Adventures In Digital Marketing

Shouldn't this be a webpage?

First off, let me just state I don’t have an iPad (my boss does so I have seen one at least) and I haven’t yet had the pleasure of the new Wired magazine app.

But I’ve been thinking…

Shouldn’t Wired’s new iPad magazine app (soon to be “all tablets” apparently) actually be an HTML5 website? That would be truly cutting edge right? And accessible to all, regardless of platform, machine or OS?

And shouldn’t it be free? I know Chris Anderson has said a “freemium” version is on it’s way – which is great.

“For all asking about Wired iPad app pricing, it will evolve as we build new ecommerce methods. Freemium is in our future about 22 hours ago via web @chr1sa“

But right now, as far as I can tell, Wired’s app is just their version of a Murdoch’s Paywall. At £2.99 a month it’s not that expensive, but it’s not that cheap either. Actually scratch that.  it is cheap.  I’d gladly pay that myself.  I’ve bought the magazine for years and don’t see any reason why I am going to stop.  But it’s still not free is it!  Not that I necessarily think free is right – but I do believe Chris has said he does in the past once or twice. (I am, after all, mainly in the business of trying to sell stuff to people, and so are most of you I suspect!)

But I can’t help feeling for such a supposedly cutting edge geek-guide magazine, it should have been web-based, in a truly cutting edge tech, and “open”.  And that’s something coming from me, as someone who’s built his fair share of flash-based websites in the last few years and screw the UX! (I’m a changed man at my new agency, what can I say!)

Howard
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I am about 60% through The Long Tail now and, whilst I have doubts about writing a post on a book before I’ve finished it, I just wanted to start a place for my thoughts on something which is coming into mind more as I progress through the pages.

So, apologies if Chris does go into this more later on (past page 138) but I keep thinking back to the stuff we discussed during my college years regarding postmodernism in a societal context.

The big issue was always, at the time, how postmodernism as a cultural movement was bringing about a collapse of boundaries between everything we experienced.  One of the ways I used to think of this was how things like television, radio, film, music, etc. would eventually be regarded as a single item, moving closer and closer to each other at all times.  12yrs on since Uni and it’s pretty obvious to see how that’s definitely happened, and whether you argue that we’re still postmodern, or post-postmodern, it’s hard not to see that a collapse on so many levels has and is occuring all the time.  (I seem to remember this being something to do with Verfemdung, but a google just now throws up a lot of Brecht references, so perhaps I have my courses mixed up?) but the notion of distance between objects, audience, and all elements in between is effectively disappearing.

Now, if you think of this in terms of a key point of The Long Tail, that of the tail part being empowered through the easy availability of technology tools to enable user generated content and lower the boundaries between production and consumption, then that distance, the gap between us being one side and not the other, is falling down all the time.  Yet I don’t see any mention of this on the blog circuit of in his book (so far) – and there may be a good reason for that, in that it’s far too obvious?

The other thing that keeps “bothering” me (might not be the right word, but it’ll do) is that on one hand, post modernism is helping to bring everything closer together, to create this enviornment in which we can consume and create all at the same time, whilst at the exact same moment, the long tail effect is making us a more disparate as a consuming body – non-hits and the opposite of the head – we don’t all like the same thing.

Postmodernism brought us all together and collapsed all the boundaries – and at the same time throws us all apart and destroys the collapse, bringing us back to a world of infinite choice and distance from one another.

Howard

technorati tags:postmodernism, collapse, disparate, long, tail, verfremdung

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Today I took delivery of my copy of The Long Tail which I have mentioned previously.  Obviously I’ve not been able to read it yet but I still think I will try and listen in on tonight SkypeCast with the author Chris Anderson over at https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=17623

I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of the SkypeCast tool until today, and it just happens to be the day of the one above, but it’s fully being pushed on Typepad, where I noticed it, which is an interesting occurence – they certainly weren’t doing it the other week.  Perhaps we’ll use one for Adventures if we can get enough interest?  I wonder if it can be saved for use later on as a podcast?

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/skypecasting/

technorati tags:skype, skypecast, podcasting, long, tail, wired

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