A reflection of digital technology in Art, underpinned by Object Oriented Ontology no less!

The SXSW Presentation caused quite a stir. Yup, looks like yet another reason to attend SXSW.

The provocative Wired article by Bruce Sterling that really got things going online-conversation-wise.

Bruce’s followup suggestion about what to do about it.

James Bridle’s Great Tumblr Scrapbook of the New Aesthetic, mother lode of all New Aesthetic collections. This is great.

Object Oriented Ontology.

I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but: people are objects.

Wade through the requisite Wikipedia article if so inclined.

Alternately a definition for ordinary folk wherein: “Nothing has special status … everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example.” Any plumbers out there? How do you feel about your alleged bonobo equivalency? Sounds like a Big Bang Theory episode: The Bonobo Equivilency: Sheldon offends the whole gang with his radical world view leaving him without friends over Easter long weekend.

Personally I’m having fun with the Aesthetic, and not worrying to much about the OOO.

http://www.proclipusa.com/

The product itself is great, I bought one perfectly designed to mate my 1999 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 with my 10-years-newer Apple iPhone. It’s nice functional solution to an awkward problem.

The website uses a product selection function that works the same way, making an otherwise awkward buying process simple and almost fool-proof.

Competing with a myriad of businesses serving the vehicle after-market this site works because it chooses to do  just one thing better than anyone else.

Google’s recommendations resulted in ad impressions dropping by half, and CTR doubling. In theory this would be good, an indication the campaign had been better targeted and made more relevant to Google’s search audience.

However today I reversed all changes. Our client complained they’ve been getting fewer inbound leads and more importantly: the wrong kind of leads. They sell B2B but careful analysis of the new campaign’s performance indicated it lost some of that traffic in favor of retail traffic, individuals. The numbers were “improved” by, in effect, switching target markets.

I attribute this to Google’s PPC analysts strictly numbers-oriented approach thinking about keyword counts rather than keyword meaning, not accounting for the overlapping B2B / retail keyword spaces, and generally not developing an understanding of the clients business and target market opting instead to just “go by the numbers”.