The Attention Span of an Ant

I put a paper wall in front of an ant. It turns right. I put up the paper wall again. The ant turns right again. I put up the paper wall and the ant takes a left. We all have it in us, this reflex response to a stimulus. We all have the insect/reptilian part of our brains that does not think, but just reacts. Interestingly, the personal publishing revolution and all the new content streams that have been built up around us have the effect of turning would be writers and intellectuals, the creative class, into a colony of insects impulsively repeating this message or that message. Why have we turned ourselves into repeater stations susceptible to any clever or not so clever marketing trick? Why have we substituted careful reasoning, research, and analysis for sound bites and regurgitated news?

This insect like response to the latest trends and the buzz of the moment was the domain of newspaper reporters and the press core. More sensible people went into different professions that gave them time to think and learn and develop their specialty. However, we bloggers have recently taken it upon ourselves to usurp “old media,” and takeover their responsibilities. Why? Because, we believe that citizen journalists can do it better?

Maybe this is true, but my general inclination is to step back and say, “wait a minute.” I don’t want this responsibility. That’s why I didn’t become a reporter! I want to think things out and learn how they actually work. I want to understand PR and marketing as it relates to human behavior.

I don’t want to hear a million microsecond pitches about what’s hot and what’s not. Trends today are as long lived as a mayfly, and therefore utterly useless to anyone who wants to understand the overall picture of what is going on in the marketplace of ideas. Ideas are the only things that really matter, and all that jabber out there is only relevant to the extent that it reinforces one idea over another. So, my suggestion to bloggers is stop reading your news feeds and THINK!

I know that there are a lot of PR and marketing people that would love to see the blogosphere continue in the direction that it is heading. The marketing industry would absolutely love it, if we just responded to the most talked about thing on the Internet, and posted it to our blogs. And, they would love it even more, if we felt compelled to do this two, three, four times per day. The more time we spend posting regurgitated news, and the less time we spend thinking, the better it is for them.

We become the mouth piece of whatever is hot on Google, Technorati, Delicious, etc.. There are a thousand tricks to get to the top of these information aggregation engines and marketing professionals are increasingly using every trick in the book to get highly ranked. The more time we spend thinking and the less time we spend posting the harder it is for marketers to get the questionable ideas and products out there. As thinkers, we become better gatekeepers and the line between news and advertising naturally begins to reemerge.

There are many of forces pushing bloggers in the reactive unthinking direction. For instance, bloggers need to maintain a steady stream of content to maintain readership, and blogging communities tend towards a cliquish culture that naturally repeats what other bloggers in that community are saying. However, there is definitely a push in the blogsphere to find ways of differentiating quality content that is worth reading from advertorials and other bilious crap.

To mindlessly repeat some things I’ve heard: Craig Newmark and Jeff Jarvis are making rumbling about a new service that will help determine the best news out there; Corante has added “hubs” of edited content from bloggers writing on specialized topic areas; and there are countless other projects in the works. Please let me know about any services you’ve heard of that help filter and improve the quality of information in the blogosphere. I’ll be blogging on this topic a lot in the near future.

Body Farm

Good news! Now you can help advance the cause of medical science, even after you’re dead!:

A biological anthropology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Tyler O’Brien, envisions turning some prime pasture in the Midwestern state into a body farm, where human bodies — buried, stuffed in car trunks or exposed to the elements — can provide scholars and criminalists with new benchmark data on human decay.

“This idea has strong scientific value,” O’Brien said. “To answer the question of how long a body has been dead, how long a person has been missing, is critical to criminal investigations.”

O’Brien is seeking a grant of $400,000 to $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice and other organizations to obtain the land and set up the project.

This is big! And it brings up a number of valid concerns:

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Eating Lemons

Ever eat a lemon?

Picture a series of lemon-eating, funky-lip faces, a wonderful Andy Warhol montage. I would pay $400 Zlotys to see it at New York’s Whitney Museum. I would pay $280 Zlotys to see it at the San Antonio Museum for the Arts. In Burkina Faso you might have to pay me to see it, as there is no direct flight and the rebels have captured all the artists.

I once read that Texas dentists were trying to get children to stop eating lemons. There is a tradition of Southwest lemon eating that goes back generations: cut a hole in a lemon, shove in some dried, salted piece of fruit called “Chinese candy,” and then squeeze the tangy, salty juice all over your tounge and your fringed rodeo shirt and your alligator boots and everything else you?ve got on.

Well it seems lemon eating plays hell with your tooth enamel, and Texans have been urged by their dentists to cease and desist and watch Lemony Snicket movies instead. Which is not to say that Jim Carey is a favorite of Lone Star dentists either, but at least he doesn?t promote tooth decay. They think.

On the other hand, a chat room poster I know named Green Hell reminds us that ?lemons rock, brilliant when your slamming tequila and you just eat one! Gobble…?

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Intercepted Email Department

To: Heads of Sales & Marketing

Re: Keeping your jobs and our pricing strategy

All:

It has come to senior management’s attention that we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars a year trying to figure out how to price our items. People, I don’t care if that’s what they teach you at Harvard, Yale, or Wharton. At dear, old Pace University’s night business program, we learned business is all about moving product, and recent figures show me we’re not doing that. To that end, CFO de Krook and I want to roll out our new, more aggressive pricing plan. Let’s call it “Operation Undercut.”

Instead of pulling your chins and scratching your heads trying to work out toe the penny what our logistics and infrastructure costs are, here’s what I want you to do. When you quote a price to a retailer or wholesaler, casually ask what our competitor is charging for the same item. If the price is lower than the one you quoted–say forty-seven cents per item, compared with your offer of fity [sic] each–cough twice, slap your forehead with your palm, and say, “Oh, did I say fity cents a unit? I meant forty-six cents, because you’re such a good customer.”

I know you all work on commission, based on the size of the sale you’ve made, so I understand your fears that shaving margins will also sharply reduce your commissions. That’s why this memo is circulated on the same day that we’ve just introduced our new “Overpriced Executive Line,” basically the same office-supply garbage we already sell, produced at the same places and for the same cost, just stuck in nicer gold-colored and silver-colored boxes with ribbons on them, designed to make executives feel important and willing to pay 40 percent more.

So be of good cheer and keep those expense accounts down. Go forth and sell, sell, sell!

Onward and upward,

The Guy Who Writes The Checks

At The Motor Vehicle Division

Today I visited the Motor Vehicle Division to renew my driver’s license. I thought the photo came out a little better than most:

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