Taking time to talk pop reminded me of something I meant to post a while ago, yet I never got around to. That something is The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way. Long out-of-print and impossible to find, this book was hugely influential on my early forrays into the music industry. The K Foundation's combination of discordianism, Illuminatus references and unabashed pop sensibility stuck with me. I've followed the further exploits, musical and otherwise of Jim Cauty and Bill Drummond. I've had The Manual in my Amazon wish list for years, never to see it actually "available". I loved it when I read a friend's copy in college, and always wanted to have my own copy. Now we can all have it.That's the term I just learned from an article in the latest issue of WIRED. The article explains how Annalee Newitz paid a service to get her incoherent, experimental blog a top rating on Digg. This, according to Newitz, was after Digg CEO Jay Adelson claimed "all the groups trying to manipulate Digg 'have failed,' and that Digg 'can tell when there are paid users.'"
It must sting to be Digg right now. But that's not the only reason I'm blogging about the article. The "cultural engineer" side of me picked up something other than the debunking of a CEO's claims.
It's interesting to read about the lemming effect that ensues once a few paid ratings are imitated by other Digg users. At a time when a lot of attention is given to the alleged usefulness of user recommendations, this is a reminder that the herd instinct is still in effect online.
Since most of us don't have the time to check the reputation of every user name we encounter ourselves, my gut tells me that we should expect to very soon see a service that recommends the best recommendations. Or, at the very least, some new sort of validation layer added to the experience of Digg. Surely, the folks at Digg must be all over it by now...
Read: "I Bought Votes On Digg"
Kids, no anarchist spends so much effort trying to make a big-box store look like a fun time. You've practically produced three spec advertisements for Wal*Mart and Target here, playing up to cliches and ultimately showing that you (suburban alterna-kids, nu-metal heads and army brats) enjoy yourselves at the big-box stores in your town.
Don't get me wrong - I'm sure you all had a great time at Wal*Mart. But you are neither anarchists nor punks just because you wear black, mohawks and tatoos into big-box retailers (and dance to mainstream pop music, and film what amount to guerila promo videos for said retailers).
Wal*Mart and Target both have big corporate marketing departments, public relations agencies, branding consultants and advertising agencies that are very pleased with you all right now, for giving them inadvertent "viral" marketing (about which they can now say "the kids think we're cool enough to have a dance party here") - even if the sales clerks turned your party off.
Kottke points us to a New Yorker article about fakes in your favorite encyclopedias, purposefully inserted in an effort to protect copyright.
If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”
Remember that stencil job I literally stepped in yesterday? It was a fake; guerrilla marketing, and a half-hearted example at that. Look what aired on a break last night (it aired just about two hours after I posted this):
Who's weak attempt at guerrilla marketing was this?
Three letters...
Fine, HBO. The joke's on me; I inadvertently promoted your new show. Gosh, you really got me on that one! Thanks for making me feel stupid, I guess. To show you my gratitude, I'm going to make a point of not watching your new show. Ever.
I'll even go a little further here, because I've known you a while and recently noticed some erratic behavior of yours. Are you feeling okay? I think you're trying too hard to cover up your dirty network secret: you don't appear to be number-one anymore, and you obviously want this new show to be a buzz-laden hit.
HBO's ratings are currently down something like 18%; an empire fallen, the network doesn't have a single show in the top ten. Kinda makes this poor attempt at "graffiti" seem a bit desperate, doesn't it? The Romans didn't have spraypaint; graffiti doesn't make much sense as a tactic for promoting the show.
This pandering to "buzz" is likely to continue until the show airs in the next two weeks, and might well become a new bad habit at the cable network. I personally think it's risky for the Home Box Office to be so determined to take this expensive new show and shove it down our throats.
They were all curiously close together, as if the stencil-er worked within an arbitrary ten-foot radius... no less than five duplicates of this stencil, strewn on the ground along the edge of the garage, on the alley that runs behind the south side of Chicago Avenue, where it meets the Noble Street sidewalk. I wish my cameraphone was able to capture the whole scene in one shot.
Oddly enough, if you stood in the center of the stencils and looked up, you'd see a big sign advertising the crappy company that manages my apartment building. (I say "crappy" because it's nicer than saying "slumlord".) I know what some of you are thinking, but I didn't set this up. Honest. If I wanted to be mean, I'd have deliberately posted a photo of the sign, too.
I told myself I wasn't going to rail on graffiti for a while (having the building management mention conveniently gives me an alternate bad guy in this story), and I normally don't photograph things people paint on the sidewalk, but...
when I found the stencil laying on the ground less than one block away, I knew I'd need photos to explain this chance happening as a sort of "compound coincidence"... plus, I knew this presented a new secret for the city: what I did with the stencil after I picked it up and walked away with it.
So I'm sure came off grumpy in the last post about ill-conceived street art... but here's another reason why the street artists need a good calling-out.
Tats Cru used a toxic, perhaps even petroleum-based spraypaint when they tagged this Hummer ad, presumably to add a tone of environmental responsibility. And they re-branded it with their own branding, which isn't much nobler than what Hummer did in the first place. One could argue that it's actually worse, since Hummer paid to place the ad and Tats Cru played the role of the hater.
If it were only about the environment and opposition to gas-guzzling, there'd be no reason for Tats Cru to brand the vandalism; instead, they're just looking for legitimate work for themselves... Tats Cru is already in league with coroporate graffiti. Consider the projects they've already done for soft drinks, hard liquor and malt liquor.
Or was Tats Cru simply paid by Hummer to vandalize their own ad?
