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Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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 Wednesday, July 18, 2007
started 7/19/2007; 5:44:42 AM - last post 7/20/2007; 2:39:10 PM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, July 18, 2007 
7/19/2007; 9:44:42 AM (reads: 7541, responses: 4)
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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. |
discuss
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Paul - Re: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
7/19/2007; 12:56:54 PM (reads: 1514, responses: 0)
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I agree with you there Doc - I too believe there will soon be a time when messages are passed between consumers without any intervention from the brand itself.
One thing I do struggle with though is the issue of trust amongst consumers. How do we trust the originator of the message? If they needed an affiliation with the brand to validate their "hot news", would we become suspicious of their motivations?
Paul
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Jim Bursch - Re: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
7/19/2007; 9:17:36 PM (reads: 1545, responses: 0)
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Ad-supported media is corrupt and corrupting and the blogosphere is no different.
Wouldn't it be interesting to do a controlled study to find out if the correlation of ad spend to buzz is less-than, equal-to or greater when you compare blogs that have advertising and blogs that do not have advertising.
Doc, do you think that you are less influenced by advertising in your blogging because you do not have ads on your blog?
I know I have toyed with purchasing blog ads not to reach the blog's readers, but to reach the blogger. In other words, I have tried to corrupt bloggers with my ad spend. Of course it is no surprise that the higher profile bloggers are less prone to this tactic, but are they immune?
The solution to this problem is to put the power of the purse in the hands of the reader/viewer/listener/audience/consumer. It's time to put an end to the third-party-payer system of media that serves nobody well. It's time to kill the industrial media advertising beast.
And the way to kill it is to starve it of its sustenance: mindshare -- mindshare that is stolen and misappropriated then sold and resold without a penny of recompense to its rightful owners.
It's time to make a declaration, and here it is:
My Mindshare 10-Point Declaration
1. My mindshare is mine.
2. My mindshare has real monetary value.
3. I have a right to sell, trade, or keep my mindshare as I choose.
4. Nobody is entitled to take my mindshare without my permission.
5. Unsolicited and intrusive advertising amounts to mindshare theft.
6. Mindshare theft is wrong.
7. I have a right to resist mindshare theft.
8. I demand media that does not deal in stolen mindshare.
9. I support media that respects my mindshare.
10. The world is better when individuals control their mindshare and their media.
discuss
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Damien Riley - Re: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
7/20/2007; 8:55:01 AM (reads: 1528, responses: 1)
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I so respectfully disagree with you about Harry Potter. It's no LWW and she is no CS Lewis!
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Doc Searls - Re: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
7/20/2007; 6:39:10 PM (reads: 1736, responses: 0)
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Well, I didn't compare Potter to LWW. Nor JKR to CSL. In fact, I compared neither to anything. I merely made a statement about what I consider their positive qualities and the chance that those qualities will endure.
By the way I've always had a soft spot for Lewis. In fact last Sunday night I even sat with Stephen Lewis (no relation, but worth mentioning) in the hallowed booths of the >Eagle and Child, where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien smoked and drank their evenings away those many decades ago in Oxford.
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