Conversation

There's a concept called "packaging for e-commerce" where things are packaged mainly for shipping for online shoppers. Simple, compact brown boxes that are meant to easily fit larger boxes etc. No flashy colors, large text or distinctive shapes meant to stand out on shelves...
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It's an anonymous-packetization of end-to-end supply chains that are addressed to their destination farther up supply chain than last mile retail. The marketing "packaging" is now in online listing optimization. For eg. book covers are now designed to pop at thumbnail size.
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I like this idea, and have been thinking of ways to apply it to media/writing. I think a media environment that looks like retail shelving -- screaming headlines competing with neighboring headlines -- leads to bad kinds of arms races.
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One experiment -- it may not work -- is to simply abandon the biggest locus of "packaging" of content online: the headline. My new blogchain series model (300 word shorts) all share a banal, non-screamy name, and evolve as numbered parts. A sort of subscription brown box.
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Other parts of the experiment are less evident. 300 words is not enough in general to present even a simple freytag triangle narrative arc with a hook, an "aha!", and a gentle landing. So each part is necessarily a single point presented directly, without much complex trickery.
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The writing feels more like writing a TV series than an essay. There's a "monster of the week" that fits the broad theme of the series, a few things that recur/rhyme. Once I get deeper in (longest series is now 4 parts), I'll be trying to engineer series-arcs somehow.
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A thing that kills blog series of the traditional sort, that attempt to mimic book like structures, is that readers have to maintain narrative state across parts. You have to do clumsy things like recaps to help. Even a 1-step memory requirement (a Markovian series) is hard
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So far, I'm doing 0-step memory (ie you don't really need to read part n-1 to understand part n). The goal is to allow near-random-access, out-of-order reading, but still with a sense of thematic development int ime.
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My mental model is actually kinda like tropes at the moment. I'd like the "Weirding Diary" for example to be something like an evolving, idiosyncratic narrative bibliography/pedia of weirding. But not indexed to a set of "lookup concepts" with individual identities.
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Replying to
A secondary mental model is that of an "observer process" like an almanac, but not quite as strongly anchored in temporality (ie, not news-cycley). Since some series represent threads I'm observing in my own head (like Mediocratopia), they're not exactly living in external time.
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On another note, Just hit me that modern spartan curation style: a straight-up saved-you-a-click tldr with a link, is a sort of unbox-rebox style where throw away the fancy packaging (clickbait headline) for a brown box with a container manifest.
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It’s artisan aggregator effect. More effective than big platforms if you can beat feed algorithms on signal-to-noise ratio on a theme. I do it too in my refactoring roundups. It’s an aggressive sort of reintermediation by people who would have been magazine editors 30y ago.
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Audiences mostly want brown-boxing by a first-order filter designed for efficient second-order filtering. Current;y the locus for this is email. Ben Evans’ newsletter for general tech, GTM for cleantech, Plethora for manufacturing are all brown-box saved-you-a-click curators.
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In a way my numbered-parts model is a 2nd order response (though that’s not why I am experimenting with it). It is better for a direct connection than either marketed clickbait promotion on social media or brown-box fodder.
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Tweeted clickbait link = bare metal server = retail packaging Artisan Aggregator targeting = VM = packaging for e-commerce Numbered parts series = containers = packaging for v-commerce ??? = serverless = replenishment consumables packaging, like toner cartridges
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