My grandmother used to tell me never to do anything that I wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper. Maybe she lived up to this ethical standard, but she’d be the only one. Substitute “internet” for “newspaper” and here we are. In today’s NY Times, there’s an article about Facebook backing […]
Posts for November 2007
Into the Open, Into the Closed
When Fred Wilson said “open is the new closed” he was echoing Seth Goldstein’s “closed is the new open“, even if it sounds like he wasn’t. I had a long incoherent post (what else is new?) about opening a few weeks ago. Here’s a summary: every opening exposes something else that’s closed. Opening up a […]
Matchbox Branding
Kids’ toys are an interesting business. The velocity of the viral marketing of kids’ chatter is exceeded only by that of currency traders’ jokes, it seems. One day every kid in town is playing on Club Penguin, the next they’re all on WebKinz. My kids are pretty impressed with brands in an enforcing-important-social-norms sort of […]
Conversation
Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias, one of my favorite blogs, is contemplating stopping his contributions. He says I’ve been wondering for a while if I should be blogging. Blogging is less of a conversation than I’d hoped, even among blog coauthors. It feels great to quickly put an idea “out there” in an accessible […]
Advertising: More of the Same, More More More
I’ve been puzzling over where behavioral targeting takes advertising for the past few months (i.e. here.) It crystallized for me this morning when I started reading IBM’s “The End of Advertising as we know It“. (I only read the first page, though, so this post isn’t an endorsement of whatever IBM went on to say.) […]
I Don’t Mind Being Friends with Brands, I Just Don’t Want to Have to be Friendly to My Friends Brand-Friends
Reading the press and opinion on Facebook’s new targeted advertising system. I think Facebook is overreaching, they’re asking too much. They’ve given us a container for widgets and a few of their own substandard built-ins (email, pictures, feed.) While free they accumulated the real value: a ton of users’ social graphs. Now that they have […]
John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now.
I’ve got a lot on my mind. You can see it by reading about the weird variety of things I’ve posted about in the last three months. For the most part it’s about the future of marketing. Much of it is, uh, aspirational (read: wishful thinking.) Greg posts about behavioral targeting: he’s tired of it. […]
Keep Your Content Close, but Your Friends Closer
Would you rather spend your time finding the needle in the haystack or the haystack on the needle? Randall Stross writes an interesting article about OpenSocial in today’s New York Times. I’m still muddling my way through where I think the widget ecosystem brings the internet, but Stross says something that contradicts one of my […]
The Sense in Irrationality
There’s a more cynical view of why it is relatively unusual for businesspeople to go back on their word than the one I posted about a couple of days ago. I mentioned that the cost of redress when treated unfairly often made it economically irrational to try to enforce a broken contract. I said that […]