Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

Words that PR killed

Word Wise:

In public relations, advertising and marketing, we’re especially susceptible to latching onto of-the-moment words and using them and using them and using them until they’re used to death (their meaning and power dies).

Adriana:

Our company is the industry-leader in innovative utilisation of words, strategically leveraging their unique value proposition to uphold its position as the world-class communications solutions provider with unmatched, seamlessly integrated and robust best practice.

A useful test for the sloppy use of a word is to inquire whether it is being used to draw a meaningful distinction?  Consider the term "robust".  Are there any products that seek to be non-robust?  There aren't, so it is not drawing a useful distinction.  Then consider the term "organic growth".  Are there products intentionally designed under a different philosophy?  Indeed there are: some products are released in a crude form and polished publicly, but others are developed privately and revealed when considered perfect.

How I twitter selected items from Flickr and delicious

I like to twitter only selected items from Flickr and delicious. The trick is to build custom RSS feeds which only contain the items tagged with a certain keyword.  I use the tag "twittered".  Then I connect these custom RSS feeds to twitter using twitterfeed.com. (rss2twitter also used to serve the same function, but a few weeks ago it blew up, vomiting rubbish into twitter, so I don't suggest you use it.) Step zero is to register with twitterfeed.com.

Flickr

1. Tag a selected photo "twittered".
2. Click the tag (not the planet icon to its left.) This will take you to a page of all your photos tagged "twittered".  Presumably, there is only one.
3. Toward the bottom of the page you will see an RSS icon. Copy the URL into your clipboard.
4. Add it to twitterfeed.com for broadcast.
5. Now every Flickr photo that you tag "twittered" will be sent to twitter within an hour.

delicious

1. Construct the URL http://del.icio.us/rss/foo/twittered where "foo" is your delicious username.
2. Add it to twitterfeed.com for broadcast.
3. Now every delicious bookmark that you tag "twittered" will be sent to twitter within an hour.

blip.tv

1. Construct the URL http://foo.blip.tv/posts/?topic_name=twittered&skin=rss where "foo" is your blip show name domain.
2. Add it to twitterfeed.com for broadcast.
3. Now every blip.tv video that you tag "twittered" will be sent to twitter within an hour.

Alexa has been proven inaccurate

Alexa's inaccuracy is the most interesting subplot to emerge from the recent dustup between Rocketboom and ZeFrank. Observe the Alexa graph with Rocketboom in red, far below ZeFrank's statistics. However, after looking at the actual logs, Marshall Kirkpatrick from TechCrunch announced:

The fact remains however, that Rocketboom’s content is being downloaded  nearly 10 times as often as Frank’s.

That's a huge discrepancy! Heather Green from BusinessWeek, who also independently analyzed the logs, concluded:

Rocketboom's daily downloads are still 7 times more than Ze's stated 30,000.

This is the problem with argument by authority.  People believed Alexa because they were a prominent company, presumably staffed by intelligent people who know more about technology than you do. However, although their methodology has been criticized by technical people for years now, let this example be cited the next time somebody risks making a business decision on such shaky figures.

Spammers using subliminal images!

Check out this spam that uses a subliminal message! Before the final message about stocks, there's an image that says "buy! buy!" The clickable thumbnail shows the first frame containing the subliminals. This is history.

Why do I have this strange urge to buy a GIF? Weird.

Thanks to Richi for the original notice.