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The Power of the Purse: Women, Money, Maturity and Mags...

Women are finally being recognized for being powerful economic forces, making most of the purchasing decisions for the household.  And purchasing power increases with age so purse carriers are finally being recognized as heavy-hitters when making spending decisions.  Isn't it time?!!  Julie Gilbert, a vp with Best Buy, was quoted in a NYTimes article  that “Women are outspending men in our industry $55 billion to $41 billion,” Ms. Gilbert said. “Not only that, they are actually influencing 90 percent of the purchases. It is a new day in consumer electronics.”  The article's theme was that businesses are realizing that "they overlook women at their own peril" and are looking to court this "fermale-centric" base.

More magazine was named Magazine of the Year by Ad Age Magazine and in their article, AdAge wrote that  Meredith Corp.'s More magazine, "has finally cracked the code for a magazine aimed at 40-plus women that is embraced by both readers and advertisers."

For those who feel that the higher powered pockets of more mature women are neglected by our culture who puts youth on a pedestal, this is good news.  The online site  More magazine site has room for improvement (their audience is most likely to read the paper copy, not an online version)  but as I checked out the online site,  Hoyun Kim has an interesting article on The Popgadget Hot List and it had a fun write-up with a link to a company who makes charms from the emoticons.  Like this :-)   I think the emoticon jewelry might be something moms - or grandmoms - might want to buy for younger kids.

Other members of the Ad Age magazine A-list top 10 are here (pdf) and it was fun to note that New York magazine, one of my newest regular reads, is #4 on the list.  More would do well to look at New York magazine's online site for tips on how a good magazine site can function wery well in as an internet medium.  Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine covered the growth in newspaper online readership statistics published by the Newspaper Association of America -- and they are surging.  I thought it was very apt, as I wrote this post, that the title of the update in changing media trends was "Your Customers are Ahead of You." 

I think women have been out front in many ways.  They've just not been noticed.  Women gain wisdom with age.  (That means discretionary power with money, too, and what it can purchase.)

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Happy Halloween...

How long do kids trick-or-treat?  Even dogs do it.  If the age of demarcation from child-to-grownup keeps extending... maybe children will never quit trick-or-treating.  One of four kids trick-or-treat at the mall.

Now U C It - Grammar 2.0 and New U Books...

Do kids do cursive?  4 what? What are the rulz? Are rules of grammar dead?  The Chicago Manual of Style, that great arbiter of writing and style, is putting their manual online for a subcription cost of $25. The monkey is probably out of the cage on this one. In fact, the monkey is swinging from the English teachers' trees on this issue.  Even though the U.S. is behind many other countries in cell phone use (and the texting that goes along with it), texting and online acronyms and loose writing styles have wreaked havoc with the rules.  No rulz now.

Texting has become the preferred method of communications for teenagers and is changing the way they communicate, according to an article in Teens and Technology.

Benjamin Franklin had a loose spelling and grammatical style, too, back when he was using the new phamplet media under pseudonyms to get his ideas out in new ways.  Ruffians, we were then, as upstart Americans, upsetting the apple cart of the King's English and pushing the new frontiers of inexpensive publishing.

Want a taste of the new way literature might be appealing to youth? The book TTFN by Lauren Myracle, published in Spring '06, is aimed at highschoolers and written in their new sling-style text.  It is a follow-up to her '05 book, ttyl (talk to you later).  The thing that caught me was the second book didn't even need a parenthetical explanation.  Warp speed changes.

Anonymous messages in code on playing cards? That's a twist. Maybe writing is going every which way but the traditional way. I Am The Messenger won a 2006 Honor Award announced during last week's National Teen Read Week.

New literature by crowds? YRUHRN --Why Are You Here – Right Now? is billed as the first crowdsourced book, written by the collective wisdom of 1,000 people in a turn-key 50 day project. It has just been released by Lulu.

e.e. cummings was way ahead of his time, writing in ways that turned conventions upside down and inside out.  Isn't it interesting how old things become new when we look at them in retrospect, through the rose colored glasses of the present?   

i think and probably u do 2.

Note: The original site for this content is MotherPie, www.motherpie.com

Sunday Soap Box: Fevered Food Fascists...

When Forbes magazine labels those concerned for healthy food "fevered food fascists" and "prissy New York-style food police" they are slinging epithets at a lot of mamas and we should stand up and be counted as caring for our children and families.   The story is hydrogenated vegetable oils (transfats) and the big issue now is banning their use in NYC restaurants with a hearing on October 30. It is a poisonous apple,  this feeding of toxic substances to unsuspecting customers.

Dr. Walter Willett, the Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and an extremely credible source, says: "Trans fat from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is a toxic substance that does not belong in food."

Chicago is considering a similar effort and Forbes calls Chicago a City of Nannies - the headline of an October 30th article that calls banning trans fats "putting reins on restaurants."  Hold your horses, there.  Doing right is more than a profit-loss accounting form.  Moms know this. Nanny-nanny boo-boo to you, Forbes.

Does it surprise anyone that mothers care more about what we put in our mouths and those of our children and families than big business does?  Love is priceless. Profit isn't.   

Last Minute Costumes for Halloween? Go Virtual...

If you are thinking about costumes at the last minute, you might just want to do it all virtually.  At Yahoo! Avatars you can create your own avatar.  After  writing about alternate unreal/real virtual living on Second Life and ranting last week about Halloween costumes  on Sunday Soapbox: Skanky Costumes, I found, via  Life as I  Know It, the link where you can go to play (for free) with your own identity via your very own avatar -- an online characterization of yourself.  I played around dressing in a cowboy hat with a horse, and then tried a witch with a black cat and flashing lightening in a cemetery for a haunting, surreal effect for the holiday. 

This just goes  to show you how people play with their identities online and where the trends online and otherwise are going.  Spooky?

Click on the avatar, above left, to go to the site.  If you can't go in w/out a Yahoo! account, it just goes to show you what sort of ploys search portals are working on to draw you in. Capturing the audience is how the money will be made.  Getting the attention of the eyeballs is the name of the game.

Will Yahoo!'s new avatar play will help it's lackluster bottom line results as compared to mega Google?  Google's profits nearly doubled from a year ago and  besides buying popular spaces like YouTube, their spending for research is up 76% over a year ago.  Google Chief Executive Eric Smith says, "We are at the early stages for something likely to be a very transformational industry."  Hold onto your (witch or cowboy) hats or whatever you virtually might have on your head.  The future is galloping here at race-horse speed (or rocket speed) and it is going to be a weird world haunted by all sorts of strange things.  Boo!

An Invisible Cloak? You can't get it yet, but scientists at Duke University have been working with a design theory and material that distorts space so that microwaves are bent around a cloaked object.  Making wearers disappear has been the project of U.S. and British scientists -- some of the funding for the research came from the US Defense Department's high-tech research unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The online explosion of social communities -- and the identities that go with them. Strange, alluring, wierd, sci-fi. Really, very unreal. 

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Sex, Politics and Money...

The three unmentionables?  I won't be socially polite and avoid the subject. It is down and dirty.  Tabloidization (tv and mags) are eating up Anna Nicole Smith's sagas.  She's gone from having a Sugar Daddy to being a Sugar Mama. Heather Mills might make from $100 - $376 million in her divorce deal from Paul McCartney. Let's hum the Beatles tune, She loves you, yah, yah, yah... with a love like that, you know it should be true. What does civility mean anymore?  Or honor?  Or love? What is true? 

Fact: controversy sells and because we have taboo subjects, they become media fodder for storytelling.  Think about it.  It is the raunch culture.  Are you buying into it?

Political polarity and partisanship create fevered nastiness fraught with desperation and low and dirty tricks.  Sexual and race issues are insinuated in nasty political ads in Tennessee that have attracted riveting national attention.  Nastiness works and fear sells.  It is a hard-wired fact.  We've descended into the gutter where dirty is the only way to talk about these three things.  It isn't healthy, nor is it right.  Our nation was founded on a higher level of civility.

Family Friday: Jack-O-Lanterns...

The Art of the Pumpkin!!! This has to be one of the most fun family projects.   Do you have great memories of carving the fruit (yes, pumpkins are fruits).  Our favorite pumpkin carving memory is the year we had two exchange students from Spain living with us and we carved up HUGE pumpkins. These girls said that the pumpkin carving was their favorite American tradition and best experience! 

The pumpkin was one of the foods from the New World adopted by Europe.   I can make a mean pumpkin pie and will for Thanksgiving and the pumpkin carving runs right into Turkey decorations... all Americana traditions!

Carve it up with art and style!  Let your creative juices flow!  We don't have a porch anymore to display our creativity... but I don't want to lose this tradition.  We'll carve up a good memory and a great time!  President Bush picked his pumpkin for Laura this year at a patch in Virginia.  Don't pick it up by the stem like he did.  Pumpkins are fragile things and need to be handled gently.

If you have a good pic, send it to me at hapage at motherpie dot com and I'll post it!!!

Bush photo - Reuters/Jason Reid; top photo credit

Copyfights: Copyright Violations, Content Theft, Internet Skumbags...

Copyfights. Copyright is the next huge issue with blogs and online content. Non-professionals can publish anything to everyone for virtually nothing.  For those who create and publish content, understanding copyright, fair use and licenses is important.  How to police and protect work and how to create and share work?  It is illegal to publish copyright material without copyright holder's permission and this applies to content published on blogs, just as much as commercial content. Internet skuzzbos -- scraper sites, splogs and stealers of content who look to take advantage of this site (and other blogs) for profit are frustrating at least, and have made me think seriously about the future of this endeavor, micro- and macro-wise.

Approximately 70% of blog postings consist of spam from splogs. Splogs use stolen content without permission or links back only for promoting affiliated websites for their own financial benefit and ad revenues.  Scraper sites pull/steal information, mostly through RSS, and have proliferated (Bitacle is one of these and the first experience I had with stealers).  These are all copyright violations but difficult for regular Plain Jane bloggers to fight.  Some use software to scramble the content so it won't be detected by plagiarism software.

It was more than seeing my content stolen by some entity in Spain.  It was a blogger this week in Mexico who used my self-portrait without permission, a copyright violation, that ruffled my feathers and by unfairly stealing, shat upon my charade, this blog parade. 

It was me out there, by jove, she took.  Merde Mierda. I should know better: it is a no-rule place, this internet ephemeral cloud of boundariless space.

Ramble: Information, Souls & Politics

On the mid-week Ramble I'm caught up in the politics just like everyone else, it seems.  Do you wonder about who your neighbors are, red or blue, and how you fit into your area?  Map the Dollars by your zip code and see how it politically sorts out, thanks to Matthew Kane.

Thinking more of  politics...does reality and truth matter, or is it all in the presentation and spin?  Getting attention and buy-ins is what matters? This week I'm studying virtual realities, theoretically, in media studies (you'll get the gist w/ the themes in upcoming posts...).  The NYTimes had an article on new software technology that can capture the soul and it really stuck in my mind and I've been mentally masticating on this.  Andy Wood, chairman of Image Metrics, calls it "soul transference."  The company's software can map an actor's performance onto any character, virtual or human, living or dead. Marilyn Monroe doesn't have to be dead any more.   Think about it.

If you thought the Audrey Hepburn Gap ad was a little odd, making her seem as though she is alive today, think about what you'll be seeing commercially in the future.  This is something truly different.  California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has conducted tests with new technology to use his Conan the Barbarian character in political ads.  Who's the real guy... the actor, the politician or the character? 

Petabytes...Past Infinity? How do you measure all this information that is out there in the digital ethereal virtual world?  We no longer are talking millions and jillions.  Have we passed infinity yet?  Wired has an article on The Information Factories and the dawning of the petabyte age where information resides in the Internet Cloud: "Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes of Gmails, MySpace pages, and dancing-doggy videos – a relentless march of daily deltas, each larger than the whole Web of a decade ago."

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wrote on Ethan Zuckerman's blog awhile back about his list of things that yearn to be free.  I would say information is hard to contain, especially now. Wikipedia started in '01 and by August '06 it had more than 4,600,000 articles in over 200 languages, including more than 1,300,000 in English.  The Washington Post wrote about information being forever and harder to contain in the disintermediated environment.

So... to end my Ramble on an informative political note, I think I have two of my three children prepared to vote, bless their souls, for the first time in this election.  Politics on the razor's edge, slicing and dicing and positioning. 

Midweek Cheers.

Recursive Creative Content: Stephen Colbert and iPod...

Stephen Colbert, of the Comedy Central show The Colbert Report, issued a challenge to take his video footage of fighting with a saber in front of a green screen and remix it for new creative content.  It wasn't a contest but he did choose two winners.

The new remix of Colbert's saber fighting I found most interesting (but it wasn't one of the winning two) was the recreation of Colbert as an iPod dancer (it didn't win). It built on established and well-known Apple commercial images and brands, taking old/existing content and remixing it to create new recursive meaning.

Deconstruction, reconstruction.  New media mixing the old and new -- that was what Colbert's challenge was all about.  Copyright, trademark infringements... it is all a new dance out there as content is mashups and mixups.  Colbert generated publicity on YouTube for his challenge (of the two winners, this was my favorite and others are on the Colbert site) but not as fun as the iPod remix.  Ads and commercial content get wider play-on-demand.  Am I one of the one million people a day checking out YouTube.  I only do it on occasion.  I have better things to do with my time.  Like blogging.

10/25 update:  I would assume that the above video has been removed due to copyright infringement issues that have come up after Google's bid to buy YouTube.