edgepolitics

In a recent post on Doc Searl’s Project VRM site, responding to a post on ReadWriteWeb, Doc says he’s  “flattered to be called an academic”, (he probably deserves that tag now, so perhaps he shouldn’t be) but plainly takes umbrage at Bernard Lumm’s observation in an interview with Richard de Silva from Highland Capital Partners, that:

“…Some recent blog chatter says that online advertising is doomed. The best reasoned case for this is made by Doc Searls (of ClueTrain Manifesto fame), who is touting his radical Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as an alternative.”

Doc responds that: “if VRM is radical, it’s not in an oppositional way. It’s not against advertising, or CRM.” - OK… it might not be against ‘Advertising’, but my understanding has always been that VRM grew out of, and was defined as being antonymous to CRM. If its not “against CRM” what is its agenda? So, there seems to be some back-peddling going on… with Doc wanting to clarify VRM as not really so “Radical”.

(As I said in my comment on Doc’s Blog) The real problem is that VRM is not so much being ‘radical’ as ‘rhetorical’ i.e. “expressed in terms intended to persuade or impress”…

Doc takes a swipe at both Bernard Lunn and Richard de Silva (from Highland Capital) by saying:

“ReadWriteWeb is a micro medium. So is Digg, in which Highland is an investor. They may be big on the Web, but they’re micro next to the giants of mass marketing that have kept Madison Avenue in business… What keeps ReadWriteWeb and Digg in business isn’t Madison Avenue. It’s Highway 101.“

Yes, ReadWriteWeb and Digg are being driven by “Highway 101″ (if by ‘Highway 101′ Doc is referring to a mass of users themselves) however, the major problem for VRM is that it is patently NOT being driven by Highway 101…  It is ideologically concerned with “Highway 101″ without a broad validation by its claimed constituency… Therefore, its weakness is that it comes across as a ‘top-down’ prescription for a ‘bottom-up’ solution.

For Doc to make statements like: “VRM is also about Highway 101. It’s is one more stage in the not-very-seamless transition to whatever succeeds mass marketing.” actually succeeds only as a rhetorical statement, which he is not supporting by any compelling argument.

Further, to say: “Our job is to make the pudding that proves our ideas.” is very much like the statement Doc made last year in his post ‘Clues vs. Trains, cont’d’ (http://tinyurl.com/c2rld3) that: “We need the invention that mothers the necessity” - and as I pointed out that the time:

“We need the invention that mothers the necessity ~ That is an inversion of a parable, the same way that VRM is an inversion of CRM. I get it, and its clever, but… the inverted meaning really kind of messes with the logic of the original parable. The original, points to what drives human invention: ‘need’. To say that we need the invention to mother the necessity (i.e. the need) is to almost admit that ‘need’ has failed to be the driver.”
- June 2, 2008

Where is the mass bottom-up push for VRM from Highway 101? Many of us see the ‘need’ (me included)… but you can’t pronounce the solution into being, and you can’t rely on an “open-source” approach to magically provide the answer.  This is the ‘Achilles heel’ of VRM… and (I still think) The exponents of VRM have to address this ‘elephant in the corner of the room’, before they try and address ‘managing vendors’ on behalf of customers.

[note: I support the overall ideas behind the VRM movement, but have issues with the rhetoric and the process, rather than the desired outcome]

On March 22nd I got what seemed to be a typical Twitter ‘Follow Notification’ by email, then later that same day I got this private message from Bill… and I thought:

“What’s this?” It sounds like a scam… and unfortunately, (I’m sorry Bill)  but you chose the wrong person to send your automated pitch to.

If you follow Bill, you will find he has all manner of things to say about highly topical and interesting issues… in fact the more topical they are, the more likely Bill will be right onto it.

However, all is not what it seems… because Bill has ‘invented’ the: (wait for it) ‘THE TWITTER TRAFFIC MACHINE”… http://www.twittertrafficmachine.com

Here’s a quote from Bill’s promo-video:

“ I’ve figured out how to get 16,000 targeted followers in 90 days, and make a bunch of money from it… all on auto-pilot”

However, (borrowing a phrase from Umair Haque) to add ‘insult to irony’, Bill (who describes himself as a “Social Media Evangelist”) also has a video on his website called: “Twitter Etiquette (Twetiquette) in Plain English” is which he states:

“… What Twitter is NOT? It is not a place to sell stuff, if you do, you’re gonna turn people off.”

(link to ‘Twetiquette’ video)

What Crosby describes as his: “automated content factory”… is based on pure trickery and its viral ‘get-rich-quick’ multiplier tactics will have the inevitable effect of muddying the waters of twitter with a growing avalanche of ostensibly authentic looking ‘Twitter-Spam’ and will induce ‘tragedy of the commons‘ effects.

I urge everyone to reject this kind of B.S. as it’s DNA is inherently surreptitious and dishonest.

First up, let me quote Robbie Wiliams, who sometime back was the recipient of an £80 million record deal by EMI :

OK, the relevance of that quote may become apparent later…

The best thing I’ve seen this week, came from techcrunch. An article about a guy called  Kutiman, (MySpace page) who has very recently produced a series of musical mash-ups of various YouTube videos, weaving them together, creating credible and quite sublime musical pieces in themselves. The collection is at: www.thru-you.com .

Comments on the original techcrunch article are overwhelmingly positive, although some have questioned whether the ‘thru-you’ clips could in themselves really qualify as ‘music’ or as ‘art’…  - They most definitely are both.

If these people are reacting to the ‘many-authors’ attribute of these works as somehow diminishing Kutiman’s achievement, they are totally missing the point. - Kutiman is a musician of considerable skill, and what he has done, is actually to create a highly evolved crowd-sourced composition that, (IMHO) displays a good deal of humility on his part, because he is moving beyond the common ’self-referring’ style of most songwriters and musicians, toward a kind of ‘crowd-referring’ meme. Interestingly, one cannot consider Kutiman’s work without also considering the wider issues of copyright and the (retarded and almost misanthropic) music industry and particularly the RIAA.

(I say: ‘misanthropic’, because they are suing teenagers for using file-sharing applications, instead of realizing that the speeding freight train has already left the station… EMI and the RIAA are like the large Ice Factories that went out of business following the invention of the refrigerator)

Kutiman’s offering, coming so soon after EMI launched legal action against a Mr. Ryan Sit, the developer behind a number of popular mashups, for his application Favtape, makes an interesting juxtaposition…  EMI’s action is apparently because Favtape uses the Seeqpod API, and The RIAA and the record companies are not too fond of seeqpod.  What has alarmed many industry watchers is the way EMI has gone after an independent developer of an API… as this has the potential to supress what has been one of the key drivers of innovation on the web. (for a perspective openly critical of the RIAA see ‘boycott-riaa.com‘) …but, speaking of innovation:

Back to Kutiman… (as I said in my comments on techcrunch) - far from not being ‘real art’ or ‘real music’, www.thru-you.com displays the work of an artist who can not only see, but fashion the beauty and value in the scattered leaves of myriad YouTube videos, and weave them into multiple works of art, in the same way that avante guard artists from the 1960’s and 70’s juxtaposed ‘found-objects’ on boards or canvases.

His works, to coin a new term, could be called a musical ‘Folkshomily’… celebrating the mundane and the disconnected… and making stars of ordinary people… like the enigmatic woman on track #3 who soulfully repeats “I am Blue, I am Blue…” and the equally engaging young woman on track #5, who sits with a baby on her lap while playing a keyboard, singing: “…Someday I will find my soul… I, gotta have one too”… (Incidently, the definition of a ‘homily’ pertains to “spiritual edification rather than doctrinal instruction” …so that somehow works for me…)

Featuring these aspirational people and their precious human fragments is a gift to all of us… and; if the ‘form’ of this art is hard for all to comprehend, then it is yet further indication of its uniqueness and cutting-edge status.

[consider Robbie's quote now]