Counter Culture. A Design Philadelphia Event at 160over90.

Please join us at 160over90 as part of Design Philadelphia on Tuesday, October 13th from 6:00-9:00 pm for Counter Culture, an exhibition of the De’Longhi Artista Series. 160over90 in collaboration with De’Longhi commissioned designers across varying disciplines to create original works of art to be laser-etched onto the De’Longhi Perfecta Espresso machine. Beginning on Sunday, October 4th these limited-edition pieces will be auctioned off on ebay giving works to benefit Oxfam America, a charity committed to the fight against poverty and social injustice.

The Counter Culture Exhibition will be the last time the public will be able to see the Artista Series in its entirety before the machines are sent to the winning bidders. Contributing artists Mike Perry, Damien Correll and Mario Hugo will be on hand as well as familiar faces from the Philadelphia design community. We hope to see you there.

RSVP by Friday, October 9th to rsvp@160over90.com

Happy 60th, Boss

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Passing Strange

Last year’s musical highlight, bar none. The best kept secret in songwriting genius, Afro-baroque pop smarty pants Stew took a bright bow in the klieglights of Broadway for his debut autobiographical musical Passing Strange. The Tony nominated show, a massive critical success (see here, and here) has been superbly filmed by Spike Lee. The film is now available nationwide on cable pay-for-view as the premiere offering of Sundance Selects’ Video on Demand service (available on Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox and Bright House) beginning August 26th. You. Must. Watch. This. Featuring gospel raveups, formative stabs at California hardcore, a heart-wrenching song about getting stoned with your choir director, musical pastiches of bohemian Amsterdam and German anarchist industrial agit-prop (on Broadway!), all in the service of a supremely moving story about the search for the meaning of art in life. Once more – Must. Watch. (via shepelavy.com)

The No Facebook League… well sort of

I’m a fan of the NFL.

I believe it is one of the best run businesses around. When you consider all of professional sports it has the best salary cap and free agency structure allowing teams to move from worst to first in the span of a year. The balance of power between professional football organizations and their players helps prohibit players from taking a day, a week or even a season ‘off’. A plight that many other professional sports teams deal with once players get their guaranteed money (thanks Matt Geiger). The amount of games that are played throughout the course of a season are so few compared to their professional counterparts that every play seemingly counts more.

Like any successful business the NFL has evolved and found new markets. This can be illustrated in the league’s efforts to have more games abroad and in the way it has been able to take what was a four to five month season and turn it into a year long engagement. Shortly after the Superbowl the Combine starts being promoted. The Combine takes place in February followed by a few months of pre-draft hype. The NFL draft takes place in April (and generally gets more viewers than NBA playoff games occurring at the same time). Followed by post draft analysis, training camp the preseason and before you know it is September and you’ve been following football all year on what – the NFL Network. All of this ultimately provides fans with ways to stay emotionally invested with the NFL.

Recently the league was faced with a decision that many organizations are grappling with. What will our policies be in the face of evolving social media? With its hand forced by Ochocinco the NFL had to modify its position. For a business that has done so much to expand its reach and interest  the new policy seems counterintuitive to the progress it has made.

The NFL said that it will let players, coaches, and other team personnel engage in social networking during the season. However, they will be prohibited from using Twitter and from updating profiles on Facebook and other social-networking sites during games. In addition, they will not be allowed to tweet or update social-networking profiles 90 minutes before a game and until post-game interviews are completed. The rules also extend to people who could represent a player or coach on their personal accounts and also prohibit the media attending the game to post updates through social networks.

The ruling to prohibit players, coaches, and other team personnel from tweeting during games makes sense. But why won’t the NFL allow players to post updates directly after games? Instead of waiting for a few select players or coaches to come up to the podium after a crushing defeat or roaring victory why not allow all of them to post to their social networks? Real time input directly after the game could prove advantageous as it expands not only the NFL following but an individual player or coaches following.

What also seems a little foggy is the stipulation that people who could represent a player or coach are prohibited from providing content. What if McNabb’s mom wanted to post that her son just scored a touchdown (or finished some Campbell’s Soup)? What if there was an emergency on the field where twitter could most quickly find a doctor in the stands who could help? Moreover, how will the NFL define and then monitor people considered representative of a player?

As it relates to regulating the media the league’s policy has been that while a game is in progress that, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount. Here the league is protecting its huge TV and radio contracts so no tweeting can be going on from the press box. This policy is set up for failure. If the guy sitting in the stands isn’t representing a player or a member of the media and is able to provide live-tweets of play-by-play action his reporting could ultimately trump that of the media.

My expectations of the NFL as with other trusted brands and businesses is that they are more often than not going to make decisions aligned with their value set and that those decisions are ultimately going to benefit the consumer. In this instance the league has done neither.

Now please pardon me as I have to go and check the waiver wire in my Fantasy League.

OMG, ppl luv writing, nu study sez.

“No one reads anymore.”

Copywriters hear some variation of that phrase at least thrice daily. And while we occasionally drift into the enticing pastures of overly garrulous, wildly pretentious prose–uh, I mean write too much–it should come as welcome relief to anyone who pecks the home row keys for a living that people, in fact, are reading and writing more than ever.

This new Wired article, citing a new Stanford University study, states “that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.” The author Clive Thompson makes a point that perhaps the good old days weren’t so good for people writing, because “before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”

Sure, old farts–myself included–have derided the lol-tastic world of text and IM speak, but at least people are organizing their thoughts in the written form–albeit an evolving form. And even the oldest codgers among us must concede that we now occupy a world where folks actively consume the majority of their information; discovering news and reading things online is far more involved than passively sitting in front of a TV screen or radio.

Of course, people have more options than ever, so they can quickly bail on any content.  So the good news is that people will read. They just won’t read crap.