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Books Digital Culture Media Personal Technology

CluetrainPlus10 – Thesis 17

Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

As many will probably say about The Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s almost scary how precient it was. To put it into perspective, when the authors were writing Cluetrain, Google had less than a dozen employees and has just moved out of a garage. The word “blog” had yet to be used to describe a chronological website. Napster hadn’t shattered the media industry yet. And statistics put the number of people on the Internet at just about 150 million, or around 10% of the current number.

Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger put together an amazing set of principles that are even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago.  The sad part about Thesis 17, in particular, is that companies haven’t yet learned this lesson. Some of them are trying, with standouts like Zappos. But far too many companies are failing to see the benefits of participatory marketing and extreme customer service.

The market is no longer passive. Almost no one under the age of 35 these days interacts with products in the way the older generation did…we expect to be involved in our consumption, connected to it. We ask friends, we poll our social networks, we take recommendations of the people we know very seriously. We have to love both the object and the process or we just don’t buy. And loving means becoming involved, knowing more, interacting with the makers, asking questions, and otherwise being active.

We want a relationship with our products, and producers who try to feed us advertising may be ok short-term, but the days of the passive are over. The new market is fragmented and participatory, and content producers will have to adjust or die. Making a better product isn’t enough. The companies that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that understand and cultivate the one-to-one relationships with their customers and their potential customers.

This post is a part of the larger CluetrainPlus10 project. Follow other reflections on the Cluetrain there!

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Brand_New_World Uncategorized

National Cornbread Festival



IMG_1086, originally uploaded by griffey.

Took Eliza to another festival this weekend, and she seemed to get more attention than all the cornbread. Wherever we go, people want to talk to her and touch her. Or we hear them talking about her. She has no idea how powerful she is. Yet.

We ate lots of yummy fair food (freshly fried potato chips, barbecue, hot dog, ice cream, kettle corn). Eliza was in heaven. Heard some decent bluegrass music, watched some juggling on stilts, looked at John Deere tractors and giant cow statues, and played with rubber ducks floating in a fountain.

We didn’t ride any rides, but she had a blast looking at all the bright spinning things. She kept saying “Wow! Wow! Wow!” It was clearly a feast for her little tummy AND her little eyes.

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ALA Books Media Personal Technology

Kindle 2 on Techsource

Just a note for those that might have missed it…I’m one part of a three part post over at TechSource on the Kindle 2 and libraries. I’m pointing it out mainly because of the fact that I did the very first, I think, video for TechSource, showing off the Kindle 2’s Text-to-Speech feature. Go take a look, and let me know how you think it came out.

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Brand_New_World Uncategorized

For my Blueberry Girl

I think everyone with a daughter should hear this…we all have our own Blueberry Girl.

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Brand_New_World Uncategorized

Turtles and chickens and llamas, oh my!



IMG_1030, originally uploaded by griffey.

Eliza got to go to her first “petting zoo” environment this weekend at a local festival. She had absolutely NO fear whatsoever and picked up the turtles with an ease and grace that astounded me. She also had fun stopping the mice on their wheel with just a powerful little touch of her finger and lifting it so they could spin again. She did this over and over.

We also took a hayride, which she thought was funny and fun. Although we were going about 5 miles an hour the whole time, she kept saying “wheeee! wheeeeee!”

And there was live music, which she enjoyed, and a cookout. She had an entire hot dog plus some of mommy’s food. But the best part of all was just seeing her walking all around, very independently. Someone asked us, “Is she a runner? Some kids just see an open space and take off.” Well, I wasn’t sure until Saturday, but yes. She’s a runner.

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Media Personal

New TV?

I asked on Twitter, but thought I’d ping the brains of all 3 of the people that read me here. I’m shortly in the market for a new TV, finally upgrading to HDTV after our 37″ Toshiba of a decade or so is losing it’s picture.

So: who’s bought an LCD HDTV in the last few months that they really like, and WHERE did you buy it? I’ve gotten two recommendations for the Vizio 42″ LCD, but so far I’ve only found it for sale at one place online, Target. Love to find it somewhere with free shipping…

So: What TV do you have that you love, and where did you procure it? Under $1000, please, and 40-42 inch or so LCD. 1080p preferred, but 720 acceptable if there’s a cost/savings analysis there that makes sense.

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Brand_New_World Profile

Eliza Profile: Sixteen Months



IMG_0973
Originally uploaded by griffey

Favorite hobbies: Climbing, especially stairs. Dancing. Trying to jump. Basically, she’s learning lots of physical things right now. One of her favorite pastimes is wrestling with Daddy.

Favorite foods: Fish, sweet potatoes, bread, yogurt, cheese, tortillas (she calls them “tias”), freeze-dried fruits, toast with peanut butter.

Favorite toys: All her Elmos. Daddy’s Guitar Hero drum set. Mardi Gras doubloons and beads. Plastic eggs. Puzzles.

Favorite books: Her first Dolly Parton Imagination Library book, the Little Engine That Could. Hop on Pop. Birthday Monsters. Apple Farmer Annie. Carnival.

She’s basically becoming a toddler, and learning to assert herself. She will now ask for books by name, request specific bedtime friends (“Elmo! Elmo! No, Bunny!”), and foods. She can basically ask for anything inside the house at this point…she asks for things, and to do things (“Outside!” or “Up!” to go upstairs). She’s learning that she can effect the world with her voice, which is both awesome and scary as hell.

She’s also becoming far more cuddly. She will actively seek hugs, and insists on getting kisses in the morning when Daddy gets her up. The normal wake up kisses go something like “Blankie! *kiss* Baby! *kiss* Eliza! *kiss*”. We taught her that she can pat the dog and cats to show them love, and now she pats everything and everyone to show that she likes it: the phone, a book, Mommy…doesn’t matter. “Pat, pat, pat.”

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Personal

Joss Whedon on Humanism

I felt exactly the way that Joss did during Obama’s Inauguration…it was a historic moment for the President of the United States to recognize the huge numbers of people in the country that are not religious.

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Personal Technology

Gmail hack

Not sure how many people know about this gmail hack, but it’s come in handy for me recently, so I thought I’d throw it out. Suppose you have an account on a service like Twitter, but now need to sign up for a different username, or just want one account for business and one for personal use. Twitter (and other services) won’t let you use an email that is already in their system to sign up for a new account.

Here’s where the gmail hack comes in. Gmail has one feature and one bug that allows you go get around having to have a secondary email address. The first is that Gmail allows you to create an infinite number of + aliases for your gmail account, in the format:

griffey+TEXTHERE@gmail.com

You can use any text at all after the plus sign, and gmail will ignore it completely for the purposes of delivering the email to you, but WILL let you filter and search on it. So I could set up a second twitter account called fakegriffey, and give it the email address griffey+fakegriffey@gmail.com, and Twitter will let me, since that isnt in their database. Gmail will happily deliver it to my griffey@gmail account, and all is well.

The other hack is that Gmail completely ignores periods in any account name for delivering email. griffey is the same as gri.ffey is the same as griff.ey is the same as g.r.i.f.f.e.y. By giving Twitter some variation, you can get around their email limit and still keep your email organized.

Hope this is useful to anyone who didn’t know about it!

Categories
Digital Culture Media Music

Wisdom from Reznor

Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, recently said this in a Wired interview:

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free,” Reznor says. “But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”

How’s that for a customer service mantra? Try that for your library: What would you want, if you were a patron? How would you want to be treated? Work back from that, find a way for that to make sense.