The World Clock Project says:
We find it intriguing to see a picture of a clock that is located thousands of miles away, but one which tells us the exact time of where we are right now. So we’ve set out to collect as many pictures of clocks as possible from as many different people as possible from around the world. Our goal is to gather enough pictures to account for all the minutes of the day. Upon accomplishing that, we will create a “digital picture clock” for the community.
Check it out here. You can email your own clock pix or use the related Flickr group.
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This post was written by
Rob Walker on October 31, 2007
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I’ve long contended that most of the stuff we read about how people are so “confessional” online is a bunch of hooey. MySpace and its ilk aren’t about confessing. They’re about presenting a marketed version of yourself — better looking, smarter, cooler, etc.
And what better summation of this could there be than the fact that everybody’s “friend” Tom has evidently been lying about his age. He wasn’t 27 when co-founded MySpace, he was 32. Soon he’ll be 37, a veritable geezer! Thumbs up, Tom.
Chris “Long Tail Guy” Anderson lashes out at lazy PR people in this post, going so far as to list the email addresses of those he’s blacklisted. The comments to the post are interesting: Some criticize Anderson for leaving the addresses out there for spam bots to harvest. And one guy explains how he spends thousands of dollars to by email lists to promote his photography business. (As the replies note, that money may not be well spent if the lists include people like Anderson, who as editor in chief of Wired is not a relevant contact.)
I’m sympathetic to Anderson’s point of view, in that I get a ridiculous amount of PR email from people who clearly have no idea what I write about. In fact I recognize several of the addresses on his blacklist. I try pretty hard to be accessible because I like hearing from readers, and actually I like hearing from anybody who has a good, relevant idea for me. And I’m not slagging everyone in PR here — I do have regular contact with some very clever people in that line of work, who actually understand what I’m interested in.
The trouble is figuring out a way to be accessible without being overwhelmed by static. I used to publish an email address in the Times Mag for Consumed, but I had to have them take it out, because basically the address was getting added to so many PR blast lists it became useless, drowning out the feedback from real readers in a sea of off-point flackery. Pretty sad.
So I don’t know if Anderson’s post is the best solution to the problem, but I do think it’s a problem.
Blog Neuromarketing mulls the way the brain processes specific numbers and percentages differently, keying off the discussion of “framing” in Jason (not Philip) Zweig’s book Your Money and Your Brain. Zweig’s point is to help regular people understand how the different ways we think about absolute numbers and percentages can lead us astray. Neuromarketing approaches the subject from a, uh, different angle.
There are times when marketing and public relations people do have to address negative topics, as when dealing with press coverage of a company problem. In these cases, I’d recommend percentages. “Only 1% of our laptop power supplies have actually caught on fire” is, from a framing standpoint, better than, “Only 1 out of 100 …” Bad news is bad news, but people will be less likely to visualize their legs getting scorched if they don’t imagine themselves as “the one.”
Great!
Here — maybe — is another example of the counterfunctional value discussed in yesterday’s Consumed. It’s a bookshelf that rocks back and forth. Core77 says:
Julian Appelius‘ Topple bookshelf leans ever so slightly on its rocking base–5° to be exact–when books are stacked on, creating the perfect amount of tilt to add some extra stability. A bit ironic, yes, but it works!
One might fairly wonder what the upside of this approach is, over, say, a perfectly stable bookshelf. To echo Jonah Berger’s point in the column, regarding watches that do a less-than-optimal job of telling you what time it is, this seems like another object whose main value is that it “provides more information” about the owner. And part of that value is that not many others will swarm in to buy the thing and water down its identity value, because most people will want a shelf that doesn’t move.
Speaking of that line about counterfunctional watches “providing information” about those who wear them, Marginal Utility has this amusing reaction: “Exactly, it screams loud and clear that you are an idiot.”
From the L.A. Times writeup on the Murakami show at MOCA:
Murakami has spoken about the kudzu-like proliferation of ultra-cute imagery in Japanese culture — Hello Kitty, say — as a colossal index of repressed confidence in the wake of a militaristic nation’s humiliating battlefield defeat 62 years ago. Even death now seems infantilized, as in his remarkable paintings of a skeleton whose mushroom-cloud shape is horribly adorable.
The conceptual debt to Andy Warhol, here and everywhere in the show, is obvious. But the squeamishness induced by Murakami’s distinctive brand of Pop Art is entirely different.
And I emphasize brand. Murakami is the first major artist, Eastern or Western, to make our pervasive culture of branding a primary subject, rather than simply exploiting it.
Worth a read. I would love to see this show, but I doubt it’s in the cards. At least Bobby Hundreds has posted a bunch of images here.
Bonus Update: Eric Nakamura (Giant Robot) blogs about the gala and the goodie-merch.
Low-functionality watches: How the value of a watch becomes detached from its role as a timekeeper.
The chief function of a watch, you might assume, is to tell the time, accurately. But watches can do other things too. Some years ago, for instance, there was a trend toward watches with calculators built into them, although that didn’t last. Also there’s the aesthetic factor. The look of a watch might sound more like a matter of form, but style has its functions, too.
The watch is an interesting product category through which to examine the function of style…
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.
Regular Murketing readers will recognize that this is theme I’ve pursued a bit here, in previous posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The caption: “Rampant Consumerism is the product featured in this window display from the store Wet Seal, at the Santa Rosa Plaza. In case you don’t have the proper mindset for mall shopping, Wet Seal has a helpful hint.”
See also the enjoyable set Trash.
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