I took a big screenshot that you can find here, and here’s a sneak preview:

Kemp Obit with FB banner

This content-ad juxtaposition struck me from a surreal angle. Kemp himself probably had a BlackBerry later in his career — or an assistant who had one — and probably had heard of FaceBook, but what would his response have been to seeing such a twenty-first century ad placed next to a story about such a twentieth centure figure?

Note also the AT&T U-Verse ad at the top of the page.

Note#2: Kemp was 73, which USED to seem old.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks

Yesterday, wandering through CD Trader here in the San Fernando Valley, I spotted an unpriced copy of the first season of Veronica Mars, of which I’d only seen half. I took it to the front desk and learned the price was $29.99.  “It’s a used price, but the set has never been opened,” observed the cashier.

Too rich for my blood, I left. Walking to the coffee shop across the street where I was meeting my wife, I used the Amazon widget on my iPhone to check the price: $19.99.

So much for the new price REALLY being $59.98– that’s only for people who don’t know any better. With my Amazon Prime membership (perhaps the best $79 I spend each year) there’s no shipping cost, so if I bought the DVD right this very second it would be here by Wednesday with a total cost of $19.99, rather than $29.99 plus tax yesterday.

Is it worth a couple of days to save $10? Usually the answer is yes.

Although I do want to catch that first season, my desire isn’t THAT great at the moment… not $19.99 today, not $29.99 and certainly not $59.98.

That isn’t always the case, though. Hanging out with my three year old son a few weeks back I paid full price at Toys R Us for the DVD of the 2008 Speed Racer movie, since he likes the 1960s cartoon so much. (Alas, like the critics neither of my children liked the movie.)

With Speed Racer, I was investing in intest (mistakenly, it turned out) that might not last until a company could ship something to me. That’s one of the true values of local: impulse purchases where your impulse has a short half life. I imagine that suits and other clothing that needs to fit carefully — as opposed to t-shirts — will also remain largely local, as will perishable foods and things that nobody wants to buy in bulk. We’ll search for cars online but buy them in person because you don’t really know until you drive it, and we’ll do the same with houses. You can have food delivered but at least at the moment Amazon doesn’t deliver pizza.

Most other things, though, are up for grabs.

http://www.twitter.com/bradberens

So far, Twitter updates my Facebook status, which is good, but the reverse doesn’t seem to be true.

I’m performing this experiment because we’re doing something with Twitter and round table discussions at next week’s iMedia Agency Summit.

But Twitter still scares me.

So much is going on and I’ve been traveling so much that I’m going to put my lack-of-blogging guilt on hold until the start of January. So, before I exit stage left, some questions that I’ll be pondering while I’m away and hope to dive into after the first of the year:

In music, when does a cover become a standard? I’m obsessed with artists covering the famous songs of other artists (see my post on “Rainbow Connection” from a few months back for a bit more on this), but at some point the dialog between different versions fades away and what is left is a standard.  This is the difference between Elvis singing The Beatles’ “Yesterday” onstage in Hawaii and anybody singing “Happy Birthday to You.” When does that transition between cover and standard start?

Why do we digital folk believe so intensely in the wisdom of crowds? Historically speaking, mob rule has rarely worked out well, so why do we as a new media culture accept prima facie that groups of people are smarter? Perhaps I just need to drill down more into this work, but I worry that we’re not making enough of a distinction among different kinds of groups.

How long until somebody makes it easy to cross the last 10 feet between the computer and the television? It’s the killer app that I’ve been waiting for.  Last night, I watched an episode of (guilty pleasure alert) “October Road” on ABC.com and enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed it MORE on my couch watching it on the big screen. Why can’t somebody do this for me? (See the first chapter of Henry Jenkins “Convergence Culture” for a longer and more articulate version of this whine.)  In the first dotcom bubble (what Community Connect CEO Ben Sun wittily refers to as the “dotpocalypse”) the big question was “the last mile,” but now we’ve whittled this down to 10 feet. For more on this, see an article I wrote for iMedia Connection.

How do we create eventness in media consumption? More and more, the media we watch is masturbatory– consumed alone in a dark room. Simply watching an episode of “30 Rock” with my wife sitting next to me is a better experience by orders of magnitude than sitting by myself and watching the best performance of anything else ever. Her presence enlivens the experience in all sorts of ways (see Daniel Goleman’s recent best seller “Social Intelligence” for some of why this is). How do media people help their audiences to create this sort of experience, and are media people even equipped to think about this in a useful way?

How is it that nobody has called NBCU head Jeff Zucker on his bull***t? In a recent talk, Zucker said of the prices that new media consumption of his programming brings in relative to broadcast dollars, “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side.”  The way he phrased the question speaks volumes: it leaves all the agency on NBCU’s side… as if the media monolith HAS A CHOICE in the matter.  Dude, this is SO not up to you. The dollars are going away and the only money that is going to be left on the table can be counted in pennies. The bad news is that a lot of fatcat big media lifestyles are going to change. But maybe in the coming shakeout we’ll see rise of what I’ve been calling “the artistic middle class.” All that being said, I’m a big fan of Hulu, but see the last 10 feet question above.

And with that, I’m off… happy holidays to everybody, and thanks so much for reading Mediavorous.

You can check out the podcast here.

Watch this space for more news coming soon.

Today, USA Today has a substantial article about the show.

One new tidbit of information is that the website will have longer versions of the user-submitted video than what air on TeenNICK, which brings to my mind some questions of authenticity, pace Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” When both versions air, which is the official one? Which has authority over the other? Or that very question an indication of my mediafuddyduddiness?

Show creator Dan Schneider has this to say:

Now, technology can make that a reality, and iCarly has a format that invites user participation, he says. “Ever since the Internet hit, every pitch for a TV show says it has a Web element, but they really didn’t offer anything other than the very obvious stuff, like behind-the-scenes photos and interviews,” he says. In iCarly, “we have the convergence angle between TV and the Internet, and we have user-generated content.”

I’m setting my TiVo for this one.

I’ve been on LinkedIn and other networks for years, but never check them regularly.

The problem with LinkedIn is that nobody sane puts ALL their good contacts into the service, so it’s ultimately a way for people to get in contact with a lot of folks at their same level. It’s GREAT for that, but if you’re trying to make friends with billionaire VC investors (note: I am NOT trying to do this), then LinkedIn ain’t for you.

But why is Facebook different? I think it’s the constant chatter, the eventful (there’s that idea again) quality of the chronic updates. I know that Facebook caught a lot of hell when they launched their feed application (one former iMedia intern even called me on my cell phone when I was driving into the office to find out what I thought about it… I didn’t know what he was talking about until I got to a computer), but that chronic update means that there’s nearly always something NEW happening.

And you can reconnect with old friends without having to join one of those sites that wants you to provide your first born child.  For example, for a while I’ve been running across the name Kevin Werbach in my internet circles and have distantly wondered, “is that the guy I went to high school with?” But I never got around to doing the Googleathon about it. Then, when I saw the name in a mutual friends Facebook circle, one click later I saw his photo, and it’s the same guy! 10 minutes later we’d traded emails. Now that’s interesting!

Another reason that the chatter is helpful is that you can contact somebody casually through the in-network email application and not have it be a big deal. “Hey, do you know somebody who?” or “See you at the conference next week!” or whatever. This is a way of conveying a message without infliciting the burden  of a reply, which email seems to have with it. So we might even rename this online community SavingFacebook.

I’m still not sure where this fits into the community vs. mass culture question, but it sure is interesting.

It’s also potentially bad for my writing, so it’s a good thing that I’ve created that filter for myself.

Both culturally and on an entertainment-industry wide basis, we’re seeing a tectonic change in how Americans consume movies and how many movies the ticket-buying public can support over the course of a year. By taking a look only at the total box office numbers, Bart betrays a provincial perspective, which is surprising from a guy who usually has such a holistic take on the movie business.

Mass culture isn’t going away anytime soon, but it is definitely on a diet. Variety uses Nielsen EDI numbers in its regular reporting on box office numbers, but the problem with Nielsen EDI is that it tracks total revenue rather than number of tickets sold, and that bleeds away any holistic sense of how audience behavior is changing. I tend to look at Box Office Mojo, which does track tickets sold.

It’s a few weeks old, but the PowerPoint deck that I presented at iMedia’s Entertainment Summit gives a nice data overview of how things are changing. You can download it here.

There’s both bad and good news.

The bad news is that the number of opportunities for movie-theater eventness are shrinking, and as the big-industrial movie studio model shrinks we’re going to see a lot of people who are committed to that model lose their jobs as making, marketing and distributing movies becomes less and less cost effective.

So what’s the good news? Given how comparatively cheap digital filmmaking and distribution are, we are looking at some exciting potential: within the next few years we will, I think, see the emergence of an artistic middle class. While there are fewer opportunities for people to become sickeningly rich as the makers of culture (movies, TV, music, books, paintings, etc.), there are more and more opportunities for folks to make a nice living as artists.

But it’s hard to see this potential through the gauzy distractions of the Big Media American Dream where you write that book, that song, that script and are set up for the rest of your life. That dream will still be a reality for some folks, but the number is shrinking. There’s a new dream out there, where you can make videos or music for a living, have that be your full time job, never make it to the big time and still afford a house with a yard and private school for your kids. It’s a new dream worth pursuing, and one that we as a culture should start to make a real topic within our discourse.

The Big Media entertainment industry is set up with a lot of highly paid executives who are talented at getting mass audiences to consume the same products all over the world. But mass culture as a pervasive and fascinating phenomenon has already seen its best days–we’re returning to the kind of local culture that keeps folklorists and ethnographers in business.

If your dream is to drive a Bentley and live in a mansion in Beverly Hills, well, good luck.

But if your dream is to support yourself and your family as an artist and you’re comfortable with a Honda and a nice house in the suburbs, then your future may be a bright one.

I’m a second generation Los Angeleno and being to the mannered born I was interested but not hugely surprised to learn in Brian Lowry’s Friday Daily Variety column that the City of Angels leads the country in DVR penetration and therefore in on-demand consumption of media. L.A. has a 27% penetration whereas the rest of the country is at 17%. Lowry, who I respect and have enjoyed meeting at conferences, sees a possibly utopian future for media and advertising in this as Nielsen Media Research can newly measure time-shifted viewing of, say, “How I Met Your Mother” that winds up tripling the live audience.

While the total size of audience might go up, I suspect that this is only a transient phenomenon and that it will do little to halt the inexorable dwindling of mass culture audiences. For the moment, it may bring comfort to national advertisers — and therefore to TV producers — that there are more folks out there watching the programs and skipping the ads than we originally thought, but that solace is thin.

New forms of media always pressure the old media to find their truest selves. Movies pushed theater away from naturalism toward a focus on the interplay between actors onstage. Television pushed movies away from character pieces toward spectacle. What DVRs like TiVo and its lesser cousins push broadcast TV and all other forms of video toward is finding a way to create appointment television that is more attractive to viewers than the seductive infinity of on-demand content. It’s a tough challenge and focusing only on the content of the show in question is a big mistake. (For a glimpse of how this works take a careful look at Henry Jenkins’ chapter on American Idol in Convergence Culture.)

I have a handful of shows that I like, but there’s only one show that I MUST see and that’s “Entourage.” Why? Because I watch it with my wife Kathi. I travel for business a lot, and when I’m home I focus on the kids, but for 30 minutes each week we stop all the clocks and turn off the telephone to watch this paltry little squirmer together. Doing so makes it eventful. The show itself is only half the equation: it’s the total experience of the show plus the context in which I watch it that matters.

Sporting events are inherently eventful, and one senior marketing official observed to me that he spends a huge amount of money advertising in sports because he thinks they are “TiVo proof.”

But WHY are college football games, baseball games and the like TiVo proof? What is it about the ephemeral suspense of the outcome that cannot withstand delayed viewing? For my father-in-law and brother-in-law it’s all about the network of other guys watching the game at the same time, jumping on their phones and jabbering away then hanging up, then calling again… replicating in part the dynamic of being in the stadium. But even if you don’t plan to call anybody, the tingly feeling that you might, that at any moment you can call or be called or that disaster or triumph is hanging around the next play… that swelling feeling of being there, of presence, contingency and — you guessed it — eventness keeps you from changing the channel whether you’re watching the Super Bowl or Olympic ice skating or a low-speed chase happening right this very moment on the local news.

That feeling is what smart TV execs should be trying to define, bottle and sell with their programming, whether it’s comedy, drama, reality TV or a test pattern.

One window into how this works is plenitude, or, to put it another way, a cognitive experience that is overdetermined but not overwhelming. Watching a live sporting event an engaged viewer jumps back and forth among watching the game itself, comparing a play in this game to other plays in other games, trading observations with the other folks watching the game, keeping the kids at bay, fending off the non-game related phone call that comes during the big play… it’s a form of cognitive juggling: WHERE do I focus my attention and for how long? Do I switch focus NOW or wait a moment? Two people can watch the same game and have distinct experiences because of the different trajectories they take through the different things they can focus on.

An overwhelming experience is one where you can’t take in enough information to make sense of what’s going on. That’s not what I’m talking about here. An overdetermined experience — and one that is eventful — is one where at the end you have a generally complete sense of what happened but you still didn’t catch everything. This happened to my wife and I watching “Knocked Up” in the theater a few weeks ago. Midway through, when we missed some presumably hysterical line because we were still laughing at something ELSE, Kathi turned to me and said, “we are SO buying this DVD.”

But I suspect that watching that DVD will only be fun if we manage to do it together.