June 29, 2008
Rebuttal of the Overmind proposition: short version
Chris Anderson, George Dyson and Kevin Kelly reckon we are better off letting computers understand everything for us. I was going to quote some lengthy passage from "Brave New World". But, as always, comedy has the answers.
Posted by Chris at 6:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Loren Feldman: fighting for old media one blogger at a time
In the wake of the uneasy truce between Loren Feldman and Shel Israel, it seems that Feldman has been able to do both things from the most famous quote from John Dryden's "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire":
"Yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place."
In ruthlessly taking Israel apart with the humour equivalent of a rusty meat cleaver, Feldman co-opted Israel into saving the finer cuts for social media in general.
"And now it’s done, my little experiment with Social Media. I beat you with your own tools, in the arena in which you bill yourself an expert. You are an amateur Shel, an amateur, always remember that."
With the puppet, Feldman did distinctly old-media things. For one thing, it's all fake. It's a puppet pretending to be some other guy. Out through the window goes the social media stricture of "authenticity". Although the puppet was a goof, it was a lovable goof – the kind of thing old TV loves. And the set-ups were straight from from pro-TV school. It's just as well. Israel's videos were self-satirising: the one of him waving a boom mic around like a balloon on a stick in front of a bleary-eyed Jeremiah Owyang while supping disinterestedly on a latté is unforgettable. And not in a good way.
Feldman called the puppet "more real": a classic bit of legerdemain. Israel was very real during the whole spat. He was angry. He was upset. He wanted to get even. Faced with what Feldman was doing to him, what would you want to do? Social media's advice: be real, be honest.
But nobody believed the advice. The sensible advice to Israel was to bottle it up, act nice. And that probably would have worked. Had Israel gritted his teeth and pretended that he really loved the puppet, he would probably have come out of the whole episode more famous and better off. In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: Be inauthentic. You can't blog or tweet your way out of a crisis any more than you can knit your way out of a burning building.
And don't forget Feldman's position of being a pro versus Israel's amateur in what was meant to be an amateur's game.
And that is the Feldman's gift to social media in a situation where most in the club seem to have ignored the puppet sites's tag line: "A parody of Social Media’s impact on business & culture".
But what about the position of Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis in this? Israel seems to believe that Arrington's hand was behind the puppet all of the time. Feldman's response:
"You chose to blame Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, and myself when you should have been blaming yourself. Mike is busy taking on AP and the NY Times. Jason is taking on Google. I’m taking on TV, do you think anyone of us have the time or even give a shit enough about you to plot a conspiracy?"
Or, to paraphrase with a slant on social media: these people are building media empires, do you imagine they give a shit about some social-media revolution? It's been good to them, it's been a laugh, but there's a lot more money in replacing the 'old-media' companies.
Now it seems to be Dave Winer's turn. The joke's just not so funny second time around but the ability of some of social media's voices to self-satirise, who knows what's possible.
Posted by Chris at 5:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 15, 2008
The bluffer's guide to understanding
It took me ages to get round to reading Nick Carr's Atlantic piece on the stupefying effects of Internet usage. I was too busy looking at lolcats, surfing the news and skimming through RSS feeds. And I liked it. That's probably where the problem lies.
In The Big Switch and other recent writing, Carr worries about the relentless push toward the Singularity - a time when humans and computers become inseparable because the machines will keep us alive and help us think. The Atlantic piece signs off: "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence".
I think Carr worries too much about the ability of computer science to deliver on Larry Page's 2004 promise in a Newsweek interview that he cites: "Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off."
The idea of the machine that learns for us was echoed recently by a UK educationalist who thought we would be learning in our sleep courtesy of hypno-programs. It's a popular theme in sci-fi but really only makes sense if you confuse information with knowledge.
A lot of people seem confused about it, especially those in the 'knowledge management' field. You can no more manage knowledge with computer databases than you can manage lions by putting up signs saying "please don't eat the antelopes". You can, however, corral information, which is what the average knowledge management system really does. And, as it turns out, many of them function as glorified search engines. Some places have even replaced the traditional knowledge-management system with a search engine that is not Google's but one that works pretty much the same way.
To turn information into knowledge you have to apply understanding. There are no shortcuts. However, the brain does make it easier on us by providing subtle rewards for learning stuff, both good and bad. The amygdala is a tiny part of the brain that takes part in a lot of neural processing. It's easy to overplay the role of the amygdala but recent research suggests that the amygdala is there to help us understand, and making us feel good about it. However, the amygdala tends to favour learning in an social or emotional context.
And this is probably where the problem with Google and the Internet lies. Our minds are inherently distractable. This is a good thing. It probably helped stop us getting eaten by lions. Sorry antelopes. And I'm willing to bet that the process is helped if we learn something by being distracted, even if it is just a lolcats punchline. You can then double up on the mental reward by getting social points from emailing it or blogging it.
If the brain rewards us for the kinds of learning distractions that the Internet provides, then it is not hard to see why putting a lot of effort into reading a longer tract would seem harder. Fear may also play a role in this, another response mediated by the amygdala. It's interesting that productivity schemes such as Getting Things Done tend to revolve around writing things down in diaries and to-do lists to effectively clear them from your head, so you stop worrying about them until it's time to get on with them.
I reckon some of the effects are temporary. Take away the external stimuli and reading a book is easy. People seem to happily digest books on flights – probably more so on medium-distance journeys where there is no multichannel TV and games system.
However, I also believe that there is a second influence that comes into play: the ability to fake it. This is potentially the permanent legacy of the searchable Internet and one that is far harder to deal with. This is where hooking your head up to Page's ultimate addon is both a boon and a dangerous idea.
One thing that the search engine excels at is DIY tech support. Got a problem with the computer? Google the error message and see what comes up. Nine times out of ten the answer is staring from the first page of results.
Where it becomes insidious is where you start to believe that manuals or text books are for suckers and that the answer is only one search term away. It dawned on me as I was looking to solve a Unix-related problem that you can waste an awful lot of time trawling round the Intarwebs looking for a solution when I could have simply learned a bit more about how the system actually works and then just use the logs to nail the issue.
I guess I could learn about the workings of the system by piecing together the errors, but it's often a whole lot quicker just to put some donkey-work into learning. This kind of knowledge fakery is the thing that really worries educationalists. The systems we have to test knowledge tend to assume that students have gone through the understanding phase. But the types of exams and tests that worked pre-Internet are breaking down because it is hard to distinguish between someone who has genuine understanding and who has just managed to fake it by picking up on the key points and buzzwords around a topic.
Posted by Chris at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 12, 2008
Sabotage from a faulty time machine
There was something oddly convenient about the passage extracted from a 1944 manual on sabotage supposedly written in 1994 by the US OSS about disrupting corporate activity. You read through the list of things a saboteur should do, as quoted by people such as David Weinberger, and think: "Yeah, I've been in those meetings."
Take, for example, point one on page 28:
Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
It was at that point that my internal hoaxmeter started edging into the red.
Download the document. Take a look at it. Doesn't it look just a little too clean for a publication that was printed more than 60 years ago and, presumably, scanned only days or weeks ago? The front page has been disfigured by stamps to make it look a little distressed but there's barely a dog ear – in fact there are no dog ears - on the subsequent pages.
Maybe it's the little things that give it away. There is the lack of hyphenation in 'cooperate', the use of phrases such as "inside dope" and the reference to fluorescent lighting. Yes, dope was slang for information a century ago. But in a document supposedly for distribution to agents whose first language probably wasn't English? Fluorescent lighting? It existed but hardly anybody had seen it in the 1940s.
And then maybe it's the reference to "the United Nations war effort": an organisation that was not formed until after the Second World War.
When you consider the provenance of the 'manual' - it's an exhibit being used by a couple of Web 2.0 evangelists from the OSS's successor the CIA - it shows that spooks have a sense of humour too. The OSS and CIA did have sabotage leaflets (they probably still do). Just not, in all likelihood, this one.
Update: Darn it. A commenter at David Weinberger's blog points out that the term United Nations was used before 1945. The commenter points to the Declaration of United Nations in 1941 as the point at which the name started to be used. I wasn't totally convinced but then spotted some speeches given by Roosevelt where he used the terms United Nations liberally. So, maybe that bit was culled from a real OSS document. But the whole thing still screams fake to me.
Posted by Chris at 7:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 4, 2008
The currency of news
It wasn't until I read about the research commissioned by the Associated Press into news consumption (via Martin Stabe's blog) that I realised that hardly anybody has done ethnographic studies of how people deal with news. Other than this study, I can't find anything through Google Scholar that deals with the audience – most of the ethnographic research concentrated on the journalists not on who they are producing the work for.
Media companies make a fair amount of use of focus groups and surveys but those sessions can be very misleading, not least because internal marketing departments structure them to probe behaviour that affect commercial decisions rather than the editorial concerns. The other big problem is that people don't tell the truth about how they read newspapers or magazines. You spend a lot of time watching the sessions or reading the reports trying to infer what the subjects are really thinking. Ethnographic research goes further by trying to compare what people say versus what they do.
It is still flawed. People behave differently with a stranger watching what they are doing - it's a kind of social Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And it's always entertaining to see researchers at conference ripping apart each other over the quality of their ethnography - no-one else's is as good as yours, it seems.
Yet, it seems bizarre that countless academics doing media studies don't seem to study people dealing with media. They prefer, it seems, to concentrate on those producing the stuff. Which is bizarre when you consider that most of the people on the production may not seem to care what the consumers think but have a vested interest in understanding it.
'Newsosaur' Alan Mutter considers the research to be contradictory, partly because Jon Stewart comes off well in some of the individual studies. The report said:
"American respondents in the study noted that the news comedian Jon Stewart could take even the most serious news, spin it and make it palatable."
Neil Postman is not so much spinning in his grave as bouncing around saying: "I told you so."
Mutter worked out from the report:
"...forward-looking news executives would be advised to ensure that future stories report all the latest developments, contain all the facts, provide context, include in-depth explanation, forecast future events and, above all else, are upbeat and funny."
Mutter is a bit unfair on the report. But you have to separate the 71-page document into useful bits and those that are surplus to requirements. The spin at the end on how AP has responded to the findings also tend to cast suspicion on which bits of the research made it into the report.
One glaring example of the dual-purpose nature of the report is the way that one theme pursued in the segments on the research itself suddenly disappear. If you read through the capsules on the study participants and the discussion, one phrase keeps popping up: "social currency". Given that much blogging revolves around the news, this is hardly a surprise. However, the report authors concentrate on the issue of news fatigue and the claimed need for in-depth background among participants.
This is where, I think, the findings are contradictory. I'd love to believe that what readers want is in-depth background on stories. Some of them do. But to concentrate on that as a strategy for a media company is probably going to be commercial suicide unless you have a great new way of getting money for it. People tend to say they believe they want the in-depth stuff but it's tough to get the money for it.
People looking for background on a subject are far less likely to be distracted by ads and other links than when they are grazing for news. Given that many online news sites make their money from ads, it should hardly be a surprise that they will favour producing pages that generate high click-through rates, particularly if the ones that produce poor results are also expensive to produce.
Somewhat unconsciously, news organisations have already embraced the philosophy of news as social currency. I don't mean this in the sense they have spawned blogs but that they are focusing more attention on the stories that get linked to or emailed. Unfortunately for news production it means they are going to spend a lot more time on blokes marrying goats and mice setting fire to houses than substantive stories about the state of the world, except in the developing world where readers seem to prefer news to be important rather than a source of entertainment. At least for the moment.
Posted by Chris at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2008
Quelle surprise: another PR blacklist
If there is one post that's worth reading on the issue of the Gina Trapani PR blacklist it's Jeremy Pepper's. While the priests of the social media press release whiffle on about transparency, accountability and some other eye-crossingly dull commentary that roughly approximates to "we didn't do it and if we did, we're sorry", Pepper gets right to the point and leaves enough room to tell bloggers they need to be careful what they wish for. As I've written before, if you think receiving irrelevant emails is a problem, wait until you get the phone calls.
I'm sure there are plenty of PRs who feel Trapani crossed the line, as they claimed about Chris Anderson of Wired. But while email remains the main delivery mechanism for emails, it is going to keep happening, so get used to the idea of the blacklist. I fully expect another one of these situations to blow up in the next three to six months. And you will have another round of posturing. Why? Because people start banging on about transparency and ethics and training without ever examining what the core problems are. This is where I disagree with Pepper: more training will not solve this problem because I believe it is ingrained in the way that PR is bought and paid for.
It just sounds stupid doesn't it? PRs routinely send out badly targeted rubbish. Not all of them and not all the time. But you don't have to look far to find it. How come? For years, it was never an issue. Hacks quietly seethed about it but did very little about for three simple reasons: one is that the horse might actually learn to sing and one of the no-hopers topping up the inbox will do something interesting; second is that, other than filling up inboxes, these releases are not doing that much harm; and third, complaining about it never actually had an effect.
The reason why the trash just keeps pouring in is the result of the first reason. Throw enough stuff at the wall and eventually something will stick. Actually, that's not quite true: there is some stuff that I have routed automatically to the bin because it's never going to come good. Don't worry, if you're a PR and reading this, it's probably not your stuff.
Here is where the bloggers need to face up to reality: if you have a position of influence, someone somewhere is going to want to influence you. They are probably paying people to do that job. But it's worse than that. The people they are paying probably only have five minutes, if that, to spend on influencing you. That's because it's a numbers game. There will be a core list of people who will get a lot more time spent on them because a result in their magazine or blog will net more exposure than going to Johnny C-list. The rest will probably be culled from a media directory or a fairly low-level account executive sifting through sites and media packs to get contact details and then matching them up with clients. (I don't know this first-hand - PRs may see this differently, but this does not feel as though it is too far from reality).
This is where it really starts to go wrong. The second issue, as far as I can gather, is that the tools for PR are pretty ropey. Not even that good. It seems that it is very difficult for PRs to customise how they send things to individual bloggers and journalists because the standard tools they use just can't handle the idea of sending out individual messages and formats even if they wanted to. And they don't want to, because there isn't the time to do it for more than a few. With more media outlets in action, the proportion of people getting the personalised treatment is just not going to go up. So, most people get the cookie-cutter pitch and release and deal with low-level account executives who just don't know the client or the media they are trying to sell to.
The sensible thing for PRs to do would be to restrict the number of people they actively try to promote to and put more resources into dealing with reactions. Bloggers are good at picking up on stuff from each other. Why not use that? However, I can see a problem here that probably explains a lot. As I understand it, clients don't actually pay for reaction, they pay for set jobs, such as bunging out three releases a month, or whatever. And those releases go to a list. And when they've gone out, a pile of time is spent writing reports on who got what and what they did with it. This seems to lead to the temptation to push stuff out as widely as possible because it's a numbers game: the more people who get the stuff, the more likely something - anything - happens that can then go in the report. From what I've gleaned from PRs over the years, those reports are more important to keeping clients than what you might think is the core job: getting publicity.
A second, probably easier path is to push more of the material to channels such as RSS or even Twitter. People can then choose to sign up for those streams of stuff and unsubscribe just as easily: not something that is easy to do with the bulk of emailed material. Personally, I would much rather that all press releases I dealt with were channelled through RSS, preferably using full feeds. Email could then be restricted to introductions and invitations. However, I can see the problem here. Because it's so easy to unsubscribe, there are going to be plenty of companies who don't actually have what amounts to a media-distribution list: everyone just gets bored and goes away. So, again, that's probably not going to happen.
Posted by Chris at 9:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 16, 2008
Running the numbers on eMusic
The 200 millionth download at eMusic has provided an opportunity to take a stab at how many active subscribers the service now has. I did it the not so subtle way by plotting the cumulative downloads against days since eMusic went subscription only. The company conveniently provided three real data points and one implicit point in an arrangement that suggested some kind of power law was at work in the cumulative count.
For one, it implies that the growth of eMusic in the last couple of years has been pretty linear and got a bit of push sometime during 2006. Wasn't that roughly when AllofMP3 got its marching orders?
Using the graph it looks as though eMusic has surpassed six million downloads a month. The company claims 7 million a month now, which is kind of borne out by the fainter trend line in the graph. However, based on the figures provided, the launch of Amazon MP3 last September didn't seem to do a lot to download growth and it may even have tailed off a little. In either case, it's tough to square the downloads with the last known subscriber count of 350 000, released towards the end of November. It implies that the average user downloads way less than even the minimum subscription.
Simply dividing the 30 downloads of a basic subscription into the six million downloads I estimate were made in the last month only gives you 200 000 subscribers. The subscriber numbers seem somewhat inflated based on this, but eMusic said at the time these were paid subscriber numbers so it seems unlikely that there is some kind of Second World effect coming in here. It seems, therefore, that a lot of people do not come close to downloading their full allocation of files every month.
I tend to make sure I use up almost all of my allocation - and I'm on the 65-download subscription - as download credits don't roll over. So, there must be quite a few people who come nowhere near their quota. That's a nice little earner for eMusic as it means royalties that the company does not have to pay out, or it means that users who eke every last credit out of their quote every month are getting music cheaper than they might if, for example, eMusic started rolling over credits each month.
Either way, it remains my favourite paid-music download site.
Posted by Chris at 9:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 13, 2008
Hidden comments
A bunch of people are up in arms about yet another social site that hoovers up newsfeeds so that people can collect all their comments into one place. The two big problems that some blog owners have are these: it's an infringement of copyright as content is being sucked into another site wholesale; and it encourages people to comment on posts away from the source blog, so that the blog owner can't get to see them without subscribing to this new site.
The first point is a tricky one. You could argue that it is an infringement of copyright. However, if you are providing full feeds then Shyftr is really only acting like an online newsreader. The name Shyftr doesn't really help the service's image but, if you don't want copy hoovered up in this way, don't provide full feeds. As this blog isn't ad-supported, it is not that big a deal where the material is read as long as it's attributed to me. Sure, I'd like to know how many people are reading. Owners of sites such as Shyftr would buy themselves a bit more slack if they ponied up readership stats to the people who provide the actual content. But it's not in evil country yet. Anyway, if you're that worried about content leeching, just used a bit of Apache mod_rewriting to serve up partial feeds, or a list of links to Rick Astley videos, to those service's spiders – assuming they've been good and announced themselves.
The second 'problem' is an indication of how misguided some bloggers are when it comes to the subject of The Conversation, although I think there is a small, subtle issue with a site like Shyftr. Because comments appear on blogs, it is easy to be misled into thinking that is where all the action is happening.
Take Scoble, for example, who can be relied upon in these circumstances to come out with this sort of line: "The era when bloggers could control where the discussion of their stuff took place is totally over."
And bloggers had control before? How so? Is that like how nobody discussed what appeared in the papers before blogs came along? Pubs and cafés were eerily quiet as people digested their daily news in total silence, fearing to talk about it because the nasty media had all that control?
The ratio of comments on blogs to page views is very low: I don't think 1 per cent is an unreasonable number and that's after weeding out obvious spiders. The referrer logs often show up links from webmail accounts, forums and sometimes intranets. Have the people asking for some kind of comment aggregation system so that "the blogger can see all the conversation" actually thought about the problem for a moment? You can't see it all. Because, even if you designed a superspider able to track down and parse links to blogs so that it could extract relevant comments, it still wouldn't be enough.
Are you going to bug people's email accounts? The water cooler? Even if you did have such a piece of spider software, the thing would just be the most powerful spam magnet ever invented. It would be stuffed full of poker and pills ads in minutes.
And does it matter? If people want to make a point to the blogger, they go to the blog and post a comment there. This is where I can see something like Shyftr being a problem: the site makes it look as though the home for comments for a blog is there. It doesn't even attempt to locate comments on the source blog because it's working from the RSS or Atom feed. So, I can see people posting points on Shyftr thinking they are being made to the blog's writer when those comments are, in fact, invisible to them.
Shyftr might do itself some good by coming up with some kind of widget - assuming its programmers haven't done this already - to at least show where comments on a post might be located. Perhaps they could even feed the comments back to the site. However, the second option sounds dangerous even just typing it in now. It has cross-site scripting vulnerability written all over it. After all, who is going to weed the spam out of Shyftr comments? The blog owner can't do it. It doesn't look as though Shyftr users can do it. The man and his dog at Shyfter's owner Upshot Interactive (and I'm not convinced there's a dog)? Good luck with that.
Posted by Chris at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2008
"If it's wrong, it's not our fault - the client made us do it"
I've seen plenty of releases with disclaimers - mostly about forward-looking statements. Or as the CFO of one big analogue chipmaker put it at a financial conference some years back as he put up the obligatory safe-harbour statement: "This basically says that everything I am about to tell you may be a lie."
This disclaimer from Webit PR, however, is a new one on me:
"Disclaimer:Whilst WebitPR Ltd endeavour to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this Release, WebitPR Ltd cannot accept any liability for:-
• the inaccuracy or otherwise of any information contained in this Release; or
• any loss liability or expense which may be suffered by any party in consequence of acting or omitting to act as a result of any information contained in or omitted from this Release; or
• any loss or suffering which may be caused by or to any party either as a result of the information contained in this Release or such information contained in this Release being inaccurate or otherwise misleading."
I guess this is one of the consequences of more releases being turned up directly by search engines. But it only serves to confirm what we already know: everything in the release may be a lie.
Posted by Chris at 11:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
March 4, 2008
Make your mind up
In days of yore, there was a show at Olympia called British Electronics Week that involved an overweight bulldog in a tight-fitting Union Jack waistcoat (yeah, it was that tasteful). This year, it seems we're being treated to a reprise - albeit minus the hound.
A test company XJTAG is to sponsor the National Electronics Week in June that, like its near namesake, runs for three days. And the people at XJTAG are very keen on the idea:
"XJTAG urges the whole industry - from universities to PLCs - to support National Electronics Week and create a truly international exhibition in the UK."
Err....right.
Posted by Chris at 4:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 2, 2008
Managed retreat
There is a stark statistic in the presentation that United Business Media used in the analyst call and webcast from Friday, when the company said it had decided to split CMP Technology (formerly CMP Media) into four units. Headlined "the CMPTech print experience", the text alongside two graphs illustrating the slump in print advertising noted that the 29 per cent drop in ad sales from 2001 to 2002 was larger than the total revenue that CMP Technology (as was) expects to see during 2008.
And no, online did not make up for the shortfall. Using the graphs in the appendices of the presentation, it seems that print advertising accounted for around 70 per cent of divisional revenues in 2005, dropping to around 35 per cent in 2007. Online advertising was less than 15 per cent in 2005 and has rose to just 20 per cent in 2007. It means that CMP Technology was down 30 per cent on total advertising sales from 2005 to 2007. This is priced in UK pounds rather than US dollars, so the slide in the value of the dollar has taken its toll as well. Even so, it's still a fairly large fall.
Despite that, CMP Technology turned over roughly the same revenue in 2007 as it did in 2005 – events and recently acquired data and information services made up the shortfall. Recent cutbacks – 200 positions gone – helped the company push up operating margins, although they are someway behind other parts of the company. Looking at the slump in ad sales, you can see why those job cuts were so deep.
In the two-year period from 2005 to 2007, print-ad revenues dropped by more than 45 per cent. It is not clear what happened between 2002 and 2005, but it seems that the move away from print ads in CMP's technology titles accelerated in the last two years. At CMPi, the decline was slower but not that far behind at 35 per cent. And these are titles that are way less tech-centric. Until recently, CMPi did not even report online ad-sales numbers and, today, they account for a tiny percentage of revenues for that group: less than 5 per cent.
One thing is clear in all this: UBM is betting the future on events and paid-for information. That is not all that dissimilar from the strategy being pursued at Reed-Elsevier, which put its trade-magazines operation up for sale in late February. The difference at UBM is that, unless it wants to chop out magazines individually from the operating units, the company will hang onto the controlled-circulation magazines while it builds up other services, presumably, just as long as their costs can be controlled so that they don't lose money. The problem is working out where the near-term bottom in this market is.
I believe it is possible to arrest the flight from print in controlled-circulation magazines and newspapers like EETimes, at least until technology finally renders paper obsolete. But that does rely on a reality check at the remaining advertisers, as well as those who have quit the market. The problem, at the moment, is that an increasing number believe that vanity publishing will give them as good results as going into independent publications. That kind of thinking will make them concentrate more on vendor events and inhouse mags that nobody attends or reads. When they pull out of that cycle, they suddenly realise they have no effective way to promote to people who aren't already customers (and even those who are hate them because of all the sales spiel foisted on them at every opportunity).
However, until there is that realisation, the publishers will continue their managed retreat not just from print but from magazine publishing in general in favour of more profitable areas. Or they may decide to play a short-term game and just go for the vanity-publishing market. Either way, if advertisers thought some of the bigger technology publishers were banking on their business...think again.
For some other viewpoints on the breakup of CMP Technology take a look at the posts from former EETimes editor-in-chief Brian Fuller and EDA PR specialist Lou Covey.
Posted by Chris at 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 29, 2008
Truth in irony
I don't care whether this one-liner was intentional or not, it's just great:
"...not enough people even know what the word 'semantic' means"
BTW, I think Mathew Ingram is wrong. The Semantic Web won't fail because it's dull – it will fail because it relies on everybody supporting the same metadata formats and protocols. Which. Will. Never. Happen. (However, we might still get something that looks like it by merging the concepts from people such as Clay Shirky and Tim Berners-Lee - a number of AI researchers are working along the lines of "we'll take whatever metadata we can get, every little helps").
Posted by Chris at 11:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 23, 2008
Bland leading the brand
With some of the electronics magazines cutting back on their coverage of the electronic design automation (EDA) business, you'd think the vendors would be trying to do more to increase their visibility on the intertubes. Someone needs to tell the people who come up with the product names that, whatever they're doing, it's not working. The trend right now, particularly with the two largest companies – Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys – is to pick as anodyne and forgettable a name as possible and then coat every single tool they have with it.
One of them complained this week about not being name-checked in a recent feature. I had a look at why that was and immediately ran into a problem: I couldn't remember what the actual product was called. I could remember what it used to be called, but not its current moniker. That caused a bit of a problem when I went to the website I had to whittle down the list of possibilities by a process of elimination - and only because the company hadn't rebranded everything else in the meantime.
Take Synopsys. It bought a company called Virtio a few years back that does simulations of the blocks that go into system-on-chip designs. Then the brand police swooped in and called it...Innovator. I am so going to remember that. What was it again? To this day, in my mind it remains "the tool formerly known as Virtio". Unfortunately, that doesn't do a lot to help find it.
Let's whizz across to Cadence where every tool in the verification arsenal is now Incisive something or other. Now, the name NCsim was hardly going to set the world alight. But at least it was googleable. Now it's the Incisive Enterprise Simulator, unless it's the equally memorable Incisive Design Team Simulator. Not to be confused with the Incisive Enterprise Manager. OK Vmanager – Verisity's original name for the tool before the company got bought by Cadence – was not that much better but you can guess which one sticks in my head.
And the companies think these 'umbrella brands' are the best thing ever: even organising meetings to tell hacks they have just thought up a new umbrella brand for some group of otherwise unconnected tools. It's hard to suppress the response: "You got me here to tell me you're launching an umbrella brand. Are you kidding me?"
Posted by Chris at 10:35 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 20, 2008
"I made money on articles in EETimes"
PR man Lou Covey has an interview with venture capitalist Drew Lanza at his site that, although it was recorded before EDN laid off two senior journalists, is well-timed. Basically, Lanza is not happy with the way things are going in this particular corner of trade publishing and makes some points that publishers should bear in mind as they try to work out what to do about the separation of ad money from their business.
Lanza is not trying to make an argument on behalf of anyone: his interest in the content of magazines such as EETimes and EDN is selfish. In short: "I made money on articles in EETimes".
Of course, it is highly possible that the content we have all been producing has really only helped VCs. But I don't think that's the case as Lanza alighted on the things that can set a newspaper or a magazine apart from other sources.
Unfortunately, Lanza is only missing it because it seems to have gone: "I know there is something changing and it is impacting the way I do business. There used to be a crystal ball and it used to be in these pubs. I'm missing the in-depth technology articles...it's going to be harder to synthesise the future [without them]. We make money by taking those views of the future".
Lanza is sceptical of whether bloggers can fill that void. "It is not clear that bloggers are going to be capable of doing that synthetic activity – synthesise a view from multiple competing smart people."
In reality, there is nothing to stop one or more bloggers doing that. But Lanza doesn't make the point on the basis of bloggers being bad at it. Just lacking the motivation to make it happen: "How will they get paid?"
What's useful about Lanza's comments is that we have had these debates internally for many years. What do we deliver as journalists? The answer, at least from a trade perspective and, very often, in a consumer or newstand environment is: context. What's happening. How it's happening. Why it's happening. It's handy to this kind of thing from someone outside the publishing environment.
Posted by Chris at 6:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 11, 2008
"Up is always good, right?"
The big problem with marketingspeak is that, pretty soon, even the people using it forget what the words were meant to mean. People just slot them together like Lego in the vain hope that it gives the prospective consumer a warm feeling. Or maybe utter confusion is an effective sales target.
And it means you end up with crackers like this press-release headline: "MEN Micro Inc. Extends FPGA-based Universal Submodule Concept to Include XMC and Conduction-cooled PMC Formats for Increased Time-to-market"
Yes, use our product and slow your project down to a crawl. I have visions of the person signing this one off saying: "I don't want 'reduced' in the headline, it's not a happy word..."
Posted by Chris at 8:15 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 9, 2007
Searching for the young soul fansumers
I love the analysis at Bubblegeneration. But not in a good way. It's because the prophets of the microchunked hypersocial mediaconomy are laugh-out-loud wrong so often.
Take Umair Haque's "research note" trying to deflate the fansumer bubble. Yes, fansumer is an awful term. The approach, as described by Jeremiah Owyang and his acolytes, makes me want to scratch my palms until they bleed. But along comes Haque and you start to wonder whether Owyang is on to something. That really, really scares me.
Haque makes it clear:
"There are no fansumers. There are people who love products. But very rarely will they want to be pimped out and put to work on Facebook's (or anyone else's) digital streetcorner.
Are there really no fansumers?
They exist. And they are all around us. You work with these people. You might live with them (well, maybe you don't). You might even be one. But one thing is clear. They have no problem talking about their favourite brands. You might say they're almost obsessed with it. Of course, they almost certainly don't think of their favourite things in terms of being brands. And they certainly don't regard themselves as fansumers. But they are fans and they eagerly eat up the output of their chosen obsessions. That makes them consumers in my book.
Don't tell me companies don't want a piece of that. Only some of them can manage it - it's hard to envisage people 'connecting' with Mr Muscle Bathroom & Toilet Cleaner with Anti-Bacterial Action. But I have seen with my own eyes people with Nike tattoos. So, it is possible no matter how odd or even distasteful it seems to the rest of us who only go as far as watching the film, wearing the shoes or buying the CD.
Haque gives a stern lecture to the people talking about fansumers: "What we really need are better foundations, concepts which reflect economic reality. And building those takes much more critical thinking."
Damn straight.
Posted by Chris at 5:31 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
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 26, 2007
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 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
September 12, 2007
Lots of people talk and few of them know
Nice little curve-ball thrown at a Rolling Stone writer on CNN this evening (aah, the delights of conferences overseas). Anthony DeCurtis was hauled in to talk about the Led Zeppelin reunion concert. It's not the first time that this type of question has tripped someone up publicly - although PM Gordon Brown claims he was railroaded into pretending to like the Arctic Monkeys - but the "what's your favourite Led Zeppelin song?" knocked over DeCurtis.
After a long pause and digression - "um, there's so many..." - guess which one he named.
If the one Led Zeppelin track that someone can cite as their favourite is "Stairway to Heaven", the chances are they're not a fan. I'm with the Wonder Stuff* (and the guitar shop in Wayne's World) on that particular offering. Give me the Bonham-driven battering of "When the Levee Breaks" any day.
* Good Night Though on Hup! (I didn't want to link to some dodgy, popup-ridden lyric site).
Posted by Chris at 9:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 26, 2007
You might not think it's spam, the law may think otherwise
Tom Coates doesn't like getting press releases. I can't blame him. Reading plasticbag.org you get the feeling that he isn't suddenly going to put a link in for GlobalCorp the world leader in global corping and it's latest corping solution.
PRs have for the most part taken a step back and thought "you know, sending press releases to people who don't want them isn't a great idea". But, for Drew Benvie, there was that niggling little point: "Maybe bloggers need to realise that if they publish and they have an audience, they are vehicles conveying messages, and companies will always look to sign them up. A lot of the time the wrong way, but they will try".
Coates looks at it a bit differently: "They're no better than spammers".
Actually, they are spammers. It all happened pretty quietly, but UK wrote into law an EU directive meant to curb spam in 2003. It did nothing of the sort but, for people like Coates, it almost certainly does put the releases he is receiving into the spam category. If agencies are sending him press releases without asking first and without an opt-out clause (I can only think of one company that puts an opt-out link on an email release), that's unsolicited commercial email and could, if they keep doing it, attract a fine up to £5000. Frankly, I'd love to stick that one on Zebra Computers, but they've been using a business email address for me.
Here's the relevant bit:
(1) This regulation applies to the transmission of unsolicited communications by means of electronic mail to individual subscribers.(2) Except in the circumstances referred to in paragraph (3), a person shall neither transmit, nor instigate the transmission of, unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing by means of electronic mail unless the recipient of the electronic mail has previously notified the sender that he consents for the time being to such communications being sent by, or at the instigation of, the sender.
As far I can tell, he is blogging in his personal capacity. A lawyer might want to argue that Plasticbag is a business but without ads on it and the blog being a personal view on the world, it would have to be a good lawyer.
PRs are unlikely to have encountered this legal nugget before because journalists would almost certainly be treated by the law as 'legal persons' - operating in a business rather than in a personal capacity. Also, releases are something of an occupational hazard. Most are junk, but sod's law rules. So, the day you ask to get taken off a list is the day before that company discovers the true recipe for cold fusion. But sending unwanted releases to personal bloggers is spam - nothing more, nothing less - whether PRs like it or not.
Stuart Bruce noted that Plasticbag is in media databases. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 is that it provides stronger rights for individuals to decide if they wish to be listed in subscriber directories. However, I'm not clear yet on whether this part of the Act extends to things like media databases. However, if I were Cision and the like, I'd be taking a look at whether they should find out from bloggers whether they want to be listed and maybe move the blogs for those that don't to a section that says: "don't send releases to these people" with no other contact information than the blog's URL.
However, bloggers could come off the high horse once in a while when it comes to PR. People get sold to all the time; the ones that get called out tend to be at the more stupid end of the spectrum. The trouble is that the holier-than-thou attitude interspersed with falling for a bit of flattery gets a bit tedious after a while. Speaking of which, the ugliest part of this episode is that it made me feel that Stowe Boyd might have a point. I don't like that feeling and I'd like it to stop.
Posted by Chris at 6:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 21, 2007
European time - that would be UTC minus five days, would it?
Every time I think PRs have got out of the habit of sending out European versions of press releases days late (and re-dating them), one clutters up the inbox. Today's offender is Text 100 with a release about Cadence Design Systems buying Clear Shape. It was a purchase that has been rumbling on since before the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June, something that John Cooley at Deepchip picked up on weeks ago.
Cadence declared that it had done the deal on the 15th: the US release went out the next day. What should turn up this morning, dated the 21st, but the Europeanised version of the release. Which, by the way, hasn't actually been translated into UK English - analog is still analog, for example. All that has changed is that the slug now reads "Bracknell, UK" rather than "San Jose, CA".
In my position, this is not such a big deal as at least companies like Cadence put their stuff out through the PR wires, which helpfully have RSS feeds (unlike big companies like Cadence, hint, hint). And I can generally remember from one day to the next what I've dealt with. However, this is the kind of thing that has news editors on weeklies or higher-frequency newspapers foam at the mouth. What happens is that in that space of time, you can have dealt with the story only to have someone else turn up days later with the same story. Most of the time, that will get spotted early on. The PR firm responsible will be resoundingly cursed but no bones broken.
But, you may have someone doing holiday cover or the release is steered into the main news section versus the business section, so that different people are now dealing with the same thing. The problem only gets noticed down the line and ends up with the page being remade or, worse, getting into print. This is not the way to PR popularity. It is also one of the reasons why some newspapers insist on releases only ever being sent once rather than splattergunned out to every writer on the book.
In short, sending out releases days after the event for those oh so slow Europeans is an irritation. Re-dating those releases is even more irritating and unlikely to endear you to editors. Leaving it five days to send out an almost identical release just puts it into the realm of the bizarre.
Posted by Chris at 12:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 18, 2007
Not far enough inside baseball
In what I assume is an extension of his continuing campaign against people who ask Apple about its non-involvement in the Intel Inside programme - eight days and counting - John Gruber goes to the world of political punditry to pick up this piece of advice for publishers:
"A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball."
The line, quoted by economics professor Brad DeLong, came from a comment on a piece about the state of US political reporting. The responses were predictable. To summarise: "Haven't you seen the state of baseball writing?"
I haven't asked but I assume that Gruber, Prof DeLong and Bernard Yomtov, who repeated the line for DeLong's benefit, are not diehard baseball fans. Gruber has mentioned the word 'baseball' eight times on his blog and mostly in the form of similes. I imagine that DeLong and Yomtov, being serious people, look at the baseball pages with its mysterious statistics and internal references and wonder at the ability of those reporters to capture such detailed nuances of a game when political reporters in generalist newspapers write so naïvely on a subject that they know in detail. At the same time, those baseball reporters get attacked by baseball addicts for simplistic analysis and dumbed-down coverage, who point to outlets such as Baseball Prospectus as the model they should use. You won't be surprised to find one comment refer to the Prospectus at DeLong's blog. And it's the same situation with the Mac addicts who wonder out loud at the people who report on Apple for the same newspapers.
I can see their problem and so I offer up this slightly more realistic alternative:
"A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as an expert on X (who knows as much as the average man in the street about baseball) thinks a baseball writer has of baseball."
There are dangers in getting too in-depth in a subject - you can forget to challenge things that you have come to accept when other people with less experience find it easier to ask "well, why is that?" And you can easily lose the audience you are trying to reach. There is little point in describing cache-coherency mechanisms to people who just want to know whether a 3GHz processor is better than two 1.5GHz processors, or in comparing value-over-replacement-player scores when all the reader wants to know is who won and by how much.
Posted by Chris at 2:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 15, 2007
What it must be like to not have to ask questions
Wow, what it must be like to be telepathic. To reach into another's mind and pull out the answers you want without having to ask them first. This marvellous gift gives the owner the ability to declare people jackasses for asking questions, such as poor old Bob Keefe of Cox Newspapers who wanted to know why Apple has not gone in for Intel's cashback scheme: the market-development programme better known as the Intel Inside campaign.
Keefe explained how Apple PR told him his best chance of getting the question answered was to use the Q&A at the most recent press launch. That meant, he could conceivably get an answer from Steve Jobs rather than some non-answer from the PR department. This, apparently, was a sin. To ask the mighty Jobs such an inane question when everybody, simply everybody just knows the answer.
As Charles Arthur and Bobbie Johnson have already pointed out: there is no such thing as a daft question in a press conference. Anything goes. That is because, as Johnson explains, all that matters is the answer. In fact, repeated answers to repeated questions are good: because those answers can change and a compare and contrast can often provide a way of getting to the real answer. Furthermore, Keefe had a story on the go about the Intel Inside programme and its declining popularity among computer makers. Apple was the highest-profile holdout against a programme that provides those hardware makers with a way of improving their margins.
Some of the commentators then did a revision, claiming that they too would like to know why Apple turned down the free money. But they could not let Keefe off the hook: that would mean doing something like apologising. So, instead they claimed that he asked the wrong question on the right subject. That he should have asked about the money, and not mention the Intel Inside stickers.
I assume that Keefe actually wanted an answer. You don't have to do many business-oriented reports to work out that senior executives love nothing more than a question on which they can use the commercial-confidentiality card. I would imagine that Jobs would instantly take the opportunity to say that the company does not discuss things such as margins or contracts with other companies. However, I wouldn't pillory someone for asking a question like that because you never know what the answer will be. He really might just turn around and say: "We considered the 3 per cent lift it would give our margins, but did not consider that sufficient to offset the dilution of our brand". Like most people, I like questions that are likely to get some sort of answer rather than "No comment, next question".
The other problem with the attitude taken by John C Welch, Christopher Brennan, Dan Moren and others - all writers for specialist Mac magazines or newsletters - is that they typed out screeds on how stupid it is to ask about stickers, saying it's obvious why Apple doesn't want stickers on its machines without even considering what the potential answers would be. Welch managed two long blog posts on it: which seems excessive for a supposedly time-wasting question. But, I guess that when you have a blog called "Schadenfreude is my life", you need to be able to make as much use of those moments as you can.
Yes, Keefe mentioned stickers but in a "such as" clause of the main question which was about Intel Inside. The answer that came from Jobs and Phil Schiller focused on stickers but I believe (and it is only a belief as I have no evidence for this) they did so because it provides a feasible and convenient explanation of Apple's position. Most people seemed to accept it.
But the stickers on machines are a comparatively small part of that programme: it mainly focuses on advertising. I dare say that Intel likes them to be on machines but the few contracts that have leaked to the outside world show how much the programme is about what goes into the advertising. The most complete, albeit very old, example is the contract between Intel and Intergraph. There is no mention of having the processors placed on computers; only that the logo is used in advertising and promotional material. As I recall, the machine stickers came later and I imagine they carry a bounty of their own. But, I doubt very much that Intel would mess up the chance of getting Apple to join the Intel Inside campaign by telling Jobs he had to have them stuck on his machines. Not when it is the advertising that is worth so much more to Intel.
For the moment, we can only speculate that Jobs considered the problems of having the jingle play on Apple ads and decided that it would not work. It could confuse the consumers it now cultivates with imagery and sounds they associate with PCs. It might simply be a consideration of aesthetics. However, as one of the few computer makers with a demonstrable understanding of branding and one that poked Intel in the eye with its first ads for x86-based Macs, Apple did not want its image tarnished too much by things that are associated with bog-standard PCs. I'd be interested to know the actual reasoning, however. So, I'd like people to keep on at this one if only to satisfy my curiosity.
I don't think I'm alone. Alfredo Octavio asks some of the so far unanswered questions:
"Furthermore, we all have the suspicion that Apple deal with Intel is different from the deal Intel makes with a similar sized manufacturer. Now, what does that entails? Is Apple getting a deal close to the one Dell or HP has without having the size? Is part of the deal getting the money without having to put the stickers?"
I can think of a number of people who really want to know the answers to those. It's unlikely that they will come from the mouth of Steve Jobs but that doesn't mean people should stop trying.
As a sidenote, Apple has actually conspired with people who want to "booger up their computers with stickers" for close to the last 30 years. The G4 Powerbook I bought secondhand a few years ago had one stuck to the bottom and I'm pretty sure there was a sheet of stickers with the last new one I bought. Sticker-adorned Macs seem particularly prevalent in the Valley based on my entirely unscientific survey of users on the Caltrain versus other trains. Indeed, Jobs said he likes Apple's stickers better than Intel's. So, the idea that Apple wouldn't let stickers near its computers is not just asinine, it's wrong. The only difference is that you have to stick them on yourself if you want them rather than having a Chinese assembly worker do it for you. OK, they tend to go on PCs and cars rather than Macs, but none of the commentators who rounded on Keefe mentioned that Apple has consistently shipped stickers with its computers. No, that's too inconvenient when you are trying to browbeat people with your constructed reality of a company that considers stickers fugly.
Posted by Chris at 9:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 9, 2007
Blog posts: inferior quality sells
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox emails are good in that they often come up with antidotes to received Web 2.0 wisdom. But the latest one, telling people that blogging is bad for Internet exposure, looks a bit off-target.
Trust me, I'd love to be able to agree with Nielsen's central point: that rapid-fire blogging is inferior to properly researched articles. But I'm afraid he is basing his analysis on the world he wants to live in, not the world he actually occupies. There is plenty of evidence that quickly tossed-off blog posts are only too effective. In fact, the quicker and more poorly researched the better in many cases, just as long as you are already heading towards the steep end of the power law that dominates blog statistics. How many of the sites at the top end of the Technorati stats spend a lot of time on each post? They post a lot each day, but there just isn't time to research them.
Nielsen's view is this:
Even average content undermines your brand. Don't contribute to information pollution by posting material that isn't above the average of other people's writings.
But if you tell people about a great theory in a forest full of nothing but squirrels, does that theory exist? Demonstrating world-class expertise is one thing; letting the world know you are there is another. In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville cited Mooers' Law (as opposed to Moore's Law). Calvin Mooers pointed out that having information can be more troublesome to people than not having it, if the effort to obtain and understand outweighed the apparent benefit of ignorance.
Understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needless...Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it.
While search engines continue to favour digital-diarrhoea diatribes (short ones, mind) that act as link-bait, I'd hesitate counselling people to not blog in that way if they want to get noticed. It's something that newspaper columnists have known for years. Being right is all very well, but it's not a lot of use when people actually prefer to read stuff that gets them riled up. From the laughably named "Voice of Reason" columns of Woodrow Wyatt through Richard Littlejohn to Little Green Footballs, the same techniques are in action. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.
And, for people who don't necessarily foam at the mouth at life's injustices and just want to talk product, I'm afraid Nielsen has it back asswards. He argued:
Blogs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products. On these sites, visitors can often be easily converted and the main challenge is to raise awareness. For example, a site that sells pistachio nuts should post as much content about pistachios as possible in the hope of attracting quick hits by people searching for that information. Some percentage of these visitors will buy the nuts while visiting the site.
Now, I've seen a blog about hamburgers. But pistachio nuts? From people selling pistachio nuts? The only blogs I've seen in that pile 'em high, sell 'em quick market have been fake blogs. Not terribly successful.
Where blogs have taken off is in those areas where more in-depth articles would seem to be more sensible: technology development. Microsoft's sponsorship of internally generated blogs has been remarkably successful. Forget about Robert Scoble. Take a look at the developer blogs, such as The Old New Thing written by Raymond Chen. Here, developers of software that runs on Windows can get a look inside the thinking that went into the many, many function calls that make up the arcane structure of the world's top-selling operating system.
Now, you can argue that blogs like Chen's are popular because of the piss poor quality of Microsoft's official documentation - having Chen tell people not to use a certain function call rather than putting it in the manuals does seem perverse as the Register has pointed out. Then again, searching for ways to deal with a coding problem is easier with Google than it is with MSDN. So, for a technical audience, blogging can and does work, although it's success has yet to be replicated in many of the non-software technologies.
One day, search engines will stop using links as their primary means of determining relevance. Until that day, blogging will continue to rank highly in search results. And writing short posts around a subject can attract regular readers. How many you want to attract depends on how often you want to risk falling flat on your face with an off-target post.
It took 20 minutes to write this. Five minutes of that I spent looking for Morville's