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http://hyperbooks.hypermart.net/
Hyperbooks Online
By James DeckerI had intended to write about www.etoys.com, but luck or justice caught up with them before I did. Etoys has gone the way of the dot coms, but once upon a time it was a retail powerhouse. What went wrong? Unwittingly, Etoys tried to bully the guerilla artists collective known as Etoy (aka rtmark) despite the fact that the collective predated the retailer by some years. Visit http://www.rtmark.com/etoymain.html to learn how resistance in this case was not futile, but an art form. I mention this case because it is important background as we consider the "art of advertising" so widely acknowledged whereas the art of resistance goes unstudied and unheralded. Over and over I am told that advertising is an art form, and not because Andy Warhol conceived of advertising power as something totemic, ritualistic, and fauvist. No, what I hear is that advertising is entertaining, pleasing, memorable, and holds human attention. The conclusion is that advertising must therefore be art. Nothing is incorrect about such a notion if in fact human emotions, sensibilities, and our capacity for understanding really do amount to mere bombast, self-adornment, and greed. I don't claim that such qualities are in short supply in humans. Indeed, Hyperbooks Online is one example of how our emotions, sensibilities, and logic can be played like a toy fiddle. Hyperbooks serves up the secrets of how to "grab and hold" humans by their attention spans. It is secure in the knowledge that people remain susceptible to rash claims and confidence games no matter what subtler sensibilities we are also capable of.
Survival-of-the-flashiest ethics have little to do with art; and I was grateful that Hyperbooks Online did not employ eye-candy graphics, corporate collages, or steel-surfaced navigation icons to make its point. Until, I realized, but of course, the yellow on white homemade look-and-feel is the style of secret Internet information. An established look and feel would fail to ensnare the clandestine, shame-faced, urge to turn a quick profit. Hyperbooks online cuts through the crap and bears a message that's hard to duck. Hyperbooks Online summons the self-promoter in you and me. It's airtight text rushes to conspire with us, to tell us (for free) that promoting others is the sure way to promote ourselves. Yes, of course. Sure, "doorway pages" are important to "glue your visitors' eyeballs immediately and 'compel' them to click the links that lead to your main site." But alliances with people in your "content area" are the essence of promotion. Not only because information and misinformation thrive on social buzz, but also because other sites linking to your page will simply drive the spiderbots horny. Spiderbots are, of course, those artificially intelligent bits of code that visit Web sites in order to report back to search engines about what content is contained there and how popular it is likely to be. If a
search engine decides the
Spiderbot is breathing heavily enough, then actual humans will be able to search for and locate your site. At this point, you will have to offer something for FREE if you want them to stick around. Don't worry about what to sell, just sell! Hell, sell advertising for other sites for pennies per click. Whether this will work for you is a matter of how dedicated you are to being successful. Hyperbooks does draw advertisers, not surprisingly they are of the no-credit-check credit cards, dating services, and how-to-find-your-perfect-woman variety.
Hyperbooks is Internet marketing, but it reveals something fundamental about old-school marketing. Hyperbooks is not quite hip to advanced viral marketing techniques. But it bears an important relationship to those hipper, high-power, entertainment-based advertising firms. For all the talk of mass customization, smart-targeted ads, and value-added vertical integration, the purpose of advertising will always be to squeeze more out of the consumer, and to herd more of them into communities of homogenous needs. Marketing teaches people to want what has already been produced for sale. Profits are won by increasing demand for a diminished base of suppliers. To suppose that innovations in marketing seek a better understanding of their customers needs is to hallucinate some difference between pornographic marketing and major public relations firms like Middleberg (http://www.middleberg.com). Am I saying marketers don't care about their customers? Yes, where "care" was a term once used by humans to denote interpersonal relations, a sense of shared fate both social and economic, and a relationship between living agents primarily. As advertising gets better at amusing us, and as gorgeous actors and actresses set down their cigarettes to lift cans marked "Microsoft Pepsi" many of us will get used to it. We may enjoy watching and even hope that we are being watched, and we may learn to appreciate skilled promotions for their 'compelling' techniques,
but if we can pry our fingers from the can, car, or cologne long enough… and if memory still serves, we might also notice that no one asks us to care. Perhaps last to the table will be those groups that do promote socially relevant thought and action. If MTV and Superbowl ads (http://www.adcritic.com/search/?query=peta ), and Boston Globe pages
(http://www.fair.org/activism/boston-globe-staples.html) continue to be denied to groups interested in anything other than compelling materialism, perhaps targeted viral marketing, collaborative filtering, and virtual agents can provide the alternative means for informed engagements between living agents. So it is in this spirit that I humbly ask you to seize your mouse and… CLICK HERE NOW http://www.billhicks.com/darktimes/index.html !!!!!!