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Why is this happening?  When I first started blogging I couldn’t have both a site about moi and a blog, but in the meantime WordPress has galloped forward technologically and I no longer need to maintain two different domains. The archives from this blog have already been moved to www.bradberens.com.

Thanks for your support and enjoy the new site!

• Yahoo! What Women Want – Interesting piece from Yahoo! about how women use the internet in the EU… wonder if they've done a similar study elsewhere?
• Photo Sharing on the Go Is the Latest Hot Investment Niche – NYTimes.com –
• AOL and Michael Eisner’s Vuguru to Produce Video Series – NYTimes.com – "In a deal to be announced Wednesday, Michael D. Eisner‘s Web studio, Vuguru, will produce half a dozen scripted Web video series for AOL." <br />
  <br />
  Why, reading this, do I find myself wondering whether or not a tree falling in a forest makes a noise?
• Online Privacy Is Poised for Regulatory Showdown – NYTimes.com – "After “do not call” lists became popular, more than 90 percent of people who signed up reported fewer annoying telemarketing calls. Now, privacy advocates are pushing for a similar “do not track” feature that would let Internet users tell Web sites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location and leisure activities."
• Unleashing the Power of Marketing – Harvard Business Review – Truly fascinating article about changes in GE marketing from HBR. Long but worth it.

• Will We Have High-Speed Internet in Every Classroom by 2015? – Nicholas Jackson – Technology – The Atlantic – WASHINGTON — "Almost if not every school in this country will have broadband" by 2015, said Jim Shelton, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education, last night at Slate's "Design a Better Classroom" event, where he sat on a panel with several distinguished education experts. "The contracts are signed, the money is spent."
• Beyond Facebook: the Benefits of Deeper Friendships – WSJ.com – "Sara Orr of Chatham, N.J., has about 20 people she counts as friends. But when she hits a rough patch, she turns to one of a handful of truly close ones who already know her "deepest, darkest secret or issues," she says. When she fell gravely ill a few years ago, it was her childhood friend Kristi Balc she called every other day on the phone for comfort. "I can't imagine relying on a 'virtual friend' in a time of real crisis," Ms. Orr says."
• Meet Intersect, where storytelling, time, and location get all mashed up – Interesting layering of geography and presence from the Nieman Lab at Harvard.
• Task Force Out to Prove Procurement’s No Villain – Advertising Age – Agency News – "…Procurement has historically had little interest in buying creativity or strategy — is easier said than done. Especially considering it's not just agencies decrying procurement anymore. In fact, an ANA study this summer found not only a wide disparity between how procurement officers and agencies view how well procurement is doing its job, but a significant perception gap among marketers as well. Only 49% of marketing executives thought their own procurement units were knowledgeable about marketing. "
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

Since I’ve spent more than my fare share of time thinking about Shakespeare’s plays I clicked and was taken to one of the dullest, schmaltziest articles I’ve read recently (and that’s saying something).

The anonymous author culls five lines from Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes as the latter is returning to college in Paris after the funeral of the Danish king (in act one, scene three).  Here’s a sample. Read it slowly.

“Give thy thoughts no tongue”

Basic as it may be as far as business lessons go, keep in mind the idea of thinking before you speak; it looms large when you are just starting to feel your way through your career. You must pick your battles wisely and with caution.

Kinda clichéd– both the line from Shakespeare and the lesson the author, right?

There’s a reason: Polonius’ advice to Laertes was already clichéd in 1603 when the first edition of Hamlet hit the printing press. In fact, back when I was teaching Shakespeare at U.C. Berkeley one of my students, upon reading this passage, said to me, “Mr. Berens, I don’t see what’s so great about this play: it’s really just a patchwork of old sayings”—not realizing that Shakespeare is where such saying come from.

Anybody who has had even a half-conscious 11^th grade English teacher (or seen it onstage, or one of the many movies) will instantly see that trotting out Polonius as a business councilor is like getting personal decorum tips from Lindsay Lohan or nuance advice from Carrot Top. He is a foolish character who gives idiotically superficial, greeting card advice that the play’s original audience would have found laughable.

The author of this article was probably under deadline, came up with something in a hurry and pitched it to an editor who needed to fill some space. More importantly, this sort of deployment of Shakespeare as a cultural shield behind which lack-of-thought can hide is exactly why most people find the plays boring beyond all comprehension, and that is sad.

However, my point in this post is not to say, “Shakespeare is for trained professionals: kids, don’t try this at home.”

Quite to the contrary, if you want good business advice you should look carefully at William Shakespeare’s career. Yes, read the plays, but don’t just take greeting-card snippets from famous passages. Instead, look at their deep structure and how they’re embedded in the early modern London economy.

Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in the history of the language, but he was also an innovative businessman who vertically integrated the production of his product centuries before “vertical integration” even became a term: he was part owner of the playing company, part owner of the buildings in which the actors performed, the chief dramatist and one of the players.

More on this soon—let me know in comments if you want it sooner.

And here’s the full passage in question—a beautiful patchwork of entry level HR handbook precepts that just happens to be written by the best copywriter ever:

POLONIUS

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,

And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee,

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged courage. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,

Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy–rich, not gaudy,

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender, boy,

For love oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!

• The Rise of the Corporate Transmedia Storyteller – The Steve Rubel Stream – "Regardless of which side of the debate you buy into, one that sees superficiality rising versus another that envisions a new Renaissance, one thing remains clear. Space on the Internet is infinite. Time and attention, meanwhile, remain finite. Therefore, “Digital Relativity” will become a major challenge."
• Research finds Twitter app in the classroom increases involvement | Lafayette Online – "A pilot study of a new technology that lets students use Twitter and text messages during and after class has found that it increases student engagement and is used more often by higher-performing students.<br />
  <br />
  "The technology, called Hotseat, was developed by Purdue University in 2009 to increase student engagement in large lecture classes. The application allows students and instructors to use smartphones or laptop computers to send messages during or after class. Other students can vote to rank the messages and respond to the discussion."
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• IAB – IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report – The latest numbers… and they're good. But should we get cocky?
• Digital Life Project Analyzes Global Online Behavior – PSFK – "Digital Life – the largest ever global research project analyzing people’s online behavior – announced its results and observations today by TNS. The piece covers nearly 90% of the world’s online population through 50,000 interviews across 46 countries. A thorough and visually beautiful showcase of the results can be experienced at the Discover Digital Life site, where you can also narrow down results by online behavior, drivers, and compare across countries."

• The Education of President Obama – NYTimes.com – Fascinating profile of / interview with President Obama a few weeks before the mid term election.
• Will Ad Industry’s Opt-Out Program Entice Consumers? – Advertising Age – Digital – Thorough and useful explanation of the Digital Advertising Alliance.
• Just Manic Enough – Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs – NYTimes.com – "IMAGINE you are a venture capitalist. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”"
• Psychology of Objects (Fall 2010) – Fascinating deck by Prof. Stock, with thanks to Sidneyeve Matrix (@sidneyeve) for tweeting this.
• Eli Pariser on the future of the Internet – Internet Culture – Salon.com – Interesting Salon interview with the Chair of MoveOn.org about "filter bubbles" in which we are all talking to an echo chamber and fail to be open to dissenting or new ideas. Important and interesting stuff.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

• Reed Hastings: Six Lessons for the Newspaper Industry | Newsonomics – "Though he mentioned the newspaper industry only in a single passage — “There’s a special case around newspapers that’s been different…a ton of highly profitable regional monopolies that employed way more journalists than you needed if you had national reach” — his building of a company with almost 10 million subscribers is noteworthy. That’s five times the number of subscribers of the country’s leading newspaper. The number, though, isn’t important; it’s the Netflix, and Hastings’, philosophy that’s worth applying."
• CNN study confirms ‘share’ power – "Social media and the power of peer-to-peer recommendation can boost revenue streams and brand loyalty, according to a new survey from CNN.<br />
  <br />
  "The results of a CNN inaugural study into the power of news and recommendation (POWNAR), showed a "halo effect,” with substantially higher engagement around recommended content compared with randomly consumed content, said Didier Mormesse, senior VP of R&D and audience insight at CNN International.<br />
  <br />
  “The commerciality of the social media space is fast becoming apparent and this study means that for the first time, we are able to substantiate the value of shared news from an advertising perspective", said Mormesse."
• Mindfulness(1): Teach us to Sit Still : RSA Projects – "You can talk about ‘behaviour change‘ until you are blue in the face, without changing your own behaviour in any meaningful way. You can also craft elegant words about 21st century enlightenment, and lay out a roadmap to a better future by describing the kinds of people we need to become. For instance you can argue, as Matthew Taylor does, that we need to become more empathetic, more autonomous and more other-regarding. But the burning question is how? Intelligent discourse is important, as far as it goes, but it remains at the level of theory, aspiration and proto-policy. In this sense it is as much a part of the problem as it is part of the solution.What we need are methods, ongoing practices that are tested and inclusive, and which will allow us to change ourselves for the better in deep and enduring ways."
• Creator Of The Sims To Launch Choose-Your-Own-Adventure TV Show – "Will Wright, the videogame creator behind The Sims, is launching a game show for Al Gore's cable channel/web TV startup, Current TV.<br />
  <br />
  It's called Bar Karma. (We're not sure about that name…)<br />
  <br />
  Supposedly, viewers will be able to to create and control the show’s storylines and plot developments. The show will launch in the first quarter of 2011."
• Cisco Launches ‘Umi’ Telepresence Box To Turn TVs Into Videophones – "SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco Systems Inc., seeking to become a bigger name in consumer electronics, said Wednesday that it's going to start selling a $599 box that turns living-room TV sets into big videophones."

This isn’t a movie review, although I will talk about the movie “The Social Network” that came out last weekend.

Instead, in this short post I argue that everybody reading this post – and just about everybody who works in the interactive media and technology industries – ought to go out and see this movie in a hurry. “The Social Network” does for the internet biz what “Pretty Woman” did for prostitution.

It’s a terrific flick (take a date and save dinner for after so you can talk about it), but the other reason to see “The Social Network” is that this movie will define for the next decade how the rest of the world sees us, the people who make a living building and placing and optimizing websites and apps and display ads and emails and platforms of all sorts. The fact that the movie isn’t accurate doesn’t matter (there are abundant articles within easy reach of Google on this, so I won’t go into the details here): he who tells the best story wins, and this is a great story.

But it’s not a flattering portrait—more like the elementary school picture that still makes you cringe when you see it decades later.

Directed by the always-ominous David Fincher and with the trademark “Warning: You Must be a Mensa Candidate to Watch this Movie” rapid-fire dialog and crystalline structure of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, “The Social Network” paints Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an arrogant and brilliant software engineer who effortlessly leads other geeks but can’t talk with a girl. The movie Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money yet steals the idea for Facebook from two rich jerks, improves it, lies about stealing it, builds Facebook with his best friend, later doesn’t hesitate to screw the best friend out of the company and gets sued by all the aggrieved parties. I saw the movie with my wife and she found the movie Zuckerberg somewhat sympathetic, whereas I had an easier time feeling good about Humbert Humbert, the unapologetic pedophile in Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

For those of us who has seen the real Mark Zuckerberg interviewed on stage or monitor (the hoodie, the discomfort) Jesse Eisenberg’s physical impression is spookily dead on. The movie Zuckerberg is not amoral or immoral—he just has a different moral code than most people, one that Nietzsche would have found cozy. This is the movie story about digital entrepreneurs that will define them for years. Justin Timberlake does a star turn as Napster-co-founder and Facebook Pied Piper Sean Parker, a vintage bizdev guy with a rolodex and no conscience. This too will stick.

The fortunes of the movie geek have improved over the decades. From Spaz in “Meatballs” to the entire cast of “Revenge of the Nerds” to Matthew Broderick in “War Games” and Val Kilmer in “Real Genius.” Up until now geeks have been socially awkward but moral, plagued by a compulsive curiosity that can lead them into bad decisions but willing to fix the problems they create. Not so with the movie Zuckerberg. This geek leaves bodies in his rear-view mirror and doesn’t slow down, but does so while building Facebook, the addictively engaging platform that many have open 24/7/365.

How the movie Zuckerberg defines a new kind of geek comes through most clearly in one of the films tag lines: “Punk, Genius, Billionaire.” When I saw that tag on a poster in the theater I thought, “Punk? Arthur Fonzarelli and Danny Zuko were punks. Sid Vicious was a punk. But… Mark Zuckerberg?” But if “punk” means somebody who lives outside the normal social order and pressures that order by being compelling and different, then maybe the label fits.

“Pretty Woman” came out in 1990. Five years later we saw “Leaving Las Vegas.” By this logic, we won’t see another movie about the internet biz this good until 2015, so go see “The Social Network.” And the next time you have to explain to civilians what you do for a living, remember that “The Social Network” is probably the ruler they’ll use to measure you.

[This blog is moving to www.bradberens.com in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and get ready to change your RSS feeds, if you have 'em.]