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Picking up a copy of USA Today this morning it was easy to be struck by the negativity of the content.

- Nelson Mandela is a terrorist

- Jet fuel prices set to make air travel a luxury item

- Fed rate cut does nothing to change Wall St. sentiment

Basically, doom and gloom all around.

Then there was this Harley ad, which offered a contrary point of view.

It reminded us that America is a strong nation and it's bounced back from tough times before.

It took the long view and reminded us not to be fearful with the simple statement:

"We don't do fear"

Some might say this irresponsible, but I say it's brilliant to seize on the moment and offer a counter point that's so true to the brand and its ridership.

It's brave and gutsy, just like the brand.

I don't have the ad, but there's a taste of it on the Harley web site.



Posted by Ed Cotton Lots of smart thinking in this from Clay Shirky's presentation at the Web 2,0 conference and therefore, plenty to steal, or use and build upon, depending on where you stand.





Posted by Ed Cotton AEG Electrolux has embarked on an interesting campaign in Europe, the company sells quieter washing machines and has developed a campaign about noise pollution to sell them.

I've often talked about the need for brands to rally around a big idea that transcends their products, but I am not sure about this one.

It certainly works great in the cities where AEG's innovative interactive billboards inform citizens of noise levels, but it seems a little far removed from the washing machine that creates a fraction of the noise compared to construction work and of course, transportation.

On the positive side, it demonstrates good citizenship in helping drive awareness about an important and often ignored topic. I also wonder if AEG has got themselves wrapped up in an issue that's too big for them to make an impact?

When Unilever celebrated the goodness of kids getting dirty and playing, they could demonstrate their belief in the idea by taking urban kids on trips out to the countryside.

Other than pointing out the issue, I am not sure what role AEG can play?

While Unilever's kids can get their clothes clean with Lever detergent after playing in the dirt, I am not sure how quieter washing machines really help city noise levels.

Perhaps AEG needs to close the loop on this for us?

Any thoughts?


Posted by Ed Cotton The PSFK empire knows no boundaries and it was just a matter of time before it landed in San Francisco.

On July 17th, Piers is hosting a conference here in town and I am flattered to have been asked to speak.

It looks he has already lined up a great bunch of presenters, including some friends and people I've been wanting to meet for some time;

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones, Andrew Hoppin, NASA, Chris Riley, Apple, Eric Ryan, Method, Jean-Marie Shields, Starbucks, Mark Lewis, DDB, Polly LaBarre, CNN, Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy PR.

NOTE: This is a partial list.

More details on the event can be found here.

Posted by Ed Cotton Back in March, Starbucks asked their customers for ideas, it created a website and the ideas have been been flooding in, exceeding the expectations of the company.

It makes me thing that every brand should be doing this, why not?

Here are the top 20 ideas that are being considered.

It's a great list that includes new products and experiences, ways to reduce waste and more healthy items.

Option to not print Receipts



Posted by Ed Cotton Interesting data visualization exercise from the folks at Current TV.

It's a technique that fits the brand.

In 48 seconds they cover the 500 most popular images on current.com.

The length of time the image stays on the screen represents its popularity.

Done as an experiment for the Web 2.0 conference and spotted here.




Posted by Ed Cotton "Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else.

The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture.

Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup."

NYT


Posted by Ed Cotton Notes from Web2.0 Expo 2008 (SF) (37.78502894901508 , -122.40164279937744) This year felt a lot less hectic than last year. Crowds were noticeably smaller than last year, probably because of the economy. Discounting the crowd size as a factor, the buzz seemed more controlled and thoughtful than last year. The question has shifted, thankfully, from how do we make a mashup and put it on Facebook to how do we make the cloud smarter, easier to use and the same regardless of how you access it. Open standards are the rallying call of the day.

Tim O'Reilly’s keynote was nothing short of inspiring in my opinion. The takeaway: we are at a critical juncture in human technological advancement and we should all concentrate on how to use any and all of the various inputs around us in new and unthought-of of ways to get people useful information in real time, without regard to desktop vs mobile vs refrigerator. He’s encouraging us to all look at the big picture and do something amazing with the mountain of technology that surrounds us. Obviously O’Reilly loves the open source methods for doing these things, as should we all.

 
From Joseph Smarr’s Web2.0 presentation

Most exciting new technology (stack): OpenId, OAuth, OpenSocial, Google Social Graph API. I attended a great session hosted by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo where he talked being able to login to a site that you’ve never been to before using OpenId and having the site auto-populate your profile with content from your friends already on the site based on your social graph. The need to maintain a spreadsheet full of username and passwords goes away. The need to manually find your friends on the 27th social site you join is gone. The need to give your google login to an application so it can scrape your contacts is gone. You maintain control over how much of your information the site can use via OAuth. Permissions to use your data can be revoked at any time. Eventually everything works this way - one cloud working seamlessly from the user’s perspective with complete control over the profile data. There’s been a lot of coverage about OpenSocial and OpenId already this year, but to brainstorm about what these technologies could actually do together is exciting.

Mesh from Microsoft makes your data available 'anywhere' you want it and should be interesting. It was kind of funny how much prominence the mac user had in the promo video they showed though. Can’t wait to have my files synced everywhere I go. The little bit they talked about the smarts built into the technology sounded interesting as well.

How to make money by the pallet: Dash’s ability to glean (and then sell) specific search queries from in car GPS units to companies wondering where they should build their next franchise as demo’d with aggregated Starbucks searches along an Arkansas highway.

Posted by Josh Brewer The Daily Show puts the idea that Americans are now hoarding and stockpilling basic supplies like rice, into very sharp focus.

Sam's Club now restricts rice purchases to four bags per visit.


Of course, we know The Daily Show's stock in trade is satire, but the WSJ?


"I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax."

Could Americans be so scared and fearful of rising prices that this Summer we will see mile long lines at gas stations and riots in the grocery aisles over bread, pasta and rice?

Posted by Ed Cotton Some great thinking from Clay Shirky on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads....

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? "

It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!

From a version of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week.




Posted by Ed Cotton