Netpositive

Angela Gunn from USA Today’s Techspace blog had an exchange after she published her post about Valleyschwag. She started:

I remember some of the stuff that rolled through the offices of the
publication I was at during the first boom, and there was seriously a
point where the swag levels just made me nervous — we furnished an
entire chillout room with beach furniture, beanbag chairs, etc., for
instance. We didn’t know what else to do with it!

So there’s an echo there of that doomed rush for “mindshare” or
whatever, and it’s troubling deja vu. OTOH, I’m totally in agreement
with the tribal-markings nature of tech gear. (ThinkGeek: The Gap for
nerds? Discuss.) It’s been that way since long before the days of the
IBM songbook/dress code. But what does it mean now, especially if folks
*outside* these various companies are clamoring for this gear? On the
site you posit it as a rock-star thing; obviously I wasn’t going for
that, but I agree that *something* is signified, and that I would react
differently variously wearing a Google button, an MSN button (!), a
Flickr button, a company-I-haven’t-heard-of-yet button, and so on. It’s
pretty sophisticated mindslicing, too — I’d say I think of Blogger and
TypePad users as different sorts of people. (And yet I use both. Hmm.)

And then I responded:

For a lot of us Internet refugees who suffered through the shame of the post-bubble years, the Web is fun again in a way it hasn’t been since the mid-90s. Nonetheless, in everything we do we live in the shadow of that ol’ bubble economy madness. It seems like we talk more about whether or not we’re in a bubble than we talk about how to exploit the bubble! (I haven’t tested this, but I bet a Nexis search for news mentioning “bubble” will far outstrip mentions of “boom”).

So this pathological self-reflection makes the environment very different this time, despite all the talk of us repeating history. There is definitely an echo chamber (yay blogosphere!) but there’s no IPO market, a pretty mild acquisitions market (in terms of valuation), and a VC market that is dabbling at the roulette wheel.

It seems we instinctively equate Internet boom with doom. Valleyschwag’s response is to co-opt one of the very symbols of bubble excess–the schwag–and celebrate it. We like what we do!

Of course, it only works because there are Web companies with schwag (and products) worthy enough to care about. These generally happen to be either joke companies that accidentally became real, or renegade projects that are, in fact, rock-and-roll at heart. There are also those that are just aesthetically cool.

The economics of the New Schwag are also different. Anybody can have on-demand printing of their pet project set-up in a few minutes on a Web site. And for that matter, people are are building things out of the pure love of it, market size be damned. T-shirts and stickers, may be their biggest hard cost, designed for no other reason than to show the pride.

So perhaps it’s a less a bubble that we’re in than a petrie dish.

This entry was posted Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Random. Both comments and pings are currently closed.