San Francisco Update #3 posted by Ben

Where to begin the end?

Current.tv is a fascinating endeavor that may or may not succeed. In any case, though, it's picked up a lot of attention in the last few days, especially since being Slashdotted recently.

It has also picked up quite a few misconceptions. Current will not be a 'liberal' or 'conservative' network. (A producer assures me that they will insist that submissions be, you know, verifiably true, which could be a problem for the wingnuts.) Current will not feature Al Gore, all the time. I doubt that he will even appear on the air. Current will not randomly grab Google searches (as the /. crowd seems to anticipate) but will be a bit more sophisticated about presenting thematic popular searches. (It works better than it sounds. I've seen the footage.)

However, there is one issue that none of the commentators seem to have latched on to yet: Current has a crappy new logo.

That's right, their four green squares in a row effectively fail to communicate that a) it's a television station, b) it's driven by youth-created content (mostly, eventually) and c) those squares actually represent command line computer speak for 'awaiting input'. In fact, the new logo says just about as much as 'Current' does: absolutely nothing. It sort of reminds me of Nike's 'Just Do It' campaign. Without a significant branding campaign to establish an emotional connection and consumer allegiance to those four green squares, there's nothing there. It's so simple that it becomes reductive and simplistic.

But is that the answer I give when Al Gore asks me what I think of the new logo? Of course not. I simply say "It's green." Actually, that pretty much sums it up.

By the way, the image of gray-suited Al Gore walking through a San Francisco hip-hop club, surrounded by a sea of hip and trendy city youth dancing the night away, is a pretty effective visual metaphor for the entire Current plan. It's funded by suits, it's run by suits, and the suits don't get that you can't be perceived as truly "underground" when you're funded by the "authority".

I actually do have quite a bit more to say about Current (much of it is actually quite positive) but I just received a call to be somewhere by 10 AM, so I'll have to finish up later.

Hopefully by tomorrow I'll be back posting daily political commentary. Thanks to all my readers for your patience during the recent unexpected insanity!