I make myself Laugh

I sometimes wonder whether blogging is a sincerely egocentric operation – does anyone really care about much of what we have to say? My experience dictates to the contrary, and yet I’m still sitting here blogging away (though that might have something to do with a 25% hidden away on a syllabus somewhere…). I started out this project by dictating that I would escape this narcissism by simply presenting the content of others, but if you look at my blog posts so far, it seems I’ve audaciously decided that you want to hear what I have to say. Or think, if you believe that any sort of thinking went on in those posts. Maybe I have a bunch of monkeys sitting around with wireless keyboards…

Enough meta though, because I /know/ personne wants to read that.

One of the biggest controversies last spring in the web design world was Scoble’s article about anti-design. Scoble talks about how websites that are “pretty” don’t do as well as ones that are not. I don’t think this has much to do with aesthetics, however. Instead, I think that we, as consumers, have learned to distrust marketing. Would you rather have someone sell you a service, or would you rather borrow the tools from a friend and achieve the same results that way?

I think that along with the digital revolution, we’re undergoing a revolution in the way we understand marketing and communication. Traditional methods of advertising no longer work on the younger generation. We, as a generation, have learned to pattern scan for advertisements on web pages and not even see them, just as we have learned to hear advertisements on the radio and tune them out (or satirize them, if that’s your thing). In response, advertising has started to meld content with advertising. Radio commercials now resemble songs in the hope that you won’t be able to tell the difference, and ads start to blend in with content so that you won’t pattern match them out. Examples of this form of ad include google’s text ads and sponsored search results.

In that vein, this article (Slashdot) proves extremely interesting.