Quotes for the week ending 15 November, 2008

“We are now offering a 25% Discount on all Collectable McCain/Palin08 products left in inventory”

Fire sale notice from the McCain-Palin campaign store.

“Simply put, things are already close enough between Change.gov and the Google Gang.”

Chris Soghoian, at CNetNews, commenting on Google’s relationship to the incoming White House administration. He also recommends BitTorrent for Pres. Obam’s fireside chats.

massive employee raiding.”

Agency.com’s complaint that Scottsdale-AZ based agency, specifically Don Scales, a former Agency.com staffer, has been poaching its employees and clients.

“I go dark some weekends and evenings until 8 p.m. because my kids come first. It’s not easy, but I don’t need to be big on Digg.”

Jason Falls, Head of social media at Doe-Anderson, interviewd by Jason Baer

“Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.”

The not so shocking news that an unnamed source for the Sarah-doesn’t-know-Africa-is-a-continent story a fabricated person, carefully set up by two film-makers. Many media outlets were duped.

“Create a video hub for the executive branch – call it GovTube – that aggregates all video content throughout the government in a searchable, user friendly video portal.”

One of the recomemndations by Dan Mannet, at TechPresident, for how the new administration could use multi-media.

Times are tough. Compete, don’t complain

Yawn. There’s a lawsuit being filed by Agency.com against Scottsdale-Arizona based iCrossing.

Having been within earshot of the folks as they trotted out the Agency.com hires (and this was more than two years ago) one has to wonder: Was Agency in a coma all these years? On the other hand, what is it complaining about. If you can’t hold onto your employees by providing the proper incentives, would a court order do the trick?

Let me sidestep a personal angle here and comment on what’s at stake in a tight economy.

  • Eat your own dog food. Marketing agencies seem to be great at coming up with solutions for their clients, but are embarrassingly bad when it comes to applying some of it to themselves.
  • Empower your employees. Employees beat brochures. And trade shows. And junkets. The iCrossing I remember ran ran a top-down operation that was ridiculously incongruent with the bottom-up world it operated in.
  • Reputation is (that awful word again) sticky. Companies get too busy propping up a reputation with press releases and forget to monitor and respond to chatter. Agency.com has some great bylines in major trade pubs, but some bad google juice it warned after a YouTube incident that still hangs around.

Internet forecast: partly spammy with chances of control freaks

Jeff Herzog of iCrossing is into a new venture that claims to be ‘the future of the internet.’ It’s easy to scoff at a big-hairy-audacious-goal like this but we are talking of Herzog who anticipated the search business.

Zog Media, is taking aim at a personalized internet with “new ways to control, communicate and experience the Web.” I haven’t seen anyone put the words ‘control’ and ‘communicate’ so close to each other in a Web 2.0 business proposition but it appears to subscribe to the attention crash theory I have long believed in.

The theory being, humans are incapable of functioning with so much information bombarding them –not just spam, but through mindless opt-ins — via channels (like Friendfeed,) filters (like AideRSS and Litefeed) and devices like these and these that promise to simplify their lives.

So yes, the future of the internet will mean each of us will turn into some sort of control freak, just to remain sane and productive. But how many emails can you zap? How many filters can you filter? How many lame tweets can you ignore?

If you are really interested in a speculative look into the future of the Net, there’s a book just out called (you guessed it) The future of the internet By Jonathan Zittrain. If you like to download a copy, it’s is available as a free PDF.

Don’t blame me if it contributes to your attention crash –it’s 351 pages long!