Yesterday I wrote a about the death threats supposedly aimed at a famed female blogger. Although I still stand by my decision to claim that all such behavior is absolutely and absurdly intolerable, I might have to modify my thoughts on this particular situation.
On another note – hindsight is always 20/20. I acted quickly and from the gut and that can not be all wrong.
Feedback. Constructive negative criticism. Negative criticism. Attacks. Personal attacks. Threats. Death threats.
Some of the above are ok. Some are boarder line. Some are clearly and without any hesitation way over the line.
The line which I thought would not be crossed in “my†blogosphere clearly has been crossed. I argue day in and day out that “my†blogosphere is a self cleansing community, and that deconstructive negative behavior is cleansed out of all aspects of it.
Clearly, I was painfully wrong.
Death threats in blog dialogue have recently had a massive negative impact on a prominent member of the blogosphere. And, to make things even scarier, they seem to originate from another group (!) of prominent blogosphere members(!).
Scoble said in the comments to the above linked post that one should strive to add light to the world through blogs. IBM in their blog policy suggests that you should add value with your blog interaction.
But mom said it best. “If you have nothing good to say, keep your mouth shut.â€
I have written several blog posts and then updated them after posting. In fact, some posts have been updated three or four times before I let them go. Today, however, is the last time.
The reason is Engadget and Gizmodo. As a real gadget-lover, I would never let a day go by without reading anything and everything they publish. That being said - they engage in something horribly annoying: they modify almost all of their posts. This means that my Bloglines subscriptions are constantly doped by the fake-new gadget posts.
Please, get it right the first time. Or think of another way of updating the posts - like adding a comment and ensuring that your own comments always show up first. Due to constantly forcing me to rescan posts, Engadget & Gizmodo are actually the only two Bloglines subscriptions that take more time to consume via subscription than via straight website visiting, and that is not right
NIKI received the first Airbus A319 featuring the new cabin
The great title is what inspired me to read on; no “Press Release†or “For Immediate Release†as headings here. I was truly interested in reading on about what this new cabin looks like, and to see some great imagery, possibly a movie about it all.
But no. I am presented with one tiny picture of the overhead bins, and nothing else. Not even a link to more media! Listen, no one will read the whole thing. But if you have rich media, they will stay!
I have a hard time finding motivation for this activity, but I am guessing that Justin sees some value. If nothing else, he is clearly getting a lot of attention. Good for him.
Will this kind of transparency ever make it into the corporate world?
God, I hope not.
A colleague noted, and I agreed, that sometimes when we shop in a store and are looking for something basic, like soap, it is calming to see a white box with four black letter spelling “SOAPâ€. Nothing else, no happy people, no free butterfly, no clean hands. Just “SOAPâ€.
I couldn’t really stop thinking about it, and then I started reading “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be†by Paul Arden. (Interesting note: the Swedish translation of this book has messed up several key points. Most notably, the subtitle in English is “The world’s best selling book by Paul Ardenâ€. In Swedish, the subtitle reads (translated by me) “A best selling book by Paul Ardenâ€. Talk about missing the point.)
Anyways – a part of the book instructs us to “find the positive, and exaggerate itâ€. At first, I felt that this statement contradicted my conclusion about how wonderful the “SOAPâ€-box is.
Now I am not so sure.
Now I wonder if exaggerating the best part of a box of soap is to convey that it is “SOAP†or to show images of clean hands, flying butterflies and smiling young gorgeous couples.
I am sitting in a seminar room here in Stockholm waiting for a presentation about the new sponsored search platform. A guy named Gulshan Verma who is a Directory of Product Marketing at Yahoo Search Marketing. Ill try to do this quickly and real time.
OK - descent presentation. Took a bit more than an hour. In English, from someone who know about the system. The Panama platform should probably not be put down solely because it is a copy of the Adwords system. The Adwords system is good, so a copy is probably a bit better, right? I think that Yahoo’s big issue here in Sweden is more about driving traffic to their web properties.
I had a good discussion with a friend and colleague about what is “hot right now”. It was difficult not to answer “Twitter” immediately. His next question - “what is it good for” - is not as easy to answer. Particularly if you see it from a corporate communications perspective. Sure, informing family or friends about the way your day is unfolding is easy and cool with Twitter, but is there anything else? It has been argued (by me among others) that communications trends, tools and services always start in B2C, then B2B, to finally end up in corporate communications - but not always. We are very early with discussing corporate implementations here, but that is what is so exciting.
Lets break it down: what type of corporate communications target groups could benifit from Twitter?
Financial analysts? Probably not - companies could not use Twitter to disclose anything, and a financial analyst is probably not interested the information that companies can Twitter.
Journalists? Possibly - if nothing else to write a story about a company using Twitter. But if a journalist is able to subscribe to Twitter feeds from 25 high level corporate executives, I am guessing that there would be very little need to hunt articles. They would come by themselves.
Top students? Absolutely. In fact, I yesterday had a discussion with a colleague about the apparent crisis withing the IT field here in Sweden. The crisis is caused by a lack of talent, and dropping numbers in IT related school programs. He believed that a large part of the problem is the fact that high school kids think that a web or software developer sits and writes code all day. Imagine if 10 exciting web or software developers used Twitter to describe their days, and schools around the country encouraged students to subscribe.
So can a Twitter account be useful for an information department? Absolutely - you just need to know your stakeholders.
Update: Fox News seems to know their stakeholders - they have an official Twitter feed. They even integrated compacted URLs to ensure that we can get more information. Genious. Putting the information where the target group is, and making it easy to get more information, and to visit the Fox News web. Where, in turn, there is lots of related information. I can not say that I like Fox News, but right now they are on top of it. Textbook.
I was glad to see that due to the Flickr integration, lots more of my Flickr pictures were viewed. Same can be said about the Twitter integration to the right here - simply amazing. If I was able to blog from YouTube (never seems to work) I would clearly have some amazing content-interlacing-power.
But there are some negatives as well. Primarily that the load time of the page is dramatically increased. I wonder how many people go crazy waiting for it to finish loading. In the best of worlds those people start subscribing instead - ensuring that they are free from any plugins and lagging load times.
This should be a happy middle ground though - Twitter and Flickr is good enough. Until something else cool shows up…
Update: I simply could not stand it. So I removed the Twitter sidebar widget. When they shape up, I will return it.
As I read this mornings paper, I, again, took particular note of the residential advertisement section. It is interesting to note how different the approach is form different companies. Some cram massive amounts of ads into the space, others use the same space to portray their real estate in a more detailed fashion. Some have made a real effort to look and feel “premiumâ€, while others seem to be content with being plain.
With the real estate market changing as it is today, it is going to be interesting to see what happens next. Will the cram-as-many-as-possible people change, or will the make-it-look-expensive people change?
I am guessing that it depends heavily on what type of real estate is generally available for sale in a recession – I simply do not know. But if what I saw today is an indicator at all, the high end and high middle types of houses and apartments are being reduced in numbers.
The effect of this is interesting: we have two totally different approaches to marketing an apartment or house in the paper, and they are marketing the same type of apartment or house. Shooting off my hip I don’t like the premium look and feel coupled with low en housing – I almost feel fooled.
If you market premium, if you communicate class and avant garde, I think it is vital to let the product live up to your hype. If you can’t, create an alternative brand or something and let them deal with the lower end segment. Toyota did it the other way with Lexus, but clearly they have benefited by having separate brands for separate segments.
After spending the better part of a day creating a beautiful new layout for my blog, I started thinking about my blog consumption behavior. Of the blogs I consume on a daily basis (of which there might be around 40), I visit the actual site only once or twice a week. So, when the blogs I consume get a nifty new layout, I am not affected - Bloglines (and xml in general) does a good job separating content and style.
Now, I thought, I am at least doing this for myself. When I go to create new entries or moderate comments, I will get to see the new site. But even this has started to change. At work, I use the Live Writer service for desktop post creation and publishing, and this post is being written using Journaler on my Mac. If I get to trusting this service I probably will rarely ever look at my blog.
Now, I have found some flaws in desktop blog publishing. The first is the lack of integration against plugins, in my case primarily Ultimate Tag Warrior. All these tools seem to be focused solely on the old fashioned categorization system. It seems like the Live Writer is able to, with some modifications, adapt to UTW - but I need my Mac to do it as well.
Now, lets see what happens when I publish…
Seth Godin, the uber-marketer, argued that it is more often than not what you say rather than how you say it that makes the difference between success and failure. In some cases, I probably agree, but not in the one he bases his example on.
He listened to an old live Neil Young recording, and noted the following: “it’s interesting to note how much more excited and open the crowd is to songs they’ve heard before. Even some of the songs that ended up becoming classics got a tepid reaction because they were unknown at the time”. He continues “on songs that aren’t working so well, you will hear Neil try harder, play louder, raise his voice and strain to make an impact. It doesn’t work. At all.”
OK, but how do those at the time unknown songs become well known? Possibly by Neil constantly trying harder, selling them more, selling them more often, right?
If you have a product you are proud of, remember that you need to say the right things. But you also must say them in the right manor. In the right place. At the right time.
It seems like there are new trends and new behaviors showing up each day. All in some way improve or aid communication, but a vast majority will fade away and disappear without much mark left on the communications community. So, if you as a company want to be an early adaptor but minimize the risk for getting burned on time and money invested in short lived trends, what do you do?
This is a perfect example, in my opinion, of where you need to identify and encourage private web activities by employees. A large corporation cannot easily simply set up a Twitter account and start seeing what it can do – but a single employee can. And if you identify that one employee, or group of employees, they can be an excellent focus group.
One of the major issues with any testing of new trends is to find a measurable ROI in one way or another. In some cases, the value appears by being the first. (The Sun press conference in Second Life comes to mind.) But very rarely will the value be that simple to extract. You need to get a clear picture of what you can get out of the tool/trend/system. The way Starwood Hotels is using Second Life as a huge focus group for new hotels is a good example of intelligent usage of a new trend. So is Starbucks’ usage of YouTube.
My point here is this: the corporate communications plans for any company should include provisions for dealing with new and fast moving online communications tools. And companies should take charge to ensure that they are not left in the dust when things happen.
Clearly, the set of tools available to corporate communicators is immensely bigger today than 10 years ago. Ignoring that fact and sticking to dreadfully boring press releases sent to the regular list of journalists as your only communications activity should be criminalized.
It started out by me being caught up in all the “Twitter” hype. I wanted my own account. So, I created it. Now, I wanted to integrate it all with my Wordpress blog, but the plugin that I believed in needed version 2.1, while I only had 2.0.
So, I updated my Wordpress.
And then I realized that it would be neat with a new look and feel, and really liked this presentation. And now you can also see that in the right hand column, there is a “What I’m Doing” heading under which my Twitter feed is published always. Creating a twitter post is naturally much easier than creating a regular blog post, so those might become more frequent. I have gone as far as installing a Twitter Widget on my Mac as well - so I can publish immediately from my desktop.
OK - a supposedly high level Guantanamo detainee has accepted blame for a series of horrible world events including planning 9/11, personally beheading journalist Daniel Pearl and planning to blow up Big Ben in London.
Let me add a couple of words to that paragraph that dramatically changes its impact:
OK - a supposedly high level Guantanamo detainee has after years of living without basic human rights in solitary confinement, constant questioning, possible physical torture, very likely exposure to mental torture accepted blame for a series of horrible world events including planning 9/11, personally beheading journalist Daniel Pearl and planning to blow up Big Ben in London.
Is it not extremely ignorant to believe at face value a single word this person says? I really think so. Is he guilty of something? Sure - no doubt in my mind. But if he, and his confession, are used to “close the case” on 9/11, I think we are simply fooling ourselves.
I have had some challenges with motivating journalistic presence in tomorrow’s web world. I see things such as press releases directly published in news aggregators, news makers communicating directly with the public not via a journalists etc. and feel that journalists are a thing of the past.
Some behavior recently has supported this: the sometimes disturbingly off target attacks against bloggers (notably against Carl Bildt here in Sweden) have been seen by me as death twitches.
A meeting I had today at work has made me think again.
I started arguing my point of view with a colleague, who happens to be an accomplished journalist, and he didn’t really agree. No surprise there. But he let me finish my train of thought, and I felt especially sure of myself when I discussed the citizen journalism events that took place after the London bombings.
Journalists can’t always be there, I argued, but citizens always are. So journalists won’t be needed. (I started saying the same thing about photographers, but was not as sure of myself there.)
Now, my colleague agreed. It is not possible for a journalist to be present with immediate facts and thoughts. But the day after, when things have settled, the journalist is the one who does what he or she is good at. Detective work. Analysis. Puzzling together of spread facts. There is clearly a huge amount of added value of the work created by a journalist with all his or her attributes and talent that simply is not possible for a blogging engineer or marketer to create.
So, my conclusion is this: journalists will always be needed. Even if we only use their work as one view on a story we are trying to grasp, the work created by a professional journalist is worth lots.
According to Wikipedia, the Wright brothers flew their first powered flight in 1903. That is 104 years ago, roughly. Halfway between now and then, if my math serves me correctly, was 1955.
Guess what aircraft started being manufactured in 1955? You guessed it - the SAAB Draken seen here in Austrian celebratory colors. Is this amazing, or what? This aircraft simply looks stunningly modern even today. Does that mean that we in the first half of human powered flight got way more than halfway in the development up to date?
My guess is probably not. The development since the Draken is not as easy to spot as the difference between the Wright Flyer 1 and the SAAB Draken. I am thinking of items such as stealth technology, fly-by-wire, and CAD-design.
I wonder if the IT-development will follow the same curve. Will be in a couple of years see the development take place more behind the scenes? Will the development slow down on the surface?
Oh, this is posted directly from Flickr. Cool, huh?
I have been doing a lot of searching lately, and found a couple of interesting things. I am one who loves the long tail, so I have always been one to suggest to companies that “lets get everything we can indexed”. One of the holy grails of this is to get search results indexed. I have never been able to find an ethically un-challenged way to do this, and in addition there has rarely been any real value in these pages, so I more than often gave up.
Lately, however, I have found that there are more and more search results from Swedish websites in Google search result pages. But there are some odd things: first of all, the websites are respectable. Publications such as ICA Kuriren, Uppsala Nya Tidning, Sundsvalls Tidning, and Dalademokraten. The second odd thing is this: when you select any of the indexed search results from a Google search result page, there is a massive Google Adsense ad right in front of you. Highly spammy, in my humble opinion. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, the Adsense account seems to be the same on all pages.
To see the pages I am talking about, try one of the following Google searches:
site:icakuriren.se inurl:harkiv
site:unt.se inurl:harkiv
site:allehanda.se inurl:harkiv
Some of the indexed search result pages are somewhat valuable, but that seems to be more chance than anything else. I believe that this is someone being very smart - I see somewhere north of 1 million pages indexed. With descent domains, that someone is making a killing on these Adsense ads. I wonder if the companies are aware…
Update: I found the company responsible. Not much detective work - there was a link from the bottom of each of these pages. It is a company called “Hermes Publications AB” - situated right here in Stockholm. They offer this service proudly on their website - and I basically can not believe it. They claim that they offer something that will make their clients some money, and increase their traffic. I have issues with this for several reasons:
Then again, this might be nothing other than envy. The company in question was last year registered at an address in a suburb, and today list their address on the possibly most high end street in all of Stockholm…
Update 2: Finally someone else gets upset. He seems to see the scam more from a newspaper-angle, with the credibility of the newspaper as the biggest potential loser. I still must focus on the fact that this company somehow has managed to through clever code expose their Adsense ads on millions and millions of pages within credible sites.
I really enjoyed RegisterFly. Danny showed me the company when we were playing around with bulk domain purchases back in the day. We always wondered what the catch was - how can they sell domains for 99 cents?
Well, now we know. They were basically a bogus company who made it impossible to even think their name without going nuts. They arent doing all that well anymore… and I am not complaining. A couple descent domains of mine went down with that ship.
We have a company similar to RegisterFly here in Europe. Active24 - but they are even worse. The make it impossible to cancel services, they do not answer customer support emails, they have crappy service on the phone. My suggestion is this: never ever use Active24 for any web services. Your money is spent better somwhere else. So is your time and sanity.
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