Oh the humanity. It’s so sad when people don’t even know they’ve been rick rolled until it’s too late and they already started dancing.

By the time something hits national circulation (Headline news, People, Time, Newsweek) whatever it is, is a was, and it’s old news, probably dead, and teenagers, tastemakers and anyone in the know has already been there, done that and sold the carcass on eBay at a profit to get out before the B&T people mung it up lest they be associated with the pasty faced philistines who are just now arriving.

I don’t fancy myself that far up at the bleeding edge but I’d be horrified to think that I just found out about something cool by reading a weekly magazine. I’m at least cool enough to not be there. I hope.

Julie sent me a note on Absinthe that was posted on Trend Central which I’m taking as Official Coolness Death Notice. Now we’ll see this in every bar until it finally, but assuredly gets to Applebees where ordering it would be akin to a scarlet letter of not cool.

Not so? How about the Mojito, Apple Martini, Caiperiena, Maxican Martini and espresso martini? All very cool little drinks that have made it beyond the cool membrane and entered the mainstream. Are you now acusing me of being an indie drink snob? Well, I might be. I favor the Modest Mouse of drinks rather than the Kelly Clarksons. That’s just me. Call me a snob if you like.

I’m the same way with beer, but beer is a slower burn and often you can stay underground for years. I like Kronenbourg 1664, a very nice French brew that is pretty much the Budweiser of France. It’s not fancy in any way, not some special hops or barley, nothing spectacular of note, just a nice Lager (could be a pilsner, I honestly don’t know) that I like and now can find at a few grocery stores. I’m also a fan of the Hogarden which is a great white beer and Shiner Bock (a bock… and the Bud of Central Texas) and Newcastle. The last two, not weird or indie or rare at all which is what’s nice about beer. It’s not as susceptible to being rought into an indie-beer mold. It can be, but beer is more ‘common’ even if it’s a ‘fancy’ Chimay. So, call me two-faced. I find it annoying that drinks go mainstream but I don’t care if beer does. I might not be able to explain that.

But back to absinthe. I’ve enjoyed an absinthe here and there for a few years and even bartered for some “artisan” hand crafted absinthe at Burning Man in 2001. I tried samples here and there in soft-spoken establishments in Europe where it’s been served, quietly, for almost 80 years. And now it’s legal and everyone knows. Good. Good for the brewers like Anchor in SF (who make an UNREAL gin, BTW) who will likely capitalize on this but we’ll also see it turned into something of a party trick and there will be lower-end offerings that just spoil any “interesting” aspects of it, rendering it pedestrian, boring and ultimately, a dusty bottle in the liquor store when people realize that it’s charm is in it’s craft and subtlty, not in the other hyped and silly aspects that are completely lost in 20,000 gallon stills. It will end up as a weird sister of Ouzo and thats sad, that the sun will be allowed to shine on it and that while it will be free, it will at the same time die.

So, in my quest to stay away from the boring drinks, I’m taking a hard right turn and embracing an old vet that needs a good shaking off, Mr. Harvey Wallbanger. Essentially a screwdriver with a good dash of Galliano. It’s a fun story, easy to make and very nice to alternate with a good Pimms. What’s a Pimms you ask? Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.

Dammit dammit dammit… I need to stay ahead of this stuff better.

I’m all caught up on lost again. My mind is reeling. I thought it would start to come together and we’d have more answers than new questions. But no. It’s digging deeper.

Looking back on this, knowing what I know now, It’s not like you can just tell someone to check it out, see if they like the show. It would be out of context and make no sense at all.

If you want to get into the show you have to start back at season 1 episode 1 and lock in for what’s now like 70 something episodes??? And now, even after seeing every single one, this season I’m trying to keep track of the intertwining flashbacks, very complicated current state and multiple time-frame future-flashes.

While I like House and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (The UK ones, not the stupid US ones) and Criminal Minds, when I want to get lost, Lost is it.

I trust that J.J. has everything completely mapped out and that the story does have a finite end that ties up things as much as he wants to (making sure to leave enough questions to torture people) so I know that this all leads somewhere. I know it’s a lot of thought about a TV show but it’s almost like someone took a very good book and made a TV show out of it with a beginning, middle and end. Let’s hope the writer’s strike ends soon enough so they can go back into production.

Great lead-in for a film. I grew up skating, not at this level, but still love this sort of stuff.

Gartner puts out some great reports. They do, I have a bunch that are kind of old and still refer to them. That said, the report today that pronounces Blu-Ray as the format winner is a bit of a face-palm…

Perhaps I read the news on this stuff more than most so I knew as soon as WB broke up with HD-DVD there was another disk in their life. I’d like to see a WB – HD-DVD facebook defriending parody of that…

I guess some people didn’t get the memo. Those people probably don’t get most memos…

If only all my predictions would come true so quickly. Ginger, a new version of Netvibes is picking up where Plaxo was going before they decided it was time to put their company up for sale. They might have to take the sign out of the window since I think Ginger might beat them senseless right out of the gate.

With Plaxo and now Ginger, we’re seeing the first of what will be called “the great aggregation” and all of my far-flung social apps will come carpet-bagging to one central hub.

Will the existing, super-sites get right into a street fight to buy these new focal points? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, the universe of social sites is still expanding but the opposing forces are in play and we’ll soon see needed contraction. Now all I need is a private-beta password for Ginger

Ok, I think this is an SNL clip and while I thought SNL quit funny 20 years ago, this is laugh-out-loud funny.

I had read this article in this months issue and while this is not my area of expertise, the idea that trends are truly random and come from anywhere is shockingly oversimplified in a way only a PHD could conjure up.

Trends are not total anarchy, the fact is there are people who can see patterns in places where most see noise and they can also get ahead of it sometimes. Perhaps this guy never went to high school where trends come from the “trendy kids”. And he never watched TV where things people wear / use etc in a video (do they even play videos anymore?), TV show etc tend to be pushed up to the top of likely hot things.

I think he’s way too focused on these “mystery” trends that come out of left field but the likelihood there is he’s so far intellectually and culturally removed from those trend epicenters, he can’t even conceptualize that there was a purposeful activity behind it before it became cool. That there are groups of people who are highly likely to be close to it and those that are not. Take for example New York City. Sample Forest Hills and the East Village. I will guarantee that more trends will come out of the East Village. That’s not random, it’s the fact that Forest Hills is not a place where things come from, the East Village is. That alone ruins the forest fire theory unless he also included some formula for particularly sappy trees that tend to hang out in the same place, wear skinny jeans and listen to indie-rock.

What I don’t find surprising is that this silly notion comes from a PHD in academia, which is where you find the people most removed from any semblance of real-world rules as opposed to their favored vacuum-based testing. I find this hypothesis to be somewhat typical of people who live in ivory towers of education. The real-world is too messy and unpredictable; it’s far less stressful to just apply a formula to everything, run some tests and file that problem away as a simple equation where it ends up being a general density of randomness and rules it as a permutation of chaos-theory. Plus, he gets his publishing credit which is their type of currency.

I won’t argue that there are some out-of-left-field trends that start like a SoCal brushfire but in most cases, it’s a weird kind of social-object meritocracy mixed with those ingredients of timing, right exposure, political climate and in some cases a champion / promoter (stylist). And even then, the person / people involved, call them “Trendy Patient 0” are, very likely, part of a segment of the population where likelihood of a trend starting with or around them is higher than most.

This quote almost sounds like people are completely hapless and clumsily bump into things:

“To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

It completely dismisses the idea that there are people who are more likely to be in a position to spread or start, or spot the early signs of a trend. And that these hapless bumblers are the ones who generate these trends, advertisers have no option to just market their products everywhere in hopes that they’ll get the attention of these unwitting trendsetters. Since it could be anyone, anywhere. Like Publishers Clearinghouse, YOU COULD BE A WINNER.

It’s almost the notion that you, me, anyone could start something, and not even know it! It’s the new American Dream, instant popularity, fame, money, all without thought behind it. All without effort. Some simple thing I do today could be the next plastic bit of nonsense that plugs into the already heinous Crocks. Or I could be the next king of Pogs or Beanie Babies. I could be the next American Idol! Well, no. It’s not that simple. Sure, Pogs were random, but if the pimply fat kid was the one in the schoolyard playing with milk bottle caps (as I am sure there have been for a long time), we’d not know of Pogs. I would bet that an influential was the one who played with them and that’s where it started to take off.

This all reinforces the concept of influentials but it makes me think of what makes these people special. I suspect that these people are born marketing folk. They have an eye for what could be hot and have a knack for showing off what they like and what they don’t.

I guess this touches a nerve for me around my particular distaste for pontificating academics that live in cloistered communities where they never have to practice their theories in real life or suffer real repercussions when they don’t work. Theories are nice and all but on earth, we use methods that professors hate, like gut, experience, feel.

We might get one or two cool things from Forest Hills but it will never be the East Village. If you want to know who the influentials are, you have to look at where rich cultures live, where concepts are thrown around, where creativity thrives, you’ll find hot-spots. The same thing goes on on-line, in forums. 4chan is where so many of those funny photos we all pass around come from. It’s a disproportionate number, that and PhotoshopPhriday.

While it’s hard, if not impossible to predict if a singular item itself will end up as a trend, you don’t have to go too high up to get a perspective of where to look for them starting. That’s not random. That’s the point of marketing, and understanding the culture, the public, the markets, the existing trends and everything else that makes up our wonderfully interesting marketplace. It’s also not something that can be or should be explained with a damn formula.

I’ve always like the Wired and Tired lists in Wired magazine. I quit reading wired a few years back when they got way too full of themselves and were writing about things so far off in the sci-future it was more like a slick version of Popular Science for democrats and a useful magazine on things that I care about. Like real technology that could exist in the not too terribly far off future. Nanobots making skyscrapers might happen but I’m more concerned with solid state hard drives and Vista being a POS OS. I’m still not buying a Mac (My new HP DV6000se is wicked cool).

So, I just caught the Washington Post’s In and Out list for 08 which I found to be very cool since it’s actually hip and interesting. First, I had no idea they actually made those springy stilts called Powerizers… If you look for them on YouTube you’ll see why they’re going to make skateboarders look like welcome guests in parks and malls around the country. We’ll also see a lot of injuries associated with it, much like the kite tube.

As cool, hip and in-the-know as you think you are, you’ll not get through the list without having to hit up Wikepedia more than a few times to figure out what they’re talking about. Along the way I managed to learn quite a bit about what is about to be a huge miserable fad, and what cities will be under water in 20 years. You’ll not be surprised by that one.

There were some stinkers in there too. Staycation? You mean not going anywhere on a holiday break? Yeah, thats what people involuntarily do when they’re broke. Don’t give it a name. Oh, and Sex is out while naps are in? Naps? Seriously? Well, the majority of the list is cool.

I never watched Speed Racer as a kid. I don’t think it made much sense to me since I think I expected more of a real race and less… weird stuff…

But, a lot of people like it so, as Hollywood does, they make a movie out of it. But… Instead of making it “normal”, it’s pretty baked. In fact, it’s completely baked and I might even watch it in spite of the terribly weird trailer. You have to watch it, it’s, um, odd.

I think I’ve beat this drum more than a few times but someone else articulated it quite well. The fact is, we have too many things that do their own thing and thats not good.

The wish list?
(From Gizmodo – Jason Chen)
• HD DVR Functinality. For example, a TiVo or a Windows Media Center box’s video recording capabilities.
• DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray playback. All in one.
• Gaming. Throw an Xbox 360/PS3/Wii in there and we’ve got ourselves a date. Oh, and we’ll want PC gaming as well.
• Slingbox-style broadcasting. Have this box stream to every device you own, be it PSP, iPhone, Windows Mobile or a laptop.
• On Demand. Make it friendly with your cable provider’s content.
• Format Agnostic. Want Apple’s movies? Done. Want Amazon’s movies? Done. Want Netflix’s movies? Done. Make it play back content from every digital online store.
• Friendly interface. Everyone loves the TiVo interface, but let’s take that an expand it to encompass every sort of media you could want to play back on this miracle box.
• Plug and Play with other devices. Got a Zune that you want to play back music from? Just dock it into the box. Got a camera you shot an hour of footage with and want to watch? Plug it in.

–

I dont have a lot to add to that other than the ability to stream between rooms with similar devices or even better, a single aggregation box that acts as a home head-end for media and smaller “client” boxes (could be built into the tv too…) that can push that to a monitor.

I can dream too, right?