E-marketer Editorial Director Ezra Palmer manages to pull together blogging, the Sex Pistols, Cicero, and Paul Gauguin in an interesting post at iMedia Connection called How Blogs Pertain to You. Here’s a quote, but read the “whole article”:

It’s probably not wise to generalize about something as amorphous as the Blogosphere, but here goes: the Blogosphere is a place for people who want a more personal relationship with various entities they deal with on a regular basis — corporate, government, media, you name it. They want to have a sense of a person behind or within the enterprise. They are looking for something or somebody real. All of which brings to mind the Sex Pistols. (Really.) John Lydon and John Simon Ritchie couldn’t sing or play musical instruments, but they took the stage names of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious and in 1977 their album, “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols,” upended the music world, tapping into listeners’ desire for something real — real emotion, real anger, real energy. Tired of calculated professionalism, music fans (some of them, anyway) embraced the raw.

And further on:

Nonetheless, there is clearly a meaningful group of consumers — your consumers — who want that feeling of community, the feeling of “the real.” They don’t want corporate speak or push-button options. They actually might like to know about your personal taste in music and don’t mind if you aren’t a good speller. How many of these consumers are out there? It’s almost certainly far short of a majority. (After all, the best-selling single in 1977 was not by the Sex Pistols but Debby Boone, with “You Light Up My Life.”)

---

Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on August 26, 2005.