Cool-right-now can be a useful phase. I was happy to see it used in an entertaining Onion interview with Patton Oswalt. Oswalt says:

“Nothing goes stale and sour quicker than street cred. There’s nothing more perishable than cool-right-now.”

It’s especially good advice if you’re creating a story to connect with people across a wide range of places, times, and cultures. These are all smart objectives when you’re consulting with a client like Dreamworks. The lesson carries over to many other (though not all) types of design work. As Oswalt suggests, it’s sometimes best to avoid cool-right-now.
[tags]cool-right-now, Patton Oswalt, Onion[/tags]

What happened to Merlin? Where did he go?

Last I knew he was with those dudes from Snocap…

There was a potentially interesting wave of hype last January when a new licensing company called Merlin struck a deal with Snocap. At the time I expressed curious skepticism over Merlin’s lack of a web presence. Other bloggers described Merlin as “an agency formed to represent the music industry’s independent artists”, the “first wave of the future”, and the end of “Copyright Apartheid” (huh?).

Bloggers. Anyway - the “pros” were hyping it too. There were stories on CNN Money (expired) and Yahoo news (expired), and this Reuters piece on CNET’s News.com (expired, thanks CNET for leaving a stub).

So where’s Merlin?

[tags]Merlin Licensing, the future of bad metaphors for music distribution[/tags]

I’ve been more or less following the net radio story recently. Last Friday, Xeni at BoingBoing reported a breakthrough in the negotiations. There’s been a lot of development over the past few days and I’m not going to attempt to summarize. I’m sure the sunday papers have done a fine job.
From my view it looks like Soundexchange lobbyists gambled that they could knock out net radio with one blow. They proposed a deal that would effectively buy off a chunk of the internet. Many thousands of members of the internet using public were unhappy about the proposed deal; they phoned and emailed their congressional representatives. “Oppose this deal” they said. Congress stepped in on behalf of public opinion. Soundexchange’s previous terms are off the table.

Evidence of pretty good collaboration between radio and net radio, newspapers and blogs, politicians and public opinion.

PS: If you want free indie rock go here.

[tags]Save Net Radio, Soundexchange[/tags]

Alana Semeuls of the LA Times seems to think so (via Techmeme). She reports:

“But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.”

“The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.”

Dell Island? Does that sound like a fun fantasy world to you?

It’s all trial and error for now. Obviously fantasy based Second Life isn’t a great test environment (better than WOW). Still, real customers were virtually shot outside the virtual American Apparel store. That’s not sexy. That’s not good for the brand.

The situation will sort itself out in time. Virtual worlds aren’t going to go away. The businesses that learn to work with them will be better off for it. Here’s hoping folks can figure out smarter ways to experiment.

UPDATE: One angle of the LA Times story is the suggestion that Linden Labs is to blame for the corporate marketers failures. Techcruch’s Duncan Riley writes that reasons for the failure are open to debate, yet his headline implies otherwise. He’s illustrating a lights out scenario for Linden. Strange. More analysis at GigaOm.

[tags] Second Life, Dell Island[/tags]