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Afternoon everyone,

Before I get to my original topic for the day, I just wanted to let you all know that the Fall semester starts tomorrow, so many of my posts for the next few months may be school directed. I am going to try to keep posting and updating with topics on technology, comics, film, and music, as always, but my education comes first. Shame, I know. To make it easier, I’m going to work out some kind of signal so that at first glance you’ll know if it’s regular posting or school posting, so you can decide easier if you want to skip it or not.

In the realm of school news, I’m taking Public Relations in the Digital Age of Influence, and it sounds really interesting. Here’s the official course description:

Marketing and communications are changing. The levers that we have pulled for years to sell products and services, change behaviors, advocate for causes no longer work the way they did. As trust in media and marketing plummets, trust in our peers, friends, family, and colleagues rises. Today the public does most of the relating and we recognize new influencers in the people sitting next to us. Now, creating a conversation is just as important as driving media, forming partnerships and crafting messages. Call it influencer marketing. Call it brand stewardship in the network age. It’s all public relations. This class will cover how to create comprehensive digital influence strategy and ultimately how to be effective public relations professional in this new digital age.

I’m hoping we really look into the impact of social media – viral, ARG, digital distribution – since more and more communication marketing seems to be headed that way.

Anyway, just wanted you all to know. I’m still hoping to get Tomblin back for the non-school posts, but we’ll just have to wait and see. If any of you out there have heard from him, poke him and tell him to call me.

MP3 Culture

Since I decided to share my paper examing the meaning of images and their relation, and use, in a digital medium, I figured what the hell – I’ll share with ya’ll my paper from my MP3 Culture course.

Rebirth of Aura: Communal Recording in the Digital Age

It’s an examination of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin‘s belief in the destruction of the aura of art through mechanical reproduction. The concept being that all art is a representation of an object so what you see or hear is not the object itself, but the artist’s rendering of that artist. Even photography is merely a representation of the viewpoint of the photographer on the object being photographed.

My assuration is in an age of digital distribution, the aura of music may not only be preserved, but revived. Artists such as Fort Minor and Nine Inch Nails have allowed, at one time or another, fans access to multi-tracks of their respective songs allowing new creations, or new renderings of the artists work. So in this case, the art (music) isn’t losing its aura, so much as its identity is being recreated.

I’m hoping to take the concepts within and expand them into my thesis, so any thoughts would be appreciated.

Enjoy!

End of the Summer

Morning All,

It’s been a long time since I last posted, possibly April, and a lot has happened.

First, sorry for dropping off the face of the world. I figured I’d take a month off between Spring and Summer sessions and then be back in the saddle ready to go. Well, I did rest, but as soon as Summer session hit – I was off to the races! The problem was, I was in last place the whole time. Now enough with the horse metaphors and on to the real deal.

Summer session is over and with my one week off before the Fall session starts, I want to do a little sharing and see if I can’t get my butt in gear and keep this up. I’ve tried a few times to get in touch with Tomblin since our last podcast with little luck and I shall try again – see if I can get him to join in on future discussions. For now though – what’s been going on?

Over the summer I took a course on Digital Promotions that examined digital communication technology from a philosophical, physical, and analytical perspective. The result is a paper reviewing the power of imagery through the digital promotion for The Dark Knight.
For anyone who’d like to read the paper, here it is: Foucault and The Dark Knight

I discussed and examined the viral campaign executed by 42 Entertainment and Warner Bros. Studios in my Digital Literacy course, but this time I really got to delve into the imagery and discuss it. Love to hear what any of you might think.

Anyway, there is more to come. I have come up with my Thesis topic and it’s based on a different paper I wrote for my MP3 Culture course on the mechanical reproduction of music and digital distribution. I’ll share that next time.

Anyway, take care all and sorry for the absence. I’ll try not to make it so long next time.

Weird Science

This blog gets its name from my favorite quote by Seneca the Younger, Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit.
Loosely translated: In all great talent lies an element of madness. This line very much fits the subject of John Battelle’s The Search. Battelle discusses the rise of Google and the near-rise of its fore-fathers. The story is full of pride, money, passion, and just a hint of a soap western spice. Though Battelle seems bent on pushing the concept of “Search” as the focus of his book, it comes across more like a history lesson of the internet. Certainly the concept of “Search” as a philosophical idea is a fascinating one and its one that has pushed humankind to strive for more. Some might even categorize “Search” as curiosity as a verb. “Search” is movement. “Search” is interesting. I’m not so sure about the reading, though.

Google is the penultimate database. It keeps track of everything that near every Internet user does. I’m not talking about information like passwords, but something more private – your cyberprint. Google has developed the Database of Intentions that Battelle describes as the “aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result” (2005, 6). Though I use Google several times a day, at work and at home, I don’t like that it keeps track of my whereabouts. Certainly by tracking what information I am seeking is the system better able to function for others, but privacy should never be forsaken for more information. From an academic prospective, information should be free-flowing like a river so creating a database that is a listing of every site, every link that I go to on the web makes sense. Information should be free. From a personal perspective, what I do in the comfort of my own home is my business. I may rent my internet from a provider, but what I do with it should be free from nosy nellie neighbors and government offices. Should, of course, being the main point. Reading this book got me thinking about the privacy issues that Google has faced since 9/11 and I found comfort in remembering their fight to prevent our government from having access to their database. Information should be available to the public, but privacy, I think, should never be sacrificed.

One interesting comment that Battelle made was also in his opening chapter. He spoke of his fascination with computers and how “a representation of the plastic mind made visible” seemed to come alive to him through the Macintosh (2005, 4-6). This not only works in regard to what Google has done for “Search” by making it far reaching and all-encompassing, even as the Internet gets larger and larger., but also in regard to ourselves. Certainly technology has had a strong hand in making information gathering easier. I wonder, though, if the benefits are worth it? We have a world’s worth of information at our finger-tips, but we sacrifice privacy each time we log in. The information that we find may not even be reliable because it’s fallible people posting the information, so really, is the information any more valuable than it would be if you found it pre-Gopher? While I do think some of the brightest mind of our generation did find a way to fill a need within the academic community, Brin and Page are no Ginsberg and Google is no Howl.

On a side note: Did you know that if you search for “Google” on Google and hit the I’m Feeling Lucky button it only refreshes your page? This is only slightly less interesting as when you type in “French Victories” and click I’m Feeling Lucky. That, at least, is worth one attempt.

Is the phrase “sh*tting a brick” appriopriate here?

With all the things going on in the world, our glad our legal system gets to be tied up in the war between Proctor & Gamble Co and Kimberly-Clark Corp. I wonder – could I sue them or submit an injunction preventing stupid lawsuits between rival companies over ads? I’d really like to get my tax-dollars back somehow. I mean if our judges, lawyers, and other civil servants have all of these dumb issues to deal with, no wonder real criminals go free.

Seriously – Can I get my money back?

Naked Conversations (Round One – FIGHT!)

This week’s readings came from the first eight chapters of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations. Though each chapter discusses different aspects of the dialogue that occurs through blogging, or what they call the one-to-many conversation, each chapter carried a specific theme throughout: be truthful, be passionate, be yourself.

Blogs may be as useful as sharing ideas and thoughts as other weblogs like Livejournal, but what sets apart blogs is how they have become the device of choice for CEOs and Mom & Pops. Programs like ICQ(the fore-father of AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and others) and Firefox(a browser I am using to type right now) all became popular through blogs. Firefox, for example, became my browser of choice after I graduated college in 2003 after several, more computer-savvy friends told me about it. I didn’t like Netscape too much, so with my options so limited, I didn’t have much choice. Now I prefer only Firefox and I recommend it to anyone who is still using IE or Netscape. This would make Joe Hewitt, a founding member of Firefox, jump for joy.

In chapter 3 they discuss viral marketing as part of the word of mouth process. I like when they say that:

Word of mouth is most viral when the words credibly relay such passion. Viral also seems to work best when it is home-brewed, rather than part of a marketing push.

Reading that, my thoughts immediately moved toward the PSP promotional campaign. This marketing push involved a blog created by company hired to drive sales. If “Charlie” could help get “Jimmy” a PSP because of all the “awesome PSP support” from readers, then who knows – maybe sales might go up. If you talk about it, maybe people will buy? The real story came about when people found out the blog was a phony. In the first two chapters of Naked Conversations we read about how Microsoft got a PR make-over by communicating with consumers – maybe someone should send the folks at Sony a copy of the book.

We don’t like being lied too. We don’t mind playing a game that advertises a product like Halo 2(ilovebees) or The Dark Knight Returns(Harvey Dent’s page and the Joker Page(highlight the entire page)), but don’t try to sell us on the idea that a product is fun and because a blog tells us to buy something we should. If we are going to live in this open-global community, we need to be able to trust what is out there. If it’s a game, tell us – if you’re trying to sell us something, tell us that too. Just be honest.

One other thing I wanted to touch on from the reading was from the end of chapter 2 – Google’s Ascendancy. No one seems to know the length of Google’s reach, but when it comes to information, they have access to nearly all of it. While it’s nice to see a company provide a great service and rise up over it’s competition(Yahoo!, Ask.com) , Google may have started selling your computer space to make them money. As someone who loves radio and technology, I’m not sure I trust a search engine with too much of both.

As a last thought, the be truthful, be passionate, be yourself mantra of the chapters felt very fitting on today of all days. Today is the first day of Jammie Thomas’ trial. She is the first of 26,000 individuals that will be undergoing prosecution for sharing files over the internet. Ms. Thomas, like many individuals around the world shared music of various genres with others through a P2P service, but she was caught by the RIAA and will be the first scapegoat for the music industry. Now I realize that musicians deserve to be paid for the songs they create and that songwriter’s do to. What I don’t understand is why in an iWorld, music can’t be shared just like everything else. If it’s good music people will pay for it. Sharing tracks over the internet doesn’t seem much different from making a mix tape of tracks for a friend except that you get to choose which songs you want. Evidently the RIAA doesn’t want you to listen to music unless you’ve paid for a copy and only keep it on the disc you bought. It’s already illegal in some countries to make copies so by ripping it onto your computer and saving it for yourself, be careful – after the RIAA gets done with terrestrial radio, they may be coming for you.

Now I leave you with this message from 1999/2000 and Camp Chaos.

(BE WARNED: Foul language)

Morning! (because it’s time for breakfast somewhere)

Good Morning Everyone!

This is my very first post. Exciting huh? I know I’m all a twitter.

Truthfully I don’t know what to write here that would or could be significant for as was once written in Calvin & Hobbes, “I AM SIGNIFICANT…..screamed the tiny dust speck.” So with that in mind, I will write about what interests me and that would be everything. Music, movies, books, comics, technology, video games. Some will be discussed as a singularity, others as a amalgamation of sorts(my favorite kind). Particularly as October 23rd comes closer, comments concerning the band Coheed and Cambria and their new album No World For Tomorrow. Coheed and Cambria’s fourth studio album, The Amory Wars finishes the story of the Kilgannon clan.

The promotional method for the newest and last album in the series takes full advantage of New Media by creating a grassroots campaign. It all began with a bulletin from the band that only “friends” could see. This bulletin let fans know about a website for the new album, a website with a countdown and a picture of the Keywork.

Without getting too offtrack on the mythology of the story, for those that know what the Keywork is and what has happened to the Kilgannon clan – the notion that their story is coming to an end is both heartbreaking and exciting. Back to the campaign – as the countdown clock reaches zero, typically on a Monday around 5pm-ish, a new message is post from the band. From art to be included with the album, a first glimpse at the music video for the first single, and even a message from the band – everything is controlled by the band with their audience in mind. Though the communication is strictly one-way at this point, the way in which they are communicating makes the final album more than a release, but an event. Thus far, no posters have been displayed, ads have no appeared on multiple channels, it has only been the foot soldiers in the war spreading the message of The Crowing, the nickname for the main character and sole-surviving member of the Kilgannon family, Claudio.

This bring us to this week’s reading….
We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People by Dan Gillmor discuses the innovative nature of New Media. Gillmor suggests that the increase in available technology and the ease with which individuals are beginning to utilize New Media, the structure of standard communication and journalism is changing. From SMS, RSS, blogs, and email to cell phones, digital cameras and Peer-to-Peer sites, the way people communicate is changing and at rapid speeds.

In 2004, the time of the original publishing of We The Media, most cell phones didn’t feature cameras, or if they did the quality was terrible, but like the emergence of the cell phone itself, simply having the featuring was stunning enough. So now when Gillmor discusses the implications of a phone with digital quality photography available and the threats to security of regular individuals, I only think of what is going on now with the Disney starlite, Vanessa Hudgens. Private photos taken from a cellphone have traveled around the world and possibly jeopardized a young actresses future. This, however, is the truth of the world we live in where access to information is everywhere and at the click of a button can go anywhere.

In a later reading, Gillmor discusses the power of blogs to communicate a message. Gillmor discussed the power of individual people as they come together in pursuit of information and communication with the example of Howard Dean. Of all the factors that powered Dean’s rise to the forefront of the 2004 Presidential Election, Dean’s use of the website Meetup gave voice to many people who came believe in his message for the future. Though Dean would become a joke to many, his use of the internet as a sophisticated networking tool would not be lost.

Though grassroots campaigns were often run by the few, the internet has given the few a microphone to share their thoughts without fear of being shutdown and allowed others from around the world to join on the discussion. Clearly the members of Coheed and Cambria understand this in the way they have embraced the new paradigm of communication. By communicating directly with the audience, sending “personal” messages through Myspace and the NWFT website which, until recently, was mostly concealed to the general public, the band has given fans a deeper connection to the music and increased the bond between fan and musician more than any record label’s PR blitz ever could.

The power is not just in the message, but in the way the message is delivered. Gillmor, I believe, would agree.