If you can get heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) techs to play, your approach might be working. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) have been blogging since 2004, and with attention-getting results (WSJ gave the blog a nod as exemplary for its diverse daily content and breezy style). www.accabuzz.com

Proving you can’t be too ephemeral or obscure, here’s a well-executed blog celebrating the impulse to tinker, putter, and otherwise noodle with any and all things mechanical. www.finkbuilt.com/blog

Laden with irony is the posting “Circular Saw Blunders in 3-D,” from a 1953 edition of Popular Science. It even includes the glasses. Did that exemplify that era’s concept of audience interaction? What ensures that blogs don’t suffer the same fate as red-and-green-lensed cardboard glasses?

The New Yorker has an interesting review of Wired editor Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail.” John Cassidy sums up the thesis:

Anderson argues that we are witnessing the decline of the blockbuster. The “emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today’s mass market,” he writes. “If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches.”

Cassidy takes issue with the idea that a proliferation of niches means that the blockbuster is in decline:

Putting our debates into practice, I happen to have a link for everyone.

A blogger called the Media Guerrilla (aka Mike Manuel, an industry journalist), whom I have come across several times while researching different media, marketing, and PR topics, carries on a pretty detailed and useful conversation about corporate blogs and the implementation of related policies.

http://mmanuel.typepad.com/media_guerrilla/corporate_blogs/

As broadband penetration into the household continues at its fiery pace, watching video online is no longer the pie-in-the-sky dream it once was. As more and more people watch their favorite video programming on the small screen—via download, streaming, or mobile device—the advertising that makes it possible to view this programming for free is going along for the ride.

And even better, the ride is an interactive one. Online technologies are giving advertisers and marketers immediate and extremely accurate feedback concerning the effectiveness of a specific ad or placement. Read all about it in this ADOTAS article.

Care to comment on the effectiveness of Nielsen’s people meters vs. the new tracking methods being utilized online?

Where do rejected network TV shows go to die? YouTube, apparently. And like Lazarus rising from the grave, the 300,000+ views of “Nobody’s Watching” are breathing new life into the show and making network execs take notice. They are not the only ones who should be paying attention, either. If you’re in the business of marketing (marketing anything—ideas, products, entertainment), I’d encourage you to read the following article, published yesterday on CNET News. Increasingly, sites like YouTube and MySpace are going to become an important part of any marketing mix that desires to reach the 13–25-year-old demo.

In an interesting twist of technology-meets-subversive-counterculture-classics, Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book has been made into a wiki that anyone can edit.

The wiki concept goes one step further.

Could a marketing piece be as infectious as these?

Viral videos—those short Internet downloads found on Web sites like iFilm and YouTube—are America’s most exciting new media, the New York Post reported.

The award seeks to honor news and documentary programming that appear on such nontraditional delivery platforms as broadband, iPod video, mobile phones, and other portable media players. The nominees’ entries must be original to new media and not debut on TV or radio and then be repurposed into the new media.

More

(It’s already here.) A recent article on the power, positive and negative, of online word-of-mouth:

But as angry clients increasingly turn to the Internet to settle scores, companies, independent retailers, and everyday wrongdoers are learning that consumers can have the last word—and often the last laugh. The Web has turned into a place where shame and humiliation are sometimes the strongest weapons in fighting scams and unfairness.

Public relations has never been easier, except that it requires a good product and customer service. Otherwise, caveat vendor. Feel free to discuss…

One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus…repeat until you have 60 hippopotami, and you’ve reached the outer limit of people’s website attention span. A minute—if they’re feeling generous—to soak up whatever idea, influence, or inspiration you’ve wedged into your sliver of cyberspace.

A minute is actually a decent amount of time. You can convey an incredible amount of information, prompt desired responses—in short, get your audience to act. But you have to bring the right kind of weapons to bear, and your aim has to be dead-on. Otherwise, with a mouse-click, your million-dollar message just got tossed into the browser “History” file like leftover meeting muffins.

What kind of weapons do you need? Fancy Flash animation? Understated text? A quick, informative video?

Who are you going after? A captive audience that needs to learn the lesson you’re teaching, or an anonymous crowd of consumers that wants one good doggone reason why they should listen to you, and not the other guys?

Whether you want to talk to someone around the corner or across the globe, Mind & Media makes sure you stay on message, and on target.

Get in touch. We’ll show you how.

My 60 seconds are up.