Broadcasting Brain

Measuring the value of an idea is like making a statement about the length of a piece of string. How long is a piece of string? It depends: they aren’t all the same. The same is true about ideas. Some are good, some are awful, and there’s a wide range of quality in between.

Some people think that ideas are a dime a dozen; in fact, I’ve had at least three new ideas in the three minutes that I’ve spent writing this post. I expect many more to follow. Most of those ideas will be next to worthless:

• impractical
• expensive
• time-consuming
• and of limited appeal to most normal people.

Perhaps I’ll have a really wonderful, brilliant, spectacular idea and heaven help me if I forget to write it down or else it’ll be lost in the ether, never to return.

Who know what brilliant concepts, works of art, etc. were lost due to forgetfulness? Author Garrison Keillor, in the introduction to Lake Wobegon Days, tells the tale of a magical, wonderful set of short stories that he wrote… and then forgot in a restroom while traveling. Apparently Lake Wobegon Days is not that batch of stories, but instead was the best he could come up with afterward. I don’t know that I believe this tale, but nonetheless it’s always interesting to think about what might have been or what might be.

If this blog post about the value of an idea seems a bit different from my normal blog posts, it’s because I’ve been listening to Stephen Fry’s Podgrams and I’m imagining that he’s dictating the blog post to me now. I can hear his voice sounding out each word as it appears on the computer screen. Well, not literally of course, but it is an exercise of imagination, after all, and thus I’m trying out an idea that I had and I’m just realizing that now.

This isn’t exactly a Flattery by Imitation post, but it’s not bad for a Friday, especially the one after the US Thanksgiving when a number of my readers may still be recovering from the lingering effects of Tryptophan induced coma.

Thank you for reading and I’ll lighten the load on your mind by ending this blog post with an idea (hah!) that I just had while finishing this blog post:

“I CAN HAZ TURKEE SAMMICH?”

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In recognition of the US Thanksgiving holiday (we already had ours here, thanks), I’d like to thank a number of Twitter users for being interesting, fun, and kind - often all three, in fact. Here they are:
AmberCadabra

Mousewords (Christine)

Chris Brogan

Remarkablogger (Michael)

Blog Islam

Liz Strauss

Suzemuse

Amy Guth

pcornqueen

Sammysunshine

TheNanny612

AmyDerby

GrahamEnglish

rjleaman

WalkingGal

FairyBookMother

PurpleCar

Steve Spalding

Jeff Pulver

Merlene

I know I’m probably forgetting at least a few dozen other great people, so please accept my apologies if I’ve overlooked you!

EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot:

MenWithPens

VegasPenman

PamelaWeir

Today is the day that the Batman dies.

Today, the last issue of the Batman: RIP story arc is published and a story which has promised the death of the Batman finally comes to an end.

SPOILER: no, he doesn’t actually die. Not physically. But he will be betrayed and Bruce Wayne will stop being Batman. Someone else will take on the role of the Batman. That’s what both old media and the new media are saying.  EDIT:  erm, better check the end of this post for the real story…

(Note: if you’re not an avid comic book reader and you’re not quite sure what’s going on with the DC Comics character Batman, who also happens to appear in TV shows and movies, this article from IO9.com will give you the quick update as to what this Batman RIP story is all about. Consider it another spoiler.)

# # #

Welcome to the Spoiler Age, which has been in progress for several decades. In some ways, the Spoiler Age makes the bootleg phenomenon redundant. You don’t have to make an illegal copy of a commercial work; someone with insider knowledge can give you the secret details of what’s going to happen so that you don’t even need to get the bootlegged copy!

Social media - all media - have empowered the Spoiler Age by making it easier for people to communicate. There are few surprises in either popular culture or news media

Like I said, this isn’t new. People have been stealing copies of Star Trek movie scripts for years, “spoiling” the movie-going effect by revealing important plot details before the movie is released. The same is true for movies and TV shows. The comic book industry is rife with spoilers and speculation about what will happen to our favorite characters and villains. Websites like IO9.com and Newsarama.com would probably lose significant traffic if they couldn’t give us previews of what’s going to happen.

You can argue that the Spoiler Age changed how we consume content on a large scale. People don’t want to be completely surprised by what they see anymore. They want some certainty that they’re going to like what they buy before they get it. When you think about it, it’s pretty logical. In a similar vein, the accepted versions of spoilers, product reviews, are still highly popular.

Likewise, in politics and business, the art of the deliberate “leak” or “spoiler” is valued as much as the uncontrolled leak of information is loathed.

Social media is taking over large parts of old media’s role in supporting the Spoiler Age because social media can do it faster and cheaper. Everything that I see indicates to me that the Spoiler Age is alive and well. You could even argue that we’ve become heavily dependent on the spoiler.

This leads me to another thought about both the Bootleg Age and the “free” business model, whereby the consumer doesn’t pay:

If cost is no longer an issue, it means that we can get virtually any digital media at almost any time we want (leaving legalities and distribution methods aside; neither of which are huge barriers). Therefore, there’s almost no barriers to getting what we want.

At the same time, the Spoiler Age continues to rule. We still love surprises. We still love to be know what’s going to happen before it happens. And social media is the means to get it.

It’s almost like advance knowledge about a thing is as important as the thing itself. This is true for the financial markets (and thus a subject of government regulation).

You might think that the Spoiler Age would have completely destroyed big media, but it hasn’t. People are more concerned about losing sales to bootlegs than to advance knowledge of what’s going to happen. After all, if I already know what’s going to happen, why do I bother to experience something? Isn’t it just a waste of time?

So, we like free (legal or not), we like fast, and we like spoilers. Given all three attributes, is there a market for paid content anymore?

Clearly there is a market for paid content because we want quality content (well constructed, planned, tuned to our desires, etc.) But more and more high quality “free” content is emerging amongst poor and average quality content, so people are less willing to pay for content.

Question: is the spoiler one of the last tools of content creators and distributors to get us to buy content, by building anticipation? Or is that a dead end and should they instead go back to total secrecy as a means of protecting?

Here’s the thing: if you already know that the Batman is (or isn’t) going to die via the spoiler, what would entice you to buy that last issue and see it with your own eyes?

EDIT: now, in what might be seen as rather ironic, it looks like the old media spoiler about this story that was leaked about a week ago was, in fact, false. Here’s a synopsis from IO9.com of Batman # 681, the end of Batman:RIP. I guess I forgot about the classic “fake-out” or false information spoiler…)

I’ve been scouring the Web to find more blogs on creativity and idea development and I encountered something… unusual.

A Google search led me to Creative Something, which seems to be a really good blog about the creative process. The search led me to a blog post that listed other blogs about creativity - great! When I clicked on the link, though, I found something that I hadn’t seen very often before:

The blog’s author has made the full content available only to RSS subscribers. Try this link and you’ll see what I mean.

I haven’t seen this happen very often.

I’ve certainly heard of pay walls (i.e. pay to get access to content) but never putting all of the blog’s content behind a “RSS wall”. The author wrote a post about why he turned this in a subscription only service, which you can read here. Uh, no, actually you can’t… not unless you subscribe. I’ll say it’s because the author wants to restrict the content to a community of subscribers - there are no restrictions on who can belong to the community.

I can see going subscriber only to prevent blog scrapers from copying your work. Although you could use some other kind of exclusive website, even a member’s only forum, to distribute your work.

It’s certainly the author’s choice as to how they publish their work, I’m not saying what they are doing is wrong. It just seems like you’re cutting off the means to spread yourself further if all you see is a single paragraph that’s open to public view. Leo Babauta has gone the opposite route with Zen Habits and “uncopyright”.

Creative Something is an excellent blog, by the way. I recommend that you subscribe if you’re interested in this subject matter.

What do you think? Is the Creative Something blogger being smart or making a mistake by going subscriber only?

EDIT:  in addition to some great discussion here, I’ve also been contacted by Tanner Christiansen of Creative Something, who shared these thoughts about his blogging approach:

The reasoning of putting the content behind an “RSS wall” is two fold: 1) I wanted Creative Something to be more like a members-only club, rather than just a blog that people can come to and read as they please. By making the subscribers the only people who get complete articles they feel like they are a part of the blog, instead of just readers. 2) Because the blog is all about creativity and doing things differently, I figured doing something such as this would be interesting to try. The results have been incredible thus far. I’ve only been on a “subscribers only” basis for a few weeks, but already my subscriber, visitor, and click-through rates have increased dramatically. I’ve seen a huge spike in subscribers (as expected), and don’t plan on changing the way the blog is for a long time.

Interesting stuff!

Image by Bird Eye

One of the posts that really caught my eye recently was by Jay Cruz of Tape Noise Diary. In wrote an interesting post called The Death of the Album, Jay quotes music critic Chuck Klosterman in Chuck Klosterman Reviews Chinese Democracy:

… Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context—it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.

Jay takes Klosterman’s comment and expands on it further:

That’s another reason why there is a perceived notion that music criticism is no longer necessary. And it isn’t that there are no longer artists and bands that are making “albums” in that context, I’m sure artists like Radiohead are going to record maybe two more “albums”, but people simply don’t care for “albums.” Not that definition. Today’s music listeners probably don’t even know what it meant to make an album. That things like track order “meant” something and it was not a random choice. The only thing they may care about is if the songs are “playlistable”.

This is fascinating stuff. People have been making mix tapes for years (if not decades), but there were always albums, compilations, soundtracks, etc. that were the source material.

In a similar vein, there have been a number of calls promoting the atomization of news content (I want to attribute this to Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, but I may be mistaken) so that content can be unbundled, selectively consumed, and sequenced as desired. The medium is different, but the concept is similar:

• Music of all kinds has been packaged in albums for years.
• News articles have been packaged in newspapers and magazines.
• Short stories collected in books and magazines.
• TV and radio news stories packaged together in programs.

On the other hand, comic books are increasingly being packaged as “trade paperbacks” or anthologies with many individual issues being bundled together.

This increasing atomization of content, whereby the consumer gets access to increasingly smaller, separate chunks, is a topic worth discussing. For example:

• Does the “concept album” (aka The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia; Pink Floyd’s The Wall, etc.) ever stand a chance of resurfacing?
• Will more artists move to “unit marketing” where they push the smallest possible pieces of content into a marketplace that mixes, matches, and rearranges (even more so that today)?
• Will we see more “mash-ups” of content?
• What’s the impact on both the creator and the consumer if these trends continue?

These are some of the things that I’m thinking about.

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There will be a prize for deciphering this.

Back and forth, back and forth: where to start and where to stop?

Everyone’s trying to get ahead, at least ahead of the next person.

First person to solve this in the comments, in the correct sequence, wins!

EDIT:  congrats to Jason R. for winning this contest!  He wins a huge whopping $5.00, delivered electronically.  Sometimes the early bird…. well, you know how it goes.  

My cold is temporarily overpowering my long form blogging muscles.

If you’d like to check out some stuff I’m reading, you can have a look at my Google Reader Shared Items. Some interesting stuff there today.

Have a good day, all.

Here’s a little snippet of a project that I’m working on:

The Internet is like the world’s biggest amusement park. Amusement parks are full of attractions: rides, games, shows, and lots of people. Picture Walt Disney World for a moment. It has four major theme parks, a major shopping and entertainment area, and a number of hotels and resorts to stay in, plus many stores, rides, eateries, and other attractions.

Imagine one hundred million Disney Worlds and you start to get an appreciation of the size and complexity of the Internet. There is no way that you could visit one million Disney Worlds in one lifetime!

The Internet and the World Wide Web are a lot like one million Disney Worlds. There’s a staggering number of websites for you to explore, devoted to almost every topic imaginable. You can buy, sell, learn, or talk about almost anything on the Internet.

If you’d like to get a sneak preview of the entire document, you can either sign up for the Thought Radiation newsletter E-Mail list (email markdykeman at gmail dot com to register; no need to register again if you’ve already sent your information to me) or you can subscribe to this blog by E-Mail (E-Mail is the only way I’m distributing the sneak peak; ergo I need your E-Mail address).

I have a privacy policy in place if you’re worried about giving out your E-Mail, so please rest assured about that.

One thing that bugs me about Twitter is that the term followers, the people who elect to see your microblogging updates, sounds like a cross between a group of zombies and a collection of cultish fanatics that you might want to keep at arm’s length. We use other terms like friend, contact, colleague, and buddy to refer to these different kinds of people who pay attention to what you do and say.

Image by toprankonlinemarketing

A lot of people (including both you and me?) like the idea of building up these follower numbers for several reasons. It can come across as being selfish, ego driven, or manipulative. Or, with a more positive spin, maybe you’re just looking for a group of great people to share stuff with. Maybe you feel you’ve got important things to say THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW. Read the rest of this entry »

Over time I’ve worked up a simple little workflow for writing blog posts.

Typically I’ll do the draft, if not the complete post, the evening before. If I don’t complete the whole thing the night before, I have a window of about 20 minutes in the mornings before breakfast in which I can either write or complete a post.

This all kind of fell apart last night when, for some odd reason, I couldn’t access my own blog from home! Even though other people could. Which is really weird. So, since I was feeling a bit under the weather anyway, I packed it in for the night.

When I tried to work on it this AM from home (I’m in the Atlantic time zone, one hour ahead of the Eastern US seaboard), I still couldn’t get to my website.

Argh.

I’m at work now, typing up this meager little offering to you, dear reader, to tell you that the dog ate my homework. Actually, the dog didn’t even get to eat it. Bummer. At least I can connect to the blog now.

The lesson: probably a good idea to write blog posts in advance. Days before, even. Or have a backup plan to get access to the blog.

Now, please don’t get upset and go read Lateral Action instead, no matter how good it is or how intriguing their article was about the nature of creative genius and how it ties in to climbing Maslow’s hierarchy, building esteem and achieving self-actualization (hint: the last three links actually go back to this blog… )

Unless you want to, of course. And, if you do, you’ll find that their article in the nature of genius and creativity really is pretty good.