I did have some thoughts on how weblogs themselves operate as and through brands, but I decided I would rather collate and discuss the grid blogging experiment itself.

GridMeister Ashley Benigno starts grid blogging off in style, with a poetic set of reflections on the ubiquity of the brand.

[NB: I normally refrain from post-publication editing, but this post will grow and mutate as I discover things, kay?]

Anne Galloway has written a ripper of a post on the uses of brands, rather than the ideological aspects of brands as representation, or brands as symbols of global capital:

The use-value of a commodity emerges only through its use or consumption (see Marx on that one) – and it seems to me that discussions of BRANDING too often ignore use-value or the active participation of users in creating meaning and value around commodities and BRANDS. In other words, just as designers cannot predict every way their products will be used, we cannot make easy arguments for how BRANDS are used. A BRAND-in-use is different than a BRAND-as-representation, its meaning separate from its actual use; what a BRAND represents is different from how it acts.

She discusses a Starbuck’s in the Forbidden City and Amazonian Avon ladies along the way. It is, as I said, a ripper.

Less politely, Antipopper has a refreshing rant against the blind reductionism of Adbusters-style brand bashing. I love a good polemical assault on self-righteousness. What I like about this blog in general is its enlightened populism: it manages to defend the ordinary without being anti-intellectual (in fact demonstrating an intimidating command of cultural theory at times). Hooya.

And William Blaze, who has shown a deep distrust of all things cool, also has a go at Adbusters, which he calls “a lifestyle magazine for consumerist anorexics and bulimics”:

Feeling guilty about buying that handwoven toilet paper in a custom carved wooden box? Or maybe the fact that it only took 94 minutes to get bored of your new cellphone/vacuum cleaner has got you down? Adbusters sells the perfect remedy, anti-consumption in nice bite sized, well designed chunks.

There are, I think, more bulimic than anorexic consumers in the West. Although due to poverty I tend to dream-binge, and therefore rarely need to purge…those consumer electronics sales brochures are my pornography.

Gary Sauer-Thompson muses on Kylie as brand and urban branding, and then asks whether or not the gift can stand outside of the market. In a literal sense, maybe, but I think Bourdieu would say that a gift is only experienced as such (i.e. as a free expression of goodwill) because of the delay in reciprocation (and perhaps the decentralised nature of the gift economy). And, interesting for me, the gift economy is what open source networks are all about. Thought-provoking stuff, worthy of a longer discussion I think.