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| Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
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Just a thought 
| | The podosphere is the new conferencesphere. Podcasts are the new keynotes. Volleys between podcasts are the new panels. |
| | And, of course, it's all free. Keep moving. No money to be made here. |
Pink tickles
| | If it were, Fimoculous would be right: My dear internet, you have jumped the shark. Pointed to here. |
Media in the mirror may be smaller than they appear
| | ...note that the burden of reform is not borne solely by Big Media. Yes, these institutions will need to engage with the blogosophere, but so will everyone who seeks to advance a public agenda. A while ago, Dave Winer nailed this. In a knowledge-based economy, narrating your work becomes part of everyone's job. That narration produces artifacts we call blogs. They'll transform Big Media, but only because they'll transform society. |
Seeking release
| | The press release headline reads, TargetX CEO Launches First Podcast for College Recruiters. Spake the release, |
| | "There's a revolution underway in recruiting communications," said Niles. "The old techniques are giving way to electronic tools like email, blogs and online chat sessions. Many admissions people understand that, but they don't know how to make effective use of the Internet for recruiting and marketing." |
| | Niles decided to use podcasts to help demonstrate how online communications can be more timely, interactive and entertaining when trying to attract a generation raised on the Internet. |
| | He created "On the Road," short and informal podcasts that cover some aspect of college marketing. These Internet broadcasts typically originate from a workshop or conference where he's speaking to a higher education audience on the strengths and challenges of interactive marketing. |
| | "The podcasts reflect what I'm hearing on the road and what I'm seeing in higher ed marketing," said Niles, who 10 years ago became one of the first college officials in the nation to use the Internet to recruit students. |
| | Well, kudos to TargetX for getting ahead of the curve. Since the company makes money advising colleges on how to use the Net, I hope they don't mind a little free advice that might help them improve the example they set: |
| | - Don't call your blog "An Email Minute." Or vice versa. Nothing wrong with having your emails and blog cross-promote, or even duplicate each other. Chris Locke has been doing this with EGR and his blog since the Miocene. (And now with CBO as well.) But the two are very different, to say the least.
- Make your blog a blog. What you have is an archive of emailings. That means, use some kind of blogware, featuring permalinks and RSS feeds. You're doing that with your podcasts already. Do it with your blog as well.
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Who's on Sixth?
| | An interesting observation is that although the blogosphere has done an admirable drop criticizing the fourth estate, they are not very comfortable being criticized themselves. Although criticism is not usually delivered in the best possible way and often is snarky, try to listen - in the same way you hope the fourth estate is listening to you. |
| | Generalizations are unavoidable, and often help. And Mike's advice is good. But let's also not paint with too broad a bush, regardless of which members of which estate we're talking about. The main power trend here is from the few to the many, from the institutional to the individual. It's a big 'sphere: ten million strong, already. Manners run the gamut. |
Get small
| | To begin, the trend toward larger and larger televisions will continue as screens double in size every 18 months. Televisions will eventually grow so large that families will be forced to watch TV from outside their homes, peering in through the window. Random wolf attacks will make viewing more dangerous. And, just as televisions grow larger and more complicated, so will remote controls. In fact, changing channels will soon require people to literally jump from button to button. Trying to change the channel while simultaneously lowering the volume will require two people and will frequently lead to kinky sex... |
| | One of TiVo's best loved features—its ability to provide viewers with commercial-free television—will inevitably force TV advertising to go extinct. As a result, celebrities will be forced to find new and creative ways to compromise their integrity. (At this moment, the writer pauses to slake his thirst with a delicious Diet Peach Snapple... now with less aspartame!) The sudden loss of ads on television will push many companies to stage their pitches live on Broadway, revitalizing the theater in America and garnering Patti LuPone a Tony award for her work with Geico. |
Podward bound
| | Thanks to good advice from Tony Steidler-Dennison, I've got my MXL mike, my Eurotrack mixer (both bought through Tony), and a very small pile of other gear that will contribute to podcasts that should be starting up, sometime soon, at IT Garage, and wherever I do my own podcasting as well. |
| | Love what Dave wrote today about podcasts going deep. He's right that podcasts, and blogs, are not necessarily conversations. Also that Cluetrain didn't say that everything is a conversation. (We said markets were, and qualified that to some degree as well.*) |
| | Yet both are personal. In fact, they're about as personal as what we call "media" can get. So personal, in fact, that I think "media" might be the wrong label for them. |
| | There's something dependent about media. Something channeled, as if through a conduit. Something involving other parties: networks, distributors. I think blogging and podcasting are something else: something that isn't conversation but is still just as immediate and personal because it isn't distrubuted in the manner of "media." |
| | Not sure what the right metaphor is. I'm just sure it's not one we can borrow from publishing or broadcasting, without which we would never have been talking about media in the first place, I'll betcha. |
| | *Bonus link from Bruce Fryer. Pull-quote: I view the marketing conversation as a two way street. A full duplex kind of thing. |
Finding Fault
| | Doug Kaye flew down in his Beechcraft Bonanza to visit yesterday. We met at 11am, hopped back in his plane and flew North over the Santa Ynez mountains toward lunch in Santa Maria. Santa Barbara and the whole South Coast was shrouded under low marine clouds, which lay like a futon up against the mountains. We flew over the four thousand foot Santa Ynez and Broadcast peaks. Also the Reagan Ranch, Santa Ynez Valley (where most of the movie "Sideways" was filmed) and the intersection of Highways 154 and 101. The former is the hypotenuse that cuts seventeen miles off the journey up or down 101. (Or, in Southern Californian, The 101.) |
| | First we headed for Soda Lake, then dipped our right wing in a gesture toward the Cuyama Valley, then began following and circling the fault to the Southeast along the rift zone, which looks like a long scar on the desert. That last link shows a dramatic "stream offset." You can see where a stream's flow from Northeast to Southwest is broken by the rightward movement of the land on the far side of the fault, which forms the main boundary between the Pacific and North American plates of the Earth's crust. The stream apparently went straight across the fault at one time; but now takes a Northwest detour along the trace of the fault (where the ground is weak and easily carved into a valley) and breaks Southwest again. As the Pacific plate continues its Northwest journey (where its leading edge is subducting under Japan and the Aleutian Islands), the detour will get longer and longer, until the stream breaks through some closer breach. The most dramatic stream offset in California is the Salinas Valley, which once connected the Central Valley, then filled with Lake Corcoran, with its outlet at Monterey Bay. The valley lengthened as Monterey Bay moved progressively farther from its Central Valley source. Drainage was eventually cut off by rising hills and mountains along the fault system, re-routing drainage of the Central Valley through the Golden Gate. This happened only about 700,000 years ago. |
| | The San Andreas formed about 15 million years ago, after the Pacific Plate finished shoving the Farallon Plate under the North American Plate. The subducted Farallon melted in the Earth's mantle. And, since crustal rock is lighter than mantle rock, much of the melted Farallon rose underneath the North American crust in a series of plutons that solidified into vast granitic batholiths. Now exposed, we call the biggest batholith the Sierra Nevada. Much of the Farallon's ocean floor was scraped off and piled up in the bottom of a trench. That trench is long gone, but the debris remains in the form of The Franciscan Complex, which comprises most of the Bay Area. So, with the Farallon plate gone, the Pacific plate began moving roughly the Northwest. The San Andreas is thus a right lateral "strike-slip" fault; meaning that movement on the other side of the fault is to the right, no matter which side you're standing on. Total displacement is now about 350 miles. |
| | Anyway, I've seen this section of the San Andreas countless times from commercial airplanes, but never from a private plane like Doug's. My thanks again to the big guy for a helluva fun trip. |
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