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July 30, 2006

Warning: this post contains electrons

Spotted at the Barbican cafe, London.

I can understand labelling cakes with warnings about nuts for allergy sufferers. But you have to wonder what made this company decide they had to put this warning on top on a packet of butter. I'm going to start checking pints of milk to see whether anyone has decided to put "Warning: This product contains what it says on the label" to hammer the point home to anyone who might be a bit lactose intolerant. Or has the campaign of I'm Quite Sure It's Not Butter been just too successful?

Posted by Chris at 3:41 PM

July 13, 2006

Compare at your peril

Shame on Nielsen/Netratings for uttering the comparison that must never be made. Robert Scoble (having gone podcast-happy) and Jon Watson, another podcast blogger, for having the temerity to point to two small numbers being quite similar. Which is the kind of thing small numbers have had to endure for centuries. Somehow this has turned into a Techmeme-assisted blog flurry.

Although the press release that caused the kerfuffle did have some other problems, Watson steered straight past those and claimed to be "embarrassed for Nielsen" for saying that the number of people who download podcasts, as a percentage of US Internet users and not necessarily podcast listeners, is not far from the proportion of Internet users who are bloggers or people who use Internet dating services. Watson ignored the lonely hearts and took Nielsen to task for somehow confusing bloggers with podcast users. Err...right.

"I very clearly see a comparison of two unlike activities here," Watson wrote in his comments to Brian Sullivan, who patiently pointed out that Watson might be reading a little too much into the Nielsen release. It was the specialist site Podcasting News, to which Watson linked, that did the damage, it seems. The site wrote a headline claiming that podcasting is bigger than blogging (but not the Beatles or Jesus). What the site maybe should have pointed out instead, although that goes against the podcasting-is-big thesis, is that all of the things that were compared in the first couple of lines are very much minority interests. Around 5 per cent of US Internet users is a small minority in my book.

Many bloggers say the most important thing in blogging is to listen. I'd say reading is the skill some really need to master.

Posted by Chris at 10:53 PM

July 11, 2006

You are no more than a snivelling contrarian

It's funny how apparently innocent words become insults. Lit-crit types have been thumbing their noses at each other with accusations of "Leavisite" for years. Poor old FR Leavis: you turn lit-crit into a serious subject and end up becoming the top insult for drunk English students. The political left wing used to be fond of the old standby of "reactionary", sometimes expanded into "reactionary running dogs of the imperialist aggressors" among the more hardline members. I remember being told by a teacher how children had managed to turn the politically correct term of "learning difficulties" into a playground slur thanks to its contraction to "learndiff". Now, it seems that the world of blogging has its own: "contrarian".

Barely pausing to wipe the spittle from his mouth as he lay into computer maker Dell's rather bland blog, Jeff Jarvis decided to round on other bloggers, such as Nicholas Carr and Scott Karp. Carr is fast approaching enemy-of-the-people status given the number of times people have levelled the contrarian accusation at him. In this case, the thought-crime was to wonder whether it was simply too early to say that the company's initial efforts at blogging just needed some time to bed in.

Those critics? Why they are nothing more than...contrarians. Jarvis is by no means alone in using the word to label anyone who disagrees with a point he has made. But it is a bit odd when you consider that Jarvis' central theme in just about every blog post he writes is that blogging is about conversation, whether it involves agreement or disagreement. I conclude that Jarvis believes in only half of that. No prizes for guessing which half.

I wonder what Jarvis will have to say to 'Jack', who posted a comment on the first of three entries about Dell in the same day, asking the former Dell user and recent Apple convert what he thought of Apple's corporate blog. Given Jarvis's decision to reprint an open letter to Michael Dell about how the Texas PC maker should blog and blog often, and his apparent satisfaction with all things Apple today, he must be very impressed with the blogging output of Apple Computer. A clear sign that less truly is more when it comes to blogging. Maybe Dell should emulate the example set by Steve Jobs and his company.

Posted by Chris at 11:06 PM | Comments (2)

July 10, 2006

Loophole or lame excuse?

It was only a matter of time before this happened - another unfortunate collision of technology with the telephone. I got a call at home at about 19:30 from a company on the pretext of asking about satellite dishes. Nothing strange about that, other than the fact that the number called is registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which is meant to stop unsolicited telemarketing calls. And the voice at the other end was a recording played by a computer. That was more worrying, especially when my silence at its first question (did I receive satellite TV through a dish) was met with a "Hello, hello are you still there?" before the machine cut the call off.

One of the things that puts a limit on how many cold calls you get comes down to the cost of paying people to talk to supposedly potential customers. That has become a major factor as the cost of placing calls has shrunk rapidly. With a computer doing all of the work, suddenly the marginal cost of placing each call plummets, even compared with farming out those jobs to low-wage countries. Letting computers call people without your expressed permission is something that needs to be stopped. In principle, it is already illegal in the UK. But that is not what Data Partnership Solutions of East Sussex believes.

Data Partnership Solutions was the company responsible for the call. To be fair to the company, it did not block its number (0870 240 2559) and the rep who answered the phone at the other end did not give me the usual runaround on identifying the company. His first question was, did I want the address in order to make a complaint? I didn't take notes of the brief conversation, but I think we reached that point before I even mentioned the TPS. The East Sussex address given, by the way, checks out and there is a company registered under the name Data Partnership Solutions at a nearby address at Companies House (albeit a bit late with its first accounts).

However, when I did mention the TPS, his response was: "Well, these calls are surveys rather than sales calls, so they aren't really covered by the TPS." Having said that, he asked if my number was to be taken off the list or, rather, added to the "do not call" list. I said yes and that was more or less the end of the call.

Then I went and checked, as much as you can at 8pm at night, what the situation is with automated calls. I dimly remembered UK legislation being passed to outlaw automated calls - being the main reason why you don't get pestered by recordings of breezy people flogging rip-off holidays in Florida from the UK, only from other countries.

Here's the relevant bit of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, which came into effect at the end of 2003:

19. (1) A person shall neither transmit, nor instigate the transmission of, communications comprising recorded matter for direct marketing purposes by means of an automated calling system except in the circumstances referred to in paragraph (2).

(2) Those circumstances are where the called line is that of a subscriber who has previously notified the caller that for the time being he consents to such communications being sent by, or at the instigation of, the caller on that line.

...

For the purposes of this regulation, an automated calling system is a system which is capable of -

(a) automatically initiating a sequence of calls to more than one destination in accordance with instructions stored in that system; and

(b) transmitting sounds which are not live speech for reception by persons at some or all of the destinations so called.

No need to invoke the TPS. It's the law that a robot can't call you without asking you first. Wait a minute - that's "a robot can't call you" for direct marketing purposes. Now, in my book, a survey about what sort of television I receive is pretty much a telemarketing call. It's not a sales call, but the company at the other end wants to know information about my spending. That puts it squarely into the marketing domain for me. This is the point where I regret not just giving the robot a bunch of useless replies to see if it transmuted into a sales call. My guess is that the final part of the call is for you to say "please tell me more", at which point you invite that company to place that sales call.

I suspect this and other companies will probe this apparent loophole until they get told to stop, if they get told to stop. And, if it is the case that companies can trouble you up cheaply using machines under the pretext of "research", then the 2003 regulations need to be tightened up. If not, we need not worry about VoIP spam - it will just hit you using the regular telephone service.

To try to help that process along, it's next stop Ofcom for me.

Posted by Chris at 9:17 PM | Comments (185)