I’m heading to the airport shortly to fly to Austin for a geek-filled weekend at SXSW Interactive. (Arriving at different times are three other geeksters from Hammock: Patrick R., Laura, and Austin-based Summer.) Also, the 16-year-old in my family is coming along to soak up the ScreenBurn Festival. I’ll blog some, but will probably be using my Flickr account and twitter.com/rexhammock for most updates. (My updates to Twitter are also displayed on the right hand column of my blog under the heading, “Where is Rex?”) I’ll be tagging all my posts here and on Flick with both the sxsw and sxsw2007 tags.
Next time you hear an expert explain to you how the “Youtube” generation gets all of their “content” from the web, remember that I pointed you to a story from earlier in the week that appeared in the Seattle P-I that reports how teenagers are buying books at the fastest rate in decades. Quote: “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.” It is a confusing time for marketers who want everyone in a specific demographic to “consume content” from the same tube.
Let’s all feel sorry for those business-to-business writers and editors who cover the marketing beat for a “professional” marketing audience. See, they have to use terms like “user-generated content” or “consumer-generated content” or “amateur content” to make the distinction clear between video, audio or words that are created by “ordinary” people who are not necessarily guaranteed they will be paid for that self-expression and video, audio or words that are created by those who are paid to create it, whether it’s self-expressive or not.
For example, here is a link to a story on Adweek.com that has the headline “Southwest Picks Consumer-Created Spot” (how one “consumes” air travel beats me, but I have pity on the reporter, so I’m not going to repeat my rant about the term “consumer”). In the article, we learn that Southwest Airlines’ experiment to solicit advertising created by amateurs will be seen during an April telecast of the NBA playoffs. (And on Youtube right now, as embedded below.)
The winning consumer-amateur was Brian Cates, a member of Southwest’s Rapid Rewards frequent flyer program, who produces videos for a local comedy troupe in Oklahoma City. Wait! Have those folks ever been paid to perform? Has Cates ever been paid to produce a video? Let’s check with the NCAA of “amateur content” and see if we have a violation of the amateur-status of consumers to create user-generated content. Surely there must be a “professional content creators guild” who maintains such guidelines.
Obviously, this post is amateur humor generated by me, an excessive consumer of Southwest air travel. By the way, it’s a funny ad — see below. Sidenote: I’ve been on close to 120 Southwest flights during the past 12 months. None of them, as I recall, were the result of an embarassing moment from which I wanted to escape.
This is a first for me — a Twitter-initiated conversation. Tom Biro (The Media Drop) reached me via Twitter last night moments after I had activated my phone’s text-messaging to receive Twitter updates — preparing for some SXSW Twitter experiments. I asked Tom to switch over to IM, as I’m still learning how to use Twitter (not much of a learning curve to it, however). Anyway, between phone calls to the 16-year-old son — who’s joining me in Austin tonight as his boarding school’s Spring break begins today — and me watching the SEC basketball tournament (sorry, Tennessee fans), Tom and I talked about the future of magazines.
Audio: The popularity of camera phones and lightweight digital cameras means previously private and embarrassing moments are now made public. Who owns your image on the Internet, and are there limits to privacy?
I’m heading to the airport shortly to fly to Austin for a geek-filled weekend at SXSW Interactive. (Arriving at different times are three other geeksters from Hammock: Patrick R., Laura, and Austin-based Summer.) Also, the 16-year-old in my family is coming along to soak up the ScreenBurn Festival. I’ll blog some, but will probably be using my Flickr account and twitter.com/rexhammock for most updates. (My updates to Twitter are also displayed on the right hand column of my blog under the heading, “Where is Rex?”) I’ll be tagging all my posts here and on Flick with both the sxsw and sxsw2007 tags.
