If you sell products to consumers (I guess that takes in a few people), you’ll be interested in Street Peeper (via PSFK).  Street Peeper posts pictures of mostly young people and their clothes (despite the name) from the streets of, New York, Miami, Berlin, Seoul, Paris, and Chicago (with more coming). The photos are searchable by label, style, or color (it’s early in the life of the site so some searches may come up a bit empty). Fashion, yes, but consumer tastes as well. Clothes are a great paradox - personalized and uniform at the same time, although the younger the wearer the less likely he or she is to believe they’re wearing a uniform. To catch a clothing trend as it moves from the personal style of a few to the uniform of a demographic, can put a business on the developing end of an incredible profit opportunity. But clothing trends cross into other areas (and vice versa) so they never really develop in isolation and are relevant to any kind of design creation.

The interesting thing about sites like Street Peeper is how available it makes this kind of research. No need to spend hot days on city sidewalks people watching, now you can just click around Street Peeper. Too bad people watching is so much fun in person.

A little while ago I posted on desktop fabricators, many of which are user or kit built.  Sears is selling a “desktop” woodworking system called the Craftsman Compucarve.  From the Web site:

Compact, computer-controlled, 3-dimensional woodworking machine with an easy-to-use interface. It allows a novice to make a complete project without a shop full of tools.The unique configuration allows it to perform many other woodworking functions, including ripping, cross cutting, mitering, contouring, jointing and routing. The CompuCarve can work in most soft materials, including wood, plastics (polycarbonate or cast acrylic) and certain types of high density foam.

It’s a bit pricey (as you’d expect) at around $1,900, but it moves us that much closer to the day when we can dream up a product and manufacture it on our desktops.  At first glance it appears to be simply a carving machine (although a pretty nifty one), but as you can see by some of the comments to this article, with some imagination it can become much more.  This is a first generation machine and as it is improved it will get easier to use and more capable.  You can read more about the Compucarve here. Another sign that the huge trend toward customization and personalization isn’t limited to the digital world.  

(Also discussed at Core77)

Business Week has an article about collaboration in the workplace, which focuses mostly on wikis.  The article begins with an anecdote about the founder of Geek Squad wondering how a member of his staff stayed in touch with employees in Anchorage.

Prodded for details, he sheepishly told Stevens that they all play Battlefield 2 online. ‘With each server, you can have 128 people simultaneously fighting each other in a virtual environment,’ said the director. ‘We wear headsets and use Ventrilo software so that we can talk over the Internet while we are running around fighting.’

Stephens, who now joins in himself from time to time, says: ‘The agents taunt each other, saying, “Hey, I see you behind the wall.” But then, while we’re running along, rifles in our hands, one of the agents behind me will be like, “Yeah, we just hit our revenue to budget,” and somebody else will be like, “Hey, how do you reset the password on a Linksys router?”"

 Is this great or what?  We have to remember, this is the Geek Squad, but still…  This immediately makes me think of “The Office” episode in which the Connecticut office of Dunder Mifflin plays a computer game (it’s a FPS - Call of Duty, maybe?).  It didn’t convey quite the same feeling of collaboration, did it?  Even if there was no communication happening during the Geek Squad game however, just playing together has to make far flung colleagues feel like they know each other.

 Much of the rest of the article talks about the use of wikis in the workplace and how natural it is for younger workers and how unnatural it is for those who are older.  These are old themes, but worth exploring again every once in a while, if only to confirm that social software like wikis continue to add value to businesses.

Xerox is another company using wikis:

Typically, high-level strategy documents are formulated by a handful of people atop the corporate hierarchy. At Xerox, Chief Technology Officer Sophie VanDebroek turned the process inside out by setting up a wiki that would allow researchers in the R&D group to define collaboratively the company’s technology strategy.

If you’re still afraid of social software - Instant Messenger, wikis, streaming media, blogs, file sharing, and online multiplayer games - you’re now losing a competitive advantage, but soon you’ll be ignoring a basic requirement of the game.

The debate over the death of newspapers reached another crescendo this weekend. It’s not exactly clear why now, although it was probably prompted by Tim O’Reilly writing that the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble.

Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent “emergency meeting” that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.” (”And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”) Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.

This led to a spate of other blog posts, including Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and Scott Karp. Each one has something interesting to say and offers food for thought for any news executive. Doc Searls’s list of suggestions provides a particularly good starting point.

Scott Karp argues that “What the news business and the entire media business are suffering from most right now is a failure of imagination.” While it’s pretty hard to argue against that, Scott’s imagination leads him to say that “journalism should become nonprofit, like NPR, because the reality is that the journalism we all value as citizens — the kind that brings down administrations (not that it’s done much for us lately, but that’s another story) — has never been a for-profit endeavor.” That’s an interesting idea, but not, I don’t think, a solution. First of all, NPR isn’t so much non-profit as government funded. The kind of journalism “that brings down administrations” is unlikely to be funded by the government. We frequently hear calls that NPR should get off the government dole, in large part because we live in a world that supports many niche information services, none of which are government funded. NPR’s wealthy, educated consumers will someday have to stop getting news subsidized by their poorer, less educated fellow citizens who are uninterested in the product.

Newspapers aren’t so much dying as the paper is dying. Newspapers need to understand that they produce news, not newspapers. The news product needs to be produced for delivery across multiple channels, without regard to print schedules or newshole size. It should be written as long as needed for understanding or as short as needed to hold a reader’s interest, and produced as soon as possible, while maintaining the integrity of the product. That news should then be packaged for delivery in print and on screen, with the print product a point-in-time snapshot of the constantly updated screen product. The screen product, by the way, should include video (why aren’t TV stations afraid of newspaper competition?).

News organizations can’t move into the future simply by applying the latest Web 2.0 technology to their Web sites. New products are part of the solution, sure, but a transformation is needed. A transformation in thought and in operation. Some argue that newspapers should stop worrying about delivery altogether and just report the (local) news. That’s a valid point, and one that warrants discussion, but it’s hardly a foregone conclusion. It’s also pretty clear that more focus on local reporting will also be a big part of the solution. In the end, the newspaper that realizes it exists to inform its consumers, by whatever means they choose to be informed, and using a variety of professional and amateur sources, will be on its way to becoming a news company of the future.

Several months ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker in which he explored the difference between puzzles and mysteries. It’s a fairly long article, but full of excellent insights. Gladwell, noting Gregory Trevington’s distinction between puzzles and mysteries, described the location of Osama bin Laden as a puzzle, while what would happen in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein was a mystery.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

The distinction may be easiest to see in national security affairs, but much of the article is about Enron, which has been treated as a puzzle (we weren’t told enough), but was more accurately a mystery (we didn’t properly interpret what we were told). Those analysts that treated Enron’s financial statements as a mystery, were the people who recognized the compnay’s problems before the rest of the financial world.

There are major ramifications for national security as we move from treating the world as a puzzle to treating it as a mystery. During the Cold War the CIA spent a lot of time trying to solve puzzles like the size of the Soviet missile arsenal.

Now most of the world is open, not closed. Intelligence officers aren’t dependent on scraps from spies. They are inundated with information. Solving puzzles remains critical: we still want to know precisely where Osama bin Laden is hiding, where North Korea’s nuclear-weapons facilities are situated. But mysteries increasingly take center stage. The stable and predictable divisions of East and West have been shattered. Now the task of the intelligence analyst is to help policymakers navigate the disorder.

It seems to me that when companies with strong financial controls and frequent internal financial reporting still somehow find themselves surprised by bad news they feel they should’ve known earlier, they have fallen victim to a puzzle mindset. With controls in place to set standard costs, capture variances, and report massive amounts of information monthly, the company believes the puzzle can be solved. With perfect information, costs are a puzzle, it’s just that the “perfect” part never quite seems to happen. For that reason, treating costs as a bit of a mystery, may just be the proper approach. What CFO, though, is willing to admit that despite a smart staff and millions of dollars spent on an ERP system, costs are still a bit of a mystery? Yet with the hubris of believing that your system will capture all of the information you need, often comes an inability to recognize when unexpected business events disrupt the system. You may be set up to capture all of those emergency air freight costs coming out of Shanghai, but what about the vendor who decided to air freight out of Tianjin?

Strategy, of course, is a mystery at its heart. It’s tempting to view it as a puzzle, using what happened yesterday as the interlocking pieces, because that means there is an answer certain. We want that to be true, but it isn’t. As Gladwell explains, “Puzzles are ‘transmitter-dependent’; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are ‘receiver dependent’; they turn on the skills of the listener…” For this reason, puzzles “require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth,” while “Mysteries demand experience and insight.” This is a good lesson for businesses trying to transform themselves as they move into a new century. While many things have aspects of both puzzles and mysteries, the future is a mystery. Some puzzles need to be solved along the way, but after the data is collected, it still comes down to the application of experience and insight.

From Agenda comes some stories that should provide clues to mainstream media players about how they can serve their advertisers better. First is a story in USA Today about how teens are being targeted with cell phone marketing. Cell phone marketing isn’t particularly new, especially if you’ve ever driven into mainland China (where your cell phone is immediately bombarded by text message ads), but one statistic in the story especially caught my eye:

[The] CEO of Access 360 Media, says a holiday coupon campaign for retailers including f.y.e. saw redemption rates of about 40% compared with less than 2% for many print or online coupon campaigns. Shoppers text a code found on store signs to get the coupon, then show it displayed on their phone at checkout.

If you’re a newspaper, you realize that you’re selling a product (print circular) with a 2% response rate, when there’s a competing product available with a 40% response rate. Ouch! How do you compete with that? Well, maybe you don’t. Maybe you join in and figure out a way to bring that kind of relevant advertising to your readers, thereby serving your advertisers. Maybe you print ShotCodes in the paper so that your advertisers can run the digital version of the old Blue Light Special. When readers who took a picture of the ShotCode with a location aware phone are in your advertiser’s store, a time limited coupon can be sent to their phone, bringing a sense of anticipation and excitement to the shopping experience. Can you act as the clearinghouse for these messages for your advertisers?

Next, we read of Kate Moss’s new clothes collection’s debut at London’s Topshop. The debut of this line on May 1st is garnering an incredible amount of attention (try Googling “Kate Moss” and “Topshop”), with large crowds expected at Topshop stores. I wonder if a London newspaper or UK magazine was able to sell an ad package leading up to this launch. A combination online and print package, among other things (how about Twitter messages about the crowd size at various stores?), that reveals a few items in the days before the launch could really help whip up a frenzy!

Finally, there’s “Bum Rush the Charts,” an indie effort to push the song “Mine Again” by Black Lab to the top of the iTunes charts. As the Web site says:

We can match and exceed the reach of big media, corporate media, labels, and the entrenched interests. On March 22nd, we are going to take an indie podsafe music artist to number one on the iTunes singles charts as a demonstration of our reach to Main Street and our purchasing power to Wall Street. The track we’ve chosen is “Mine Again” by the band Black Lab. A band that was dropped from not just one, but two major record labels (Geffen and Sony/Epic) and in the process forced them to fight to get their own music back. We picked them because making them number one, even for just one day, will remind the RIAA record labels of what they turned their backs on - and who they ignore at their peril.

This is happening today and I wouldn’t bet against these guys. The question for mainstream advertising vehicles is obvious - how can I generate this kind of enthusiasm and reach and passion among my readers for my advertisers. This kind of thing is particularly difficult because as a traditional advertising vehicle you are immediately suspect. The first question then, is how do I get the credibility with my readers to even suggest I can create a community that they would be interested in, much less actually do it.

On second thought, I guess the first question, if you’re a newspaper, is how do I get readers with passion, period? They all seem to be talking about everything but traditional media.

If you’re a fruit marketer, you probably feel pretty good about the health and exercise trend we’ve been living through for some time now. Unless, that is, you’re Chiquita. While the company was happy to ride along as consumers paid more and more attention to what they eat, it also realized that because ripe bananas spoil more quickly than other fruits, they were only sold in green, not-yet-ripe bunches. This means that it is very hard to purchase a single, ready-to-eat banana at a convenience store, fast food outlet, or other eat on the run outlets. While it participated in the better health trend by default, it couldn’t take advantage of consumers’ desire for convenient, portable, ready-to-eat food. An article in the International Herald Tribune (from the Boston Globe), says Chiquita may have solved that problem:

So Gen3, a product innovation consulting company, researched ways to ship bananas in the perfectly ripe yellow state and keep them that way when they arrive at shops. The company found that the pharmaceutical industry had engineered plastics that regulate air flow in boxes and decided to apply that technology to bananas.

At Chiquita’s packaging plants, workers hand-pick the bananas heading to convenience stores and other fast-food outlets for their ideal size, color, shape and ripeness. The single bananas are laid on top of one another in boxes covered with a semipermeable membrane that allows oxygen to pass through but controls the flow of carbon dioxide to delay ripening until the box is opened.

So Chiquita sells more bananas and banana loving consumers will soon be happy to find their favorite fruit where they want it when they want it. Chiquita did some research in 2005 that told them “42 percent of people would eat more bananas if they were available in more locations.” More importantly, I think, Chiquita recognized the trend toward convenience and hurried lifestyles, or the “transumer” trend as Trendwatching has dubbed it, and innovated to give consumers what they want. Why only take advantage of one trend, when you can use another as well?

Some time ago I noted Don Norman’s article discussing consumers’ desire for more complex products. Shortly after that I pointed out a New York Times article that discussed research showing that if a multi-attribute product is priced too low, consumers suspect its quality. The Times is back again with an article discussing a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research that found consumers “are more likely to repurchase products when the initial purchase experience is packed with ’superfluous choices.’”

For example, students choosing between packages of blank CDs with varying prices and features were more confident in their eventual choices, and more likely to repeat them later, if they were first asked whether they wanted 4, 5, or 6 CD case colors in their packages — though all had said that case color was unimportant.

The choice itself, the authors said, was meaningless. But that tiny extra step — choosing how many colors to get — made the decision seem more considered, and hence more reliable, when the students reflected back on it.

This isn’t the same as a complicated product, of course, but it does reinforce the idea that we like choices and we like to feel in control.

Grant McCracken writes that he believes that the days of accidental friends may be numbered:

In the “old world” model, we make friends by accident. Our family is from Seattle, so that’s where we were born. Or, our Dad got a job in Chicago, so that’s where we went to school. We like to ski, and that’s how we ended up in Vermont. Accidents of birth, occupation, inclination, all of these constrain the set of people with whom we can be friends.

[…]

My guess is that machines once they are dedicated to this purpose will do a much better job of building social connections than I could do even if I were to devote all my time to it. It can detect patterns in the stuff I put on line, and find hidden resonances with the stuff others put on line. And this would be interesting. It would be fun to get an email that says ‘we’ve found a match.’

Pretty clearly we spend a lot of time and money trying to sort ourselves into like-minded groups, in both the virtual and physical worlds. We join MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn (as Grant notes) in an attempt to find people we have something in common with. We also join book clubs, sports clubs, country clubs, museums, and the SPCA, hoping that we’ll find kindred souls as members. We have a need to find people who are like us, and Grant is probably right that machines will be able to do a good job with this.

This search for people I’ll like, though, reminds me of the search for information I want to read. If I end up only reading articles on topics I’m interested in from sources I like, I’m in danger of never coming across a new thought. I also miss stumbling across information that I might not have been able to predict will interest me but does. It’s the same with people. Do you have a friend you’re surprised you can even tolerate, much less like? Someone else you enjoy talking with even though you think differently on just about any subject? Another friend from a completely different background and cultural upbringing? Of course you do. Might a machine someday match you with them?

If our social networks were the result of machine driven sifting and filtering, I have to believe that society would become polarized, with interactions among self-reinforcing groups resembling a Hardball episode - lots of talking and shouting but not much learning and understanding. It is encountering diversity of thought and experience that allows us to grow and develop intellectually. While I, like everyone else, employ filters for many of my friends, I recognize that it is accidental friends who often add the spice to life.

I suspect that Grant just has more faith in machines than I do. He no doubt believes that they will be able to pick up on something we exhibit that provides the evidence for that unlikely match. On the other hand, maybe every thirty-third search they’ll short circuit and throw out a random match. That might work.

For years now we’ve been hearing greeting card manufacturers and the Greeting Card Association talking about the enduring values of sending paper cards for holidays, birthdays, and just about any other special occasion. Fine stationary manufacturers also tout the beauty and feel of their products as a perfect antidote to the over-digitization of our society. An e-card for your special Valentine? What could be less special?

Well, e-cards may not be all they were once cracked up to be, but it’s pretty hard to ignore stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal just prior to last Valentine’s Day.

Love letters aren’t what they used to be. While young correspondents have committed their deepest feelings to paper for centuries, the latest generation of lovers is coming of age along with new technologies that let them court each other on the run. The passionate essays penned on Valentine’s Days past have morphed into bursts of instant-message affection. Confessions once sealed in envelopes are now dashed off in email. While romantics have bemoaned the end of the love letter for decades, the latest generation of amorous Americans is turning the language of love into shorthand.

Many of us may lament the loss of penned love letters and paper cards, and many of those who now resort to texting “ILU” do as well, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t on their way out. Of course, expressing your feelings electronically also means that those feelings can be forwarded to friends, friends of friends, and complete strangers around the world. It’s a dangerous game, but one that’s played all the time.

Knowing that their prime consumers are middle-aged, for years card companies have discounted low demand from young people, secure in the knowledge that as those consumers get older, they will eventually turn to cards. It seems unlikely that’s the case any more. Certainly some will, but many more have learned a new way of communicating that will serve them just fine as they grow up. There will constantly be new ways to communicate, and paper has a lot of life left yet even if only as an anti-trend, but one thing seems pretty clear - the long term trend for paper cards is down.

A look at TheKnot.com’s wedding trends for 2007 (via Iconoculture) shows that even that bastion of fine paper is headed into digital territory. Making the list are

• Daily bridal blogs
• Personal URLs on invites
• Online RSVP
• Live webcasts
• Digital music
• Streaming video

I’m not sure we’re quite at the day when wedding invitations will be on Evite, but I can’t imagine that Evite isn’t working on how to get brides (and, more importantly, their mothers) to use the service for exactly that purpose.

Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article by Amy Chozick, explaining how Japan has become “‘Disneyland’ for trends.” The article goes through an exhausting array of trends, including bejeweled sneakers, Jesus-themed restaurants, and robotic baby seals the keep the elderly company. Chozick traces this explosion of innovation to Japan’s recent economic woes:

Japan’s latest ferment can be traced in part to the economic slump that began in the early 1990s and lasted more than 10 years. As monolithic corporations cut jobs and lost their luster, more workers entered fashion, animation and music businesses. The number of employees in these so-called creative industries grew 16%, to 1.4 million, between 1996 and 2001, even as employees of all industries shrunk by 4.3%, according to the Marubeni Research Institute in Tokyo. Japan’s consumers began seeking eccentric products that flattered their growing sense of individuality.

While some of these new trends will travel well overseas and become hits in the US, many will not. The Jesus restaurants, for example, sound like they’ll have patrons thinking less Easter and more Stations of the Cross as, in at least one case, the restaurant is “reached by a dungeon-like brick stairwell, lit by dripping red candles, which leads to a dining area decorated with giant crucifixes, gargoyles and images of a bloodied Christ weeping on the cross.” Yikes!

On the other hand, you can always eat in a “maid café” “where waitresses dress in the black-and-white French maid outfits worn by comic book heroines. ‘Welcome home, master,’ they say upon the arrival of a new customer, typically a male. For $5, waitresses will lift a drink straw to a customer’s mouth, or write his name on his omelet in ketchup.” Sounds like home, doesn’t it? The maid cafes are inspired by “cosplay,” or costume play. You’re familiar with this from seeing people dressed as anime or manga characters. The latest is “Goth-loli,” or Goth meets Lolita.

The list goes on and on, through hot tub karaoke to ice vodka bars. Western companies are taking trend tours of Japan as it lives up to its trend theme-park reputation. It’s pretty clear that this all bears watching, but if you can’t make the trip to Tokyo, one place to follow along from your office chair is the Japan section of CScout.

Any day now, China’s National People’s Congress is expected to pass a private property law that gives the property of individuals the same protection as that of the state. The New York Times notes that,

Approval of the property law was expected last year, but party leaders tabled the proposal after an unusually public and passionate ideological fight erupted. It was led by leftist scholars who argued that the law would worsen income inequality, legalize the misappropriation of state assets and undermine the socialist tenet of state ownership of property.

No doubt there were some sleepless nights spent at CCP headquarters over this one, but in the end, economic progress won out over communist ideology (wasn’t that battle won long ago?).

Also reporting on the law’s imminent passage, the Economist notes,

Every month sees thousands of protests across China by poor farmers outraged at the expropriation of their land for piffling or no compensation. As in previous years, placating those left behind in China’s rush for growth has been a main theme of the NPC

As if to prove the point, 20,000 people rioted in Hunan during the first week of the Congress. Although ostensibly over transportation costs, it’s easy to see this as another protest by those “left behind.” Lest we expect instant change from the impending law, the Economist gives us a dose of reality:

This latest law, likewise, will not bring the full property-rights revolution China’s development demands. Indeed, it will not meet the most crying need: to give peasants marketable ownership rights to the land they farm. If they could sell their land, tens of millions of underemployed farmers might find productive work. Those who stay on the farm could acquire bigger land holdings and use them more efficiently. Nor will the new law let peasants use their land as security on which they could borrow and invest to boost productivity. Nor, even now, will they be free from the threat of expropriation, another disincentive to investment. Much good land has already been grabbed, and the new law will merely protect the grabbers’ gains.

Outsourcing manufacturing to China continues to be protectionists’ bugbear, and they will likely see anything that makes the country more welcoming to capitalists as bad. A freer China, though, is good for the United States and for the world. Yes, it may prompt more businesses to outsource or invest in China, but that train has already left the station. The best thing for the US economy is for China to move from hungry capitalists to satisfied capitalists. When that happens wages will begin to equalize and China will fulfill its potential as the home of billions of prosperous consumers. This property law is one more step down that road.

As a sad aside, the Times notes the confiscation of land by “corrupt officials working in concert with developers.” As China moves closer to a Western economy, not so long ago the US took a step closer to China’s economy.

[Update: For more extensive coverage see China Law Blog.]

If you still need evidence of the mainstreaming of the formerly underground worlds of comics and video games, go see 300. The genesis of the movie, just released on Friday, is explained well in this Time article. As Time states:

It was made by a young director, stars nobody in particular, and it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. Very little in 300 is real except the actors. Sets, locations, armies, blood–they’re all computer generated. It’s beautiful, and it might well be the future of filmmaking.

The article spends some time worrying about whether nearly all movies will be made like this in the future. Seems like a silly thing to worry about. Movies will become what their audiences want them to become, although it’s as hard to imagine that most future films will become digital as it is to imagine that few future films will have digital elements.

The film looks like a comic book which, as an adaptation of a graphic novel, it is. It is highly stylized and atmospheric, just as the comic is and just as video games are. “For [director Zach] Snyder it was simply the only way to get the look of [the graphic novel] off the page and onto the big screen.”

Other movies have been made using this “digital backlot” method combined with a comic book feel. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow comes to mind, although that movie was not a box office success as 300 certainly seems destined to be. I liked both films and while it’s difficult to say why one fails and the other doesn’t, 300 has much more of a video game feel. Anyone familiar with atmospheric first person shooters will immediately feel at home with 300. The violence is much more prominent in 300 as well, just as it is an integral part of FPS games.

The well-known classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, compares (page down) the digital backlot technique to ancient Greek tragedy:

…Snyder, Johnstad, and [300 writer] Miller have created a strange convention of digital backlot and computer animation, reminiscent of the comic book mix of Sin City. That too is sort of like the conventions of Attic tragedy in which myths were presented only through elaborate protocols that came at the expense of realism (three male actors on the stage, masks, dialogue in iambs, with elaborate choral meters, violence off stage, 1000-1600 lines long, etc.).

Comparing 300 with Oliver Stone’s film on Alexander the Great, Hanson says,

If characters sometimes sound black-and-white as cut-out superheroes, it is not because they are badly-scripted Greeks, as was true in Stone’s film, but because they reflect the parameters of the convention of graphic novels, comic books, and surrealistic cinematography.

During Leonidas’s final moments, he is shown in profile, a profile that looks exactly like the profile of Greek warriors found on ancient pottery. Most of the best lines in the film are taken directly from Herodotus and Plutarch. The whole thing is a wonderful mashup of comics, video games, and ancient history. What a fantastic combination!

A few other noteworthy nuggets that came out of the PSFK conference on Tuesday were from the panel discussion titled “Eco Shift or Greenwash.” The panel was comprised of Tamara Giltsoff, Hemal Vasavada-Gill, Jill Fehrenbacher, and Marc Alt.

The first few people to speak, Marc and Jill, both noted companies that they felt hadn’t received proper credit for their Green efforts. In Marc’s case it was Wal-Mart (several initiatives) and in Jill’s case it was H&M (organic cotton). I had expected fire-breathing eco-dragons on this panel and instead heard some rational discussion of corporate Green efforts. This, along with some other discussion, made me feel that the eco-ground is truly shifting for activists. With opinions expressed in the media and among the urban cognoscenti swelling in their favor, they seem to be shifting into business mode from fire-breathing mode. If I’m right, this should mean that companies can stop trying to please activists with their Green products and start trying to please consumers. I’ve said many times before that Green products will only become widely accepted when they offer benefits beyond their Greenness. Those who truly believe in the cause should work on creating superior Green products, not just Green products. It looks like there may be hope that the shift is beginning to occur.

The danger for companies is not over yet, however, as evidenced by an interesting quote from Hemal: “Green is a liability.” She wasn’t entirely clear on what she meant, but I took her to mean that if you do Green “wrong,” the price you pay is high. To me, this brings to mind the lessons learned by the college football world as a result of the criticism Notre Dame received when it fired Ty Willingham. Whatever it was that the critics wanted to teach, the lesson learned was don’t hire a black coach unless you are absolutely positive you won’t need to fire him. With Green products the lesson may be don’t bother unless you are willing to make your product, initiative, etc. absolutely unassailable. The shame of this is that it leaves no room for companies to make honest, but flawed, efforts. What I heard from this panel, I hope, means that is also beginning to change.

The best evidence of a change in the air came from Tamara who said she has been, somewhat controversially, “pro-greenwash.” Her belief is that even if flawed, a Green initiative at least starts the conversation. I think that’s a healthy attitude and one that may actually result in truly remarkable Green products.

The New York Times reports today on a new Internet start-up.

Next New Networks, a New York-based Internet start-up run and backed by former executives of MTV and Nickelodeon, will announce plans today to begin a series of video-oriented Web sites — what the company calls micro-networks — on niche topics like do-it-yourself fashion, comic books, car racing and cartoons.

The company has notable founders, credible investors, and is targeted at online video, all aspects to give it that buzz juice every new company wants when it launches. What interests me about the company is the kind of shows it plans to offer:

Next New Networks plans to blend elements of old and new media into a type of hybrid entertainment that is different from traditional television and user-generated sites like YouTube. Its various Web properties will revolve around professionally produced videos of three to eight minutes, which it plans to pitch to sponsors as safe and predictable places to advertise online.

Many of the programs will solicit contributions from their audiences, but the company will screen submissions before they approved as final product. The company plans to generate some programming itself while also identifying talented video contributors and bringing them into the Next New Networks fold.

The article leads us to believe that this format is mainly driven by the need to find a real revenue model from short Internet video. With YouTube only pulling in $15mm in 2006, it’s pretty clear that the right model hasn’t been developed yet. Advertisers are worried about associating their brands with the free-for-all that is consumer generated video. They’re happy to support the best of it, run away screaming from the worst of it, and right now there’s no way to know if the best or the worst will follow their ad. With this “curator” model, Next New hopes to deliver consistent quality which should allow advertisers to buy space with much greater confidence in the product.

Another reality, however, is the fact that we all know deep down that to be really valuable, online video needs to be curated. That is, we need someone to root through the mass of stuff and separate the wheat from the chaff. Not because we can’t decide for ourselves, but because we don’t have the time.

Remember chat rooms? In the early and mid 90s, people flocked to them for the sheer novelty of telling absolute strangers what was wrong with the world and how to fix it, all while using this cool new technology. There were specific community oriented chat rooms, but the wide open general subject rooms were most popular. Soon, though, we realized that it was all a bit like walking down the street and asking the first person you saw what he thought of US foreign policy. Turns out you really don’t care all that much what he thinks. You care what people you respect think, whether they are friends, family, or experts.

Consumer generated video is a bit like chat rooms were. Neat technology, a chance to express yourself, and some hidden gems among the generally boring or idiotic mass. Just as we found a way to connect with those people with whom we really wanted to talk, we’ll find a way to watch those videos that really interest us. That, I think, is what Next New Networks is really about.