Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Exclamation Interview: Everything Is Miscellaneous Author David Weinberger
If you ever find yourself singing, “Don’t know much about ontology…,” then maybe it’s time you picked up David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. In a year when Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail sit comfortably in the Amazon Top 40 and Top 400, respectively, it’s no surprise that Weinberger’s book isn’t far behind. (Top 650, anyone?)
Never before have I been so enthralled by a book about order. Yeah, that’s right - how stuff gets sorted into clumps and piles - from 18th Century Botany to reddit. Everything has already made some enemies; Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is killing our culture violently disagrees with Weinberger on many points, but no matter which side you’re on, Weinberger really explains the why of the miscellaneous.
Micro-Blogging Vs. Micro-Napping
As I spent most of this week at Supernova 2007, I had the opportunity to sit in on some brilliant sessions and discussions, especially during the Unconference part of the conference on Tuesday. One panel that I worked on, “The (Non)Ethics of Corporate Ghost-Blogging”, was a great debate on acceptable levels of transparency (and readers’ assumptions about transparency) in social media.
Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls workshop/discussion on VRM, vendor relationship management, “the reciprocal” of customer relationship management, was a well-attended, much-discussed session at the Unconference as well.
For many, Supernova was a speedy introduction to Jaiku, a micro-blogging service akin to Twitter, albeit with a different (and slightly cuter) set of features. A few sessions, like those at any conference, were a bit of a snooze (the ironically entitled “Provocations“, for one), and it made me want to pull out my iPod and try out my latest discovery, Placebo’s Sleep Tracks.
The site is perfect for the on-the-go blogger or traveler: creator Placebo offers nap music at 5, 8, 12, 18, 20 and 23-minute increments, taking the napper through a succession of white, blue and brown noise followed by a gentle “cock-a-doodle-doo” wakeup. But it gets progressively less gentle after that, ending in a cacaphony of bagpipes, computer tones, and eventually, a series of computer noises, and someone saying, “Get up.” You don’t even want to hear the nails-on-a-chalkboard effect. I prefer the rooster, personally. After trying this yesterday in a crowded pizza place, I realized that this truly is what noise-cancelling headphones were invented for.
So, the next time you’re thinking about making 5 Twitters or 5 Jaikus, just remember, you could make the next hour of your life 5 times more productive by unplugging with a 5-minute micro-nap.
Crush On Obama: Textbook Execution
As I was teaching my dog, Teddy, a dance routine Saturday evening to Leah Kauffman’s “I Got A Crush…On Obama”, I had to stop and think, and after he put down his fake phone and finished learning his moves, I sat down at my desk and pondered the way this video was talked about with the blogosphere. And I thought about how mainstream broadcast media and the blogs acted symbiotically to break this story, sharing linkage, and rocketing this video up the Viral Video Chart, where it’s currently perched at number six.
Although the initial posts in the blogosphere were influential, I feel that the tipping point that got most mainstream media to pick up on the story was the Washington Post blog posting on the 14th. This article really showed the blogosphere that a newspaper blog can take on a breaking story and garner blog-level comments - 12 of them in 3 days - it’s not quite Daily Kos, but it shows that the only team blogging in 20071 have got a lively and active readership. (You read that right: the Post owns that whole darn zip code.) Is it a trend? Who knows. Is it a sign that some newspapers are learning how to break news in the RSS space? Hell yeah.
Just what does it mean to be hot?
I like to think that we have some hot clients. Clients with stories, technologies and entrepreneurial leaders that make people stand up and take notice. Our client SuccessFactors, for example: industry analyst Jason Corsello just called SuccessFactors the hottest thing going in enterprise software today. The Financial Times too is taking notice. As is Forbes. And some folks don’t necessarily agree either; nothing like a healthy disagreement to validate the hotness factor.
Apple of course is hot. Hotter than hot. Since more than a day can’t go by without iPhone news, this week’s hubbub is that Apple has announced what time the iPhone will be available at Apple stores across the country. But will it be any good? Does it matter? Google of course is hot: so hot that people are trying to get out of the glare and trying to live life without Google.
Having a crush on Obama is hot. LaunchSquad’s Melissa Klein is behind the scenes working the phones to help make this video one of the hottest viral videos going at this very moment. Is it the video? Is it the PR behind the video? Is it just plain luck being in the right place at the right time with entertaining stuff that made it so? My take is it’s a combination of things that’s making it hot right now: entertainment, smart marketing, good timing, a willingness to shake things up a bit.
One thing is clear, it’s 80 degrees in San Francisco today, and for San Franciscans, that’s hot.
How Does Consumerist Know I’d Like Amon Duul II?
I was really surprised when I clicked through from a Consumerist posting in my NetNewsWire last week to get to an ad halfway down the page that featured the semi-obscure German psychedelic band I had been thinking of checking out: Amon Düül II.
Had it been a brick or a banner for the new Wilco album or something, I wouldn’t have even looked twice. But Amon Düül II? That was just way too strange (and coincidental). I might have even overlooked something like the Fiery Furnaces, figuring everybody and their mother listens to indie rock these days.
I quickly opened up a new Firefox browser tab, and noticed that I was logged into my Amazon profile, where I’d seen the band pop up in my Amazon favorites, after I’d indicated that I’d liked albums by Ash Ra Tempel (after my wife bought me a Hawkwind disc for Hannukah). So, this strange chain of events has me now seeing targeted advertising in one of my favorite blogs. How in the heck did this happen?
I turned to Chris Batty and Erin Pettigrew at Gawker for the answers. It turns out, it’s all a part of the public Amazon associates program. Geeks, you read that right: blogs like Gawker (or any dynamic page that’s part of the Amazon associate program) can read a cookie from another domain. Granted, they’re only using this program on Consumerist, and not on any other Gawker Media domains, Batty said. But this is big stuff.
This means that there’s a unified, individual-targeted advertising campaign going on in the blogosphere, potentially across hundreds of blogs. And it’s just a pre-packaged ad widget that comes from Amazon - no crazy coding. This type of link debuted about a year ago (with a few other integrated functions), according to Gawker’s Pettigrew. While it’s not unusual for a site to run an Omakase links (Japanese for “protected” or “entrusted”), I’ve never come across them in such a seemingly unlikely place. According to the link above to the Ask Dave Taylor post and discussion of Omakase links, Norton AntiVirus/Internet Security causes some ads not to appear properly. That’s bad for companies like Amazon, but good for people who want less personalization.
So, that means that most PC users could shut off the personalization if they found it a little bit too invasive. But I’m on a Mac, and, yes, I bought three Amon Düül II albums with my eMusic account this weekend. They were pretty damn good. Too bad I didn’t click through and give some change to Consumerist. But, who buys CDs anymore? Amazon’s digital music download program is still at least a few months away. Bummer. We could have had a deal.
Science Fiction’s Influence on Web 2.0 (podcast)
In this podcast, LaunchSquad’s Adam Metz and Stanford doctoral candidate Noam Cohen, author of the forthcoming thesis, “Speculative Nostalgias: Metafiction, Science Fiction and the Putative Death of the Novel,” discuss the influence of science-fiction on business, and especially, Web 2.0.
The podcast also features an in-depth discussion of the ramifications of Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, and its influence on virtual worlds like Second Life and There.
