Category
Society & Media
-
04.10.08Here it goes againSpeaking, as we were not so long ago, about unreferenced advertising homages to internet viral creative endeavours....here's another one for the collection. First, watch this new ad from Berocca. People dancing on treadmills. Strangely familiar? Indeed. OK Go did this to great viral effect not so long ago: I know. Ad creatives in ripping off internet shocker. <rolls eyes>
-
03.12.08Malapostrophication, crap marketing agencies, and why its they’re fault you’re business look’s dumbSome of you who keep up with my Flickr stream will be aware that one of the things which crops up with alarming regularity in my camphone snaps is the misuse of apostrophes. I am an apostrophe dullard: it's true. I can't help spotting them when they're misused, and let me tell you it nearly killed me to write that headline up there. Seriously. I keep looking at it and wincing. I classify public apostrophe abuse into three buckets: 1. Permissible Error This usually means that the sign is handwritten, chalked or otherwise home-produced, and is generally an indication that the writer was in ...
-
02.27.08The Seven Deadly Sins of TwitterOR a list of social faux pas that are likely to get you removed from my follow list (From my perspective: you may disagree. In fact, you probably will. Life's rich tapestry and all that...) Using Twitter instead of (or as well as) an RSS feed. Most web publishing services these days have RSS built in as standard. If you've got an RSS feed and I want to know when you've updated, I've already subscribed to it. If I haven't, then I don't, and you endlessly publishing links to your most recent blog output - constantly pushing your links at me - looks ...
-
02.06.08Game for a laugh (or something darker): deceit in popular cultureLast night, out for dinner with a group of friends in celebration of one of our number's birthday, I mentioned that I had noticed that in an awful lot of articles lamenting the lately departed entertainer and king of trivia and video clips, Jeremy Beadle, he was referred to as a "Prankster". In fact, a casual search on the interwebs shows that he's been referred to as such online on no fewer than 464,000 occasions, and that his name occurs in nearly a fifth of all search results for "prankster". This is surely the only proof required. This got me thinking about ...
-
12.20.07Pimp my privacySo, back in August I wrote about Facebookand the perils of prodigious sociability - that the "one giant bucket for all your friends" nature of the site was a limiting and messy experience. At the time, I sketched out a possible workaround: making custom groups which users can then sort their "friends" into, and set permissions on a per-group basis. My solution involved using the existing "groups" functionality to manage subsets of friends, but better still would be to have the potential for grouping people within the mega list, right? Well, the first bit has happened: Facebook has now added the ability ...
-
12.04.07On Art and Advertising[or: Haven't We Seen This Somewhere Before?] I've been noticing recently a number of ad campaigns which seem to have "taken inspiration from" (which is a polite way of saying "copied wholesale from") works of art. In recent years there's been controversy over the origin of Sony Bravia's Bunnies ad (was it ripped off from LA based art due kozyndan?), the Honda Cog ad (did it borrow extensively from a 1987 art film?) and (while the original doesn't really count as art, perhaps), even the Bravia's Bouncing Balls commercial (was it all Letterman's idea?) While there's always been a liberal approach to ...
-
11.15.07A Light BiteLiving in Spain, I became familiar with the concept of tapas - small snackettes which can be served with beer - and greeted their gradual introduction to the UK with a combination of amusement (because people ordered loads of plates at a time, as a meal, rather than in sequence) and gratitude (because, y'know, yum). Over the years, I've seen the style of ordering and food presentation migrate, so that you can now get Indian tapas, Chinese tapas....even Thai tapas. All of which got me to thinking: if there was such a thing as British tapas, what would it be? It would ...
-
11.09.07Ten Reasons Why Numerical Lists Are The New BlackNearly a decade ago, when I worked in the editorial department of a major ISP, one of the homepage editors had a theory that while lists were always a good thing, there was a magic list number - a sort of divine proportion, if you like - which was the perfect length for any list of items, where perfection is measured in people's enacted interest which is proxied by the action of following a link trail. This number, I can reveal, is seven. Her reasoning was this: Five items is too short: it feels like there's not enough content there, or not enough ...
-
10.28.07When I am queen of the world, all of these things will be punishable by a spell in the stocks, where I and many others will throw rocks and possibly also fecal matter. I’m just saying.I've been madly busy the las few weeks, and while I'm percolating some posts about community and socialness and the like, I'm taking the time while Sunday dinner is cooking (mmm, roast lamb, and it smells FANTASTIC) to scribble a note on a current obsession of mine. I don't want to whinge, here, but in recent months I've noticed a growing number of people doing things that I had not realised were social norms, but apparently are completely fine, not only because the behaviour goes unchallenged, but because the perpetrations increase in frequency and obviousness as the days slide by. Worse ...
-
10.17.07Things I don’t want to see you doing on the tubeClipping your nails (biting is just about bearable, but any activity which results in bits which were previously attached to your body suddenly arcing through the air towards me is a no-no) Picking your nose (especially if you subsequently eat/flick/wipe your boogers - see (1), above) Scratching your noggin (most especially when it causes a scurfy blizzard to erupt, which then settles in drifts on my clothing and alights on my nose and eyelashes) Picking your feet (including and especially if they're on the seat next to you and/or you're wearing flip-flops. There is never a right time to debride yourself in public.) Scratching ...
recent posts
- Lovely idea
- Things I might write about at some point, but not now
- Back from over there
- A Life in Pictures
- The sound of silence
- Here it goes again
- As You Like It
-
Looking for the Anti-Valentines?
