You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
Just wanted to point to some mentions of me and my activites. This is completely self-serving, but hey, what can you do? Hopefully you'll find it moderately interesting.
First off is an article I wrote for Media Magazine titled "Power to (a Few) People". Not surprisingly, it's all about power laws. Here's an excerpt:
From Facebook to Dove’s “Real Beauty� campaign, social networks play a key role in media today. But, despite the current hype, networks aren’t particularly new. Consider, the famous “six degrees of separation� experiment examining social networks was conducted in the 1960s.
What’s new is our understanding of how they really function. Just 20 years ago, if you asked a social scientist to graph out a social network they would have shown you a bell curve: Most people are friends with a few people who know hardly anyone; a few who know a massive amount of people; and the majority sit in the middle. Bell curves, or Gaussian distributions, traditionally result when the subjects being plotted aren’t connected to one another.
Second, my friend Celia recently started a magazine called Slice. The first issue features an article all about likemind. Here's the intro:
The premise for Likemind is so basic that it’s brilliant: free coffee, scintillating conversation, and the opportunity to meet new friends, all at 8 o’clock in the morning. It’s baffling how many people are willing to set their alarm clocks to gather at such an hour, but when we arrived at sNice in New York City at 8:05am, the café was already bustling. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Likemind is that there is no agenda. There are no rules and there’s no exclusive list of invitees. People recommend Likemind to friends or stumble upon the website online and the result is a crowd of like-minds, drawn together by the appeal of meeting new people. Nestling our steaming cups of coffee, we hopped from one table to the next to chat with folks about what drew them to Likemind. We left with an inspiring collection of personal accounts about chance encounters and the possibility of discovering new friends, if one only has the opportunity to sit down and strike up a conversation.
If you're in the mood to support a good cause, head over to the Slice Magazine site and subscribe. It's pretty cheap and should be great.
Last, Adage recently teamed up with Todd And to make his Power 150 the official Adage top 150 marketing blogs. I fall in at number 80.
To be honest, I'm not sure how to feel about it. I really don't like marketing blogs that much. As I've said in the past, I think the best way to think about marketing and what's next is to not talk about "marketing" at all, but rather to focus on things like people, technology or culture. With that said, obviously it's exciting to be on the list and I'm joined by some esteemed company (PSFK, Publishing 2.0, Russell Davies, Grant McCracken and Influx Insights all made the top 50).
That's about it. Naked, the company I work for, also had a nice writeup today in Adweek featuring this choice quote: "Carney confirmed that J&J is by far the shop's biggest win yet. And the agency celebrated with gusto: "We sang We Are the Champions by Queen loudly and repeatedly whilst inhaling vats of Champagne," Carney recalled. "Neal [Davies] and I danced on the boardroom table and everyone [at the agency] got money. It was brilliant, I still have a hangover."" Nice.
Update (8/6/07): Fixed the link to my article in Media Magazine.