Over the holidays, I found myself in an odd discussion with my grandfather. He wanted to know what a blog was. As we continued to talk, I assured him it was not a new breed of chickens but in fact it was a new breed of his “Lancaster Farmer.” In today’s information obsessed culture, limitless amounts of both useful and non-useful facts are at our fingertips.

The conversation reminded me how much many of us take for granted these “newfangled” communication methods and how a large segment of the 21st century population (older Americans) still has little knowledge of these channels (or little use for them). Will blogging alter consumer habits in the future? Some would say it already has, and the influx of “non-credible” blogging has become more worthy than the facts and ultimately change how people make decisions for their lives.

Don’t look now, but the FTC wants to regulate blogging. A recently approved rule now requires bloggers who review products to clearly disclose any payments or free items they may have received from a company.

Evidently only four people get to vote on an issue like this and, in this instance, it was unanimous.

According to a FoxNews.com article,  “The goal is to cut down on advertisers manipulating the content of blogs by giving them free stuff. Bloggers have long praised or panned products and services online. But what some consumers might not know is that many companies pay reviewers for their write-ups or give them free products such as toys or computers or trips to Disneyland. In contrast, at traditional journalism outlets, products borrowed for reviews generally have to be returned.”

Its a shame we can’t just assume people will stay true to this open and valuable form of communication. If the lines get blurry it’s on the blogger to set the record straight — to me it’s pretty simple. According to the new regulations, they are skewed to punish the advertiser, not the blogger, but still. I’m sure readers will respect someone’s honesty versus the alternative.

One bad apple can spoil the bunch, unfortunately. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need regulations, guidelines and a group of people administering fines to people who violate them. $11,000 by the way is the maximum potential penalty.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. The first fine they place on someone is destined to get some coverage — perhaps right here on the Think It So blog on December 1st when the regulations take effect.

Last Friday night, fairly late, I unleashed a modest Facebook application called Your Halloween Name using the slightly-more-than-beta interface of AppDeveloper from the newbie start-up AppBank. My creation follows the primal recipe of most Facebook apps in that it promises to:

A) tell you something about yourself, and

B) share that something with a small coterie of friends who will, in turn, share it with others.

Your Halloween Name also features dopey, spurious, black-and-white drawings of vampires, werewolves and some sort of bug-brained creature. It took me far less than three hours to produce, start-to-finish.

But within a half hour of publishing this content, a friend reported that his cousin had used it. And, as I write this — barely 48 hours later — 29,431 unique Facebook users have encountered my trivial Halloween pursuit, which does little more than translate their name into a spooky moniker (a la the credits on the annual Simpson’s Halloween Special.)

Here’s some current data from my recent foray into viral content:

• 28.25% of those users are between one and 18-years-old, while a meager 2.26% are over 55.
• Nearly three quarters are under 35.
• Females outnumber males in a ratio of 79.22% to 20.78%.
• The users are nearly all from the U.S. and Canada, with the states of New York (2,484 impressions) and California (1,390) leading the pack.

Later this weekend, over on YouTube, my millennial offspring introduced me to the Mean Kitty Song which has enjoyed 26,634,112 views since its posting in 2007. The Mean Kitty Song and its subsequent spin-off video franchise are basically amateurish videos of a guy playing with kittens. They are unpolished, nominally edited, and relatively goofy. They are, in short, pretty much next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. And yet, if each of the Mean Kitty Song’s views was made by a unique individual (of course, the viewers are not actually unique), that number would constitute roughly 1 in 12 of every human living in the United States. That’s one powerful kitty, friends.

Today in still another corner of the digital world, I watched the exceptional advertising case study for the Queensland Tourism Board by the firm Sapient Nitro. This campaign used classified display ads to generate one of this year’s most massively successful returns in earned media.

My experimental Your Halloween Name app, the Mean Kitty Song, and Sapient Nitro’s Best Job in the World Campaign all share a few common features:

• They look like they were thrown together.
• They are casual.
• They are very, very cheap.
• They do not appear to sell anything.

All of this got me to musing. It seems like content that isn’t overly crafted or commercial may also help lower the barrier to viewership. It’s almost as though, as digital foragers, we have become accustomed to favor content that signals its own impermanence and lack of airs. While we might well shell out ten bucks to see a blockbuster movie, that movie usually costs upwards of $30 million to make. If that same movie returns $100 million in profits, it has delivered only 10 million impressions, give or take. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Mean Kitty dude probably spent about three days and $150 in software to generate twice that many viewings.

In my mind, none of this tolls the death knoll for the thirty-second spot, an ad format that has been much lamented by our industry of late. But it does mean that a few creepy Facebook drawings, a kitten caught on an amateurish videocam, or a classified ad all have the power to drive one more nail into the spot’s coffin.

That’s what I’m calling next-to-nothing to the something-th power

Rumor has it there’s a new search engine on the loose — or about to be on the loose. Its called Wolfram Alpha and it is being billed as a computational knowledge engine which on the surface sounds much better than the traditional search engine nomenclature that we are all accustomed to. It’s also being called the Internet’s holy grail, a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does

According to one article, Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location, nearby towns, other mountains, graphs and charts. College just got a whole lot easier. The real innovation, however, is its ability to work things out “on the fly,” according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. This is mind boggling to me. Start thinking of questions like this you’d like the answers to…

One kink in the armor ironically is a search on “50 Cent,” which caused some issues because the search engine confused currency with the rapper. I’m sure Dr. Wolfram and his boys were laughing their asses off. Back to the drawing board…. 

Launching in May, Wolfram Alpha is currently being tested by people who sign up on their website to put it through its paces. I sent an email asking to try it out. On the form it had a section for a message in which I wrote, “The worst you can do is say no.” I’m no Internet insider but I am just as curious as the next guy. We’ll see what the response is. I’ll keep you posted.

Google is working on a similar search engine in beta currently as well. It will be interesting to see which one figures how who to handle 50 Cent first. My money’s on the computational knowledge engine — it just sounds better.

The one or two people out there who doubt the power of the Internet need only look at the mind-boggling response to Susan Boyle’s April 11 performance on “Britain’s Got Talent.” As I write this, it’s estimated that it’s been viewed more than 100 million times – which seems like a low estimate. Thousands of sites have linked to the main posting on YouTube or thrown up their own copies.

It’s an indictment on our society that people are shocked that a plain-looking 47-year-old woman has the voice of an angel. We suspect that she could NOT have gotten a recording contract on her own, despite her talent. We think recording studio executives would dismiss her because of her looks. This harks back to Shanna’s entry on sex in advertising/marketing, “Where’s Rosie the Riveter When You Need Her?” That Rosie is actually pretty sexy. Did real life female riveters look like that?

People weep when they watch Ms. Boyle sing “I Dreamed A Dream” because she not only bravely faces a studio audience filled with smirking people – sending them to their feet with wild applause – but she packs so much power and emotion into her performance that you think the song must have personal meaning for her. She jokes about being single, “never been kissed” and living with her cat Pebbles, but isn’t that just bravado?

One thing to take away from the response to Susan Boyle is that people who want any kind of audience at all outside their little corner of the world – and that means outside a one-block radius – MUST put their message online. Why can’t people spell? Why do they turn to the Internet to make friends or be entertained? Or get their news? Shop? Or do anything for that matter? Because “new media” is the massage.