Archive for category Digital Life

Science Fiction Future Direction

I was thinking today about science fiction, and how it has always been the fiction of ideas. These science fiction novelists have always been pumping out new ideas, and trying to place them in the context of a narrative in order to make them more easily digestable by the public.

Becuase the pay for a novelist over the past 50 years has been, on the average, pretty poor, with only those that make the best seller lists making anything like a decent income, most of these science fiction novelists toiled day and night for very little income or even critical reward.

For instance Phillip K Dick used to pump out novel after novel to try to keep the wolves at the door, and these earned him just enough to get by when he was alive. After his death, the ideas and plot lines in these stories have earned holywood Billions of dollars. The list of films based on Dicks work is staggering.

Now, imagine the time Now, if you can. These days, writers can sit down day and night and pump out ideas, but these days they can do them in bogs. All of these Novel ideas are then indexed, and if they are searched for by people then they have a chance of generating income via PPC advertising etc.

Having new, novel ideas would allow you to build a massive long tail, well ahead of the curce that should pay of as people start to search for the new terms that these articles contain.

Say you coin the terms InfoAchons, and write a blog post about some Archytype based digital entities that start to gain an autonomous hold of the internet. It could be written in any form, even as a pseudo factual peice. As long as the keyword density was right, it would be spidered by the search engines, and found by people interested by the concept. Words locked in paper may be dead words.

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Who has an IQ of 121?

Seeing a lot of ads around at the moment saying:

X person has an IQ of 121.. are you smarter?

I have seen the same tactic applied for people like Kevin Rudd, George Bush, Australian Cricket players, music start, film stars.

This is an ad-meme, an idea that worked well for one advertiser, and via sharing knoweldge and tactics, has spread to a large number of other marketers, who all put their unique spin on it and try to get you through to their websites.

It can be seen as an evolved digital life form, becuase it has selection pressures, and feeds on clicks. If it does not get clicks, it gets turned off and therefore has not been succesful. This one has been succesful however , and the first meme has given birth to all of the other celebrity based sub memes.

If you click on these ads, they take you through to a site which tries to get you to sign up to a dodgy mobile phone site, which is going to charge you $6 a messsage to tell you “fun facts”. As if the internet is not already full of “FUN FACTS”

The value of 121 too would have been split tested, to determine which number is not too high, and not too low.

Hey, and i have an easy answer to the question the ad asks. If you click it, the answer is NO

I am so suprised that these ads convert to clicks, which actually convert to sales to pay for them.

Some things just don’t make any sense

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