Bobbleheaded dolls possessed by evil

Big in Japan was a song in the 80’s. I know because I used to dance to it. It’s also a turn of phrase in this case, ‘Unazukin dolls are big in Japan’, these eggs with faces in Alpine attire answer your questions with an unambiguous yes or no.

I found the story via Buzzfeed:

‘We feature buzz that is detected by our technology and selected by our editors. The majority of the content on the site is purely editorial, however we also periodically track a product on behalf of a client. This content is always marked with the [Partner] tag, so you can tell it apart from purely editorial headlines.

In either case, we refuse to link to any blog or news source that takes money in exchange for writing positive commentary. Our aim is to aggregate authentic excitement that captures what real people are saying about the things they find most interesting.’

It’s a very simple concept, executed well. Hyper aggregation is the next content wave online as we stop to surf the web as we once did and instead swarm in increasingly concentric circles around trusted aggregators and portals whose editorial we trust. What Buzzfeed does is restrict the filtering to no more than 10 stories daily. Despite it’s endless Pikachu vagina stories I’m a Digg zealot, but some days go by and I haven’t had time to open the feed reader and I’m confronted with 450 stories. As sure as eggs is (talking) eggs I only browse the first 10 and then click ‘Mark all Read’. Too many choices in our attention based economy and I’m outa there.

The challenge for modern publishers is not to create a new portal for commissioned editorial but to create an aggregator and human filtered portal that people return to daily. The ubiquitous mobile web is soon to be upon us as the operators realise they can’t maintain their Soviet style walled gardens and deny us access to multi-platform applications. Given the size of the screen and the snacking culture that is mobile surfing, those who can filter the content and refine it to keep us engaged will be best placed to create innovative business models.

The freemium business models of paying for an ad free experience have only limited success online, but on the mobile web they will be infinitely more successful as we rage against mobile advertising.

As I try not to bump, brush, touch or accidentally thrust at my fellow commuters, I want to switch on my iPhone/smartphone and fire up a cached filtered content portal offering me 3 choice items to read during my journey. Each time I hit a wireless hotspot the phone goes online and updates the portal, seemlessly.

I get a lot of free magazines and papers through the door and shoved in my face, sure I browse them and they’re mostly crap, ad filled re-hashed editorial. I buy The Guardian daily, I spend time reading it, I enjoy it, I value it. An economy in which we come to expect everything for free takes away any sense of value, but then perhaps we should all be asking evil Unazukin what will work in the longer term?

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