Friday, April 10, 2009
Doodle
Monday, April 06, 2009
Twitter feedback: it’s not just opt-in, it’s volunteer
I don’t know if commercial producers, ad agencies and their clients are gauging reaction to TV commercials on Twitter, but they should be.
Thinking the Kia hamster commercial was very cute—especially the cool passenger’s crisp little inverse nod of recognition to another hamster at a stop light—I took to Twitter to see if others reacted as I did. The Twitterati likes it mostly.
Strikes me it’s an incredibly objective view. If you’re a marketer, you reach out to consumers with a phone survey or recruit them for a focus group and you’ve attached a lot of importance to wanting to know. You look at blogs for a sense of the pulse and you have to figure the bloggers have attached a certain measure of importance to the act of writing about your product, or may even have some agenda. It takes some effort to publish a blog post. But a twitterer doesn’t make a big investment of time in blurting out a tweet. A collection of opinions tossed out in this way seems very real, honest.
mooshki: If I had any $, I would buy a Kia Soul because of the hamster commercial.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Microsoft is going all free and live and stuff
I let Windows update give me Live Essentials and tried the Movie Maker beta.
Not a lot of controls, but it is very easy to make and publish. Not that the publishing part is anywhere near as populist as YouTube. Click on “Soapbox” in the embed. You go to an MSN video page that’s dominated by MSNBC videos. Soapbox user videos, the thing you thought you were clicking to see, are relatively hidden away behind a little link on the top nav. That seems to be changing with the new MSN video site. (See preview.) But the change doesn’t favor the creations of everyday folks; it seems to tilt from an emphasis on news to an emphasis on TV shows.
I guess they’re feeling their way. Microsoft is getting quite live and webby—in some quarters of that big place. Pretty soon now you won’t even see dialog boxes when you install stuff, like “You may now disconnect from the Internet.”
Couple days ago Sharepoint Designer was freed. First thing some IT folks thought about? Lock it down in enterprises. Can’t have that now. Everybody publishing? Shudder.
I’m sure it must be hard for Microsoft to balance all the interests. They can’t diss the protectionist IT cops who are their customers for servers and Office, but at the same time they have to listen to the reality out there.
Control vs. contribute. I haven’t looked at it lately but there used to be a similarly interesting balancing act performed by Adobe in marketing Contribute on their site. As I recall it, there was practically no summary of the product on the microsite home. You forked immediately to pages for IT or publisher and each audience got a different story. Editors were told they could do anything! IT guys were assured they didn’t have to let anybody do anything.
Monday, March 30, 2009
The right climate for Dickens
A new BBC take on Little Dorrit started on PBS in the U.S. tonight.
It’s nice. No surprise there, as it’s been adapted by Andrew Davies (newest Bleak House, Middlemarch, 1995 Pride and Prejudice).
Good time for it, too, with its threads of ruinous debt and government bureaucracy, all packaged up to satisfy a need to find amusement in despair.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Little pieces of my heart
Every once in a while I go on a sentimental journey back to websites I once maintained. This morning, for the first time in a number of years, I checked out the IU Alumni Association site that I tended 12 years ago.
It’s undergone I-don’t-know-how-many redesigns since my day, but I never mind. Time moves on and I’m sure I’d hate the looks of my 1997 idea of cool if I had a look at it now. In fact, I don’t even want to check the wayback machine for fear of a cringe attack.
I did spot one little bit of my snarky copy that was either preserved or overlooked on the license plate lobbying page:
“What do Indiana, Tennessee, and New York have in common?Maybe only one thing: IU license plates!”
Funny to think about web development back then. If anything interactive was needed for the site, I was all about CGI/Perl, and flat text files were the only databases I thought I needed. And we got by; it was fine for the time.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Rolling Stone: read me a story
I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I even tried to sell a t-shirt from the classifieds in the back of the book in the late 70s (Linda for First Lady; got a cease-and-desist).
While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.
But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.
Would I pay? Maybe. A little.
*How often do you print? Me: I’ll go a month without turning on the printer at home, maybe twice a week at work, usually to pass something around for review and copyediting.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
288-hour news cycle
Further on persistence of interest: 12 days later people are still passing around links to the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer encounter.
