social-creature

More on Lightning in a Bottle later.
First i’m trying to recover from a week in the forest. As part of the decompression process, yesterday involved a trip to the hair salon, which meant I actually had time to do nothing but sit around and read for the first time in quite a while.
“It’s the Adultery, [...]

following up on the smash success of its award-winning “evolution” ad, dove unleashes “onslaught“:

much like the evolution ad, which shows the intense makeup and photoshop augmentation of an image of an average woman and at the end offers, “no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted,” while directing viewers to take part in dove’s Real [...]

in her essay “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” a few months ago, danah boyd offered her observations on the dichotomy she was seeing emerge in user-demographic trends on myspace/facebook. a dichotomy that involves such ethnographic aspects as lifestyle, heritage, even aesthetics, for instance.
MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before [...]

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
– e.e. cummings
which is all quite noble and good, but the thing of it is, e.e., is that [...]

as a marketer you realize that it’s not so much that you’re really setting anything up for sale, it’s that everything already IS for sale, and you’re just helping it along. so it’s not so much that i’m bothered by the selling of “enlightenment,” (there’s been buddha statues on-sale for millennia, and what are THOSE [...]

photo by: anearthling

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.
- jakob nielsen
much the same way that the developer is not the user, the marketer is not the [...]

just yanked this bit of rad from jeremiah owyang:

my favorite part is where she goes, “you don’t know anything about me.”
and he says, “i know everything about you sweetheart!” and starts spouting off all sorts of demographic statistics. perfect case in point about the difference between knowing your demo (defined by the market), and understanding [...]

while being too sick to get out of bed for the majority of the past week, i read Generation Me by jean twenge. i found out about the book via danah boyd’s post several weeks ago, and beyond my long-standing general infatuation with teenagers, it was the aspect that dealt with the rise of [...]

how’s about an introduction?
before i tell you what i do, i’ll tell you about who i am, and you’ll understand where my sensibilities for marketing come from….

i was born in the former ussr to a jewish family. by the time i was six my parents had been “refuseniks” for nine years. the ussr government [...]