Random thoughts from Mads Kristensen - Danish journalist, new media consultant and sort of entrepreneur

As advertising becomes ever more targeted, will our receptiveness towards advertising messaging decrease?

The reason I ask is because I can imagine a future where the intrusiveness of the ads become so all-dominant that we, collectively, decide to say ‘No!’ to it. A time when we come to the realization that not even the proposition of something being free to use in exchange for intrusive messages is enough.

What do you think? Am I seeing ghosts here?

Seth Godin has an excellent point about the number of hours being spent watching TV - time that could be put to use against more ‘important’ matters.

Three, four or even six hours a day not spent doing virtually nothing. Multiply it by 800 million people online and suddenly, there’s a huge influx of hours just waiting to be put to good use.

It’s mind-blowing when you think about it. So how do we get the ball rolling - away from the TV and towards something truly useful?

I met with a former employee today. She’s going to spend some months as an intern at a big interest organisation in Denmark, and she has a real opportunity to be the face of a very important subject for debate going forward. And this gives her some grief.

She’s thinking that there’s a limit to how far she could push this publicity in the view of her employment. I’m saying that she shouldn’t bother and just go all in, because by going all the way, opportunities will present themselves and secure her a nice career doing something she’s passionate about.

What do you think?

Today marks the day of the relaunch of my personal site in Danish. It’s moving from the good old madsk.net domain to the new domain mads-k.com.

Why the change? Well, basically because my needs drove beyond what my hosting could provide. Too much hazzle with databases and manual updating to new versions of WordPress finally made me make the decision. And since it proved a real pain to transfer the domain, I got a new one.

But it was a hard decision to take. Because I managed more than 1000 posts and 200+ comments on the other site.

Now it’s onwards and upwards with madsk-k.com - and this site of course.

I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s thoughtprovocing book “The Schock Doctrine” (more on that in a later post), and today I made a startling discovery.

Back when I was president of the local chapter of Junior Chamber International, I got a lot of positive and negative feedback for driving a hard line with members, who didn’t contribute anything to the common good. When some decided to put me up for President of The Year, part of the feedback from the judges were that “…sometimes the forest has to burn down in order for something new to grow”. I was quite proud of this.

What striked me today is that this is exactly the argument that Naomi places with the disaster capitalists.
Does that make me a disaster capitalist in spe?

Social networking creates the illusion that the fragmentation and despair that are so characteristic of modern human existence are somehow eliminated with the click of a button.

Jeremiah D. Braunlin in a Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Times.