turbine

jakelodwick:

I continue to work on TooManyBrands, and find myself almost addicted.

To keep the project focused, I gave it a tagline: “Quick and Intelligent Brand Education”. I want TMB to be an extension of your brain, to be as fast and accurate as recalling information from your own head. Obviously, the site is an embryonic form of that ideal, but now I have the goal to guide me.

I believe a person is the sum of his or her actions. And much of what modern humans do involves brands. What we use to act and while acting are integral parts of our identities. The brands each individual chooses to use comprise a sort of profile. Like musical tastes, or fingerprints, no two are exactly the same — just as no two people are exactly the same.

A brand is a sort of ‘mental gateway’ to some slice of the economy. Our current world has too many gateways. There are too many options and not enough time to analyze and distinguish between them. Advertising, in the primitive, “now that I’ve got your attention look at THIS” sense is irredeemably offensive, wasteful, and anachronistic. Strangers can’t be trusted, period, and this gets worse as the economy grows increasingly global. As modern, internet-connected individuals reject their parents’ dreams of stability and happiness through corporate office jobs, the number of brands will increase. It is easier to go into business and to stay small today than it’s ever been — and your business can be global. 1,000 employees at a corporation = one brand; what happens when half of them go do their own thing? Now there are 501 brands instead. How will you sort that data? How will you function in that environment? If I can stay on the ball, the answer is, “With TooManyBrands”.

Some bullet points:

• We now have 73 users. The home page is getting crowded.
• I was updating the site manually. Yesterday and today I converted it to a MySQL database, and created a submission page, so now my time can go into developing new features and not copying & pasting from emails into a text file.
• People submitted “Vodka” and “Conor Oberst” as brands. I’m on the fence about Vodka, I can’t decide if ‘a type of beverage’ is a brand. I don’t think it is, but let me sleep on it. Conor Oberst definitely qualifies as a brand in my mind.
• If you haven’t submitted yet, there’s a link on the home page.

(pardon my hyperbole in this post; I am in the hyper-focused and optimistic state required to make a new site)

I don’t think I’ll participate because I am anti-brand to a great extent and feel the branding of America has become detrimental in a way to our continued happiness (if not very survival). And for me, a good black T-shirt is a good black T-shirt, no matter where it comes from.  However, should Jake get this going it’s going to be a cash COW.