Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Enter The Matrix by kirainet

“The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

I’m knee-deep in final preparations for Digital Book World next week (look for the new website to relaunch by Tuesday, built by me!), but I wanted to give a quick shout-out to two people who are blowing my mind right now.

First, to Jaron Lanier. I’m in the middle of reading and enjoying You Are Not a Gadget, not just because it elaborates on my own thoughts about tech fetishism, but because it does it so intelligently and convincingly. Kudos to Stephanie Anderson for bringing it to my attention with her excellent, must-read review.

Second, to Chuck Wendig, blogger extraordinaire, who writes engagingly and entertainingly about writing practically every day, with a unique energy and style that so few writing bloggers can match. I anxiously await his first novel.

Chuck gave me the opportunity to stretch my legs on his blog while he was out of town last week doing very cool things, with a guest post about The Future of the Blog that went up this morning.

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Stool, Sunlight by Voxphoto

They show me and tell me about stuff I would never think to look for myself. They take me to places in their pictures that I will never get to but so enjoy looking at. I’ve turned down the corners of many a page after finding places I want to visit, books I want to buy, or stores I want to shop from (online). There is an open copy of Garden and Gun sitting right by my computer right now.

Why Magazines Won’t Die, Maria Rodale

I love magazines, and Garden & Gun is one of a handful of favorites — along with The Atlantic , Harvard Business Review and Writer’s Digest — for many of the same reasons Rodale notes in her optimistic ode, not the least of which is that “sometimes, I just want things to FIND me.”

Like my favorite writers, the magazines I truly value introduce me to new things, or show me new angles on the familiar, that I’d not have come across on my own. In my own series of posts for Folio: a few months back, I made the point that content + context = value, declaring that magazines that nail the equation will survive. That same math is also valid in the conversation about the future of books.

I’ve worked with magazines for the past 15+ years, most recently as Advertising Sales Director and Publisher & Editorial Director for Horticulture, and over the past year of learning the book side of the business up close, I’ve noted 5 key things it could/should learn from its periodical siblings:

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newsstand by loop_oh

The rise of the social web has given birth to a phenomenon similar to the indie film revolution of the 90s, when everybody thought they had an interesting story to tell, and believed a credit card limit of a few thousand dollars was all it took to become the next Robert Rodriguez. He even wrote a book about it!

Most bloggers fall into similar territory, minus the upfront financial investment, and as noted in the New York Times on Friday, the failure rate is roughly the same — astronomical:

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled… Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

It’s worth noting that a percentage of those abandoned and lightly used blogs belong to traditional publishers who didn’t understand what a blog was but launched them anyway, partly because everyone else was doing it. Interestingly, many of these publishers have also bought into the notion that bloggers are legitimate competitors to their established brands and devalued their own content in response by giving it all away for free online and, as noted in Part One and Part Two of this accidental manifesto, are effectively doing so in print, too, all in the service of delivering as many eyeballs as possible for their advertisers with no Plan B in place for when the advertising dried up.

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Kool-Aid by Slambo_42

“Be a little cautious of the social media kool-aid… It does work slowly over time, but if you need to get attention now, you still need to use traditional methods, too. Social media is not a replacement for anything; it’s an add-on, it’s another way of communicating. But don’t leave the other stuff behind, especially if the other stuff works for you still; don’t drop it just because there’s a shiny new object.”

–Christopher Penn, Marketing Over Coffee

Rational, hype-free discussions about social media are difficult to come by, so I was thrilled to discover the Marketing Over Coffee podcast last week, the best of the bunch from the handful I’ve sampled so far, via Lee Oden’s list of Best Podcasts on Social Media. Hosted by John Wall and Christopher Penn, the episodes I’ve listened to so far have been meaty, informative and thought-provoking, and I’ve found myself going through their archives today while doing laundry, as inspired as I was coming out of last week’s Conversational Marketing Summit.

Wall and Penn keep things in perspective by focusing on “both classic and new marketing,” avoiding the social MEdia tendencies of self-promotional, agenda-driven circle jerks that pass for social media “expertise” on blogs, podcasts and Twitter. I’d name names, but it’s easier and far more productive to call out those doing it right.

Among my current favorites for thoughtful marketing insights and commentary are Seth Godin, Geoff Livingston, Jane Friedman, Amanda Chapel and Patrick Boegel. A few others I don’t always agree with but often spark interesting discussions and are willing to engage include Mack Collier, Lauren Fernandez and Olivier Blanchard.

Who are some of your favorites?

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