connecting*the*dots

Margaret Bourke-White
Bread Line during the Louisville flood, Kentucky
1937

(photo by Jesus’ General)

Reuters
ABC Scrambling to Change 9/11 Drama

[…]

Officials at the Walt Disney Co.-owned network said they were still tinkering with the five-hour production, titled “The Path to 9/11,” which is scheduled to air without commercial interruption in two parts on Sunday and Monday.

But ABC declined to say how the movie was being reshaped or whether any changes would address specific complaints lodged by Clinton, his former aides and congressional Democrats that the film contained numerous inaccuracies and distortions.

The Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, citing sources close to the project, reported the network was considering canceling the miniseries altogether.

The docu-drama, which ABC says is based largely on the official 9/11 Commission Report, opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security adviser Samuel Berger refuse to authorize completion of their mission.

An unfinished version of the film circulated by ABC to TV critics for review portrays Berger as abruptly hanging up the phone while the CIA is pressing him to approve the raid.

In letters of protest to Disney President Robert Iger, Berger and former White House aide Bruce Lindsey said no such episode ever occurred.

The executive producer of the film, Marc Platt, acknowledged to Reuters on Thursday the Berger scene was a “conflation of events.”

The film also drew denunciations from Clinton supporters for strongly suggesting his administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal effectively with the gathering threat of Islamic militancy. Lindsey said the 9/11 Commission Report disputed that notion.

[…]

This is what you get when you try to cash in too early on a national tragedy.

Remember the films JFK and Pearl Harbor? Both films took tremendous license in their portrayals of actual events, but the difference is that they did so 28 and 60 years after the fact, respectively. And while each took accuracy jabs from critics, neither had to deal with this degree of criticism because the emotional scars of the American public had already healed and the people who were on watch during these tragedies were either retired or dead.

With the airing of The Path to 9/11 on the eve of the five year anniversary of the events of that day, we also happen to be stuck, knee-deep, in a war that has been proven to have no relationship to the events of that day. No matter what inaccuracies are found — from either side of the aisle — this production was bound to catch major flack for trying to feed a narrative to a still healing nation, ever so hungry for the truth, not some docu-drama version of the events leading to 9/11.

Who Made The Call To Produce This Film?

In my estimation, there are only two possible reasons why Disney/ABC would give the green light on this production at this time:

1. Karl Rove instructed his minions to write the narrative and convince Disney/ABC to produce the film
2. Disney/ABC is simply gambling on the old adage, “There is no such thing as bad PR”

As a firm believer in the power that human greed wields in shaping our world over back door conspiracies, I’m sitting pretty squarely in the second camp (though I couldn’t help using the above image of Mickey Rove; Gen. JC Christian, Patriot is a genius).

I’m betting that Disney/ABC figured that this would be business as usual, though blown up a bit due to the subject matter; you know the formula — create a controversy, sell the advertising, line the pockets and move on unscathed within a few weeks.

What they didn’t take into consideration is the age that we live in now — where blog reach is both gaining traction in the very same homes that their sugar-coated narrative is being presented, as well as influencing the presentation of popular shows on TV (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to name a few).

When a passive audience starts to become more active in their digestion of information, these old axioms of capitalism begin to start biting mainstream marketing strategies in the ass.

To make my point, let me perform a few minutes worth of Google research… Okay, I’m back (and my own thesis has shifted somewhat after only 20 minutes). Take this bit of information from HuffPost as an example of how nutritional facts for digesting reality can change a perspective in a matter of minutes:

[…]

In fact, “The Path to 9/11″ is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham’s TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled “Untitled History Project.” “TFI’s first project is a doozy,” a newsletter to YWAM members read. “Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!” (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).

The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series “under a shroud of secrecy” about the 9/11 attacks. “At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries ‘Untitled Commission Report’ and producers refer to it as the ‘Untitled History Project,’” the Post noted.

[…]

Hm… Maybe I was too quick to espouse my faith in greed over conspiracies? I highly doubt I’ll be going to Disneyland again. In any event, the chances of Disney/ABC walking away clean from this beaut of a mis-timed and shady production is slim to none.

The Future Of Market Accountability

As the ecosystem for delivering entertaining, informative and personalized information gains a new foothold of innovation each and every year, we’re becoming deeper and deeper immersed within the information age.

The people formally known as the audience are becoming more politically aware through osmosis these days. And the harder the mainstream, one-way channels are leveraged to message us with constructed narratives, the easier it becomes for us to unbundle the programming and filter fact from fiction — no matter our brand of politics.

An analogy: The addition of nutritional labels to food products years ago didn’t end up preventing obesity, but the presentation of nutritional meta-data sure as hell increased the potential for new forms of viable economic levers within the food industry.

As high-fat foods in the mid-nineties and high-carb foods over the past few years have taken a hit due to greater consumer awareness, low-fat and low-carb products have gained a place in the market at a higher selling point due to simple demand.

My point?

While a conglomerate like Disney/ABC can get away with producing a film with this level of empty calories here and there, as we move deeper into the online revolution, such blatant disregard for nutritious content could easily lead to the collapse of advertising arteries via brand corrosion, as an informed public is now armed with digital printing presses.

And man, is the web chock full of beating hearts willing to pump out blood or what?

href=”http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/08/082906.html”>the show with zefrank

Nike acquired a Phantom v5 digital camera — usually reserved for studying military defense systems — to capture Tiger Woods’ swing at 4000 frames per second.

I’m not a golf enthusiast, but I do love hitting the driving range every now and then. My approach to driving off the tee is a bit twisted; I’ve always imagined that the golf ball has just committed a violent crime against someone in my immediate family before I settle in to take my whacks.

Apparently, if my family were to be accosted in reality, my approach to retribution would only find the actual assailant 10% of the time and I’d get my ass kicked in the process.

But enough of my stupidity on the links. Keep your eyes fixed on Woods’ head and lower body during his entire back-swing. The man is a machine.

Oh, and by the way, what a beautiful piece of work by Nike and their agency of choice. The music is beyond apropos, reaching past elegant into the sublime.

(via Neatorama)

Jay Ovittore — the newly elected President of the The Young Democrats of Guilford County (congrats again, Jay) — caught the telcom and cable lobby once again spinning more lies about net neutrality.

If you’re still unclear as to why net neutrality matters, I highly recommend you take a minute to watch the following clip from The Daily Show.

Now that you’re armed with this foundational knowledge, put yourself in the shoes of cable executives (and their executive partners in the telcom industry) and think like these guys do for a minute. If you can make that leap into the pits of capitalism, it’s not too difficult to understand why they want to turn the internet into a toll road.

The Little Internet That Could

The first pass of the web (circa 1994 to 2001) wasn’t much of a threat to existing cable and media business models. We might have placed video online back then, but it was time consuming, costly and, relatively speaking, not viral at all.

Sure, once in a while clips like Dancing Baby caught the attention of the masses, but without the benefit of mass email spam between friends, they had to be sparked by inclusion in traditional mainstream media (in the case of Dancing Baby, the hit show Ally McBeal proved to be the tipping point).

Such crossover instances of viral exposure/marketing were few and far between and proved to be an intangible strategy that neither individuals or media professionals alike could leverage to spread their message, music, movies, etc.

All that has changed with the recent developments in viral infrastructure.

With the rise of video sharing sites (like YouTube or Revver) and millions of decentralized blogs — all pre-enabled to deliver embedded video at no cost — media networks are beginning to move content to these new distribution channels at a pace to keep up with the consumption patterns of today’s generation who are moving away from the boob tube.

(originally uploaded by Ian Chase)

It’s only a matter of time until advertising models are developed to monetize this organic delivery of non-programmed content and that’s when the great media exodus from TV to Web will occur. I’m not saying TV will go under completely, but the future of pre-programmed cable TV — the Golden Goose of of executive revenue — is not looking as viable as it did just 5 years ago. As a matter of fact, it’s beginning to look quite bleak.

So how do these old media distribution channels respond to such change? They don’t attempt to build anything useful for people to use that fits their new media habits, instead, they try to lobby for control to carve this new media distribution pie — a pie that they had *no hand* in innovating, evangelizing or iterating.

Capitalism 101.

If this isn’t enough information for your appetite, check out this archive of net neutrality goodness. Or simply run a search here, here or here.

If net neutrality is legislated away, you just might be paying for those searches in the not so distant future.

originally uploaded by don pedro: course 98, velocity 40.

The day that AOL/Netscape reduces their decade-long focus on squeezing profits from dial-up deals with web newbies long enough to compete with a niche, early adopter site like Digg, is the day that online, participatory communities will have reached the ROI tipping point.

Eh-hem! That day is here.

Michael Arrington frames the move nicely:

[…]

The fact that AOL is launching the new service under the Netscape brand instead of building out a new property says how serious they are about the space. According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views - far more than Digg today.

Putting this kind of audience in front of a Digg like service could spell trouble for many sites that ultimately make it to the top of the site. A Digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service.

There are a number of other notable features of the new Netscape. Story submissions can be tagged by the submitter along for easier search in the future. Every category, user and group of friends has their own RSS feed. Also, category anchors will follow up on many stories and post their own editorial content on those stories (see below)

With all of the recent moves, one has to be wondering where the participatory news space is heading:

• Newsvine is already an “all category” user-generated article space
• Digg is rumored to be expanding from a niche site to an all-encompassing domain
• Netscape is launching a full-force, broadly targeted, participatory interface into the mix

At first glance, the long-term benefits of this growing industry and competition seem to land in the laps of the end user.

In the real world, industry competition drives quality standards while the invisible hand of the market usually corrects pricing issues (except for oil and other lobbied industries, but that’s a whole other article).

If you follow similar logic within this segment of the internet economy, the domain with the most intoxicating experience design and participatory incentive programs should retain the largest share of the participatory market (and I’m not talking about the bread and circus returns of shiny AJAX widgets and karma points).

Interfaces that are primarily designed for an optimized, ad sales, click-through scheme and not unique, behavioral, user experiences, just won’t survive in the long-run. Domain competition will force top notch user-centered interaction design, reducing opportunities to implement old school, bean counting advertising schemes to piggy-back user behavior.

Even more disruptive; in order to increase sign-ups, retain customers and increase degrees of participation, one would think that revenue generated from these new user-centered, advertising paradigms will have to be efficiently shared with this new workforce of virtual attention laborors.

While it’s true that these particular industry domains are already branding the very idea of 2.0 community — essentially “soft-locking” people into committing to a domain as with neighborhoods — without certain concessions (such as revenue sharing) I’d imagine that tactic alone to be short-sighted. I mean, wouldn’t corporate abuse of our participatory nature by these enabling domains drive us to be quick to change our attachment to these particular 2.0 communities?

I have to profess, this is where my faith in the many falters.

Honestly, my “fear” is that the masses of early-adoptor geeks who are driving the emergence of this participatory economy are just as self-centered as the capitalistic drivers of the attention economy itself.

Let me rephrase and explain my thoughts more clearly.

Are we more interested in participating as authentic medic creators and information contextualizers from afar, while being left alone to receive our timely, customized, community-centered, topical information? Or do we believe in standing together as a workforce of developers of this information revolution and as personal, information contextualizers to create change in our overarching financial system itself, ensuring a greater diversity of fiscal opportunities for people living on the other side of numerous socio-economic divides?

This is where the rubber hits the road, just before the fork.

We Don’t Have To Follow The Same Path We Used To Get Here

Big business is just beginning to view participatory systems as an obvious line extension of the profit vehicles that mass production provided in the industrial age through financial capitalism. If you understand the underlying principals of the first go-around, the evolutionary patterns of the second pass make themselves quite obvious:

• In the 20th century, capitalists leveraged cookie-cutter product design, simplified mass production assembly lines, ensured low-wage labor systems and implemented hardcore, mass marketing and psychological advertising within an imbedded entertainment mass media to drive product consumption
• In the 21st century, capitalists have the advent of collaborative filtering and personalized interfaces, running on the movement, interactions and contextualization of data and perspectives of the people who use them, driving contextualized ad placement, resulting in both revenue and product consumption with much less overhead

VC’s drool over the possibilities of the attention economy, because they see exactly how to take advantage of the situation, turning passionate information junkies and connectors into ad sales generators, which is fine, because it’s in their nature.

(photo by illmatic)

The question I desperately want to ask “the masses” is do we, the designers, the developers, the content creators and authentic media generators, care about this pure, capitalistic leeching or is it truely in our nature to provide a free ride, no matter the potential for being used as residual generators of capital?

For if we do care, we — the schitzophrenic creators and consumers of this new economy — are in a unique position to take a slice of the proverbial pie, whether through better positioning in a buyer’s market or as compensated content creators in a participatory, user-generated, contextualized media system. Either way, we can completely alter the model of managed capitalism and move one-step closer to to realizing Doc Searls’ intention economy.

Let the capitalists finance the infrastructure and reap their fair, residual returns, but let the people drive the costs of the market based on our desires while sharing in the residual profits that we generate via digital forms of word of mouth advertising.

In today’s parameter-passing, unique-identifier, permalink world, both notions are completely feasible. The only question is whether or not they will take this revolutionary change lying down.

With the massacre of Haditha already drawing comparisons to the My Lai massacre — where up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children were killed in cold blood by American forces — proponents of this war are holding fast against this incident becoming the tipping point of complete anti-war sentiment.

Local blogger, Joe Guarino:

[…] We cannot take these unfortunate events, and then somehow generalize and amplify the Big Message they convey to suggest that the overall war effort is unworthy. We cannot make general assessments of the war in Iraq (or in Vietnam, for that matter) on the basis of tragic events that do not reflect the overall pattern.

The media would be wrong to muster a drumbeat on these stories, but if they do in stereotypical fashion, the public should ignore it.

Unfortunately for Joe and his agenda, the American public will discuss the role this atrocity plays in the overall war effort.

Whether Haditha represents an accurate assessment of the US military’s tactical MO or not, it has marked a clear shift in our collective perception of modern warfare. No longer do we live in a fantasy world of surgically precise operations; we’ve all awoken to the reality that combat-stressed groups of men and women in a war zone are capable of murdering civilians on their own accord.

That 21st century, smart-bomb warfare meme is kaput; we’re now all aware that the US is knee-deep in a grudge match.

But in the end, it truly doesn’t matter if this one incident is indicative of the pattern to the entire war effort or not, because to the Iraqi people — the people on the other end of the gun barrel in any circumstance — it signifies a terrifying escalation of chaos, murder and occupation that cannot be erased with clarifying words.

Not that our words would do any good anyways.

The Overall Pattern In Iraq

From pg. 39 of the September 2004 Strategic Communication report, by the Defense Science Board — a federal advisory committee established to provide independent advice to the secretary of defense:

2.3 What is the Problem? Who Are We Dealing With?

The information campaign — or as some still would have it, “the war of ideas,� or the struggle for “hearts and minds� — is important to every war effort. In this war it is an essential objective, because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.

American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.

• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,â€? but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that “freedom is the future of the Middle Eastâ€? is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World — but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.
• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public support.
• What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of “terroristâ€? groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam.
• Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic — namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is — for Americans — really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they are really just talking to themselves.

Thus the critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim World is not one of “dissemination of information,� or even one of crafting and delivering the “right� message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none — the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam. Inevitably therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and the “loud and clear� channel: the enemy.

That last sentence (with my emphasis) represents the overall pattern that I see in the Iraq war.

We’re a 100,000 strong force of monolinguistic, armed men and women on a foreign soil.

Our soldiers have little to no training in the local customs of the Iraqi people, and practically no one can verbally communicate with either civilians or the enemy.

Essential building blocks of communication with Iraqi’s — humane, personal connections via idle chat during a convoy exercise, supportive conversation in local establishments, calming direction provided during a house raid — all become lost opportunities to gain a semblance of trust or credibility.

This simple inability to communicate waters the fields of insurgent seeds.

So when an atrocity such as Haditha occurs, the Iraqi people’s understanding of the act can’t be contextualized or messaged into obscurity by our military.

Worse even, the sheer brutality of such an incident doesn’t need to be framed or spun by operatives of al Qaeda or the leaders of local insurgents to build a greater resistance to American forces.

The atrocity speaks for itself, with a clarity of message delivered via a deafening tone of dead relatives, neighbors and friends, all never to be seen again.

Iraqi citizens have lived with the fear of a potential Haditha massacre for years now. Their daily lives are filled with various degrees of similar experiences with American forces as we consistently sweep through house after house in the middle of the night, searching for insurgents. A Haditha massacre does only one thing: it confirms their worst fears, leading to more fear and more aggression towards our troops.

No matter what we want to tell ourselves, perception is reality.

The DoD knows we’ll never be able to control the perception of Iraqi’s, so this cry of the right to look at the big picture of the war is a nothing more than panicked attempt to control the perception and reactions of Americans that might question this war effort.

To suggest that the American public should “ignore” the “media mustering a drumbeat on these stories” — these atrocities — in order to protect the overall pattern of the war in Iraq is a failed intellectual position. This incident might only be one data point in the overall pattern of war, but it’s a glaring one — one that exposes more elements going wrong over there than going right.

The Role Of The Media

Iraqi war planners aren’t overly concerned with critical journalism, such as the March 2006 Time magazine exclusive on Haditha, affecting the average American’s take on the state of the war.

Sure, it’s a concern, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

If not managed, the mainstream media can become a major threat to war efforts because it is exists via the same capitalistic infrastructure as the government it supposes to watchdog.

In other words, when media institutions begin climbing onto editorial limbs, foregoing their inherent responsibility to the interests of corporate advertising, it clearly signals a shift in times to American corporations who become placed in a position to make certain decisions they’d rather not have to make:

• They can remove themselves from media buys that are beginning to serve the reflected will of the consumer (poor PR) or
• They can keep their advertising in place as a public relations strategy, while implicitly distancing themselves from our government’s effort to wage war

See, the real concern isn’t with the common people in as much as it is with the flow of money, for once the majority of corporations are off the bandwagon of a war effort, its future becomes rather short-lived.

An Example Of The Power Of Media

Lieutenant William Calley — the American officer in charge at the My Lai massacre — faced the scrutiny of the much more centralized, mainstream media of 1970. Advertising legend George Lois provides context to the media exposure of the atrocity at the time by describing the decision and experience of placing Calley on the November, 1970 cover of Esquire magazine :

“Lieutenant, this picture will show that you’re not afraid as far as your guilt is concerned. The picture will say: ‘Here I am with these kids you’re accusing me of killing. Whether you believe I’m guilty or innocent, at least read about my background and motivations.’” Calley grinned on cue, and we completed the session.

When I sent the finished cover to (Esquire editor, Harold) Hayes he called to let me know that his office staff and Esquire’s masthead bureaucrats were plenty shook up.

“Some detest it and some love it,” he said. “You going to chicken out?” I asked. “Nope,” he said. “We’ll lose advertisers and we’ll lose subscribers. But I have no choice. I’ll never sleep again if I don’t muster the courage to run it.”

The notion that some editors might feel a sense of duty to a global community — and not just to a sovereign position or a bottom line — marks the potential for transforming the media into the greatest, political equalizer on the face of the earth.

In 1970, the attack on the “liberal” media — outlets that didn’t explicitly recognize corporate interests over human interests at every turn — was eerily similar to the conservative banter of today. From Into The Dark: The My Lai Massacre:

[…]

On April 1, 1971, just two days after the verdict, Nixon ordered Calley to be placed under house arrest while his appeal worked its way through the courts. “The whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives,� he wrote.

Across the nation, there were many demonstrations of support for Lt. Calley. The American Legion announced plans that it would try to raise $100,000 for his appeal. Draft board personnel in several cities resigned in groups. Several politicians spoke out in public criticizing the government’s prosecution of the soldiers at My Lai. “I’ve had veterans tell me that if they were in Vietnam now, they would lay down their arms and come home,� Congressman John Rarick told the New York Times.

But prosecutor Aubrey Daniel also did not remain silent. He wrote a highly publicized letter to President Nixon criticizing him for releasing Calley to house arrest: “How shocking it is if so many people across this nation have failed to see the moral issue… that it is unlawful for an American soldier to summarily execute unarmed and unresisting men, women and babies.�

[…]

In the end, we have to recognize that an atrocity such as Haditha is a symptom of the behavioral patterns of all warfare.

To brush it aside as a random act of violence would be to remove the complicit nature of war planners from the equation and lay it squarely on the shoulder of the brave souls that serve our country, no matter the call to duty.

An extra optical inch? Brilliant advertising.

Now, please excuse me while I head out to, er, uhm, pick up some groceries. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

(via Mike Davidson)

I guess Lance Dutson shouldn’t have challenged the Maine Office of Tourism’s strategy to overbid for the top “Maine” queries in their search optimization campaign, even though it drove up prices for both his and other local businesses attempting to bid on similar keywords. The state’s advertising firm sued him (pdf) for his public display of discontent for how tax-payer’s money was being spent.

Oh yeah, they’re also suing because he took this (taxpayer-paid) ad off their site to make a point about the number provided (hint: call it if you’re lonely).

If the State of Maine had any clue, they’d do themselves a favor and pause to learn about the nature of the web and the power of conversations across state lines before backing an agency over one of their own residents. But then again, this is reality.

So much for Northeast intellectuals.

Back to the campaign at hand; Increasing the visibility of the Maine Office of Tourism to Maine residents must be good for the state, right? Why exclude Maine web browsers from their optimization campaign to help residents find Maine businesses first and foremost? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking to come across tourist attractions within my own home state.

Unbelievably dumb. If this was happening in my neck of the woods, I’d be equally upset.

(via BuzzMachine)