Ideas worth talking about.

fin

Flicks & Picks
Originally uploaded by samkarp.

I paid my final respects to Flicks and Picks yesterday. Beloved by the community, for many years this video store was the only place in town to find an obscure documentary or foreign film.

Then came Netflix.

After 23 years, one of the last remaining video rental stores in Eugene closes.

"The convenience of being able to stay at home in your living room and dial up a movie or get one in the mail, it's just a changing industry and we thought this was a good time to bow out," says co-owner Dave Mendonca. (source: TV station, KVAL 13 Eugene).

Sometimes you need to realize when your way of doing business no longer makes sense and quit.

It’s interesting though how many people SAID they loved this locally owned video shop, however chose to rent videos elsewhere. As we all know, what people say they want or do is often different from their behavior.

generational nonsense

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the usefulness of naming generational groups of people. Then, I saw David Wolfe's four-part post on Generational Nonsense (part: 1, 2, 3, 4).

It seems trendy to use phrases like Gen Y and Generation Next in the boardroom. But what does it really mean to generalize a whole group of people? It scares me to hear business people say Gen Yers are like this and Gen Xers are like that. They think they know their target audience. But do they?

Here’s a great quote by Bill Bernbach (via David Wolfe):

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”

whatever it is I think I see

I saw this video on retrojunk: your memory machine (via Adrian Lai). Retojunk has a collection of TV intros, commercials and movie trailers from the past 30 years.

David Nottoli makes an interesting observation, “We're living in the 1980's again!  We have a Republican President, Democratic Congress, 80's music being played at restaurants, bars and retail shops, teenagers walking around in pegged pants, Mr. T on television and everybody's driving around like they're Thomas Magnum.”

tracking trends

Chirag Mehta shows us tag clouds of Presidential Speeches from 1776 to 2006. These tags document the popularity and frequency of the top 100 word used in each speech.

Hans Rosling does an amazing job of breathing life into data. Not only does he debunk a few myths about the "developing" world, he does it with passion.

Technorati takes a close look at the blogosphere. It’s now tracking more than 57 Million blogs. Every 230 days the blogosphere is doubling. That’s about 100,000 new weblogs created each day.

Two more dedicated and creative blogers joined us this week. Welcome Deb and Joe.