Flow Advertising, Defrag Talk

Eric is working on getting people’s juices flowing for Defrag, and has been blogging some teasers:

[from Anything but ho-hum]

“Is the flow just too much? Lifestreaming at the edge”: Anyone who knows me knows that I’m impressed by Stowe Boyd’s brain. One of the big pushes around information overload is always how to “limit” things. Declaring “email bankruptcy” is a pretty common happening for folks that come back from vacation (or travel) to find 1000s of email messages, feeds, bits of news and tweets that haven’t been read. Hell, I’ve done it.

What fascinates me about Stowe’s thoughts are his immediate reactions against this surrender. He would rather take us the other way - claiming that perhaps our metaphors of work and living inside of this “flow” aren’t quite caught up to where the technology is trying to lead us. Could it be that we’re all just horribly behind the curve (or flow)? I’m not sure, but I know that Stowe will make us think, and I’m betting that he’ll start to open our eyes to how it is that re-imagining our metaphors around interaction can help to reshape the technologies and tools we’re dealing with.

On the Defrag website you will find my picture and the title of my planned talk, “Flow: The Still Point Of The Turning World?”, which he somehow mangled into “Lifestreaming at the Edge” (which is not too bad, really).

I am going to dig into the first order cognitive impacts of working with modern flow applications — both good and bad reports from various researchers — and extrapolate a bit on cultural, media, and business implications.

Among other thoughts, I am dithering around with ‘flow advertising’ — what if advertisers emulate the social ‘touches’ and short commentary that create most of the conversation in flow apps, like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Feedly? If an advertiser responds in a natural way to my Tweets, is it spam? For example, I post ‘Listening to Gillian Welch “Look At Miss Ohio”’, and a entertainment service responds ‘Gillian Welch in San Francisco, 9 Sept. Tickets http://bit.ly/yZQF7’. That’s not spam, bro: that’s good conversational marketing. Likewise, I post I am heading out for lunch, and a few hours earlier I had posted my location (‘I’m at 156 S Park St, San Francisco, CA, 94107, US (156 S Park St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA) - http://bkite.com/010u4’). If I get a message from a nearby restaurant offering me today’s special, I would be happy.

(And people wonder about the Twitter business model. Ha!)