Three years young
Image courtesy of Below Zero.
Forgive this self indulgent post but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that has helped adliterate stay the course for three years this month, whether commenting, linking or reading. Self evidently I couldn't do it without you.
In particular your comments that offer a thoughtfulness and intelligence often lacking in the original post! And at best they not only get the debate going but take us somewhere new and far more interesting.
Incidentally looking at the 2420 comments so far, the first was from Rob Mortimer as was virtually the last. That deserves the blogging equivalent of a carriage clock.
Blogging goes mainstream
For a while now Todd Andrlick has been compiling a weekly ranking of Marketing blogs called the Power 150. Earlier this year he expanded it outside the US to create a Global Power 150, and for the first time blogs like Russell's, John's, Gavin's,James' and mine got included.
So authoritative is this ranking that Advertising Age has decided to adopt it as it's official benchmark for marketing blogs and bloggers (in part as a way of communicating how influential or not a bloggers voice is, when quoted editorially) and will host and run the Global Power 150.
What is exciting is that the industry is starting to take the blogosphere seriously and has, in return, given it a univeral standard to judge the potency of its individual voices.
One wonders whether the UK marketing and advertising press will start to support its indigenous maketing blogs in a similar fashion, rather than seeing them as a quirky and colourful fringe activity.
There are many rankings of marketing and ad blogs however the vast majority use one metric - usually linbound links (from Technorati) or traffic (from Alexa).
The authority of the Global Power 150 comes from the way it pulls together 4 different metrics - page rank (from Google), subscriptions (from Bloglines), links in (from Technorati) and a qualitative measure of frequent, relevant and quality content policed by Todd and in the future, one assumes, Ad Age.
Adliterate is back
That bridge shot from the Marin Headlands as the fog rushes into the bay. Image courtesy of John Curley
Been on my hols in the extraordinary and beautiful San Francisco. Clearly unable to post while in a California state of mind on account of feeling too damn nice to my fellow man. Now back in London and as cranky as hell so normal service will be resumed shortly.The curious case of the mushroom cloud
Peter Sellers in Kubrick's 1965 film, Dr Strangelove. Image from dvdbeaver.com.
A light little post for you after the death of planning ding dong.
Ever since I had my statcounter installed I have been able to tell the proportion of people coming from different countries. On the average day about 40% of my visitors are from the UK, 40% the US and 20% from the rest of the world.
But one of the other advantages of Stat Counter is you can tell whether a visitor has come directly to you or via another site. Every day around 10% of these US visitors come from Google Images and, rather worryingly, they are searching for one thing.... mushroom clouds.
A while ago I wrote a post about the ethics of sales promotions aimed at children.
To illustrate it I used a picture of a mushroon cloud because it summed up perfectly the meltdown my three year old had over a Cars movie promotion on packs of Shreddies.
It's a rather good image as it happens - high res' and with a cheeky signature from an airman who presumably felt quite chipper about destroying Nagasaki and the decades of ill health and birth defects to come for those who survived the blast.
But the weird thing is that 'my' mushroom cloud now comes up forth on google images - with no reference to the original source. Hence the bus loads of American school kids trucking up to adliterate to bring their Weapons of Mass Destruction end-of-semester project to life.
What they make of adliterate and whether it is converting a generation of American youngsters into wannabe planners we will only know when Miami Ad School looks at its 2012 entry applications.
But a final twist was provided by someone who emailed me recently wishing to use the image on a DVD cover and asking if I knew who owned the rights. Because I was the square root of no use at all he then contacted the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque.
Turns out that Nagasaki is open source - so download away children of America.