7 posts tagged “business”
I spent all weekend at the SF Green Festival. I have all sorts of thoughts about it that are tied into work, because SustainLane.com was the main sponsor of the event and we had a pretty huge presence in front of an estimated weekend crowd of 50,000. But one feeling I had most of the weekend was that a lot of the exhibits were missing the point. One of our booths, for example, was across from invitees from the Rennaisance Fair. How you spend your free time is your business, but you're certainly diluting the idea of green pretty far there, no?
anyway these thoughts from another attendee, le, which i think are very pertinent:
on saturday it was so crowded i could't move, and was very frustrating and not fun because of that. sunday was better, i actually managed to buy a couple of things and ran into some friends.
my mixed feelings revolve around this thought: part of being "green" should be to reduce consuming items we don't need and a LOT of what was happening at the green festival was crap people just don't need for sale. that was disheartening. a lot of organizations were giving out a lot of useless paper in the form of brochures and one pagers, which will just be thrown away later.
i'd like to see the green festival give out a green festival branded pen and pad to everyone, so they can write down URLs, and then ban their participants from handing out brochures.
I'll admit (before papabean comes in here to argue the merits) that copyright is a complicated issue and if i were at the helm of any old-model business based on maintaining a dominant share of content ownership being forced to acclimate rapidly to a constantly changing technological environment which i neither appeared to understand nor have any appreciation for, I'd probably be a little terrified and prone to bad, unnerved decision making. And I have neither the knowledge nor the passion nor likely the money to ever have been a Lik-Sang customer. I don't think I would ever make the decision Sony has, and fire me the day I do. (via)
Thanks, Sony. I hope you lose a shitload of money on Blu-Ray.
Christ, it's hilarious to see Sony wringing its hands over its poor customers! These are the people who compromised 500,000 computer networks with their rootkits and spyware!
What books are on your nightstand?
If I get through all three of these before Christmas, I'm an all-star.
Knowmore, "the people's corporation watch project," has published a long and seemingly thorough report on American Apparel. They focus quite a bit on AA's labor relations and Dov Charney's particular sexual proclivities, but cover both pretty fairly and thoroughly. (I can't make a decision on what I think of the particulars of the unionizing stuff, except that I don't think he's clearly in the wrong at all; as far as the sex stuff, I have mixed feelings: to each his own on the one hand, what a mysogynistic, clueless asshole on the other). I've been trying to learn as much about AA as possible as I am considering copping their business model for some future endeavors, and I found knowmore to be a worthwhile site, if a bit slanted in their choices of who to cover.
agency.com (a former employer) makes a video for subway; it is in fact lame. coudal submits an unsolicited response. this scares the hell out of me from ever wanting to work in such an environment.
anyway, i think the lesson is that there is no authenticity in advertising short of planting a video on someone unknowingly and waiting until they buy the product you're selling, and then proving that they like it. the second that lady starting talking about it is when the thing went south.
I haven't read this yet -- but I've been hearing about it and reading references to it for a while. Then this morning, I was reading this really interesting article in Wired, and I get to the end and find it's an excerpt from this. More than enough to lead to an eventual purchase, the next time I'm in a bookstore. (I have too much to read and insufficient disposable income to buy things I'm not ready to read just yet).
[update] so i was cleaning up some bookmarks just now, and found that the Long Tail blog was somewhere I had glanced at, liked enough to bookmark, but never gone back to. Reading it over has me more enticed. At least one tenet of the book seems to be that the capacity of the general public to publish their own content easily (thanks to weblogs, the proliferation of digital cameras, etc) leads to the public not buying mass media as much (the decline of the blockbuster). One underlying thought I've always had about media piracy is this: hey, guys, maybe your music machine isn't a zillion-dollar business anymore. Maybe the fact that you've relentlessly pushed crap on us for years, forced our social perceptions, controlled our access to what used to be our property, and held yourselves up for worship doesn't work for the rest of us anymore, or at least an increasingly bigger part of the rest of us. It's kinda like the umbrella repairman blaming globalization for his woes.
[[update]] the reason i haven't read it yet is because The Long Tail was published today. I found that out through Anil, who in addition to being a 6A person, has a lower user number than I another site we both frequent. The point being that for all the things I absorb in a day, sometimes basic facts can go right by me. And also that Anil's thoughtful posts (such as his thoughts on the book) have helped me understand a lot about the web right now, and you should check him out. [This is good]
get in front of a monitor, type in a few series of several-hundred character texts interspersed by various clicks and time allowed for reading, and have someone deliver your pregnant sister three tubs of ice cream, several thousand miles away from you, as a favor.
and even better, the roots of an awesome idea emerge from it -- call if MetaFavor, MetaKarma, whatever -- and to some extent, this idea will work. it may only work for a few, but i doubt it; one of the blessed curses of mefi is the amount of self-policing that goes on there. craigslist and metafilter are two of the most amazing community resources out there, and while both are a business, they barely are - they are plaintext, nogimmick, opportunities for people to ask for what they need and in some cases exchange what they don't. i've spent a lot of the summer working on web-based communities and how to create one around a relatively specific niche, and the biggest problem i see is that it's often ingenuine when built around commerce. i've argued all summer -- effectively, to my surprise -- that community will tolerate commerce infinitely more than commerce will drive community.
anyway, i've diverged, but that's a pretty important thought and one i'm glad i articulated.
