Trumpeter Terence Blanchard Hard Bops UNC

Terence Blanchard Quintet At Memorial Hall
There is some singular thing with the trumpet. It is the Matador’s instrument and Terence Blanchard’s Quintet’s performance tonight at UNC’s Memorial Hall was a hard bop bullfight. Hard Bop is a particular kind of jazz. At times atonal, thick, leaving tough exposed edges, Hard Bop was a reaction to the cool jazz favored on the west coast by David Brubeck and others. Hard bop jazz is a kaleidoscope of conflict and resolution. Its primary practitioner, Miles Davis, was a master at the jazz bullfight that is hard bop jazz (read Seeing Miles Davis post).

Forty years after Miles introduced Hard Bop at the Newport Jazz Festival (1954) with his masterful Workin’ Terence Blanchard lifted his magical Monette horn to slay hard bop’s atonal bull. Terence Blanchard’s debt to Miles is clear more in his stage presence than sound. His sound is rounder than Miles more influenced by childhood friend Wynton Marsalis and his Blanchard's Orleans roots.

It is no mistake Blanchard, like Wynton, plays a Monette horn. This horn’s tonal range is hard to describe. At times the horn sounds electronically muted. Other times the sound is small and squeaky then round, full and deep. This trumpet costs $30,000, but that is not why it isn’t for the faint of heart. With greater range comes possibility of trap doors and dead ends. Without sufficient skill tonal range and a $30,000 horn is wasted and dangerous.

Terence Blanchard’s tight quintet doesn’t lack for tonal range (lol). Blanchard’s leadership was interesting. He and his tenor saxophonist would step back allowing piano, stand up bass and drums to play extended riffs. Stepping up together like dramatic Matadors Blanchard’s horn equally matched by tenor saxophone created dramatic Mo Better moments. Blanchard’s frequent collaborations with Spike Lee and his playing with the Branford Marsalis quartet on Mo Better Blues, perhaps the best movie about being a jazz musician, leaves clear brush strokes. Tonight’s concert at UNC was harder and rougher than Blanchard’s horn and music as part of Branford Marsalis’ quartet in Mo Better Blues.

The Terance Blanchard Quintet wears bullfighter “suit of lights” easily moving toward the dangerous bull's horns fighting in Spanish style. Those atonal horns are the "space in between the notes" Dr. Cornel West discussed in spoken word riffs cleverly included usually when a piece started. Dr. West's a jazzman in the world of ideas quote was a favorite:

"I consider myself a jazz man in the world of ideas, a blues man in the life of the mind. Because my models were jazz musicians and blues men, who have to find their voices, not just be echoes. Who had to have a vision, not just a stare. And in the end, have to be true to themselves. Because all imitation is suicide. All emulation is a sign of an adolescent mind. Now all of us imitate. All of us emulate. But those who love us, like Monk loved Coltrane? You don't need to imitate Johnny Hodges. Go ahead and find your voice brother." - Dr. Cornel West.

Tonight, thanks to a blazing performance by a jazz matador, we were all jazzmen in the world of ideas, blues men in the life of the mind and matadors fighting hard bop bulls.

Martin

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Martin's First Web Site

FoundObjects.com Gone But Not Forgotten
Teaching myself HTML, Photoshop and Dreamweaver in 1999 in order to create this Mondrian grid almost killed me. It took six months of my life and made me cranky and obsessed. Mondrian's grid solved the site's organization problem. The grid creates an immediate design hierarchy and presentation of what would otherwise seem busy becomes acceptably packed (lol). I made other designs that used to be included in the Internet Archive, but seems we've moved too far from those early years now more than ten years later. The design below, my first, was the best of the lot anyway. FoundObjects.com was popular with trade, B2C customers and press. The site closed in 2004.

Siftable Content Networks

Someone, it may have been my friend and TED attendee Red Maxwell, turned me on to MIT Media Lab professor David Merrill, creator of Siftables. Siftables are cool digital “blocks” capable of linking to other siftables sharing information and they have intelligence. Siftables correctly add. Siftables spell. Put a siftable with the letter "D" next to "a" and a third intelligent block finishes the word spelling DAD. I’ve used Merrill’s magical blocks and his TED demonstration (included below) to demonstrate my siftable content ideas. Nice when an MIT Media Lab guy takes time to demonstrate an idea (lol).

The way we create content now seems wrong. We write 1,000 to 2,000 words into our blog or include it as an article on our web sites. We tag content, publish it and send it forth to play with search bots (robots search engines use to “index” the web). The closest we come to how I see content in my head is interlinking with hypertext. Hypertext links allow content to spider out to natural brothers, sisters and cousins. The net effect of hypertext links is HOW we create content should be different, more siftable.

In my head I see content as siftable blocks with hooks (tags, keywords). I wrote a 1,500 word buyer’s guide today. Inside1,500 words there are probably 100 different relevant keywords, 25 pieces of implied content, ten hypertext links, three quotes and a couple of hidden controversies only publishing will expose. Publishing opens the content to comments and inbound links. See the problem? The way we publish content today is flat and isolated, and it will remain that way UNTIL we recognize something and build something else.

RECOGNITION
Where is Merrill’s siftable invention’s intelligence? Merrill’s digital blocks are nodes. Intelligence is in the network. Intelligence is in the network. Remember those Sun “the network is the computer” ads in 2002. Can there be a more true statement? As I write this lines between computers, networks, phones and MIT’s digital blocks are tiny, meaningless and rapidly becoming moot. Just as Moore’s law is killing every hard good with a digital sibling (read my Death of Money Is Not Exaggerated post) Metcalf’s Law creates unbeatable network economics just as Moore’s law creates unbeatable transistor economics (and when I say transistor you should think everything because that is what transistors control now). Metcalf’s law states that a telecommunications network’s value is proportional to the square of the number of users on the system. Think of this in financial terms. This is compound interest run a muck. Ten people squared equals 100. Think of this in your own terms. The value of your Facebook network is square the number of people in it. If you are like most and have around 100 friends in Facebook your network’s value is 100 squared or 10,000.

BUILD SOMETHING
Until content has half the network awareness and knowledge of Merrill’s blocks life on content share cropping farms will be hard. Inside of every million dollar e-commerce web site is a team like ours playing dominoes with content, trying to sift, connect, extend and mash content to meet needs we see easier in our head than we can manage on pages. We have to build a smarter database, a database with network intelligence in mind. Database just got changed too. Did you notice? Instead of databases as static storage they become dynamic network nodes. These future databases are reference librarians constantly referencing, cross referencing, linking and extending data away from island or silo tendencies. Content using these reference librarians move away from isolation toward an infinitely connected future. Google is to blame. Google’s ability to knock Everest sized data mountains down in time so fast it can’t be experienced makes information liquid molecules flowing down a river and over a tall Canadian cliff. What does this siftable content tool look like? I can see it but can’t fully describe it. That is not strictly true. I see glimpses. I see a cube’s side, a piece of connection and a fuzzy navel understanding of relationships so complex my tiny pea brain isn’t up to it. Where is Stephen Hawking when you need him?

Mary And Tim Go Up A Hill
There is probably no way to demonstrate what is banging around inside my siftable head, but here are some semi-random thoughts created while babies screamed people were being welcomed to Moes…

A.
Mary and Tim chase spot up the hill.

B.
Tim and John threw a stick for spot to retrieve.

Siftable 1
Mary, Tim and John chased spot up and down hills and threw sticks for retrieval.

Siftable 2
Mary and John threw sticks for spot to retrieve.

Siftable 3
Mary chased spot down the hill.

Siftable 4
Tim ran into John walking spot and they threw sticks for retrieval.

Siftable content builds on the subject, object, verb relationship of previously created content using tags. Some content is related while other is implied. If spot was chased up hill logic says he also went down hills. If one stick was thrown several could have been thrown. The siftable example above builds on the simple sentences A + B + implications = Siftable 1 – 4

Content tags become hooks future content builds on. In the age of the hypertext link all content are siftable blocks (some are just bigger blocks than others). Hate to mix metaphors, but think of dominoes. Connection with the next domino drawn depends on suit. Suits are another name for tags. Suits sift.

Any content management system (CMS) worth its weight must understand siftable content providing multiple dimensions into the data, multiple ways to tag and hook content. Web site content quickly becomes unmanageable. Content flows in 8 dimensions: you write some, users comment, users link in, users build on yours, you build on theirs, and on and on. Every word on a site is important if it can be sifted into many new multiple dimensions. Words that don’t sift become orphaned islands quickly decaying out, losing relevance.

All sites revolve around certain content poles. Look closely at a site’s navigation to see their sales. Stuff at the top and easier to reach sells better. I’ve had some best selling categories in the middle of our navigation for over a year, so there are exceptions, but, for the most part, stuff at the top = best selling categories. The vexing problem is merchandisers think differently than people. Merchandisers think in category and subcategory. Customers thinking needs and related needs. On site search is usually in most site’s top 10 most important links because search = keyword and need based.

Our, we Internet marketing groupies, challenge is to recognize and build content as flowing water rushing over a Canadian cliff like Niagara's river meeting its magical destiny every second of every day.

Money's Death Is Not Exaggerated

Death of Money
Moore’s Law is killing money. Bits are replacing paper stuff in your wallet. Sound familiar? How do you listen to music? Bet you DON’T take a piece of petroleum out of a beautiful cardboard sleeve and play it on a turntable. I’m listening to Tom Petty sing Down The Line as I write. I bought this CD, but I would download it from iTunes if I was going to buy it today. Hard to cut your dope on downloads, but that is another issue (lol).

Moore’s Law killed CD’s. Moore's Law says, in terms non-geeks can understand, computers get more powerful even as costs go down and they do so every year. There is a complicated equation predicting how much power increase rides over how much cost decrease. Simplifying the math: Power increases a lot while costs decrease a lot.

Transistors, the thing Moore’s Law covers, touch everything. Extend Moore's Law math to all things touched by transistors and we live in a different world, a world forming as I write this (on free blogging software provided by Google). This new math says music become atomized into bits and fed out to distributed devices. Moore’s Law’s next physical victims - movies and books.

More e-books were sold day after Christmas this year than bound books. In a meeting yesterday I said books will be dead soon. My statement sparked a miffed response. There was a retort about the advantages of bound books. Bound books are better for READING. Problem is I do things with books OTHER THAN reading. I put notes into a database tagging and cross tagging sections, authors and subject to help my writing.

Absurd? An author writes a book using word. She gives it to her publisher who works with a graphic designer to make the book look good probably using InDesign or Quark. PDF’s get sent to the publisher. The publisher runs the press. The publisher ships books to stores or web sites warehouses. I buy the book and wait. When the book arrives I read it taking notes. Next I sit down to RE-DIGITALIZE the book into my writer database.

Who has the better presentation system now? Our preference for bound books is moot. Moore's Law's economics are so dominate they can't and won't be ignored. In a world where bits fly through the air at light speed printing is a cottage industry. It cost too much to put ink on paper. When an alternative is so cheap adding one more of anything costs almost nothing, printing is dead.

Print 100,000 books and you might get the cost per book close to a dollar (depending on size, etc…). You have to pay the printer so let’s put $.50 on the book for them. Our book is sitting on the dock. We have to move bits to a store or web site's warehouse, so let’s tack on another $.25 per book for shipment to stores.

Some books will be damaged and come back. Let’s tack on another $.25 for damages and returns. Wait, we aren’t done. The money we tie up has value (granted not much these days), so let’s add another $.25 for the opportunity costs associated with putting the money into books instead of investments. Now our “cheap” book costs $2.25 per book and is really cramping our style using $225,000 of hard earned cash to print 100,000 copies. If we have a winner our book makes us rich repaying our investment many times over. If we only have a moderate success or flop outright we are broke for a long time. Anything other than smash success cost too much.

Compare those numbers to an e-book. Author writes e-book and graphic designer makes it look good. Cost per book = author time + a few pennies if it is a smash hit, maybe $2.00 per copy of it is only moderately successful. Cash out won’t be greater than a couple of thousand dollars at most probably more like a couple hundred dollars.

You sell your e-book for going rates of around $9. Sell 100 books and creation and distribution costs are paid (give or take). Sell 100 more and you just made $1,000. Sell 100,000 e-books and you can hit the beach. Let’s see, publish a book for $1,000 that makes $100,00 with almost no pull on invested capital, no dead trees and no fossil fuels versus tie up $225,000 on a bet. I love books, but Moore’s Law is about to KILL books.

How do you pay for your e-book? You can’t get money into your laptop. You will use a credit card transferring funds from your bank to Amazon or B&N. Think about spending habits this week vs. same week last year. Did you use more or less cash? You may spend more except in this economy I doubt it. You are spending more with electronics, using bits. Moore’s Law KILLS money too. Once our cell phone boohoos get their head in the game like European counterparts we will use cell phones to pay for things, a virtual digital wallet. Money is dying now. Money will be dead the day we scan our cells at Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Kroger or Vons.

When that day comes, and it pains me to write this, AT&T and Verizon, two marketing zombies if there ever were ones, become BANKS. Throw some investment advice in there somewhere and Wells Fargo and Bank of America should be afraid, very afraid. Once physical money is dead those who move bits better have an advantage. Right now cell phone boohoos are better at moving bits. They suck at math and banking however.

Cell phone boohoos think small. They trip over the $100,000,000 bills to pick up dimes. They keep rates jacked and limit use. They would rather get $100 from 100 people instead of $1 from 5,000,000 people. Stupid is as stupid does and that is why cell phone companies are not ready to be banks...yet. The day is not far off. You will know it because it will be the day money dies.

Peace.
Martin


P.S. The cartoon art is from Joseph Farris.



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Rodrigo's Armor

In Director Roland Joffé’s movie The Mission (1986) De Niro’s Spanish warrior Rodrigo carries his armor around his neck much like the ancient Mariner’s albatross at Jeremy Iron’s Father Gabriel’s suggestion. Rodrigo’s untamed arrogance and conqueror’s God-Like narcissism trap his spirit. Redemption is simple but hard. Carrying armor humbles Rodrigo. He sees the CATCH-22 of his life. Rodrigo, like all of us, fights himself. The harder he fights the more damage he inflicts.

Carrying armor up cliffs and through the jungle helps gain perspective fast. It turns out armor is useless, mostly dead weight. Death stalks Rodrigo. We know Rodrigo’s time is limited. Death is sure and coming with increasing speed. Rodrigo’s question isn’t if he will die. He will. The question is will death make sense. Will he understand the CATCH-22 of his life before previous employers end Rodrigo.

I think Rodrigo’s sequence isn’t important. Once Rodrigo gives up old things, old fights, he is free. Armor around neck is penance not punishment. Penance leads to contrition and absolution. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Punishment is what Rodrigo WAS doing. Rodrigo wobbles. He stopped punishing himself. Granted Rodrigo’s punishment tended to kill others, but they happened to be in the room. Rodrigo fought and hurt himself.

Sound familiar? I had an old friend ask me if I was nicer now than 30 years ago when I hurt her. She knew me in full Rodrigo. Being in the room hurt her. I was walking stupid. I tried to apologize but how do you clean a thirty year old mess?

Am I nicer now? Punishment gave way to penance and redemption’s search years ago. Redemption is granted by search. Rodrigo is saved by stopping old patterns. My old patterns are gone. I’ve carried armor for years (since my divorce read my Case Against Divorce). Time to put armor down and simultaneously accept and forgive. Pema Chodron teaches how to carefully correct meditating behavior. She teaches softening one’s approach to self. Any harsh treatment creates itself. People say, “I am a perfectionist” or “I am hardest on myself”. This is nonsense. How you are is how you are. You must take care in moving your mind back to meditation. Any harshness seeps out. Eckhart Tolle says the same thing in a different way.

Every external thought is an internal thought Tolle says. Talking about others and you are talking about yourself. See the similarity? Take care with external thoughts. You may say Dick, or Jane or Jim, but any thought outside is hidden inside truth. Things you don’t like in person X are things you don’t like…in you. You fight Rodrigo’s fight.

We draw what we receive and receive what we draw. Generosity and kindness receive generosity and kindness. Rodrigo’s anger and meanness creates anger and meanness along with a self-perpetuating infinite loop. Rodrigo’s wobble breaks the dance. Rodrigo lives his life by giving it up. The only way to solve CATCH-22 is to wobble out. Once inside the loop is infinite, the trap complete.

Am I nicer than thirty years ago? Without hesitation I answer yes. Ask the second question. Am I nice enough? Don’t think so, but working on it. Am I nicer than Rodrigo? Absolutely.

:) M

** My friend wrote to tell me she has long since forgiven the boy I was even as she worries for the man I am. She was generous and kind much the way I remember her. I hope I was half as nice. Am I as nice as I need to be? Not yet, not yet, but I working on it :). **

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Babatola: Artist

Babatola Oguntoyinbo, Tola, is a friend and the portrait of an artist as a young man in our technology enabled times. Tola doesn’t paint with technology, but technology allows him to open a previously closed loop – his creative process – while it happens. Tola keeps his fans and patrons up-to-date with Facebook, he uses Ustream to record, archive and play his painting sessions. His web site creates hub for artistic process communication never available before.

Tola is a living example of how process is product, process is the first object any artist, designer or company creates in an Internet enabled time. The portrait of the artist as tortured young man isolated from society, family and friends seems out of step with our time. In this time isolation may be the hardest thing to create. One can debate the value of so much connection as a recent USA Today Article entitled Friends No More. Or, like Tola you can learn how to open and share process. Artists such as Babatola Oguntoyinbo who understand process is product change what it means to be an artist.

The extension of Tola’s technical skills is Damien Hirst’s recent $200,000,000 auction. I wrote about how Hirst boxed his galleries in and how he used technology to control his brand in How Damien Hirst Changed The Art World. Hirst changed the top of the art world. Artist like Tola and Shepard Fairey are changing the bottom and middle. Shepard Fairey “sacrifices” much of his art as street graffiti. Fairey is appropriating and commenting on culture, politics and power simultaneously. His guerrilla marketing approach allows collectors like me to own his work. His prints usually run a few hundred dollars. Fairey’s Obama Hope, a now controversial appropriation of an AP photo, served its street purpose with Obama's election. Its sad other impact is it may force Fairey’s work into more exclusive venues with the concomitant price increase such a move implies.

My friend Tola’s prices are reasonable because discovery lies ahead. Discovery of Tola’s art is inevitable. His new work is finding a stride somewhere between Hockney, Schnabel, Miro and Calder. Tola's painting "Creatures" is a masterpiece. Its seeming captured prehistoric movement of dinosaurs and birds makes abstract paint speak to us. We see life’s struggle. We see Darwin, childhood playing with molded plastic and technological future. Any artist who can paint the past, present and future half as well will be discovered, will be cherished. In another time such discovery may take decades. In our time it will take minutes or seconds. I am glad I already own a painting by Babatola Oguntoyinbo along with several Shepard Fairey prints. Time to buy some more before they both become financially untouchable.

Martin

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Mrs. Robinson The First Cougar

Anne Bancroft, 36 when cast as Ben Braddock’s seducer in The Graduate (1967), was not the first choice for the role. Patricia Neal, Doris Day and Jeanne Moreau turned it down. Close your eyes and TRY to picture anyone OTHER than the very HOT Ms. Bancroft as the first cougar now. Dustin Hoffman was a thirty-year-old journeyman actor when Mike Nichols cast him as a college graduate worried about his future.

1967 was a good time to be worried about your future. Ben graduated into a strange and violent world. Communists were playing with dominoes. The only way to stop the spread of evil red ideas was fight them with blood and treasure in some out of the way place. Had to find a proxy country to keep nukes out of the conflict. Ben Braddock,a Frank Halpingham scholar, was prime Vietnam draft bait. Reason enough to be worried about your future.

Nichols innovations happen frequently and quickly. The Graduate was one of the first films to use numerous songs from a single group. Simon and Garfunkel score perfectly mirrors The Graduate’s onscreen montage and plot lines. I’m watching the Sound of Silence montage as I write this. Possibly never has film and music been so perfectly match. Telling Ben’s story in song by moving from Sounds of Silence to April Come She Will is film making genius.

“What then were those four years of college for,” asks a Ben’s father expertly played by William Daniels as “young Ben” floats aimlessly in the pool. “I have absolutely no idea,” comes Ben’s acerbic response. Ben’s father is beta dog to Mr. Robinson’s alpha. Strict mores forced Mrs. Robinson into a loveless marriage. Pregnant as an Art History Major in college, Mrs. Robinson’s choices were narrow, constrained by rigid cultural constraints:

Some commentators have seen in this era a classical Jungian nightmare where a rigid culture unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm.

Mrs. Robinson, the “broken down alcoholic” and first cougar, uses sex as a revolutionary weapon. We think of the sixties as revolutionary, and it was for some, but most obeyed tight social order rooted in conformity. The sixties as revolution didn’t became packaged and consumable until the seventies. How could Mrs. Robinson act like Camille Paglia and live to tell the story? Having an affair with her husband’s partner’s virgin draft bait son maybe? Sounds like a cougar’s move, the first cougar’s move.




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Asynchronous SEO

a⋅syn⋅chro⋅nous
–adjective

1. not occurring at the same time.
2. (of a computer or other electrical machine) having each operation started only after the preceding operation is completed.
3. Computers, Telecommunications. Of or pertaining to operation without the use of fixed time intervals (opposed to Synchronous)

Search Engine Optimization SEO proceeds with routine tasks working on keyword density in page titles, body copy, alt text and links. SEO doctors review sites looking for typical flaws. This approach makes sense to humans, but what meaning does any human activity have for search engine spiders. Search engine spiders are bits of code sent out to understand the web. These spiders are on an infinite loop. Every millisecond something changes somewhere in the world. Search engines understand things site creators don’t. The web in toto can’t be categorized, at least not in any meaningful way. This realization led brilliant quants to think hard about what could be known. Predictable patterns was their answer.

Ever read Isaac Asimov's sci-fi classic Foundation Series? You should because every book in Foundation is an amazing read. Asimov’s “Psychohistory” is as close to understanding how our search engine fueled world works to anything I can think of except Stephen Hawking and I don’t really understand Hawking. I understand THAT I don’t understand Hawking. Asimov’s psychohistory says the path of an individual man’s life can’t be known, but man’s macro future is knowable, an extractable mathematical certainty give or take a few points of standard deviation. Knowing man’s future without knowing your own causes interesting ethical dilemmas in Asimov’s Foundation series.

Is psychohistory here now? Not yet, but how can Asimov help us tune our sites better? How can we understand what search engines want? Should we care? One problem is assuming search engines have a soul. They don’t. Their job is a constant search, categorize, search, categorize infinite loop. Humans tend to see patterns where none exist. Read Taleb’s Black Swan or think about how you react to random events. You pan for meaning. We all do. It is natural human tendency to search for a ghost in the machine. Google’s ghost is unknowable. Too many variables firing too fast means math necessary to trap it, to trick it is much greater than any benefit such a traps could generate. This wasn’t always the case. Black Hat SEO, in the old days, used Google’s math against it.

There were fewer variables inside of Google’s religious algorithm and outside in the web. Variables could be cornered and made to serve black hat masters for a little bit. Cornering a search engine spider is akin to knowing the future of an individual. This power is too God-like. Psychohistory depends on absolute mystery of any individuals life's path even as macro tendencies, emergent human flocking behaviors, become better understood. With every keyword entered, search done and result set sent a little bit of man’s mystery falls away. Currently we are willing to make this trade. As guitarist Jack White says, “technology is a destroyer of emotion and truth, sure it gets you home faster but ease of use should be fought by any creative pursuit” in the excellent movie It Might Get Loud.

Enter Asynchronous SEO
I started experimenting with asynchronous SEO several years ago. One night on a whim I spent the better part of a night looking for meaningful phrases with no Google documents returned. Yes, in answer to your hidden question, I have NO LIFE (LOL). Standard English keywords I typed generated more documents returned. Understand the true meaning of this statement. Web sites cluster around meaningful poles, a.k.a. keywords. I thought of popular keywords as synchronous communication, as "in phase". In phase communication wasn’t the purpose of my exercise. I was looking for how a search engine would respond to a surrealist breaks. I wanted to see how math would wrap around something roughly the equivalent of a word game surrealist used to play. They would cut out words form a newspaper, place words in a paper bag and randomly draw them to tell a story. Randomness inside of intelligent context can create serendipity. Jung called these relationships synchronicity (read SEO Synchronicity), or “meaningful coincidence”. I created the phrase “Earlip Fantasy” with only a single document returned. There are earlips and there are fantasies, but these two concepts were combined on Google for the first time in a meaningful way by my post about the search for meaningful coincidence within Google. Fantasy became search engine realty at least for a little while.

I blogged about Earlip Fantasy and went to bed after a long night. By the next morning there was over twenty documents returned on “earlip fantasy”. Google was struggling to find relevant responses to a term without any relevance. By the second day Google returned over 100 documents for Earlip Fantasy. We reached the top of the mountain quickly. By the end of the first week there were 300 documents returned and an Amazon ad asking if I wanted to buy books on Earlip Fantasy. Amazon's algorithm is just about as good as Google's. Amazon, one could argue, is as much search engine as store.

Surrealist fantasy became commercial reality. ScentTrail owned the most relevant content for Earlip Fantasy so it appeared first in Google’s organic search. Earlip Fantasy is off the beaten track enough it couldn’t create sustainable buzz. After about a month Google dropped back to under 100 documents returned for “earlip fantasy”. If you are in marketing hairs on the back of your neck should be standing at attention. Marketing types rarely like to do things in regular ways. Born rebels constantly trying to be a pain in any system’s royal backside, marketers survive by breaking trends. This tendency is Darwinian. Marketing pros get paid for cutting through clutter, to get products and brands noticed and purchased. .

If this “swim against the tide” rule was important when I started selling bar soap (1981, read my Death of Procter and Gamble post) then there is no greater survival skill for marketers than the need to be extraordinary and to create magic. Why then do we employ SEO specialists to tune our site so they fit comfortably into the herd? Wouldn’t we be better served with asynchronous SEO ideas and strategies? What happened when I introduced something Google couldn’t understand? Google immediately swarmed the idea and started picking it apart looking for its parts: the earlips and the fantasies. Google’s spiders swarm what they don’t understand. If others find what Google doesn't understand interesting then swarming intensity increases. Links are the currency Google follows to understand if content has external value. If a tree falls in the Google forest and no one links it then Google will care less. Google must know and categorize anything others find interesting NOW, right away, or their reason to be is in question.

I realize Google seems HUGE and powerful. In fact, like all life, Google’s existence is fragile. Google must know what is happening everywhere all the time instantly or risk being bested and become slave instead of master. Google’s genius is its dedication to change. Create an engine to know a thing and irrelevance is assured. Create an engine to understand organic change and relevance increases like Metcalf’s Law to the square of those connected to the network (or search engine). Google’s “give it away free to consumers but charge advertisers” model depends on ever increasing usage. The day, and this day may NEVER come, Google's usage slips 10% the entire model is at risk.

It is hard to explain why this is so. Google is similar to money. Google's main value is not the thing itself. Google is valued at the confidence created from the use of the thing itself. Money is the ultimate confidence game. Money’s intrinsic value is zero, but its extrinsic value is equal to what is printed on the face of a bill and a set point created by the market. You must sense how money’s confidence game is changing. How much cash did you use today? I bet it is half of what you used on the same day last year. Technology is speeding up money’s floating-point math. As we trade bits instead of paper money’s real value floats further and further away from tangible things. Money is a concept, increasingly it is a technological concept. This is why, as we saw with the bank scare recently, money can crash faster and more completely than ever since the Great Depression. The depression destroyed people’s confidence in paper money. The bank crisis destroyed people’s confidence in money’s technological backing. It was as if an enormous flock of geese wheeled and all tried to land simultaneously on the same small pond. Panic set in when it was clear only a few geese would get a place in the pond. Want to see homicidal intent? Threaten money’s confidence by creating the ultimate zero sum game where a few win as most lose and people will kill themselves to protect theirs. Irony is always a BITCH. See the irony here? Any crowd panic inside of a confidence system brings on and accelerates the events scaring peo0le. If everyone tries to get theirs the chance anyone is safe is greatly reduced. Once we agree to confidence systems we are all in this together....literally.

See the CATCH-22? Go with the crowd and you may get something, but chances aren’t great. Swim against the crowd and you may get nothing, but chances are better. Choice is illusion. Change, in any organic system, is the only sure thing. Approaching any change system, an asynchronous system, with ritual and habit is madness. Common madness as it turns out. We all approach asynchronous organic systems (also known as life itself) from synchronous ritual, habits and beliefs. To be honest, I’m not sure how to live an asynchronous world. Creating my little surrealist word experiment took half a day and was exhausting. We tend to live by Newtonian laws where solid apples fall from living trees even as we know at a quantum level even the hardest substances are made of mostly space and Newton’s observable rules break down. We live in the physical "real" world not the quantum.

We must approach SEO from a Newtonian perspective. We tune keywords and meta data because it is something to do, something we understand. Recently I asked our new SEO Manager to reserve 25% of his time for asynchronous experiments. We found a great one today. We decided to take a relevant event, The Winter Olympics, something with a lot of search juice, and write asynchronous riffs mashing existing content. We wrote fictional sports sounding back-stories for all of our products. Writing these 300 to 500 word stories was easy. We mashed up reviews, manufacturer content and fictional stories creating new asynchronous content. We created fifty pages of Earlip Fantasies. The stories are funny enough they should prompt back links. Back links will make Google’s bots work hard to categorize the uncategorizable creating an organic pop…or that is the theory anyway.

If you’ve done asynchronous SEO work please share by commenting on this post or email martinsellingzoe(at)aol.

Thanks,

Martin


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First Analytics Camp Is A Hit!

Analytics Camp Rocks Right Brain
Meeting some people you know immediately they can teach you helpful things, things that might keep you out of the poorhouse. I experienced one of those reactions meeting Nathan Gilliatt at BarCampRDU three years ago. Not long after BarCampRDU 2006 I asked Nathan to speak to our company about social networks. Teaching anyone who will listen about social networks is something Nathan was born to do. Teaching about the future is rarely easy as our team illustrated when Nathan presented. Undaunted, Nathan continued to create his own socially networked future.

Three years later Nathan’s modification of BarCamp “unconference” format for the first Analytics Camp held Saturday February 6th was a clear hit at a great venue. UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is an amazing place designed for a connected global world. UNC decided to build Kenan-Flagler AROUND the computer: outlets are everywhere, classrooms are Roman amphitheater-like with even more outlets in front of every seat, slides are easily projected on massive screens positioned so there is no bad seat in the room and there are collaborative glass paneled meeting rooms with massive white boards lining the halls. Several solitary students were working in rooms this Saturday and it is easy to see why. I would be tempted to never leave these inspiring buildings and business building idea laden halls.

Nathan and his team ran a great event. The first Analytics Camp attracted speakers and participants from Boston, the west coast, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill and a healthy group of BarCamp alums. The diverse audience ranged from company founders, marketing types like moi, software creators and sellers, MBA Students and professors, people looking for work and those crazy enough to run or manage web sites. Sessions included discussions of Behavior Analytics (for dummies) to Growing Basil Using A/B Testing and experimentation.

Analytics Camp Sessions

Analytics Camp Wiki

If BarCampRDU tends toward programming left brains Analytics Camp focused on right brain creative thinkers and marketers. This may be a distinction without a difference, but I could have attended every Analytics Camp session understanding at least a little of what was being discussed. This is not true for BarCampRDU where many sessions speak in programmer tongues. Web marketing requires even he most out-of-the-box right brainers to understand presentation context and results also known as Web Analytics. Google Analytics and Omniture were on most attendees analytics tool list. CoreMetrics, the analytics program my company uses, seemed left out and there was only a single mention of WebTrends, the granddaddy of all web analytics.

I will leave reactions to sessions to a later post. This post is a THANK YOU to Nathan and his hard working team. Even casual ScentTrail readers know my love of “The New Altruism” as outlined by Robert Wright in NonZero, Michael Shermer in Mind of the Market and Fowler and Christakis in Connected. Unconferences are also great examples of altruistic behavior since everyone is giving away their time and expertise for the greater good. Nathan’s decision to “give away” his Analytics Camp idea is a great example of the new altruism. Nathan let me know analytics Camps are planned for Dallas and Washington and coming soon to a city near you if today’s success is any indication. I’ve been privileged enough to be in on and help mold several viral ideas (Magnetic Poetry Kit, Zen Board, Rorshock). Analytics Camp is going viral and global thanks to the hard work of a dedicated group of new altruists. Great job everyone!

Nathan's Blogs:

Nathan Gilliatt

Social Target

The Net-Savvy Executive

Analytics Camp
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How Damien Hirst Changed The Art World

Attack of Shark Boy
September 8th 2008 was a pleasant Indian summer cloudy day in London. Who could have predicted a nice boy from Bristol would change the art world forever? On this balmy night Damien Hirst used technology, the implications of technology, a lion's courage and wicked smarts to blow the art world to bits.

Hirst’s most recognizable work is a shark swimming silently and forever in a vat of formaldehyde. “The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Living” is the title of this easy to misunderstand masterpiece. This post is not about why Impossibility of Death is a modern masterpiece with surrealist roots and direct lines to Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornel, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman and Louise Bourgeois. Those who think Impossibility is dumb don’t know what they don’t know, so let’s leave it at that and concentrate on how Shark Boy attacked the art world on September 8th, 2008.

The global art world is a close cousin to finance. Wall Street looms large. There is usually a direct connection between Wall Street bonuses and art prices. What do you remember of global finance in September 2008? In case you’ve already forgotten it was a black time. Financial markets around the world were in crisis. Unregulated Credit Default Swaps, also known as bank gambling, started to tank. Home prices where on their way to 30% losses in over heated markets creating banks “too big to fail”. Stocks plummeted; lumps of coal for Christmas for all EXCEPT artist Damien Hirst.

Damien Hirst walked in with a smile. His incorrigible youth was giving way to a brilliant financial future. In fact, Hirst’s grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives after this single night. How did this former shoplifter pick the art world’s pockets to the tune of $200,000,000? It was simple.

Hirst knew technology was changing the art world faster than established gallery owners could keep up. Hirst would orchestrate an auction. His “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” show was 100% controlled by Hirst. The show took place at Sotheby’s, but Sotheby’s acted only as an acceptable venue. The show’s genius was Hirst, and his genius reaped most of the two hundred million dollar reward.

Why, you may wonder, in such a tumultuous economic climate was there any reward? Why did the art world choke up $200,000,000? Hirst’s insight about technology, that he could control his marketing future better than any gallery, was coupled with a brilliant understanding of social psychology. Humans, as outlined in numerous books including Mind of the Market by Michael Shermer, hate to lose more than they desire gain. Hirst used this knowledge to turn tables on gallery owners.

Gallery owners holding original Damien Hirsts would have to create and support a market floor or risk losing hundreds of thousands of dollars as paintings in their inventory moved up or down with Hirst’s auction prices. Allow prices to plummet and existing holdings lose money. Humans and gallery owners fear loss more than they desire gain.

Hirst took a giant risk. He played Russian roulette with his brand. If gallery owners were too strapped to buy aggressively world headlines would read, “Artist’s Experiment In Personal Manifest Destiny Deemed Failure.” Instead headline read, “Living Contemporary Artist Makes $200,000,000 In A Single Night.” Few media outlets understood what Shark Boy’s attack meant, the art world; an insular world of kings and sharecroppers, was leveled by a brash boy from Bristol in a single night.

Technology helped. Access to the Richy Riches who buy million-dollar art is not downloadable on the web, at least not yet. Hirst understood he didn’t need Richy Riches at his auction. All he needed to have more money than several generation of Hirst will be able to spend was gallery owners. They would understand how to protect their money. Death, taxes and gallery owners know how to protect their money are Aristotelian truths.

It couldn’t have been fun to be forced into helping destroy your own business model. Make no mistake; gallery owners helped Hirst destroy THEMSELVES. Hirst’s genius was in realizing gallery owners had no choice. His brash action set his art free of artificial market controls. Hirst controls his art and brand now. Even the concept of THAT control is less meaningful. Hirst has beach money. I doubt he was struggling before the auction, but no more sharecropping for Hirst. Several generations of Hirsts where freed by their brilliant patriarch's move.

Gallery owners should understand their total loss. Only one global entity controls information now – GOOGLE. A gallery owner’s ability to whisper contrasting secrets into just the right ears is gone. Google creates the next Pop Art movement. Gallery owners became order takers marginalized by Shark Boy. I don’t lose sleep over a handful of millionaires losing control over how they pay for wine and multiple homes; fair enough is my thinking. I am interested in Hirst and the implications for other contemporary artists.

Hirst’s actions complete Duchamp’s ideas and philosophies. Duchamp’s, “It is art because I say it is,” concept made a cage of sugar cubes and urinals respected museum fare. Maybe Duchamp’s brain was the first Google. Duchamp’s readymades moved power to artists away from critics, and galleries. No more enslavement to rigid doctrinaire academy thinking. Obeying any dogma, Duchamp knew, was anti-art: contemporary dogma being dogma nonetheless.

Duchamp worked enough not to starve. His relaxed, “Let’s play chess,” manner was indication he knew it would take generations before his ideas would be accepted. Marcel lived just long enough to see a new generation of artists blow apart the art world. Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Ruscha and Dine created POP ART because Duchamp created readymades. Marcel Duchamp died in October 1968.

Pop was an artist and then quickly a gallery phenomenon. Sidney Janis, Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp groomed, packaged and sold Pop. Impossible to understand disdain and anger the general public voiced when Pop “hit the scene”. Now Pop is accepted. Then it was part of a radical underground agenda destroying America and the world. No, it was just Duchamp’s next shoe to fall. Pop elevated a handful of gallery owners to superstars and kingmakers. People were too stupid to understand Pop; the line went, so a handful of gallery owners and curators would teach them. Necessary then stupid and superfluous now as Shark Boy proved on an Indian summer night in London September 8th, 2008.

Nest installment of Art is Business Is Art: Sharkboy Meets A Shepard.

Art Is Business Is Art

Martin

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Facebook: Tactic, Strategy or Chimera?

Reading Sang Kim’s, CEO and Founder of Ripple6, excellent Why Facebook Is A Tactic, Not A Strategy article got me thinking. Is Facebook friend or foe, hero or villain? Can one site really manage 300,000,000 people fairly with loving kindness for all? Could Facebook become a Chimera, “"a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire”? *

Sang Kim’s company Ripple6 helps companies create social networks. He doesn’t hide his agenda, but offers expertise and insight. He is VERY insightful about how Consumer Package Goods companies operate. I’ve worked for a few CPG’s, as Sang liked to call them, and he is right on their social psychology. We discussed how pendulums tend to swing violently in CPG land and how manic this can make marketing.

Facebook is the current online marketing rage. As I write this there are probably hundreds of large company IT groups combing Facebook’s API to see how to embed their presence inside of FB’s network like 1-800 Flowers. Sang asks an important question. Does your company / brand belong in Facebook? Ever crash a party? How well were you received? I’ve only crashed a single party and got pushed into the pool. Not fun.

Sang points out any market of 300,000,000 can’t be ignored, but he also tells you why you will never address 300MM people. Facebook isn’t stupid. They’ve kept their advertising in proper scale, small and off to the side. They use sophisticated algorithms to fire ads RELEVANT to your profile. They also, and Sang hints at this, retain 100% control of your presence on their site. That is worth repeating. Your store using Facebook’s API is NOT, in the end, in your direct control. You have to hope the rule of mutual benefits protects your FB store from double secret probation rules you broke not even knowing they were there or a change in management philosophy or direction. Would Murdoch or Cuban run Facebook the same way?

If you see sand castles as you read you are getting it. The secret code inside of Sang’s Tactic or Strategy article is be careful of tides you don’t and will never control. Facebook with too many commercials becomes MySpace. This is an old problem. I like to live in funky places where artists live. Problem is money follows cool and money always changes things. Money changes the very things you moved to a funky side of town to avoid and this is true for downtown real estate and online properties.

I respect anyone who can turn down a check for a billion bucks and the young Mark Zuckerburg’s fidelity to his beliefs bodes well for Facebook’s ability to walk a fine line between community and commercial. I agree with Sang’s advice suggesting presence and his counsel to keep options as open as possible. He suggests Ripple6, his social network in a box software. I’ve been looking for social network in a box and there are several, but Ripple6 seems the most “like me”. Ripple6 understands my CPG mindset and frame of reference better than anything we’ve found.

Red oceans are why I would never follow a manic marketing crowd. Red because the ocean is so crowded fish are eating each other. What does it mean to have your brand underneath Facebook’s? For some, FB’s brand will lift legitimacy and credibility, for others it will be neutral and it will LESSEN THE VALUE OF SOME BRANDS. A house is what you are buying or building and you are building it on THEIR property. I am not saying DON’T use Facebook in your company or brand’s marketing plan. I am saying use Facebook in ways that are beneficial to your company such as:

• Facebook makes companies feel more like living organic entities, something they always are since any company is made up of people.
  

• Facebook used in creative ways supports any brand. Look at how Ideo uses FB to reinforce their out-of-the-box-creativity (click on the sticky note below Open Conversations), an important part of their brand, without giving away the farm. Ideo is Ideo and Facebook is Facebook in this application. Ideo respects FB's boundaries and limitations. This respect means Ideo’s brand message is supplemented by FB not eroded.

• Facebook’s psychology is positive so respectful presence can feed off of an existing positive emotional infrastructure, but make no mistake about Facebooks NO LOGO message. If protesters carry signs about your company protesting the WTO move onto Facebook VERY carefully. You’ve entered a room where there are many who HATE you and can pull in large groups of friends to HATE you too. If you are honest, transparent, walk your talk and have dedicated resources ready to run down every problem and respond to every nit then, and only then, should you be thinking of a FB presence. If when I say, “No Logo”, it means nothing to you then you aren’t ready (by half). Chance favors the prepared mind and the Internet can grid up an unprepared mind in about a second, so do your homework BEFORE you mistake a tactic for a strategy.

• Absence from Facebook can make you and your brands feel old hat, out of touch and been there – done that. Here’s the thing. If your brand is old hat then no amount of Facebooking will help. Truth is the only currency that lasts on the web and it can take a LONG time before truth sorts itself out. If truth is your brands are boring and dying then fix the problem. Make great cool stuff or go home. If you don’t make great cool stuff and are on a milk run that’s fine, but don’t spend a dime trying to artificially “cool up” your brand. Doesn’t work and just makes your brand or company look older and more out-of-touch. Embrace your truth whatever that truth is. Facebook can’t fix brand cracks it just accentuates them.

• Sang’s point about appropriate conversations in appropriate places is a very important Facebook marketing concept. I recommend movies and products to Facebook friends all the time, but IT IS MY IDEA TO DO SO. See the problem? To the extent you smother my natural curiosity you wreck what you are trying to accomplish. If that sounds like CATCH-22 it should because it is. I noticed this CATCH-22 writing to press years ago. Better to write a “here is who we are and we can help if you want” note than a traditional press release. Create the relationship and you can have the conversation. Blather at me and I have 9 different ways to make you go away or worse. What is worse than being ignored? Tick off the wrong connector and your brand is screwed, blued and tattooed. If Seth Godin blogs about the lousy meal at your restaurant, dirty room at your hotel or lousy customer service on your site I suggest 1. KNOWING about the problem via monitoring services,2. FIXING IT and 3.BLOGGING IT (or Walling It) after asking permission to do so. It is important to get your story out to Google. Seth is a good fair guy. If you fix it he is liable to spend more words, think of words in this context as money because they are, giving praise than he spent noting the problem. Since FB is omnipresent, it can serve as a universally understood way to provide feedback. Once something is on the wall other fans may help you resolve the problem (NIRVANA) or your response can bring out similar problems helping you resolve previously hidden problems (NIRVANA AGAIN). This type of Facebook application uses the power of the group in your favor keeping your company involved in conversations about your products, brands, people, service or whatever…

I write this post knowing some young Brand Manager is banging on the Facebook drum this minute. “We got to be there,” I can hear her saying to her boss, “X, Y and Z are there.” Red oceans are red because there are so many fish there they eat each other. Facebook is pink now and be red soon, so build a small castle that contributes to your brand and company’s power. To that young brand manager I would advise, as Sang Kim does, UNDERSTAND Facebook is a TACTIC not a STRATEGY.

Good luck,

Martin

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