The Mike Abundo Effect

I’m now reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and I just came across a passage that made me LOL.

Indeed, it’s becoming common at technical conferences for the organizers to recommend the attendees tag their conference-related blog posts, photos, and online articles with a tag specific to that conference — “etech2006″ or “poptech07″ — so they can all easily be found by using tag search sites such as Technorati.com.

This is exactly what I’ve been telling Philippine event organizers to do in this fiesta-happy nation of bloggers. Every time I do, they look at me like I’m insane. One even accused me of sabotaging their site’s security, apparently confusing spam-vulnerable tagboards with tags. Another accused me of facilitating massive copyright infringement through tag streams, as if they were selling content instead of events.

Well, now it’s in a book available on dead trees in Philippine brick-and-mortar bookstores. Filipino event runners, most of whom have been taught since youth to know nothing but what’s written verbatim in dead-tree textbooks, should be able to appreciate that. I am officially not insane here.

A Filipina gaming executive once told me she went to E3 just to see the Black Eyed Peas. Recently, friends of ex-Level Up COO Sheila Paul defended her ridiculous use of irrelevant offline marketing in the comments section of this post. To see where Sheila’s path of ever-bigger offline gaming events was leading, check out what E3 2007 has become. Yes, I’ll miss the booth babes, but I won’t miss the irrelevant extravagance.

John Mahoney points out that candidates need to include embed code with their Web videos.

That’s why Barack Obama got his video embedded here, and everyone else did not.

On a broader note, this goes for any entity publishing any promotional content on the Web. Widgetize, people, widgetize!

(Via Fred Wilson.)