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Read my eyes, B2C Boy
Here's an especially clueful passage from the Economist piece: ...the intermediaries will still have to answer the same old question: whose side are they on? John Hagel's infomediaries and Philip Evans's navigators around the web act as agents for the consumer. The best Internet portals, aggregators and auction-sites will have to do this too. In the physical world similar questions can be fudged: an auctioneer works for both seller and buyer, a travel agent tries to get the best deal for both sides. But in the online world, where any transaction can be unbundled and any intermediary disintermediated, such ambiguity may not be sustainable. The best indicator will often be payment or ownership: that Brandwise, the reviewer of white goods, was set up by Whirlpool, a manufacturer, arouses immediate suspicions. Once profits start to be made on the web, it will always be worth asking an intermediary: who pays you? How long before "eyeball" and "consumer" are Bad Words? I say a year for the first and three for the second, tops. <annoy>Loading Flash...</annoy> I just got a form email from NewMedia, which holds my standing award as the king of the Most Annoying hill. Looking for Cluetrain's opposite? Contrast NewMedia's "fresh business stories"...
... with the Manifesto's own inaugural banner:
There are no ways to link to NewMedia's stories, of course, since they are accessible only through that intermediary link. In my case, that brings up an especially vexing linkwall: the same insulting message I encountered back in April, when I ranted about NewMedia in the first place. Ah well. Uselessness springs eternal. (And hey, do you really want to know which of six kinds of online consumer NewMedia thinks you are. Hey, we already know what kind of online producer NewMedia is.)
The continuing end of spinning as usual In the May issue of Red Herring, Kenneth Neil Cukier writes about "The Crisis in PR." It's a good piece. Almost ten years ago, when I was still in that business, I wrote a shorter piece for Upside, a version of which is archived in Reality 2.0. That one isn't too far from what I said about PR in Cluetrain. As a business, PR is a conversation between companies and PR departments and agencies -- not between any of those parties and their consumers, the editors and analysts who serve as the trade's unwilling instruments. Credit where due: at their best, PR agencies can be darn useful. At their most typical, they elevate obscurantism to absurd levels. Yesterday I received a "story" in the form of an embargoed press release in which the only paragraph that qualified as news contained no factual needles in a haystack of marketing cliches. Let's see... there were... ... seven cliché modifiers --
... seven cliché verbs --
...and three cliché nouns --
I trust I haven't violated the embargo by putting this news mannequin through the Cuisinart. Back to work...
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Just heard from my friend Bradley Zall at 
