Sunday, March 27, 2005

Marketers Feverish Over Viral Ads - Daniel Terdiman, Wired [Edu_RSS] Tie this one together with the vulgar blog.  Wake up guys, it only works a couple of times and then we get bored... How about just trying to explain the product?  Asking too much of ya? 4:08:35 PM    comment [] Conflict in Design Education [Edu_RSS] To me, this is a just a revisiting of the dicussion about the difference between training and learning. I tire of this because, well, I think it is over.  Knowledge workers (or whaever today's buzz word is for people who perform most of their work with their brains not their hands or at least with their brains connected to their hands, can't be trained to do what needs to be done without thinking.  How can you build a learning program with "appropriate levels of structure and difficulty when most work STARTS with the highest level of Blooms taxonomy? 3:59:47 PM    comment [] Another vulgar "blog" is born. Noah Brier: Another blog that wasn't. Ahh, the marketers are starting blogs without realizing why blogs have power. To really understand this you need to go back to the depression days of 2001. The days when Evan Williams (co-founder of Pyra, the guys who started Blogger.com) was broke and looking like he'd go bankrupt. The days when UserLand was quickly running out of money (and did, under my watch). The days back when Ben and Mena Trott couldn't get a job. No one had any use for a cute couple who could write Perl scripts. Other factors? Corporate scandals were rocking the land. Worldcom. Tyco. The bubble had burst and had exposed folks who were taking advantage of the system. So, what do out-of-work web designers and developers do? They built systems to let them spout off. And then they used those systems to do just that and fight back. Remember the site we all used to read every day to find out which companies were gonna lay off more people? Yeah, it has a vulgar name but 2001 was a vulgar time. Another factor? The ascendancy of Google. Google's algorithm used inbound links. They treat inbound links as so important that my NetMeeting site is still listed two years after being turned off. What's the best way to get inbound links? You guessed it right: change your content often. What's the best way to change your content often? Blog, baby, blog. Blogging and Google were made for each other. Another factor? The ascendancy of RSS. Why was RSS important? It let connectors watch a large number of sites. It let people have relationships with sites ON THEIR TERMS. No more email mailing lists. No more writing rules to stick newsletters into folders. No more giving our email addresses to marketers who'd then turn around and sell our addresses for 8 cents a name. No more spam. (Seriously, I still get spam from email newsletters I signed up for in 1998 because they make a lot of money selling email addresses to other companies). But it goes back to those dark days of 2001. We were gonna take back the world from corporations. From mainstream media. From the government. We were gonna tell the world what we thought. So, today, we've evolved a few "best practices" out of those dark days. No comments? Lame. That tells us you don't think we're important enough to listen to. No RSS? Lame. That tells us you don't want connectors/sneezers/influentials to talk about you and you don't want anyone to have a relationship with you on THEIR TERMS. No real human author? That tells us that you aren't passionate or authoritative about your product and you aren't willing to get over your fear of talking with real customers. So, go ahead. Be lame. Make my day. At least we'll get another vulgar Gapingvoid cartoon out of it. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 3:54:44 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Judy Smith. Last update: 4/22/2005; 5:21:19 PM.