Our friends from the Norman Lear Center, one of the world’s leading think tanks and research institutions devoted exclusively to entertainment, is celebrating their 10th anniversary in style – with a list of ten good reasons why TV, the last remaining mass medium, is good for you: “We've heard the arguments: How TV is bad for us, how it's linked to violence, the obesity epidemic, the dumbing down of culture. At the Norman Lear Center we've made it our business to study entertainment -- televised and otherwise -- and believe that whatever its downsides, TV also has much to contribute to a healthy, connected and well-informed society.“
Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.
Nano-blogging makes micro-blogging soooo long-form. If Flutter were real (and not a spoof, see the video below from earlier this year), it would allow only 26 characters, and (the supposedly real) Adocu is even more extreme: You have only one word. Hemingway would love this, although he was less economical. Remember his six-word story "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"?
There seem to be three (non-mutually exclusive) models for marketers tasked with building brand equity: marketing scarcity, marketing artificial scarcity, or marketing relevance.
I was thrilled to read the riveting “In Defense of Distraction” piece by Sam Anderson in New York magazine this week. Well-surveyed, it covers a lot of different aspects of this complex topic without being overly academic or boring. In fact, and this is the biggest compliment I can possibly give, the article is full of distractions – digressing thoughts that open up unexpected avenues of pleasure for the reader.
I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums. This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).
When Twitter made its first big appearance (at SXSW Interactive in 2007), it was a relatively small community of techies and web 2.0 geeks. Now it's mainstream and keeps growing at an explosive rate. HubSpot, the developer of Twitter Grader, just released its "State of the Twittersphere" report. The report reveals that an estimated 5,000-10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened every day.
It's a few weeks old but still worth pointing out as another recent example of "Disruptive Realism" - a clever twist on the slogan of the New York Times: 'All the news we hope to print:'
I saw this mural at the "Tacheles" in Berlin -- the legendary community center at which Bruce Springsteen shot his video to "Glory Days" (when I was still young....).
