tonight i went to the eff’s fight for blogger’s rights party over at minna. i got back and my rss reader was filled with posts about how mind-blowingly awesome boeing’s new connexion plane is (there, i linked to it, increasing the mileage they are getting out of the whole thing). it seems that boeing staged a marketing coup: just invite a bunch of bloggers onto your new wifi-equipped plane, fill them with fine wine and rich food, and they will, as scoble puts it, have “a circle jerk” talking about how INSANELY INCREDIBLY AWESOME boeing is.
of course, all those involved are A-LIST blogger VIPs (!), or else they wouldn’t have been invited. in other words, boeing and their marketing team definitely was working their hand vigorously in the circle, giving everyone concerned a proper sense of celebrity and entitlement to board the plane in the first place.
well it certainly worked. boeing is getting terrific blog press for its dollars, and has paved the way for many other companies to dive in and wine and dine their way into the hearts of “blog celebrities”.
i had already been thinking about the whole notion of blogger “authority” and an a-list in the first place, as a result of some things that were discussed at the eff event. you know what an a-list is? when you are casting a film, you get a list of actors and the amount of box office dollars they can be expected to bring in if they appear in the film. the ones at the top are the a-listers. it is a list, for your consideration, of “bankable talent”. completely devoid of all considerations of ability or talent.
i picked up an activist quarterly, impact press, before i got on the train home, and the first thing i read was this:
every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
–franz kafka
i threw some ads up here for the hell of it. get in on the gold rush, see how the whole thing works. yesterday i made 4¢.
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