The BrandForward Blog

Sometimes when I click into my RSS reader, I feel like I’ve walked onto the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Racing through space with the warp drive cooking at ten. Little bits of light rushing past from all sides, each star system passing so quickly there’s no way to tell if there’s intelligent life worth stopping for. Or if it’s a barren wasteland I’d want to circumvent like a sector full of Borg.

This is life inside my RSS reader.

A vast unknown. Many wonderful things to discover. Many irrelevant time suckers. And more than a few cling-ons.

So while on a recent exploratory mission to uncover the mysteries that might be revealed under a pile of roughly 4,027 unread news stories, blog posts, and myriad YouTube memes it struck me that what I really needed was some sort of aggregator that can go down onto the planet while I sit up in the transporter room.

Something that can beam down to the surface and rifle and poke around all that content, while I wait for a specimen of intelligent life to magically materialize.

I mean really, they’ve got to have that, right?

Even Mashable’s wonderful “Latest News Updates” in my mailbox every day wasn’t exactly doing the trick. I didn’t necessarily need to know the top 10 Droid apps for drunken World Cup revelers, or how Google Pacman confused somebody’s grandmother in Dubuque.

What I needed was someone who’s committed to staying on top of the things that are driving the world fast forward, but with more of a marketing and advertising perspective. And I needed that someone to become my personal aggregator. I needed that someone to care about the point where technology and culture and brands and social media converge.

I needed this imaginary person to assemble the stuff that’s making an impact. The news that’s signaling change. The stories that are so thought-provoking it makes your head hurt. The stuff that if I overlooked, might cause me to miss a pivotal development, and initiate a planetary descent into irrelevance.

And while I was dreaming. On my fairy tale wish list I wanted this person to combine all these most important stories into a podcast I could listen to while I mill around in the kitchen on Monday mornings, or listen to on my iPhone while reading in bed at night.

I needed it and I needed it now!

Which of course led to my realization that it’s not fair to always expect someone else to do it. It’s not right to benefit from freebies like open-source platforms and creative commons photography and iPhone apps and spare pennies at the gas station if I’m not putting something valuable back into the jar.

That’s when I decided to keep digging through my RSS feeds and email newsletters and keep reading my admittedly old school print editions of Wired, Inc., Ad Age, and Fast Company, and I’ll keep pulling out the stories that are making a difference. And this time, I’ll try to make a difference, too.

The BrandForward Top 10 Podcast is the result. It’s the top ten stories every week from across the net, plus some added bonuses such as recommended TED talks, TV spots, video memes, hot apps, and must-read books and blog posts. An aggregation of my galaxy-class RSS feed with all the interplanetary static tuned out.

So as I continue to explore the outer reaches in a quest to write about the future of marketing, advertising, brands, technology, and social media, I’ll now start sharing the official captain’s log of my on-going adventure into the darkest recesses of that RSS black hole.

Find the latest podcast episode by clicking on the icon below or search “brandforward” on iTunes and subscribe!