Seth Godin uses Star Trek as example

Tags: Seth Godin Star Trek

For a while now, I've been reading Seth Godins blog, and I've actually read the backlog (back-blog?) as well. Good stuff. And some of what I liked were the Star Trek examples:

Seamless
Wear clothes without seams and you look like you're on Star Trek.
Seams make it possible to get a grip.
The goal, it seems to me, is not to create things that are seamless. It's to put the seams in places where they are actually useful.

Q. How do I license this great idea?
Second, there's the problem of what it's worth. What is the basic idea behind Star Trek or Mission: Impossible worth? Would a different two-paragraph treatment really have made the difference between success or failure? The producers of those shows would tell you it was the 10,000 little things that happened after the original idea that made the difference between success and failure.

"I don't feel like playing tonight"
Reading an auction catalog tonight, I just discovered that Gene Roddenberry designed the phaser to be a profitable children's toy first, a Star Trek prop second. And the only reason the Klingons had a ship is that the Enterprise model kit sold so well... They even let the model company, AMT, build the prop so that they could be sure the model sold in stores would be the same. Does that make you think anything less of Roddenberry's universe?

...in the middle, Starting
Blog writing is different than almost any other sort of exposition. Some people have been with you for years. They understand your conventions, your shorthands and your biases. They know you've written a few books, appeared as a child actor in Star Trek or have a deep and abiding hatred for cats. You can drop a few hints and they get it.
The rest of your readers are left clueless.

Created: 6 August, 2008 - Last changed: 6 August, 2008 - Comments (0)