BlogMKE

On the way to work today I heard a story on NPR about the ridiculous cost of college textbooks. I remember being in college and getting the total at the bookstore and thinking what a ripoff it was. Of course, I remember it being maybe $300-350 but the NPR story was saying the average is more like $500-600 now. Weak!

Apparently the industry is $6B a year! Bastards! The newsworthy bit is that 12+ states are considering laws that would restrict price increases for college textbooks. And see, I completely support that. I have never understood why those books need to be so damn expensive. So, US Government, I fully support you regulating those evil book sellers. I’m sure you will sleep easier tonight knowing that to be true.

Listen to the story

Do you ever get lost on the internets? I often find myself wildly clicking links with the apple key (throwing links into new tabs) and then finally going through the hundred tabs I have open and forgetting how I got there. Is that just me?

Anyway, I just got lost on the internets and found myself in awe of Blissful. The animation is absolutely amazing, but the really interesting part is that the music is Fantomas. How strange that I would end up on a site with Fantomas music (I’m a very large Mike Patton fan). I know I didn’t get here from any Patton type sites, so odd.

Anyway, head from Blissful to Leftchannel to see some more incredible animation work. Seeing stuff like this does two things. First it makes me want to do motion design. Second it makes me realize I am such a hack that there is no way in hell I could do motion design.

OK, been a couple days at least, time to complain about MySpace. MySpace makes you lazy. Like, really lazy. My guess is that the reason that so many profiles are practically unreadable is because people are willing to put in just enough work to change their background, but that’s about it. If it sucks beyond that, laziness prevents it from being fixed.

That’s fine and dandy, but what REALLY bums me out is the fact that MySpace has made bands lazy. What happened to a band having a website? Does that not exist anymore? I was looking for shows at aestheticized presents >>> and found that as I went to check out some of the bands listed there, something like 90% of the links go to a MySpace page. Dammit.

Listen, I don’t want to go to your MySpace page. I understand that MySpace is helping connect you to your legions of fans, but dammit, I want to see some thought and work and love that went into ye olde band website. I want to be impressed with the design, I want to see something different than other bands, I just want to see something OTHER than MySpace. Please?

The funniest part is that I guess MySpace is actually down at the moment for maintenance (despite the fact we are an hour outside of their maintenance window), so guess what all you bands that I was interested in learning more about? Not going to happen. There’s no way I’ll remember to go back and check you out later. Not that I’m some important dude, but your laziness has lost you a potential fan.

So, in most cases I would be talking smack about a company, or product, that has just launched a “blog” aka a thinly veiled self-serving advertisement. However, today I stumbled on a blog for a commercial. The Sony BRAVIA commercial (high quality .mov files here) to be exact, the totally badass rubber-balls-bouncing-down-San-Francisco-streets commercial. Believe it or not this thing has had 3.4 million views on YouTube alone, pretty amazing for a commercial. You can even get the making of/behind the scenes which is fascinating.

Anyway, they’ve launched a blog at www.bravia-advert.com, which I have to assume is a first for a couple of reasons. First off, who the hell starts a blog for a commercial? Company and product we’ve seen, but just for a commercial is new. Secondly, they are using this intelligently to give you a behind the scenes look at the next Bravia commercial, which is clearly anticipated to be something cool. And lastly, while there isn’t much content yet, the writing is actually pretty clever.

“Those of you who are familiar with the internets will recognise this as a “blogsite” employing “web logging technology”. (This poor and rather awkwardly-staged attempt at self deprecation has been deliberately designed to catch the eye of bloggers, because we have this special message to deliver; Relax. We have no plans to come charging into your web-space, but you’re more than welcome to interact with ours.)”

So, on account of my past, present and future as a marketeer I tend to pay a little more attention to commercials than most. Ironically this also makes me capable of ignoring bad commercials almost instantly, so that’s a bonus. However, while watching The Office tonight I was stunned by this new Gatorade commercial.

See, there are bad commercials that are just plain bad, those are a dime a dozen. Then there are bad commercials that take a swing at being different or unique but fail. Then there are commercials like this that obviously took a lot of thought, a lot of time and still suck.

However, and this is the important bit, I’m blogging about this commercial. I will remember this commercial. So, ultimately, Gatorade wins. The point of advertising has changed. Instead of promoting certain aspects of a product, or differentiating it from the rest, we now see commercials with one purpose: burning the product name into your brain. The product is barely seen and certainly there is no indication of what the actual concept has to do with the brand, but dammit, those big heads are gonna freak a lot of people out and have them talking about Gatorade.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (who I love by the way) published a report yesterday saying that 8% of internet users, or about 12M American adults, keep a blog. I had always guessed that number would be much higher, and while 12M is a lot, the fact that it represents only 8% is quite interesting.

It is interesting to look at the number of blog readers (39%, or 57 million American adults) and compare that to the existing blogs. If you do the simplest math possible (divide bigger number by smaller number) that means for every blog there are 4.75 readers. Which, incidentally is exactly the number of readers I have!

Also interesting (and from a prior survey) is that more than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30 and evenly divided between men and women. That seems expected, but how about the fact that more than half live in the suburbs? How about the fact that bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population? Sixty percent of bloggers are white, 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race. By contrast, 74% of internet users are white, 9% are African American, 11% are English-speaking Hispanic and 6% identify as some other race.

If you want to read all 33 pages, check out a [PDF] of the full report. And thanks Amy for pointing this out.

The neat thing about the intarweb is that I have lots of friends scattered here and there, people I know well but have never met in person. In fact, I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest musician on several records being produced by these phantom intarweb people. One of these fellas (Shawn Knight) has a pretty nifty site where he makes music videos for local bands. I’ve always wanted to get into video but the few times I have tried, I’ve quickly realized how much time and patience it takes. It is amazing as well how crappy a video can look if you don’t have the right equipment, but more importantly if you don’t know what you are doing with that equipment.

There aren’t many videos here but I love the Kiddo one. Shawn has done lots of creative things over the years, including artwork, design and music and I’m not surprised that he has moved on to video. I even dig the site design, nicely done.

I was on the last record that Shawn did through his Boyarm creative/distribution/label outfit. It was called “Il Programma Di Religione” and featured 265 songs, each of which was 15 seconds and was a tribute to each of the 265 popes that have existed. It took two and a half years to complete.

A couple of weeks (maybe months) ago I picked up a new magazine downtown called Reax Music. It is similar in size and style to a couple of other magazines around here, but focuses completely on music and actually has content as opposed to mostly ads like tbt and Weekly Planet.

My first reaction when I saw this was “there is no way they can actually put out another issue.” We’re talking a free, full color magazine just launching. The few ads can’t be paying for much, I doubt even the distribution. This made me a little sad because I actually read the whole and thing and thought that it was well written, covered the local scene well and has a great design. Each story usually has its own design and layout, which could be annoying in some instances but makes sense for a music magazine.

Good news! I just picked up issue 3 over the weekend. And just like the other 2 issues I now have a local band that I have never heard of to check out (The Beauvilles, playing August 10 at The Orpheum). I am really hoping that this means Reax is being well received by others as well and that it will stick. This is exactly the kind of thing that we need in the Tampa Bay area to pull together a very disjointed music scene.

Thanks Reax, and good luck.

Congratulations, you’re #1!! MySpace has been in the news a bit lately, thought I’d gather some of the links together to check ‘em out.

MySpace overtakes Yahoo Mail
Social networking site ranked No. 1 in most recent week (July 12, 2006)

MySpace may face legislative crackdown. My favorite quote from this article is:

“MySpace.com has been a center of drug activity, of gang activity, and of Internet predators,” said Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican. “Isn’t it entirely appropriate that the state get involved?”

Gang and drug activity? Man, I hate MySpace more than the next guy, but gang and drug activity sound kinda far fetched. Is he talking about people uploading photos of them doing drugs? Or with bandanas or something? Just struck me as funny.

Also, politicians are so hip naming a bill Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. That’s right, the bill is actually called deleting online predators. Get it? Compruders delete things. Isn’t that clever as all get out?

While reading some of this I stumbled upon Orkut, which I had no idea even existed. News to me. Google owns it. It has been around since 2004. They have over 2 million users. It is invite only. Interesting. The sad part is that the following appears in their user agreement. MySpace has something similar, but come on Google!

“By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.”

Ah yes, smell the online social communities! I do have to admit though, I am impressed that a service as crappy as MySpace has grown so big and been so influential, and as with all popular things is now under fire. Crazy.

P.S. Be sure to read the history of the middle finger found here… awesome stuff. PLUCK YEW!!

I think this link has been floating around a bit lately and it is funny how timely it is for me. You see, I’ve been growing my beard and moustache for several months now and I was just commenting last night that it is longer than I’ve ever had it.

Not only is the beard longer, but I’ve been meticulously growing and trimming the sides of my moustache in order to get it long enough to wax. Unfortunately, despite having found the wax, I have not discovered the trick to molding a handlebar moustache yet. I can remember being just a little kid and cutting handlebar moustaches out of construction paper and taping them to my lip, so I’ve definitely wanted to do this for a long time. However, it is far more complicated than I expected.

Anyway, looking at this site has renewed my desire to figure it out. I vow, from this post on, to have a badass handlebar moustache and wear it with pride… and perhaps enter it in next year’s World Beard and Moustache Championships where you must also apparently dress in a silly costume.