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| Tuesday, June 13, 2006 |
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Soylent brands 
| | Why do we take something new to journalism, to publishing, to personal expression, to so many other activities not supported by Journalism 1.0 — much less anything ever taught in school or anywhere else, yet profound and far-reaching in its influence on countless institutions — and explain it in terms of a narrow, threatened and nearly irrelevant institution that borrowed one of its most overworked buzzwords from the cattle industry? |
| | That's what I think every time a blogger gets called a "brand". Or even "talent", which is another label for what Alfred Hitchcock called "cattle". |
| | I don't mean to knock Scott Karp, who scores a two-fer with Individual Talent as Media Brand. I actually agree with everything he's saying. But I also have to say that what I like about Om, and everybody else listed on that post, is not their qualities as "brands", or even their very real talents. I like them for who (not what) they are, — and the fact that they are interesting, entertaining, provocative, and putting to use an endless variety of other qualities that have nothing to do with their values as products and everything to do with their humanity. |
| | I'm guessing Scott's probably with me on that. And I'm sure he'll get farther in explaining What's Going On Here than I will, because he's speaking native Marketese. Hey, maybe that's even a Good Thing. (Since, after all, it answers the question in the first paragraph.) |
| | But every once in awhile I have to raise my voice in this wilderness that's actually a new frontier that grows with every post we make. What we're doing with blogging (and vlogging, and podcasting) is far bigger, far more intereting, and far more full of money in the long run, than the whole damn "media" business it's disrupting. |
Still in training
| | Back in the mid-'70s, when a bunch of us lived in a little rural enclave called Oxbow (not much to look at from straight down on a late winter afternoon in the '00s, but here it is), our alpha member was Larry Tuttle, who lived in an A-frame called The Red House. Tuttle (best known, as if he were a law student, by his surname) worked about 500 times harder than the rest of us put together, running a recycling operation and working on broken vehicles, when he wasn't also running the second largest brewery in North Carolina — next to Miller's. |
| | Tuttle had other obsessions, too. The Grateful Dead was one. Darts was another. And trains was another. He didn't have much opportunity to indulge his Train Thing around Chapel Hill. Maybe that's one reason he wound up in Rogue River, Oregon, after departing from Oxbow one day in '78 or so, in a green truck loaded down like the Joad family's Ford. |
| | I've hardly seen him since, though we stay in loose touch through the Oxbow Network. Last time I saw him was at an Oxbow beach gathering in NC, where he told me he'd consumed his quota of brews many years back. I guess was why he was still in great shape while I looked like I was in my second trimester. Still, every once in awhile he also crosses the radar here in Cyberland. |
Couldn't resist
| | I had to move travel plans around, but I just got it done. New plan: I'm coming by redeye to Bloggercon IV in San Francisco next week, right after the Identity Mashup at Harvard Law, where Bloggercon was born. |
| | Looking forward to seeing many of ya'll at either or both of those. |
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