Metablogging: Maybe we are all egomaniacs…

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and if we were, or, if I were, I would not be sitting here at 6 am worried about my being an egomaniac and what all this blogging and twittering and facebooking says about me as an individual.

Is it not enough to live an anonymous life? Or, Why is it not enough to live an anonymous life?

I asked myself guiltily.

What does this say about me? Does this mean I am so ill content in my own personal, real, life that I need to create a separate persona for myself in the cyber space? What kind of wuss am I that I cannot do something about my “real” life?

Doesn’t “We Are All Egomaniacs” have a nice ring to it? Nice name for an alt. rock band?

Here is what the venerable (or at least expensive) Forrester Research has to say about Microblogs, i.e. Twitter and its like:

“The current darlings of media attention, microblogs appeal to both the egocentrism and the voyeurism of Web 2.0 aficionados.”

From Oliver Young’s research article on Enterprise Web 2.0 (published in November 2008)

Mr. Young is a fine researcher with a good head on his shoulder, let me preface by saying this. The irony of his comment on microblogging is that, and I suspect that he himself has sensed the irony, he is on Twitter (with 337 followers and not all of them are friends or FOAF).

Fewer than 50% Americans believe in the Evolution Theory… How many of the rest believe in aliens?

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Numbers (or Bars) speak louder than words. Draw any conclusion based on your own bias and convictions. And don’t send me any hate mail, but this visual impact is too much for me to bear. I feel dizzy. Would be interested to see how this affects the government’s and Bill Gates’ professed belief and vowed actions to improve science standards for education in the U.S.

Seriously, if you have any gripes, sign in to the Economist and post your comment there. As of now, there are 161 comments: obviously this is a topic that is close to home, to people’s hearts and brains. (But if you ask me, it is obvious which side has more brains than the other…)

Now that I have a few moments to calm myself down from the initial impact, come to think of it, the number is not that surprising considering that this is the land that proudly hosts the Creation Museum as a historical and scientific institution. Let’s be thankful that we are still behaving better than Turkey! Woohoo!

Courtesy of The Economist‘s Daily Chart (February 5, 2009)

I am beginning to empathize with Maleficent who wasn’t invited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening…

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We all know the story of the Sleeping Beauty. The version I remembered has it thus: The Queen and the King gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. At the celebration party, the Queen invited only 12 fairies because she only has 12 place settings. (I didn’t make this part up. That’s the version I read as a child and remembered…) The 13th fairy got wind of the party that she was not invited to and threw a tantrum, and the rest, as we know, is history… In the Disney version, the “wicked” witch was cleverly given the name Maleficent, a play between Mal (as in “malfunction” and “malice”?) and Magnificent.

I found out just now that there is going to be this big powwow meeting discussing new product ideas at my company, and two of my 3-person team were invited. Guess who is the only female of this whole group and the Engineering team and was NOT invited?

Was the 13th fairy really a WICKED faerie? Maybe she had just reached the boiling point when she was once again dissed by the Palace: apparently she is not as pretty, not as young, and she wears mostly black, unlike the other fairies. So perhaps she said to herself, “Enough is enough. This time I am going to speak up because I am PISSED AS HELL!”

WTF?

One of the Perils of Working while Female: once in a while, when I feel I absolutely need to speak up, I hesitate because I am afraid to sound like a woman scorned…

The Comcastic Super Bowl Happy Ending. Watch porn and we’ll pay you $10!!

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This story is too funny to be true. I have to hop over to Snopes.com to make sure that the story itself is not a prank, and verify with The Onion that they did not pen this story. So by now everybody in the US has heard of the surprise given to 85,000 families in Tucson, AZ, home of one of the Super Bowl teams, the Cardinals. They were offered 30 seconds of free porn!

My male friends cried foul, “Why couldn’t it happen here?” Well, they would be happy to know that the porn segment that they so sadly have missed actually featured full male nudity. Comcast and the police vowed to get down to the bottom of this. Ha ha. And Comcast is also offering $10 credit to any customer who viewed the clip. (So, even if you did not, just say you did. Or maybe there are people who would rather not discuss this any more… “My eyes! My eyes!”)

There is another catch: Apparently, those who watched the Game on high-def TVs were not affected. Only those who received standard-def signals got to watch the free show. I am still trying to decide whether this makes a good argument for finally getting that high-def TV or not…

I just want to say this again,

COMCASTIC!

“Congratulation, Neil Gaiman!”

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Came upon this blog entry on Geed Dad (part of the Wired blogosphere). Was surprised to see that Neil Gaiman’s book won the Newberry Medal. Well, not really surprised. Actually was surprised that Gaiman was surprised.

My 5th grader couldn’t put this book down. True to Gaiman’s fashion, the book is dark (judging by the cover of the book… yeah…): it starts out with a little boy’s family being murdered and with the little boy being abandoned in a graveyard (hence the title) and raised by ghosts… Kids nowadays are so much more mature than when we were growing up so I was not concerned that my son was reading about the subject of death and murder at the age of 10. Glad to know that the judges (and many teachers and parents) feel the same way. We should never talk down to our children as if they live in a cocoon. I believe that’s a main reason why Gaiman is so popular with kids with a good head on their shoulder – he treats them like adults and speak to them truthfully about unpleasant subjects.

“On Monday Neil Gaiman was awarded the most prestigious award in children’s literature, a Newbery Medal, for his new book, The Graveyard Book. The news rocked the world of kid’s literature and was a surprise to Gaiman himself. Neil Gaiman is a beloved author for many GeekDads for his children’s literature. The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls have been bedtime storybooks for my daughter since she was tiny. But Gaiman is also famous among GeekDads for his more adult literature, such as Sandman and American Gods; his movie adaptations, such as Stardust and the upcoming Coraline; and he is also a GeekDad in his own right, often relinquishing his blog to his daughter Maddy.” (Jan. 31, 2009)

Oh, Michael! Now you are not going to be on the Wheaties boxes!

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Unless we begin to serve the Breakfast of Champions in a BONG!

Apology is good. But it would have been better if you immediately came out and admitted it. Now go fire your publicist. He tried to cover it up for you. Yeah, right. Like any news outfit was going to sit on the big fat juicy story of “Michael Phelps caught smoking weed!”, or people were just going to ignore this. This is the payout that every tabloid has been waiting for.

This is a dumb move because you did it 3 months AFTER your stunning Olympic performance. You didn’t realize that you are now famous? You didn’t think anybody was going to follow you, watch your every move, and catch your every action on camera? Where have you been living? Under a rock? Haven’t you ever heard of Lindsay Lohan, Britany Spears or Paris Hilton?

And another thing: NO CAMERA ALLOWED in the BONG ROOM!

Since it happened at a student party, there are two scenarios: someone pretended to be your pal and sneaked in the party. Or, one of your buddies sold you out… That would be the most troubling part of this whole story, for me.

It seems that you were trying to cover yourself up by smoking the pipe while standing sideways. How about wearing a disguise next time? What kind of role model are you for all the dopeheads on college campuses?

I repeat: There is NO FREE lunch. Only Freemium.

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Chris Anderson (the chief over at my favorite mag, WIRED) is coming out with another book, FREE, this summer. As a precursor to the big PR blitz for sure to come, he penned an article on WSJ, “The Economics of Giving It Away“, published today.

Mr. Anderson is the god of generating buzz words (think “The Long Tail”) and cool, attention-grabbing titles (such as this one). And this article, like his previous book The Long Tail and the mag that he edits, is an interesting read.

“Does this mean that Free will retreat in a down economy? Probably not. The psychological and economic case for it remains as good as ever — the marginal cost of anything digital falls by 50% every year, making pricing a race to the bottom, and “Free” has as much power over the consumer psyche as ever. But it does mean that Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid. Just as King Gillette’s free razors only made business sense paired with expensive blades, so will today’s Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of the people or even most of them — free is still great marketing and bits are still too cheap to meter — but enough to pay the bills. Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.”

Companies need to find a business model that most likely will be based on the “Freemium” model: Free products and services subsidized by the few that actually are willing to Pay. And the Paid price will most likely be extremely low. Companies just have to make it up on volume. Think all the online RPGs that charge gamers $5 a month so that they can get cool weapons for their characters or customize their avatars. I am not sure how well this model will succeed though since my 10 year-old boy refused to pay, out of his own pocket, for the privilege of making his avatar look super duper cool, after I approved of the expense. “Nah, who cares what I look like?” So he uses the money saved on more Pokemon cards. (Hmmm, where is the logic in this decision?)

And I love this line:“The standard business model for Web companies that don’t actually have a business model is advertising.” (and here is a cartoon to match).

The Lipstick Index: Myth Busted?

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The first time I heard about the Lipstick Index was from a Mary Kay rep: I learned from her that the three recession-proof products are lipsticks, alcohol, and cigarettes. It is not difficult to understand why alcohol and cigarettes are recession-proof: if you are addicted to something, you are going to get your drink on, in good times or hard times. (The same can be said of drugs and “purchased sex”, then? I imagine a flat line across the chart for these addictions?)

Above is the Daily Chart from The Economist on January 23, 2009, comparing national GDP to lipstick sales from 1989 to 2007.

The term Lipstick Index was coined by Leonard Lauder, the chairman of Estée Lauder, in 2001 during the recession. Lipstick sales in the US jumped by 11% in the 3rd quarter, (and more excitingly for the would-be theorists, the sales increased 25% for cosmetics during the Depression). The common theory states that lipsticks is a relatively inexpensive luxury for women with tighter purse strings. But statistics shown here does not show an obvious trend to prove this theory.

In my view, there will always be people who can purchase luxury goods when the rest of us are forced to “eat cake”. The retail anecdotes for this past Christmas season tells an interesting story: when stores were saddled with unsold inventories, 3 (relatively) big-ticket items were hot hot hot, couldn’t keep them on the shelves: Nintendo Wii, Uggs Boots, and Amazon’s Kindle.

Go figure!

Now if anyone could explain to me the attractions of those Uggs Boots…