- Entertained but a little puzzled by Twitter Blocks. Click here to look at my ‘plasticbagUK’ relationship blockgraph… I’m not sure this is much more than a beautiful and interesting folly, but it’s beautiful and interesting which is more than can be said for most of the internet. Yay Stamen!
- Amazon are going to be launching a DRM-Free MP3 Store in mid-September Of course it’s going to be relatively sparse to start off with, but I can’t help thinking with Amazon behind it the sales will be sufficient that record companies will eventually change their tune.
A lovely piece in the Guardian today, although I’m going to link through to the full uncut version on badscience.net because it’s more curvacious and has a nice bounce to it:
“Jessica Alba, the film actress, has the ultimate sexy strut, according to a team of Cambridge mathematicians.”
This important study was the work of a team – apparently – headed by Professor Richard Weber of Cambridge University, and I was particularly delighted to see it finally in print since, in the name of research, I discussed the possibility of prostituting my own good reputation for this same piece of guff with the very same PR company in June.
Here was their opening email: “We are conducting a survey into the celebrity top ten sexiest walks for my client Veet (hair removal cream) and we would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it.
And there was survey data too. “We haven’t conducted the survey yet,” Kiren told me: “but we know what results we want to achieve.” That’s the spirit! “We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom
Then I managed to get hold of Professor Weber at a remote location in Greece. He told me this: “The Clarion press release was not approved by me and is factually incorrect and misleading in suggesting there has been any serious attempt to do serious mathematics here. No “team of Cambridge mathematicians” has been involved. Clarion asked me to help by analysing survey data from 800 men in which they were asked to rank 10 celebrities for “sexiness of walk”. And Jessica Alba did not come top. She came 7th.”
These “cash for bad science” stories add nothing to our understanding of the world, and they do nothing to promote science. They sell products, pay money, misrepresent the very notion of doing research, and sell the idea that scientists are irrelevant boffins engaged in pointless head scratching.
And did they really get 1,000 respondents from an internal email survey? Well maybe: Clarion Communication are part of WPP, one of the world’s largest “communications services” groups. They do advertising, PR and lobbying, they have a turnover of around ¬£6 billion, and they employ 100,000 people in 100 countries. These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
The thing that gets to me is the absolutely casual relationship to the truth. I wonder how the people who do this rationalise it? Do they really think it’s okay to just make up pseudo-scientific studies to get people to buy their products? Or do they think that it’s the responsibility of the press to do more work and that their job is to just get away with as much as possible…
- Rumour is that Heroes is no longer going to be sold through iTunes in the US If this is because of rising tensions between iTunes and the industry over pricing, then the only thing that the industry has to do is find and support a plausible alternative, not demand more control over the iTunes model.
- Gideon Lichfield–foreign correspondent for the Economist in Jerusalem–and someone I’ve known a very very long time has started a blog about the situation called ‘Fugitive Peace’ It’s fascinating to be able to see what’s going on at ground level in Palestine and Israel and it makes it all the more real to me that I’ve known the commentator for almost half my life.
- Via Dan Hill, I come across Jossip’s list of the amount of advertising in magazines. Only 13% of Vogue’s last issue was editorial. I post this mainly to suggest that for the moment at least there’s a fair amount of money in the advertising industry and that we don’t have to worry too much about the Internet collapsing for lack of money in the short-term at least…
- Absolutely insane image resizing and editing video from the Guardian Technology blog Israeli scientists identify paths through a an image that contain the least information and then allow you to resize the image while retaining the most significant proportions of the information rich bits. Hard to explain. Must see!
- A beautiful Flickr set of typesettings from the past Astonishingly gorgeous, pre-digital books of type.
- Should ‘UGC’ as a term be replaced by ‘Indigenous content’? Clay’s post on this is highly entertaining and I love the idea. I may start using it in meetings and see what kinds of eyebrows I get.
- I’m a bit frustrated by the trailers for BBC Four’s Comics Britannia season It’s all Bash Street Kids and I’m not sure I even see the connection between that stuff and things like 2000AD or the British comics creators working in the American idiom.
- Search Engine Land’s article “The Impending Social Search Inflection Point” borderline convinces me that there is no such thing as ‘Social Search’ in any meaningful way I swear that social search is basically a way to explain to people why search engines buy social stuff, by explaining it in terms that their shareholders understand, without it actually referring to anything real in the world…
- Bruce Nussbaum says, “CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them” and I think he’s right. The problem-solving, find a user need and fill it as close to perfectly as you can is where the future is, particularly in technology… “In today’s global marketplace, [the key skills are being] able to understand the consumer, prototype possible new products, services and experiences, quickly filter the good, the bad and the ugly and deliver them to people who want them…”
- I think I’m obsessed with Mark Titchner. His work seems to describe the honourable goal of my industry while savagely satirising it. I like that. It’s good to have some dark perspective. Slogans like, “We want answers to the questions of tomorrow”, “The Future demands your participation” and “We want to make dreams a reality” all resonate with me very strongly even as I know how political or messianic they sound.
- ‘Things’ is a beautiful looking GTD application that’s supposed to be launching relatively soon in competition with OmniFocus Could I make one suggestion. The name of your product can only result in no one being able to find it online. I stumbled upon it once and then had to wait until I stumbled upon it again by accident to post a link to it. Not good, I’m thinking.
- A relatively old interview with Tim O’Reilly from Wired News declares Web 2.0 is about ownership of data.. The only slight proviso I’d make is that it’s about access to or ownership of data. One of the main interesting territories in social media is how to work with your audience to create a repository of value to everyone. Good piece though.
- Merlin Mann is in a similar state with regards to PR people… Lovely graphic he’s posting. That other people are feeling the same way maybe indicates that the PR people are upscaling their assault on webloggia?
Some people have been having trouble working out why I’ve got so worked-up about this whole public relations thing. Perhaps this quote from a Flickr user called keeneypr on the thread about PR posted overnight will help explain to you why I’m so angry about the whole thing:
Our job is to get even “challenging” people like you to write, say and/or do what our clients and companies want — of your own volition — and not even realize that you’re doing it. If you are telling us that you only want information from people whose views you like and trust, then we’ll just reach you through them and you’ll never be the wiser.
I could find a dozen similar quotes by people like him from the conversations that I’ve been having over the last few months with PR people. To be honest, I find it sickening. That they would seek to use me as a device to further their aims makes me even more unhappy.
- Do you have more than $700,000 lying around that you would rather spend on a semi-squatted domain? That’s what Flickr.com is currently going for. Ridiculous. Aggravating.
- Spot the Open Rights Group poster in new episodes of the I.T. Crowd! I haven’t really watched the show myself, but perhaps I should do so. Yay, Open Rights Group.
- ‘Faceball’ Craze Hitting Cubicles Around The Globe Awesome video featuring lovable Flickrinos Alspaw and Orchard. Very entertaining.
As has probably become clear recently, I’m currently not particularly well-inclined towards people who work in public relations – particularly the particularly unscrupulous ones that spam me with press releases and work ardently to try and persuade me to talk about their products or services on my site.
They don’t seem to understand that I find it objectionable that they would consider me a platform for them to sell their wares. Nor do they understand that I could consider it even more irritating still that for the most part they haven’t got the slightest idea what things I write or care about. They consider my personal voice a commodity to be acquired, along with what little credibility and authenticity I have. This–I’m afraid–just pisses me off.
It may seem like a trivial thing to get angry about, but you’d be surprised the pressure that you can receive to deform what you write to serve other people’s best interests. And it needs to be said, quite apart from my own personal irritation with these people, they are actively trying every day to commandeer the conversations that you are having out there by fair means or foul to serve their needs more effectively. They do it by offering perks, holding or withholding access to people or things and by making people feel privileged by giving them gifts or treats.
For those reasons I’ve made every effort through the last few years to never be beholden to anyone, even to not allow myself to get in the kind of position where I might be unsure of my own motives. But this doesn’t seem to be enough to get the message across, so in a fit of irritation the other day, I wrote a pretty angry and frustrated post on my Flickr stream associated with the picture that opens this article.
In the post I stated that for as long as I have it up, plasticbag.org will never contain anything that someone has tried to persuade me to write about. This applies equally to PR people, to marketing people or to my employer. I will write about any company or business (including the one I work for) only when I think there’s something genuinely of interest to talk about. I will only write about my employer when I’m proud of something they have done (or I have done with them) or when I really feel I have something to say. And I will absolutely never talk about something that I hear about through a press release, or as a consequence of someone giving me a freebie.
Of course, I’m not trying to talk for everyone with a blog out there. There are a lot of semi-pro bloggers out there who operate much like journalists and have good relationships with PR people. Their sites are treated like a job, and any access they can get to these organisations can help them do that job. So good luck to them. But they ask for these press releases. They encourage this contact. They make it clear that they’d like to receive them. I have to say that posts from Guy Kawasaki (encouraging the giving of schwag and compliments to bloggers to butter them up) and Paul Stamatiou (pitching for freebies and flights) make me (and Jeremy Zawodny) slightly queasy, but as long as these particular pundits don’t try and talk for the rest of us then I have no problem with them making it clear that they’re interested in receiving press releases. However, that doesn’t apply to me.
As far as I’m concerned, an unsolicited press release is quite literally no better than spam. It is an e-mail that arrives in my Inbox, trying to sell me something. In fact it’s worse than spam, because it actively seeks to persuade me–sometimes bribe me–to sell something on their behalf! Can you imagine how affronted you were if your Viagra spam not only tried to persuade you that you were impotent and in need of assistance but also wanted you to sell it to your friends? What kind of person would you be if you took up the opportunity to bring up sexual problems at every party you subsequently attended? That’s the kind of person that PR people seem to think I am.
I’m going to be putting up a page on my site soon for people who want to send me press releases, and it’s going to say all of this on it. Hopefully people will start to get the message that–for me at least–their attentions just simply aren’t wanted. If you feel the same way, then perhaps it’s time to let them know in public that your culture isn’t here for the benefit of their clients and that your voice is not for sale.
- Lovely “Dance Dance” David Heinemeier Hansson (Revolution) post about the rhetoric that people use about ‘the real world’ “The Real World must be a truly depressing place to live. It’s apparently a realm where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose.”
- Fascinating Pasta & Vinegar post about user research on Halo The best thing about this post is how much of the success of the game is predicated on the topography of the landscape. Something interesting there.
- Alice Taylor spots a really bloody nice looking coffee mug All styled up like a Chemistry beaker for your more accurate mix of coffee and milk, I’m guessing.
- Another coffee/tea-cup design experiment, this time allowing you get a sense of how milky/strong your tea should be based on colour. This is nice and everything, but I think it misses a trick. Assuming for a moment you put the tea in first you need to evaluate strength immediately separately from milkiness. I propose a colour guide at the bottom to recommend appropriate strength.
- Stephen at PRBlogger has put up a big post warning PR people not to spam bloggers… I have to be honest, Stephen has done his utmost to make this (limited) situation right and I can’t thank him enough. If his post gets the attention of people in the PR industry that’ll be a really good start.
- Just watched the 1936 film ‘Things to Come’ based on HG Well’s book Wow. That was extraordinary. A celebratory song for science and progress that contains some of the most extraordinary and convincing special effects I’ve ever seen. I’m not kidding. Extraordinary.
- Insane story about a guy who sold a dime worth $1.9 million and had to fly it across the US Jason Kottke is quite right. The best line is the bit where he says that he didn’t take the dime out because it’s suspicious to stare at dimes in public.
- Another Kottke rip-off – the trailer for new Wes Anderson film, ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ I love his style and the last two films, but it looked kind of samey from the trailer.
- Meg Hourihan has a very interesting and well-researched post on what she ate when she was pregnant and why… Really genuinely interesting. I imagine the world is litigious enough that most people are now too afraid to recommend anything with very very limited risks in case they got sued by those poor unfortunate people.
- An extraordinary blog post about The Punisher who gets his face messed up and needs to go into hiding so a plastic surgeon with a stack of melanin makes him black Jaw on the floor awesome. They don’t make ludicrous madshit like this any more.
- The London Evening Standard Headline Generator Brilliant fun. Ludicrous statements at the best of times, subsequently chopped up and recontextualised.
- Weird story from Wired News: Astronomers have found a huge area of the Universe completely devoid of, well, anything… My mind leaps to terms like Necrid Expanse from Star Trek. This is because I am a dweeb.