While waiting to see Walk the Line (the really great Johnny Cash biopic), a slide flashed on the screen advertising blogging at MyCoke.com.
If I'd had coke in my mouth at that moment, it would have come spewing out my nose.
I was aghast--amused, yet horrified. First, that they were blatantly ripping off MySpace.com. Secondly that the folks at Coke have the cojohnes to believe that they will be able to establish a blogging community around a soft drink
I read the Privacy Policy (came up in a pop-up window with no URL) which has a specific provision for children under 13.
Obviously, they are aiming their "blogging" community feature at very young people.
Rob Capriccioso out in Washington D.C. heard about this MyCoke thing back in July and blogged about the ridiculousness of it. Funny thing is, at that time, they must've been testmarketing it because they used the term journaling (as Rob notes) rather than blogging. (I have to agree with a lot of Rob's assessment of the whole thing)
Guess someone hipped them on the proper term before letting Coke push the idea on those of us out here in the hinterlands of Massachusetts.
Either way, there's something kind of creepy about asking people keep their "blogs" on a site hosted by the Coca-Coal Bottling Company. But, there may indeed be enough naive parents out there who will have no problem letting their children spew their most intimate thoughts to a corporation.
After all, there's just a lot of perverts over there at MySpace...and we can't tell the kids they're too young to have a blog...oh, no...that would be squashing their creativity....
More and more I keep thinking Rollerball.....
Blogging Blog Blogs Culture media new media
3 comments:
MyCoke. I'm just staring and going "huh?" at it. Is it because I'm old and decrepit? Where's the "MyMylanta" or "MyGeritol" site...I'd go "huh?" there too. There's a science fictional "future gone mad" feeling about it...a future where the megacorporations control not only what we eat and drink but what we think and write about online...fortunately I think this stuff is all conceived by marketing weasels who couldn't cook up a good global conspiracy if you gave them the map to the secret Gnomes of Zurich clubhouse and the secret passcode knock...I'm going to go off and mumble somewhere now.
Rob...oh, I'd love to see MyCoke.com tank right now! It's insidious and contributes nothing to the web. Talk about a waste of bandwidth--and another argument for taking some things completely away from corporations :-)
Dawn...I'm glad to hear another voice chime in on the creepy aspect of all this.
Although what MyCoke.com is doing runs paralell to some discussions recently on BusinessWeek about people as "brands". It's all about "branding" us and making us loyal to corporations (since we've lost so much "faith" in corporations.) In a worst-case scenario, MyCoke.com, to me, a corporate ploy for getting into the minds of young people to market more stuff to them. That's bad in so many ways (considering that the carbonation in soda can facilitate osteoporosis.)
If we're going to be concerned about insidious branding then I say we start looking into the Hello Kitty cabal. That cat is everywhere. There are even 'goth' and 'punk' kitties...That's scary. I wonder if there's a MyHello Kitty - no, I don't even want to know.
Post a Comment