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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Filtered by Category: Blogging

Two More Links To Make Your Internet Experience Complete

Opinions are like blogs, everybody’s got one. But some blogs are better than others, so I thought I’d share a couple that you might not know about. The first is focused on the ad business, the second is a thoughtful perspective on our culture. Both are worth checking out.

Ad Aged—Will Madison Avenue Become Detroit? by George Tannenbaum, as you might guess, is the advertising focused blog. I worked for George for a couple years and he’s filled with insightful and entertaining observations on the state of the advertising industry plus the state of the rest of the world. Luckily, he now shares them with the blogosphere. Check out “Daily dumbness update” for a good example of his take on the state of advertising. You can tap directly into his POV on Ad Aged every morning.

Chock-A-Blog, by the one-named author “Tom” is a little bit technology, a little bit entertainment industry, a little bit marketing, and, well, a little bit of everything else that catches Tom’s eye. It’s updated sporadically, but there is a new entry you can be sure it’s always well-written. Chock-A-Blog is where I learned about TXT of the Living Dead, the latest version of Night of the Living Dead as recreated by SMS messages. It also had a nice perspective on the end of the writer’s strike with “What to expect when you’re expecting an end to the writers’ strike”. Add to that a critique of the critiques of the new New Museum. Very varied topics, but informative. Be sure to give Chock-A-Blog a try.

This Is Your iPod Talking

I love music. You’d have a really hard time finding me with my iPod close at hand but you won’t hear much music coming from my iPod. I listen to spoken content almost exclusively. Because I’m a bit of an information junkie, I was really taken with the invention of podcasts. podcasting is simply embedding a file, usually a piece of audio content, into an RSS feed. (What’s an RSS feed? Basically a special kind of link that’s always up to date. Want to know more about RSS? Check out the article at Wikipedia.)

The variety of podcasts being produced is incredible. There are a lot of tech podcasts, probably because that’s the world podcasting started in, but you can find something for nearly ever topic. (Yes, even that thing you’re thinking of right now.) If you’ve never added a podcast feed to your iPod, I encourage you to give it a try. The easiest way to get started listening to podcasts is iTunes. The podcast directory is in the iTunes Store, but don’t worry, you’re not actually buying anything when you subscribe to a podcast. Every podcast there is free. Just enter a search in the upper right hand corner and see what you find.

I’ve got nearly a thousand individual episodes of podcasts on my iPod, so I’m won’t post an exhaustive list of what I listen to, but I’ll give you a few that I like to get you started. My favorite podcasts tend to have a Mac focus, so if you’re a PC fan, you might want to steer away from some of them. (Or you could just get it over with an buy your Mac.)

Never miss an episode:

• Mac OS Ken
• Security Now
• Mac Geek Gab
• This Week in Tech
• MacBreak Weekly

• The New York Times Audio Digest (This is the only paid podcast I listen to.  It’s included with Audible Gold subscription)
• The New York Times Tech Talk
• BBC Documentary Archive

• Ken Radio
• Please Explain
• Ask Leo!

From an advertising perspective, I think they are an incredible way of reaching a dedicated audience with a very targeted message, whether it’s a tech enthusiast or a knitting enthusiast. The problem has been that there haven’t been great tools to measure the audience for an advertiser, which makes it a difficult investment for the people who have to account for their media spending. There finally a little hope on the horizon for the creators of podcasts with the founding of the Association for Downloadable Media. (Read about it in this article from the New York Times.) This means that the variety of podcasts produced will only increase. That’s good news for everyone. 

CES: User Generated Media session

The first “knowledge session” I attended at CES 2007 was User Generated Media: An Internet, Communications and Advertising Transformation. It was really informative. My notes from the session aren’t complete but I’ll try to reconstruct as much of them as I can here. Some of my own thoughts have slipped in.

User-generated content is providing the voyeuristic view that traditional producers of media wouldn’t approach. Consumer generated media isn’t new though. Remember Rodney King? That event basically was the video tape beating. That user-generated video generated the story back on March 3, 1991. Skip forward to today and the power of user-generated content is shown again in the Saddam execution video. The “official” video—molded and edited to serve an authority’s purpose—was quickly supplanted by the grainy camera phone video that exposed the taunts and chaos of the situation. That camera phone video is now the version people know of that event.

We’re also seeing the emergence of very high-quality video pieces now that the technology that used to be only in the hands of “professionals” has become affordable to the masses. One example shown of non-professional content produced by a student on his/her computer was Dollface. You can see it here below.

Given the power of user-generated content and the production values it is now capable of, we need to ask ourselves the question, how does this change the rules for media and advertising producers? Advertisers need to follow their potential consumers wherever they happen to go. Where are they going with their eyeballs consuming content? They go all over the place. The problem with so much content in so many different situations is that there has got to be some guarantee that the client who is buying advertising associated with that user-generated content is represented correctly.

When a new technology comes along, it seems “spectacle” is the first forms of expression that happen there. “Storytelling” comes later. Initial attempt in film were just spectacle pieces, showing off what could be done with the technology. The storytelling came later. We will probably see user-generated content go in that direction too.

When we ask for users to generate content for a brand, we are going to get the people who are highly motivated by that brand to respond and it will be really informative to see their perspective. People want to tell their story. They sometimes want to express themselves using the world they live in which is filled by lots of copyrighted material. There needs to be more effort trying to rectify this problem. We’re asking people to live with our brands and they’re taking us up on that request and they are going to use them to express themselves when they create content about their lives.

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