We all appreciate a good hoax from time to times, but being duped by someone with an agenda solely for the good of a brand, not only sets up a betrayal of trust, but adds very little depth to the brand itself.

“One thing pretending to be another is always a betrayal of trust. If these brands really want to engage communities online, they’re going to have to learn how to stop lying to us and start interacting honestly with us.” – (Derek Powazek)

There is no doubt that this is exciting and we all want to be in on the experience of figuring out where this came from, but when the joke is over, we are not left with anything meaningful to speak of, and someone put their time into this. It’s flat, depthless, and plain boring. Moving on to something else.

“The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?”

semiconductorfilms.com

“And what’s the root cause problem? The useless article with no real-time data and no links was written for the PRINT newspaper. And the homepage is edited to match what will be important in the PRINT newspaper. And the navigation assumes I think like I do when I’m reading the PRINT newspaper. Want local news? Go to the metro SECTION.”

It is nice to see that the blog ghetto is more favorable and usable than Washington Post:

“Here’s an idea for newspaper website homepages — just a search box and a list of blogs. Seriously. Instead of putting all the web-native content and publishing in the blog ghetto, like NYTimes.com does, why not make that the WHOLE site? (I mean seriously, having a blog section on the website is like having a section in the paper for 14 column inch stories.)”

While he makes a number of good points, I still think there is a great deal of work that needs to be done to encourage, change, shift (enter adjective here) our culture to get their news and updates online. It will gradually happen, give it time… I think most people are still going to turn to TV and radio to get the most current information, and both of those forms still have something that the webs doesnt – a human connection.