BIG Brother: Take back their 15 minutes!
by steve lundin on February 20th, 2008
Are we really as guttural and vulgar as the Gen WHY group that we’re exposed to on CBS’ Big Brother? Between the bleeped out swearing, Dr. Phil level lay psychoanalysis, utter lack of social empathy, it’s enough to make Alfred Adler turn in his grave. Small wonder the rest of the world hates us – between exports like this and Dallas, it’s clear that we hate ourselves: they’re just following our lead. But what can you expect? These quasi adults are merely parroting what they’ve been taught by watching COPS, listening to angry rappers and realizing that only the biggest trailer trash celebrities warrant multiple People magazine covers.
The show airs in 70 countries, with multiple versions and is streamed online as well; for the fame seeker this affords a constant virtual stage for displays of all kinds of unseemly behavior. Throughout the course of its run we’ve been treated to racial slurs, verbal assaults, rampant misogyny and physical assaults involving fists, found objects and knives. Now – this would all be excusable if the show was at least funny – I mean the same elements are found in Die Hard, and I’ve watched that movie a hundred times. But it’s not. And ironically, it’s not even unsettling. We’ve become so inured to this kind of behavior that we’re establishing a new norm, benchmarked by the gutter. Clearly, the only way to get someone to pay attention to you is to yell at them. If that doesn’t work, try a knife. Or, if your name is Steven Kazmierczak, four or five guns.
BIG Brother is popular because it appeals to our gaper’s delay gut reaction: people screaming and fighting and doing nasty things to each other are a lot more interesting to watch than people acting kindly. Could you imagine a house where everyone got along? How abnormal! And the players in this game are clearly out to please: while they’ve got the attention of the viewer they’re each out to make the biggest impact possible. After all, the most famous apprentice was Omarosa, not the guy who was trying to get along with everyone. So, if trying to outdo everyone in the room for worst behavior is rewarded, then Generation WHY is helping the next generation understand how to succeed in life: just be an asshole.
David “Cluetrain Manifesto” Weinberger interview…
by steve lundin on December 14th, 2007
We brought David into Chicago for an exclusive BIGfrontier presentation on December 3, 2007 - and he received a warm reception from a roomful of attendees who had braved near zero temps to hear his talk on Everything is Miscellaneous. We ran an interview with David in our BIGfrontier Midnight Missive newsletter - here’s the beginning of it with a link to the rest. We’ll be posting video and interviews from the event over the next few weeks.
The Wall Street Journal called him a “marketing guru.” He’s the co-author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto, the bestseller that cut through the hype and told business what the Web was really about. His last book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined has been published to rave reviews hailing it as the first book to put the Internet in its deepest context. His new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, details how we’ve pulled ourselves together after blowing ourselves apart. BIGfrontier’s Steve Lundin attempts to get inside the head of Mr. W. in this exclusive interview.
What is the evolution of thinking that moved you from Cluetrain to Everything is Miscellaneous?
I’m perpetually fascinated by the effect of the Web on our ideas. I’d been thinking about the importance of metadata (information about information) since before the Web, in part because in the late 1980s I worked at a company that pioneered document management and electronic document publishing technology. Document management is really metadata management. So, “Misc” grew out of long-term interests, but isn’t a direct descendant of Cluetrain.
Why is everything miscellaneous? Please explain the thesis behind your new book.
In the physical world, everything has to have a place and one single place. Those physical limitations shape how we organize physical stuff. But in the West we’ve taken those limitations as limitations on how ideas are ordered. The digital world subverts those old assumptions. In an online store, we’d never file a book under a single category, or list a camera under “photography” but not under “gifts for grads.” Online, things don’t have a single right place. So, it’s often better to treat the collection of digital stuff as a big miscellaneous pile, rich with potential relationships among the pieces. And rather than have experts decide before hand what deserves to be in the pile and how it should all be organized, include everything and give users the tools so that they can sort through it how they want.Of course, if you do that, you change the basics for a whole bunch of institutions, from business to science to education to politics, because the power to organize ideas and information for others is a type of power over others.
Full interview on the BIGfrontier site.
Weinberger Coming to Town: BIGfrontier event Dec. 3, 2007
by steve lundin on November 25th, 2007
And what better follow up on our Andrew “Cult of the Amateur” event than David “Everything is Miscellaneous” Weinberger. Here’s a link to a great K vs. W “reply all” debate that the WSJ ran: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118460229729267677.html. We’ll have a short interview posted later this week and full video of the event and BIGfrontier’s Steve Lundin posted the second week in December. Do you have any questions for David? Send them through.
Keen Drops a Dime on Web 2.0 at BIGfrontier event: Meet the Cut and Paste Generation
by steve lundin on July 25th, 2007
Andrew Keen, author of the Cult of the Amateur, came to Chicago on July 10th for a BIGfrontier event to shake the Web 2.0 trees and found them a bit barren. It’s not because Keen’s argument isn’t compelling, or that he wasn’t tossing the chum in the right direction, it’s just that there aren’t many yellowtails in our waters. Chicago is a security town, it’s an IT town, it’s a software town, a Web 2.0 town it ain’t. He began with an introductory discourse that charted his Ionescoesque
metamorphosis from a self described Silicon Valley player into a Don Quixote railing against Google’s windmills. During the full, one hour plus, non powerpoint presentation Keen diatribed on marketing, ethics, child rearing, the media and the growth of a potentially brain dead generation. The video highlights can be found on the BIGfrontier site. My own personal conversation over cocktails with Andrew has been posted here.
Andrew can light up a room. He touched on many issues that I find just a little more than personally irritating about those who are living the Web 2.0 life. Here’s my my reaction to some of the more notable Web 2.0 sites he discussed:
Wikipedia: OK, so according to Andrew it’s completely unvetted, user written, changes by the minute and has the validity of White House press release on the success of the war, but we already know all that. Or so I thought, until I stumbled on this gem in the current issue of ESPN magazine, contributed by none other than the “Answer Man” explaining why there are 43 cars in a NASCAR race: “Wikipedia.org: 43 is the 14th smallest prime number…” Then I received a letter from a political flogger who had posted her project on Wikipedia as if it was an actual entry: “it’s the go to source for research and it’s a cheap way for me to bring the my story to a collective place …wikipedia has an editorial staff that proofs stuff, I go to it on a daily basis.” And this brings up what really bothers me about Wikipedia: Users like our letter writer who add their own posts as if they were added by the crack Wikipedia staff (which according to Andrew does not exist) and journalists who believe them! According to Andrew the site receives something like a billion times more traffic than the venerated and well vetted Encyclopedia Britannica site that we all know, love and grew up with. Revisionist history - how 1984. I can only wonder who Wikipedia attributes that novel’s authorship to this week.
YouTube: Everybody’s favorite personal reality TV show. Sure, there are some nuggets, anyone catch some of Hillary’s stuff? But how many different ways can you watch idiots doing wheelies on their GSXR’s, playing drunken golf, strip poker or videotaping their backflipping pet fish? On the upside, if you’re willing to wade through millions of hours (and growing by the second) of material you might come across the next wannabe Wes Craven slasher short produced by some disenfranchised ad guy jonesing for a Hollywood contract. Hey, you saw it first on YouTube .
Second Life: The ultimate video game for non video game players. With a declared 4 million members why are there only 400,000 on at any given time? And you can only imagine the demographics : 50 plus guys cruising for 20 something women (wait a second - that’s My Space) would go a long way to explaining why genitalia is the number one selling Linden dollar item. I only have a few questions: if you die on Second Life are you still alive in real life? Conversely what happens if you die in real life? If you get married on Second Life is that grounds for divorce in real life? I’m sure some lawyers have set up a Second Life offices for just such contingencies. Hey, if Barack and Edwards have staffed up Second Life offices can the lawyers be far behind?
MySpace: And where would we be without all those key insights into the world of the 13-22 year old? MySpace is the great equalizer and a watering hole for pedophiles: 29,000 as of today, and counting. Wonder how many will turn out to be Catholic priests. Suddenly everybody can manufacture their own cool and entreat others on line to join them, swelling their ranks of friends. And if one personality doesn’t work, scrap it! In the old days it would take a good year to reinvent yourself, now it take a few hours with a motivated cut and paste imagination. And that’s the beauty of MySpace, you don’t have to be yourself - ever. You can pull bits and pieces of music, graphics, content from all over Internet and cobble together your own personal Frankenstein. Living it is another story - but in the online world you never actually have to meet anyone.
Personally I’m glad we’ve got Web 2.0, my feeling is that in a few years it’s various stars will find their place in the online world just like the survivors of the original bubble: Google, EBay, Amazon, etc. Most of it will become personal interconnected communities for friends to keep in touch with each other. In terms of interfering with the creative process, the whole mess is a gaper’s delay into the ultimate banality and unoriginality of our cut and paste generation. If anything, when the patina wears off and the shallow underbelly is exposed audiences will be clamoring for quality material produced by professionals. I didn’t see a lag in Harry Potter book sales this Summer - did you (liberal use of the word quality here - at least it’sa book!). If there is one positive side effect of Web 2.0 it’s that it has created a class of diary-ists. Suddenly everyone is writing, interacting, taking note. Newspapers may be closing (check the Tribune’s current stock price) but at least people are reading SOMETHING. Whether these words are on paper or on screen they are are still words. And they are creating conversations and that’s a start to understanding the world around us. Will anyone graduate to Andreww’s higher order of cognition? I’d say the odds are about the same as any typical Midwestern High School graduating class. Some will become townies welding truck bodies, some will go to college and become middle managers a few will join the professional class and a rare one in a generation will grow up to become president (anyone ever hear of Bill Clinton?). It’s all the same curve.
Keen Coming to Chicago - Where are the Web 2.0 companies?
by steve lundin on June 25th, 2007
Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur), one of the most controversial technology authors of the year, is coming to Chicago for an exclusive BIGfrontier Brunch event (co produced with mobium creative group) and the only question we have is - where are the web 2.0 companies? According to an article that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times on April 30, 2007, Web 2.0: Return of the dot-com, by our buddy Howard Wolinsky, the following are bona fide Chicago Web 2.0 companies:
CondoPerks at condoperks.com, a one-stop shop for condo and townhome associations
ParkWiz.com at parkwhiz.com, which helps motorists access parking information or reserve a space en route to their destination.
Pawky.com, the short film Web site at www.pawky.com
Viewpoints Network, a Web site at viewpoints.com designed to help people make major life purchases
PrepMe.com, online test prep service
GrubHub.com, an online guide to restaurants that deliver in Chicago and other cities
jobcoin.com, developer of software that adds job boards to blogs and Web sites
Planypus, an online planning organizer for busy young professionals at www.planypus.com
inklingmarkets.com, an online predictive market
aymz, the online identity management company at Naymz.com
Never one to keep his mouth shut, Ron May, fresh from barcamp, contributed the following to Howard’s list:
humanized.com
kirix.com
dieselpoint.com
cleversafe.com
Despite multiple mailings and postings at websites all over the city, not a single person from any ONE of these companies has registered for the event. Will someone please wake them up and let them know that Mr. Keen is speaking on July 10th and he may have some ideas they’d like to hear. And we’re extending a BIG BIGfrontier welcome to Fred from the ITA - according to Howard’s article he’s all over the Web 2.0 space. For that matter we should also see roving reporter Fendelman at this event. eprairie covered Trump’s press conference and his comments on Rosie O’Donnell, surely this event has just a tad bit more to do with technology, Adam.
Mr. Keen has captured national attention with his viewpoints because he hasn’t drunk the “all is well” Kool Aid concerning 2.0. Strange that our local companies are turning a deaf ear when the rest of the country is listening.
Register here for the July 10th event
Let’s Hold the Presidential Debates on Second Life!
by steve lundin on June 5th, 2007
If television is so 20th century why isn’t an avatar Brian Williams asking an avatar John Edwards how he would respond to a terrorist attack? John’s already got an office on Second Life, all he would have to do is beam over to whatever cool location had been determined by the moderators (a cloud city or underwater ampitheatre, for example) and start the party rolling. Hillary’s got a Second Life office, so John wouldn’t be alone. Mike Gravel and Barack Obama also appear to be there. Missing are Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and, surprisingly, Dennis Kucinich. And if anyone’s been to Dennis’ website you’ll find that no that no party is complete without him!
One of the criticisms of debates is the lack of real exposure into candidates’ personalities. Candidates are groomed and shaped into what they and their handlers think are the most appealing public personas. With a Second Life debate we can dispense with the middle man. The handlers and PR people can actually fill in for the candidates when they get stuck on tough questions, like how to respond to multiple terrorist attacks. I highly doubt that an avatar Barack would need a second chance at that question on Second Life.
And speaking of appearances, can you imagine how the candidates could look in a debate like this? In true reflections of their personas Biden would have hair, Hillary would look like Bill and Barack, well let’s just say there might be a crown of thorns and a cross involved somewhere. Of course a Republican debate would be a little confusing with everyone vying for the George Bush or Richard Nixon avatar. Maybe they could wear name tags or have their initials appear on their chests like superheroes.
I think we’re really missing an opportunity to take this process into the future. As a matter of fact why not hold the entire election on Second Life? We could eliminate the whole chad issue from the last election and we’d probably have a bigger overall turnout. It’s time people, let’s up the reality quotient and let the avatar candidates have their moment in the pixels.
Fred Newell 1926-2007 Author and BIGfrontier Speaker
by steve lundin on June 3rd, 2007
I first met Fred Newell, author of WHY CRM Doesn’t Work, at 5:45 AM in a raw space on the top of the Merchandise Mart that we had styled as a Tiki themed conference center, with patio lanterns, lawn furniture and posterboard. It was 90 degrees outside as the sun was just rising, but Fred was frosty and dapper in has classic adman’s navy blazer, tan slacks and loafers. He was the first one in the room and had already run through his PowerPoint. Fred was a pro and this was a presentation, pure and simple. Giving it the best shot was all that mattered. He even brought his own coffee. “Wasn’t sure you were going to make it on time,” he chided; the event wouldn’t start for another hour and a half. And I learned that that was his style: ready to go, easy to work with and grounded.
Fred was swinging through the world of marketing in its mythic heyday, when print and broadcast were the budget and Madison Avenue was the center of the universe. Fred lived in the NY area from 1957-1967, immersed in his two passions: marketing and sailing. He would later found and run the very successful Newell CRM Conference in Chicago, now in its 11th year.
Fred’s book was recommended to us by John Crutcher, of Bloomberg Press. John also recommended Richard Laermer, who spoke at a BIGfrontier event in 2002. Fred spoke to a crowd of roughly 120 people, who arrived in various states of dishevelment, as the outside temperatures rose and they cooled off with the only beverage we were serving: hot coffee. A review of his event can be found on the BIGfrontier website.
Ironically I heard of Fred’s passing while setting up for the May 3rd Robert Herbold
event in Kansas City. Someone I had met at a BMA conference in KC five years before had recognized me and shared the news. It’s either a small world or KC is a very small town. You decide.
Fred lived his last few years in St. Johns, Antigua BWI. His ashes were sent out into the Caribbean, permenently sealing his relationship with one of his loves: the sea.
Off the grid
by steve lundin on January 28th, 2007
My eight year old had been told by his friends in school that our family really didn’t exist. We weren’t in the White Pages, you see. And for all practical purposes, in the world of printed paper and copper wire, we didn’t. After converting to VOIP phones and cell phones three years ago we entered phone purgatory: our numbers would never appear in print. They couldn’t be obtained from directory assistance. To top it off an Internet search for a cell phone number costs at least $7.95, and that’s a whole lot of Pokemon cards to an 8 year old.
When the teenaged John Conner narrates that he is “off the grid” in Terminator 3, he actually has more company than he could have imagined. If your friends are anything like mine (and if they are you can keep them) most communicate largely via their cell phone while the “house” line gathers dust. Ironically VOIP and cell numbers are still the untouchables of our plugged in world, taking a back seat in terms of information retrieval to POTS lines. Sure, there’s a nostalgia element to having a land line, which is why we have museums and thrift shop: you’ll find the rotary and push button princess phones right down the aisle next to the Selectric II’s.
Nothing makes this more clear then the seasonal arrival of the Phone Book. An entire skid is delivered to the lobby of my office building and there they sit there, slowly gathering salt in the Winter and dust in the Summer, being used primarily by homeless people as sales tools when they run out of copies of StreetWise. Who is asking for these arcane eyesores, an unwanted expense of ink, paper, electricity and gas? How often are land lines updated these days? Isn’t one Phone Book every five years or so enough?
My wife recently discovered that her estate sales could be posted for free on craigslist; a tip from my 11 year old son. The first thing she did was cancel the $200 a month Yellow pages ad that she had been running for ten years in the Phone Book. Want to know who is reading the Phone Book? The advertisers. They’re looking for their ads because God dammit – they paid for that one inch square and no one is taking their little bit of real estate away from them. Sure, you can run your cell phone number and your URL in your paid Phone Book display ad, but how many people do you know who turn away from their computer to look up a website in a book?
Off the grid? I told my son to give his buddies his cell phone number to prove that we actually existed. He could also give them his brother’s cell phone number, my cell phone number, my wife’s cell phone number, the house VOIP phone or any of the office numbers AND our respective email addresses. Off the grid you say? Look around baby, We are the grid.