it's a quiet, sad, thoughtful day, so here's a blogdex/daypop-fueled linkorama:

latest guerrilla marketing fooforah: sony, says the wsj, hires actors to pretend to be interested in some new cellphone. i hardly see how this is any different from, say, teens being paid to go into chatrooms and plug some lamewad buzz bin band (as noted in 'the marketing of cool'), or that woman at stu's disco who works for bacardi. also, the florida high-speed rail authority (a government agency) hired off-duty state troopers to flag drivers down to take a marketing survey. some of the people objected to seeing warning signs with pictures of ditch-diggers instead of palm-pilot-toting schmucks.


the sf chronicle asks, is bush channeling orwell? when people say it's like 1984, sometimes they don't mean the super bowl ad.


salon compares the war on file-sharing to the war on drugs. there's a link to a mikejack article, and moby talking about what he calls the 'pearl jam effect' (it has nothing to do with saturating your market by releasing hundreds of bootlegs), too. senor moby's thesis is that groups with more tech-savvy fans are less likely to sell lots of cds, because people will download/burn/etc instead. pink sells more records than weezer, but moby would like to think that weezer is more popular. he'd also perhaps like to find an excuse for the disappointing sales of his new release (my suggestion: license more tracks to commercials). as is always the case with these arguments, i'm waiting for empirical evidence.

copyright restricts creativity, suggests (note the academic language) siva vaidhyanathan in the chronicle of higher education.


mit's media lab works on musictoys. there's even a download.


tv guide lists top 50 cartoon characters. as usual with these lists, it's very of-the-moment (spongebob squarepants ranks higher than daffy duck), and, as usual, i have mad beef (e.g., gumby's not a cartoon, he's claymation. pikachu's not a cartoon but a video game character). on the bright side, they include the wonderful gerald mcboing-boing.


"I thought it was a dance club," she said Monday. "Well, I declare."  ¶ 3:55 PM