Over on Marketing Over Coffee a few weeks back we talked about manipulating perceptions - creating story and reality that the customer wants to see. This is nothing new, Seth Godin made the bold proclaimation “All Marketers are Liars”.

While Mr. Godin’s title embraces irony, using the word “manipulate” creates a sinister impression that is rather severe. Of course it fits well within the Red Saber attitude of the show, but is not perhaps the best marketing. For those who see the concept instead of the literal word it’s not a problem, otherwise it needs some copywriting. This becomes a guiding force during campaign times, with calculated phrases such as the more acceptable “climate change” replacing the more menacing “global warming”.

Rather than debate the semantics, this video demonstrates bending the will of others while using the power for good.

One of my favorite podcasts is Steve Wright over on BBC2. It started out a few years ago with just his “Ask Elvis” segment, but they started throwing in some of the interviews he gets with big names (Jack Nicholson, Billy Joel, David Tennant etc.) and then I was hooked for good.The one I listened to today had Ian McKellen (fanboys will know him as either Magneto or Gandalf), who mentioned that he was working on a 6 part re-imagining of The Prisoner. 

Originally broadcast as a series in the late sixties, Patrick McGoohan played a Secret Agent Man who was kept as a prisoner on an island village. You could never tell who exactly was keeping him or why exactly was he was being kept. He said he wanted to retire, was it his own agency locking him down? An enemy spy agency trying to break him? Every week he, referred to only as “Number 6″, would try to escape or the leader “Number 2″ (who was played by different actors as the series progressed) would have a scheme to try and break him.

The original series is kind of odd in that the final episode is very strange and it’s not really clear what the hell was going on at all. Long before “Lost” or “The X Files” this series presented a story that really made you think, and forced you to think long after it was over.

As they say in the Village… “Be seeing you”.

Photo uploaded to Flickr by John Rees 

Marketing Over Coffee is out with a review of Google chrome.

This weekend I recorded a special M Show with C.C. Chapman, who hasn’t been on in about 100 shows.

Photo on Flickr by alzimmermanoh.

So after a few hours of using Chrome the only bad thing I have to say is that I’m missing my Delicious tags. Aside from that there are some very interesting things:

•  History Homepage - When you open it up you get screenshots of your past pages, it’s dynamic, it’s very cool.
• I also really like the fact that the window itself has no border, between that and the modest toolbars, and use of the title bar to compress the tabs, you get more overall screen real estate. If you’re someone like me who sets the start bar to auto-hide for a few more pixels, you’ll really like it.
• It’s a lot more solid than I thought it would be, most pages look “right”

But it’s not perfect

• For some reason the graphing plugin that AWstats uses does not show up (for 1 of 3 sites only)
• I couldn’t get the Flickr uploader to work

Aside from that, I’m very impressed and it’s already taken the top spot. 

Another browser? Google announces their browser: Chrome

This comic tells the story and here’s what I’m thinking so far.

“Wouldn’t it be great to start from scratch”

Uh. No. Web designers and marketers have taken years to get things to work on 2 platforms, nobody wants a third. You could consider Vista an attempt at starting from scratch, that’s gone well.

P5 and 6 - Multi-threaded browser that’s less of a memory hog - Ok, so I’m a little interested.

P11 - They talk about QA, yeah that’s not a revolution.

P12 - Uses Webkit just like Android. Give me your best Spock… “Fascinating”

P22 - Porn mode, you can open a tab that saves no history. Great, the politician’s dream.

“It’s good for developers because it’s open source” That’s debatable. My ultimate question is: can you get more standardization by further segmenting the market? I doubt it, they have to be counting on wiping out the competition.

Camp is over, but it was a great 4 days of shooting. You can check out my shots here. And then click this link to search the tag “tfttf2008me” for pictures from everyone at the session.

Thanks to Chris Marquardt for putting on a great show, if you are into photography you should check out his podcast on photography.

Totally off topic here, but just a quick one for Centro owners. I have this thing about paying for ringtones. I’ve been editing audio for a long time so the thought of paying $1.99 for a crappy snippet absolutely kills me.

There is a shortcut where mp3s can be sent with text messages but on the palm boards I found an even better solution. For the full post click here, otherwise here’s the punchline from Ridius, the smartest person on the Palm Forums:

Step 4: Now we actually need to import the songs. Here’s how you do it

1. Open the Blazer app (Web icon)
2. In the address field, type file:///cardname/foldername/filename (e.g. file:///MYSDCARD/Audio/PurpleHaze.mp3)
Remember that this is case sensitive so make sure you have all the capitol letters correct
3. Tap Go
4. Choose Save as Ringtone from the list
5. The rest is easy as you pretty much just tap ok

I only ran into a minor glitch as my card had not been named so the default “Card” did not work. I named it on my PC and it’s all good now, the Jack Bauer ringtone is in full effect.

The next Geek project is Opera on the Centro…

As a card carrying gadget geek it should be no surprise that I get the Crutchfield catalog at home. Since I buy cheap crummy cars that are good on gas since they are just going to get abused on 128 or parking in Boston, the first thing I do is upgrade the speakers. They are always knowledgeable  and accept returns, which happens frequently if stuff doesn’t fit (which doesn’t matter to them because I’ve had enough equipment stolen that they make it up).

The catalog this week had the results of their “You dream it, we’ll help you build it ™” contest. I don’t even remember seeing it before, but if I did I’m sure I thought “there’s no reason they would give me free stuff, they already know what I buy, and the wife is not about to let me put a kicker or glow neon on my sweet wheels for our quaint New England town.”

I have taken to heart many of Christopher Penn’s statements about taking time to protect your mental state. We are bombarded with trash news and celebrity crap at a relentless pace. If you into sound systems take a few minutes and check out the sound system Robert Vega built for his brother-in-law.

I keep an eye on what Justin is working on. He’s not just talking about how media is changing, he is getting his hands dirty, watching it change around him. The beauty of this is that he may see some fame in the next few years and some speaking gigs, but because of the hands-on experience he has it wouldn’t surprise me to see him in 10 years working on whatever passes for big time Television then, or making movies a la Kevin Smith if that’s what he wants to do.

This week he was thinking about media being free. It’s actually far worse than that. Media is less than free. It costs you money and time to produce, and often the people consuming it are not going to pay for it. This came to me in a flash in New York City after touring NBC studios. A few blocks away I saw a subway sign for the TV Show “Heroes”. Here’s one of the biggest shows going, from one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates in the world, and they buy space on a bus to make sure it stays one of the biggest shows.

How can a lame podcast like The M Show compare to that? One easy answer is to change and go more niche. The M Show isn’t really different from talk radio, but Marketing Over Coffee is audio that you can’t find on the radio, or anywhere else.

It kind of makes you wonder how musicians can complain about the death of CD sales, while TV has dealt with end users getting the stuff for free from day one.

The problem with trying to find a way to charge for content is that it ends up throttling the only marketing the majority of content producers do - the giving away of great content for free, one of the oldest marketing stunts in the book. If it’s no longer free, now you need to find another way to make it spread. I’d like to be able to say that you can succeed on the strength of your content, but classical marketing says that you need to be anywhere from 5-10 times better to dislodge a competitor. Have you ever read a book that you felt was 10x better than everything else out there? Or better than the average? For me that’s happened maybe once.

So unless you have some budget to make people aware of your content, you are going to have to stick with free. There are some ways to make it work, you have two paths - one is to come up with a business model right away. For someone like Justin that could be having to say “70% of my time will be producing videos for others”, basically doing commercial jobs to fund the more entrepreneurial project. The  other option is to ignore the cash and go hungry and spend every waking hour gathering an audience.

Once you have a fans, scarcity enters the equation once again - everyone’s audience is unique, and odds are they have characteristics that can’t be found everywhere else. When you reach a critical mass of people this can fuel a business model. Another method that I see as the wave of the future is product placement. There’s only x minutes of time within a story, and if people are clamoring to watch the story you can limit the supply by having only 30 seconds to sell out of the whole story. Let the bidding begin.

Gather a crowd and go from there.

This post has been in my drafts forever so I thought that it was time to send it out. I was hoping that I would have some brilliant flash of genius that would make it a world class post, alas, no flash.

The concept is pretty simple: Damon writes about Software Configuration Management, and he started it through is love for that science as opposed to his love of the blogosphere as those who blog for hobby tend to do. As he is not a blog fanboy, he missed that whole “never go back and change posts or comments” voodoo that tends to be perpetuated by tree-hugging hippie types (the same type of people that say podcasts should never be edited, and the web has been ruined ever since they allowed graphics).

As a result he has no problem with retconning or going back and cleaning up posts that are not read often (he presumes that he needs to be clearer in his writing, as opposed to the average blogger’s hubris that would see it as a sign that the general public just doesn’t appreciate their genius). The idea that the entire blog can evolve, including the back posts, rather than the linear changes most blogs go through, was something that changed the way I look at blogging as a whole.

Any blog that eventually gains traction depends on the back catalog of content. Why shouldn’t it be the best it can be?