Demand (?) on the Internet


	LinkExchange Member Demand (?) on the Internet
Consumers want to be people and demand becomes interest		Demand for information In economic theory Supply & Demand are the variables that rule the Market place. On the Internet there is an enormous and increasing supply side, but information demand seems to be slack.	Consumer Demand? With an increasing information demand, the demand for commercial products may follow. But today, an Internet consumer does not exist and strong inertia to its creation exists.	Interest replaces demand The closest paralel to the need & want of traditional marketing is that of interest. Imagining people as mere products of their immediate environment - their strata - will not do	The Imaginary Philosophers talk of the imaginary of the population. Within it is contained the myth and the norms of society. Building activities around the imaginary is to strengthen it and may be the key to success.

New case studies to build...		The bad guy in this imbalance is often the communication agency or the marketing specialist. It is fashionable to "be there" and companies often hurry their launch instead of asking why ? A French car manufacturer is said to have been convinced to convert a commercial television spot into a video sequence on their web site. It was done (and paid) and to the great surprise of the communication agency and the car manufacturer, nobody visited the web site. There are some pretty good reasons why nobody came, but the point in this case is that a great amount of information was published with any demand for it. Many individuals create their own web site and publish information for (almost) no reason. It is wonderful to have such abundant sources of information: It is redundant in terms of economic efficiency.	A pretty disgusting business practice is called "spamming". It consists in "stripping" e-mail adresses from public places (newsgroups, closed networks, web sites) and send an impressive number of unsolicited mail to the owners of these adresses. Diffusing commercial offerings in this way is rejected fiercely by a large amount of people. At C/net a whole section is permantly advising on how to avoid junkmail. This rejection of a commercial dimension of the Internet is an important factor to consider. The whole "Cookie" debate is related to this debate as well and led to the creation of services like Anonymizer , where the web can be surfed through and intermediary who blocks cookies, identification of geographical origin etc. A last example is the many Remailer services that offer to send anonymous e-mail.	All publicity is concentrated on the interest shown by people. A web site mastering state of the art information subgrouping is Firefly where a dynamic subsociety is created. An excellent article by Erik Granered on information subgroups used to be available on http://www.clark.net/pub/ granered/theory.html but now he is probably publishing it as a book...	The imaginary is a scary concept that probably the same origin as the mass psychology. Imagine the Internet as an enormous mass of thoughts, ideas, ideologies, discussions, debates on all themes. The result of this is almost something live, and it shows a picture that could not be seen when studying just one fragment... ...building activities around interests detected in newsgroups, forums and on web sites could perhaps be a way to choose / test commercial activities...
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