According to web technologist Cameron Adams, a mashup is “a song created by blending two or more other songs.” In analog terms, a mashup is a musical collage made up of bits and pieces of other songs, sound effects, and audio files. But while you can look at a collage and tell which bits came from where, the more complex a mashup gets, the harder it is to distinguish the parts that are being used to create what you’re hearing.

So Adams dissected his mashup, Definitive Daft Punk, in real time to “reveal its entire structure: the cutting, layering, levels, and equalization of 23 different songs.” In doing so, Adams not only used the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technology to create an impressive bit of software and a fascinating explanation of a complex process, he also created his own visual art.

According to the website Coolhunting, Adam’s “online visualization tool breaks down and analyzes the complicated construction, demonstrating how individual sounds work together to form the whole in a diagram of rainbow-colored concentric rings. The beautiful animation lends a unique understanding of the intricacies of the particular mashup, joining the audio and visual for experiences not unlike ‘little slices of synchronous art, designed to please all of your senses.’” Adams posted his mashup, his dissection, and an explanation of it all, on his site, The Man in Blue.

Let’s recap: Cameron Adams created a new work of music, Definitive Daft Punk, using parts and pieces from 23 earlier compositions. The song is available on iTunes and YouTube. Adams then wrote software to graphically deconstruct the mashup and show how it was created and he posted the results on his website. Coolhunting wrote an article about the deconstruction presentation. So did two Google pages worth of other sites.

Our trend spotting director, Marlisa Shapiro, aka Trendaholic, sent me an email about Adam’s work and I found it interesting enough to write about. If you find it interesting too, then you can read about the deconstruction of Definitive Daft Punk’s marketing HERE.

Compare Adam’s marketing calendar to the traditional model. In the old days, a musician would record a piece of original music with other musicians, a publisher would produce and distribute it, radio stations (later MTV and VH1) would play it, and consumers would trek down to their local record stores to buy the song.

Adams did none of those things. First he built a piece of music by using existing recordings. Then he posted his music online for immediate downloads and generated consumer interest in the song by programming a new app that created art by disassembling the song he just put together. He then documented his process on his blog. Metaphorically speaking, Adams not only deconstructed his composition, he also deconstructed the traditional marketing machine.

Am I the only one who’s getting excited here? And by the way, it’s irrelevant whether you like Adams’ music or not. It doesn’t even matter if you like mashups. The bigger universal message is that every industry, creative and otherwise, is going to be disintermediated just like the music biz. Only here’s a clear diagram of exactly how to do it. Adams not only created music and visual art, he also built an easy-to-follow blueprint on how to market your output. The trick that Adams makes so clear is that it’s not just the product itself that generates interest but the process that created it, the components that go into it, and the analyses of both the product and the process. In other words, thanks to today’s digital technology, every part of your business can be marketed to the right people.

Nicholas Negroponte, the head of the MIT MediaLab, sussed it out years ago. He explained how computer technology breaks everything down to bits and that it’s these bits that change everything.

“First, bits commingle effortlessly. The mixing of audio, video, and data is called multimedia.

“Second, a new kind of bit is born – a bit that tells you about the other bits.

“These two phenomena, commingled bits and bits-about-bits, change the media landscape so thoroughly that concepts like video-on-demand…are just trivial applications – the tip of a much more profound iceberg.

“Being digital…creates the potential for new content to originate from a whole new combination of sources.”

Negroponte wrote about this in 1995. Adams showed us how it works in 2011. Today’s question is whether you (and your business) will start disintermediating your own world before somebody else does.

We’ve all heard the lies:

“The Mercedes is paid for.”

“I’ll call you in the morning.”

“I’m from the IRS and I’m here to help.”

“You may already be a winner.”

But lately, thanks to the brave new world of online marketing, I’ve heard five new ones that are worth considering before we fall for them.

1.  The fundamentals don’t matter anymore.

2.  The best pricing strategy is free.

3.  To be successful, pursue your passion.

4.  If you build it, they will come.

5.  Content is king.

1.  The fundamentals don’t matter anymore.

It seems like each time there’s a new boom, whether it’s real estate, IPOs or online businesses, this old trope gets rolled out. People think the fundamentals don’t matter because they’re looking at something revolutionary and how could something so new be predicted and controlled by something as old (and boring) as fundamentals?

Of course, while technology and opportunities are changing at lighting speed, what doesn’t change is how people react to these new phenomena. And so the same issues and problems resurface time and time again.

Bottom line? The fundamentals DO matter; that’s why they’re called fundamentals.

2.  The best pricing strategy is free.

This lie is so counterintuitive that books have been written about it. And the strategy is so seductively simple: give things away to attract attention, build relationships and sell products. Unfortunately, what the authors of the “Free” books forget is that the people who take their advice actually need to earn revenue to survive. Like the World War I flying aces whose planes were shot at and spiraled gracefully down towards the ground where they inevitably crashed, the race to win the low price war finally ends with prices being so low that the sellers go out of business.

The ironic proof that this concept is hogwash? One of the first evangelists for this axiom, Chris Anderson, wrote the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. It lists for $26.99.

3.  To be successful, pursue your passion.

This lie is not only untrue; it’s also cruel. But thanks to its siren call, lots of college students study subjects they have no chance of turning into careers and lots of professionals abandon their careers in order to pursue activities from which they have no chance of earning a living.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a design degree and I think it’s great to study the history of comparative religion or the modal chants of the Renaissance. I just don’t think it’s a particularly profitable endeavor. The ugly truth of many “passion” industries – music, art, filmmaking, etc. – is that you may make a fortune but you can’t make a living. Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs presented a wonderful speech at TED on this very subject. You can watch it HERE.

The simple truth? If you want to be successful, don’t pursue your passion; pursue your customers’ passion.

4 .  If you build it, they will come.

Way back when, in the nascent years of the Internet, posting a site was about all you needed to do to generate viewership. Every site was new and every concept was exciting. And the developers who incorporated viral recruiting, like the guys who built the site HOTorNOT.com, were able to attract millions of users and enormous valuations.

But today the web is crawling with websites. According to the Netcraft Web Server Survey, there were 266,848,493 sites as of December 2010. Over the last few months there has been an increase of 47 million host names and 7 million active websites, and we’re quickly closing in on over 300 million sites.

It’s not much better in the publishing world. Amazon alone offers almost 810,000 ebook titles to browse through. And as you know if you read my blog post last week, I added my own ebook to the list (as of Monday, March 28^th, Mouth of the South has sold a whopping 21 copies, by the way), which will really put the count over the top.

Woody Allen might have said that “70% of success in life is showing up” but it’ll take a whole lot more effort than that to be successful these days.

5.  Content is king.

Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, wrote a wonderfully prescient book titled Being Digital. Although it was published almost 20 years ago, it’s still a go-to guide for people who want to understand the online world.

One of Negroponte’s key points is that content is worth considerably more than distribution. As Negroponte points out, “the valuation of a bit is determined in large part by its ability to be used over and over again.” So Mickey Mouse is valuable because it can be produced in movies, printed on comic books, screened onto tee shirts, stamped onto lunch boxes and even formed into lollipops. Accordingly, way back in 1994 when Being Digital was written, “the market value of Disney was $2 billion greater than that of Bell Atlantic, in spite of Bell Atlantic’s sales being 50 percent greater and (its) profits being double.”

What Negroponte may not have thought about —back then in the dark ages of the Internet — is the incredible volume of content that’s been created, posted and repurposed across the ‘Net. And so his apocryphal line “Content is king,” is only true if it’s qualified that that content better be good, unique or compelling.

These lies are popular because they are grammatically symmetrical, comfortably instructive and because they appeal to our personal self interests. And thanks to today’s 24/7 news cycle hungry for endless bits information to report on, the lies are continuously repeated until they enter our collective consciousness.

Oh, and by the way, you know that money I owe you? Don’t worry, the check’s in the mail.

My laptop broke so I’m writing this blog post longhand.

There was an afternoon once when I was at lunch and got inspired and thumb-typed an article on my phone but this the first time I’ve ever written a post with a pen and paper. Even that wasn’t so easy because while I’ve got sketchbooks stacked everywhere, I had to search for ruled stock to write on. Plus, without the convenience of backspacing and spell check I find writing is a much less fluid process. Not to mention how much slower handwriting is when compared to typing.

The other day, Jonathan Robertson, the CEO of TG Capital, told a great story. He said a guest was staying in one of their hotels on the fifth floor in room 555. He woke up in the morning and noticed the alarm clock on the bed said “5:55.” When the newspaper was delivered he saw that the date was May Fifth. Opening the paper to the sports section, he found a horse in that day’s fifth race named Take Five. So he dressed, had breakfast, went to the track, and bet five thousand, five hundred and fifty five dollars on Take Five in the fifth.

“How’d he do?” we asked.

“The horse came in fifth” he answered.

Exactly as we should have guessed.

But just like I assumed the horse would win the race, I assumed that writing this story by hand would have inspired some different thinking then when I bang it out on my laptop. Other than a lot of cross outs and a sore left hand, however, it was pretty much the same.

My discovery was not in the words I wrote but in the result of the writing. I found that the whole process of creating these blog posts is technostic, or, technology agnostic. My brain doesn’t care how I record the information as long as I get it out of my head and onto paper. I can type, scribble, record or even capture my thoughts with whatever technology comes along next. As long as you read, enjoy, and ultimately find my words worth your time, I’m happy.

Come to think of it, the distribution of my messages is technostic as well. It doesn’t matter if I send you my blog post via e-mail, if you point your browser to http://www.TurkelTalks.com, if you click on the link in Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn or if someone forwards you the message. And it doesn’t matter if you read the post on your desktop, your laptop, your netbook, your smart phone, your iPad or if you print it out on paper. What matters is that you read it.

Perhaps we should obsess less over our tech and more over our text. After all, as Nicholas Negroponte wrote more than 15 years ago in his book Being Digital, “content is king.” He was right back then and he’s right today.

My to do list is about as long as my arm – people to call, people to call back, clients’ jobs to work on, appointments to schedule, blog posts to write, tweets to post, emails to return and books to read.

Hey, I’m reading just as fast as I can but the night table is still sagging under my growing pile of books.

Thanks to Things, the computerized to do list program, most everything I need to do is neatly cataloged and updated right on my screen. And because the list automatically syncs with my iPhone, the list is always in my pocket, silently screaming out how much there is to be done.

With so much to do, and everything so well organized, why is it that I’m never sure of what I should be doing next? Especially when my favorite business books tell me EXACTLY what to do:

• Jim Collins was adamant that to go from Good To Great I need to get the right people off the bus, the right people on the bus, and to make sure they’re all in the right seats. I better stop writing this post and go work on my HR plans.
• Eliyahu Goldratt made it real clear in The Goal that the number one thing a manager should do is avoid being a bottleneck. So that means I should put down my personnel files and go approve those pending ads to keep my agency humming along.
• In The E-Myth Revisited Michael Gerber says that the thing to do is “work on your business, not in your business.” So the heck with reviewing client work, I should be finding clients to work on.
• In Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte preaches that “content is king.” Maybe I should stop prospecting and start creating more content – like this blog post that I had stopped crafting in the first place.
• And in Younger Next Year, Chris Crowley and Harry Lodge say that if I don’t work out intensely at least six days a week I’m not going to be in any shape to run my business anyway so maybe I ought to turn my computer off and go for a run.

Or maybe I should stop reading so much. Not only will that give me more time to get my work done but imagine how much shorter my to do list will be without all those recommended book titles cluttering it up.