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Reading about this month’s WIRED magazine highlights the value of finding an idea that kinda works and absolutely exhausting it till you’ve gone ridiculously way too far.
NYT has the story on how WIRED partnered with J.J. Abrams and embedded a slew of puzzles within their latest issue. It’s so deep that it this guy required ASCII files, Morse code and some other intense cryptology techniques to solve some them. While 99% of readers won’t go through these lengths to figure this stuff out, many people will enjoy reading about it, and the depth that WIRED went to gives them street cred.
This reminds me of HBO’s Voyeur hyper media experiment which rewarded it’s hardcore fans with a complex storyline that crossed boundaries of TV, Online and the real world. It wasn’t for everyone, but those who got into it, REALLY got into it.
Lastly, I recently read the fascinating back story about the Subservient Chicken on the Barbarian blog. The magic of the site was in the depth of the tags which were added to the 400 clips they had shot for the project, making it feel like there were thousands of videos. From profanity to politeness, miss-spellings to the obvious, they took the idea of tagging into the realm of ridiculousness and created one of the most successful online campaigns of all time.
Depth matters…how can you take your next good idea way farther than its supposed to be taken?
