Tomorrow's Spin

Not only do I not think that a lot of marketers are appreciative of where the citizen publishing movement is coming from, but also I'm not sure they understand the scale of it. To that end, I put together a piece this week that follows my story from my early days in home recording through to the present. I think a lot of marketers understand that digital distribution is a driving force behind all the content that's emerging. What I don't think they understand is ease of creation and production. Desktop publishing as we've come to understand it (magazine, newspaper, website creation and publishing) is just the beginning. Desktop publishing of music, film, animation, and just about every other art form is well established among early adopters and the early fringe, and will be going mainstream. It's that part that I don't think marketers understand well.

I also didn't pass up the chance to suggest that we think up a name less offensive than "Consumer Generated Content" or to suggest that new content producers have options other than record labels, film studios and such. And this isn't about thumbing your nose at the man. It's about acknowledging that there are more paths to the end goal of being able to make a living producing content. I think there are artists who don't yet realize that.

Talkin' Google

Last night, I had the pleasure of joining several industry colleagues at the Harvard Club as a guest of Choice Media to have dinner and a roundtable discussion with author David Vise about his book - The Google Story. After sitting down to dinner, host Chris Schroeder asked some interesting questions about Google, why they're so successful, and what challenges they face on the horizon. David cited the click fraud problem as a big challenge and described to the audience what constituted click fraud. I was surprised when someone from AvenueA/Razorfish (I didn't catch her name) insisted that she didn't much care about click fraud because Google was driving customers to her clients' sites. I chimed up to say that her clients pay for that media activity on a per-click basis. In an industry where a good media planner would go after a magazine that falls short of its rate base, how could an agency professional in good conscience fail to acknowledge a click fraud problem? It didn't make sense to me.

I got to catch up with some buds at this dinner, including Allen Baum (formerly of Lycos, now with Choice), Nick Pahade from Denuo, Sean Finnegan from OMD and Babs Rangaiah of Unilever. It was a very stimulating discussion concerning Google and a lot of the aforementioned folks got to ask questions of David. Personally, I chimed in to see if David knew anything about the dark fiber Google was buying up and asked whether he thought the rumors were true about Google holding onto this in case the "tiered Internet" scenario came to pass. David said he thought it was aimed more at reducing costs than anything else.

At the end of the night, David was kind enough to sign a copy of his book for me - one that I plan on reading soon (when I get unburied from all the tech manuals I'm currently reading).

An End To Splogs?

One of the things that's always ticked me off about syndicating content through RSS is that often, splogs pick up the stuff I write (along with the stuff other marketing writers post) and post fragments of it on their own site, achieving mucho Google Juice in the process. I've faithfully reported every splog I see showing up consistently, yet it it often months or years before Google and other search engines get around to delisting a splog. Maybe we can look forward to an end to these situations. Check out Nick Usborne's post on the Marketing Experiments blog. According to Nick, Google has purchased a new search algorithm that can help weed splogs out.

I look forward to it. Getting rid of splogs would make it much easier for those of us who produce content to be rewarded for what we do.

New Season, Old Looks

It's sunny and 65 degrees in New York City after having been cold for the past several days. Folks are walking around outside in the nice weather, celebrating the first real warm day in a while. Okay, it needs to be said: Can we get past the Paris Hilton look already? During my brief 1.5 block jaunt to Radio Shack an hour ago, I counted six Paris Hilton wannabees along the way. Each was walking a small dog, sporting long straight hair, a light jacket with furry stuff somewhere on it, and sunglasses that looked like Elton John's ski goggles.

And can the guys please get rid of the Borg Bluetooth headsets?

Yuck.