MURKETING

Rising Leif

Josh Spear’s site just had a glowing writeup about artist Leif Parsons: “talented, creative, fresh, and has a great sense of humor … we think the best is yet to come for thoughtful young Parsons.”

Congrats to Parsons. I’m a fan of his work: He’s the illustrator for Consumed. (So, yes, the best must be yet to come …. )

TieLab Updates…

Very pleased to see Murketing Q&A subject TieLab getting some more attention, from Adorn Magazine. Meanwhle, the TieLab has continued to add new designs: Skull + Bones, SquidBrain, and Bombs Away!, for instance.

The business of Second Life (cont’d)

More random notes regarding Second Life, which continues to draw lots of coverage:

+ Caliandris Pendragon, writing on Second Life Insider, questions the widespread assumption that Second Life is dominated by young people:

My experience of having many friends and acquaintances in SL is that the minority of them are under 30. … I work as a mentor and the incoming avatars must be a fairly random bunch, and I have met a substantial proportion of my friends that way. They aren’t all 19. By a long chalk.

+ More on that, and other thoughts on doing business in Second Life, here.

+ Also on the subject of doing business in Second Life, and focusing in particular on competition from real-world brands/companies: Joystiq argues that “Second Life’s denizens are concerned that the entrance of big business into the world will drive them out. They’re right to be concerned. Their businesses are as at risk as the local bookseller’s business before Barnes & Noble comes to town.”

Akela Talamasca counters such fears may be overblown, because: a) many SL “residents” don’t want their world “tainted by commercialism from RL;” b) instant travel makes real estate less critical (at least I think this is the point being made); and c) “It’s entirely possible that a preexisting SL store could create or emulate a style of clothing designed by a RL store. Therefore there is no material difference between a white t-shirt made by The Gap and one made by Mistress Midnight. What matters then is which one costs less; that is the one the average user will buy.”

Regarding c) — I’d be interested in the intellectual property fallout if a Second Life resident started doing virtual knockoffs of real-world clothes. Once you get beyond white T shirts or other commodities, things get more complicated. Also: In those cases where it really does come down to a simple matter of cost between something made by a real world company, and something made by a Second Life entrepreneur, real world companies have huge advantages.

Here’s a recent Business Week article on Toyota’s SL efforts. Originally the company was going to simply give away cars, since for them this is all just marketing anyway. Realizing that this sort of tactic pisses off the local entrepreneurs, they’re now selling cars for the going rate.
+ Reuters has launched an SL news site.

+ Long Tail Guy Chris Anderson did an event in Second Life. I don’t see what’s good — even for somebody selling his book — about having an avatar that looks like your real-world self.

+ Here’s a pretty good Second Life Herald bit complaining about SL looking too much like RL, thanks largely to marketing efforts (and journalists, I suppose).

+ And finally, here’s another Second Life Herald piece, more serious in tone, about the commercial drift of SL, and what it means to the residents. Here’s what I think is the most interesting passage:

In the Game of Second Life, the losers will be all those homemakers in New Jersey or part-time Wal-Mart workers in Wisconsin or security guards in North Carolina who were making up a storm of content, making a near-living or a substantial amount of money with either content creation, club management, or rentals. There will be less need for them now — they played their roles as early adapters, bug-testers, and server-load-tests, and now they need to retire.

Superconsumer

And in other news of consumuption/art projects:

For several days now I’ve been trying to work out what I think of a project I read about on We Make Money Not Art: It’s called Superconsumer, and was created by Franz Alken and Karl Rueskaefer. Superconsumer is described as a “bot” that buys stuff “autonomously” on eBay, and a little while later re-sells each object it has bought. In between, the purchased items are exhibted in an art gallery.

While transfering ordinary objects from the mass-market to an art space, the bot enhances the objects to pieces of art. This enhancement is temporarily, the bot takes away the “art aura” by selling this pieces again via ebay.The installation gives an constantly updated overview on the mass market. The programming of the process makes the items the bot will buy unpredictable — a search on the topic “football” can respond items like fan-articles, computer games, books or sportswear.

There are elements of this that I like, particularly the conversion of random objects into Things Of Interest (if not exactly art) by some more or less arbitrary process. I happen to think that many of the Things of most Interest to us on an individual level also acquire their value in some idiosyncratic way — albeit linked to biography, not random computer software.

And I like the idea that eBay users are in effect “arranging the exhibition without knowing it,” as the official description puts it.On the other hand, I’m not really sure I that completely get the point of using a “bot” to make this happen. I also think it’s kind of a mistake that (despite the usual nods to tech “interactivity”) the gallery viewer apparently doesn’t have an opportunity to buy the object him or herself. (I guess one could bid for it on eBay.) Maybe nobody would do it, but so what? Art galleries don’t just exhibit aura — they sell aura. Maybe that’s beside the point in this case, but if you’re using the gallery setting to explore the nature of object-aura, that’s an element you ought to deal with.

Broken iPods…

If you’ve had just about enough of products and projects that involve indivualizing or otherwise arting-up the iPod, maybe you’ll enjoy this: Stay Free! is “seeking artists and (broken) iPods for an upcoming project about planned obsolescence.” You are invited to turn your broken iPod into “something deliciously useless,” or to send it to Stay Free, which will hand it over to a participating artist. Details are here.

Sounds promising. For the record I should mention I own two iPods — the original version, and the third generation. Both still work.

Impressive

Now this is some Halloween costume. Via Gizmodo, which offers a few more pix that show a bit of how this was made.

Coinage alert! “Meganiche”

In Wired, Clay Shirky writes that as Web usage has gotten huge, thin slices of the overall Web audience are, not surprisingly, bigger than they were when the overall Web audience was smaller. And thus:

I define a meganiche as a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture…

[T]he Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you’ve never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post.

Examples include Howard Forums; Gaia Online; and You’re The Man Now, Dog. It wasn’t always clear to me how “user base” is defined, and I’ve always been skeptical about measurement claims about millions of “unique users” for some sites. But in general this seems like a logical — or really a mathematically inevitable — development. And now it has a name.

Something to do in NYC

Tomorrow night, November 1:

Packing Detail of the Day

This weekend I happened to need a long extension cord to do something outside. E picked up what I needed: One of those long, orange cords. You know the ones. I was amused to see that such an item is longer a “cord” — it is now a “Do It Yourself Cord.” So now I’m all DIY! I’m so on-trend!

Petra Cabot and the Skotch Kooler

Until reading her obituary yesterday, I had never heard of Petra Cabot, or the “Skotch Kooler.” Cabot invented this item, which she described as “the best-looking bucket anybody ever saw.”

The Skotch Kooler, copyrighted in 1952, was made by the Hamilton Metal Products Company of Hamilton, Ohio. It could keep ice cream firm for two to three hours without ice and was handy for a fishing trip: it kept groceries cold on the way to the lake and fish cold on the way back.

The container held (https://www.capefearcardiology.com/ambien-zolpidem-online/) four gallons and had three layers of insulation: one of fiberglass, one of inert air and a heat-reflecting outer surface. It was airtight and waterproof and, long before the practice was common, it carried the signature of its designer. (Knockoff versions, without the signature, were made as far away as Thailand.) The coolers are now popular collectibles.

In fact, the image above is something I swiped from an eBay listing. Looks a bit chavvy, doesn’t it?

One other note about Ms. Cabot from the obit: “From 1938 until 1950, she worked for the designer Russel Wright, who brought modernism to the American home with his inexpensive, mass-produced dinnerware, furniture, appliances and textiles.”

Out

No Consumed column today; I was out. It’ll be back next week.

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by Mamish.

Potentially interesting books roundup

• Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1992, edited by Brandon Stosuy. (Village Voice writeup by Ed Halter.)
• Vintage T-Shirts, by Lisa Kidner and Sam Knee. (Josh Spear brief.)
• The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen. (Keen blog post.)

Then again, maybe they’re all terrible. But each is potentially interesting.

Leggings up… Sort of…

Who’s wearing leggings these days? And who isn’t? And why?

Entertaining answers offered in the Washington Post by Robin Givhan:

Leggings have been touted on must-have lists as one of the surest ways for a woman to announce that she is acutely aware of this season’s fashion trends. They identify her as someone who keeps track of hemlines and silhouettes, probably has at least one subscription to a fashion magazine and may have, upon occasion, even put her name on a waiting list for a particularly desirable handbag.

The fashion industry desperately needs this trend-conscious shopper — even as it mocks her….

The rest is here….

T Time

Clearly I’m still in catch-up mode. Here’s something else I meant to post earlier: At the Museum of Design Atlanta, a show opened recently called To A T: T-shirt Culture … Cute or Couture? Here’s something from an article about it:

With the wildfire growth of the D.I.Y. and affordable-art movements, T-shirts — already synonymous in American life with totemic expressions of selfhood in washable form — have now also become as symbolic to artists as to consumers. As the Wall Street Journal‘s Jamin Warren notes, the limited run of artist-designed shirts also gives them an exclusivity, that elusive “cool factor” that younger consumers treasure.

Laura Moody, a co-curator with SCAD-Atlanta of the MODA show, says the new “Art T” serves two markets: “With the rise of D.I.Y. designers and indie crafters creating limited-edition shirts, you probably won’t be caught wearing the same shirt as your neighbor. For the designer or artist, T-shirts offer an affordable medium for experimentation.”

In any case, we’re actually going to try to see this, maybe in January. I believe it closes January 13. If we go, I’ll report back….