Peter Hirshberg's weblog on disruptive culture and technology

Flixwagon: The End Of Privacy

Remember the good old days when you saw something and decided whether or not to post about it? Or when you took all those pictures at a party and got up the next morning and thought about which ones were appropriate for Flickr? Or all that stuff you went through editing video and deciding what to post? All that is so loaded with 20th century values. Flixwagon lets you turn on your Nokia N95 camera phone (in the U.S.), click the "broadcast now" soft button and anything you see or say... anyone can see or hear! In this interview
Xen from Flixwagon tells me about the time she made a pocket broadcast. Like an unintended pocket call, except the video stream when out--live from her life---unintended. And there is the story about the Hillary Clinton event that was closed to the broadcast press... except it was broadcast. And through the combo of Flixwagon and Twitter the press tuned in live via camera phone.

I suggested to Xen they post set of best practices or warnings, like all the stuff we ignore about operating potentially dangerous machinery. My list might include:

-Warning broadcasts are live. Use with discretion when you're inebriated.
-Warning. You're not likely to have much discretion when you're inebriated.
-The Golden Rule of Broadcast: Ask permission to broadcast others as you'd hope they'd ask permission of you
-If your are under 18, read the warnings.
-Warning: No one under 18 heeds warnings.

I'm actually delighted that all the stuff that sat in the way of shooting video and posting it has gone away. Now everything's a post, life's a broadcast, and going live has also been completely democratized.

Things will never be the same. Sure its a cliche, but here's a place it applies. Or, as I said just a moment ago:

News Not Fit To Print: AP Tries to Stuff Paris Hilton Gossip Back In A Bottle.

At 12:32 today the Associated Press attempted an act of social alchemy : they tried to make Paris Hilton gossip go away. Seriously.

This item ran over the AP broadcast wire to radio and tv stations:

      

Stations: KILL the following cuts fed on the 12:32 P.M.

     11-13-07-take 1 network feed:
      
      
Cut 233, 234 and 235
A publicist for Paris Hilton says Hilton never made any comments
about helping drunken elephants in India.

A kill is mandatory. Make certain this material is not aired.
A sub will not be filed.

AP Broadcast News Center

Way to go AP;  keeping those mainstream media clients in line!

Meanwhile, over  in the Blogosphere Technorati reports 1,976 blog posts on "Paris Hilton" AND "Elephant."

So either its a bogus rumor, or its goofy, true and real... in which case the news is more about silly publicists and the power they yield.  As in,  "Kill the following: A publicist for Paris Hilton says Hilton never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India."

Remember the old saw about you cant make this stuff up?

Conversational Marketing

I'm at a conference in Athens put on by the WPP group on the future of advertising, media and technology.

A session on online advertising inspired me to post links to two documents:

The Memo on Monday Morning, a white paper written by Steve Hayden (Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy), Doc Searls (Cluetrain Co-author) and myself on conversational marketing. I also posted on the topic at Technorati.

Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing and Consumers a draft paper from two professors at the Harvard Business School presents a great framework to understand how online marketing is moving from the direct response model to a community model.

Meme gone wrong: conservatives not buying Bush commuting Libby's sentence

Andrew Sullivan nails the conservative meme, "They keep repeating the line that only the "left" will be angry. And links to some posts that (rather lamely it seems) make the point here and here.

If you look at the conservative blogosphere as a whole, and not just the few who reliably spread the party line the meme doesn't seem to be playing out particurlarly well. A Technorati search of blogs tagged "conservative" that use the term Libby shows a lot of anger and disbelief from the rank and file.

At 5:28 PDT as I write this some of the headlines are: Outrage Fatigue, the rather exasperated "I Do Not Favor Impeachment", Equal Justice Under Bush and Contempt of Court

Here is an additional Technorati seach that further constrains the results to more authorative conservative bloggers. Folks aren't much happier here either.

Earlier in the day, before this news broke, the Washington Post ran an article on the increasingly detached bunker mentality of Bush Presidency headlined, "A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease." It provides a prety good explanation of the tone deaf thinking that led to the Libby decision. The founders granted our President extrodinary powers of clemency and pardon, but when the collective reaction to their use is, "what an awful decision from a clueless guy" the political fallout can be equally extraordinary.

Postscript: best headline yet. Even Paris Hilton Served SOME of Her Time

Post Post Script: The last time I got riled up with such clarity was Watergate. For years it seemed like we were living in ambiguous times. No longer. If there is one thing this President is doing well, its helping to unite the country in realizing that things are going very wrong--- and with little ambiguity about who to hold accountable.

Only this president could mange to pack the equivalent of the tragedy of the Vietnam war and the hubris of Wategate into a single administration.

The White House Talks Science!

Newsweek has discovered that the President Of The United States has a science advisor, and they are asking readers to submit questions!

Not only is it encouraging to hear that the President is aware of science, but the fact that they are listening to the audience shows what an enlightened democracy we really are. I'm patriotic, so I've fired off my questions for Newsweek to take to the White House and learn more about science. In the off chance that my questions and the answers from Science Advisor Marburger don't make it back to Newsweek, I'm reproducing my letter here:

Dear Dr. Marburger,

I'm excited to hear from the White House on issues of science, especially given how controversial this has become in Washington. A lot of the President's supporters have pointed out recently how suspect science is, and how science has not really been too supportive of the facts as the Administration would like them to be. So here are my questions:

I understand the earth is only 8,000 years old and this geologic time stuff is so much liberal hooey. What is Genisis, chopped liver? As supporters of the President we really need your help here. Can you please help explain why science keeps coming up with million year old rocks and then puts all this in text books?

This bit about mankind evolving from alge and apes. Why isn't the white house doing more about this? Science is getting in the way again, and isn't this your job to fix ?

Global warming. Isn't it scientifically proven that there is co2 in soda pop? Our GI's live for soda. We take away co2 and the soda's flat. Flat soda and you have a bunch of demoralized GI's. We have enough of that already (damn scientific polls telling us its an unpopular war, but I won't hold you responsbible for that, Dr. Marburger.) So the more we push this global warming stuff the more lakluster we Americans become and then we just poop off and loose our mojo. Dr. Marburger this is no way for a great people to be!

So can't we just put science in its place, in a museum perhaps, and get on with a more convienient truth.

Yours Truly,

Peter Hirshberg

Technorati and Paramount Classics Bring Blog Conversation to Film Sites

I'm posting this both on my blog, and on the Technorati weblog.

This is a great example of how brands can really engage their audience. Here you have the Hollywood--- home of the ultimate media companies. And film marketing--- which has been about posters and junkets. Amazing things happen when you let the brand side of a media company go beyond traditional marketing behavior and actually engage in conversation--- and act like a media company itself.

Technorati and Paramount Classics have announced an eighteen-month relationship to bring blogosphere discussion about each of their upcoming films directly to each film's web site. We've begun with An Inconvenient Truth, the global warming documentary starring Al Gore, which will be in select theaters beginning May 24th. The site, with live blogger commentary, is here. Here's a link to our official press release.

Film sites have traditionally been one-way marketing vehicles. A place to find trailers, synopsis, actors' pictures, and bling for fans to download. But seldom a big tent for conversation and ideas. Paramount Classics recognizes that their film site will be more vibrant and authentic if the unfettered conversation about a film plays out on the film home page. Its a terrific way to shine attention on the word of mouth about a film--- which is traditionally difficult to find since blog discussion is spread out over thousands of blogs, but never in one place. The studio is both making word of mouth about their film easy to find, and creating traffic for bloggers who are writing about the picture.

The Inconvenient Truth site highlights both posts about the film, and posts about climate change and global warming which may never mention the film. About an hour after the site went live I dropped by and found a fascinating post that led to an oil-industry funded organization that is starting to run TV spots proclaiming that global warming is bogus. Throughout the weekend I checked back to watch the blogosphere's reaction to that drama. A film site that tunes into the live web really is a lot more lively than the alternative.

By the way, this is a well crafted film. Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, which was a polemic and made the left act left-ier and the right behave right-ier, this picture does a great job of laying out its argument and --- just when you're wondering if an argument holds weight-- coming back with evidence to make its point. In many ways this film and the blogosphere were made for each other. Its going to be fascinating to watch how the left and right, the energy industry and environmentalists speak to one another in the coming weeks. No matter where you stand on the issue, go see the film. Blog about it. Its going to be a quite a consequential discussion!

Art: Giant Dice Take On Aspen Colorado!

Sunday February 19, 2006: show day for a giant performance art happening in oh-so-chichi Aspen, Colorado. Japanese-born artist Yutaka Sone worked with the Aspen Art Museum to build a pair of Giant Dice (8 feet square) and then roll them down the halfpipe of Buttermilk Mountain. In the name of Art I hightailed it over to Buttermilk just in time to record the festivities.... Click Here to see the video

This Is Not A Joke: Pope Sues To Prevent Spreading The Good Word.

The Vatican has announced that is is enforcing copyright on the Pope's writings and encyclicals. You heard that right, if you spread the word... you now have to pay a 15% royalty to the Church. And you thought the whole point of the Church was to Spread The Word. Forget it... Now its, "If you quote the Pope, you pay the Man." This isn't evangelism, its antivangelism. The Vatican seems to have learned a bit of "this ain't no fooling around" from the RIAA, Disney, and the New York Subway System:

A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.

At first I thought this was an Onion comedy piece. "Pope Sues To Prevent Spreading the Good Word," is a very funny gag. But.. its true! And further proof that calcified old institutions can act incredibly stupid when it comes to understanding a world where publishing isn't about control but about spreading ideas through a network of influencers. The Times article is full of quotes from the Italian versions of Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen expressing outrage and confusion at all this.

The article goes on to say that if the Church approves of how and when you use the Pope's words, they would be willing to waive the fees, but only by "prior agreement." This is an egregious mashup of bad copyright policy, bad free speech policy, and Nixonesque strong-arm tactics.

But in the end its only fair to give Vatican the last word:

"A Vatican spokesman said that the Holy See had to defend itself against “pirated editions.”

No, come to think of it, I get the last word. "The Cluetrain will not be making any stops in Vatican City anytime soon."

Transit Union Squelches Angry Bloggers

The Transport Workers Union Local 100 has a blog. The Blog had comments. But no longer. Fortunately the comments were cached before the union tried to make all those angry New Yorkers go away. Bloggers wrote a lot about the strike, but the comments on the union site really seemed to catch the enmity of a lot of New Yorkers towards the union.

Sample Quote: "You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn't hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You're asking for way too much here. Back down and know your roll. You guys aren't as high and as mighty as you think."

Thanks to Bill for finding this cache!

Hey, Local 100: you guys weighed the options, asked for support and chose to go on strike. So you ought to own and acknowledge citizen's reaction. Censorship is so lame.

The fact that your leadership---which wrapped itself in Rosa Parks, dignity, and Dr. Martin Luther King--- also embraces censorship and revisionism says more than a little bit about their openness and ethics.

Live8 Blogs: Uncovering the Real Story

With all the attention on Live8 and Africa relief, its jarring how little content there is on the official Live8 site about the  underlying Africa issues and what actually needs to be done to help people on that continent.

The take away from Live8 seems to be its the G8's job to fix Africa and that George Bush is the main bad guy. You're left thinking these poor Africans are helpless, can't do a damn thing for themselves, and are just lying around waiting for the Rich Countries to come on in and clean up the mess. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of some LBJ, Really Big Government Approach and of 60's idealism, but not necessarily in good way. So come on people now, lets all get together and try and love one another right now.

Benedict XVI Tackles Brand Development

Pope Poses Eternal Question: Who’s the Target Market?

Haven't We Seen This Positioning Before?

We’re only days into the new papacy, and already Benedict XVI is honing the Church’s positioning and strategy. And have you noticed how similar the Vatican strategy is to the Karl Rove strategy?  "Dictatorship of Relativism" is linguistic genius, up there with "Right to Life” as a meme. What a brilliant way to frame the issue: anyone who isn’t a doctrinal hard-liner is now cast as a wayward westerner, rolling his own morality, with no reliable sense of good and evil, and quite possibly a secular humanist with no need for God. This is up there with Rove implying that all Democrats are faith-free people.

Both Bush and Benedict XVI are playing to a very conservative base. Difference is, if you live in a democracy and you’re outvoted you still gotta obey the law. If the President gets a tax passed, you pay. If gay marriage is illegal, gays don't get married. If conservative judges get appointed, we all get judged conservatively. In religion, when folks get fed up they actually have the option not to go to church, or ignore teachings, or more actively, change sects or religions. Just ask Martin Luther. Ratzinger would prefer to have fewer, but more devout followers.

This is an accepted brand strategy, but implementing it is tricky and I’m not sure it’s the best way to manage an already huge, mass-brand religion.  It certainly doesn’t look like a growth strategy.  I’ve been around this mass/targeted market issue my whole career, and since the new pope hasn’t appointed his deputies yet, I figure I have a responsibility to chime in.

The Pope, The Word, and The Blogosphere

The blogosphere is pondering the papacy and.... blogging. For example, Tony Gentile asks, "Will The Next Pope Blog?"

Here's my take: the papacy is one of the last great one-way broadcast “we're in control and you’re not” entities left on earth. Popes don’t listen, they hear from God and pronounce. The last pope used lots of travel and communication technology--- but to the end of extending his centralized reach and minimizing the sway of local bishops.   The pope doesn’t care about comments. (Confessions yes, but that’s not really the spirit of the blogopshere).  The Church is not a conversation.  The Vatican is not a particurlarly fertile Cluetrain , the "customer defines the brand" kind of place. Popes seem swayed by big trends over time (the U.S. Church scandals, rise of 3rd world) but the whole short time-frame, fast feedback-loop thing doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant to a 70 year old guy who’s elected for life, is deemed to be infallible,  and speaks to and for God.  Contrast that with a US elected leader who faces pundits daily, must deal with interest groups that can organize around the blogsphere and is elected every two years. Its good to be the pope!

On the other hand, the Vatican and churches in general will happily adopt any communication technology that lets them preach more effectively. Sermons are one of the killer apps of podcasting--- why settle for reaching just your flock on Sunday morning when you can reach them on their schedule 24/7 with a podcast and easily reach beyond your local parish and speak to anyone who wants to listen. Podcasting is the first technology that lets any preacher preach beyond their local territory easily, instantly and at no cost.  They don’t call it Really Super Sermon technology for nothing. If parishioners can listen to any of the priests in town (or anywhere) via podcasts, will that improve the quality of sermons as competition sets in?

Brands That Really Get It

Sure marketing's a conversation. And a relationship. But if a brand really got that idea and didn't just pay lip service, what would they do? They'd trust their customer to do some  marketing, make the commercials, and be the voice of the brand. (Note to those who haven't spent a lot of time around brand marketers: this is kinda rare behavior.)

This is just what Converse, the shoe company owned by Nike, is doing at Conversegallery.com. They've invited their customers to make 24 second films and submit them.  Spots that make it to TV earn $10,000 for the film-making customer.

Converse's instructions to their customer: "Make a film, not a commercial. It’s a great opportunity for you to tell us what Converse means to you". Translation: "We don't want you to just parrot our marketing and commercials, you're the customer dammit,  you get it,  so interpret the brand as you see it.  We're just the guys at headquarters...."  That's trust, thats really listening, and that's treating your customer as an equal, not some consumer.  And thats definitely unusal behavior for a brand.

Digital Convergence--The Movie

Bob Kalsey and I made this brief film for Bill Gates in 1994. It was pre-internet; we still called it "The Information Superhighway." But a decade later the industry is still chasing after the same Digital Livingroom vision. And we're as hopped-up on convergence as ever!

Bravo: Daily Show Nails The Blogger/Journalism Thing.

You could read all that stuff on blogs, in the mainstream press, on the left, and on the right about the tango between blogging and journalism. Or you could watch this recent segment on  The Daily Show. Longer than most segments, it really uses humor to nail the issues.  First half summarizes recent examples of bloggers setting the news agenda (and the mainstream media's response), while the second half is a very funny commentary bit by Stephen Colbert.

In five minutes it not only hits the major issues (mob psychology issue, main stream media playing catch-up, the power of emergent media...) but sums of the last year of this stuff in a pretty coherent manner.

Young People, Overwhelmed by Friends, Turns to Friendinis

Friendships seen evolving in face of social networking, technology.

Is companionship-light a fad, or a new staple in our emotional diet?

Laura Bellingkamp has no time. This 33 year old New York marketing consultant has met over a hundred cool new acquaintances on services like Friendster and J-date. She goes out every night, but at parties she meets more people, not less. And in addition to her work and social schedule, Laura must leave time to process all the content captured on her TIVO, iPod and four voice mail accounts. She’s exhibit one of what techno-sociologist Linda Stone calls “the continuous partial attention generation.”

Academics say the problem faced by Laura and those like her is how to deal with all those budding friendships. A hundred years ago a person was lucky to meet 15 new acquaintances a year. Now thanks to technology, people often meet that many in an hour. “Our species was never programmed to adapt to such an onslaught of potential intimacy” says Harvard biologist Irving Bockman. “ Yet we still have an innate need to meet people. So you can see the frightening implication of this codependent cycle. We now believe Traumatic Friendship Stress Disorder is rapidly emerging as the premier psychological ailment of our era.”

Denny’s Introduces "Red States Cuisine" ™

"God’s Batter" Invades Los Angeles
Moral Value in Chicken Fried Steak?

President Bush’s landslide 3% victory margin is heralded as a mandate to bring red state values and sensibilities to all Americans. Just this week incoming NBC News anchor Brian Williams declared he wanted to spend nights in "Dayton and Toledo and the middle of Kansas" because the New York/Washington axis can be a journalist's "worst enemy." What elitism!  What blue state resident has enough time, money or frequent flier miles to get politically reeducated in the heartland? Clearly a more populist and accessible form culturectomy is needed for urban America.

NY blogs - The Movie

I hosted the blogging panel at the AlwaysOn Summit this past July. What to do when everyone in the audience is oh-so-into-blogging? Get another perspective! In this case, a video featuring a bunch of opinionated New Yorkers, one of whom may have actually heard of blogging. Or perhaps he confused it with a cookie. But New Yorkers are nothing if not helpful; thats why they were so willing to give us directions to---the Blogopshere  But there is wisdom in crowds--- and our New Yorkers didn't dissapoint!

NYblogs- The Movie. Presented in Quicktime.

Here's the second little movie made for the AO summit. In the middle of shooting , the Shoe Shine Man beckons me to come over and get a shine. I explain im asking about blogging and big media. He knows big media; he's been shining moguls' shoes for years!

Blogging, Big Media and the Shoe Shine Man. Presented in Quicktime

Scratch Code

If you’re in New York this fall, check out Scratch Code at the Bitforms Gallery. The show looks at the origins of computer-based art, pulling together some of the earliest artists who used software to create their works. It’s amazing ---and unexpected----to see what was being done in the late 40’s through the mid 70’s.

By late 1970’s computer graphics and painting systems became widely available--- dealing a terrific setback to the possibility of computer art. The paint brush, an old medium, had been replicated on computers, a new medium. The brush had been replaced…with the brush. Not a breakthrough.  Marshall McLuhan often observed that old media are the content of new media until we get around to figuring out the real meaning of a new medium. Early movies were often theatrical plays caught on film (complete with proscenium), until directors like D.W. Griffith came along and invented the language of film. The only thing "on" early radio was ship-to-shore communication (the telegraph, but this time with speech) until Sarnoff conceived of the radio music box and helped give birth to broadcasting. And early computer graphics systems made it too easy for computers to serve as an electronic brush…with largely predictable results.  (This was good news for the crafts of design, illustration and industrial art. But not a breakthrough in art-as-expression.)

Scientists: Mutations Affecting DNA of Radio

There’s a lot of great radio out there, but the radio is one of the worst places  to find it. As a distribution channel, radio is an ever more narrow and annoying pipe that has to homogenize and consolidate its product in order to save its business. Which makes for a worse air product.

What’s amazing is that during the very year we’ve lamented the market dominance of Clear Channel, there are so many cool and satisfying alternatives to radio-as-usual to choose from.

Check out PRX.org. This site officially makes a market between independent public radio producers and public radio stations: program creators upload hundreds of original shows they hope stations will license and air. But what it does for the rest of us is let us all listen to wonderful, passionate radio programming while going around the constipated trickle that is your local public radio station. You register for free, agree to review shows you listen too, and you’re on your way to a candy shop full of great documentaries and original programming.

Arafat to be Open Sourced by Palestinian Authority; move is criticized by Microsoft.

The Palestinian Authority announced today that it will Open Source its late leader Yasser Arafat; the action means Mr. Arafat’s ideas, politics and peccadilloes are no longer propriety to the Palestinians but freely available to the world. It is believed to be the first instance of the open-sourcing of a world leader.

“This is a global liberation movement and it should serve every human,” said Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath. “We believe we can achieve our aims more powerfully by letting oppressed people everywhere take some of Arafat, add their own ideas and contribute back to the world. You won’t find the Israelis doing this; Ariel Sharon won’t let anybody mess with his code and that’s a mistake,” said Mr. Shaath.