One of my favorite blogs to check regularly is The Ad Contrarian (thanks for pointing it out, Ewan). As suggested by the name, posts on the blog regularly take a devil’s advocate point of view on popular trends, like Twitter, or the web in general. I’m not sure how I missed it for so long, but I just recently came across a series of posts targeting one of TAC’s favorite gripes: branding.
Before I go further, let me say that part of the reason I enjoy the blog is because I respect the point of view of its author (Bob Hoffman of Hoffman/Lewis). In fact, I often agree with him. While I understand his frustration over “branding”—I’m easily annoyed by misuse and overuse of both the word and the concepts behind it—I did think these posts took aim at a bit too big of a target. As one commenter put it, he may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Anyway, here’s a summary of one of TAC’s posts and my response. You can follow the links below to see a few more of his posts, and you’ll see I’ve commented on those as well. It’s worth reading everyone else’s comments, too (many enthusiastically agree with Bob’s point of view). Would be curious to hear your stance, as well.
Although I’d planned on entering, I narrowly missed the deadline (oops) for 2009 submissions to New Times’ 55 Fiction competition, which calls on readers to submit 55-word fictional stories. So I was excited to hear the announcement of NPR’sThree-Minute Fiction Contest, requiring authors to write stories that can easily be read out loud within three minutes (under 600 words, according to them, but shorter is fine).
I know, I know. It’s the type of question about Twitter that you’d expect to hear from your parents, or from someone who still gets their news from a newspaper. But it’s a valid question, despite (obnoxious) responses having to do with “ambient intimacy.” Equally valid in my mind is the question of who reads the articles that are so frequently forwarded as links via Twitter.
I was thinking about this the other day when I came across a post by Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian, entitled “8 Recent Observations About Twitter.” Specifically, I’ve been wondering what percentage of tweets are blindly forwarded links, aimed at making the tweeter look interesting or engaged without actually forcing them to do any work. Hoffman’s relevant points are:
You may have already seen this clip of Pattie Maes unveiling the “sixth sense” wearable technology at TED. If not, I recommend checking it out.
This clip, along with a great post by Steve Rubel about Open Web, has me thinking about what the future holds for technology, and how different organizations might be able to capitalize on it. Seems to me that Pattie’s talk and Steve’s post more or less point to the same trends:
Every year New Times of San Luis Obispo hosts a unique writing competition. The goal is to write an entire fictional story in 55 words. Submissions are not due until mid-June, but are accepted all year. As the website states, keeping a tale under 55 words—fewer than are in this paragraph—is “not as easy as it seems.” But it’s a pretty interesting experiment to see how much story you can squeeze into a few sentences, so I’m planning on giving it a go again this year.
In about 2002 I was working in insurance and desperately seeking some way of releasing creative energy in between performing financial analyses and filling out rate sheets in Excel. When I accompanied some friends to Cal Poly one weekend, I happened to pick up a New Times and read about the competition. I decided to write down a few ideas over the following year, and somehow managed to stay organized and submit them before the deadline. I think I entered about 16 stories, and the following story was chosen as one of many winners:
