…or is it just an attempt to cross-breed whales and goldfish? This article about NBC’s 600 million blown in trying to converge something with something else is illustrative:
Most embarrassing, an effort to increase traffic by introducing a syndicated television program, “iVillage Live,” resulted in a month-to-month drop in visitors to the iVillage Web site. Introduced last December, “iVillage Live,” carried on NBC-owned stations in 10 cities, was seen as a failure on its own, suffering from low ratings, poor production quality and a certain nagging cloying quality. It ceased production in June, but is still running in repeats and will return, after a full makeover, next month.
Running repeats. Excellent plan.
It reminded me for some reason that may not be exactly clear in my mind of the movie 24 Hour Party People that was on over the weekend about the rise and fall of mid-80s Manchester rave scene that spawned Happy Mondays and the use of ecstasy. Effectively paid for by New Order through flipping their record sales to subsidize the money pit of everything else, the movie notes how the entire time was a financial flop due to the failure of the clubs to control the actual money flow. Ravers bought drugs not beer. A bubble economy except for the pushers.
What they may have in common is the acceptance of the insistence that a concept is viable supporting external investment of money and other resources, including public interest.
As a general concept that may be useful and something that explains many things. David recently wrote a good comment here about to the effect that (because I can’t find it at the moe) through blogging he has come to the conclusion that people understand their own beliefs very poorly. Maybe this is the human condition, however, and that all things are bubbles to some degree as we thrive on hope and expectation more than knowledge.