A Marketing Mix

This Clay Shirky talk from Web 2.0 Expo NY ("It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure") challenges the idea that we've got information overload problems (we've had more books than any human could read for hundreds of years), what we have is a series of filter failures, as our systems for managing information abundance are swamped by the growth of information.

"Media companies are in trouble because they have to compete against a multitude of companies producing media as a loss leader."

This is an interesting analysis by Tom Foremski on ZDNet that shows how much companies have now invested in the Publishing space. Be it through Content Creation or Content Curation, Social Media makes every brand a publisher. And it's bad news for traditional media which have to reinvent themselves.

Great read.

Apple's decision to reject an e-book by Seth Godin because it contains hyperlinks to books in the Amazon store is just another example of how the oligopoly that controls the market for e-books is turning the landscape of reading into a walled garden.
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Just as a few massive chain stores eventually came to dominate the traditional printed book market in North America, the e-book marketplace is a kind of oligopoly involving a few major players — primarily Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. And while bookstore owners of all kinds are free to decide which books they wish to put on their shelves, these new giants have far more control over whose e-books see the light of day because they also own the major e-reading platforms, and they are making decisions based not on what they think consumers want to read but on their own competitive interests. That is turning the e-book landscape into even more of a walled garden.

Author and digital-marketing maven Seth Godin highlighted this issue in a recent blog post, in which he described how his new book was turned down by Apple because it contained hyperlinks to books sold by Amazon (with whom Godin has a partnership). According to a letter that the author says he received from the company, the new title — Stop Stealing Dreams, a book about the transformation that Godin believes needs to happen in public education — was rejected by Apple due to what the letter described as “multiple links to [the] Amazon store.” Godin notes that the book had links to related works, including Too Big to Know from David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.