A connection between Rupert Murdoch and Nancy Grace?

In the course of working on a blog post that will tangentially mention Nancy Grace, I ran across this summary of her broadcasting work. Now I am no fan of Nancy Grace, but the beginning of the post was too much, even for me:

Her fans

Bored, overweight CSI watchers who live their lives in their mobile homes fascinated with murder and crime and imagining themselves to be crime-solving geniuses. I guarantee that all of these people have a Myspace page, live in a rural area, and are used to being the smartest person in their little group of friends, maybe even in the whole trailer park. They all want to write a book and have sent several hundred short-story manuscripts to every magazine in their 3 year-old copy of Writer's Market. They have limited experience with violence, limited grasp of how murder investigations work, and so have romanticized it in their little imaginations. Basically murder is for them the equivalent of a soap opera, something they can involve themselves in vicariously and forget how narrow and empty their lives and their futures are.

Now the funny part about this is that Nancy Grace, part of the CNN empire, is linked with MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch - who also owns Fox News Channel, a CNN competitor.

And the sad part of this is the perception of MySpace users as white rural uncool trailer trash. Now I happen to have a MySpace page - and I do NOT live in a rural area.

Ironically, part of this perception is diametrically opposed to something that I read in a Broadstuff post today, which I previuously cited for another reason. The Broadstuff post quotes from GigaOM:

In 2007, [Danah] Boyd wrote an essay that said her research showed Facebook users were primarily white and from middle-class or more affluent households and neighborhoods, while MySpace users were more likely to be from immigrant or working-class families and households....

Boyd has since expanded her thoughts into a book chapter, slated to be published at some future time. The draft includes a quote from a self-conscious teen at a multi-racial school outside of Boston:

It’s not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I’m not really into racism, but I think that MySpace is now more like ghetto or whatever.

And it's not just Boyd. The noted scientific publication Stuff White People Like has also documented this:

For a brief period of time, MySpace was the site where everyone kept their profile and managed their friendships. But soon, the service began to attract fake profiles, the wrong kind of white people, and struggling musicians. In real world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check cashing store, a TGIFridays, and a housing project. All which strike fear in the hearts of white people.

White people were nervous but had nowhere else to go. Then Facebook came along and offered advanced privacy settings, closed networks, and a clean interface. In respective real world terms, these features are analogous to an apartment or house with a security system/doorman, an alumni dinner, and a homeowners association that protects the aesthetics of the neighborhood. In spite of these advances, some white people still clung to their old MySpace accounts. That was until they learned that Facebook started, like so many things beloved by white people, at Harvard.

Within a matter of months, MySpace had gone from a virtual utopia to Digital Detroit, where only minorities and indie bands remain.

So who do you believe? Is MySpace a hangout for uncool white trailer trash, or is MySpace a hangout for uncool brown ghetto trash?

Frankly, I don't believe either of these theories. Why not? I have my reasons.

(singing) Barbecue sauce...with some chips and salsa!

A handy tip from AndroidGuys - some Chili's locations have a special Foursquare promotion.

Participating locations are now offering up free Chips & Salsa when guests check in using Foursquare.

Then again, the Consumerist is not impressed:

I've dined on Chili's chips and salsa many times and can wholly vouch that they are totally worth the Foursquare-discounted price of free.

Let's forget for a moment that just about every other restaurant that offers chips and salsa does so gratis without making you annoy your friends with a status update. Bravo, Chili's.

Coupon clippers will tell you that the key to intelligently using coupons is to only use them to buy products that you would buy WITHOUT the coupon. So if you have a hankering for chips and salsa, AND if you want to get it from Chili's, AND if you're a Foursquare member (over 6 billion people aren't)...have at it.

Grabbing the mrontemp Ontario Emperor crowd - Mahree Bok, cursor freeze, and bad photos

I check my analytics for the Empoprises series of blogs on a semi-regular basis, looking at trends, and looking for things to improve.

However, as some of you know, the Empoprises blogs were not the first blogs that I ever created. I created a number of blogs under my old pseudonym, Ontario Emperor.

I hadn't looked at the Ontario Emperor analytics in some time, but earlier this week I checked the analytics for my last big Ontario Emperor blog, mrontemp.

And I discovered something that is either really good or really bad, depending upon how you look at it.

Despite the fact that I have not posted to that blog in over a year, my mrontemp blog is more popular than most of my Empoprises blogs.

Ouch.

So how do I get the mrontemp readers over to Empoprises? Well, one way is to respond to those people who took the time to leave comments on the mrontemp blog posts. When I quit blogging as Ontario Emperor, I put all of those blogs in comment moderation mode. Because of this, I found that I had over 200 comments to moderate at mrontemp. I ignored all of the anonymous comments (which seemed to be Cialis ads and the like), and found a grand total of 3 comments that deserved responses.

One comment was made at my July 2007 post Some stuff about cursor freeze. In January 2010, Mike Hobart asked:

My sister got a new laptop and it worked great for the first day. Then it crashed and now it crawls ever-so-slowly, the cursor freezes and it won't do System Restore. #Sigh# Why does this happen so often? Have we offended the gods somehow?

I responded:

Mike, sorry for the late response, but I quit blogging at this blog some time ago and only came back to moderate the comments. After I wrote this post I bought a new computer which worked fine for a few months, then it suffered a hard disk crash. Luckily this computer (not a Compaq computer, an HP computer) was covered under warranty, so I shipped the computer to HP and they replaced the disk. Things have been fine since. Obviously a lot of time has passed since you wrote your comment, but I hope your sister contacted the original manufacturer and took care of things.

The next comment that deserved a response was posted at my February 2008 post When the semi-fictional character Mahree Bok is bigger than all of the presidential candidates combined. ChrmdRcks20 asked:

Hello. I was wondering if you had found any new information about the real Mahree Bok, Carrie. It's so odd that in the age of internet, there is little to no information about her. The Color of Friendship was a pretty successful movie, and still no one has been able to find information about what happened to the real person that was represented in the movie.

I hope you have found more information about her. If so, would you mind creating another quick blog about it possibly?

I replied:

I apologize for the late response. I quit blogging in this particular blog over a year ago, and just returned to moderate comments. I haven't returned to the topic of Mahree or Carrie, so Piper's comments above are probably the best information available at this time.

Piper, by the way, is Piper Dellums, who should know a little bit about the topic.

On to my third post, from later in Febuary 2008. It was a picture post entitled My Cracker Jack prize. Ernest asked:

Could you take a shittier picture for me? Please?

You have to go here to see my complete response. (Short version: Ernest was right.)

If you want to know more about these esteemed commenters, see Mike Hobart's Tasmania blog. ChrmdRcks20 apparently doesn't have a blog, and Ernest did not share his Blogger profile.

Will Microsoft evolve again to adapt to the new consumer market?

Microsoft should have failed years ago. After all, most of the companies that were founded at that time either did fail, or became part of other companies.

And, as we know, Microsoft has done so many stupid things, and missed so many boats, in its 30+ year history.

One example - remember how Microsoft completely missed the boat on graphical user interfaces, yielding the high ground to Mac while maintaining DOS as its primary operating system? Oh yeah, they did come up with this kluge called "Windows" that resided over DOS. Whatever became of Windows, anyway?

Another example - remember how Microsoft completely missed the boat on the Internet, yielding the high ground to Netscape while pretty much ignoring the Internet? Whatever happened to Microsoft and the Internet, anyway?

I happened to be writing this post before Apple's press conference (The Revision), realizing that you won't see it until after the world has entirely changed (or maybe not). But the fact remains that when people talk about innovation, they're more likely to mention Apple before they mention Microsoft.

Yet Microsoft has been innovating all along, as those two examples show. Throughout its entire history, Microsoft has demonstrated a history of adapting to a changing market. Perhaps they're sometimes a bit slow at adapting, but they always adapt - with a (literal) vengeance.

Steven Hodson has noted that Microsoft may need to adapt again:

While the corporate IT world hasn’t changed in regards for its desire for a long and stable upgrade cycle the consumer world is changing. It is changing because of the effect of the Web and how rapidly it changes. After all look at how fast things like Facebook and Twitter have taken hold and affected not only the Web but also the software and hardware we use....

But Microsoft doesn’t do short release cycles because for them everything has to go by a timetable that their corporate customers can count on. It is because of this ever increasing sharp division between corporate and consumer needs that Microsoft needs to totally rethink how is separates its different divisions in relation to the targeted end user needs.

Now Hodson has talked about Microsoft and the consumer market before. For example, here's an earlier comment:

I will agree that for most of the company’s past it has been extremely single minded and that in the area of the consumer marketplace they have made a lot of mistakes. At the same time Microsoft has also shown that when it needs to make a change it can do it with amazing speed. We saw this when Bill Gates belatedly realize the mistake the company had made in its estimation of the importance of the Internet.

Unfortunately as Microsoft was shifting gears they were also came at it with their typical corporate-centric mindset and this cost them a lot of consumer, and developer, goodwill.

Yet I believe (and I think Hodson would agree) that it's more than likely that Microsoft WILL adapt, and will adopt a consumer software release model that takes the new realities into account.

Who knows - maybe five years from now the European Union will try to force Microsoft to REDUCE its number of product revisions, just to keep the playing field "level."

Results from The Revision - we're sorry and we'll make it up, but you're really really stupid

OK, that was fun.

After Apple announced that they were going to hold a press conference on the iPhone 4, I wrote The Revision on Wednesday, not only comparing the upcoming event to LeBron James' "The Decision" TV event, but also noting the following:

...there's going to be a lot of speculation over the next few days. I could go ahead and speculate myself, since my guesses will be just as uninformed as everyone else's guesses. Maybe Woz will do a dance routine. I don't know.

The following day (Thursday), Glen Campbell conducted a FriendFeed survey to see what we thought would happen.

Apple's iPhone Press Conference #1: Will Steve Jobs be in attendance? (yes/no only)

I said no.

Apple's iPhone Press Conference #2: Will Apple issue a recall for all iPhones? (yes/no only)

I (and everyone else) said no.

Apple's iPhone Press Conference #3: Will Apple give free Bumpers for all current and future iPhone 4 purchasers? (yes/no only)

I said yes.

So, for the record, I had a 66.7% success rate on Glen's first three questions (the fourth was open-ended).

The answer that I missed had to do with whether or not Steve Jobs would be there. I guess some can argue with hindsight that he HAD to be there, but that's based on the message that Apple wanted to give.

I didn't hear the event itself (I confess that this post was staged because I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to tune in), but I've read coverage from ReadWriteWeb, the New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Inquisitr, and AppleInsider.

Of those posts, the New York Times piece appears to have the blow-by-blow of what happened and when. It appears that Apple started with the Jonathan Mann music video (which I previously shared in my Empoprise-MU music blog after Jesse Stay shared a TechCrunch post). Then Steve Jobs appeared and talked about making the users happy. In essence, the two themes of the press conference had already been outlined:

• We're sorry for what happened to our customers.


• Our customers are very important to us.


• Our customers, and everyone else, are a bunch of bozos.

The bozo implication comes because (according to Jobs) all smartphones have this problem, only 0.55 percent of iPhone buyers have complained, and the return rate for the iPhone4 is 1.7 percent - much lower than the 6 percent return rate for the iPhone3GS.

There was another comparison of the two phones, and it's either a positive or negative depending upon how you spin it.

The Inquisitr showed a picture of Apple's spin - a slide that stated:

< 1

Additional calls dropped per 100 calls
compared to iPhone 3GS

But the headline writer for AppleInsider saw it differently:

Apple admits iPhone 4 drops more calls than iPhone 3GS

It all depends on how you spin things.

After implicitly calling us a bunch of bozos (“This has been blown so out of proportion that it is incredible.”), Jobs then detailed what Apple will do. According to the Times:

Mr. Jobs notes that the company has already released a software update that fixes the display of signal strength.

Second, a lot of people told us the bumper solves the problem… So every iPhone user will get a free case. The company will give refunds to those who already bought one. Apple will revisit this in September to see if there is a better approach.

“We can’t make enough bumpers, so we will source other cases, and users will be able to choose which one. People can apply on the Web site.”

Those who are still not happy can return their phones for a refund, no restocking fees. “We are going to take care of everyone.”

John Markoff interjected a comment into the Times coverage:

Basically a Harvard Business School tutorial on how to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Theme song for the event? Brian Kramer suggests Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

Jobs, Tim Cook, and hardware engineer Bob Mansfield took questions, and then the event ended.

Apparently a lot happened in that nearly 90 minute session, so you can take out of it whatever you want. TechCrunch has a sufficiently large readership that ensures that you can get a wide cross-section of comments - especially when three different TechCrunch writers cover the press conference. Mark was not impressed with Apple:

We have no fix, it drops more calls with the new genius antenna, we will give you a 1 $ piece of plastic to prevent you from noticing.

Mark then went to express his displeasure. But someone who started their name with a lower case i felt differently:

Few days back one of the Microsoft execs said, "iPhone4 is Apple's Vista"! How shameless!
3 million iPhone4s sold in 3 weeks, even after knowing certain issue ... and now even the issue will be fixed.
And that's no joking matter... while Vista CDs are headed to the landfill!

So now The Revision is over - and thankfully, Jim Gray didn't conduct the interview. I couldn't reliably predict what Apple would do during the press conference (sure I said that there would be no recall, but no one in Glen Campbell's unscientific poll thought there would be one). However, I think I know what's going to happen next.

First, there will be a lot of news when Apple or whoever is completely swamped by requests for bumper cases.

Second, everyone will forget about the whole thing and we'll move on to next week's topic.

NOTE TO SELF DO NOT PUBLISH YET The Revision - Apple iPhone4 Announcement

OPERATION SCOOP NOTE TO SELF LEAVE IN DRAFT MODE UNTIL ALL EDITS HAVE BEEN MADE!!! VERY IMPORTANT!!!

Well, it's official. In the long-awaited press conference today, "The Revision,"

Steve Jobs announced that
Tim Cook announced that
Jerry Seinfeld announced that
John Sculley announced that

there is no problem with the iPhone4.
"We goofed."
Apple will discount the antenna-protecting bumpers to 99 cents.
Apple will give the antenna-protecting bumpers away for free.
REACT has raided the homes of everyone at the press conference to located leaked information.
Verizon is now the exclusive iPhone provider in the United States.
Apple is releasing the iPhone5, which corrects the problem. Existing users can upgrade for free $99 $199.
Apple is recalling all iPhone4s.
Steve Jobs was eaten by wolves, just like Gerald Ford was.

Three hours until The Revision

The Apple press conference regarding the iPhone4 - the Revision - is now three hours away.

I may or may not catch the news when it happens, but since I've been relying on eSarcasm for my coverage, I suggest that you do so also. They already have the scoop.

Sources close to Apple have confirmed the company is working feverishly on an external, head-mounted antenna – dubbed the “Mantenna”....

More here.

Now if you doubt that eSarcasm has the story right, you probably won't get the real answer at 10:00 PDT on the dot. You see, I'm sure that Jim Gray is one of the invited journalists to the event, and he has to get through several minutes of questions first, including questions about Steve Jobs' liver, Steve Wozniak's dancing, and Tim Cook's beer-making brother Jim. (Embarrassed silence.)

On a more serious note, Dave Winer has provided some perspective on this:

I've been lucky to be in the middle of a number of Internet shitstorms in my life. They've been absolutely surreal, unfair, cruel. No one will listen to your side of the story. People you thought were friends join the pile-on. Etc etc. And then it passes, and eventually you go back to life as it was.

Winer then states that our perception of Apple is changing. I'm not sure if this is truly the moment when it is changing - "Lemmings" didn't go over that well - but Winer's been in the public eye longer than I have so he might be right.

I think what we're seeing is Apple's charm wearing off. The Reality Distortion Field bubble is about to burst. Their run as the Exceptional Company is about to end. And they're going to be the last ones to figure it out. And it's going to be the ugliest shitstorm you've ever seen.

Not #firstworldproblems

I belatedly discovered the hashtag #firstworldproblems, which is used to refer to things that are unique to completely developed nations, and that bear no relevance to the majority of the world's population. Via FriendFeed, I contributed a few of my own. One example:

In our Sunday School room, we had to put a sign on the coffeemaker warning people not to unplug it. If it's unplugged, the programming is lost.

It's a funny, silly game, but it proves a point. See if you can identify the major problem with this business plan. I made it up, but there are a lot like it out there.

The Powalarm(tm) addresses a basic human need that is found worldwide, thus enlarging the potential target market to billions of people. Because of extremely low manufacturing costs, it can be sold at an economical price, thus ensuring a large target market.

The Powalarm(tm) will be sold via the Internet and can be purchased with a credit card.

Perhaps many of us, when we read the last sentence, don't initially see the problem. Based upon our own personal experience, we see no problem with using the Internet to buy something (there is a 99.999% chance that if you are reading this post, you have Internet access), and many of us have credit cards or debit cards or Paypal or something that will allow us to make online purchases.

But that's not the case everywhere. Rob Salkowitz:

Many countries in Africa are among the world leaders in mobile banking, and growing numbers of Africans are becoming accustomed to using their ubiquitous mobile phones as payment and credit systems. Unfortunately, for consumers and businesses looking to participate in global e-commerce, the convenience ends at the border.

Part of the problem is indigenous. Most African banks are constrained by complex and opaque regulations governing foreign exchange transactions, and the majority of Africans do not have formal accounts in any case. Local money changers are not much help when it comes to bits and bytes.

In addition to these regulatory and infrastructure problems, there is a problem of perception when it comes to doing business in Africa. Salkowitz addresses this by noting that one country is responsible for 65% of all cybercrime. That country? The United States. (Nigeria is at 8%.)

Because of all of this, what's it like for Africans who want to purchase goods online? Not pretty.

Despite the low actual risk, perceptions and perhaps prejudices still predominate. Western-based merchants like eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) and Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) are leery of shipping to most African countries. At best, the process involves costs and complexities foreign to customers elsewhere in the world. Some email systems preemptively ban IP addresses originating from countries like Nigeria purely on the basis of their spammy reputations, outraging legitimate businesses, citizens, academics, and other honest parties.

PayPal's reputation -- at least among those I’ve spoken to -- is the worst. "They make you wait forever, and that’s the best possible outcome," said one South African entrepreneur last month. "If there’s ever a complaint or dispute, they automatically assume the African is at fault and you won't get paid at all."

Salkowitz links to a post from the African blogger Hash that describes the situation:

I haven’t been able to use PayPal for two months. I just got profiled for extra security measures on Facebook. I can’t make certain purchases from Africa. Few organizations ship goods to me here.

Let’s be honest; living in Africa, or being African, gives you a certain unwelcome aroma in the eyes of global corporations. Frankly, we’re just not trustworthy....

This isn’t new to any of us who live, or spend a great deal of time, in Africa. You’re blacklisted, given extra screening, and generally treated like a second-rate human. You’re not trusted, and you’re not worth the time to figure out if you can be trusted.

Frankly, as a total continent-wide user base, we just don’t make enough of a blip on the radar to be worth their time. There’s not enough money here in their minds, there is lower-hanging fruit elsewhere with a lot more spending history – and therefore power.

(Oh, and if you're curious about Hash's views, go to the post and check out the title of his blog.)

But Hash has outlined two possible solutions:

First, we in Africa come up with our own payment and business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.

Second, the global corporates wake up and realize that there is quite a bit of spending power and money to be made in Africa, just like the mobile operators found out in the 90′s.

For me, I think the first scenario is more likely.

There's more to biometrics than David Caruso

Yes, I know that I just published a post that states that biometrics isn't quite as glamorous as TV makes it out to be.

But perhaps this headline will catch your eye: Zetes Biometric Voice Solution Provides ROI in 6 Months to European Lingerie Sector.

OK, what does voice biometrics have to do with lingerie? And was Barry White involved? No, he wasn't:

Zetes’s voice solution 3iV Crystal is used for automating the picking and cross-docking processes at VFB Lingerie Europe's main warehouse in Igualada, Spain, which has an area of 8,000m2. All the company’s multinational brands are distributed from there. The Igualada facility can send out anything from 15,000 items a day to 25,000 at its busiest times.

3iV Crystal was integrated directly into the warehouse management system already used by VFB Lingerie Europe (Manhattan WMOS), and did not require any middleware. Zetes also adapted its voice solution to meet the company’s needs. Since the company has a wide range of products and a high volume of information, Zetes customised the voice system so that the company could conduct picking and cross docking tasks using voice technology. The system performs various tasks simultaneously, and manages all shipments, taking into account styles, sizes, colours, etc, and obtaining real-time information whenever required.

So has voice paid off?

VFB Lingerie Europe began working with the Zetes voice system in September 2009. Now, having used it for only 6 months, the company has already recouped its investment and gained measurable benefits. Toni Solé, IT Manager of VFB Lingerie Europe, says: “In just six months, our initial expectations have been fulfilled. Zetes and its voice solution have enabled us to increase productivity by around 20%, and we can now offer a faster, more efficient service to various companies without any errors, unlike the previous paper-based system, where errors were inevitable due to the wide variety of products we handle.”

Now for those who are familiar with what I do for a living, it's important to note what this particular Zetes solution is, and what it is not. Using the terminology adopted by Wikipedia, this is speech recognition, not speaker recognition:

There is a difference between speaker recognition (recognizing who is speaking) and speech recognition (recognizing what is being said). These two terms are frequently confused, as is voice recognition. Voice recognition is combination of the two where it uses learned aspects of a speakers voice to determine what is being said - such a system cannot recognise speech from random speakers very accurately, but it can reach high accuracy for individual voices it has been trained with. In addition, there is a difference between the act of authentication (commonly referred to as speaker verification or speaker authentication) and identification.

So this particular Zetes solution can identify what is being said about lingerie, but cannot identify who is saying it. Cheating spouses can breathe easier, I guess.

P.S. It looks like I beat Ravi Das to this story!

P.P.S. FCC DISCLOSURE: My employer has done business with Zetes in the past. However, no lingerie was involved.

I'm a Barbie girl, in a geo-world...

Mashable reports that Barbie has joined Foursquare as a "celebrity Foursquare user."

Barbie, as a celebrity Foursquare user, will be using the service to fashion location-based scavenger hunts as she travels across the U.S to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York on her summer vacay. She’ll also be using Twitter (Twitter) to tweet out text, photo and video clues.

That Twitter account, incidentally, is @BarbieStyle. Now I've heard a rumor that Barbie doesn't write her own tweets, but whoever does write them is careful to stay in character:

Oh. My. Gosh. Now if only @foursquare offered more pink badges...

And there's not only the Foursquare and Twitter stuff. Mashable notes that Mattel even has a street team. Wow, street teams have certainly come a long way from their origins.

Now I'm sure that there are some people that are decrying all of this and complaining that Foursquare is now a commercial ghetto and uncool and that corporations should be banned. But I can't sympathize; after all, Foursquare has to pay for its servers somehow.

Although I have to admit that I'm not like totally stoked about Barbie on Foursquare. I guess I'm waiting for G.I. Joe to join Foursquare. Now THAT would be a TOTALLY AWESOME scavenger hunt.

How do content scrapers WITHOUT advertisements gain?

There are a number of sites that incorporate content from other sites. I quote from other sites all the time, and hedgehogs.net has quoted from me to provide content for its "Intel" channel. Now when I quote from others, and when hedgehogs.net quotes from others, a link to the original source article is provided for those who want to read the original piece.

But some sites move from "fair use" to uses that appear to have more questionable fairness.

LocalSpur seems to be on the borderline here. Yes, its repost does link to my original post. But it's hard to find my original post with all of the ads that are surrounding it.



But that's tame compared to homecomputerdeskfurnitures.com, which reposted my content way down at the bottom of a page.

But that's tame compared to cranial.com, whose repost does provide a link to my original content - after displaying a full screen ad first.

But that's lame compared to sites that lift your content without attribution. I couldn't find any good examples at the moment, but they're out there.

In most cases, those types of sites take someone's content, pass it off as their own, and surround it with a bunch of ads. In essence, those people are definitely making money off of the original writer.

But I'm mystified by people who appropriate content and DON'T surround the content with ads or redirect you to other places.

I was performing my usual ego search, and I ran across a mention of myself at a post on a WordPress blog called TechAdopter. More importantly, however, this post included every tweet that Louis Gray had tweeted during a particular day.

Now if you're going to rip off someone, it makes more sense to rip off Louis than it does to rip off me. However, there was the off-chance that Louis himself may have set up this blog for some reason, so I checked:

Louis, was http://techadopter.wordpress.com/ created by you, or is the blog just lifting your content?

The response:

Lifting. That's not me.

So I'm not sure who created this blog. But more importantly, I'm not sure what the person gained from it. The About page for the blog provides this information:

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

The blog has no ads, no redirects, nothing. So as for why the blog was created, I can only come up with a few possibilities:

Perhaps the blog was created by LoudTwitter. Every one of the posts includes the statement "Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter." There's a possibility that LoudTwitter itself created the blog as a way to draw attention to LoudTwitter's capabilities. Then again, probably not, since the TOS page contains the statement:

Loudtwitter is shutting down.

Perhaps the blog was created as a test. People create tests all the time, so maybe someone was trying out LoudTwitter (before its announced shutdown) and figured that Gray's tweet content was a good way to test it.

Or perhaps the blog is an evil scientific experiment that has sucked me in, and since I've posted about it, it's sucked you in also. Now we just have to wait for our zombie brains to receive the command from The Overlords in Brussels to start promo...wait a minute, I have a sudden urge to link to http://misstilaomg.com/ http://misstilaomg.com/ http://misstilaomg.com/ http://misstilaomg.com/ http://misstilaomg.com/ http://misstilaomg.com/ http://misstilaomg.com/

Through the eyes of a child - @SaraBAllen and Big Bird (and you)

Over the weekend, I saw this tweet from Sara Beth Allen:

How do you get people to volunteer to be an unpaid guest poster? What's the draw? #blogchat

I wasn't sure if she was trying to get people to guest post in HER, but before I asked, I figured I'd check her blog and see if we had somewhat similar interests and writing styles.

Unfortunately, Allen showed no interest in items such as English tech events on French holidays, Wisk detergent, or Paul "Lebron" Buchheit.

But I did find a post about Big Bird that began as follows:

Big Bird is a connector. He shows millions of little kids what is good in the big world. Little kids believe every word that comes from the yellow bird’s mouth. Brands need to emphasize the same kind of trust that young children place in their favorite talking animals. Our friend, Mr. Bird is the ultimate publicist.

Allen then described how her lifelong love of art was influenced by something that she saw when she was four years old - a visit by Big Bird to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Although Allen noted the influence that early childhood events has on people, she didn't really explore the "why." Why is a four year old more accepting of information than a fifty year old?

Yale University explored the development of cynicism in children:

The first part of the two–part study included 20 children each in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. The children were told very short stories in which characters made statements about the outcomes of contests that were in or against their self–interest. Children of all ages believed true statements more than clear lies. However, when characters made statements involving their self–interest about very close contests, children evaluated the statements in very different ways. Children in kindergarten were more likely to believe statements aligned with self–interest than statements going against self–interest, but by second grade they were much more savvy and they recognized that self–interest statements might not be accurate.

In the second part of the study the children were asked how self–interest might lead someone to make an incorrect statement. Children were provided with three choices: intentional deception, unintentional bias, or pure mistake. They rarely endorsed bias as the best possible explanation for being incorrect. The youngest children were more likely to think the characters were lying.

“It is not until sixth grade that children begin to endorse lies and biases as equally plausible explanations for self–interested incorrect statements,” [psychology graduate student Candice] Mills said. “Adults are clearly sensitive to all three sources of inaccuracy. How children begin to understand what it means to be biased is an open question.”

Now I'm no psychologist, and I'm no expert on the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), but what motivated Sesame Street to base an entire special around the Metropolitan Museum of Art - rather than, say, Carnegie Hall? ("Don't Eat the Music Stands" has a nice ring to it.) Did some CTW person happen to know some Metropolitan Museum person via joint membership in a Democratic Party support committee or something? Could Allen's lifetime have been shaped by the fact that two people agreed that Ed Koch had to be removed from City Hall?

But that's wild speculation (created out of whole cloth), and not the main point of this post. The fact is that certain people are more accepting of advertising messages than others, and obviously your company will do much better if people don't automatically put up barriers to your advertising messages. Perhaps Sara Allen likes Big Bird, and therefore will gravitate to things that Big Bird likes. Perhaps Robert Scoble likes Steve Jobs, and will therefore gravitate to things that Jobs endorses.

Salespeople have to deal with resistance to sales messages all the time, and Debbie Allen has explored the topic.

Resistance can take on many forms, such as questions, statements, and body language, and can mean many things. Occasionally, it is difficult to understand the exact reason for the resistance because people use excuses to cover up their true feelings. Prospects don’t like to say NO. Your prospect or customer is actually doing you a favor if they are honest and straightforward when they tell you how you let them down.

So...how do YOU overcome resistance to your message? Can you get your prospects to a state of childlike acceptance?

(Picture source)

The Revision

I own John Sculley's autobiography, and I recall that it included a statement along the lines of "marketing is theater."

Certainly you can get a lot of press out of holding an event with a capital E, and Sculley's former employer isn't the only one who knows this. Just a few days ago LeBron James, who has been scrutinized for months over his basketball future, participated in a prime time event commonly referred to as The Decision.

Now Sculley's former employer is getting into the act. All Things Digital:

Apple (AAPL) is holding an invitation-only press conference Friday July 16 at its Cupertino headquarters. In an e-mailed invitation the company offered few details beyond the event’s topic: the iPhone 4.

No more details were provided, but speculation is certainly running rampant, given how Apple iPhone 4 news has dominated the tech press since...well, for about as long as LeBron James news has dominated the sports press. Even I'm writing about the iPhone 4, most recently here.

Now some might fault Apple for holding an invitation-only press conference. However, as I noted:

...frankly just about ALL press conferences these days are invitation-only. I can't think of the last time that a business leader or politician opened themselves up to questions from ANYBODY.

The reason is obvious. If Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer or Barack Obama or Sarah Palin or whoever literally opened up the floor to EVERYONE - Helen Thomas, Sacha Baron Cohen, me - then there's a greater chance that the questioning may result in an Incorrect Answer. Now I don't know who was invited to this Apple event and who wasn't, but you can bet that Apple - just like any other entity about to be subjected to questioning - is going to make every effort to make sure that the questioners behave nicely. Perhaps there will be nice munchies. Perhaps there will be pulsating music.

And you can bet there's going to be mystery. Any leaks regarding the contents of the prepared statement will be pursued by the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team. Any Apple executive who visits a yogurt shop will be in disguise.

As a result, there's going to be a lot of speculation over the next few days. I could go ahead and speculate myself, since my guesses will be just as uninformed as everyone else's guesses. Maybe Woz will do a dance routine. I don't know.

Steven Hodson has referred to a statement from Microsoft's Michael Turner comparing the iPhone 4 to Windows Vista. And it took months, if not years, for the Vista furor to die down. So don't expect the iPhone 4 issues to be forgotten by Saturday.

I am curious, however - if Apple announces some modification to the phone, will it be referred to as "The Revision"?

Opoprtunities to question the Washington Post

A couple of comments in the Daily Kos are of interest. Here's the first:

Why stop there? Why not outsource journalism to India or Mexico? You can get a thousand chinese who scan police blotters and press releases and twitter and facebook all over the US and write stories about it for a fraction of the price of a US journalist.

And the second:

Maybe you thought you were kidding? It's been done.

The second commenter referred to Pasadena Now's use of Indians to report local events in Pasadena. (See my most recent post on this.)

But they were commenting on a Daily Kos story about how the Washington Post is trying to get original content from bloggers:

You may remember this from a few months ago -- the Washington Post wanted to create a network of local bloggers to provide content for the Washington Post. It was an unpaid gig, but bloggers would offer up a couple of paragraphs on the Post website, and readers could click through to the blogger's site to read the rest of the piece.

Well, it hasn't turned out that way....

In short, the Post has created a "workflow plan" requiring the bloggers to be on call on certain dates to provide original content, it's encouraging them to do original reporting, and it's even begun assigning stories to them.

Whatever you may say about James Macpherson, at least he PAYS his reporters.

And Macpherson would have a sharp enough eye to catch this item in the first comment:

Is jounalism something that is so simple, that ANYONE could do it? Really? Scabs for journalism?

Well, perhaps jounalism isn't that simple. You need a Macpherson or someone to check for misspellings. I know.

How do we make decisions?

Jesse Stay recently wrote a post entitled Name a Better Phone. This post can be examined on a variety of levels, including the applicability of a phone to a person's particular needs. Jesse's post itself briefly discusses this.

At the same time my experience may be different than yours. You may need something cheaper. You may not need a camera. You may just need the phone features. All these factors go into the purchase of a cell phone.

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins looked at this in much more detail. (H/T Louis Gray.)

Jesse, and many others who are defending Apple, contend that “the thing that people aren't realizing is that the definition of "phone" has changed for most of
society. For those buying these types of devices they're not looking for just a phone.”

Jesse went on to say that “It's stupid to not recommend it solely on phone functionality.”

I disagree with that statement strongly, as do the global usage numbers for mobile phones. The definition of phone has changed for a minority of society. Most people still use a phone for texting and calls -something for which a smartphone is not required (otherwise, we wouldn't call them smartphones, but phones, since no one would own a "dumb" phone).
Ask yourself: who reads Consumer Reports? Certainly not us, the early adopters.

It's people like my dad who read it religiously before making a purchase. People who use phones to, you know, make phone calls with.

While these thoughts align with some other things that have appeared here in the Empoprise-BI business blog, I want to focus upon another part of Jesse's post - namely, the METHOD that he used to make his phone decision.

Partialities aside, when you rate phones, as a whole, feature-by-feature, side-by-side with the other phones that I own, the iPhone 4 still outperforms them, hands down. Even Consumer Reports confirms that. The iPhone 4 takes better pictures than my Evo. It takes better video. The iPhone 4 has so much better screen quality than my Evo. I can edit my movies on my iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 lasts at least 3 times as long in battery life than my HTC Evo. The iPhone 4 has a better, more consistent application experience than my Evo. There’s simply no comparison on those features. The iPhone beats the Evo in user experience and simplicity (My 2 year old has issues with the Evo – he has no problem with my iPhone). It has better parental controls. It has a much smaller, easier-to-hold form factor. It has FaceTime, and before you say the Evo has apps that do that, the Evo has not integrated it into its Operating System and phone book, and that’s a huge difference.

Forget about the specifics here. What Stay did was to choose two products, list a number of attributes, and compare each product on the basis of the listed attributes. Actually, Stay wasn't the first person to do this; Consumer Reports initially did it, as Stay notes.

Now this sounds like a reasonable and superior way to do things. Set your evaluation criteria, take the two (or more) products and evaluate them against the criteria, and then let the superior solution just pop out of the process at the end. Now perhaps people can argue about the weighting of the various criteria (Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins' dad might assign a higher rating to "voice call quality" than Jesse Stay would), but there's no quibbling with the process.

Or is there?

Let's face it - we live in a world in which many people are deciding to use a particular web hosting service (or, conservely, to NOT use a particular web hosting service) because of a hot female race car driver. I'm not sure where Consumer Reports would put THAT on its charts.

And, conversely, we seem to use these non-logical methods for the bigger decisions. David Maister:

Michael Lovaglia, (a professor at the University of Iowa) proposed Lovaglia’s Law: The more important the outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it.

Maister continues:

I have always been fascinated by the fact that (in spite of what they teach us in school) logic, reason, rationality and sensible analysis seem to play so little part in human affairs – at the office, in our home lives, and elsewhere.

It sometimes seems as if, for all of us, nearly all the time, rhetoric triumphs over reason, personality over substance, politics over merits, neuroses over facts.

I’m not saying this as a complaint. I’m saying that it’s a more accurate critique of human affairs than the misleading interpretation we sometimes fool ourselves with – that our smarts (logic, reason and rationality) are what drive the world.

Bearing this in mind, I wonder how many of us are making decisions on the iPhone 4 based upon objective criteria (either "The iPhone 4 has a better feature set" or "The iPhone 4 performs poorly in the one feature that is really important to me"), and how many of us are making iPhone 4 decisions based upon other factors (Apple is cool, Apple is evil, Steve Jobs steals body parts from deserving people, Woz is a good dancer)?

Cutting your udder to spite your face

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of most cost-cutting measures. While they look good on paper, they don't necessarily help the company to actually perform better, in part due to their negative effect on company morale.

But I think I've seen a cost-cutting measure that defies belief. Guess what an agricultural college is selling? Its cows.

The fields and long red barns at the University of Vermont will soon house fewer cows as low milk prices, high costs and budget cuts have forced the university to sell its herd....

The sales are taking place despite growing enrollment in agriculture programs. The herds are mainly used for faculty research.

Now there's an economic justification for the move:

The University of Vermont plans to sell its 255 Holsteins and have faculty do their work on private farms that could be paid $20,000 a year for three years, said Tom Vogelmann, dean of UVM's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The farmers would benefit from the added income, while researchers would have access to more cows, possibly in more modern facilities.

Of course, perhaps the students may end up bypassing the University of Vermont altogether, and just getting a job at the private farms instead.

On a bruised apple

While Louis Gray and Robert Scoble are debating the relative merits of iPhones vs. Android phones (see previous post), there's a lot of discussion about Consumer Reports' refusal to recommend the iPhone 4 because of antenna problems. (See Jesse Stay's views on the matter.) But whether you're talking about Apple's reaction to the iPhone 4 antenna discussion, or Steve Jobs' attitude toward porn, or the merits and demerits of the Gizmodo police raid, it's clear that an image of Apple is emerging in some quarters...and it's not a pretty image.

For example, take the memo that eSarcasm magically found: a memo from Apple's Tim Cook. Before I quote from the memo, let me present eSarcasm's standard disclaimer:

The story you're about to read is not (entirely) true. It is, however, more accurate than most things on network television.

With that, let's look at the memo. The memo that Dan Tynan - I mean Tim Cook wrote is so funny because it reflects what a lot of people are thinking. Excerpts:

* There is no problem with the iPhone 4′s antenna. There is no problem with the iPhone 4′s antenna. There is no problem with the iPhone 4′s antenna. Are we all clear on that?

* Remember, at Apple we do not “hold press conferences,” we “host special events.” Anyone caught using the phrase “press conference” will find themselves interviewing over at Bebo.

* If any reporters manage to penetrate our anti-journalist shields and ask about alleged problems with the iPhone 4′s reception, please refer them directly to Randall Stephenson at AT&T. You know the drill.

More here.

Why there probably won't be a "CSI Orono"

I work in the biometric industry, and one of the things that we talk about a lot is something called "the CSI effect." I'm not at this year's IAI conference in Spokane, but I bet it's being discussed up there this week.

Basically, "the CSI effect" is an assumption by a layperson that everything that you see on TV shows is the exact truth. Taking my specialty of automated fingerprint identification systems as an example, someone who watches TV might assume that once a crime scene (latent) fingerprint is captured, you just scan it right into the system, wait thirty seconds, and watch a big ol' "HIT" message display on your computer screen. If they can do it that fast on TV, they can certainly do it that fast in real life, can't they?

But it goes well beyond that. Not only can someone assume that all of these forensic technologies are very quick, one may also assume that any crime scene investigator can call upon any of these technologies at any time, for any case. Thus when the real court cases arrive, the jurors are left wondering why the police didn't run DNA tests on the purse left by the jaywalker. After all, they'd run that test on TV.

So let's say that you see one of these shows on TV and decide that you want to go to school and major in forensics so that you can do things just like the TV stars do. If you go to the University of Maine at Orono and take a class from Irv Kornfield, you'll be in for a bit of a shock.

Kornfield has taught a wildly popular course on forensic science since 2003. While any number of crime scene investigation television dramas may pique students’ interest in the course, Kornfield quickly replaces slow-motion camera shots with cold, hard science. In fact, the first assignment of the year is to watch one of these shows and record the absurdities.

“I disabuse them of the notion that they can become crime scene investigators,” as no such position exists in the real world, Kornfield said.

And he has another surprise for his students.

Despite what the television shows depict, one of the main messages Kornfield wants his students to take home is that DNA evidence is only a piece of the puzzle when solving a crime.

“On its own, DNA is insufficient to decide if someone is guilty or innocent,” Kornfield said.

And Kornfield also shares something that I've known for over 15 years.

“In general, the people who commit crimes are not very smart.”

Hey, if they WERE smart, no company could make money selling automated fingerprint identification systems, could they?

(H/T Forensic Magazine. And let me make it explicitly clear for FCC disclosure purposes that I am employed by an automated fingerprint identification systems vendor.)

Yeah, but does Robbie Joyner have a blog?

I subscribe to a lot of shared feeds via Google Reader, and there was a particular item in my feed that had been shared by a bunch of people, including Rob Diana, Louis Gray, and Jesse Stay.

But before I talk about that item, I want to explain who Robbie Joyner is. From the entry in the Kevin and Bean Glossary:

Kevin’s neighbor as a child. Whenever the show interviews somebody who accomplished something at a young age, Kevin invariably pipes up that “When I was [that age] I was still throwing rocks at my neighbor Robbie Joyner.”

But Kevin did OK for himself (well, other than that little murder thing), despite the fact that he was (or so he claims) an underachiever at a young age.

The item that Diana, Gray, and Stay shared was written by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and it is entitled How To Quit Your Day Job & Become a Professional Tech Blogger. Kirkpatrick is someone who quit his day job and became a professional tech blogger. This is (part of) what he said:

Not so long ago, I was working at a convenience store, selling candy, soda, beer and lottery tickets. I had just graduated with an undergrad degree in political science and I discovered the world of blogging, RSS, etc. in the last few months I was in school. My plan was to do consulting for nonprofit organizations about how to use these new tools for research and promotion, but I had to pay the bills – thus the convenience store gig. Maybe you have a better job than that now – but I still think this is good advice.

After mentioning some things that he did (one of which I'll come back to a little later), Kirkpatrick wrote:

In blogging I tried to add unique value to conversations and I tried to do a good job at important little projects I started. Both Barb [Dybwad] and Marnie [Webb] ended up hiring me to write for them at Netsquared and at AOL’s Social Software Weblog, within just a few months of our having met face to face. Once I had both those gigs, I quit the day job at the convenience store.

Networking, projects, commenting...Kirkpatrick did all that stuff, as well as starting his own blog. The "How To" post links to the first blog post that Kirkpatrick wrote - one that described the goals of "Marshall's Web Tool Blog." Here's part of that first post:

What I intend to do is start a consulting and training business in the use of new web tools. Tools like...

* RSS - content syndication, push and pull
* Search - including automated search, metasearch and other search tools
* Blogs - easy web publishing
* Wikis - collaborative knowledge development
* Social bookmarking - popular cataloging of online content
* Podcasting - radio on demand/ MP3 content mixed with RSS syndication
* And anything else that's exciting and useful!

Read the rest here.

Kirkpatrick's first post was written on March 23, 2005. Let me share another post with you, written by someone else. This post appeared on October 14, 2003:

Why did synthetica start with fake bluegrass sounds? Why not? This is the Ontario Empoblog, or the blog for Ontario Emperor, which has nothing and everything to do with Canada, New Mexico, and Texas, but also California, which is a location in California. It exists in cyberspace, which is also synthetic.

The Ontario Empoblog may or may not touch on a variety of subjects, including music, poetry, poker, the supposed familial relationship between Brian Eno and Slim Whitman, the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (1,121 - I checked), various comments about frogs, and the nature of nature.

Yes, people, I have been blogging longer than Marshall Kirkpatrick, since I wrote this post about a year and a half before Kirkpatrick wrote his first post. Now you'll note that Kirkpatrick's post is much more serious than my post, but THAT'S not the reason why Marshall Kirkpatrick is now a co-editor at ReadWriteWeb while I am the super-duper Senior Editor of Empoprises.

No, the reason why Kirkpatrick has been much more successful than me is because he has been more focused on his goals. For example:

[T]he Social Software Weblog one was where I had the best opportunity for visibility in the larger tech blogging world. The pay there was miserable, it was something like $4 or $5 per post, I don’t remember. I worked that job as hard as I could, though, writing 3 to 5 posts a day. I also had another job writing as a subcontractor for an international currency speculation blog, writing 6 posts about currency speculation every weekday before 9am PST. That was nuts. So I was writing about 10 posts a day, of various lengths and about different topics, at three different places.

Forget for the moment that he was willing to take the low pay; just look at the sheer number of posts that he wrote. Now I'll confess that I'm writing this post on a Saturday afternoon, and I've written a couple of other posts on this Saturday, when I've had a little bit of time to do so. But would I be willing to wake up very early in the morning and write six posts about currency speculation? Probably not.

So I'm not as dedicated as Marshall Kirkpatrick, and despite my 1 1/2 year head start, I'm not as experienced as Kirkpatrick. But I can look at what I have done.

In the nearly seven years that I've been blogging, I've created a number of blogs, publicized a solution to a technical issue regarding the Motorola Q, made one of Robert Scoble's top lists (under my old Ontario Emperor pseudonym), wrote a blog post about Shel Israel's departure from FastCompany that became part of a huge multi-pronged conversation about said departure (links here), wrote a number of things about Oracle OpenWorld that were covered by Oracle itself, and became the leading online authority about former sportscaster Tracy Simers (list of links here).

But those aren't necessarily the things that excite me about my time blogging. I still love the Annie Jacobsen parody I wrote in July 2004, the fake David Byrne/Laurie Anderson collaboration I discussed in November 2003, my August 2006 re-evaluation of I Chronicles 20, and my December 2006 share of the "Gerald Ford was eaten by wolves" sketch.

And yes, I have addressed the whole Brian Eno-Slim Whitman thingie on occasion.

And as for Robbie Joyner, I don't know what happened to him. Maybe he became a major league catcher.

Block-Head (business)

Today I used our corporate instant messaging software to discuss Oracle Technology Network's efforts to demonstrate the depth of Oracle's stack.

In other words, I talked about playing with building blocks.

Block-Head (music)