Pleasant Dream Update: Last night I dreamt that I was sitting outside a building in New Orleans. It was nice, I was just kind of lounging around and trying to catch a taxi. Except the city really wasn’t New Orleans, it was kind of like London but not really. It’s a city I’ve been to in my dreams a bunch of times though. Does anyone else have that? I swear, there are a few places that I’ve visited in my dreams numerous times that aren’t real but I could draw a map if I needed to. (Oh, and I really am having all of these dreams. My subconscious must be working overtime because this is way more than normal and this is coming from a guy who has spent time performing lucid dream experiments.)
Today featured two events that just made my life happier than it ever deserves to be and they are great because they are the silliest things in the world. The first is all of the hoopla surrounding the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla marketing campaign. This is what shut down all of Boston yesterday as some guys put up little LED signs of the Mooninites. For those of you who don’t watch the show, the Mooninites are aliens out of a bad Atari game who attempt to disrupt the world through the use of out of date technology. So they were featured in these signs that, well, ended up disrupting the world through the use of out of date technology. Seriously people, batteries and a bunch of wires does not automatically equate to a bomb. Your iPod also has batteries and a lot of flashing lights.
Their press conference today was also the best attempt at performance art I’ve seen in years. The two guys had just left court, there are terrorism charges pending and at the press conference they state that “they will only be answering questions regarding 70’s hairstyles.” That’s just awesome. It’s ballsy but it shows just how paranoid we have become.
The other event that totally made my afternoon is something that almost no one noticed but those of who did enjoyed it to no end. In the Friends of the Blog I list Deadspin.com, which is a sports blog and the funniest site on the net that I’ve seen in ages. Part of the humor is in the articles but most of it lies in the comments, which consist of in-jokes and humor that ranges from extremely clever to extremely disturbing. One of the main themes of Deadspin is an undeclared war against ESPN, mainly bringing to light the foibles of the announcers in as graphic a manner possible. Well, after today I think we can say war is officially declared.
Today started simply enough on Deadspin, as someone noted that it is the third day since Barbaro’s passing so we were all anxiously awaiting his return. And Barbaro came through as someone in ESPN thought it would be a brilliant idea to allow people to comment on some of the posts on their website. When this function was launched it was like someone fired up the Bat-signal. Seriously, there was probably a hundred different commenters from Deadspin overriding ESPN with comments that were non-sensical to normal people but hilarious to those of us from the site. There was some poor soul at ESPN whose job it was to delete all of these comments and it just was not going to happen.
I haven’t seen an online invasion like this in almost a decade. One of the top websites on the planet was overrun by a blog and they brought it upon themselves. This is my big learning from all of this. Companies talk about how they want to build an online community and they assume that all we have to do is open the doors and everyone will act nicely and say good things about the company. That is precisely what will not happen, as any lingering issues about your company will come to the forefront in about five seconds. It also shows how the open source mindset can fail when the crowd becomes too large. This might be Wiki’s undoing. While it is a great first resource it’s just to easy to get into an edit war that will cause the signal to noise ratio to fall apart. It’s why I picked up The Wisdom of Crowds because I really want to see how the author addresses the problem of controlling the masses.
That’s it for this week. Sunday night will mark the posting of Super Blog 3 as I (along with Coach Ditka and the Superfans) will keep a running journal on the Super Bowl. Game analysis, commercial recaps, discussions of Kevin Federline’s career options, and references to Brian Baschnagel are sure to appear at some point. Bear Down, Chicago Bears.
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