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October 31, 2007

Won't anyone think of the phone calls?

Chris Anderson's decision to post online the email addresses of PRs who decided that the editor-of-chief of a heavily staffed magazine was the obvious place to start with getting a launch covered made sure his anguish got noticed. It drew someone else who revealed that they have started to quietly blacklist PR emails. There could be a lot more of those people.

In the distance, a low rumble accompanies the law of unintended consequences grinding into action.

Here is the problem. People who think bypassing section editors to pitch the editor-in-chief of any book using his or her named email address aren't suddenly going to get a clue because their own email addresses are now online ready for any passing spam harvester. However, what they will be aware of is a large number of messages underneath the original post saying: "Pick up the phone, build a relationship."

What they will understand is the first bit: "Pick up the phone..." I can say with certainty that a dull, misdirected pitch delivered by email is ten times worse delivered by phone. Emails are easy to kill. Phone calls are another matter.

My opinion may differ radically from that of other hacks - a lot will depend on areas of coverage - but the last thing I want is someone ringing me up to "build a relationship" before they actually have anything to sell. I'm much more interested in seeing how people deliver straightaway. Yes, this can mean missing out on some tips, but there just isn't the time available now to get to know every single PR I might encounter. The good news is that you can often tell how well people will deliver from the emails they send you.

Put it this way, if PRs send you releases as Word documents with massive attached pictures and kick off the email with a phrase like "Please quote reference number 3664 when inquiring about this release" (I'm not kidding), these people will be useless when asked for anything that isn't attached to that email.

In the case of a pitch, if it kicks off with "Have you heard about...?" the chances are that it's a candidate for the round filing cabinet.

Before anyone rushes off to alter the phrasing on their gestating pitch, think about what the rest of the message might contain. The chances are that if I have heard about whatever it is, I'm not going to be surprised. No surprise equals no news. And if I haven't heard about it, but someone is asking whether I might have, then it can't be news because clearly other people have heard about it. The tone of the pitch is a clear signal that the writer of that email is not going to be on top of the subject they are trying to pitch - they are writing to me because they just heard about it and think everyone else is at the same point.

Now, consider what journalists are saying when they say they are happy to blacklist. In the past, you would be loathe to do that even for the worst PRs, just in case they do manage to teach a horse to sing. Not anymore. Ignoring the torrent of stuff pouring out of the PR firehose is now a worthwhile strategy for magazines. Unless you are covering product launches heavily, the bulk of unsolicited pitches are worse than useless as they take time to process. Blacklisting the worst can liberate some time and let you focus on attention on those that will provide a return. For my part, I finally stopped fishing releases caught in the Entourage spam filter a few months back.

But, really, even when you're getting 300 of these a day, it's better than getting that many phone calls*. Making email more unreliable from the perspective of the PR is only going to make an editor's life worse. We've only just weaned most PRs off the habit of ringing up to ask "did you get our press release". Blacklists will only bring those people back. But the appearance of the blacklist is perhaps the strongest indicator we have that conventional press relations just died.

* All things are relative. I have the luxury of managing my own email, which allows me to have a 2GB-plus database. People working in offices often have much smaller limits to deal with. Having to go through their inbox frequently to stop Exchange backing up is enough to send you over the edge. The phone might be preferable.

Posted by Chris at 6:43 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

October 29, 2007

Your top 100 of blogger bloviation, or something

The problem with some scientific research is not the research itself but the way people choose to use it. What better example than research on the blogosphere itself to show how you can twist a reasonably simple study for self-interested ends or just get it completely back-asswards? The reaction to the study itself is potentially the source of new research into blogger psychology: "I bloviate therefore I am".

A team from Carnegie Mellon University decided to look at how blogs link to each other as part of a wider study to look at where to put sensors to detect pollution or disease as quickly as possible without spending a shedload of money to put them everywhere. The slightly non-intuitive conclusion is that points with a high overall flow do not provide the best positions - it is those small channels that have the largest effect on the whole network where you want to have those sensors placed.

The team picked blogs as a study area largely because blogs have some interesting parallels with the spread of contagion through a network. They also make it easy to study that spread. They are time-stamped; they link to other blogs. You can trace the flow of 'information' relatively easily.

The researchers picked a large subset of blogs – 45 000 from a possible total of 2.5 million – and crunched through their links, taking account of which links went outside the dataset and which remained inside. They monitored posts that pointed to largish information cascades – effectively blogger pile-ons. To qualify, a subject had to accumulate 10 posts to be considered a cascade. That's big enough for a small pile-on in my book.

The CMU team then computed which blogs – from the subset they picked – were most likely to be a part of blogger pile-ons compared with those which had a high proportion of posts that were not. This gave them a cost function which led to a final list of 100 'top' blogs.

This is where the fun started. People on the list found that they were on some form of top 100 and started to brag about it. It's scientific so it must be true, was Neville Hobson's considered opinion. Then people started to wonder why a really weird bunch of blogs was considered to be the researchers' top 100. A commenter at Nick Carr's Rough Type wondered why a blog that had effectively been run off the farm by an angry mob was in the listing. Had they spent about ten seconds looking at the text at the top of the list, they might have realised that the corpus used by CMU came from 2006. That's right folks, this is not a list of current blogs - only those active up to about a year ago.

There is one other point that those crowing about being on the list might want to bear in mind. If it is any kind of ranking, this is a list of the pile-on addicts of 2006. If you wanted to know where to rubberneck at the biggest accidents on the blogiverse a year ago, these were your go-to guys.

Based on this, I think there is a strong argument for building a feedreader that uses this lot as a filter against your real list of RSS feeds: it would take out the mob rule and leave you with a lot more original information. (To be fair, there are some on the list I would want to keep in the feedreader).

The irony that this post itself is part of a pile-on is not lost on me.

Posted by Chris at 3:28 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 26, 2007

"Does this svchost.exe do anything...or should I just sling it?"

From a Reuters piece on Microsoft's attempts to put Windows on a crash diet for a sub-$200 laptop:

"We still have plenty of work to do in determining if the highly constrained performance, power, and memory in the first generation XO laptops will be compatible with Windows and popular Windows applications," [Microsoft corporate vice president Will Poole said in an interview].

I think they're still waiting for it to boot.

Posted by Chris at 1:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Backwards ran sentences until reeled the search engines

Jakob Nielsen reckons it's time to rehabilitate the passive voice in writing. And it's all in the name of search optimisation - as opposed to search engine optimisation (SEO). It's an approach that might have legs but is more likely to result in a lot more gibberish appearing online.

The idea is that people surfing, and especially shopping online, scan web pages in a cursory way that favours words over to the left. By altering a sentence so that key words come first - something that probably involves using the passive rather than the active voice or, in rare cases, flipping the word order round – you can capture their attention for longer. If you look at the results they got from capturing users' eye movements, readers also seem to favour short measures. So, it is at least good to know that conventional newspaper and magazine layout ideas were right all along. It's the reason why this blog has such a narrow template. (OK, it's a sample of three at Nielsen's site, with just one piece of running copy, but it fits my prejudice.)

The passive voice has its uses. It provides a handy way of altering the rhythm of a paragraph amid a lot of active-voice sentences. It is also dangerous.

The passive voice makes copy far less readable and, as commenters at Boing Boing pointed out, lets you get away with conjecture far more easily than the active voice. Converting everything to active voice is a highly effective editor's tool for working out whether a writer has stood up a fact or not.

Readability and vagueness are not the only the problems with altering copy to try to rank better in search engines at the expense of readability. The search engines are moving targets. This week's re-ranking of sites by Google, apparently based on their use of outbound links, is an effective demonstration of that.

If people start trying to force keywords into prominent positions, they may find themselves victims of a future splog cull - because the people putting those together don't care about readability, only about the SEO aspects of a web page. They will happily lob keywords anywhere they think will help them in their quest to appear higher on results pages. For that reason, tt's not hard to imagine the developers at Google or another search engine focusing on keyword position as a way of identifying splogs and then dropping them way down the rankings. The search engine software is getting better at understanding the structure of copy - look at the way that Google now handles word stemming to get different variations of a keyword. Not so long ago, you had to use the OR operator to get the same effect.

You also need to look carefully at what actually appears on the search-engine results pages. Google tries hard to pull relevant sentences that contain the keywords out from the copy. The blurb underneath the page's title may not be the intro paragraph but a completely different sentence. Are you seriously going to render all your copy in passive form just to get keywords upfront? Especially when Google plays nice and puts the keywords in bold.

I worry when people start to talk about search-optimisation tactics for copy. What works today is unlikely to work tomorrow because the wiring in software can change much more quickly than the wiring in people's brains. And it is the people who we should be writing for, not the machines. They should learn to do it our way.

Posted by Chris at 9:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 25, 2007

Hwang's costly law

Samsung is trying hard to push the idea of Hwang's Law, as seen in the company's latest move to show off an experimental 64Gbit device. In 2002, the head of the Korean company's chip business Hwang Chang-gyu gave a speech at one of the chipmaking industry's biggest technical conferences, ISSCC. There, he claimed that flash memories would break away from the prevailing trend in the chip industry and double in size every year. That was something that happened only in the very early days of the business, at the point when Gordon Moore was putting together the graph that became Moore's Law.

For much of its history, the growth in the number of functions that you can get onto one chip has wobbled between a doubling every 18 months or two years. And a lot depends on how you measure the number of functions – something that Intel has made use of on several occasions. Right now, the rate seems to be a doubling every two years, which fits neatly with Intel's own plans. That may explain why Moore has recently been reminding people that he picked the two-year rate as he wrote his first article on it in the mid-1960s.

But Samsung seeks to break with convention, by upping the rate for flash memories, at least, to a doubling every year. And, roughly every autumn, the company has produced an example of a chip that could store twice as much as the last. So far, so good.

Samsung's relentless push looks as though it is coming at a cost.

There are three ways to squeeze more onto one chip. The first is the one that most companies promote - make the features smaller. However, you can only get so far with that approach. That is because the gap between successive manufacturing processes for memories only gives you a 25 to 30 per cent improvement in density.

Any further gains have to come from elsewhere. One is 'circuit cleverness' as Moore called it in the first expansion (and subtle revision) of Moore's Law, made in the mid-1970s. This happens in two ways with flash memories. One is just better design, gradually improving the design so that the memory cells pack together more efficiently. The other was the move to multi-level cells early - storing two bits per memory cell instead of one. However, this is pretty much a one-off boost as, to store four bits, the circuits in the memory device need to be able to distinguish between not two or four different levels but 16. That is going to be tough.

What do you have left? The size of the chip itself. In this way, what Samsung is doing with flash now mirrors what the Korean companies did with the dynamic memories (DRAMs) used in PCs in the late-1990s. To demonstrate their ability to keep winding up the capacity, they made the chips bigger and bigger. By 2001, Samsung had a 4Gbit DRAM but it was so big that it could never go into volume production. A market for 4Gbit DRAMs has yet to appear: current devices top out at 2Gbit and will not be mainstream for some years to come.

We seem to be seeing the same pattern with Samsung's flash now. To keep up with Hwang's projection, the company's designers seem to be cranking up the die size. It's been a few years since Samsung disclosed the cell size of its largest flash memories but the company has provided a few clues - mostly recently in picture form – and tend to back up some quick calculations.

Why is this important? Die size is one of the most important determinants of manufacturing cost. Up to about 150sq mm, the cost is not too bad. However, the memories you are most likely to buy in bulk tend to be somewhere between 70 and 100sq mm. But, according to my calculations, the size of the 32Gbit chip that Samsung pulled out of the hat last year was heading into the 250 to 280sq mm range. The latest one, doubling again to 64Gb, looks to be as big as 450sq mm. The Korean giant is not going to be cranking those out the way it can with its current cash cows in the 8 and 16Gbit range. What is more likely is that Samsung will use the process developed for the 64Gb memory to make cheaper 8, 16 and 32Gb devices come 2009 when this process is meant to into volume production. The 64Gbit will be for specialty users only - hard drive replacements in servers and the like - if the company ships any at all based on that process.

The question is what will happen next year when the designers have to pull another rabbit out of the hat to satisfy Hwang's Law. Such a device is likely to be very similar in size to the company's 2001 version of a 4Gbit DRAM, clocking it at something like 500sq mm assuming the standard scaling rules apply. However, the company's technologists are talking about moving into the third dimension and not just with chip stacks - the aim is to plonk the memory cells on top of each other on the same die. It is something that Toshiba claimed it had done earlier this year - there will be more about this when the IEDM conference rolls round in December. So, there is a chance Hwang's Law won't run out of steam before 2010 in terms of volume manufacture. But the cost and density trends are no longer moving in the same direction.

Posted by Chris at 11:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 21, 2007

Calling it social doesn't make it so

Some 18 months ago, Tom Foremski called for the death of the traditional press release. Not long after, PRs such as Todd Defren and Brian Solis thought the response should be what they called the social-media news release. Then people started arguing the toss about how social a press release can be. They are still talking about it.

Various people have come up with their own interpretations only to have Defren and Solis swing by to declare that it's a "good effort" but not a social-media news release. For them, unless it has support for comments and trackbacks, it ain't social. Like it matters.

The problem is, in the last 18 months, no-one has really taken a good look at how people use press releases of any sort. If they did that, they might stand a chance of producing something that works. Instead, they've been wiffling on about "conversation", "sharing" and "influence".

So, let's take a look at the effectiveness of so-called social media newsrooms. Defren and Solis have been quick to point to releases that did not qualify, in their eyes, for social-media brownie points. However, GM and Palm have implemented, as far as I can tell, pretty much all the recommendations they made. Both have comments and trackbacks active. They have links to del.icio.us and the like. Palm has gone with the bullet points; GM hasn't bothered. But I can't see how that makes much of a difference.

With all that social support, we should be seeing conversation erupt from the page. Surely, these sites are hotbeds of company-customer interaction that demonstrate the pent-up demand for people to talk back to press releases. But it's oh so quiet. The odd bit of poker or slots comment spam has drifted in on the wind, plus a comment or two on the company's adoption of this social stuff. Not all that much about the thing that was launched.

Similarly, backlinks to other near-social releases reveal a lot of PR chatter about release formats but very little about the content of the releases themselves. Now consider the highly unsocial release from Apple about the launch of Leopard. No social widgets at Apple's PR site: just plan old HTML text. As Techmeme demonstrated, a lot of bloggers quite happily linked to it while they chatted away. How so? Without any of that shiny social-media news release stuff, surely it should have remained ignored. How come it worked? It gave them something to write about.

OK, that maybe wasn't an entirely fair comparison. The technology blogs take notice of Apple's every word. Palm is not in the same position. So, let's take the Centro launch. Bloggers had the option of two press releases to link as well as the phone's product page at Palm's site. As far as I can tell, they chose the latter. What gives? How could they pass on the distinctly social release and go for the comment-free product page? I guess because it made sense to them. I didn't see anybody flailing around wondering where the canned quote from some marketing veep was hidden.

Which brings the whole thing full circle. The whole social-media news release bandwagon kicked off with Foremski's complaint. It's 18 months on and a whole lot of chat later, with practically no positive effect from any of it. If I wanted an example of how parts of PR are making themselves irrelevant to the world, I'd have to hunt around for a while for a better one.

Posted by Chris at 6:47 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

October 18, 2007

Somebody comes up to you and asks you, do you want an embargo? whaddya tell 'em?

For Rogers Cadenhead, bloggers such as Michael Arrington have "sold their souls" to PR and become beholden to the hype machine in the same way as magazines.

Cadenhead points to a piece from Robert Scoble that claims some of the more popular tech bloggers are being offered, and taking, embargoed briefings so they can break the news about some new product the minute the company says it's OK: "According to Scoble, A-list techbloggers have become just as desperate for inside access, even to the point of honouring an embargo intended to benefit another blog."

What's that noise? In the background, Pete Townshend is stabbing at an organ hypnotically, trying to channel Terry Riley on an all-nighter. A couple of quick windmilling power chords and a scream from Roger Daltry and the blog revolution comes flying off the wheels. All together now: "Meet the new boss..."

Cadenhead's argument is that the tech product magazines were effectively neutered by the need to keep in with PRs to ensure a steady stream of embargoed stories so that they need not be gazumped on news by the competition. The effects of embargoed news are more subtle than that - it's too blunt an instrument to be wielded in the way that Cadenhead describes.

The mechanism that Scoble describes is much closer to the experience of journalists and, when I read it, the surprise was tempered with the thought: "It took that long for this to happen?"

Some of the high-traffic blogs are even more vulnerable to the embargo drug than a lot of magazines are because they are so tightly focused. People ramble on about it being "all about the conversation". But when the site's whole reason for being is to be first with product news or who's launching what on the Interweb, you are asking for people to horse-trade stories with you. And the horse-trading will start with whatever medium is perceived to be top of the tree. For new Web 2.0 sites, that's likely to be TechCrunch, so no big surprise that PRs will make sure that outlet gets to hear nice and early and the others are expected to play by whatever rules TechCrunch has agreed to.

In principle, newspapers are far less dependent on embargoed information because they have a much wider remit - product launches come a long way down the pecking in terms of news value. Most of the time, when deciding to take an embargo, you are trading the discomfort of being silently co-opted into a sales programme against the problem of getting interviews quickly enough after the break date to be able to file before you have missed the initial spike of interest. You are also aware that you are shoring up the position of the perceived market-leader mag or paper. You really don't want to be doing that.

Having said that, there are reasons for accepting the embargo. In an online environment when you can file one version that has had a degree of research at the same time as everyone else and then roll in reactions, if the story warrants it, as time rolls on. For that reason alone, embargoes seem set to remain a part of media life, no matter how unwanted they are. The important thing for any media outlet is to be in the position where you don't need them.

Scoble cited Kyte.tv as an example of how a company can get by without splash launches, driven by embargoes. But he also noted that the company got no coverage on TechCrunch or Techmeme. (This version of events doesn't quite check out, by the way, as TechCrunch has stories on Kyte and it has featured prominently on Techmeme.)

There are, however, other reasons for ignoring some of these sites. The world really does not need a site that crosses YouTube with Twitter, which was how Kyte.tv launched. However, it seems to be moving more in the direction of MySpace, with the result that videos from the Residents are currently getting top billing. So it can't be all bad, even if some of the new stuff sounds as though they've rerecorded God in Three Persons with new lyrics.

Posted by Chris at 11:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 16, 2007

Dogpile!

On Monday, Tim O'Reilly demonstrated that the Web 2.0 world has so wholeheartedly disappeared up its own arse it has now reappeared at the other end. Only a bit grubbier.

In a post that actually decries an environment he cheerleaded for the last few years, O'Reilly takes aim at herd behaviour. It's not hard to find examples of herd behaviour on the Interweb, although his prime example is from the place where all the best people like to flock: finance.

O'Reilly notices, thanks to a bit of research posted on another blog, that quantitative hedge funds didn't actually do all that much hedging in practice. Or, in other words, it's hard to bet against the market when everybody else decides to do the same thing as you. This, apparently, is a bad thing. Is it? Only if you invested in one of these funds. A bunch of other people did very nicely thank you out of not getting involved in stupid trades and, in effect, picked over the bones of the quants.

Given that hedge funds were a minority sport, with arguably greater influence over the whole finance space than they should have had, the herd here was pretty limited. The real market fallout came not from an inability to read the tea leaves in market data but from the laziness of banks when it came to computing their actual risks when taking on other people's debt. You don't need a big computer to do that, just a little care and attention and the willingness to ask exactly what is something that is no more than a repackaged bundle of IOUs.

In true Thought for the Day style ("A pint of milk turned up on my doorstep this morning. I like milk and I like having it delivered. In some ways, Jesus is like a pint of milk..."), O'Reilly's attention turns to his real target: Techmeme. And the dastardly Techmeme leaderboard.

Apparently, this is doing nothing but encouraging herd behaviour. Well it is called Techmeme. I'd say a core part of its design is tracking herd behaviour on the Internet. The leaderboard just lets you know who the top herdspeople are.

"You always see this amazing pile-on effect. I'm not sure it's healthy," complains O'Reilly about what happens on Techmeme.

There are two parts to that. One is that people only notice the subjects where there has been a pile-on. Those that don't attract a lot of blog posts just drop quickly off the bottom. Second, as with finance, there is a kind of reward mechanism going on which is only partly fuelled by Techmeme.

What seems to happen is that subjects that get the pile-on effect are often those that will drive significant traffic independent of Techmeme itself. Did all the bloggers commenting on Leopard suddenly think: "better get with that Techmeme pile-on?" Or is it down to the knowledge that writing about Apple in general nets more hits? You only have to scroll down the comments from Apple fans on any mildly critical piece to see how much traffic that can generate. These are network effects in action. And, in the case of Techmeme, like hedge funds, they aren't exactly large herds.

But, the thing that made me do a double-take is that O'Reilly was one of the people who, at the beginning, was encouraging people to comment, to write, to blog on whatever they wanted. Anything they produced would enrich the collective whole according to Web 2.0 canon. Now, apparently, they are only allowed to comment in the slightly world-weary environment that O'Reilly now recognises if they bring "fresh inputs". Nothing else is good enough for the future.

However, in accusing people involved in the pile-ons of not looking for fresh inputs, O'Reilly reveals his own failings here. He has assumed that is the case without apparently checking. Does he know that there were no cross-connections to other subjects? He does not seem to have checked. That's not unusual for a good many bloggers, but it's not a good place to start with criticism of an activity you've promoted for a number of years.

Posted by Chris at 6:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 11, 2007

Read my lips. No. More. Versions.

Here's a handy tip for PRs. If you were giving your next release or invitation a little bit of 2.0 action, think again. Hoping to profit from a little Web 2.0 shine (which has tarnished quite badly in recent months), people have decided to tack on the tag "2.0" to any old topic that might be in need of a warmover, generally in anticipation of some marketing veep or CEO landing nearby for tea and Powerpoint.

With me, at least, it's having the opposite effect to what was intended. Rather than making me think: "Wow, I must find out the changes that usher in the age of Cauliflower 2.0", it's more of an "oh look, no sizzle, no steak, no I won't be going" response. Actually, it's more of an FFS response.

By the way, going to version 3.0 isn't going to help. Just in case you were wondering.

Posted by Chris at 1:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack