November 2008
October 2008
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Sarah Palin was introduced to her rally today with Michael Jackson's "Thriller"
Spooky!
Finest writers on the Web are ready to work for coffee, beer
To paraphrase John Edwards, there are two Internets. First we have the mainstream, casual, prime-time Internet. These folks think of the Internet as a supplement to TV and radio. They get their news from CNN and the “Today” show and visit Web sites they see on TV.
They surf major news sites and circulate kitty pictures in e-mail. They use Google to check movie times and look up trivial pursuit answers, but they don’t really belong to the Internet. Their tastes, their lifestyles and their media expectations froze in 1996.
The other group has adopted the Internet as a fundamental part of their lives. They host blogs, use RSS feeds and keep up with friends on Twitter. These people are connected 24/7. They send text messages while they sleep and check e-mail before they put their pants on.
They are young, smart and upwardly mobile, but there aren’t enough of them yet. They’re hyper-literate, hyper-critical and hyper-connected. These are true alpha consumers. They want to be first with a new gadget, first to review a great book, first to complain about a bad movie and the first to celebrate when an old brand does something new.
They’re sick of the old media paradigm and are desperate to see something new. The key to this group is subversion. You can’t just sneak your commercial onto YouTube three days early and call it “viral.” You can’t just put your marketing copy on Twitter and pretend you’re 2.0.
You have to change the way you talk to them, and the quickest way to win them over is to slaughter a sacred cow. It’s not enough to put a young model in a hot new dress. You have to pan the camera over and show the ripped jeans that she changed out of.
You have to establish a context of subversion in your ads and on your Web site, to prove you’re not taking yourself too seriously. The Internet generation rebels against anything that smacks of pretension or self-importance.
These people know all the standard PR tricks and are violently allergic to corporate boilerplate. That’s why sites like Gawker and Radar are so popular, even when they’re raw. Generation Y is sick of committee thinking and committee writing. Blogging is the antidote to this. In this context of subversion, sloppy links and strange word choices can actually work in your favor, adding to the raw, intimate appeal of your site.
This style violates 50 years of advertising guidelines and a century of professional journalism.
“I do not think it’s class warfare [Obama’s economic policies], I think it’s empirical economics. The real issue is the empirical content of the supply side economics dogma. It’s pretty threadbare. The “real business cycle” theory is simply inconsistent with empirical evidence. That does not prevent it from being taught as gospel to students (it’s really gospel not empirical evidence). I would first and foremost talk to Ray Fair (Yale) and Mark Watson (Princeton) about the evidence for the supply side model. What is ironic is that those who preach supply side practice a crude version of Keynesian economics that ignores all of those incentive effects claimed to be so important by the supply side theorists. The real question apart from the current turmoil is the longer run. Denying the value of investment in knowledge;in infrastructure;in basic science and education at all levels has been and will continue to be harmful to our long run health. In my mind Obama’s eyes are fixed more on things that will improve the US economy in the next century. The basic data on the current crisis is still being revealed, but it’s clear that the absence of serious regulatory oversight contributed mightily to the current problems. It’s not class warfare; its about a future-oriented society.”
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— James Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
This and many more quotes at Obama For a Sound Economy, a repository of good answers smart people have offered to the questions “Why are you supporting Barack Obama? Why do you think he will help the economy?”
(via southpol)
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