Josh Kramer. First of three team-ups with students at the Center For Cartoon Studies.
• Rebranding America: That’s the title of the latest by NYT “contributing columnist” Bono. Who you will recall earlier wrote a column on “Rebranding Africa.” Here’s an idea for your next column, Bono (I assume you’re a reader of this site): “Rebranding Europe.” What do you think? (What a great decision to make this guy an NYT columnist.)
• Placebo effect caught in the act in spinal nerves: Study asserts: “The placebo effect is not only real; its ability to deaden pain has been pinpointed to cells in the spinal cord.”
• The Music Genome Project and the Science Behind Pandora’s Song Choices: Another analysis from a user and writer; also interesting.
• ‘Pop-up’ stores are becoming an overnight sensation: Well, either that or they’ve been happening for years.
• Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog: Pandora: One user’s detailed reactions to its recommendations. Interesting.

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