Joe Blubaugh’s Blog
I spotted this car on Interstate 94 today on the way home from work and snapped a picture with my crappy mobile phone camera. It’s a Chevy Cobalt with California plates and a suspicious metal appendage atop it. Looks an awful lot like these. I think we’ll see Milwaukee added to the Street View cities some time in the near future.
You and I will never be as cool as Poppa Neutrino. The guy built a raft of junk and sailed it across the Atlantic. He’s getting ready to single-hand a junk raft across the Pacific, which is just a mind-boggling achievement. He turned his “tribe” into one of the coolest bands out there - the Flying Neutrinos. The guy is like a wandering prospector dropped into the middle of our time. He works hard, he’s incredibly smart, and he does what he wants whenever he wants to.
You will never sail a raft across an ocean or start a band composed of your children. Ok, you may try the second one, but your children will hate you. This guy is so cool his kids LIKE being in his band!
the LOLcraze continues unabated, and I HAD to share this one, which has unseated LOLpresident as my new favorite:
Yeah.
This one’s been a long time coming, but it seems that the LOL phenomenon may be nearing a peek. LOLcats have been around forever, but the lolrus, lolpres, and lolcode seem to spell the beginning of the end for the latest dumb-internet craze. I hope it collapses quickly under its own weight and we’re spared the prolonged kiss goodbye of the Chuck Norris phenomenon.
kthxbye
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that even Geoffrey Chaucer is in on this.
Daniel sets us straight on Bud. I’ll give him this: the man knows his stuff. I still do not like light, watery beers that have to be served icy-cold to keep them from being gross (including Kirin). It’s silly to hate on Bud, I suppose, but there’s also no reason to say that it’s actually good, because it’s not.
I don’t know if you read Achewood or not, but you should. The Friday, May 4 strip contains the only prayer I shall ever pray again:
Hail Mary, full of grace, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done, thy kingdom come, on amber waves of grain. Amen
So, I found out that the FTC is probably going to start requiring “viral” marketers to identify themselves as such. That’s good news, because such marketing (I like to call it guerilla marketing) has been eroding trust in opinions for too long already. I read a book by Paco Underhill a few years ago called Why We Buy that alerted me to the practice. In an example cited by Underhill, kids as young as twelve years old were being paid to promote toys to their friends. They weren’t paid in money but rather in things like free toys, backpacks, and sports equipment. When twelve year olds can’t even trust their friends to give them an honest opinion, the world has truly gone mad.
I bring this up because I’ve noticed the practice happening increasingly across the internet. Sony hired the scum of the earth, Zipatoni, to try to prop up the PSP. Zipatoni promptly created a blog purpoting to be run by people who desperately wanted a PSP for Christmas. The blog is gone now, vanished in a haze of gamer-induced shame, or I’d link to it and show you what a disgusting attempt to mimic real, personal writing it is. I’m glad gamers are still outraged about being cynically manipulated.
Word of mouth is the most powerful force in the consumer market today. People, being constantly bombarded by billboards, radio spots, Flash banners, and TV commercials, are tuning more and more of them out. We still trust the opinions of our friends and family though. I didn’t really want an iPod until my brother bought one and I saw how cool it really was. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Well, not until recently.
With the advent of TiVo, podcasts, and various other technologies that allow you to skip or miss ads entirely, companies are getting desperate to manipulate people into buying their products through emotional attachment rather than an actual, reasoned decision. They’re creating and purchasing what used to be the consumer’s reward to good companies: great word-of-mouth. That’s why I don’t read customer reviews very often. They’re seeded by paid advertisers. The same goes for message boards, blog comments, and a lot of other things that used to belong to the public-at-large. These people disgust me - everything advertisers touch turns to dust. Once the web has become another ad-covered hell, where will we run next?
There’s another good example of this in Arrested Development, but liquor companies have been using this tactic since the 1930s when Smirnoff broke vodka to America: Lindsay is paid to sit in a bar, drink a new liquor and comment about how much she likes it. It’s hilarious: “This is so good, I hardly have any judgment left at all.” These sort of seeds are used all over the place today, but their roots go back a long way.
Advertising at the beginning of the 20th century was primarily informative: ads were viewed as a dialog, a way to convince your consumer that your product’s quality, features, etc. were better for them than the competitors. This sort of ad lives on today mostly in sales of expensive equipment to customers. Medical equipment advertising, for example, is primarily fact-based: “Our MRI machine has twice as many channels.” The more an item costs (with glaring exceptions like automobiles), the less likely viral, emotional advertising is to work.
Because of a discussion on another web site regarding not making a fool of oneself online, I decided that it would be wise to Google myself. Unfortunately, I am not the #1 Joe Blubaugh on the web. The title goes to one Joe Blubaugh, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. He’s in a bunch of newspapers, but none of those pages have outpaced me. His ‘quotes’ page at ThinkExist.com is beating me, though. Some highlights:
To get more support, we have projects that hit close to home, so residents can get excited about it. The scope of the project is to increase the capacity and safety (of the road).
There are some things that could be changed, but at this point it’s too early to tell.
Imagine me saying those with a hard hat and a tie on, and I think you’ll get the gist of it.
