MisEntropy

The customer is the ad agency

Tripletz.com is an on demand publishing service for user created greeting cards. But that's not all. The designs one creates can also be made available for sale to others too. If a particular design sells 111 times, Tripletz will pay the creator $111.

Threadless is a T-Shirt company that sells designs that are contributed by a community of consumers/t-shirt designers. These designs are voted upon by the community. The winning designs get produced and the winning designer receives a cash reward along with a cut of the profits from the sale of the design.

Distributed co-creation - that's what it's called - is here to stay. And the above two are just some of many such business opportunities being pursued with great gusto all across the world. (Threadless already is a big success story and a poster boy for the phenomenon.)

Which brings me to the heresy in the title of this post.

I don't see why something that works for software, greeting cards, t-shirts, Lego kits and even cosmetics (a brand called Missha in South Korea) can't work for advertising. In fact, I don't just think it could work - I think its a development that's inevitable.

Here's how it could/should work.

A brand or more likely, a group of brands, will build an online social network/community of designers, communicators and non-professionals who will be then provided with the inside dope about a brand - the product, the service, the offer - in effect, the brief. These co-creators will also be provided an 'advertising' kit with the necessary tools to help them put their ideas in shape - these could include photography, video clips, etc.

The advertising submissions generated are then subjected to a vote - both by the community and the consuming audience at large. This will happen under the supervision of the brand custodians - who will weed out profanities and controversial stuff (and who hopefully will go easy on less-than-mainstream messages.)

The submissions that score well will then be placed in the relevant media - and tracked for results. The ones that don't generate responses will be weeded out - and the ones that do will receive more airtime. The success of the later could also convince the co-creator or the brand to seek extensions of executions, which will then again go through the same process.

When a piece turns in a pre-agreed number of responses, the creator gets paid. And the cycle continues.

This will result in two things. A) There's a huge variety of messages and strategies that are generated for each task - all for no cost. B) Advertising that works will be rewarded.

Who can argue with that? Apart from agencies, ie.

Admittedly, distributed co-creation of advertising works better for direct/demand-generation/online messages where the tracking of consumer responses is easier and implicit. But as tracking abilities and models increase in sophistication, there's no reason why it shouldn't work for all kinds of advertising - and across all media.

But what about the brand and its core essence? Won't rampant co-creation destroy the singular positioning a brand has fightingly carved for itself?

You wouldn't worry about that, if you know what happens when the long tail collides with the Victorian world of brand-building.

[Image via Kate A]

Necker Cube and the Art of Planning

Necker Cube (pictured above) is a two-dimensional line drawing that’s perceived by the human eye as a transparent three-dimensional cube. The optical illusion it’s famous for, however, doesn’t just end there.

Stare at the Necker Cube for a while and you’ll suddenly see it flip to face a different direction. Keep on staring at it and you can get it to flip back and forth between these two different faces.

According to Wikipedia, this illusion is perpetrated because of the way the lines of the cube are drawn – when they intersect, there’s nothing to tell us which of the lines is in front and which one is behind. This makes both interpretations perfectly valid – thereby hiding, and revealing, a different face to the cube.

The Necker Cube is also my favourite analogy for what a planner – and the discipline of planning – should do. I believe it’s a planner’s job to stare at the world long enough to find the flip-view in a certain situation. A view that’s consistent with everything you know – but one that’s often invisible to the casual eye.

The world is full of intersecting lines where – in reality – there’s no information about which one’s in front and which one’s behind. Similar to our casual first view of the Necker Cube, we adopt a straightforward interpretation that seems obvious – and neglect looking for other valid ways of seeing the same thing.

By deliberately focusing on the intersections in the world – a planner should open a window for others to see what was imperceptible earlier.

PS: If you haven’t been able to find the flip face of the Necker Cube above, try focusing on the intersections of the lines. If you’re still unable to see the two faces, here’s an animation that makes it easier to spot the two views.

The Great Wall of Planning

Campaign recently carried a piece - Planner v Planner - in which David Hackworthy of The Red Brick Road and Ivan Pollard of Naked Communications debated whether an account planner can do a communication planner's role - or vice versa.

Both echo each other's thoughts - arguing for the exclusion of their own territory and specialisation. Their mutual view is that there's nothing stopping one from doing the job of the other - except a basketload of specialised skills that one wouldn't reasonably expect to find in the opposite number.

Personally, I stand for the daVinci-sation of planning and of all advertising itself - that one only is as limited as one believes he or she is.

Nonetheless, in a world where walls are being torn down - especially between creative and the rest of the agency - I find it amusing that it hasn't arrested the inclination to build more walls and ghettos elsewhere.

[Original pic by Jōsé]

A river of plannerliness

In a recent interview, Ameen Sayani - colossus of Indian radio - had this to say about singers :

"A good singer is like a river which has its origins in a faraway past. As it flows, it gathers treasures the shores offer, and also gives to the shores the treasures it has to offer."

In my opinion, it also sums up wonderfully what good planners (and good planning blogs) should be like.

[Original pic by SpringChick]

You must download the change you want to see in the world

The Elongtaing Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand building incorporating long tail economics - my Atticus-winning whitepaper - is now available as a ChangeThis Manifesto.

[Original pic by r1chardm]

Plannersphere Search additions

For quite a few weeks now, I have had pending requests from planners to add their blogs to the list of sites the MisEntropy Plannersphere Search Engine is configured to search. These have piled up alongside other planning blogs I have discovered and bookmarked. After much dilly-dallying, I sat myself down this week and managed to update the search engine.

These are the blogs I have added during the current update: A Brit Planner in the Rockies, a geeky planner in manila, A Hypnotype's Blog, Adam Crowe, Artificial Simplicity, Big Picture on Advertising, Big Secret Pizza Party, Brain Sells, Brand Noise, Bumped Heads (Part Deux), Case Study Addict, Conformists Unite!, Cool Branding, Diablog Cafe, do.palico.us, Disciplined Creativity, Ed Reilly, El Gaffney, Everything's Better With Brentter, Feel anything?, Fredrik Sarnbald, furtherandfaster, g.chameleon, Hee-Haw Marketing, herebenotions, I See What You Mean, Icecream 4 everyone, junior planner i am, Lise Lauritzen, Make Marketing History, Motherbrain, NoahBrier.com, Pink Air, Planner's delight, planningblog, Planning For Good, positive disruption by: Tom Martin, Right-Half Chow, Rob Forshaw, Ryan MacMillan, Serendipity Book, Servant of Chaos, Show Me The Canyon, Sidewalk Life, The Hidden Persuader, The Staufenberger Repository, Thought Curry, Trendsspotting, weakly thunk.

For those who came in late: The MisEntropy Plannersphere Search Engine is a customised search engine (with a Google backend) that restricts its results to blogs from the plannersphere. This potentially weeds out lots of otherwise useless entries - ie, if you are searching for plannersphere conversations you vaguely remember, or the buzz around plannery-type topics.

If you are a planner with a blog that doesn't figure is this master list, do mail me and I shall only be glad to include it in.

[Original pic by Karl Randay {pixelherder}]

Customised Plannersphere Search Engine

Have just cobbled together a customised Google search engine - MisEntropy Plannersphere Search Engine - that limits its results only to advertising planners' blogs. By searching within this strict confines, I am hoping it will save me - and any one else who wants to use it - valuable time otherwise spent weeding out unnecessary stuff.

I have taken the list of planners from the plannersphere wiki - if you are a planner with a blog that isn't listed among the targetted sites, do mail me and I shall add it. I would also love to hear any feedback on the customised search engine itself.

Atticus Award for 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication' paper

Open to professionals working in WPP companies around the world, the Atticus Awards "honour original published thinking in communications services."

And this years list of winners features one familiar name - mine! My paper 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating Long Tail economics' has been adjudged a winner in the Branding and Identity category.

Although I have won a few awards back in my days as a creative, this is one I have been working towards for some time. And one that I am absolutely proud of :)

Social media - just another place to advertise or a new business opportunity?

Wrote another piece that appeared in agencyfaqs! today.

You can read it by following this link : Social media - just another place to advertise or a new business opportunity?

Wrote another piece that appeared in agencyfaqs! today.

You can read it by following this link : Social media - just another place to advertise or a new business opportunity?

Where's the long tail of brand communication? [UPDATED]

I have been hard at work the past few months hammering away at extending Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory to the field of brand communication and brand-building. After repeated reading and re-reading of Chris' book and writing and re-writing of my own thoughts, I have finally got myself to hit the 'make pdf' button and have digitally shrink-wrapped copies of the resulting paper for distribution.

In it's 22 pages you'll find the answers all of these questions : What do you get when you apply the first principles of long tail economics to the craft of brand building? Can you create a complex, layered brand image by resorting to simple advertising? What role is user generated content going to play in the future of mainstream advertising? What lessons can space exploration and robotics teach the practitioners of brand-building? What's the evolving science of negative databases and why do we brand custodians need to learn about it? Why is the single-minded brand proposition an anachronism in the contemporary world of marketing?

You can download the paper here : The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating long tail economics

I would love to hear comments and views.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson has just posted and commented on the paper on his Long Tail blog :)

UPDATE 2: Atticus Award for the 'The Elongating Tail...' paper

UPDATE 3 (20th Aug 2007): A proposal to convert the above paper into a ChangeThis Manifesto is currently up for vote. Please do vote for it by following this link. Voting ends 16th Sept. 2007.

To monetise or not : lessons from chess

In a recent column for Campaign, Russell Davies writes that the difference between the previous dotcom boom and the current one is the seeming indifference of current digital media startup brands towards monetisation. Which is why, he concludes, the incumbent media owners will have to figure out how to compete with someone who's happy working for free - or for comparatively little.

In line with Russell's point that people who are talking about monetisation now are those that don't get it, this current fashionable point of view holds that we may have finally reversed capitalism. The new 'with-it' breed of companies are willingly embracing the small is beautiful outlook - small payroll, small profits, small VC funding, etc.

I think something a little more complicated than that is happening. And to illustrate it, I will draw upon the game of chess.

There are two kinds of advantages you can hold in a game of chess - material or positional. Material advantage is holding more pieces than your opponent (having captured more pieces or lost fewer due to blunders.) And material advantage will almost always lead to a win (ie., in the hands of a competent player.)

Positional advantage is a bit more tricky. It's an advantage gained out of the relative positions of pieces on the board. Though positional advantage is ultimately intangible, in the hands of an expert player any positional advantage will eventually convert into a material advantage (which will lead to a win.) Which is why the better chess players play gambits - willingly sacrificing material pieces to gain much more positional influence.

Playing with positional advantage is tricky also because the lead you hold is vaporous. If the player who holds it doesn't continue to play the right moves, it vanishes into thin air - it is less persistent than material advantage. Which is why, the common advice for average chess players is to convert any positional advantage they have to a material one as soon as possible.

But the better, and truly great, chess players often ignore that rule. Secure and confident that they will play only the right moves in the game ahead, they carry and build on this intangible advantage and press ahead - and chase victory and greatness.

Needless to say, when chess began in its modern avatar, all players played for material advantage - in a swashbuckling style reminiscent of the time. It's only later that chess theorists and players figured out the concept of positional influence. But positional thinking didn't mean that the object of the game had changed. It merely recognised that when the other player is also competent enough to keep an eye on material gained and lost, other kinds of advantage have to be sought.

I think what's happening in the digital media marketplace is similar. The early players were the swashbuckling types - playing without any knowledge of the reputation economy (the corresponding equivalent of positional influence.) But as the market matured, the better players have taken the game forward and begun to play for positional advantage, knowing fully well that 'monetise and run' tactics will not work as well - or will not take them to their goals.

And what of those guys who don't get it and who are speaking of monetisation currently? These are the not so experienced players who have eked out a positional advantage but aren't quite sure they are skilled enough to hold it. They are taking the advice given to an average chess player - convert your reputation into money soon, because it may not last.

To conclude, just because the digital media marketplace is mature enough to told more than one form of interchangeable currency - money and reputation - it doesn't quite mean the object of the game has changed. On the contrary it has only become more strategic, layered and finally interesting to watch.

[Before being relocated here, this post was originally written for a now defunct blog collective for planners.]

The Phoenix Checklist

Was looking through my notes recently and came across the Phoenix Checklist - a set of questions developed by the CIA to enable their agents and operatives to think about a problem thoroughly. It should come in handy for us planners and strategists.

The problem

• Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
• What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?
• What is the unknown?
• What is it you don't yet understand?
• What is the information you have?
• What isn't the problem?
• Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
• Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?
• Where are the boundaries of the problem?
• Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants of the problem?
• Have you seen this problem before?
• Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?
• Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown
• Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?
• Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?
• What are the best, worst and most probable cases you can imagine?

The plan

• Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?
• What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?
• How much of the unknown can you determine?
• Can you derive something useful from the information you have?
• Have you used all the information?
• Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem?
• Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step?
• What creative thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques?
• Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see?
• How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem?
• What have others done?
• Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result?
• What should be done? How should it be done?
• Where should it be done?
• When should it be done?
• Who should do it?
• What do you need to do at this time?
• Who will be responsible for what?
• Can you use this problem to solve some other problem?
• What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other?
• What milestones can best mark your progress?
• How will you know when you are successful?

[Before being relocated here, this post was originally written for a now defunct blog collective for planners.]

What I am going to tell the future

Just finished sending in my entries for the APSotW 'tell the future something' assignment.

Am quite pleased with a few, but I'd love to know which ones of these strike a chord with all of you.

(Just to sum up the task : what would you tell the future about brands/advertising/planning if you had only one sentence to say it in?)

* Any communication task can be reduced to an information flow problem.

* A brand is the recipient of a premium people are willing to pay in terms of price, time, attention, involvement, emotion, etc.

* Talking is not the same thing as communicating.

* Everything that has a beginning has an end - including your brand, your brand idea and the every day engagement you are now having with your consumer.

* A brand is a common shared experience between 2 or more people.

* Communication should be as simple as possible, but not any more simpler.
(misquoting none other than Albert Einstein!)

*A brand is anything that makes an attention profit - giving away a little of it to get lots more back.

* There are two approaches to do everything; an idea is the shorter one.

* The shorter and tighter the feedback loop between a brand and its consumers, the more successful it will be.

* Communication is what you are saying when you are not saying anything.

* (For planners:) What you know is always a subset of what you should know.

* If you aren't a consumer, you cannot be a marketer.

[Before being relocated here, this post was originally written for a now defunct blog collective for planners.]

The power of 30 seconds

So, India have finally won a test match on South African soil!

I am not a great fan of either form of cricket and rarely, if ever, watch it. I used to be even less interested in the Indian cricket team and the developments, or otherwise, that have been happening there ever since Greg Chappell came along.

But something changed inside of me in the past couple of months and I have followed this Test match very keenly from day one. And wonder of wonders, I have been rooting for Sourav Ganguly to do well, cement his place in the team and even probably lead us in the world cup next year.

So what happened to effect this dramatic transformation? Just 30 seconds of this :

I think this commercial was one of the better endorsement ads that Pepsi has done - and they have done a few. What more would you want from a commercial than sheen to rub off on both the endorser and the endorsed?

It also came at a difficult time for Sourav and I admire the bravery of both Sourav and Pepsi in doing it. (In an otherwise wonderfully scripted commercial, I just think the last line - "Apne dada ki baat sunoge na?" - was very inelegant.)

So, Sourav's wonderful comeback has begun - the papers are full of praise for his grit, determination, dignity and performance. I can't help but follow each of his innings and the fate of the Indian cricket team from now onwards.

And when I am at work, I'll never forget where it all began. With a 30 second commercial for a soft drink I don't drink.

[Before being relocated here, this post was originally written for a now defunct blog collective for planners.]

Footnotes to: Decoding the statue

Another Saturday. Another City City Bang Bang column by Santosh Desai. And another opportunity to add my own thoughts to the astute observations of Santosh.

This time, Santosh takes on statues of great men found in public places. He finds their corporeal nature a device to remember what they looked like rather than the ideas they championed. He finds their ubiquitous presence blindspots them to us, making them "a memory device designed to make us forget." He also notes that statues often better serve the negative purpose of misuse - defiling, or even being toppled (like Lenin, Saddam and countless others) - which is the only time people seem to notice them.

Here are a few things I'd like to add to the ruminations : It is true that statues serve to remind future generations of physical characteristics (like Gandhi wore round glasses and Marx had a big beard), but that's necessary because the only way most of us remember is through associating a physical persona and a face to a person. Just yesterday, I was reading about a pro blogger who reported getting a huge spike in interaction from his readers after he added his photo to his 'about' page. That's how inbuilt this tendency is in all of us - even in these virtually semi-virtual times.

What I think is that for a few people, the statue remains a chronicle of the physical appearance. But for most others, that purpose is just the beginning. It's a visual tag, to which we attach whatever we learn about the person - however little or much it might be.

I also believe statues serve a more non-intuitive purpose - they aren't there to remind us of a particular great person. They exist to remind us that our own lives needn't be ordinary and in vain - that if we strive we can be 'immortal' too. Statues instill hope in us by telling us that obscurity is not the only common end we all face. A society that doesn't earmark some of its heroes for immortality in this way is encouraging widespread despair or selfishness - probably both.

Towards this end, it doesn't make a difference whose statue is there in the park - as long as the concept and reality of a statue in the park exists.

Finally, in times before photography, statues were one way to preserve the likeness of a person.And they also were narrators of glorious tales - in the subtle intricacies of sculpture, which formed a language anyone could read. For eg., if a statue of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

But as the concept of a hero evolved with time to include statesmen, reformers, freedom fighters, engineering heroes - the craft of 'narrative sculpture' was left behind. The grammar of what a statue conveyed remained stunted. And the statue in the park was left to take its most base form - a mere physical shell of a person rather than a narrative device that encapsulated a rich and inspiring life story.

[Before being relocated here, this post was originally written for a now defunct blog collective for planners.]

Coming soon: The Google AdWords Index?

This post from Seth Godin reminds me of something I have been wondering on and off for some time.

In a googlised and global economy, wouldn't the cost per thousand impressions of an ad on Google AdWords serve as a better indicator of Purchasing Power Parity than a Big Mac burger?

So will we see the Economist Big Mac Index replaced soon, or am I missing something?

Preciousness of life?

I am a regular reader of Santosh Desai's City City Bang Bang column in the Saturday edition of the Times Of India. It gives me much fodder for thought; I often ponder long and hard on the things Santosh picks from out of his hat.

The last edition of the column questioned our assumption of the supposed preciousness of life. Why, he questions, is my lifespan everyone else's concern - why should the people and the state watch out for whether I smoke, or drink, or go obese? Is it because it's commonly and wrongly miscontrued to be slick and sinful marketing's fault? Why is it that we spend so much time, energy and money on trying to keep ourselves (individually and collectively) alive longer? (I wish the column was available online, so that I could link to it rather than have to rely on my paraphrasing; but as far as I know it isn't.)

I was quite surprised that Santosh, who usually sees the uncommonness of things, didn't probably fathom the real reason why the state is concerned in the longevity of life.

Longer lifespans simply mean a significant increase in economic growth of a country as the consuming audience adds up, or remains added up for longer. It wouldn't have been obvious to me too - had I not read an article recently in either the Economist or the WIRED (can't remember where for the life of me; will update here when I locate it) that actually quoted ecomonic growth rate figures for every year increase in lifespans.

I might also be imagining this but I think the 'supposed preciousness of life' concept came about with the birth of the modern economy. For much of our history, life - at least that of the ordinary man- has been a fairly dispensable commodity. As our economy intermingled not just within our tribe but with a geographically widespread tapestry of creators, sellers, buyers and consumers, it became attractive to value each insignificant cog in this accelerating wheel.

[Before being relocated here, this post was originally written for a now defunct blog collective for planners.]

Is your brand oversteering or understeering?

Wrote a piece that appeared in agencyfaqs! today.

You can read it by following this link : Is your brand oversteering or understeering?

Footnotes to : the tyranny of the big idea

Some time ago, Russell Davies wrote a memorable post on the tyranny of the big idea. In it, he talked about how big ideas effectively behave like monopolies, making it difficult for other ideas to get in. The ideas that usually get shut out are the steady stream of small and refreshing ideas that would have otherwise driven up the interesting-ness score of a brand.

He instead recommends idea-buckets - nebulous entities that have the heart and the space to embrace the continuous stream of smaller ideas that keep the brand going. He ends the post with a list of instructions on how to get an idea-bucket for one's brand.

It's been a few months, but I have never stopped thinking about that post. To begin with, it  summed an essential truth that we see at work every day. We all believe in ideas, yet to our eternal puzzlement - ideas are sometimes the biggest enemies of other ideas.

More importantly, I was keen to seek and find an apt analogy for how this whole thing works. Russell himself grapples for an analogy in the post, leaving the reader (definitely me!) with an unignorable question - "Anyone got anything?"

I found the answer (and the analogy) I was seeking in a wonderful book called 'Life And How To Survive It' by Robin Skynner and John Cleese. In one chapter of the book, Robin Skynner describes the two basic modes the human mind functions in : open and closed.

When we are in the open mode "we open ourselves up to the world, take in new information, and let it change our internal maps to make them more comprehensive and accurate; so that they reflect even better how the world really is, and how we can work to get what what we want from it."

And "we move into the closed mode when some action has to be taken. We give our attention to achieving some particular goal. So temporarily we narrow our focus and stop taking in all the information around us."

Both the open and closed modes are essential to our functioning. But the problem arises when we have to switch from one to another. Moving from open to closed is quite easy (for most of us.) For eg. when you are looking for an advertising idea and find it, you automatically switch to crafting and executing it - a state where you aren't actively seeking any more new ideas.

But once in the closed mode, we find it difficult to relax and slip back into the open mode again. Essentially because "once we are in it, we are closed off to the kind of information that might jolt us out of it. It's like being on auto-pilot. .... we can't actually learn anything now. We can only add details to what we already know; but we need to be in the open mode if we're to change our ideas, look for new solutions, reassess our aims."

In my opinion, Russell's tyrannical big idea and idea-bucket are not two separate entities but instead two sides of the same coin. They both are the same big idea that's either stuck in the 'closed' mode and or is basking in the sunshine of 'openness.'

Like our minds, brands too find the switch from closed mode back to open mode much more difficult than the reverse. Which is why so many of these big ideas get stuck in a morass of consistency and monotony. By not taking in information from the outside world, the brand continues to believe and act like the idea still excites and works - long after the audience has left for home.

Alternately, open big ideas leave the brand in a state of perpetual sensitivity to the world around it. Any stimulus is thus dealt with a temporary switch to a closed mode and the execution of a smaller idea - immediately post which the brand again reverts to state of open-ness. (Imagine a graph that curves smoothly upward when seen from far, but upon close inspection is itself composed of tiny troughs and peaks - sort of like the property of fractals where it appears identical at different scales.)

Of course, when I speak of idea monopolies, open big ideas and closed big ideas - I do seem to be anthromorphising ideas. That life and their behavioural characteristics are in fact given to them by the container that holds them - the human mind. Our minds.

Which explains why the same big idea can behave 'closed' and then switch to an open state at a later date. The Power Of Dreams, in my opinion, is such an idea that was pried 'open' by the efforts of W+K, London.

And what of the instructions that Russell imparts to get oneself that idea-bucket? All of them, in my opinion, do only one thing. Besiege you to keep your mind open.

What blogging does to planners

Why do planners blog? Though this question keeps cropping up in various posts all over, this particular post at Diablogue made me sit up and really wonder.

Obviously, planners themselves have a lot to say as to why. As for me, when I am not a planner (and sometimes even when I am), I am an ardent devotee of evolution. Which usually leads me to ask questions in the passive form. What change is happening to planners when they blog? Does that confer a 'survival value' in any way?

The nature of the question also ensures that I look for broad patterns rather than individual exceptions. And some of the broadest commonalities and patterns we share are rooted in our biology. And possibly because of my viewpoint, the answers I found were steeped in bio-logic.

One final caveat before I begin. In my opinion, what I write here applies to all bloggers, not just planners. I have stuck to planners because my train of thought started with them, and I believe that planners are more keen on both the 'listening' as well as 'talking' aspects of blogging. Which, in my opinion, puts them at the vanguard of blogging.

Enhanced Cognitive Capacity
No, I'm not promising blogging will improve your IQ scores. At least not yet.

One common reason why planners blog is to take notes for self and others on interesting things they have noticed  - a scrapbook of sorts. But blogs aren't the first invention to help us store information outside of our limited craniums. So why should they be any different?

I think the difference blogs bring is to the very process of storing and retrieving information. By incorporating reverse chronology, links, tagging and preserving the conversation around each entry (through comments and trackbacks), blogs mimic the very process of memory formation.

Every time you make an entry, it's almost as if you are deliberately firing a synapse. Revisits to the entry and the conversation extending from it fire the synapse again and again - strengthening it in the process. This external synapse is linked to and follows from the internal synapse - the very thought in one's mind - that created the entry.

I believe, over time, as the blog grows it becomes an extended (and integrated) part of our brains - almost like some kind of secondary memory. Of course, the access times for this 'secondary memory' vary wildly (from when we are online to when we are offline, due to bandwidth, etc.) but the accuracy, the vividness and the relative ease of 'recall' make up for it.

(Just in case you are wondering if anything outside of us can be a part of us, Richard Dawkins argues in 'The Extended Phenotype' that there's no reason why an organism should be given an arbitrary boundary of its physical form.)

Of course it follows that the longer (and more) one blogs, the larger this 'secondary memory' grows - and so does a blogger's cognitive capacity. (Theoritically there should be limits where the advantages of this increased secondary memory taper off.)

Biologically, there's an undeniable correlation between brain size and intelligence. This correlation is more precisely measured as brain-to-body mass ratio. And what blogging is doing is adding to our brain size without affecting our body mass - an evolutionary change that bodes very well if past records are anything to go by.

Of course, the results of this enhanced 'cognitive capacity' might not necessarily lead to increased IQ scores. I do think, however, that they will lead to increased storage and processing abilities.

Grow big and remain small
In evolutionary terms, growing big has it's advantages and disadvantages - one can capture prey quite easily but one also needs more food to maintain a bigger body. Staying small means less food needed but a relative difficulty in capturing it.

The spider had found an elegant solution to this conundrum. It stays small but builds a bigger low-cost 'body' - its web - to capture food. Being non-living, the web requires a fraction of the energy a bigger body mass would have needed.

What the spider's web is doing is increasing its 'contact patch' with the environment around it. I believe a similar mechanism is at work in a planner's blog.

A blog and its extended web of comments, trackbacks and links in combination with RSS readers and feeds, maximise a blogger's ability to continually capture the information he needs to feed his 'thought metabolism.'

In my belief, the better bloggers use their blogs as a cachment area for information from the outside world - as comments, links or as a continuation of conversation on other blogs. Which ensures that the energy needed to gather these 'inputs' is just a fraction of what it takes to do it the traditional way.

In fact, I think blogs are the 'long tail' of conversations (and probably even our senses) - carrying  on forth both our 'speaking' and 'listening' to places and moments long after we have left the party.

The Dunbar Number and other dominoes
It follows that if our cognitive capacities and brain-body-mass ratio aren't as constant as we thought they were, indexes that depend on these constants will probably be evolving too.

The Dunbar number for eg. I am not quite sure it is a constant or that it is immune to the changes the web (and technology) is wreaking on us.

I have also left unexplored (for the moment) several other reasons why planners blog: the 'Sandbox Universe'  where they can hone their thinking and presentation skills, the 'Mesh Memory' system that overlays our collective memories onto one interconnected network and the 'Free Lunch Cafe' where everyone gains by giving away things.

I will fire a synapse on this blog when I find answers to the questions I am seeking.

Scrapbooks 0.0

I agree with Russell Davies that all planners (and probably everybody else) should keep scrapbooks. But in insisting on the physicality of the process, I think Russell is seeing scrapbooks with blinkers on.

As some of Russell's readers have already pointed out, blogs are scrapbooks 2.0 - where you can not just stick up words and pictures but also videos and other 'alive' data.

But that's not all. What else is the mind but a giant wondrous scrapbook that has experiences, pictures, sounds, words, smells and every possible kind of stimuli 'pasted' on to it?

In fact, I'd like to argue that by physically pasting stuff and storing it, we are actually stifling the natural act of experiencing it and transferring it to the bio-scrapbook that we carry around with us. Instead we choose to store endless bits and pieces of stuff in a perpetual in-queue as scrapbooks.

As for the unexpected and random connections which inspire ideas, I think the subconscious does a better job of it than we give it credit - or leeway - for.

Good enough is not good enough

If Seth Godin wrote only 'good enough' posts on his blog, would he still have a readership?  That's the question that occurred to me after  reading his recent post about 'good enough being good enough.'  (And if that would happen, how would Seth differentiate his good enough blog from the competition - the other 'good enough' blogs out there?)

We don't read Seth's blog because he is merely content with dishing out the 'good enough.' We read him because he's always on the look out for the next big idea - even if the next big idea happens to be 'good enough.'

And when 'good enough' is alive and kicking amidst us, Seth will continue to look for the next big idea and we'll continue to read him. Which means that 'good enough is never going to be good enough.' Not for Seth. Not for us.

Happy birthday, russelldavies.typepad.com

A very happy birthday to Russell Davies whose blog celebrates its 3rd anniversary today. And as far as blogs (planning or otherwise) go, Russell has always been on the top of my RSS feeds list and recently when he took a 10-day break, I positively missed reading his eclectic and thought-provoking posts. This was my first experience of a 'missing the blog' feeling. I guess there will be many more of them to come.

In his anniversary post, Russell quotes from the statistics of how popular he is - but all of us already knew that. And not only that, as the comments at this post go - we've also long known he is an expert blogger.

But novice bloggers can take heart from what I unearthed recently (while trying to get around a temporary blogging ban here in India). An early attempt at a planner blog by the master himself - frozen for eternity in the sands of time (until Russell decides to dismantle it; I am hoping he doesn't.) And it demonstrates a piece of advice given to bloggers who are just starting out - keep blogging, that's the only way you'll get better at it.

Information Asymmetry is dead...

Not a day passes by without us being reminded that new media - blogs, wikis, podcasting, etc. - have obliterated the information asymmetry that advertising and brands have traditionally exploited. We are told that the new blogosphere-enabled consumer is armed to the teeth with information and that in the new world, brands and its consumers are equal.

But every passing day, I am convinced of the opposite. It's true that the gap is decreasing dramatically. But the gap remains and probably will never be wiped out. I am even beginning to believe that the best brands not just exploit information asymmetries but actively create them.

Take this regular feature  from the BBC Editors blog for example. It's a guide to pronounciation from the Pronounication Unit of BBC. It smartly exploits expertise that exists within the BBC to create a need in people that they didn't know existed.

Until yesterday I had no idea what the correct way to say Clydach (a Welsh town) was. And nor did I care. But by actively making me aware of my ignorance and then addressing that shortcoming, this wonderful regular feature has me hooked. No matter how far away I wander in my daily life, I return faithfully every day to this oasis like a wandering bedouin.

And isn't that what the best bloggers do? Actively create bubbles of information asymmetries - an expectation of finding out/ experiencing/ replenishing something in their readers - and then fulfil that promise. Just like the best brands.

So the next time you read reports of the death of information asymmetry, do remember they might just be greatly exaggerated.