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| Thursday, July 19, 2007 |
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The making of a classic 
| | The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal co-exist. It's a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people's innermost desires. It's also a place utterly recognizable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable, and people's lives are defined by love and loss and hope — the same way they are in our own mortal world. |
| | I've thought from the beginning that J.K. Rowling has created in the Potter series a brilliantly imagined and compelling story, as well as an original and richly detailed world that is both separate from yet tightly braided with our own familiar one. For those reasons and more, it is a monumental achievement that will far outlive even the criticism it deserves. |
River vs. Rock
| | The Trend of the Month ... |
| | ... is the old die-hard bloggers finally realising that their blogs need an overhaul of look and feel, possibly not to mention method and purpose. |
| | Well, I am old. (I hit 60 a week from Sunday.) And if being a die-hard means I'll keep doing what I like to do, I'll cop to that too. As for look, feel and method, I've held Alec's realization for many years. But I'm not eager to a) leave this blog and start a replacement with a different URL, or b) run whatever script I need to haul eight years of text and graphics from Manila to Wordpress or some other blogging system. Doesn't mean I won't. But it does mean that none of the other blogging systems, including Wordpress, revs my jets. Yet. |
| | As for purpose, I see blogging as personal journalism. If the tide is flowing away from that, I'll die hard resisting it. |
| | So I look forward to seeing what Alec says "will become apparent later this week". |
| | By the way, I got some nice hang time with Alec in Oxford earlier this week. |
A look into the advertising bubble
| | For new brands, there is a strong correlation between ad spending and buzz generated in the blogosphere, one that shouldn't be ignored when it comes to making media planning decisions. |
| | ...Nielsen's research - which analyzed factors such as buzz volume in blogs, spending, purchase intent among consumers and actual sales - has found that a big advertising budget is the best predictor of significant blog buzz, rather than tactics that attempt to specifically influence such online world of mouth. |
| | It's actually clueful. For example, |
| | First, consumers place far more trust in their fellow consumers than they do in traditional marketers and advertisers, according to research. For any marketer, advertiser or business professional trying to be heard or break through the clutter, understanding and managing this high-impact CGM is critical for marketplace understanding and success. |
| | Secondly, CGM is prolific and increasingly easy and inexpensive to create. Online discussion forms, membership groups, boards and Usenet newsgroups represented the first CGM wave. Blogs and online videos represent the latest wave of CGM that's easy and inexpensive to distributeŠand influential in its impact. |
| | Of course, Nielsen Buzzmetrics is all about selling its own spinners: |
| | CGM is dramatically altering the marketing landscape, and Nielsen BuzzMetrics gives marketers and intelligence professionals an advantage by locating, measuring and analyzing CGM in wholly new ways so that it's understandable, real-time and actionable. |
| | Is this bad? I'm not sure. It gives me the creeps, but so does most of the junk in my email inbox. |
| | To understand what's going on here, you have to look up the money river. There is a flood of advertising money pouring into the Web, and these guys want some of it. Nothing wrong with that. |
| | But advertising continues to be woefully inefficient, even when it gets clicks and sales. Just because it's more accountable doesn't mean it's less wasteful. The waste has just been spreading from paper and airwaves to servers dumping billions of useless messages onto laptop and cell phone screens. |
| | We've been around wasted advertising for so many generations that we take it utterly for granted. But does it go on forever? What happens when we come up with ways for buyers and sellers to find each other without guesswork? |
| | We will. And when we do, a lot of the wasted guesswork we call advertising will go pop. And so will the bubble it's inflating right now. |
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