Daily Meander
Yet another experiment on the virtual frontier: a stock market where you, your brand, and your content, are the commodity. I must say that I’m intrigued with Empire Avenue, and am going to have some fun exploring it.
Oh, yeah, and I hate to bother y’all, but I need to post this to verify my blog with them: {EAV:aa5a15a0f0fbe955}
There. All better now. Now, to go find something to complain about today.
Trading stamps were invented around the turn of the century (that’s the beginning of the 20th century, kids) as a shopping incentive. You’d buy products at your local store or gas station, and get a number of stamps commensurate with the size of your purchase. Then you ran home and stuck these stamps into booklets, collecting them until you’d amassed enough to get whatever premium you had your heart set on. The predecessors of modern day loyalty cards (store credit cards), they were at their peak after the Great Depression and into the 1960’s. I remember my mother collecting them, and some of the premiums (like appliances) were pretty nice. And popular: Carlson Companies was originally founded as the Gold Bond Stamp Company in 1938, and look at them now.
Just remember: You spent your money on real-world things, collecting stamps that allowed you to get other real-world things. That’s important.
Fast forward to current time: American Express has partnered with Zynga to produce a pre-paid card that rewards you with … wait for it … Farmville Credits (with other Zynga properties joining the fray over time). Now you can spend your money on real-world things, to collect credits to buy pretend things.
How much is that tiger in my (browser) window?
When Facebook first introduced the concept of “frictionless sharing”, I looked at it as just another way of marketing site interactions that already existed, and a logical extension of what Facebook was already offering: The ability to advertise what you’ve liked, read, whatever anywhere on the internet.
And yet, with recent reports that Facebook gateway apps like the Washington Post and others have seen usage drop, it appears that the whole thing has some serious holes. And, partly because Facebook’s mobile presence sucks (that’s a technical term), it’s even worse if you try to use your smartphone like the growing percentage of users are.
One example: Launch the Facebook smartphone app (I use the Android version), then click on a link that should take you to a third-party site to read an article, and you’re first presented with a “careful … you’re leaving Facebook … are you sure?” page, followed by a login screen for Facebook from wiithin your browser. So, in order to get to a non-Facebook link, you have to log into Facebook outside the Facebook app and within the browser, just so Facebook’s linking system can track the request and take you to your desired content.
Stupid? Inefficient? Irritating? All of the above. Can you get around it? Not easily.
There sure is a lot of friction in this new frictionless frontier. Color me unimpressed.
Japanese culture is an interesting dichotomy: formal, structured, and reserved on one side, crazed game shows on the other. Game shows where people make absolute fools of themselves, only to slip back to being formal, structured, and reserved.
American culture seems to get stuck on the crazed side. People will do just about anything to get noticed or make money (hopefully both). Remember “Fear Factor”? However, we seem to enjoy _living_ on the crazed side. On- and off- camera, in a never-ending quest to disprove Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” hypothesis.
Reality TV is this generation’s incarnation of “Let’s Make a Deal”.
Question: What will the next incarnation look like?
So I’m enjoying a whiskey while watching the latest in the current trend of “brilliant, gripping, ground breaking” entertainment to come out of Hollywood: “Restaurant Stakeout” on the Food Network. Shows like this reaffirm to me that Anthony Bourdain was right (read his book, Medium Raw for all the juicy tidbits), and yet, like the proverbial impending collision of a tanker of toxic sludge with a circus train, I can’t help but watch. Hell, if it wasn’t for the commercial breaks (which happen so frequently nowadays, free divers can use their recurring pattern to train for deep dives) I’d go blind from not blinking.
It’s truly amazing how people behave in public these days I sum it up in two words: self entitlement. Less than 10 minutes into the program and I’m thinking “How the hell do these people have jobs?”, followed shortly by “I’m glad I never ate there”. The I catch myself. Something’s wrong. No, wait, not wrong. Something’s missing. All we see are one vignette after the other of bad employee behavior. Where are all the bad customers? Wait, wait. There’s one … No, that’s a plant acting like a bad patron just to see how the server handles it. A paid actor (I wonder if there are any local openings …).
Here’s my problem: I realize that places that give good service don’t make for “good TV”. I can’t argue that. But if all that’s shown is the worst of the worst in the business, doesn’t that plant a dangerous seed in the pliable minds of the typical viewer? Doesn’t it scream “When you go out, watch out! They’re all evil morons out to screw you!”? It doesn’t matter if it’s true, perception is reality.
For every bad server or surly bartender there is an equally bad customer out there. Unfortunately, you’ll never see a show that records real customers doing really stupid things, since no network would be willing to carry the insurance or cover the litigation expenses. Which is too bad, because I have some great titles for such a series: “Lost Reservations”, “Table For None”, “White Trash Entourage”, or “Bizarre Foodies” anyone?
It’s all about balance, folks.
Hollywood? Call me. We’ll do lunch.
Dear meteorologists, _this_ is “a dusting”?
Brilliant. Comcast survives the blizzard, then crashes the day after.
#Angrybirds détente! http://ow.ly/3f4yS
Man, the whole house smells like bacon.
Whoa, @TekDiff . Just finished your latest podcast, and I’m blown away. Outstanding work, man: http://ow.ly/23K9y
