Business: March 2010 Analysis - Mac Slocum

This video won't save book publishing, but it sure is creative

The magazine industry might want to consult the following video the next time they're fighting for consumers' hearts and minds.

Be sure to watch the whole thing. It's not what it initially appears to be. And you might want to gird yourself for the inevitable torrent of copycats to come.

Heads up, traditional media! Pay very close attention to what OK Go just did

It's rare when you see such a clear example of the Internet's disruption: OK Go, the band best known for its clever music videos, has severed ties with its record label, EMI. The reason? The label is caught in old-think and wants to disable the embed function on the group's web-based videos.

OK Go ... God bless 'em ... told EMI to politely bugger off. The band knows embedding is an absolute must-have if you want to harness the web's power.

Speaking of which, here's the group's latest masterpiece:

Want to know what Google is up to? Here you go

GoogleI've seen lots of hand-wringing and sweaty prognosticating about Google. What will it do? What does it want? Is that don't be evil mantra for real?

Funny thing is, Google's strategy has always been in plain sight. There's no obfuscation. There's no misdirection. Heck, this New York Times piece spells it out:

Google has used a similar approach -- immense computing power, heaps of data and statistics -- to tackle other complex problems. In 2007, for example, it began offering 800-GOOG-411, a free directory assistance service that interprets spoken requests. It allowed Google to collect the voices of millions of people so it could get better at recognizing spoken English. A year later, Google released a search-by-voice system that was as good as those that took other companies years to build.

See what Google did there? It released a free service so it could gather huge amounts of data that could then be used in another product. That's what Google does. Free leads to data, data leads to another product. Repeat over and over and over and over again.

Mac Slocum I'm an editor, producer, writer, teacher and Red Sox fan. If you want to know more, read my bio.



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