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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Hair on Earth 
Death by recursion
| | I really want to take the high road with the Santa Barbara News-Press, which is hard-pressed to get a break in the 'sphere these days. So, since I missed the print edition of the paper when it ran the Travis Armstrong opinion piece that drew such scorn at the link above, I thought I'd look it up on the paper's website. As a subscriber I should have some access to some of the editorial there, right? Wrong. But not for policy reasons. I couldn't even get in a position to probe those. |
| | No, the site is just broken. I log in, I look up the piece, I see the piece in the results, I click on the piece, and it brings me to a page with the beginning of the piece and a message to log in again. I do that, to see what happens, and the loop repeats. |
| | I could say what I've said before about what the paper needs to do, but nothing ever happens, so fuggit. |
| | Still, I had fun explaining it all with pictures and call-out boxes, here. |
Let me have your full distraction, please
| | The most annoying marketing buzzword of the week is "Attention." Not a new theory, the Attention mantra has been regaining traction among blogworld marketers who propose control of Attention as the Brand New Promise for Internet citizens and the New Brand Promise for the businesses that serve them. |
| | The payoff for paying attention to what Internet travelers pay attention to is apparently twofold: 1) paying attention to what consumers are paying attention to and why makes businesses smarter (i.e., more money now), and 2) holding customers¹ attention long enough to fully engage them stitches a hyperlink directly from the business¹s URL to the knotty little skull of the consumer, making him a Customer For Life (i.e. more money in the future). |
| | She expands on the problem of assumption: |
| | ...attention is not intention. I can assume that the person who paid attention to my blog for the fleeting seconds it took to get here today by searching Google for "Great Dane Doberman Mix" was looking for something. I can't tell whether that something was to find a home for one or to fuck one. |
| | On the (even more) contrary, she adds, |
| | ...what I think I am getting at is that the Internet most important distinction is its exquisite function to enable distraction, not to track attention. That the accidental come-upon-ness of the obscure and viscerally meaningful can evoke mere milliseconds of joy or horror individually which has relevant commercial value to precisely nothing. |
| | Then she gets to the meat of the matter: |
| | What matters is often not the gesturing, but in the de-gesturing; it is not attention then, but repulsion. It becomes too convoluted to calculate, which way my attention flows, because it is neither linear nor accountable, except for total on the invoices of some mighty consultants. |
| | More and more, my gestures reflect not what I am paying attention to, but instead are sideways related to what I¹ve dropped my illusions about. In surrender of control, then, not in clinging to it, we wander here. We value most those instances of delight so fleeting that they are the opposite of thought and reason; they are out of time; they scatter us to the wind rather than draw us in. |
| | They repel us outward, until we are untraceable, exiled, free, and only in knowing me severed will I tell you how you can find me whole. |
| | As John Perry Barlow made clear in A Delcaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, what we want here is independence, not dependence. What we want from business is markets as nouns, created and defined by independence, automomy, liberty, freedom and other profoundly human attributes and aspirations. Not more demographics, psychographics, regions, clustered appetites and the other groupings that marketers call "markets" but in which all those human attributes dim and disappear. |
| | The problem — so far, at least — is that the other side can imagine a zillion uses for our attention data, while we can barely imagine any. I know The Attention Trust and the Attention Recorder are ways to get ahead of marketers, rather than ways to follow behind them. But I can't help thinking that there's something premature about the Attention Thing. It looks to me like one wrench in a future user-in-charge tool box. We don't even have the box yet, much less the rest of the tools we'll need. |
| | I was talking a couple days ago with Steve Gillmor about the problems here, and and why I wrote The Intention Economy as a way of getting past those problems. (And maybe starting to build that tool box.) |
| | Steve suggested a different way to conceive that box: individuals owning and controlling all their data. The writing we do, the music we make, the pictures we take, the art we produce — and not just our crumb trails through the marketplace. |
| | I like that. Gives me much more room for productive distraction. Such as the 10,642 photos I've put up on Flickr, viewed 150,813 times by other individuals. Among whom, it turns out, are sources of about $400, so far, in sales of those pictures. |
| | Kudos to Flickr, which treats my data — even data generated inside Flickr — as mine and not theirs. Free'd data, the individual's ownership of which is clear, makes larger markets possible. |
| | For example, I can use arrange photos of The Santa Barbara County Courthouse both at Flickr and at Tabblo. Because both see that my data as mine, and our pictures as ours, they can open the APIs between their businesses and allow customers to do more with both. Thus a new photography marketplace grows outside the giant walled garden, paved with countless patents, that Kodak built. |
| | I have more to say about this, but I also need to drive over to UCSB, where I have an office with a land line, which I'll need for the Gillmor Gang we're recording this morning (instead of the usual Friday). See ya there. |
Lucky stiffs
Agreed
Until the dog eats the deer
Unbearable Budlightness of Being
| | Among the few things the kid and I watch on TV are sportscasts. Mostly basketball, but sometimes just anything interesting. Like maybe even golf, since Tiger Woods seems to be performing at the Highest Possilbe Level lately. (Though we really can't see that, because we sort-of don't have a TV right now. Well, we do, but it only gets a few channels, kinda.) |
| | Anyway, back during the NBA playoffs the kid became a bit of a connoisseur of ads. The best, he thought, was an ad for Michelob Amber Ultra, in which "light beer just got darker". The worst was for Guinness, where a couple of animated chaps yelled "bdillliant" at each other for no reason. Never mind that Guinness is 10,000 times better Michelob Anything, I'm sure. |
| | Anyway, we recalled this at the dinner table last night. Somehow I was also reminded to pass along some beer adivice: Take any thin, shitty, weasel-spit-based yellow beer, and add Guinness to it. The result will be something amberish and improved to a significant degree. Still swill, but improved. |
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