March, 2001
Nothing old-fashioned about us, is there? We read well-appointed suspense stories, always looking for what's next as well as what's been great. You'll find that Eyeball Wars, by David Meerman Scott (Freshspot Publishing, Lexington, Mass, $24.00) has the cachet of both what's next and what's been around because it's good.
You'll recognize the plot: playboy scion gets serious and triumphs over media-baron father (think Rupert Murdock). What makes Eyeball Wars special is the no-nonsense dissections of the clash between the old media (father and his newspaper) and the new (father gives playboy son the newspaper website for his papers, thinking son will plotz. Think again!)
Author Scott is, legitimately, an Internet insider, and watching him skewer newspaper websites as boring and homogeneous--"All these websites are trying to appeal to critics, to Internet award givers; trying to impress competitors and parent corporations…ignoring the entertainment needs of the intelligent and the educated…they all run a bunch of headlines. It's difficult to see what's important and it takes five minutes to decide what to do next." Take that, corporate web designers!
Focus groups come in for their shares of Scott's put-downs..."twenty people in a room paid a hundred bucks and given a ham sandwich...saying something (not hat they really think!) to go along with the crowd to look smart."
Two bright, attractive
heroes, male and female, here; the twentysomething playboy scion who learns
the hard way how to beat his old man, and the beautiful Japanese woman,
Harvard-educated, who returns to Japan to work in a large corporation
only to encounter a glass ceiling in tradition-encrusted Japan, implicit
in the tea ceremony, in which women still serve tea and must frame their
intelligence in deferential and debasing ways to the powerful not-as-clever
men.
Scott, the author, opted to forego the glacially slow formalities of the
dance with traditional publishers and coping with their hubris in a field
the author knows better and more intimately. Eyeball Wars
is self-published by Freshspot Publishing, the name of the website that
his hero develops in the book. See Richard and Mariko run; and to see
more about them, check out Freshspot Publishing's real website at www.freshspot.com.