Brain Dump of Pertinence

In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of stories of meetings happening in hot tubs and deals being done at Bucks. I usually get together with a bunch of friends for a hot tub over at Scott’s place each week. And we’re usually on the patio at Mel’s Saturday and Sunday morning.

A couple of us are game developers, others web developers, and others are accountants and lawyers. We usually catch up on rumours about who is jumping ship to startup their own studio, venture capital, Web 2.0, what’s new, what’s hot, what you’ve been playing, watching, reading, surfing, etc.

We’re all friends, so our conversation isn’t restricted to work. We usually gossip about who is dating whom, who had way too much to drink the night before, fashion, and all of the other yuppy topics that happen to be on our minds.

Having a diverse group of friends is really cool. I don’t really know how web development works and vice versa. When you have to explain revenue models to accountants and lawyers who also happen to be women, your descriptions really have to be stripped of buzzwords. And they have to make sense in a non-techy way.

I thought I would do a big brain dump of all of our recent topics.

Web 2.0 And How It Makes You Feel

Web 2.0 is a big, nebulous, made-up, marketing buzzword of a term. So imagine describing to a female accountant what it’s all about. I think Scott does an awesome job of this. User-generated content is an important part of Web 2.0. The big distinction is that the user feels a sense of ownership with the content that they have generated.

The important word in that last sentence is feeling.

Guys are logical, left-brain thinking, heaps of oaf. Women on the other hand are not going to fully grasp a concept until they understand how a concept is supposed to make you feel.

Yeah, I know. I am generalizing.

Permission Marketing

I wrote a comment about this over at Jamie’s blog.

The quality of the game is probably the biggest problem. But a second problem is what Seth Godin calls permission marketing. I dont give marketers permission to show me billboards in real life. Billboards are ugly and gaudy and generally detract from my usual environment. Commercials interrupt me when I really just want to be watching the current TV show.

I subscribe to Apples RSS feed for trailers. And I watch Nothing But Trailers on HDNet. But I dont really want to watch trailers when Im in a movie theater. I want to watch the film that I paid to see.

Seth Godin is brilliant at explaining Permission Marketing. His book is on my to read list. I’ll get around to it eventually.

Celebrity 2.0

Out in Hollywood, there are A-List and B-List celebrities. The blogosphere does have a similar concept. There are Technorati rankings. As of right now, I have a rank of 4,446,976.

But all in all, almost everyone is on the W-List.

In this context, the popularity of Paris Hilton’s vagina is quite odd. There is no feeling of ownership there. Paris is not my friend. Why am I supposed to care?

Whereas I keep up with all of my friends’ blogs. They are the celebrities I adore. This is The Long Tail of celebrity.

If I jump off a dumpster onto an Ikea table, only about 3 people actually care. But that’s still cool. I’m a very minor celebrity in their eyes.

Update: How ironical. I post about Web 2.0 and YouTube doesn’t allow me to embed my video. Here is the direct link.