But do they have to be SO evil? It seems the closer we get to Nov. 4, the nastier the political campaign ads gets. On the presidential front, both candidates are running their share of attack ads. The topic even took time out of the debate Wednesday night and left many people upset because they thought the time should have been spent discussing real issues, not who dealt the lowest blow.

McCain has ads focusing on Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground group and Obama has ads that call McCain erratic and uncertain.

Negative ads flood the state and local scene as well such as the commercial showing US Rep John Shadegg morphing into George Bush and republicans denouncing democrats liberal agendas.

My question is: do negative campaign ads really work? It seems like right now America could use some good news and these ads are anything but optimistic. If only someone would run an upbeat ad like this one for John F. Kennedy. I know I’d be singing along.

So Microsoft has started part 2 of their attempt to make PCs as cool as Macs. Since their Seinfeld effort went down in flames in two weeks, (and being a huge Seinfeld fan that really hurts), they re-launched with “I’m a PC” ads, trying to go head-to-head with the “I’m a Mac” spots. I applaud their efforts to do something that re-positions them against their counterpart even if they are two years late getting to the party.  That should be expected, though, given how long it took them to roll out Vista.  A note to marketers here, if you let your competition control your position in the marketplace you don’t deserve to be in business.

I’m not against PCs. In fact, some of my very best friends are PCs. (Of course, they all own an iPod or iPhone). My real gripe is with Crispin Porter + Bogusky. If you are going to convince us that 92% of the world is made up of PC users then don’t create three television spots that have the same people in them. Seriously, Microsoft is a big client and with 6,602,224,175 people in the world you gotta be able to find enough PC users so that you don’t have to repeat them in the spots.

The other evening I was driving home from work along the 202 and drove past a digital billboard with an advertisement for 98.7 FM – The Peak.  The advertisement said “Now Playing: Toto”.  While not a frequent listener to 98.7, nor a huge Toto fan (although, who can deny the lyrical stylings of “Africa”) I had to tune it do see if was real.

And would you believe it… the station was actually playing Toto! Now I realize this is nothing new or revolutionary in terms of technological advances; I guess I was just genuinely excited to see the connection between two mediums and the fact that this made me change my current course of action. And isn’t this really good marketing at its finest and simplest form. Keep the message simple and concise: “We’re playing Toto”. And then deliver…and play Toto. Genius.

With cameras in phones, cheap video cameras, blogs, and anything else you can record your life with, we’re documenting our lives like no society ever has. Our days can be reported on, taped, podcasted, blogged, video blogged, micro blogged, photographed, commented on… all supposedly allowing us to live forever in the vast nexus of digital storage. (Though I hear Livejournal deletes your blog after a year of not logging in – so they can clear space for the living.)

But are we somehow taking away the specialness of life with all of this documentation? Does it cheapen our experiences to be able to dial up the video of them at a whim, relying on the value of our own memories?

Or

Do you think this is preferable, since you always have some touchstone to events that happened in your life? Rather than you mother’s scrapbook, full of photos taken on “special occasions,” do you like being able to call up a thought on a day you blogged back in 2003?

Well, I am not a blogger and nor do I wish to be, but it does seem that people are documenting their lives constantly, and I am okay with that, because I don’t have to read it if I don’t want to. If I ever did blog I would probably do it for myself as opposed to doing it so people will read it, more of a diary type thing, but as I said I don’t ever plan on doing that.

However, with two children I do photograph and video more than I would have ever thought possible thanks to my cell phone camera, my digital camera and my Flip. My mother used to drive me nuts by always wanting to take pictures when I was growing, and now I have turned into that person, but I have the advantage of being able to see those pictures or videos instantly to know if I want to keep or delete and I can send almost instantly to anyone I want. My mother may have developed those pictures once a year. I can have those pictures printed (virtually) and sent off in seconds.

People used to fear big brother was watching. Forget big brother, our entire society is eagerly waiting to capture any moment at the drop of a hat. And for some reason I am okay with that. One day we will be looking at this generation in great detail thanks to all of the blogs, images and video at our disposal and we will most likely say “What the hell were we thinking”

Brian Alig

People generally post on the Internet only what they are willing to share with the public. It is also quite common for people to filter their words and thoughts so only the most interesting and favorable information gets out. One way to think about it is that social media content producers are writing their autobiographies on the fly.

With people who become famous or renowned in their industry, a digital paper trail will serve as an excellent look into the lives of those individuals. For people who are not so lucky, the data will fade into obscurity along with the digital lives of billions of other average people.

As for affecting the specialness of life, I think having the ability to share a video of an event — or even an immediate recollection after an event — is favorable to relying on one’s memory and one’s ability to communicate to another person something that happened years ago. If anything, this will give people a better understanding and greater appreciation of what you had gone through.

Brian Shaler

It’s better by a long shot, but - like everything - it has its caveats. (You knew that was coming, right?)

Special moments are special regardless of whether or not they’re captured on film of any kind, and being so captured does not make them less so. The only “harm” inflicted by recording these moments is on our ability to get away with embellishing them the way feeble human memories typically do.

The memory of a child’s first steps is in no way less “special” because it was captured on film. Michael Phelps becoming the winning-est Olympian of all time is in no way lessened by the fact that it was captured by dozens of cameras in high definition, viewed by millions of people worldwide in real time, and viewable any time thereafter. The “vast nexus of digital storage” makes it possible to preserve these moments in a way that makes them less susceptible to being lost, and their being digital means it is far, far easier to preserve them exactly as they were recorded.

Some people have a love affair with printed paper, photographs, and other tactile means for recording human activity and/or production. I don’t buy that kind of sentimentality. The printed word’s value has nothing to do with it being “printed” - its value is intrinsic. A photograph lost in a fire has no value relative to a high quality scan of it stored in the cloud, where it can be recalled on demand; where companies far better at the task see to it that it is always there, ready.

I mentioned caveats, and in my opinion the problem with the ubiquity of recording devices is that they get us far too comfortable with exposing our private lives. The average person has no idea they’re caught on camera dozens - sometimes hundreds - of times a day. We’ve regressed into a society where privacy is no longer a right, but a privilege, and where precious few understand how to properly respond to any question that begins with, “If you’ve got nothing to hide…”

Joseph Jaramillo

The idea of capturing the moments of your life is and will always be special. But as a society I believe we are going a little overboard with allowing other people to access those moments. Any sense of privacy is being lost and sadly I don’t see that diminishing anytime soon.

Roger Hurni

That’s a good question you raise.

I had a little talk about something similar a couple days ago where it was asked if access to all this information makes us less intelligent? Basically meaning that instead of learning anything you can look it up on Google. While I understand the point I don’t believe so, in ways. Take for instance if you lose your phone. How many phone numbers of friends/family are you going to remember? Probably none as you’ve never really seen them before. But when I was a kid, I knew every friends numbers in my head because I didn’t have a cell phone to save them in.

At the same time I believe it intelligent to be able to know how/where to find anything when needed. That helps me learn.

As for the archiving of your life.
I see the specialness of life in the ability to index all that information and advance our quality of life. People have been indexing information with hieroglyphs and stories and pictures (yearbooks) ever since they could and all this digital media is just the next step in all that. … and yet we still have our memories :)

Technology helps us to live longer, cure diseases, and learn more about anything (not counting budgets or politics).

Chuck Reynolds

I do believe that ages ago people may have recorded their thoughts through diaries and journals more than people do today. They had less technological distractions, and more time to reflect on life. Fast forward to today, technology is making it easy and fun to record and share our lives with multimedia.

I don’t feel that ease of creation and sharing cheapens our imagination or the experiences recorded. I look at photos from my childhood and it helps me remember other things about a particular vacation which was NOT recorded on film, yet having a photo jars my memory about that era and helps “prove” to my brain that I was there and did that thing. Other memories follow. When we go through photos with our children they start talking about other things from the photos.

A problem with extreme documentation of our lives is we may miss out on life right now, while trying to create the “now” memories. Spending 12 hours glued to ustream.tv watching a someone life stream their (also) normal life while ignoring your own friends and family means that you are missing out on your own life. If something that great happens in a life feed, believe me, you can always see the Flickr photos, blog posts or tweets about it the next day.

As a photographer I’ve been guilty of dragging my pro gear to the park to photograph my kids playing. A ten minute lighting setup and a few thousand dollars of photo gear sitting on the ground is not very conducive to me playing with my kids and being a dad. A while back I found a website called, “UnPhotographable” by photographer Michael David Murphy. He describes events which he missed with his camera or which he chose to not photograph while truly appreciating the moment. I was never much into poetry, yet as a photographer I understand capturing a split second in time which tells a powerful story.

Since finding Michael’s blog, I’ve made a conscious efforts to take in some moments and cherish them in my mind. A cell phone photo (or just a memory) of my happy kids will will always trump a very well lit photo of a 5 year old wishing his dad would chase him around the park.

Adam Nollmeyer
Phoenix Photographer

I must say, the main reason I chose this topic for the question this week is that I just sold my Flip Video camera. It was neat for a while, but I realized as I was strolling through Jerome with my girlfriend that I wasn’t really being in the moment - I was sacrificing that moment so that I could point and click. What’s more, looking at the videos the next day, just as Adam described the YouTube example, the videos weren’t worth missing the moment of really “being there.”

How much more of our lives are lost like that? Frankly, I don’t mind killing time that way: I’m waiting for the movie to start, so I fire off a quick text to Brightkite and I’m on with my life.

For things I actually want to remember, though, I find all this documentation replaces my chance at a memory with a digital scrapbook. And that scrapbook is a pale imitation of having lived a life. The more we do this, the more I fear we won’t even care. We’ll be a population of documentarians with nothing worthy of documenting.

Eric Reid

I would answer “No” and “Yes”.

No – For those entering the fray of social media, blogs, etc. Too much is really not enough. You have to find out what types of content is truly sticky.

Yes – After you have been at it for a while, a good blogger/poster/tweeter understands the types of content which her audience really respond too. In other words, they develop a good gauge for what is interesting, compelling and provocative and subsequently a great content filter. Hint: If it doesn’t elicit further conversation, comments, replies or the occasional “thanks for your post”, then try a different approach. Unfortunately, some sources of social media content just tend to continually create the same kinds of content over and over and expect different results. I think there may be a term that defines that kind of behavior…

Chris Sietsema

Blenders, taxes, milk and urinals… not exactly the products you would expect to take off in a social media campaign. But, when creative ideas merge with traditionally “boring” products, they can become social media hits. According to a recent article, when the right marketing idea, social media and a little luck meet, your “boring” product can become the next Internet sensation. So, the next time you give up on marketing your average product, think outside of the box, go to YouTube and let the marketing magic begin.