Kevin Rothermel

No Spoilers.

Indie Brand Strategist
Professor, VCU Brandcenter
No Spoilers.
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Blogging is My Generation’s Big Band Music.

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CJ Chilvers runs a great blog. Especially when he writes about blogging. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. He linked to a post from the IA Blog about some people ditching social media and returning to blogs:

There seems to be a weak undercurrent of old and young bloggers like us that feel sentimental or curious and want to bring back blogging. Blogging won’t save the world. But, hell, after two weeks now, we can confirm: it feels great to be back on the blogging line. If you are one of those old or young bloggers, please join in. Drop Facebook, drop Twitter and drop Medium for original thought. Own your traffic. You can use them to engage in discussion. But don’t get lost in there. Write daily. Publish as often as you have something to say. Link to other blogs.

CJ adds:

The why is clear: social media is messing us up as people and as a society.

I agree.

It feels good to get away from algorithmic feeds, stop reading about the daily dismantling of liberal democracy, and look for what’s interesting in the open waters of the Web. Write about things. Share things. Read beyond the headlines. Read other people’s thoughts on the world. Thoughts that aren’t overcooked into two-dollar advice listicles on Medium. Speculative thoughts. Weird thinking. Writing that isn’t trying to sell something or kickstart someone’s career as some sort of guru. Be reminded about the greatness of Kottke.

I’ve been writing here again and I can feel it making me better at my work. I’m finding more interesting things out in the world again. I don’t have to worry about being attacked by Russian MAGA bots. And I generally feel better about the Internet.

An Ugly Job for an Ugly Bird

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Crowbars: Vending Machines Reward Crows for Cleaning Up Cigarette Butts

Crows are adept learners, able to use tools and think outside the box. Notably, they have already been trained to use specialized ‘vending machines’ in which they receive food for depositing a coin. By extension, butts could be the new coin of the urban crow realm.

Maybe smokers would be more likely to quit if lighting up carried the risk of being assaulted by flocks of crazed, nicotine addicted crows in desperate need of their next food pellet.

(HT David Vogeleer)

A better way to fight fake news

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Fake News has been a consistent topic in my classes over the past two years. The non-partisan idea that this stuff is out there, spreads all over social media, and that platforms like Facebook have to be really careful in how they step in to make judgements on what people post. None of our off the cuff 30-minute discussions led to a solution. Shocking, yes.

It turns out that a direct approach of fact checking wasn’t the answer, it was providing more information in the form of related articles.

Facebook found a better way to fight fake news

Alibaba and Making Cities Revolve Around People

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This article almost reads like a press release, but I like that Alibaba is always thinking big and thinking in terms of how to use technology to help connect people, stores, and in this case, cities, into smarter networks.

…the city of tomorrow should be able to adapt to its surroundings and inhabitants, almost like a living organism, so that municipal services like public transport, health care and education can be delivered in the right measure and time to minimise waste and optimise usage.

If you’ve ever been stopped at a red light, with no other cars in the same zipcode, it’s easy to see how this could make small incremental changes for the better. Alibaba already claims to have improved traffic speed by “up to 11%” in one city district by simply sending out instant traffic alerts and route suggestions to drivers.

But zooming out to a city-wide view, seeing the city not as chaos, but as an adaptable, interconnected system is something else entirely. Connecting people, automated vehicles, buildings, and other services together could bring about much larger changes that we might not yet even imagine.

Though it’s really easy to imagine the problems this might cause given bias built into systems by accident or by fiat.

Alibaba’s next moon shot is to make cities adapt to their human inhabitants, technology seer says

Scarcity, Burning H&M Clothes for Power, and Folk Concepts

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Scarcity is the new Business Crack

Real Housewives and great breweries are all in on the scarcity game. The trick is to out-hype your supply. Create lines. Sell out. No IPA for anyone that hasn’t been in line for at least an hour.
It’s wearing thin with me, but more importantly, it’s wearing thin with the sneaker crowd.…

…customers are annoyed by the constant flood of products that they know will be extremely difficult for them to get their hands on. “It’s not fun buying shoes anymore” says Ruffles.
…‘buying sneakers currently is like dragging your balls over a street of broken glass and then dipping them in vinegar’, he then went on to say, ‘sometimes I just want one pair to actually wear, sort of feels weird saying that, such is the game today.’”

Paul Ruffles, a strategist with a great last name, mentions:

New models used to be gradually fed into the market and allowed to percolate and digest with stores and consumers — why do you think retro models are so beloved? because people were allowed to build emotional attachments to them, now it’s purely transactional — they are rammed into the marketplace with millions of dollars and assets behind them.

And that’s the rub. It’s great for the short term. But over time it becomes a terrible addiction.

Fast Fashion is so Hot Right Now. Fast Fashion. 
A Swedish power plant is burning discarded H&M clothes for fuel:

“For us it’s a burnable material,” said Jens Neren, head of fuel supplies at Malarenergi AB, which owns and operates the plant in Vasteras, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Stockholm. “Our goal is to use only renewable and recycled fuels.”
According to Bloomberg, the plant has burned about 15 tons of discarded clothing from H&M so far in 2017.
H&M makes fast fashion. Its useful life is also fast. Because it’s inexpensive. And cheap. I’d like to see their business pivot to making clothes specifically to fuel power plants.

Handwavvy as Folk

Folk concepts are often imprecise and vague (healing energy, true love). If the phrase “folk concept” is also imprecise and vague, if its referents shift over time and context, if it presents a hand-wave-y spectrum rather than a hard category, then it shares the nature of the things it describes.
In advertising, these are usually things found in decks about social media strategy. But you can’t prove it, old man. You just don’t get it.