Why we interrupt so much

Stephen Baker

Peggy Noonan laments that the cable TV culture is rewards serial interrupters. This is true, and I've been puzzling over it since I read her article this morning. Here's what I've come up with:

Conflict: Ever since lions lunched on gladiators, and probably long before, humans have enjoyed conflict.
Choice: If we don't get the conflict we like on news shows, we can turn to a fight on reality TV, or a mother screaming at her daughter on a talk show for dressing like prostitute.
Brands: If networks can turn their news people into battling brands, ratings go up. Look at Lou Dobbs.
Time: If they're not interrupted, windbag politicians will blabber on forever. To get them to say something interesting in the alloted 90 seconds, interruptions are crucial.

So, how can viewers get news without being bored to tears or watching a partisan shout-fest? When the Romans tired of blood, they turned to the circus. If news has to entertain, comedy's a natural. No wonder Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are so popular.

Who Likes Consumer Generated Ads? Not Young Adults

Heather Green

Little food for thought. According to a new American Marketing Association survey, while most adults have a warm and fuzzy feeling about companies that ask folks to create ads, those darn youngsters just aren't buying it. (Here's a copy Download file of the release they sent since I can't for the life of me find it on their site.)

"AMA’s survey revealed that compared to a company that uses only professional advertising, most adults feel that a company that uses customer-created advertising is more customer-friendly (68%), creative (56%), and innovative (55%).

Survey respondants between the ages of 18 and 24 are more likely than those between the ages of 25 and 64 to say a company that uses customer-created advertising is less trustworthy (21% versus 10%, respectively), less socially-responsible (20% versus 10%, respectively) and less customer-friendly (13% versus 5%, respectively)."

This is fascinating because according to surveys and books, this young generation more than others before it prefers companies that stand for a cause, are socially and environmentally responsible, and have a community bent.

The AMA's Chief Marketing Officer Nancy Costopulos said in the press release "Young adults’ skepticism may be rooted in their desire to distance themselves from company-sponsored messages." So does that mean that today's youth wants companies to stand for something but is skeptical of company's trying to coopt them to be what they stand for?

Shawn Fanning To Launch Rupture, an Online Gaming Community

Heather Green

Shawn Fanning of Napster fame says he plans within the next month or so to launch Rupture, a virtual social community for online gamers. He raised seed money from a group of investors, including Ron Conway and Joi Ito. (Here's a link to a short item I did in this week's magazine that's unfortunately still behind the firewall.)

Rupture was inspired by Fanning's newfound love of online gaming. During the past year and a half, he's become a big fan of World of Warcraft, joining a guild and climbing up the ranks of players. The more he played, though, the more he became frustrated with how hard it is to communicate with other players, organize game playing together and learn about other gamers' identities, online and offline.

I haven't seen the service but Fanning explained it to me this way: Using an add on or a software download, Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing. As Rupture tracks each member's playing over time, these personalized profiles evolve. And players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals and download other addons and game demos.

Rupture is starting with World of Warcraft, which is played by 7.5 million gamers. But it also plans to pull together information from and offer services for other games.

This is the second post-Napster startup that Fanning has founded. Snocap, the online media licensing broker unveiled in December 2004, took a while to get off the ground but began announcing deals with services this year, capped off by a significant agreement with MySpace this past September.

MySpace challenger Skyblog spreads in Europe

Stephen Baker

Good story in BWOnline about Skyblog, the French blogging, music and social network site that's more than holding its own against MySpace--and now it's spreading elsewhere in Europe. I explored the site a little. Found a blog of an American school girl in New York who writes in excellent French about her teacher who insists on taking off her shoes in class.

Editing my story: a scatological impasse

Stephen Baker

An editor had a problem with one sentence in my (harsh) review of T-Mobile's sleek new smartphone, The Dash.

The sentence: "Later in the week, when I belly-ached about it to the people at the conference, they pooh-poohed my complaints."

She said that the combo of "belly ache" and "pooh-pooh" in the same sentence led readers to focus on the lower intestines. Is this true? Maybe if I had spelled it poo-poo, she'd have a case. Well, I pick my fights carefully. So I let her replace the pooh-poohed with "dismissed." Still, I looked up pooh-pooh online and found that no less an authority than George Eliot used the word in The Mill on the Floss.

"Surely if we could recall that early bitterness and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh pooh the griefs of our children."

I struggle mightily to understand the sentence, but see no signs of lower intestinal forebodings.

What should magazines do online?

Stephen Baker

About a month ago I wrote about my growing stack of unread magazines. I've been whittling them down, and I've been enjoying it--much more than the time I spend on magazine sites online. I see them as two different experiences. The online sites are for finding news, responding to it, and--on good sites--building communities. Magazines, for the most part, are for reading. That's one of the reasons I'm enjoying them so much: I like to read. I'd been spending so much time Web-grazing and writing and commenting that I'd forgotten that.

Why don't I enjoy most mag sites online? For one thing, they don't link away from themselves much. You land on them as a resource, but they don't lead you anywhere else. A dead end. Second, they're click hungry, putting up all sorts of features like slide shows. My connection is too slow for such things. I bet that many who click on slide shows are killing time while on a lightning fast connection at work. The thing I enjoy most on mag site--no surprise here--are the blogs. True, too few of them link out. But I like the voices.

Speaking of linking out: The Bivings Group studied the 50 magazines online and reports that how many of us do podcasts, blogs, and so on. (ex RexBlog) They say we're lagging in Web 2.0. (This would be clearer for me if I had an example of a mag making good use of Web 2.0. Any out there?) Jeff Jarvis says that magazines should be hubs for communities of interest, which meet online and contribute their own expertise. This, he says, works for niche publications, but he worries that there's no community for general interest. Um, Jeff. Business wouldn't be a special interest, would it?

Speaking of the holidays...Vlogsanta is BACK!

Heather Green

Yeahhhh! That crazy Vlogsanta is back.....Who, you say? Why only the slightly demented seasonal creation of video blogger Chuck Olsen.

If you have a holiday related question, Vlogsanta's the guy to ask. His email is santa@vlogsanta.tv. (interesting aside, Vlogsanta's on Revver).

This Week's Podcast With Sony's Mike Fasulo

Heather Green

On this week's BW Cutting Edge Podcast I spoke with Mike Fasulo, the chief marketing officer of Sony Electronics about emerging media.

This is a first in a series that we're doing leading up to the holiday season. Fasulo discusses the rise of consumer-generated marketing content -- and the approach Sony is taking to adapt to an era increasingly defined by Tivo and YouTube. He also explains why he doesn't believe that TV advertising is dead.

Borat in Argentina

Stephen Baker

Daniel Rubin's Blinq blog, from the Philly Inquirer, picks up an automatically translated version of the Bush daughters' romp in Argentina. It reads, as he says, like Borat's next movie. My favorite passage:

The visit from the Bush sisters to Buenos Aires spent to the public knowledge the last week when a thief stole the purse of Barbarian to the care of American intelligence agents.

(I checked out the original article in La Nacion, and that paragraph should have said: The public learned about the Bush sisters' visit last week after a thief stole Barbara (Bush)'s purse while she was under the protection of the U.S. Secret Service.)

My question: Are American spies using primitive translating technology like this to decode the murmurings of suspected terrorists? If so, the next "barbarian" they throw into the slammer may have intimate ties to more than one U.S. president.

Your Favorite Web 2.0 Shopping Services/Tools?

Heather Green

I don't know if you noticed...but it's that holiday time of the year. I was in Georgia where my cousin had totally decorated her house inside and out (complete with four foot tall nutcrackers outside the door) by the Friday morning after Thanksgiving.

So, here's a seasonal question...are there any Web 2.0 shopping tools or services that you recommend? Out of curiosity I would like to try some out and also talk to a few enterpreneurs on the podcast.

Scoble's Silicon centrism

Stephen Baker

Robert Scoble visits Wales and marvels at the spread of what he calls Silicon Valley culture. The Welsh Google things and use WiFi. Commenters on his blog complain that he mistakenly equates Silicon Valley with global tech leadership.

Says one: The rest of the world doesn’t just sit around, mouths filling with drool, waiting for web 2.0 morsels to drop from silicon valley like manna from heaven. The US is not the country with the highest broadband penetration, the greatest number of cellphones per head of capita or any number of measures of techno-geek distribution. Are you going to be surprised at how well they speak English over here as well?

I remember feeling this way when I was covering technology from Europe. Seemed to me back then that the Americans looked at the PC the center of everything, and tended to regard mobile as a sideshow. (This was even true, believe it or not, of some of my editors.) This has changed a bit, but you can still argue that even Wi-Fi is computer-centric. Fact is, the Valley just isn't the greatest laboratory for innovation in mobile tech, because the infrastructure there lags behind the hotspots in Asia and Europe.

Microsoft's B+ student shines

Stephen Baker

I was surprised and happy to read in BW's cover story that Microsoft's shining light, J Allard, was a B+ student who went to Boston University--far across the river from Harvard and MIT. I've been put off for years by Microsoft's focus on recruiting from prestige universities. They've often seemed smug and closed-minded, bragging about things like a sky-high corporate IQ. (Full discloser: I went to State U.) It always seemed to me that Microsoft would have to broaden its scope to find the rebellious spirits the company needs. (This is an issue with Google, too, which appears to focus on only one aspect of intelligence.) Looks like Microsoft found what they needed with Allard--though he and his future wife had to cross the river to an MIT job fair to get their attention.

Facebook Responds to New Report on Accesibility For the Blind

Heather Green

I meant to post about a report from the American Foundation for the Blind on the lack of accessibility for the blind at social networking sites including MySpace and Facebook. The Foundation put together a video that it posted on YouTube asking the social networking sites to offer an audio alternative to the CAPTCHAs on their sites.

Well, it turns out that Facebook responded with a fix by adding an email alternative to their CAPTCHA.

Visiting the Blog-Challenged Relatives

Heather Green

A couple months ago, I wrote about visiting my relatives in Georgia and how confused they were about blogs. Well, I am back and convinced to show them how these things work. At first, I thought of pointing to this blog and even showing them how I put a post together for Blogspotting. But frankly, I think I would lose them by even showing them some of the posts (I might lose them with the ins and outs of the Rocketboom saga.)

However, I think instead that I will set up a family blog for my wedding. (Yep, I'm getting married in June. I am really excited about it!!) That way, I can write about some subject that (for the moment) they can't get enough of. And then it will be something that they can check in on and compare to the other blogs that I am sure they are visiting without even knowing it!

Hey Jason, Over here!

Stephen Baker

I highly enjoyed TechCrunch's post on the battle between Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis. I won't repeat all the ins and outs. But the point is that Calacanis attacks Denton, at least in this analysis, by heaping flattery on one of Denton's bloggers, LifeHacker's Gina Trepani. The idea is that he'll bid up her value, and Denton's costs. Almost makes me wish Jason would pick a fight with McGraw-Hill. For you gourmets out there, by the way, LifeHacker links to a lesson on how to deep fry a turkey.