Molecularist

PDA France visited Anina’s exhibition and had quite a bit to say. Here’s the link, if you can read French.

Link: Anina : Top model et geek.

One of the funnier lines is this:

Je ne pouvais pas me faire avoir par la belle opération marketing d’un constructeur téléphone, aussi créatif qu’il soit.

As I understand it, the guy was so bowled over by her exhibition, which happened to have a bunch of Nokia products, that he couldn’t help but think this was a Nokia thing.

Well, sorry dude, but this is how I like to do marketing – find enthusiastic people, give them the right tools (thanks Xavier and Ilpo!), and let them wow the world.

Indeed, that’s what Anina has done, and we have many more things we want to create together. Yes, we helped her along, but she’s the one with the creative genius – SUPER DUPER MODEL, I say.

She’s something!

attribution: the picture is from the PDA France article

It’s a dangerous proposition for a product name to turn into a verb or generic noun. For example, some people still say ‘xerox’ instead of photocopy. And, if you’ve ever read some of those writer’s magazines (I admit, I have), you’d have sees companies like Kimberly-Clarke begging for folks not to turn Kleenex into a noun (it’s facial tissues, if you want to know). I think the biggest example now is Google – we don’t search the Web, we google the Web.

Well, as is usual in the read-search cycle of wending one’s way through the Web, I came across a reference in
Engadget that has nothing to do with Lifeblog, but references to it as a
noun:

a tool that’s a kind of lifeblog for the accident-prone

And I remembered one from The
Register, and searched for it with Google (as opposed to just googling it):

storage is now pretty well cheap enough for you to just record your whole life in a lifeblog

I say it’s dangerous, because using a product name as a noun or verb actually dilutes the impact of the product name or brand (or so we marketing mavens have been over-trained to think of the brand). Therefore, I cannot fully say I am happy or sad. Sad, if this alternate usage of the product name will diminish us and then diminish our parent brand. Happy, meaning that we are already getting to the state where folks are thinking of us and how we apply to other things in the world.
I suppose I could be happy if folks said ‘Lifeblog’ with a capital ‘L’ meaning our product. I don’t mind also if folks start propagating other terms referring to products in our class:

• multimedia diary
• automatic multimedia diary
• life recording
• life recorder
• life browser
• life archive

I’m not so sure about these terms:

• lifeblogging
• a lifeblog
• lifeblogger

So, short of me being a ninny, I’d rather at this stage that we get referred to as Lifeblog (as a product name). I think in the above two examples, that would have fit well. But, part of me is thrilled to have been thought of and used in this way.

Ah, ambivalence…