Something to help mend broken Irish equestrian hearts:

Damien has an interesting catch today -

Damien’s take:

This will scare the total crap out of the parties here in Ireland. Give someone a sign you paid for and let them fill in the bits? Lack of control, lack of control! This is what this whole new web thing is all about though and now it’s being re-applied in “the real world”.

Blogs, social networks, YouTube etc. - Give people the space to express themselves. Their dime, their time, their effort. Build those places and let them be creative. They’re better than you at being creative, they’re more intelligent than you. Be the provider, let them play. Give them the tools to spread the word and evangelise their work which is on your space. They’ll bring the traffic. For Jason they’re expressing themselves on “his space” (his sign).

I should think that entrusting someone with one of those signs means they’ll appreciate that trust and be more proud of supporting you and showing off their creativity.

There’s only one problem. Even if you accept the premise that nobody has really ever owned their brand, in the sense that they have total control - and that it’s the community who ultimately define the brand - that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Right? [Read more →]

I’m not sure what to make of this. Got an email notifying me of a new Follower on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/VirtualPodium

Who does VirtualPodium turn out to be?

Turns out it’s a promotion, using the Daily Show/Colbert Report, with cooperation from Viacom in a promotion for Comcast, the cable company so beloved of the 27 million US households it reaches that Bob Garfield, America’s Damien Mulley (a bit older, a bit crankier, but still), set up this little love note.

Now, the prize is pretty sweet, it must be admitted - three days in New York city including travel, hotel, transfers etc plus hang on election night with Jon Stewart & Colbert - but is that enough to make you forget it’s basically Follow-Spam? Or is it? Presumably they targeted me via a keyword search for Obama or something, and ya, I’d like the prize, so is it spam at all?

Then there’s the fact that, y’know, this is Viacom - currently suing Google to get all YouTube activity released to them and, incidentally, possibly do critical damage to the basic infrastructure, certainly the ethos, of the web? Which makes me want to send the Viacom CEO for an all-expense-paid trip to Gitmo for a month? Even with all that, I’m still torn.

What does Twitter think of this use case?

Your thoughts?

…he were a Democrat. Or Karl Rove was. Observe:

via Sully.

Remember this little dystopian ditty? It’s baaaa-aack, and this time it’s personal. (Oh, so bad.)

Anyway, the idea behind the Blade Runner of digital media futurism was just highlighting the newly possible - a totally customised news service, where editorial choices about what news is important is drawn from your social networking profile and fed to you. Googlezon and EPIC2014 (I mentioned them in my own Easter 2016 forecast, here) sketched out the technological possibilities. Critics felt their stomachs drop through the floor at the ultimate prospect of killing off completely the communal experience of news. It’s important because we all think it’s important.

Now LinkedIn and the New York Times have partnered so that you’re offered articles to read based on your LinkedIn profile. It’s not EPIC, but it’s a huge step towards it. Brave new world and all that. The future’s gonna be bumpy, traditional media types. Buy a helmet.

This Craigslist ad in London caught my eye:

20-30 henchmen needed for moderately-sized supervillain organisation with large expansion potential (fortresses built into geological structures, corruption of government officials, possible genesis of ‘nemesis’ vigilante). Electrical theme.

Applicants must be willing to learn new skills, including but not limited to operation of specialised ‘lightning guns’. Applicants will also be required to wear specialised uniform when at work (functional rubber suits with my logo on front), except in cases where deception is required (posing as hostages in order to ambush vigilantes, etc).

Desired (but not necessarily required) in applicants:

-interesting deformations/obsessions/powers(?) giving rise to interesting nicknames (e.g. Claws, Pyro, Buzzsaw, and similar)
-unwavering loyalty
-being a corruptible government official
-ability to work as part of a close-knit team (unless interesting obsession is of the ‘lone wolf’ variety)
-grudge against any well-known vigilante
-flexible moral code
Equal opportunies employer. Both henchmen and femmes fatales absolutely welcome.

Great promotion opportunities - right-hand-man position constantly being unexpectedly opened. Would look good on any future supervillain resume/CV.

Send an email with details of any prior henchman work, or details of what is driving you to join the ranks of a supervillain organisation. Will reply to all serious applicants. Hope to hear from you, and with luck, welcome you into a rewarding and promising career!

- Jacque (The Zapper) Zerapi

* Location: London, but planned worldwide expansion
* Compensation: £20,000pa starting salary, with added commissions based around success of supervillain operations. Contracts negotiable depending on applicant’s personal skills/powers.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.

Or is this some guerilla marketing for Joss Whedon’s post-Buffy web-only project, with Doogie Howser applying for the Evil League of Evil?

via Wired

Even as I was writing the last entry, my fears about where the US presidential campaign was headed - signalled by the reptilian rasps some of my hard astarboard acquantainces were parroting here from whatever poisonous screed they were reading online - were being made manifest. John McCain, despite being a victim of this type of racist dog-whistle campaign eight years ago - as Rick Davis, his campaign manager, wrote four years ago in the Boston Globe - has decided up to try the same tactics on Obama - and has hired the people who did it to him in South Carolina in 2000. Not surprisingly, people who thought a McCain presidency offered something more than Abe Simpson with nuclear launch codes have been blowing gaskets all week.

Thank God somebody who isn’t a lefty blogger, who’s served in three Republican and one Democratic White Houses and worked as a heavyweight journo for years, had the stones to use his moment on one of the Sunday shows to finally pronounce clearly to the DC commentariat the modifier that is precisely the awful, shameful, atavistic impression of Barack Obama the Rovian-run McCain campaign is actively necromancing: “uppity”:

92 days remaining. The polls have drawn level.

Obama said he wanted to put an end to this diseased form of politics. He’s seen off the carriers of the virus’s mutant strain, the Clintons. Can he kill off the pure form, the thugs who hijacked the party I grew up with, without becoming infected? One thing’s for sure. If you’re doubting that Obama has the steel and the stomach for it, then you’ve never lived in Chicago. I’m guessing that for the first time in 44 years a Democratic candidate for president is going to take the gloves off. Should be interesting to watch.

Recently I’ve been up to my proverbials in a project, but seemed a good time to post some observations on the state of the US presidential race. Not least because some formerly friendly acquaintances who recently goaded me into an email flame war need to be set straight on a couple of points.

First, the “where’s the bounce?” meme. Why, in a year of Republican electoral armageddon, is John McCain still within striking distance of victory? Why isn’t Obama’s lead bigger? Or if you believe USA Today’s LV screen (here’s some thoughts on that), why is McCain ahead?

Here’s the better meme. Obama 2008 = Reagan 1980. First from novelty and metrics, then from worldview. Pretty graphs after the jump.
[Read more →]

Seems I’m not the only one suddenly deluged with Twitter spam (20 attempted followers in 48 hrs - which is 18 more than the rest of the time I’ve been on Twitter). Twitter says:

However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers and we don’t want to see our avatar on their profile page.

Those who have created thousands of accounts, posted thousands of the same link, or aggressively followed way too many people, stand out like a sore thumb to our support team because they are usually blocked by hundreds or thousands of well behaved Twitter users. This simple feedback is one of the ways we detect and delete spam accounts but there are also preventative measures and more we could be doing.

They continue:

To combat aggressive following directly we have recently imposed new limits on following—spammy accounts following too many users have been drastically curbed. Those that existed prior to this new limit await review. Our administrative tools for finding and dealing with spam grow more sophisticated as we learn more.

Twitter has enough problems — like what’s the revenue model? the periodic service disruptions suggest they’re having scaling issues, some of which could be cash-related — without the Invasion of the Spammers, but it was an inevitable deveopment for a social appliance that may turn out to be a victim of its own success.

But I think the first comment on this entry in Twitter’s in-house blog is indicative of their best asset:

I offer my help. Seriously.

You can’t buy the goodwill earned by creating something people love. I don’t know what the answer is, but part of it will certainly be Twitter fans hanging in there.

UPDATE: Obviously I got one rather significant fact wrong - or at least omitted (due to nothing more clever than vapour lock of the head) the news of Twitter’s June funding round including the involvement of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. But the bigger question, which will inevitably hit them as a business, is Twitter’s revenue model - or rather lack thereof. This isn’t 1999. Twitter succeeded in the Web 2.0 way of having seemingly miniscule overheads at first. But the scaling issue means we may be reminded of the scary dotcom term “burn rate” again. Where’s the money gonna come from?