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In the future, Urban Outfitters will learn from its mistakes. Instead of stealing designs, they’ll “steal designs,” and leverage its sullied reputation to increase sales. Here’s a simple three step guide to how they’ll do it.

1. Identify an indie designer whose products they’d like to “steal.” Strike a secret deal with said designer, whereby they license the designs and agree to share revenue back with the designer.

2. List new products for sale on UrbanOutfitters.com. Designer “complains” on the Internet, fueling outrage on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., driving traffic both to the designer’s indie store as well as UrbanOutfitters.com. Milk the self-righteous anger over Corporate America Stealing Designs for incremental sales and awareness.

3. Profit.

This would make for a great test, comparing sales driven directly through UrbanOutfitters.com (using all their standard marketing tactics - SEO, SEM, merchandising on the site, etc.) to sales on the indie designer’s store front, with awareness driven primarily through viral / social means. Of course, it’s a tactic best used sparingly, lest those pesky Internet people catch on to what you’re up to.

Mark Zuckerberg, foodie:

This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.

The clock is ticking on how long it will take an ambitious food entrepreneur to open the first “kill it, cook it, eat it” retail space in a major metropolitan area. It would be the natural evolution of urban food retail (i.e. wine bars, boutique grocers, cooking schools) and the local food movement: a clean, well-lit place where sophisticated urbanites can experience the guilt-wracked thrill of slaughtering their own chicken...and then poaching it in white wine.

To maximize site utilization, they’d offer a series of classes on sustainable urban farming, slaughtering techniques and best practices in home butchering. The space (with staff and animals) would be available after hours for private kill/cook/eat events, perfect for team building or birthday parties. And with the right set of equipment, kill/cook/eat could come to you, extending the “home-delivered meals” concept a bit further.

There’d be the obvious logistical challenges, of course – animal transportation, waste management, zoning, etc. But with the right branding, kill/cook/eat can command a significant price premium over other other urban food experiences. After all, it’s not about the meal, it’s about being more thankful for the food you have to eat.

This new research from Edelman is fascinating.

The 2011 [Value, Engagement and Trust in the Era of Social Entertainment] study shows that the value consumers are getting from the Entertainment Industry has fallen by 68% in all areas, and only 17% of all respondents feel that entertainment sources today provide "very good" or "excellent value."

Smartly, they're including social networking in their survey of entertainment types.

Social networking sites, which the majority of respondents believe are a form of entertainment, have remained stable with 31% of consumers in the U.K. and 37% in the U.S. saying they provided "very good" or "excellent" value.

Emphasis mine. Per their footnotes, 57% of people in the US and 45% of people in the UK view social networking as entertainment. All of this stands to reason: as the amount of content available to consumers increases, and the choice in delivery mechanisms increase, the perceived value of any one individual type of entertainment content is bound to decline. But it turns out that nothing beats your friends as a source of entertainment.

The whole release is worth reading. I have a different point of view than Edelman in re. What It Means -- it's not just about entertainment brands needing to figure out how to deliver content across multiple platforms; it's about needing to figure out how to create emotional connections with characters and stories that approach "friend" status. If you can make your content become part of their lives and identity, they'll seek it out in the channel(s) that's best for them.

It was odd following @nytimes today, as they traded their headline bot for two editors staffing the account, hand-crafting the day's tweets. While I appreciate the hypothesis (actual humans will drive more engagement) and the methodology of the experiment (they're staffing the account with Liz Heron and Lexi Mainland), as a follower I'm not so sure...

Now, I'm usually the first one to argue for more curation. But The New York Times brand is built around being the newspaper of record. Almost by definition their news product is not an unfiltered stream of latest headlines -- it's a human edited collection of what they feel you should know. If a story makes the New York Times, it's for a reason, and the @nytimes stream is an authoritative source of what the paper's editors see as worthy of being a New York Times headline. Adding another layer of editorial to that already strong signal feels like an unnecessary filter.

This isn't an argument for all bots all the time. For every publication this decision is going to be about brand identity, reader expectations, audience size, cost, and, of course, performance. I could be 100% wrong on this, and Ms. Heron and Ms. Mainland could blow the numbers out of the water and 10x the traffic from Twitter back to nytimes.com. But for this follower, @nytimes dropped a notch today.

PS -- Get off my lawn. And while you're at it, go follow @nytbot5000, for this tweet alone: "It's okay @lexinyt and @lheron. Go eat dinner or go to art gallery openings or whatever you do. I've got you covered tonight. I always do."

I star/heart things compulsively. In a moderately particular order...

Ben Fry, co-creator of Processing's remarks on data visualization tools getting into the hands of amateurs:  "The more that people are doing the work — it all kind of goes to improve the conversation of what’s good, bad useful and what’s not." Amen. / Speaking of visualization, these plush statistical distribution pillows look fantastic; much better than the pillow pets that have invaded my house... / More visualization: via Kottke, silly charts.

Tim Bray's wrapup post on Google IO is a good read, especially for what he did during his welcoming address, asking everyone to take three minutes and introduce themselves to the people around them. "The experience was striking as the noise in the room ramped from audience hush to barroom roar in about a half-second." Be sure to click through to see his photo of what happened. I need to remember to do this next time I'm in front of a big crowd; it's the conference version of passing the peace in church. 

Adam Mathes is doing textagon-styled lessons on product management: "product management is the precise application of the word NO." I wish I had learned that earlier on in my career; saying no is hard, and when done well should be rewarded more than saying yes. / Speaking of the ability to say "no," the sky/net mashup joke that made its way around the web just wasn't as funnyscary as it would have been back when Microsoft mattered more.

Micro-micro-media: there's an email newsletter called Lounges Monthly, for people who enjoy airport lounges. / On the consumption end of the spectrum, Ken Norton on things that would have blown his 16-year old mind. (File under everything's amazing nobody's happy.) / Khoi Vinh reimagines digital music packaging. "So much happens around the music that we enjoy, but why go elsewhere to conduct the kind of social interchange — tweets, blog posts, updates, amateur covers, video riffing — that an album inspires when you could just use the album itself as a gateway?" (I'm not so sure...I'm rather a fan of those tweets, blogs, updates, covers, video riffing...)

Finally, two of my favorite Internet micro-stars, talking: Kevin Fanning interviews Joshua Allen. "I feel like the time I’ve put in writing stuff for the internet has been one long throat-clearing, but I have no idea what I’m going to finally say."

Ahem.

Leviathan is a massive Anish Kapoor sculpture in the Grand Palais that he's dedicated to missing artist Ai Weiwei.

Photo on Flickr from Co & Isa.

via newsweek.tumblr.com

Across the wire comes news that scientists have found that art makes you feel good.

We put people in a scanner and showed them a series of paintings every ten seconds. We then measured the change in blood flow in one part of the brain. The reaction was immediate. What we found was the increase in blood flow was in proportion to how much the painting was liked. The blood flow increased for a beautiful painting just as it increases when you look at somebody you love. It tells us art induces a feel good sensation direct to the brain.

Awww. So sweet. I think we should have some Clown Torture to celebrate.

Feel better? You're welcome!

Stellar's pagination nav:

Mlkshk's pagination nav:

Can't we all just get along?

Last year sometime I switched up the tagline on this blog to "Let's make a sandwich." If you were following along with pop culture at the time, you knew the reference. A year later, people keep asking me "What's with the tagline? What kind of sandwich?" How quickly they forget.

The tagline has stuck because I think about blogging -- the way I do it -- like I think about sandwiches. There's a basic form, and a nearly inifinite number of expressions of that form. This particular blog is a mishmash of things that are interesting to me -- and because it's my sandwich, I avoid ingredients that I'm not fond of.  Like pickles. There are no pickles on this blog.

I just read two posts that are the roast beef and cheddar of today's sandwich. One from Tim Carmody (yep him again) while guesting at Kottke.org, and one from Paul Kedrosky. Both are about blogging; Tim's about structure and Paul's about content.

Carmody identifies the core ingredients in a blog post (title / link / pull / response, with comments optional), and then goes on to talk about the core value of blogs being watching what happens with those ingredients...

We've got officially-approved categorial mantras like curation and community engagement -- as if what mattered in great blogs was their arty taste, skill at embedding viral videos, or pushing out tweets to their followers. Rather than watching an agile mind at work, one attached to a living, breathing person, and feeling like you were tapped into a discussion that was bringing together the most vital parts of the web.

Kedroksy's post, titled, appropriately, "Bitchy Readers" is about what happens when an audience brings their hyper-vertical media expectations to a blog attached to a living, breathing person with an active mind. He has readers that want him to stick to finance. Fat chance.

To all of you feeling that way I have one thing to say: Piss off. I honestly don’t care what you’d like to see. If you want someone who surveys his/her readership and provides that content for them, go to USA Today. Or maybe some other blog. Here I put what I want, when I want, about the things I’m interested in. If that cuts across geology, finance, backcountry skiing, extreme sports and whatever else, that’s the way it goes. And it’s not changing.

There, I just made a sandwich for you...about sandwiches. Whoa.

This morning friend of the show Mike Monteiro tweeted:

Whatever. I’ve got an editorial calendar and it says right here that on Thursday I’m supposed to take on Europe.

Now, I've followed Mike on Twitter for quite some time, and I don't doubt his willingness or ability to take on all of Europe on a Thursday. However, I was pretty sure he was kidding about having an editorial calendar. So I asked Twitter...

HEY TWITTER: Let's build an editorial calendar for @Mike_FTW: http://typewith.me/e9ZTaraeZu

And oh did people respond. I love the Internet.

TypeWithMe -- the service I linked to -- is an EtherPad descendent and lets (up to 16) people collaborate on a document at one time, color coding contributions along the way.  I had it open in a tab for a lot of the day, and watched the multi-colored insanity just pour in. If you visit that URL above, it's probably still going. (I wonder what the half life of the contents of that document will be over the "long" run?)

For, um, posterity the current state of the document is archived here. There are lots of Gruber jokes. And Phillies jokes. I ran it through OS X's text summary service to get it down to something excerptable, and here's what came out:

• May 16, Mon: Pitch @zeldman AEA talk topic, "Fuck all y'all, pay me, by which I mean, make your checks out to Mule Design right now." Afternoon tangent: Post Instagram from Twin Peaks opining how much better it is to walk up a hill with a beard
• June 7, Tues: Make a new t-shirt making fun of Gruber & sell it at WWDC in the exhibit hall.
• June 8, Wed: Trick Dan Benjamin into letting me onto The Talk Show in order to gang up on John with Dan making fun of the Yankees.
• August 5, Fri: Spend an episode of Let's make mistakes on how a random tweet three months ago landed you a ridiculously packed calendar.
• August 6, Sat: Wish a happy 30th birthday to the first thing to wreck @Maria_Pete's vagina, then chuck the calendar and choose to do your own thing.

Yep. That works. If you haven't contributed your own, you still can.

February 2007 on this blog, about the demise of Aaron Sorkin's meta-television series Studio 60:

I'm hoping Sorkin finds another TV vehicle soon, lest our national broadcast airwaves go without their recommended weekly allowance of pediconferencing.

Sorkin didn't need to find another TV vehicle, since he found a social network and turned it into The Social Network. But via Graham Smith's zeitgasm (via booktwo.org) comes news of a group of people who have been playing the characters of Studio 60 on Twitter. 

While our world’s Studio 60 was cancelled, the tweets imagine that the show-within-the-show is still going. ... They also made specific references to events from the show: Jordan and Danny getting locked on the roof, Matt’s brief drug addiction and hallucination, Jordan’s pregnancy, Jack’s meeting with Japanese businessmen, Peripheral Vision Man, and an endless procession of animals getting trapped beneath the stage. None of the tweets were particularly funny on their own or even as a whole, and unless you had a serious familiarity with the original, they would hardly make sense.

I have a serious familiarity with the original, so Jordan and Danny getting locked on the roof actually means something to me. Like Smith, I'd love to see Twitter used for more time-bound, character driven story telling. In the meantime here's a Twitter list (no guarantee of permanence) in case you want to pediconference in your mind along with Matt Albie, Danny Tripp and the rest of the unrealistically hyperverbal sanctimoniously fictitious television characters...now being impersonated by real people.

Because even if it's fake it's real.

It was an odd but good thing to load up Kottke.org this morning and remember that he's turned over the reins to guest blogger Tim Carmody for the week. (Nothing against Jason, it just is wild to have a shift like that...and I love reading Tim.) His post The limits of crowds mixes reactions to the death of Bin Laden, an editor's note from Jason, a Storify thread and notes on last night's scene outside the White House into a meditation on how Bin Laden has stunted our collective ability to process collectively, if you'll forgive the redundant redundancy.

This guy -- this son-of-a-bitch who murdered thousands of people here ten years ago and helped murder many more all around the world -- has us so twisted up that we do not know how to feel about him, or ourselves, at all.

And our inability to come together, and to talk about that, which was already latent in the way our media work, and all the more amplified by what ten years of this twisting and torturing, and being twisted into torture and then lying about torture, only makes it worse.

Tim's set his own bar high for the rest of the week. You owe it to yourself to tune in.

So all the laughter and enthusiastic applause at the Correspondents' Dinner tonight when the President skewered Donald Trump...wasn't that coming from the same people who covered the birthers and made the whole story line possible?

Just checking.