Sidewalk Life

The Medium Is The Message

Scheduling "Letting Go of God" on channel 666...Ironic coincidence, or is Time Warner Cable just having a laugh?

Trying to Stay Ahead of Twitter

A friend of mine sent me a story from CNN's website and I noticed it came with the headline  "I just saw it on CNN."  The "I just saw it on" part felt a bit odd, like he wanted me to read it right away. So I sent myself a different story from CNN, and sure enough it also came with the headline "I just saw it on CNN." 

CNN must be feeling pressure from instant news sources like Twitter and trying to stay relevant by creating a sense of urgency with their news stories. 

BTW, creating energy from food scraps?  Doc Brown's flux capacitor has to be behind that.

Suburban Spam

Visiting my brother in San Diego last weekend I came across some Suburban Spam.  A handful of landscaping rocks stuffed into a plastic bag with a business card inside.  He said they get them all the time from different landscapers. 

I suppose it seems like practical marketing if you are the landscaper.  You reach a target audience who live in the new suburbs and who may be considering landscaping.  And the message on the card is obviously we can do your landscaping for you. 

But as Russell mentions in his posts about Urban Spam, it's got to be damn annoying if you are the receiver of the spam.  You didn't ask someone to throw litter on your driveway, and now you have to it pick it up.  Not to mention find something to do with a bunch of white rocks that probably don't fit your landscape design. 

If my brother is any indication of the success of the said spam, he's got a garbage can with a bunch piled up in his side yard.

Why is everyone on steroids?

"There's something simply un-American about this" scolded Senator Joe Biden during the Major League Baseball hearings on the use and abuse of steroids in the sport.  But as the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster explains, being on steroids, and the 'win at all cost' attitude is as American as it gets.

The movie is often funny and insightful, but ultimately depressing if you like sports and want to believe it's fair.  Worth watching if you missed it theaters earlier this year.

As Seen On YouTube

YouTube is now so ubiquitous that others are using it as an endorser of their own products.  I suppose this officially makes it the new TV.

Creative Use of Media

What a smart idea.

Modern Celebrity

According to the NY Times, Tila Tequila is famous for no reason other than that's the way celebrity works today.   Here's a caption form the article.

Joshua Gamson, the author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America” calls “a shift from top-down manufactured celebrity to a kind of lateral, hyper-democratic celebrity.”

That is if you don't consider the accelerators of Ms. Tequila's celebrity, MTV and its owner Viacom, part of the manufactured top-down celebrity industry.

A better analysis of today's media/celebrity culture might be...if you're willing to do crazy stuff on camera, someone will be there to put you on.

Foodometer

This cute little animated film aims to make people aware of the energy (oil) it takes to eat a conventional agribusiness diet.  Thanks to the eat local challenge for posting.

Offline Channels Drive Customers to Search

Mass media is not dead. 
In fact, it may be more important to the way customers shop than we thought.  That is according to this Jupiter research study that reports that television more than any other channel drives people to search for information on a company or product.

It's especially interesting in contrast to this report form Alloy and Harris Interactive that seems to ignore that over 80% of students own televisions.  The story they chose to report was about the growth of mobile media devices over the staying power of the television as a dominant fixture of young people's lives.

It's Not Digital, It's Social

It's a bit of a duh statement, but the thought of new media as a social revolution, not a digital revolution is expressed nicely by BigShinyThing.