Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Early on a huge amount of the most trusted form of advertising, word of mouth, materialized. Unfortunately for BuyMusic.com the word of mouth was quite negative. [...] Generation Y is often called difficult to market to - perhaps the fact that they are so connected that they are bathed in much more word of mouth than the rest of us (the mean free path to others they trust may be much shorter than their elders). [tingilinde] The delicious irony in this is that media and communications companies were deluded that the net would allow them to create strong direct links to individual consumers ("1-to-1 marketing" and other such cant). As if consumers did not understand the asymmetry of the situation. Instead, they use the net to undermine the exclusivity of broadcast media like nothing else. 11:22:41 AM

Publishing director of the nature Publishing Group defends the profit motive in scientific publishing. "So long as you're providing a good service at a fair price, I don't think there's anything wrong," she says. [New Scientist] That's exactly the problem. The scientific community has lots of evidence that the scientific journal oligopoly is providing worsening service and increasingly unfair prices. That's why PLoS and other initiatives came about, not because scientists are gluttons for paper shuffling. 7:34:00 AM