But for the Grace of Technology

Hand thrown pottery - Allan Buitekant

While art is as old as mankind, it is technology that speeds art directly to art collectors now days. Practicing Creative Consumerism™ means that you have many options as opposed to seeing art only in galleries and museums you can view art 24/7 from the comfort of your home, and pick out those works you would like to enjoy as your own.

Now Creative Consumers have another option. You can receive updates to the blog via email. Is that not too cool? All you have to do is click on the link to the right that says: Subscribe to Buy Outside the Box via email. Or click right here.

This is especially nice for those of you who are still not into feeds. You may be familiar with and use your email all day long, but having a news feed to your computer, well, you're just not quite there yet.

We hope you have a great weekend.--Ruth Mitchell

Content No Longer King

A hundred years ago cotton was king. Last year content was king. Now social networking is king. This brief little survey of cultural norms brought to you by an internet marketer. (That would be me.) In a nutshell we've moved from a world focused on the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing, to a world that is connecting globally via the internet. Recent articles that have been appearing in my inbox, now indicate that social networking is the best way to market online. That's really good news for a small company like ours that doesn't have a huge advertising budget.

Let me explain a little, going back a little further than you probably want to. In the '90s, I worked in journalism, and we had a visionary editor who brought in a consultant who had been working on a little known project called the internet. It was being developed by brainiacs at universities across the world. Oddly enough, much of the information available was sparse, mostly erroneous and included things like how to make a bomb. I guess the brainiacs were keeping all the good stuff to themselves. The point was the internet was originally known as the information highway. Shortly thereafter, we got interoffice email, allowing us to sit at our desks even more so that we'd have to spend more time at the gym. It both connected and disconnected us, but ultimately made us more work efficient.

The idea of individual computers linked electronically was conceptually grasped by writers such S. Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff (Addison-Wesley, 1978, 1993) who wrote The Network Nation. It wasn't long before retailers began seeing the merits of online marketing. But content was still king because the internet was developed by brainiacs, and Google and other search engines were set up on the premise that the internet was an "information highway." So, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization was born and the idea that if you wanted to attract traffic to you site, you needed to have lots of juicy content that would organically attract search engines.

According to Wikipedia, the world's first socially network based encyclopedia, early social networking websites included: "Classmates.com (1995), focusing on ties with former school mates, and SixDegrees.com (1997), focusing on indirect ties. Two different models of social networking that came about in 1999 were trust-based, developed by Epinions.com, and friendship-based, such as those developed by Jonathan Bishop and used on some regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001.[Innovations included not only showing who is "friends" with whom, but giving users more control over content and connectivity. By 2005, one social networking service MySpace, was reportedly getting more page views than Google, with Facebook, a competitor, rapidly growing in size. In 2007, Facebook began allowing externally-developed add-on applications, and some applications enabled the graphing of a user's own social network -- thus linking social networks and social networking.
Social networking began to flourish as a component of business internet strategy at around March 2005 when Yahoo launched Yahoo! 360°. In July 2005 News Corporation bought MySpace, followed by ITV (UK) buying Friends Reunited in December 2005." Wikipedia estimates there are now over 200 social networking sites.

So, as a small entrepreneur, social networks provide a non-advertising venue to reach potential customers with goods and services. One such website called thisnext.com has a "Watch People Shop" page. Click on it, its fascinating. It is a real time log of people buying things listed on thisnext.com.

Gee, I can remember when I thought blogging was for bored teenagers who needed to "get a life." Now I see it as a way to share and receive information from all corners of the world. We are still very much into providing quality content in addition to the fabulous art created by artists from around the world. I share this masterfully produced watercolor painting with you now. Let us hear from you!--Ruth Mitchell

White Iris - Laurin McCracken

The World Truly is a Smaller Space

Acknowledging "the pioneering and inspiring work of Twitter, BoredAt, Digg, PostSecret, PopSugar, and HotOrNot in this field," yet another social network was launched last May. What makes Truemors stand out is the unabashedly democratic use of unsubstantiated information, and their no-bones-about-it-attitude that the information might be true, might be rumor, but undoubtedly whatever it is, it will be provocative. The intent is to spread information as far and wide as possible. I wish some of the other journalistic endeavors of this world would just come out of the closet on this issue and take the stand that their news maybe be less than factual or corroborated with three trusted sources.

One of the most singular compelling items I saw was singer John Mayer's sobbing apology to his fans for having a live pit bull fight that as he describes it, "was rather successful over the past few weeks," until Brutus broke lose and evidently a lot of fans got hurt. Now that's some dog fight. I am at once appalled that this is legal, and absolutely fascinated that this is something attractive to rock fans. But what do I know?

The tab on Truemors topics included the Latest and the Greatest, as well as Auto, Business, Crap, Entertainment, Food, Gaming, Health, News, Odd, Politics, Science, Sex, Sports and Tech.

I first heard about Truemors, directly from one of its developers, Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures in Palo Alto, one of my favorite bloggers whose blog is modestly titled, "How to Change the World." I had contacted Guy a while back in a fit of "fanacism." His blog is easy to read, down to earth, insightful and out of the millions of blogs, one I am interested in keeping up with. Others think so too, as he has a high traffic Alexa rating.

Guy told me about TFF as well, just coming out. A Truemors for Friends where you can post selectively to your closest friends, and allies and not broadcast to the world.

I must say blogging, has brought me into contact with a richly diverse context of topics, characters and possibilities that far exceed what I used to get out of reading or writing fiction. Dog fights at rock concerts, who knew?--Ruth Mitchell

Of course I didn't forget to leave you with something tempting to buyoutsidethebox...

"Statehouse Interior - Giclee print By George Wittenberg"