Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: The character of our content

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at content, a ubiquitous word with a long history and some specific contemporary senses.

Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

What are you reading right here, right now? A sentence? A paragraph? An article? Yes, yes, and yes, but think more globally and generally. In the universe of 21st-century media and marketing, these words on this website, and the image that accompanies them, are content.

And not only here on the Visual Thesaurus: content is all around. As the old dishwashing-liquid ad used to tell us, we’re soaking in it. Blog posts are content. YouTube videos are content. For the cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma, recipes are content. For General Electric and thousands of other companies, Instagram posts are content. White papers, graphs, podcasts, webinars, e-books: all content.

Content is produced by content creators and content providers, some of whom toil in content farms or content factories. It's distributed through content management systems and shaped by content strategists who may report to a chief content officer for whom content marketing is — as the business author Seth Godin put it in 2008 — “the only marketing that’s left.”

Read the rest of “The Character of Our Content.”

Word of the week: Farmageddon

It’s a book! It’s a movie! It’s a brewery! (Two breweries, actually.) It’s an impending economic catastrophe, or maybe two catastrophes!

I spotted the economic-disaster farmageddon, a portmanteau of farm and Armageddon, in a tweet-reply to short-term Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci.

What gain? He's s failure by virtually all standards. We're in a manufacturing recession; and tariff infuced Farmageddon

— Jossy (@Unitedshashe) August 12, 2019

 

Pretty big little tiny lying things

The news that Tiny Pretty Things, the 2016 YA novel about ballet students by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton, is being made into a 10-episode Netflix series sent me into a free-association reverie.

“Black Swan meets Pretty Little Liars.” – Amazon. The sequel (2017) is titled Shiny Broken Pieces.

Words of the week: Gundamentalist, ammosexual

Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton.

In these three American cities, at least 32 children and adults were killed by three shooters in a single week, 23 of them within just 13 hours over the weekend of August 3 and 4. While attending a garlic festival. While shopping at Walmart. While socializing in a popular entertainment district.

 

The Onion has run this headline and story at least nine times.

 

I’m exhausted and angry—furious, actually—and can’t think of anything original to say about my compatriots’ sick obsession with firearms. So I’ll refer you to a couple of posts from the Fritinancy archives.