Band flips off market: For the first time in history, a company — the hightly branded band Metallica — has sued its own market. With a lawsuit against the music-sharing MP3 service Napster, three universities and 65,000 Metallica fans, the band appears to be setting off a neutron bomb in its own pants.
There is ample news about this all over the Web, so I won't repeat it here. I will, however, point out the complete absence of any explanation on Metallica's own Web site, which is like one of those porn places that opens like a trapdoor from hell, gurging up random windows that are immune to back-button actions by the user. One of those windows has this quote, presumably from a Metallica lyric:
Blinded by me, you can't see a thing
Just call my name, I'll hear you scream
Master
The last scream I heard was on the evening news tonight. It was from a former Metallica fan, cursing the band he once loved and smashing its CDs in the street.
— Doc Searls
Wednesday, May 3, 2000
Chapters & Verse: Chapters, the large Canadian bookseller, just sent out an email circular pointing its customers to an interview with Yours Truly, conducted a couple months back in a fine Toronto coffee house, safe from the blowing sleet outside. Not bad, considering the fact that your co-author does not tend to speak in final draft. You can actually hear a more recent interview, completed several minutes ago, at the Financial Sense Newshour, which runs live at 4:20pm Wednesdays over the air in the San Diego area (KKSM/1320), and archived at the show's site, starting around 8pm the same day.
Another damn Manifesto: The latest Time Digital magazine (subtitled "Plus the AOL Program Guide") is a not-bad-considering vend-o-copia of cross-promotional infotainment, including "The Dotcom Manifesto: 10 Ways to Live Better Now." That content goes undelivered online, so here's the gist of it, rendered visually as ten Theses a guy nails to his monitor screen on the the feature's double-truck introductory pages:
- We will have happy families
- We will always be entertained
- We will have countless friends
- We will be perfectly productive
- We will be rich
- We will know everything
- We will shop till we drop
- We will work as we please
- We will run the country
- We will be beautiful
No wonder they didn't ask us to contribute a thesis or two. Somehow "We will catapult dead animals over the parapets of Fort Business" doesn't quite fit on that list.
— Doc Searls
Cool, Gonzo and Free: Our own Christopher Locke speaks freely on clueful marketing in A Public Corporate Water Cooler, at InformationWeek Online. The same piece should also appear in the current print version of the magazine. A sample:
In February, Ford unveiled a plan to give its 350,000 employees Net-enabled home PCs. The mainstream press made much of the $30 million worth of equipment involved--and totally missed the main story: the Internet and the market conversations it spawns.
Chris' next book will be Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices. He got started on that path with Technology Marketing Gets a Clue in the February issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0.
About the new book, Chris says, "In stark contrast to broadcast advertising, the book explores the consequences that can flow from creating genuine relationships with emergent web micromarkets." That line comes from an interview Chris gave to Tom Peters.com. Yes, that Tom Peters. Cooler yet, the index page of the site describes Chris as Tom's "cool new friend." A sample from the interview:
When business looks at the Internet, it hears the word medium and thinks, "Ah, a medium, we know what that is, a medium for advertising." But in fact this is a medium (again this is a great contrast with broadcasting) that grew up like Topsie over in the corner as some kind of weirdball DARPA DOD experiment and had nothing to do with commercial involvement whatsoever in the early going. It was mediating conversations between people.
— Doc Searls
Tuesday, May 2, 2000
One good manifesto deserves, well, any number of others: Witness The COMsumer Manifesto: Empowering Communities of Consumers through the Internet It's a wordy thing, but you'll find some ponies in there. If paragraphs like this come through for you, there's a lot more where they come from:
Intermediaries often assisted organizations in maximizing the value of the exchange between buyer and seller. Over time firms and their intermediaries organized themselves to minimize their transaction costs and maximize their profits. In this old paradigm organizations collected information primarily for their benefit. As they prospered products were segmented and increasingly customized. The incentive for the firm was to reach out and attract the customer. Now the transfer to the online world is rapidly changing this concept to drawing in the customer. This traces to customers having more information and immediate choices available.
Less wordy but just as obscure and a lot more funny is The Supreme Court of Common Horsesense, by Edward Eugene Baskett. There's a story in here, and it's worth reading around the site to figure out what it is (which may not really be possible, but getting close is half the fun). Remember the old board game called Clue? Think about that when you read this, from Mr. Baskett:
What did GE Capital do with health insurance to make Edward Baskett do this, for himself and Christian Science, alike. Where do Lorna and Gary Wendt fit in to this picture? How long will GE Capital and corporate America get away with turning Christian Science followers out in the cold with no health insurance? What Gary Wendt did to Edward Baskett is comparable to what he did to Lorna Wendt.
Much funnier than all of them is Mark Woodward's Chainsaw Liberation Choir and Chorus site. If you look carefully, you'll find a certain Cluetrain author sawing Zs in mid-session at a recent event.
Last Words on Microsoft: Nobody seems to agree with my take on The Microsoft Thing, so I thought I'd put my clues down in long form.
— Doc Searls
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