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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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      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...

      1 reply 1 retweet 24 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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      More of an atomized/liquidized version of a thematic pedia/dictionary. We'll see how it goes. I may be using tags for organizing primarily, rather than categories.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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      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.

      1:48 PM - 18 Feb 2019
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

          2 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 18 Feb 2019
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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

          2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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        8. End of conversation

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