Author: JP

MissRogue does her usual Come-From-Left-Field bit and explains why she takes extreme positions when discussing traditional and viral marketing. Well worth a read.
At the risk of being more extreme than Tara (as if that’s possible :-) ), I don’t think there is any middle ground on this.

Marketing is now about customers co-creating product, recommending to their network, making these recommendations independently yet subjectively, based on a personal experience of a product’s usefulness.
I don’t think this can be gamed. The cost of discovery-of-quality-or-usefulness is now so low that no amount of marketing money or strategy can apply enough lipstick to porcine products. And any attempt to apply said lipstick is likely to backfire and contaminate other products belonging to the same brand or stable.

Cory Doctorow pointed me (thanks, Cory) at this recent article from the FT: A closed mind about an open world. In it, James Boyle makes some very interesting points, I can only recommend you read it.

Here’s a sample quote from the article:

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production.

Understanding why “we” undervalue these things is critical to the three big I-battles we face: Intellectual Property, Identity and the Internet.

It is not enough for those that “get it” to go into a mutual-admiration huddle and back-slapping frenzies, as we are often wont to do. Those that don’t get it don’t get it for a reason. The commonest reason is an inability to comprehend three apparently simple things: that people can be altruistic; that extreme nonrival goods can and do exist; that people can make money because-of-rather-than-with.

James makes some excellent points in helping us bridge that gap of understanding.

But he also makes one very worrying one, something that has bothered me for quite a while. While we fight for openness in systems, networks, markets and information, the environment we fight in is becoming more closed. Many of the disruptions we’ve seen over the last two decades would not be allowed to happen today. And this is something we need to guard against, particularly in the context of regulation. Things like DOPA and Net Neutrality and Brand X and Mickey Mouse and DCMA. We live in challenging times.
But you know/the darkest hour/is always/always/just before the dawn. It may be a Long Time Coming, but it’s coming.

Great phrase from Miss Rogue. A post that deserves analysis and comment, but the phrase is worth a post all by itself. Thanks, Tara!

Maybe it got clogged up. Help is at hand, just follow this link.

I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein‘s recent book Infotopia very slowly. For three reasons. Because it’s very good and I want to savour it. Because it needs time to digest well. And because I’m on vacation.

As part of the conversation on opensource software, Cass quotes Woody Guthrie‘s copyright notice, as published in a 1930s songbook:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Wonderful quote. Thank you, Cass. I will comment on the book once I have had the chance to mull over it.