Links for 2006-04-18

Posted April 18, 2006 1:17 AM.

Stowe Boyd is auctioning off his chest for the rest of the year to Web 2.0 start-ups You see at some level this is fun, but at another level it really creeps me out. It's the same reason I don't have ads on plasticbag.org - it feels like you're putting something personal about yourself up for sale. Makes me uncomfortable...
MySociety is doing another round of proposals like the ones that triggered Pledgebank, TheyWorkForYou and other sites "So, whether you have an idea you'd like to propose, or whether you'd just like to read and comment on other people's proposals, you've come to the right place."
Make Me Watch TV - the readers choose which TV show he'll watch and he dutifully blogs the whole thing Interesting idea! Mostly quite entertaining! Not sure he'll keep it up very long, though. Worth keeping an eye on. I particularly like the idea that he'll keep missing episodes of programmes even if he likes them. That's interesting / cruel.
USA Today reports that posting to your site can help stop memory loss and Alzheimers... "Research on animals and humans suggests mentally challenging activities such as playing bridge, learning a new language or even blogging might help build new connections in the brain"

Comments

Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.

I think if you had your own start-up, instead of a job with a large company, you'd find advertising far less uncomfortable.

→ Posted by: hugh macleod at April 18, 2006 6:48 AM

It's not that I find advertising uncomfortable, it's that I find the idea of using yourself as advertising space uncomfortable. And I do think it's different for some of the people who get lots and lots of traffic to your weblogs - they're basically celebrities, they end up writing less personally and less for their own self-expression and more for an audience, so I'm not so uncomfortable about that. But I still think that selling advertising space on your own body takes it a bit far.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 18, 2006 8:57 AM

Yes, but some people like messing around with advertising. It's like a plaything for them.

I would say I certainly qualify :)

→ Posted by: hugh macleod at April 18, 2006 9:20 AM

Coincidentally, I've just read David Weinberger's excellent article Resist Corrupting Blogs with Messages (it's an article in Advertising Age, hence the specialised meaning of the word 'message').

Personalization increases the efficiency of marketing, but there is still nothing personal about it, and one-to-one marketing has a real human being on one side of the equation but a corporate marketing department on the other. Bloggers are highly sensitive to marketers pretending to care, when in fact the marketers have an ulterior motive. Blogs, on the other hand, are truly personal. They're written by individual humans who-for whatever reason-want to talk in public about what matters to them ... if marketers enter the blogosphere by messaging, they will stand out like an ad on a birthday cake.

The important thing is the focus on the blogosphere, which David (rightly) describes as a conversation. Even if some individual bloggers are happy to embrace marketing, it has a corrupting effect at the level of the conversation.

→ Posted by: Phil at April 18, 2006 11:00 AM

This article furthers my hypothesis that an emotionally healthy person will often be a physically healthy person. I have two grandparents still alive-one who is learning spanish and teaching english, plays golf and reads the paper every day-she has overcome cancer and is very healthy. My other grandparent however does nothing, and is in rapid decline. Her mind is more confused everytime I see her. I think there is a direct link! Now it is confirmed.

→ Posted by: fantasia at April 18, 2006 9:44 PM

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