The backstory. First there was the buzz: Bum Rush The Charts. Then I rushed and finally, I sat back and engaged in a little navel gazing…

I wasn’t obsessive about checking the rankings on I-Tunes yesterday, but I did check a couple of times and wondered who was still buying Beyonce, isn’t she a has-been by now? I did notice that things did not look good for Black Lab. Was this experiement going to work out?

Then I read this:

“As of this post, NONE OF THE ITUNES CHARTS WORLDWIDE HAVE UPDATED IN OVER 24 HOURS! The previous chart positions we have are from midday on the 22nd and our guess is that they can’t reflect the total number of downloads made during BUM RUSH. We’re expecting to rise even higher once they update so KEEP AN EYE ON THE ITUNES CHARTS! And let us know if you see anything.”

(from The Bum Rush The Charts blog)

And then I clicked through to an article in Spin magazine, which picked up the story yesterday.

They based their calculations on the only data they had at the time, the same i-tunes rankings as everyone else and concluded their article wondering if the rush worked. It will take some time for the numbers to come in, you can watch the returns at the Financial Aid Podcast.

Let’s say the rush gets Black Lab into the top 20, but never hit number one, just the fact that the rush made it out of the gates and caused a ripple effect on the I-Tunes charts is an amazing thing and it is built on the back of individual prosumers - producers and consumers in the blog/podcast sector. I’m sure Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, Chrisopher Penn, CC Chapman and the rest of the gang behind this will be talking about this for day.

New Media marketing fascinates me because at some level, it is all about how to manage and deliver information to those most likely to need/want/us it. With data feeds we have the ability to finely tune our searches, to focus our scope on the likeliest of targets, but my hunch is that we still crave the human element to put it all together for us, make it matter to us.

We are still at the very begining of the brave new world and the transition is tough. I feel like I spend my day explaining Web 2.0 to people, and that the mere act of catching them up prevents them from enjoying the process. Every once in a while, someone will tell me they’ve read my other blog or they’ve listened to a podcast and I’ll be surprised and relieved, because I’ve stumbled upon someone else who gets it.

I’m tempted to send this out before all my meetings with people, because I think it tells a story but, I worry - does it move too fast? If you aren’t a prosumer (producer/consumer) already, can you keep up?