Nike says

Jeff Staple posts on the anatomy of designing a great new Green Product : the new Air Jordan. Yes the limited edition is $230 dollars. Which places it in the realm of green cachet, which has its pros and cons.
Nothin's perfect. The shoe is interesting.

A poster child product. Wondering, though, if torn old runners, runners we wear longer, and use just to get around in, will ever come back in fashion. Thats up to the network, I guess.

Pulses on corpses

Today I went to a very peculiar seminar. The presenter described how software as a service was gaining momentum, while IT investment was flat. Maybe it would pick up , he said, but no one was confident about that, in the half empty theatre where we sat. Nope, unless you're fortunate enough to pick a nice ripe niche, it doesn't look good for IT investment, it doesn't look good at all. Pretty much stagnant. The presenter's eyes flitted to the audience and back to his podium. He continued.

Back when the news was that advertising spending was flat, and possibly dying, Google and Amazon were about to take over the world but the Internet was something you just couldn't make money from. Advertising wasn't in fact dying, but some of the old guard were. Advertising was simply changing. And today it is still changing, to the point that

" the Idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself. Once again, what we used to think of as advertising or marketing is pushed deeper into the organization."

Nowadays, of course, Google Adwords is considered advertising. Amazon is considered one giant selling and advertising mechanism. Advertising isn't dead.

Of course, the presenter is wrong about IT being dead too. He has been taking the pulse on near corpses. IT spending is on a very very steep upward curve. So steep we can barely keep up with it. When we are measuring IT investment with dumb metrics, like the IT outlay in businesses we track, we get misled; things appear stagnant and boring - when the world moves fast, and we don't.

Thing is, the notion of IT as a service, ad-based applications and the open source/gifting movement are happening all at once. We are using them all the time. For instance, here people once spent time and money finding contacts or buying things they would be better off buying elsewhere, or often buying inferior products and services, now they get it "free". They are paying with their attention. They are reading the adwords and looking at their gmail account and search results pages.

IT investment at the producer end is going crazy, in small companies (they all start small), in peoples' spare time ( got to keep the day job), and on college campuses ( Facebook anyone?) people are investing time and effort and are changing the world. They just don't tell us about it right away. Too busy.

Metrics are applied to what has come before. Now there are click through metrics - and Google searches are part of the establishment. But things don't stop there.

Linux and Google may have started it, but there is now a swelling, latent expectation among consumers. IT can get much much cheaper, ad appear free. Can't help thinking that companies that fulfill or exceed the expectations that have been raised will continue to do very well.

Sharing our time together

Consulting on an exciting and ground breaking social media application. Great people, great business. Absolutely fantastic.

How do you succeed and make money with social media? My thought is that it all boils down to sharing and growing together. Social marketing means clients are peers, not adversaries.

So when I hear messages like the voice recording that is always the same, blatantly lying to the customer: "Due to unusually high caller volume, all of our operators are currently busy..." - I know I've come to wrong place. The web is revealing how people really change together, and we can have fun building mechanisms that work with us as we really are.

There is no web

Mark Earls is all for verb-izing nouns:

... linguistic distortion helps misshape our thinking (or maybe reinforces the pre-existing distortion in our thinking) about human networks. We make them sound like things: like wires, pinned to a board and this leads us to buy all kinds of ludicrous notions (like the 'super-influencer' idea that barely reconstituted comms folk have to sell us their media on the back of).

I like the "Barely reconstituted comms folk" bit - right on the money. The entire post reminds me of a quote and book by Buckminster Fuller,

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am, I know I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe.

There is no web 2.0. There won't be an official release; you won't be able to get the CD. The web is a flux thing, and even if you could take a snapshot of it, that's all it would be, and in a sense, it would be meaningless.

We have to forget the web as a thing. It can't be found.

Of course, we can try to use the web to get ahead, but this is a bit like striding into town and trying to get laid. Fun, yup, but less welcome, the more established and intimate the community. If you want to use the web to get ahead, maybe try getting into the online gambling, pornography businesses - their clients aren't wanting to access actual intimacy. They'll be great for you.

So, less "making the most of the web" , or even "optimizing exposure thru social marketing." And more, webbing together. Advice to client: We are webbing all the time. My webbing is very different from yours. Let's see if we can web better.

Better use of walls

Seems a great movie, a spellbinding novel, beautiful music, are good and powerful things. But they aren't instances of "social media" - they're broadcasted; they dont provide tools for collaboration; they strongly delineate "creator" and "audience".

Social media is NEW, is empowering, is democratic. As such, it is something to believe in. And the market for something to believe in, as Hugh MacLeod says, is "quite large."

The newness of social media is bound to fade. In many cases, its instances are already overwhelmed by various forms of pollution, including the mindless chatter that we engage in on social network sites. Not a surprise: social media are platforms where we can stage a banal self serving talk, or a great and thrilling play. Our choice.

CG Jung: 'The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense - he is 'collective man', a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.'

CG doesn't seem to be referring to the typical content on a typical Facebook wall. But a wall is a useful object, and can be used as a projection screen for all kinds of good things.

An American reformation

Well this strikes me as great and sincere political communication.
Hats off to Barack Obama.
"Your voice can change the world." A message behind youtube, behind all social media, a voice that finds itself opposed by monopolists of our attention.

Man's a head

...It may be the coffee, or the Iowa primary, or Seth's free seminar .

But I'm glad.

Here is Seth at his best - giving something for free, and discounting a useful, prescient book that he is selling through Amazon. Leading by example, he is simply ahead.