FWIW, one mag offers highbrow/lowbrow on one axis and despicable/brilliant on the other.

Take swanky restaurant menus, you’ll see words like: planko, encrusted, jasmine, saffron. They’re priming you to pay top-dollar by convincing that it’s an exotic, unique experience.

Still, a Zagat rating in a city like Montreal is a distinguishing feature in a v. competitive field.

If you hear folks like me from the middle-class talk about their dishes at restaurants, often it’s about their taste. The well-off chat about the presentation.

Yet, the best and most successful chefs have developed concepts which blend the high-brow and middle-brow. Take Chiptole’s focus on sustainable food or Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack in NYC: top quality ingredients + comfort food. BTW, both rank well in Zagat.

This is oversimplified but, hope you see where I’m going.

The power of the specialists to build transparent hierarchies for the public is where the opportunity often lies. Just ask Tim and Nina Zagat.

Would like to see a post on creative destruction and confidence as a follow-up.

Not to discredit the point, but there is another dynamic going on with the violinist. What percent of the people walking past would have paid $100 to see him play on stage? It is likely that very few of the people passing by had the experience to judge what they were listening to nor would they have paid money for it had they been told who he was. There is also the issue of attentiveness, but that can wait.

Having one billion friends on Facebook may make you feel popular, but if it doesn’t help accomplish an objective, it has no practical value. When it comes to credibility, the quality of the audience usually trumps the size of the stage.

Thanks for letting me borrow on your credibility.

Lance

It’s a very good point, but raises another question. Why do Digital Media People fail to grasp that context is important for advertising too?

Instead of whining about low ad rates I wish more people in the Digital sphere thought about why marketers are willing to pay more for an association with branded content, even for the same audience.

There is a reason that you are more likely to see drug dealers at a rock concert than at a university library.

- Greg

Reading your post makes me think of the endless stream of “magic formulas” to get Twitter followers (supposedly to increase one’s influence). Without exception, every one of these simplistic formulas or top 10 lists fails to mention context, even if they do have some useful ideas.

Even if you have the most insightful, funny, life-altering tweets that follow every “rule,” it probably won’t matter unless your messages are delivered in a meaningful context. This may mean having a nucleus of influential followers, or it may mean using keywords or hashtags intelligently to get your ideas seen. Until you have the right context, though, no one is seeing that great content, and you might as well be playing your violin in the subway station.

Thanks for starting my Sunday right and providing some tasty food for thought.

We have, and always will, rely on other people’s judgments to validate our own. That’s why I don’t think these stories, especially the one about Joshua Bell, should be surprising. I love classical music, and I would have walked right by him too.

I first read about Joshua Bell’s performance in the book Sway by Ori and Rom Brafman. It made me realize how hard true objectivity is to practice. All of us, no matter what our backgrounds are the products of life’s circumstances. In order to be able to cope with the sprawling mass of information out there, we take mental shortcuts to keep ourselves sane. An example of this is sub-conscious racial profiling by people who would otherwise claim to not have a racist bone in their body. In the case of Bell, people have preconceived notions as to how good a street performer can really be, as such Bell received only passing interest despite being world-class.

The way you have framed it as borrowing credibility from anothers’ platform is spot on. It’s become a cliche, but the only thing scarce on the web is attention. Therefore, in order to capture others attention, one must make it easy for their readers to make the necessary shortcuts (recommendations, testimonials) in proving that their content is of real use. Expecting others to do so on their own is too much to ask when there are a million and one other blogs to read.

Keep up the great work – I’m 50 pages into Trust Agents – it’s a gem!

Charlie