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June 12, 2006

Some guy's in town to tell you something or other

The rise of the blog has made people very sensitive about the communications from PRs. The PR people at the Bad Pitch Blog berate other PRs for daring to send releases without a covering note or personalising the messages. The horror. It must be hard to be on the receiving end of those. Back in the real world, the real problem with most of the stuff that comes in is its unremitting dullness.

Invitations represent a particularly special corner of the world of boredom. And that is plain daft. Releases are one thing - we have been conditioned to expect dullness in those. But when the task is to set up a meeting? Dull, uninformative invites just demonstrate a lack of care.

Picture this. You've just been told the CEO of your client is flying over for a few days and wants "to meet the local press". What do you do? Do you find out which particular things this CEO wants to get off their chest, and use those as teasers to encourage people to turn up with questions? No, don't be stupid, you send out invites like this (I copied out a real one and changed some details to hide where this one came from, for the simple reason that the one that arrived today was no better or worse than any others of its kind.):

Jim Smiggins, president and CEO of Big Software will be in London on June 14th through 16th and would like to meet with you.

Aw, that's nice, flying all that way and he wants to meet me. Oh wait, that's a lie. He's got no idea who he wants to meet. This is a form letter. Don't get carried away. Actually this is not the problem with most invites of the kind. This next bit is:

The meeting offers a great opportunity to find out more about Big Software, the latest developments in the big software market and the latest products, which are to be launched on June 12th, which are particularly relevant to big-software customers in key verticals such as automotive, industrial and finance.

Fantastic. I can hardly wait. I can go along and get the death-by-Powerpoint on how the company is going to dominate the big software market, or something.

These days, if I want to find out more about Big Software, I can go to the website. What I want to know is why I should care. And that means working out whether readers will care what Smiggins has to say. If it's just a sales pitch on why big software rocks, that's unlikely. They too can go to the website.

I'm not asking someone to come up with an angle, but there isn't even the slightest hint of a teaser in there. Does Smiggins have strong opinions about certain things? Is there some big change coming that Smiggins reckons will reshape a part of the technology world? It doesn't matter whether he's talking out of his hat, it would just be useful to know so I can decide whether this is a meeting worth having. There are so few specifics in these invitations, they could be - and probably are - generated from a generic template.

I guess we will never know for sure whether Smiggins was good value. Because the invite went straight into the round filing cabinet. I could have spent some time doing background on the CEO, but there were many other possible stories and features to follow up. Too many to work out whether anything had changed in the world of Big Software.

Posted by Chris at 10:02 PM | Comments (7)

June 10, 2006

At least they can only mess up a small island

Update: 25 May 2007
I today received a threat of legal action from a 'Mark Bowness', claiming that comments under this entry were libellous and that he had been in touch with a solicitor, noting that he will be "forced to take matters further" if nothing happened. (He also referred to an earlier communication that I did not receive.)

However, Bowness did not specify any statements in those comments as being libellous, only claiming that some of them were. I do not believe that any were but, given the way that UK libel operates and that Bowness seems unable to indicate what actually offends him, I have taken the precaution of temporarily removing all comments, which includes those from 'Mark James', the name under which Bowness operated at Tribewanted until recently and under which he commented to this blog. I do not believe that any of the comments that raised concerns about the organisation of Tribewanted are in fact libellous. But I shall wait to see what Mark Bowness has to say.

Update: 27 May 2007
'Mark James Bowness' (rather than plain old Mark Bowness) replied in Friday, but I've only just had time to deal with this having had to deal with both a dead ADSL router and a laptop suffering from infant-mortality syndrome in quick succession.

The upshot was that Bowness didn't like two comments that appeared under this post. One of those comments referred to Bowness' selective use of his name in connection with Tribewanted (in correspondence, one day he's Mark James, less than a year on he's Mark Bowness, and then, on being challenged over the discrepancy a few hours later, Mark James Bowness). However, the way that comment was worded means that it was factually incorrect, if you chose a narrow interpretation of its meaning.

Why was Bowness worried about that? He replied:

"My name is Mark James Bowness, I never changed my name I simply dropped my surname rightly or wrongly as I was concerned that with my previous association with Christian work tribewanted would be labelled as a Christian operation, which is isnt.

"The reason that I have contact you now is because we have spent a lot of time building integrity and credibility with tribewanted, which we have, it is going well. The reason that I am contacting you now is because I am developing other projects and your post comes up in google which states that I changed my name which is untrue. As far as I am concerned we have worked hard on tribewanted and people still ask me questions about changing my name, which I havent and I explain this at the level that it happened and it makes sense to people."

I had a quick look at Tribewanted.com to see that Bowness has had his entry changed there to reflect his full name (Mark James Bowness) rather than the truncated version (Mark James) under which he, until recently, publicised his activity there.

I should point out that when the company was founded, he used the name Mark James Bowness to register as a director at Companies House. But, when the site started, and for a good long while after, he wanted to be known as Mark James and admits he had reasons for doing so. You can see that in the Wayback Machine. (Internet caches are a bitch aren't they, Mark?) However, he takes issue with a comment, based on a narrower interpretation of what was written than the commenter probably intended, that pointed this out and then uses threats of legal action to try to change his Internet footprint.

The other comment asked whether 'Mark' had been writing blogs and comments under the name 'George'. Based on the IP addresses of comments here and writing style, there is no evidence I can find they were written by the same person.

If you've waded through that lot, the original post on Tribewanted is below.

My initial reaction to seeing the coverage of Tribewanted's plan to build a "sustainable eco-community" on a tiny Pacific island was: "Oh look, Lord of the Flies for grown-ups." Then I worked it out: it's NGO Fantasy Island. Perhaps misled by the apparent ability of the characters in Lost to live on an island for close to 50 days on the contents of the aircraft bar and the odd fish and bit of fruit, about 700 people out of the 5000 needed have signed up to claim their bit of part-time community construction.

For the lords of obscure business models, Bubblegeneration, the plan to have people organise a part-time community on a remote island has everything: "blurring the boundaries, plasticity, microchunking and preference-trading in a micro-market...you know the score". No, I'm afraid I don't know the score. I'm not even sure that Bubblegeneration co-writer Mahashunyam does, given that the link is to a piece that appears under MSNBC's "What were they thinking?" column. The more I look at Bubblegeneration, the more I think it's a revival of the thinking that gave us the business model of "carrying on an undertaking of great importance, but nobody to know what it is" from another, much earlier South Sea-related endeavour.

I'm no expert on Pacific island soil chemistry, but I'm willing to bet that Tribewanted's plan will have as much to do with sustainability as a long lost-weekend in Goa. Lots of people talking warmly at each other about saving the planet but happy to chow down on stuff trucked in from miles around after being responsible for lobbing several tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the back of a 777.

The island the Tribewanted organisers intend to settle is, apparently, about 80 hectares in area. That's about the size of the main bit of Clapham Common. Yes, it's tiny. On that, 100 people will be there at any one time, staying for anything up to three weeks during a year. Now, 100 people on a chunk of land like Clapham Common does not sound like it's going to be crowded. But, to feed and water them? The organisers put the emphasis on sustainability, but I doubt very much if the island could feed more than a fraction of that number without importing most of its food or bunging high-nitrogen fertilisers into the soil.

Vaclav Smil did the calculations in the mid-1990s on how much land you need. Before the introduction of artificial fertilisers, you could only get about five people to a hectare of farmland. Not any old land, but proper productive farmland. And it assumes you are diligent in recycling your mates' waste. Nice. If you look at photos of the island it quickly becomes clear that most of what land there is comprises rocky, forested hills. Good luck ploughing that lot.

It is worth looking at what happened to Pitcairn after Fletcher Christian and his Bounty mutineers fetched up in a bid to avoid being found by the British Navy. This island is much larger than Vorovoro - or Adventure Island at Tribewanted would have it - at about 450 hectares. Unfortunately, not that much of the island can be farmed easily. There's an ex-volcano in the middle of it, so the soil is fertile, but it's difficult to farm. Only about a tenth of the total land mass is used for growing food, and the island can sustain about 50 people. In the 19th Century, the population grew to 200, but many had to leave because they were starving.

The annoying thing about this is that there are sustainable communities already in place. They are not part-time affairs and none of them are on a purty little island in a scenario that sounds uncannily like an Alex Garland novel. (If Garland wants to make amends for the pretentious mess that was The Tesseract, however, there looks to be plenty of source material here.)

An small island is about the last place you want to build one of these communities, unless you enjoy starving to death. There's probably a reason why very few people live on this particular island - it's too small for it to make for sense for many more. In fact, reading between the lines of the existing coverage, it's not clear that anyone really lives on Vorovoro rather than the nearby, and considerably larger island of Mali. The 'native' population seems to be about four or five.

Working sustainable communities tend to be in less sexy places like Wales, where some of them have had to fight off property developers to stay where they are. If there was a plan to take a smaller rolling population to somewhere modelled on one of these communities, then the Tribewanted plan might make more sense. The organisers are very keen to promote the idea that the 5000 members decide the rules. That has parallels in what sociologists call intentional communities - they differ widely in the rules they use but they rely largely on consensus among peers. But, with this setup, you have 5000 armchair generals setting rules before they get anywhere near the island. Look at the site and see all the ideas the members have already got for the island based on a map with no scale and scanty information on the resources there. It's like a thought experiment of what several hundred World Banks would come up with, if they spent more time in Aya Napa than Washington offices.

Luckily, unlike World Bank development plans, the people on the ground running the project are likely to take control of what really gets done. So, an experiment in sustainable development groupthink will amount to an opportunity to cough up several hundred quid for the privilege of being told to dig a latrine or chop down some trees. It will be instructive to see how quickly the Wisdom of Crowds takes effect on this lot and they realise what needs to be done to sustain a rolling population of 100 in such a small place. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that sustainability principles will get jettisoned quite early.

Posted by Chris at 5:19 PM | Comments (5)

June 7, 2006

Old arguments writ new

The blog slanging match over books just won't go away. Thanks to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 for finding a single link that sums much of this one up. He decries the polarised arguments. In the red corner, we have people who believe that authors suck and need to be replaced pronto by the audience. There's nothing that can't be fixed without a mashup. In the blue corner, people who think books are just fine and those who want to have their comments and annotations scribbled all over a web version just haven't learned what reading is all about.

Personally, I'd take a position quite close to the blue corner. However, what is most striking about this debate is its age. To read the stuff being posted now, you would think no-one had visited this topic before. All that's happened, with perhaps one important and probably unfortunate addition, is that the web has made possible some theories that literary theorists had 30 or more years ago. Roland Barthes, in 1968, argued that authors don't matter, only readers. He wanted the 'writerly text', where the audience effectively creates the book, inserting all the meanings: "...make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text". OK, S/Z is not the most accessible book ever written, but the deconstructionists did have a good go at promoting the idea of user-generated content, and used made-up words for the purpose - another phenomenon of the current 'media revolution'.

When you read Jeff Jarvis's claim that a book is where words go to die - the statement that did most to kick off this meme - you have to wonder whether his distaste for old-fashioned paper and ink convinced him that it was not worth looking for prior art on his idea of a gestalt text that user participation would build. Then again, Jarvis seems incapable of copy-typing even short paragraphs from printed volumes on to his blog, despite this being allowed under fair-use rights and not exactly difficult. Only by virtue of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks being online was Jarvis able to quote two lines from it. (Benkler's found a great way to get people to buy the physical volume - publishing it online with a green Comic Sans font makes you want to find the limited, ex-forest edition.)

In his dead-tree volume Ambient Findability (which actually is available for searching through O'Reilly Media's Safari system - they're not all bad those O'Reilly folks), Peter Morville recounted the 1945 Atlantic article written by Vannevar Bush that introduced the conceptual forerunner of the read-write web, the memex. (The article is also accessible online, phew.) Based on a mid-20th Century idea of technology, the memex was mechanically intensive, but was a clear description of how people might use technology to improve their library research and even use, ahem, the Wisdom of Crowds:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities.

Yes, you did read the date right: 1945. But I forget that this is the brave new world of social media - pre-2000 ideas have died with the printed volumes that contained them. Or, at least, that's the excuse. It's can't be that the blog-book boosters can't be arsed to visit a library or their own bookshelves once in a while only to find out that their big idea has something of a history.

Curiously, everyone talks about the book as though it is a separate medium to the printed word's means of distribution. Books are just collections of printed paper, presented (with luck) in page order. Books carry novels, or tutorials, or essays. Those are things that people should be arguing about.

There is a lot to be said for highly linked tutorials, as described in Bush's essay. And the structure of novels has hardly been touched since the form first appeared, itself much derided for not being the works of great philosophers or the great playwrights. Now relieved from the need to maintain a linear structure, different forms are possible. But that's not a new idea either - try Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media for some hints on cultural differences and their influence on narrative form. You can get it as an e-book; but the print version works just as well. And does not need rebooting. Chapter nine, The Written Word, is the bit you want.

No, the worrying aspect of Jarvis's brave new world of the online book is its wikipedisation, a grey goo of technology-enabled nit-picking sameness foisted upon anything with an individual idea. Science fiction has shown us the horror of thousands of people poring over signs, signifiers, backstory and plot in TV series and novel arcs that were not designed to be all that cohesive taken as a whole - burying the central ideas under the minutiae of continuity errors and plot holes. Less Search for Spock than Quest for Canon. Only, courtesy of social-media automation, we will get added spam too.

Jarvis moans about the tyranny of the blockbuster in bookshops. Imagine what a Da Vinci Code with added Network Effect is going to look like. OK, bad example, that's a book that deserves this treatment, especially the spam. But there is a reason why authors often lock themselves away to finish off a book - if they start worrying about what people will think, they don't write so well. Forcing them to fend off varying degrees of comment spam in their "active novel" is not going to get us better literature or ideas. And I thought that was the important thing about those old-fashioned books.

Posted by Chris at 11:17 PM

Yesterday was a good day for trade journalism

Paul Conley wrote yesterday, after seeing coverage of a report on the much maligned press release overtaking trade mags in importance, that it was a bad day for B2B journalism*.

I think it's the reverse. Unfortunately, it's a good day after quite a few bad years. It means trade magazines have a lot of fighting back to do but if it means giving the majority of releases the heave-ho rather than paying lip service to dealing with them, I'm happy. The releases can go straight to the search engines - I don't have much of a problem with that. It means that those publishers who sell purely on the basis of selling ads to people their magazines cover are in deep trouble. Those that either concentrate on readership for more independent material or on being more efficient, comprehensive aggegators than the horizontal search engines have more of a business model. Curiously, the report says, according to Information Week, that search does not work all that well - which makes you wonder how the respondents were coming across those releases.

There is one other point to bear in mind about a survey like this. The answer you get depends on how the original question is phrased. I know from experience of surveys done by publishers that the results can vary dramatically. Asked about information that is important, B2B readers will often point to the little-loved product section of a mag - often just a collection of barely edited releases - saying "they need to keep abreast of products and services that are useful to them". Ask them what they spend the most time reading or want to read, that section is rarely high on the list.

That is why I always distinguish between need-to-know and want-to-know material when planning magazines, features or news. The two are very different and, luckily, want-to-know material coincides more often with what successful magazines produce. Directories and automated services more often fall into the former category.

* A quick footnote as I suddenly remembered that it was not just the report that Paul Conley was referring to, but the closure of Amusement Business in the US. So, it's not all good. But, then again, mags do reach the end of their natural life for reasons other than the Internet. I would imagine Gaslighter's Gazette kind of ran out of wick quite quickly.

Posted by Chris at 6:55 PM

June 6, 2006

Film might not be much cop, but the director has a point

On Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Omen remake director John Moore defended the decision to have the movie open on the supposedly numerologically significant date of 6/6/06. He declared: "Some people say it's a cynical marketing gimmick. To which I always answer, show me a genuine marketing gimmick."

Posted by Chris at 8:51 PM

June 4, 2006

What's a trademark between partners?

Tim O'Reilly's response to the Web 2.0 trademark bust-up was curious in several ways. One of the most striking was his use of classic public-relations tricks such as deflection and outrage at his critics.

This was in stark contrast to the promotion that O'Reilly received from bloggers who know him, claiming that his straight answers would set everything right. A week on, and things are still rumbling along. If you take out his broad attack on bloggers, what he said did not differ substantially from the comments made by Sara Winge who brought much of the trouble down on the company. Yet, having them come from O'Reilly himself was enough for people to say: "Right you are guv, sorry to have doubted you." Maybe he was right to claim bloggers should read a bit more and post a bit less.

However, the funniest part of his post was the criticism of bloggers, who have done the most to promote his Web 2.0 agenda. It seems that bloggers are OK as long as they don't criticise O'Reilly. Then they're really bad people. And he wrote this without any sense of irony.

The substance of the post concentrated on the sequence of events that led to CMP owning the application for a trademark on the phrase "Web 2.0" as applied to conferences. But buried in there was an admission. He declared that businesses find trademarks to be important. Nothing to quibble about there. He said MediaLive routinely filed for trademarks. Yet, and this is the odd bit, O'Reilly declared he was ignorant of the trademark application for Web 2.0 until February of this year, after CMP had bought Medialive.

Think about that for a moment. You sign a deal with a conference organiser on a term that you claim to have come up with jointly. The organiser then trademarks the term without your knowledge, we are asked to believe. However, it's not as if Medialive had kept it secret the fact that it was going after a trademark on the conference. The company had, after all, printed as much on press releases for the conference - although Medialive was misleading in what it claimed to be protecting. I can only assume that Tim O'Reilly pays as much attention to press-release boilerplate as the rest of us and, despite believing that trademarks are important, did not consider checking on his business partners. Even so, I am surprised that O'Reilly claims to have had no knowledge of the trademark until this year, after CMP got involved.

If you believe that trademarks are handy to have, it seems a bit careless not pay attention to what your business partner was up to. Maybe the deal between CMP and O'Reilly means the two companies can never part company on the Web 2.0 Conference. But if there is a break-up, CMP is in a somewhat better position than O'Reilly Associates to maintain control over events called Web 2.0, no matter what Tim O'Reilly believes about "moral rights" to the phrase that both companies might have.

Posted by Chris at 8:44 PM

When typography attacks

A recent release from what used to be Logica reveals the consequences of companies messing with the English language and SmackingWords together with arbitrary capital letters just to make their logos look all purty. In newswire-style, the headline was capped-up. That is, in itself, a pointless exercise if you want people to read it easily but it revealed the problems caused by companies trying to mess with typography:

LOGICACMG LAUNCHES GLOBAL TESTING INITIATIVE...

How does it make sense to have it look as though the name reads "Logicacumug" rather than "Logica C.M.G."? Having it as two words makes it all a lot clearer, but I bet writing it that way gets the branding police on your back.

In fact, it's worse than that. I checked on the Companies House database and the company really is registered as "LOGICACMG": company name registrations are generally all in capitals. I wonder whether anyone thought as they registered the names of the various subsidiaries: "You know, this looks a bit daft."

Posted by Chris at 5:09 PM

Don't mess with copy

The headline sums up one of the most important rules of the newsroom (actually the real rule is not quite as polite). And it's one that a lot of PR operations should embrace pronto if they do things the Greenpeace way.

Greenpeace is not the first organisation to issue a half-finished release and then wonder why everybody was laughing at it afterwards, but few of them could have done as much damage as the missive sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Part of it read, apparently:

"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

As the Inquirer reported, a spokesman for Greenpeace was aghast at the mistake and insisted that the placeholder was someone having a laugh. It won't do the image of the campaigning group any good as it lobbies against nuclear reactors, but that checks out. Even so, I can just imagine how future press calls and conferences are going to go:

"So, I'd just like to ask whether you have any more alarmist and armaggeddonists factoids you'd like to share with us..."

"The figure of 39 serious alerts at this particular reactor, is that a true number or just an alarmist and armageddonist factoid?"

It underlines how you really, really need to avoid putting gags in the drafts of stories or, in this case, releases. It's that kind of thing that leads to bits of copy like "...the company is based at [fuck knows where]" confronting slightly surprised readers. It's so easy. Someone puts it in thinking they'll deal with it later. But they get called away and the page gets picked up someone else who fails to spot the unfortunate insertion. And you know, when it's lurking inside 30  the square brackets never seem to help. Can't think why.

Posted by Chris at 4:51 PM