If you loved Chris Anderson’s Wired article (Octoboer, 2004), The Long Tail… you will love his book (same name). I’m just a couple of chapters in but finding “hmmm” nuggets on every page.
Most of the top fifty best-selling albums of all time were recorded in the seventies and eighties (the Eagles, Michael Jackson), and none of them were made in the past five years.
Anderson provides a deeper understanding of why Amazon and Netflix, et al. are so popular. This might be a two-highlighter book.
Doc Searls was one of several blogger biggies taking part in BloggerCon IV (“Celebrating the art and science of weblogs”), this weekend in San Francisco. Looks like all of the sessions are available as MP3 downloads and I’m looking forward to the one titled “Making Money.” Doc’s take on blogging and business makes a lot of sense to me:
First, blogging isn’t a business, any more than emailing or phoning are businesses. It is, however, becoming more important to many businesses. And to the nonbusiness lives of millions. This is an example of what I call The Because Effect. In the Making Money session yesterday, John Palfrey called this “making money Off blogging” (“as opposed to making money by blogging”).
Lt. Steven Hauk’s (Bruno Kirby) wonderful line from Good Morning, Vietnam. It was brought to mind by this observation in a story about Ze Frank:
“Most people aren’t funny, and most funny people are not funny most of the time.” — Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University (interactive telecommunications program)
For my part, I’d rather be funny than know how to fly.
“Job titles, boxes in org charts, are so last-millennium. They are relics of an Industrial Age that was born of the doomed notion that people are best understood as cogs in corporate machines. … What matters most in the long run is who you are. Not who you work for.”
— Doc Searls on Robert Scoble’s value to Microsoft:
Seth Godin calls this the most important “marketing pothole”:
Great marketing pleases everyone on the team, sooner or later. But at the beginning, great marketing pleases almost no one. At the beginning, great marketing is counter-intuitive, non-obvious, challenging and apparently risky. Of course your friends, shareholders, stakeholders and bosses won’t like it. But they’re not doing the marketing, you are.
The flyleaf describes Douglas Coupland’s new novel as “a lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks.” I very much enjoyed two of his earlier works, Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, and offer these nuggets from the introduction to his latest novel:
Life is a contest between you and everyone else.
Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people.
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
You can’t fake creativity, competence or sexual arousal.
Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resume.
After a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless. — pg. 248
I think computers ought to have a key called I’M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours. — pg. 386
“Without politics there is no freedom.” — John Ashcroft, Famous Missourian.
“My other superpower is that I don’t mind embarrassing myself in public. If I had to pick one quality that best predicts success (other than wanting to be successful) it would be the willingness to risk embarrassment.”
— Scott Adams
“Sometimes we don’t do things we want to do so others won’t know we want to do them.”
“…broadcasters (should) start viewing themselves as multimedia companies, and even changing their names to help spread the message both internally and externally. The internet is NOT broadcasting, and the more we understand that, the quicker we’ll get on with business models that’ll meet our needs in a Media 2.0 world.” – Terry Heaton
A couple of years ago we dropped the “network” from one of our networks because it was felt to be somewhat…limiting. No long reflective of what we are or are becoming.