The marketing mind trick
Posted: Thursday, December 07, 2006 8:55 AM by Will Femia
Why interactive websites can create false memories - You may want to copy this into Word and increase the font size to read it, but ultimately it's a really interesting summary of a paper that shows people to be more prone to false memories about interactive models. Looking at the paper itself, the idea seems to be that interactivity helps us visualize an object in our minds, but once we're imagining it, we can lose track of what we actually saw and what our imaginations are adding. It seems to me the real question is how to plant imagined details into a person's mind (without using the Force). I didn't read through the whole paper, so maybe it's there.
Speaking of marketing mind tricks, A toy story, YouTube-style - You may remember clicking some remote control helicopter videos here in the recent past. Turns out that was part of a wave of alternative marketing. This makes two days in a row I find myself wondering if I'm actually participating in exploring word-of-mouth on the Web or whether I'm making myself a marketing tool. Remote control helicopters are cool, the videos were cool, isn't that all that matters? Is it better that it's not being forced down my throat with overt advertising or is it more insidious that it's being snuck into my daily life? Does word-of-mouth Web marketing foster a more honest kind of capitalism?
NewTeeVee is a new blog monitoring the online video scene. More text than video, but I've already learned some interesting things from it and it's only a couple days old.
Speaking of new online video coverage, Blogpulse has added a yesterday's top videos list. It's a little hard to go through with only the URLs as a guide. The most interesting thing I clicked that I hadn't seen elsewhere was this documentary on Hitler's home movies. It looks like it's for BBC5. The movies were silent so historians used lip reading technology to find out what Hitler was saying. Most of the video is build-up. The translations come around the 30 minute mark. I was interested to note (at 34:14) Hitler's enthusiasm for giving every German household a camera so they could record the nation's growth. I don't think anyone gives Hitler credit for being an early envisioner of citizen journalism, but that's OK, screw him.
Speaking of citizen journalism, The demise of the professional photojournalist - He's talking about photojournalists who do breaking news and whether they can compete with citizen journalists who happen to be on the scene when news breaks. Dan Gillmor is probably the most prominent student/teacher/proponent of citizen journalism, so I respect his views, but I don't think I agree with this one. Speaking as someone who makes an active effort to be aware and prepared for citizen journalism opportunities, I can see how a professional with good equipment, listening to a police scanner and with personal contacts in emergency services could get much better pictures of breaking news than police tape gawkers holding their cell phones in the air. Of course there are those amateur photos and videos of news taking place, but I think those only expand the available breaking news media, not replace the existing system.
What really troubles me about citizen media is that it's not necessarily reliable coverage. Yesterday there was a stabbing in Union Square in New York City. Not only is New York a very wired place, but Union Square is extremely crowded and there are NYU students everywhere over there who are presumably tech savvy and gadget equipped. "Witnesses said as many as 50 youths went after each other with canes, belts, fists, and more during the melee..." But these were the only citizen photos I could find of it and it turns out the guy who took them is a professional photographer! Maybe the citizen journalists didn't get around to upload them yet?
UPDATE: For a nice counter-example, check out the contributed photos on the BBC's London tornado story -here and here.
Free file conversion - By chance, the other day I was looking for a way to turn a wma file into an mp3 file and all the free services online were downloads. Since I wasn't feeling very bold about putting strange software on my machine I didn't do anything. Then I randomly came upon Zamzar. You tell it what file you want converted and what you want it converted to and then e-mail you a link to download the converted file. So far I don't think I've received any spam for giving them my mail address, but I used my junk mail address anyway. The whole thing worked great. (The audio was only 2 megs.)
Graffiti generator - This is for MySpace pages, and naturally no die hard graffiti fan would tolerate it, but it's fun for what it is.
Speaking of letter styles, there are few souls more tortured than designers. See how they view the world.
"Free Jamil Hussein" is a new meme circulating among warbloggers. You'll recall that Jamil Hussein is an unusually often-quoted source in AP stories about the situation in Iraq. The call to "free" him is directed at the AP to allow public verification of the guy. See also this lengthy reply to New York Times coverage from earlier this week.
The finalists in The 2006 Weblog Awards - The list isn't linked yet, so you have to search for the ones you're interested in. There are so many categories it's a wonder everyone in the blogosphere isn't a finalist in something.
I really like the idea of this mp3 digest. I'd prefer to be able to listen to the whole thing as a podcast, but I appreciate the reviews. So many mp3 blogs I click link as fans instead of critics.
And by the way, on Rex's list of worthwhile blogs yesterday, The Morning News is one that could have been on that list. Though it can be a little NYC-centric, I often find interesting things there, like this Commuter Click: The geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace.
Speaking of the Web's unseen structure, Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians - How much electricity does it take to run the servers that support Second Life and it's virtual inhabitants? Find the math done here.
Pencil art - This is funny to see in the wake of the carved crayons from the other day.
Unusual navigation on this site, but if you click around enough there's a lot of neat stuff here.
I've been running into a lot of links to National Geographic lately. I don't know how new the current design is, but I really like it. Especially the extra information in the side bar. And especially especially the camera meta data in the slide shows. The comments from their illustrations editor in their user submission section are also very insightful.
The girl guitar - Not really perverse, but still a little weird.
Making Atlas Shrug in Venezuela - Can the U.S. manipulate its immigration policy to orchestrate a sort of brain drain (productivity drain) in Venezuela?
While the rest of us go insane waiting until January for new episodes of Heroes, if you haven't been watching you can catch up on the entire series on the NBC site - free. (Take advantage of this while it's the hot gimmic. I can't imagine free online rebroadcasts are going to be the norm for long.)
Top ten naked people on Google Earth - Totally safe for work because a naked person on Google Earth is just a blur but it's a pretty funny distinction to have if you're one of the ten.
Another online Christmas tradition: the Scared of Santa gallery
Tea cups that stain in an attractive pattern - This reminds me of a history I once heard of why blackbelts are black. The idea was not that you advance to a new color but that your continued use of the belt while training would lead to it gradually turning darker with dirt and sweat. I don't know if that's true, but the idea of becoming a blackbelt(cup) tea drinker has some appeal.
"Wordie lets you make lists of words -- practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever. You can then see who else has listed the same words, and talk about it. It's more fun than it sounds." That's good because it doesn't really sound very fun.
Wii Safety: The Missing Pages (from the safety manual)
If I saw my kid throw himself on the floor like this I think I'd have a heart attack. This one in the series may be better.
