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Weighing Seatall from Cribcandy - a gallery of hand...

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 1 review • homemaking • cribcandy.com

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Rated Aug 16 2008 • 1 review • politics, obama, noam chomsky • zcommunications.org

Chomsky on Obama
From the page: "I think he's basically presenting himself as a blank slate, on which you can write your wishes. Hard to find much to be hopeful about. He is energizing a lot of young people, but I don't see much reason to expect that for that reason his presidency would be more responsive to public pressure. Overwhelmingly, the public believes that the government should be responsive to public opinion. But that's such an unpopular elite view that the press won't even report the polls showing this. A more realistic possibility, perhaps, is that those who are energized by the candidacy will devote the energy to something constructive after the likely disillusionment.

NC"

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Yes Way on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 51 reviews • animals • flickr.com

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Stumper : Expertinent: Why the Obama &Brand& Is Working

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 1 review • politics • newsweek.com

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What Obama Can Teach You About Millennial Marketing -...

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 3 reviews • politics, advertising, obama, election • adage.com

From the page: "Then there's the messaging. Mr. Obama sticks very well to his script, said Mr. Howe.

And that hasn't gone unnoticed in most quarters. Wrote Newsweek's Andrew Romano, "Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand." His rising-sun logo echoes the one-world iconography of Pepsi, AT&T and Apple.

Design guru Michael Bierut told Romano that the stand-alone logo, consistent use of the Gotham typeface ("very American ... conversational and pleasant") and his online look and feel make Mr. Obama the first candidate with a "coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. ... There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Communal, pro-social
According to Mr. Howe, Gen Xers required niche marketing: "If too many people liked something, it wasn't cool." But mass brand experiences, from the iPod to Harry Potter, appeal strongly to millennials, who have been shown to be a more communal, pro-social generation than their predecessors.

While critics see Mr. Obama's penchant for mass gatherings as arrogant, Mr. Howe finds it perfect for millennials: "They're more civically connected, and they find strength in numbers."

According to Fleishman-Hillard's Ms. Mooney, the Obama campaign's mastery of cutting-edge social media, through the my.barackobama.com site (known internally as "MYBO"), is optimized for millennial appeal. For this generation, "the new pronoun is me, my. Using my-dot brings it to a personal level."

The MYBO site shows that Mr. Obama's campaign has made the leap from CRM (customer relationship management) to CMR (customer-managed relationship) better than many commercial marketers, according to Ms. Mooney. "Young people want to be in control of their relationship with a brand. They want to customize and personalize," as they can on iTunes, Mobile Me and YouLocate. The campaign's site allows this with its use of tagging, discussion boards, photo uploads and other interactive elements.

Of course, most young people will never find their way to the Obama site. But, as with commercial brands, those that do will be Mr. Obama's "passionistas" -- his power users and brand ambassadors. "

Mr. Obama's packaging might discomfit older generations, who may think of themselves as immune to mass marketing. But it is "no problem" for millennials, whom Mr. Howe sees as averse to chaos and unpredictability (a trouble spot for both the Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns), and are "very comfortable with a very smooth brand that has minimal turmoil." "

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Bob Dylan’s Poetic Pause in Hollywood on the Way to Folk...

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 1 review • music, hollywood, bob dylan • nytimes.com

"Barry Feinstein, the rock 'n' roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark, moody snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960s.

And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.

"It was the lost manuscript," Mr. Feinstein recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. "Everybody forgot about it but me."

The poems were so lost that Mr. Dylan, when told of the discovery, had forgotten that he had written them. (In his defense, it was the '60s.)

But after languishing in storage for more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November in a collection titled "Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript.""

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Nepal Elects a Maoist to Be the Prime Minister - NYTimes.com

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 1 review • politics, news, nepal • nytimes.com

"Nepal Elects a Maoist to Be the Prime Minister

The Maoists have already achieved their main goal, ending 239 years of Hindu monarchy. At its first session, in May, a Constituent Assembly declared Nepal a federal republic. The former king, Gyanendra, the world's last Hindu monarch, was forced to vacate the main palace here and live as a commoner."

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http://bp3.blogger.com/_XkZLNjA3-GQ/ReLFUE1HG2I/AAAAAAAAA...

Rated Aug 16 2008 • 1 review • blogs • blogger.com

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