Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog

Has Twitter blocked Mrs Slocombe’s pussy?

2009-07-02T14:12:00.006Z

Above: When searching for the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy, Twitter refuses to give any results.

Ten to one comedienne Mollie Sugden is having a great laugh from Heaven.
I have just discovered that every other search works on Twitter, just not one for a new hashtag, #MrsSlocombesPussy. The reason, says one Tweeter, is that this hashtag has been blocked.
If this is true, then shame on Twitter: it is either down to ignorance (they do not know the cultural impact of Are You Being Served?), xenophobia (American admins balking at British culture), disrespect (to the memory of Mollie Sugden) or overreacting political correctness (everyone else outside Twitter HQ knows that this refers to Tiddles, Mrs Slocombe’s pet cat). Yes, we also know the meanings of pussy, but at least in the rest of the English-speaking world, double entendres are acceptable.
As SensualStories, a fellow Tweeter, pointed out, it seems hypocritical for Twitter to block a mention of Mrs Slocombe’s pussy, yet they have allowed countless spammers to set up accounts continually, for weeks, under the name of Britney F***** Vids.
Americans scared of the word pussy also balked at Honor Blackman’s character’s name in Goldﬁnger, Pussy Galore. That was in 1964. Not much has changed since then, even if American TV is ﬁne with violence, gore and sex scenes.
Just don’t say, ‘Pussy.’ You might annoy some computer geeks sitting at Twitter HQ who think f***ed is a perfectly acceptable word, but pussy is offensive.
I say we keep Tweeting #MrsSlocombesPussy in Mollie’s memory, and to show the hypocrisy at Twitter and their double standards for our freedom of speech.

PS.: A further check reveals that one can still search for #pussy as a hashtag on Twitter, so this seems targeted unfairly at Ms Sugden by xenophobes.

Choosing to remember Michael Jackson

2009-06-28T09:48:00.002Z

I’m ﬁrmly an ofﬁcious bystander in the whole “Michael Jackson thing”: I am sad people have lost a son, a brother and a father. But since the mid-1980s I have not been a big Michael Jackson fan. His death, while premature, is not going to make me suddenly say that I adored the man and his music. I’m not one of those people who made every single item on Amazon.com’s top 10 a Michael Jackson one. I’m not going to join his MySpace page and leave a tribute.
But I do not think he was a nonce. When the media go on about child molesters ad nauseam, I am not surprised that some accused Jackson of molestation. Paranoia alone could have seen to that. Some may have seen dollar signs and took the man for a ride. Psychologically, I don’t think the man was capable of forming the sick thoughts that pædophiles have.
He may have paid off some of his accusers, but think of it this way: if you are a lawyer and your client has the mentality, or tantrums, of a child, what do you do? A father might encourage his son to stand for the truth and go through even a difﬁcult experience to build his character. Someone less close, knowing the person had millions, might just advise paying up to spare a fellow human being more emotional pain than he seemed capable of handling. Michael Jackson seemed like one such person: the stresses we might choose to bear were anathema to him.
That is, perhaps, how one should think of Jackson: a man who preferred to live some form of childhood than recognize that he had reached adulthood. In his interviews, during the legal cases, Jackson came across in words and manner as a man deeply hurt, as a child might be. Visually, however, his damaged appearance through continual plastic surgeries swayed many of us into thinking he was a monster. It is easy to be fooled by what one sees, and Jackson was the victim of his own choices in that respect.
I am not excusing him fully. I am not going to say that Michael Jackson lacked an adult’s mental capacity. He was able to reﬂect on his own mortality, according to his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley on her MySpace page. He knew what was going on, even if he chose to shield himself from it.
But he was a deeply troubled man, with a very different perspective on life because of his experiences. He chose himself to be as deﬁned by his eccentricities as his music. Just as with Britney Spears shaving her head, many chose to poke fun at the person rather than say that they needed to be protected and looked after. Jackson’s plastic surgeries and his strange complexion were signs, in my layman’s understanding, of someone who chose to dissociate himself from his true identity. This was not about race, as many want to paint, but about a man who never understood who he was.
Still, I have devoted a post to him. One part of it was seeing the negative comments pages with his videos are attracting on YouTube. He did not deserve many of them. The other part is that there was a Michael Jackson, once, who was a great performer, who never divided opinion as deeply as he does today. I choose to remember hits like this one.

Twitter ratio update, June 2009

2009-06-24T10:59:00.004Z

I decided to follow up my Twitter ratios’ table from May with a revised one. A few politicians have been taken out, a few non-Americans have been put in, and I inserted one friend (who is famous anyway) as someone told her that her Twitter ratio wasn’t very good. (I beg to differ, after feeding her following–follower ratio in to the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, and knowing how she uses Twitter.) I also added new-tech guru Loïc Le Meur in there just to see where people in his industry might be.
Interestingly, some following numbers went down for a few celebs. This could be due to Twitter ﬁxing up its count: as of today, there were some bugs on Twitter leading to these numbers being inaccurate. The biggest drop in ratio was with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, who experienced a huge jump in follower numbers (they increased eightfold). A similar thing had happened to English actor Stephen Fry earlier this year, which forced his ratio down, too.
As before, Karl Rove, California First Lady Maria Shriver, President Obama and Britney Spears maintained respectable ratios, and are in the top part of the table. Obviously, a higher ratio suggests (assuming the Tweeter has interaction) that the person embraces two-way communication. However, a poor ratio is not a reﬂection of the person’s grasp of the service: it could mean anything from someone who is careful about whom they followed back (initially, I only followed people I knew in real life), or someone who has not been able to keep up with the inﬂux of followers.
I expect politicians to have better ratios given that they are meant to be representative of the people, and falls in ratios for some high-proﬁle names—who do not have Gov. Schwarzenegger’s excuse of an eightfold increase—are disappointing.
Those at the bottom of the table perhaps see Twitter as a top–down broadcast medium for themselves, rather than one where they can interact with their audiences, or are simply very inactive on the service. I have already said my piece on how I feel about that.
For average Joes like me, I would be rather be in the middle of the table or above; for celebrities, 2 to 20 per cent indicates some acknowledgement that Twitter is not a one-way medium for them.

Person	Link	Following	Followers	Ratio
Karl Rove	•	60,141	64,673	92·99%
Maria Shriver	•	69,326	78,335	88·50%
Gov. Bobby Jindal	•	22,934	27,380	83·76%
Congressman John Boehner	•	10,340	12,469	82·93%
President Barack Obama	•	774,412	1,521,246	50·91%
Britney Spears	•	394,119	2,001,339	19·69%
Kathy Ireland	•	3,069	15,666	19·59%
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger	•	64,155	438,541	14·63%
Stephen Fry	•	54,871	582,862	9·41%
John Campbell	•	309	3,933	7·86%
Summer Rayne Oakes	•	114	1,705	6·69%
Sir Richard Branson	•	6,564	131,275	5·00%
Sen. Barbara Boxer	•	480	10,443	4·60%
Mayor Gavin Newsom	•	23,481	598,838	3·92%
M. C. Hammer	•	26,357	890,424	2·96%
Loïc Le Meur	•	694	27,876	2·49%
Jonathan Ross	•	3,939	329,554	1·20%
Phillip Schoﬁeld	•	1,997	193,657	1·03%
Vice-President Joe Biden	•	156	25,903	0·60%
Philip Glenister	•	3	702	0·43%
Gov. Sarah Palin	•	41	37,101	0·11%
Shaquille O’Neal	•	527	1,371,875	0·04%
Mischa Barton	•	16	41,907	0·04%
Hugh Jackman	•	33	352,944	0·01%
Lance Armstrong	•	85	1,145,951	0·01%
Ashton Kutcher	•	174	2,362,185	0·01%
Sen. John McCain	•	55	844,385	0·01%
Martha Stewart	•	29	866,188	0·00%
Ellen DeGeneres	•	26	2,105,708	0·00%
Oprah Winfrey	•	14	1,642,692	0·00%
Al Gore	•	8	1,063,340	0·00%

Classic tales in Tweet form

2009-06-24T06:02:00.003Z

My friend Marie Young Tweeted about two 19-year-olds getting a book deal. As far as I can make out, as the article is not clear about it, they are rewriting 20 classics in Twitter form.
So, does that mean we will get the following (as I Tweeted back to Marie)?

@ﬂyinglens I wonder, e.g. Cinderella: nasty stepsisters! Gone to ball, OMG, left shoe behind! Prince C. brings it back. Thank goodness!

@ﬂyinglens Or, Pride & Prejudice: Mum tried to hook Jane up. Darcy can be an SOB, but he does good stuff, cool! Nice ring! Yay Gardiners!

Scary stuff.
The predictions were right: Milton Glaser’s I heart NY symbol will become, by the middle of the twenty-ﬁrst century, classical literature.

Saab can reach for the sun, under Christian von Koenigsegg

2009-06-16T11:47:00.005Z

I never expected this a few years ago, but a few weeks ago, it was becoming more likely: Koenigsegg will buy Saab, says The New York Times.
GM and Koenigsegg say there is now a memorandum of understanding, contingent on loans from the European Investment Bank, guaranteed by the Swedish government.
I am conﬁdent. Christian von Koenigsegg strikes me, in the conversation I had with him some years ago, as someone who is not afraid to answer questions directly. He is accessible, and he loves cars.
People also had doubts about how Jaguar and Land Rover would ﬁt with Tata, which made subcompact cars and heavy trucks in India. Yet, Tata has shown a readiness to push forward new models that Ford never had the guts to do. We need to look at the management style and the national culture.
I think we might see information on a bunch of products inside Saab that the company was never permitted to do under GM ownership, either because they were too risky or that the funds were going to other brands. Saab fell into a GM-division funk like Saturn did. But new ideas have been bubbling under there, and while $600 million is nowhere near what it will cost to get some of them out—given that the funds have to cover everything from salaries to plant upgrades—the Swedish people are not short on ingenuity.
Sweden has shown us that a little country can have leadership or near-leadership positions in so many things, from cellphones to defence technology to music. Once upon a time, the Swedish state even owned Absolut Vodka.
I know the economies of scale are not looking that good for Saab: it sold fewer cars in more territories last year than MG Rover in its ﬁnal year (2004–5) before that fell into administration. However, could make the same argument about economies with many Swedish products before they took the rest of the world by storm.
And Christian has been thinking of a lot more than supercars. What the world seems to have ignored is that he showed a solar electric sports’ saloon at Genève this year, designed by our mutual friend Joachim Nordwall.
Could it be released with the Koenigsegg brand? Probably not. As a Saab? Most deﬁnitely: it is a natural ﬁt for the brand.
GM, Honda and Toyota may have dabbled in solar energy but Koenigsegg may well outﬂank them all.
Most of us will agree that the GM ownership of Saab has not been that successful and the division has been starved of new product for years. GM’s great contributions have been a few Opel Vectra platforms, rejigging a Subaru Impreza for the US market and put Saab badges on it, and reworking a deleted Oldsmobile SUV.
When I was growing up, Saab was known for the Combi Coupé (a fastback, liftback coupé—not particularly common in the 1970s) and the early Turbos, then a great UK campaign connecting the car maker to the aircraft manufacturer. Stefan Engeseth says the company could have done quite well with a retro-modern version of the ur-Saab, the original postwar model with aircraft technologies incorporated. I am not so sure about now, but I agree that during the years of the New Beetle and the last Ford Thunderbird, a limited-edition ur-Saab could have been chic.
Logic tells us that things are not sorted with the new ownership. The numbers do not add up, the new products are going to be expensive to get out, and how many of those forward-thinkers that Saab was once known for are still in the ﬁrm?
But logic also told us that it was impossible for Sweden to be putting out a supercar that would take the world’s imagination. Christian has done that. Conventional thinking also says that a solar–electric car is too left-ﬁeld. I beg to differ.
Saab quality with Koenigsegg innovation sounds like a pretty potent mix to me.
With hindsight, I wish I had made a few more calls then just so I could say I spoke to the boss of Saab, and show off that I do know a bit about automotive marketing strategy. I say with a lean R&D model, Christian can take the risks with innovative, world-beating Saabs that make a decent leap ahead of the rest of the industry.

Swine ’ﬂu reports make it sound like we are dropping like ﬂies

2009-06-16T10:43:00.003Z

Swine ’ﬂu was long predicted by the Doctor Who writers. Except that time it was caused by Daleks.

I am so sick of the fear-mongering in the New Zealand media at the moment that has caused a rush on Tamiﬂu. This is not big news anywhere else, and it should not be big news here. Headlines like ‘Swine ﬂu toll at 109’ hint at fatalities (this is not the case) and, once again, makes me question The New Zealand Herald’s agenda in this. Or the Ministry of Health’s.
How are your Roche shares looking today? (Up 2·2 per cent on the 11th, says the Murdoch Press.) Has the PM asked his Merrill Lynch friends to buy up some stock since April 27?
We need to get a lot of this into perspective, and while I was corrected by my friend Dan Gordon on the effectiveness of Tamiﬂu, we still have some serious viruses out there that I suspect are really killing people.
Swine ’ﬂu is not, contrary to the impression from the top-of-the-news treatment metered out by everyone from the Herald to National Radio, one of the signs of the apocalypse.
Of course we should be vigilant and take the necessary precautions this winter. But we should also be asking other questions that seem to have slipped the minds of some media.

Where have all the chat rooms gone?

2009-06-14T09:32:00.005Z

One of the topics raised by Summer Rayne Oakes, author of Style, Naturally and a scientist and strategist in her own right—not to mention Lucire’s editor-at-large—was why chat rooms fell out of favour this century.
During the last week, Summer Rayne and I had plenty of good chats, but this is probably one that relates directly to some of the issues I discuss on this blog.
The obvious answer is all the odd people who used to venture into these chat rooms, often wanting to get on to a sexual topic. I’ve encountered my share, and it seems that women are targeted even more. These were always at non-sex spaces, and even they would attract those looking to get off on discussing these topics.
But that can’t be it. This is partly my memory giving chat rooms a bad name. The overwhelming majority of conversations I had on them were productive and only a handful had visitors whose minds were on sex.
Yet in the last 10 to 20 years we’ve also seen the rise and fall of the email and online discussion group. Spam may have had something to do with that. But the newsgroups also seem to be less well frequented: in fact, I found it very odd when someone referred me to a newsgroup earlier this month on, of all things, Karl Malden’s nose. A newsgroup? Do people still use those?
There have been the rise and fall of MySpace, and the rise and seemingly continued rise of Facebook and Twitter.
Anyone who has been on Twitter for a little while can see that many people out there have their own websites now. The blogging revolution that people such as Helen Baxter predicted has come to pass: people are expressing themselves, and everyone is vying for their share of the internet audience. Some do it by being sarky (some of the celebrity gossip sites come to mind), others by being deceptive (a few so-called news sites attacking people), and, hopefully, the majority are there just trying to get by with some honest reﬂection and communication.
But in this quest for self-expression, the victim seems to have been communicating in a common space. We bloggers still want to share, but we expect readers to come to our space to do it. The chat room, which worked on the idea of a central location that was common to one’s interest, has given way to everyone playing host to a variety of subjects, and netizens pop by to the one that suits their subject area. Ultimately, they are found on a search engine, not at something as neutral as Egroups.
In other words, we no longer go to the community centre, we play guests at people’s homes. Except this is done virtually. And the relationships, seemingly, are more shallow.
Unless it’s a blog that I have great afﬁnity with, I’m unlikely to visit again. Last week, Ashes to Ashes ﬁnished its second series on BBC1. I frequented blogs that reviewed the ﬁnalé. I might leave a comment. But they are unlikely to be places I’d revisit, certainly not till the next series begins in 2010. By then I am likely to have forgotten who they were.
There have been some wonderful readers on this blog whom I have come to admire and respect. But there are also many whom I do not know beyond their single comment.
I’m wondering whether the blogosphere has given rise to the sort of deep connection that one can form personal or professional relationships on, because our contact is more ﬂeeting. Certainly it cannot work alone: something must complement the blogosphere if two people are to form any sort of relationship. In that vein, the old discussion groups seem to be more self-contained.
When I look back at my dozen or so years managing discussion groups and blogging, many of the strongest bonds are still with people I met on discussion groups. Someone like Simon Young falls into that category. Others I know in person, before they even became bloggers, such as Johnnie Moore.
The blogs have opened the door to my meeting other people. I’m sure Cat Morley, whom I met on the blogosphere, and I, would get on famously if we met face to face. Jim Donovan falls into that category. But Jim and I meet almost monthly, and we’ve opened the door to that more extensive contact.
Maybe I’m not one of those “celebrity bloggers”, so blogging has not resulted in a rise in my work. It has helped a bit with my proﬁle. But it is a surface medium, one that hasn’t supplanted the chat room or email group. It is a very wordy business card or a calling card.
Yet we humans still seek those deeper relationships. They are not to be found on Facebook groups, because at the end of the day, Facebook is about keeping in touch with those one already knows. It is a social network in the literal sense: people are there with brains switched off (I know I am), socializing. While I have met people through it, I am not convinced that it is a medium where one can espouse those deep thoughts in a group, the same way some of us used to on email groups. There are so many people there that it lacks the feel of a chat room or a discussion group, where there were regulars. Its one great beneﬁt, as far as I can tell, has been the fact that the majority of the conversations have been clean and so far, no one has engaged me in a discussion about sex on a Facebook group about, say, freeing a jailed journalist.
So the answer to Summer Rayne’s question may be that we have ventured too far into becoming talkers and not listeners. The shift to the blogosphere has allowed us to come forth overwhelmingly, because we could, all of a sudden. For those of us not wishing to write posts as long as this (1,000 words and counting), Twitter has become that great substitute, where 140 characters are all that are available. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, and since few of us wish to debase ourselves on reality television, the blogosphere and Twitter allow us to control the message.
I somehow think we will congregate again. I know some people who have set up Ning groups, to some success. A friend of mine, and a former Lucire beauty columnist, frequents one devoted to young mothers. We must get to a point where everyone who wants one has their own blogs or Twitter account, and we get sick of talking without any certainty over whether anyone is listening.
People are creatures who wish to communicate, and that implies a two-way dialogue. Blogs were meant to deliver just that, but I’m waiting for the next online revolution that restores that two-way street.

“Super-city” Auckland was a fait accompli before legislation was even passed

2009-06-06T07:17:00.004Z

The ﬁrst I ever heard of the Auckland “super-city” proposal was in The New Zealand Herald, after a business trip. It was the main headline of the day. As I board the plane, I grabbed the newspaper.
   The headline read something along the lines of, ‘We’re going to be a super-city’.
   When I read the actual article, there was no such move mentioned. In fact, a commission had reported its ﬁndings, and the article did not conclude whether Auckland would or would not become a “super-city”, i.e. one where many of its individual councils would be amalgamated into one.
   I wanted to blog this at the time but didn’t think it that vital. After all, it wasn’t as though I was running for mayor of Auckland. As a proud Wellingtonian, the item wasn’t top of my list.
   As legislation has passed making way for the “super-city”, and with Māori groups deeply concerned about representation (given the Treaty of Waitangi’s provisions I can fully see why), it does seem there are a few things that need to be ironed out.
   I remain sceptical. Some feel the amalgamation would make the city less accountable to ratepayers. Some feel that it’s an excuse to sell of Auckland’s assets to foreigners, continuing policies that have not enhanced New Zealand’s industry or society.
   Nearly a year since the Herald article, I am only slightly better informed, but what concerned me was that ﬁrst piece I read.
   It is nearly never good news if a foreign-owned newspaper reports something as a fait accompli in its headline when the article below it offers nothing to support those words.
   Which made me wonder: what agenda does an Irish–Australian newspaper have in this whole thing?
   If you begin looking at it from that point of view, it gives a little bit more, albeit not much, suspicion to those people who have their doubts about the technocrats.
   Apart from the hikoi and the dull, everyday minutiæ of passing legislation (the latter being something few of us would care about), the negatives have not really been reﬂected in the media. Māori were painted as undemocratic by the mainstream media, somehow offending PM John Key’s idea of “one person, one vote”, when the real fact is that the Treaty of Waitangi makes certain guarantees over joint sovereignty.
   That issue, I know, opens up another can of worms, which was not the point of this post. But frankly, I don’t think the Māori view, one that concerns all of us, has been fairly represented in the reports I have encountered.
   So we know from the media alone that foreign interests want this “super-city” to go ahead. We know that some local interests do not. And we know the rest of us have a big question mark over what the heck the PM and the ACT Party’s Rodney Hide are on about, because we don’t live in Auckland.
   Now we have the Hon Peter Dunne MP, one of Parliament’s more intelligent members, suggesting Wellington should consider doing something similar.
   I might agree if the motives are to create a city that would be a rival to Auckland and attract investment and jobs.
   Mr Dunne’s stated belief is that having amalgamated councils which had been competing, rather than cooperating, would make sense. In that sense, I agree with him.
   As long as Wellington is not put on the block and the resulting council provides the same, if not better, representation for its citizens.
   Nevertheless, Auckland still gives me some cause for concern. Granted, I am grasping at the tiniest straw here in creating my suspicion. But that straw was in a very large Miller typeface as the Herald’s lead story that day, and on this occasion, I do not think it was sloppy editing that saw such a gulf between headline and copy. Not for the biggest story of the day. There was something more to it. And we should be vigilant, certainly more than I have been, about our biggest city’s affairs.

GM says it’s writing Chapter 1 in new TVC

2009-06-02T12:52:00.002Z

I know it probably makes the world of sense to GM right now to get its hands on taxpayer money and reduce the number of brands.

But it made a lot of sense to British Leyland, too.

Virtually wrong

2009-06-01T04:00:00.004Z

[Cross-posted] I’m quite a big fan of the work of Andrew Niccol, not because he is a Kiwi (and an underrated one at that), but I get the messages he puts in to his movies. After viewing a few of his ﬁlms over the last week on DVD, I was surprised to ﬁnd this claim about his ﬁlm Simone on IMDB and, one of my must-dislike sites, Wikipedia:

Al Pacino’s character, Viktor Taransky, is based on Ray Kurzweil and his female alter ego Ramona.

I do not know for a fact if this is true, but I do know that Mr Kurzweil’s ‘Ramona’ demonstration was in 2001. According to Mr Niccol’s father, whom I have spoken to on numerous occasions, Simone was written before The Truman Show, which débuted in 1998. So unless Mr Kurzweil had some proto-Ramona in the mid-1990s, then the claim on IMDB and Wikipedia is ﬁctional.
But you try correcting something on Wikipedia. A friend of mine attempted to remove some false information about his wife, but was blocked, so the inaccuracy (possibly defamation) stands. I once put in something about an actor and it was removed because it was ‘original research’. So, my conversation with Mr Niccol senior would be branded the same.
The other Wikipedia experience I recall was providing an authoritative view on the capitalization of the deﬁnite article, along with supporting evidence, and I got severely shot down by some who refused to acknowledge it, despite their requesting a professional come in and settle the argument. Folks, if you don’t want it, don’t ask for it.
Conclusion: things like Wikipedia are merely a collection of gossip and inaccurate rumour, which is given weight if it has been published in a less-than-reputable source. I’d give it a wide berth.
Somehow, given the message of Simone, on how the media spread ﬁctions because people prefer to believe them, Mr Niccol may well love the way life has imitated art in the virtual world.

Why The Paradise Club isn’t on DVD

2009-05-12T05:00:00.004Z

Slightly off-topic—the sort of post you might see on my casual, throwaway-line blog over at Vox. But it is connected to some of my regular topics such as intellectual property and business.
One of my favourite TV series of all time is The Paradise Club, created by the late Murray Smith. While it’s no secret I like the humour of The Persuaders (which in part inspired the name of this blog) and the black-and-white storylines of Return of the Saint, in the post-Professionals era, only one British action–drama had all the right ingredients.
The Paradise Club hit the right buttons: the 20 episodes had high-quality, consistent scripts; they were ﬁlmed beautifully; and the interplay between the late Don Henderson and Leslie Grantham as two very unlikely brothers was brilliant.
But if you go on YouTube, there is only one complete episode (‘Rock and Roll Roulette’), a clip from another (I believe it’s from ‘The Great Fly-Tipping War’), and a clip from a Detectives parody guest-starring Grantham and co-star Leon Herbert.
It’s as though in the Web 2·0 era, The Paradise Club has ceased to exist. There are few references to it—about the most detailed (other than the IMDB listing) is on Leslie Grantham’s ofﬁcial site, almost as a CV entry. Murray Smith’s name can be found, but there’s no record online of his birth name any more (Murray-Smith was actually his surname). There is, shockingly, no DVD for the series. It’s arguably Britain’s most overlooked TV series considering the audience numbers it generated.
People refer to the series as a ‘cult’ one, but it was very popular in 1989–90, and two series were commissioned from Zenith Productions, the people who made Inspector Morse.
Last week I tracked down The Paradise Club’s script editor, Philip Palmer, who has gone on to become a successful novelist, penning Debatable Space. This science ﬁction book has had some great reviews from other writers as well as the British broadsheets. A second book, Red Claw, is due October 2009.
I asked him if he knew why The Paradise Club had never made it to DVD, and he kindly responded (the italics are mine):

I’ve spoken to Archie Tait, who was the executive producer and one of the originators of the show (with the late lamented Murray Smith.) He tells me there are two reasons the DVDs aren’t available. Firstly Zenith, who own the show, have gone bankrupt. Secondly, there’s a lot of original music on the soundtrack which makes it difﬁcult to release, because of the rights situation. (A Sade song is a particular problem.) For exactly this reason the hugely popular ITV series Heartbeat (of which Archie produced 100 eps) isn’t available on DVD—because it features a lot of great 60s songs and ITV don’t own international rights to them.

Philip regards the situation as ‘Crazy,’ and I agree with him.
If you are a fan, then there is some potential good news:

Your query has prompted Archie to start chasing up the rights of Paradise Club. It’s such a waste of all that material! And, as your email shows, there’s still a real interest in the series.

Any one of us who has had to draft or review a contract in the media business knows how tough it is to predict technologies, so I can fully understand the difﬁculties that Philip writes of. The same situation held back the release of Moonlighting on DVD, something that creator Glenn Caron had to remedy as he wasn’t prepared to release his series with anything but the originally chosen songs.
There is no real solution to prevent a repeat if yet another new medium comes our way. You don’t want contracts that are so loose as to leave one without protection (and a challenger says, ‘That was not envisaged at the time of drafting’); yet you don’t want ones that are too tight that adaptations are discouraged.
But on the main topic itself, I hope Archie Tait ﬁnds success with his efforts—may the stars align for that! I believe there’s huge interest in The Paradise Club, especially considering its age, and there have been calls for a DVD version of the two series for quite some time. If the material can generate extra income for the team that put it together, and for the families of Murray Smith and Don Henderson, then all the better—they deserve it.

BYD farewell to ethics

2009-05-06T06:41:00.003Z

I had been under the impression that Red Chinese automaker BYD was a Toyota licensee, though in Autocade I stopped short of making this assertion since I had no proof of it. I did think it was odd that BYD has Mitsubishi-derived engines. It turns out there is no connection with Toyota, but when you see things like the below you have to wonder.
Two years ago, BYD issued this photograph of its upcoming model, the F1. It since renamed the car the F0, because it claimed it didn’t to get into a legal dispute with the Formula 1 people.

Look familiar? While BYD might not want legal trouble with F1, it doesn’t seem to mind legal trouble with Toyota. Here’s a publicity photograph for the Toyota Aygo:

BYD’s general manager, Xia Zhibing, has been quoted as saying, ‘The BYD F1 is a model developed by ourselves and we hold the intellectual property right for it.’
I guess there’s no shame at BYD, and that the ideals of truthfulness in Confucianism haven’t made a return to parts of Red China.
Come on, Mr Xia, the only contribution BYD has made to the 2007 photo is in Adobe Photoshop! If you are going to lie about it, don’t make it so obvious by using someone else’s publicity pic ﬁrst! At least use CAD to generate something new!
Or this could be some form of getting war reparations from Japan, but that Toyota hasn’t been informed. (Remember the Bristol 401?)
And this is the company that Warren Buffett has put money in to. Somehow I think that if any BYD cars ever make it to the US as Mr Buffett intends, Toyota’s going slap a big court order on them, and not a single one will make it on to the market.
If you look at the F3 and F6, BYD’s larger models, the doors look identical to those of the Toyota Corolla E120 and Toyota Camry XV30 respectively, but the front- and rear-end styling has been modiﬁed to resemble some of Honda’s work. I understand the dimensions are slightly different but that an expert should be able to prove objective similarity in the shapes of the doors—or enough to stop BYDs from going on sale in many markets.
The F3 hybrid, the world’s ﬁrst plug-in production car, beating Chevrolet with its Volt, might have an innovative powertrain, but what is the likelihood that has come from somewhere else?
BYD shows how out of touch parts of Red Chinese commerce is with, well, honesty and decency. I’m happy to deal with mainland Chinese ﬁrms, but only those that I am connected to by blood or referred to by family—and governments should not be signing things like free-trade agreements with the Politburo in Beijing till some of these intellectual property issues can be sorted out.
New Zealand, of course, is a triﬂe too naïve, with its free-trade agreement with Red China—but that’s another story.

Facebook switches email notiﬁcation ﬁelds back on

2009-05-04T01:25:00.004Z

This is interesting. Over the weekend I blogged about how Facebook added two ﬁelds into the ‘Notiﬁcations’ page, without my knowledge, and had switched them on. In layman’s terms, Facebook added two reasons it could send me automated emails.
I somehow found myself clicking on ‘My Account’, then ‘Notiﬁcations’. There were two new ﬁelds: (a) ‘Updates about Facebook product news’ and (b) ‘Invitations to participate in research about Facebook’. In both cases, Facebook had switched them on, which means the service could send me emails on these two topics.
Bear in mind that virtually everything else on that page is switched off. I don’t like getting Facebook notiﬁcations as there are too many of them.
It’s my choice, right? If I disliked this so much, I could switch them off. No need to be a crybaby. So I did, then clicked ‘Save changes’.
In replying to one of my readers today, I went back to the page to tell her verbatim which two ﬁelds were new. And here’s what I found:

Facebook has switched the two ﬁelds back to ‘on’ again.
I was under the impression that Facebook was serious about our privacy and email preferences. Facebook: no means no.
If you would rather not get emails on these two matters, go into your Facebook settings. But don’t go just once—go twice or even three times to make sure the site “remembers” that you opted out of receiving spam.
Facebook seems to be a necessary evil as far as I am concerned, such as for class reunions and events—but what motive does it have in annoying its users?

New Zealand’s favourite bank

2009-05-03T00:34:00.003Z

Man, I like this bank. In the post last week with a small pack of Moccona cappuccino mix:

I never got this with the other banks I had been with, though I did used to get invited to the ANZ branch parties when Laura Crellin was the manager.
It shows that Lynne and TSB Bank get it when it comes to customer service—and that they are prepared to reciprocate kindness. I really appreciate the gesture.

Facebook’s latest changes are also ill-advised

2009-05-02T10:14:00.004Z

Facebook has gone through another round of ill-advised changes over the past week.
When someone “friends” you, you now have to put in the information about how you know one another when the invitation is accepted. If you forget to do this, there is no way you can make up for it later with Facebook’s new friends’ interface. Bad move on Facebook’s part—if your friend does not do this, or gets it wrong, then it’s too darned bad. You will have to advise your friend of the error, “unfriend” him or her, and go through the process again, if you want this information to be recorded accurately.
Secondly, Facebook advertisements now geo-target based on where the user is. This, you think, might make sense. I argue that it does not, and I have often been an opponent of geo-targeting.
When I look at an American print magazine, I see American advertising—and I expect the same online. If I wanted domestic advertising, I’d browse a domestic site. The point is that I choose which jurisdiction I want to be sold from. It’s thanks to the absence of geo-targeting in the early days that I discovered many etailers to begin with, such as CD Now and Amazon.com.
Prior to the latest change, Facebook fed advertisements to the user based on where the user said his or her location was. I had mine set to Göteborg, Sweden, because I felt the Swedish advertisements had more relevance to me than Kiwi auction ads for an iPod—especially considering that I am one of the last New Zealanders not on TradeMe or similar services. I also wanted to read Swedish ads to practise my comprehension of the language.
I discovered this when travelling through India, having set my location to Hong Kong while I was there and forgetting to change it to New Delhi. While in India, Facebook still fed me Hong Kong ads. It made perfect sense to me, especially as I am a Hong Kong native. Some of us wouldn’t mind getting advertising from our home towns.
Equally, a Kiwi living in the UK might just want to see Kiwi advertising when (s)he browses Facebook.
It makes no difference to Facebook money-wise if it is being paid on CPM rates. However, if it wants to show better CTRs, or clickthrough ratios, then I suggest it return to the status quo ante.
Finally, I spotted two new ‘Email notiﬁcation’ entries that Facebook had added, and turned on without my permission. I advise Facebook users to go through their privacy settings: they will be in for a bit of a surprise.
But Facebook has shown it seldom listens to the user base—its arrogance continues to show, with every move it makes. I write about this, but I don’t expect the company to do a thing about it.

We say they’re British, but Brown still defended his apartheid policy

2009-05-02T08:34:00.004Z

My friend Pete blogged last week about how he had written a letter to the UK Foreign Secretary over the treatment of the Gurkhas. (As it was a private post I will not reveal Pete’s surname or URL.) And, sadly, this is typical of the British Government in its dealings with any group that could claim to be British—but happen to be of colour.
While the above is a sweeping statement, and I realize there are plenty of whites who have served in Gurkha regiments, it’s been my observation that the United Kingdom has not been fair when it comes to those who have sworn allegiance to the country but do not hail from an Anglo–Saxon or European race.
The Gurkhas had sworn to defend HM’s interests over the years, and interestingly, there seems to be a great deal of support from the British public over their plight. Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats has said that if Gurkhas were prepared to die for Britain, then ‘surely they deserve to live here,’ while the Labour Government seems fearful of the idea that there would be a wave of new immigrants ﬂooding the land.
Somehow I think the British public would be more accommodating of those who served in the name of Her Majesty than Europeans who are there by virtue of the Common Market.
I support the Gurkhas, wholeheartedly. I was raised on stories on their bravery and loyalty. And they have put more on the line in defence of the United Kingdom than many who consider themselves British.
I’ve seen all these excuses from the British Government before. Before Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese in 1997, the UK made changes to its law to prevent Hong Kong-born British subjects settling there. The Tories’ excuse at the time was the fear of a wave of immigrants—six million at the time—heading to the UK. It would have been a more ﬁtting excuse from someone like Sir John ‘Go Home Johnny Foreigner’ Goldsmith.
As British Columbia and various Australian states found out because of the UK’s xenophobic policies, many Hong Kong émigrés took their hefty bank accounts to more accommodating homes. Canada and Australia beneﬁted from the Hong Kong Chinese immigrants’ work ethic, while Britain missed out. We didn’t exactly create a class of bludgers or some massive drain on their social services. To engage in apartheid by creating a class of ‘British Overseas Nationals’ for us is hypocritical at best.
Labour’s cries of ‘change’ during its 1997 General Election campaign can best be interpreted, 12 years on, as ‘more of the same,’ and the Prime Minister’s belief that his party has made advances shows how out of touch he is with public opinion. It was unsurprising, then, that yesterday the PM was defeated, with 27 of his own party voting with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to allow retired Gurkhas to settle in Britain—which shows that in some cases, Parliament does indeed reﬂect the will of the people.
As I have blogged before, Britain has not gone out of its way to protect our interests and tends to ignore many of us, and in this respect I have a great deal of empathy for the Gurkhas. While I have never put my life on the line in the way they have, I also have sworn an allegiance to HM Queen Elizabeth II, and I expect that to be reciprocated when there are matters that the British Government, by law, must assist me with. All too often the Foreign and Commonwealth Ofﬁce does not understand its own obligations.
I see sons and daughters of British citizens who have never set foot in the UK, who have no desire to be connected to the UK except to gain a passport for travel purposes, become admitted as British nationals themselves, and the only commonality they have with the majority of Britons is the colour of their skin.
Meanwhile, many of us born under the Union Jack and considered ourselves British by birth, and who consider ourselves loyal subjects of HM the Queen, are cast aside, and one of the only things that seems to unite us is that we don’t have white skin.
The vote yesterday was a statement by the British people to say: apartheid doesn’t work. One would think that Labour, after being accused of racism by the Conservatives back in 1983 (anyone remember ‘Labour thinks he’s black. Tories say he’s British’?), would tread carefully in the wake of Tony Blair’s ‘change’ rhetoric 12 years ago. This is perhaps why I am always sceptical of anyone who talks about ‘change’ in an election campaign.
In Britain, we have seen no change and no greater understanding from HM Government on the simplest rules of law. All this does is set up the Tories for their own cry of ‘change’ come the next General Election—and the British public might, this time, fully remember where Labour fell considerably short.
The Gurkhas have scored a symbolic victory, as have everyday British people, but the fact that Labour even moved to exclude Gurkhas from what most right-minded people would consider their due shows both arrogance and ignorance to the greatest degree.

Twitter ratios of the rich, famous or arrogant

2009-05-01T14:28:00.010Z

If a Twitter presence is de rigueur in 2009, then who is using it as a tool for generating dialogue and connecting with stakeholders?
A few weeks back, I posted my top 10 reasons for following someone on Twitter. While not everyone agreed with the 10, I dare say that the majority struck a chord. And one of the things many of us agreed on was that certain celebrities wanted the same level of worship on Twitter as they had in the ofﬂine world—and how that wasn’t exactly encouraging for some of us to become one of their followers.
That’s ﬁne: it’s their prerogative, but I see it as rather self-centred. ‘Come, look at me, I am Tweeting,’ doesn’t seem as accommodating—or even human—as, ‘I want to hear about you, too.’ All the ideas about modern marketing—from Christian Gronröos and relationship marketing, to the Medinge Group’s writings about humanizing branding, to Stefan Engeseth’s One—are summed up in the latter quotation.
Part of the reason for President Barack Obama’s campaign’s success was his staff’s use of the service. It should be noted that since winning his election he has been an irregular Tweeter, which suggests to me a reduced desire to interact with the Twitter community, but only he really knows for sure. What is less arguable is that the President has a reasonable following-to-followers ratio: he is following 766,815 people, while 1,044,307 follow him.
It means that if the President ever logs in to his account, he’ll see the latest updates of some of these 766,815. And if he does want a feel of the Zeitgeist, he can do that very easily. As Barack Obama is probably the most tech-savvy American president in history, this would be a good way for him to keep his ﬁnger on the pulse—and ignore any biases in opinion polls.
One can compare this with the other extreme: actor–producer Ashton Kutcher. I recently saw that he had proclaimed himself ‘Mr Twitter,’ which is laughable, considering he doesn’t have a grasp of the service at all. Mr Kutcher follows 142 while he has 1,542,437 followers. If the internet is this great equalizer, one where there’s one-to-one or even one-becoming-one communication, then Kutcher fails terribly based on his ratio: he sees Twitter as a one-way service, another channel to broadcast without needing to hear back from his supporters.
It’s his right, of course, and we all have our ways of using Twitter. I just don’t see his as being particularly fruitful for his personal brand, and I see the proclamation of ‘Mr Twitter’ particularly arrogant. That would be like my calling myself ‘Mr Branding’ just because I wrote and co-wrote a few books.
There are in-between cases, such as actor Stephen Fry, who maintained a very healthy ratio before he gained more followers than he could handle in a very short space of time. Cases like that are totally forgiveable, in my book. I understand, though I have not known of his account for long, that Hugh Jackman found himself in a similar boat.
And perhaps some of us are on information overload. For my ﬁrst year on Twitter after I joined in April 2007, the only people I followed were those I met in the real world, because I didn’t need another thing to follow. After a while I opened myself up to reading more from others—it helps one feel connected to the dialogue on our planet, if that’s what one wants.
So by this reckoning, how are others’ ratios? As of this Friday (this post was written around 1.30 p.m. GMT), we are looking at the below numbers for a few people I can think of. And with the exception of a few politicians, many in that ﬁeld are doing a terrible job of listening to the people: I’m talking about Sens. John McCain and Claire McCaskill in particular. Politicians should be doing better than that.
Gov. Sarah Palin’s account is still, from what I can tell, very new (started April 29, 2009), and I’m prepared to extend to her the same courtesy as I have to Stephen Fry and Hugh Jackman—for now.
With an emphasis on American politicians, here’s how things are stacking up in terms of Twitter ratios. Does it say much about their egos or how much they wish to interact with the public, or does the ratio cease to mean much when we talk about the very well known?

Person	Twitter handle	Following	Followers	Ratio
John Edwards	johnedwards	13,651	12,412	109.98%
Karl Rove	KarlRove	43,546	46,050	94.56%
Congressman John Boehner	johnboehner	9,261	9,845	94.07%
Maria Shriver	mariashriver	44,261	53,463	82.79%
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger	Schwarzenegger	44,263	56,397	78.48%
Gov. Bobby Jindal	BobbyJindal	14,344	19,054	75.28%
President Barack Obama	barackobama	766,815	1,044,307	73.43%
Britney Spears	britneyspears	377,899	1,263,017	29.92%
Stephen Fry	stephenfry	55,097	464,878	11.85%
Mayor Gavin Newsom	GavinNewsom	23,809	336,294	7.08%
Sen. Barbara Boxer	Barbara_Boxer	482	7,275	6.63%
M. C. Hammer	MCHammer	26,048	563,733	4.62%
Sen. Kay Hagan	kayhagan	19	512	3.71%
Sen. Chris Dodd	chrisdodd	20	1,265	1.58%
Jonathan Ross	Wossy	3,424	235,498	1.45%
Vice-President Joe Biden	joebiden	156	21,188	0.74%
Gov. Sarah Palin	AKGovSarahPalin	45	11,782	0.38%
Shaquille O’Neal	THE_REAL_SHAQ	456	858,417	0.05%
Perez Hilton	PerezHilton	199	727,895	0.03%
Hugh Jackman	RealHughJackman	33	167,485	0.02%
Demi Moore	mrskutcher	81	801,808	0.01%
Ashton Kutcher	aplusk	142	1,542,347	0.01%
Rumer Willis	TheRue	5	57,102	0.01%
Sen. John McCain	SenJohnMcCain	43	541,042	0.01%
Lance Armstrong	lancearmstrong	57	754,049	0.01%
Martha Stewart	MarthaStewart	28	519,343	0.01%
Sen. Claire McCaskill	clairecmc	1	22,619	0.00%
Ellen DeGeneres	TheEllenShow	21	1,264,886	0.00%
Oprah Winfrey	Oprah	11	747,266	0.00%
Al Gore	algore	7	707,465	0.00%

Post no. 1,000: the dangers of too many press releases

2009-04-20T11:21:00.004Z

When there’s a recession, people tend to act predictably. In 2001, they began cutting their online advertising, because online ads were further down the food chain than they are today. This time, a lot of companies have cut above-the-line marketing spends in favour of press releases.
I have a lot of friends in public relations (PR), so this post isn’t targeted at them. But I think they know, with the rise of their business, that they are the ﬂavour of the ﬁrst and second quarters of 2009.
With several problems: if everyone’s sending releases, how are they to be differentiated? It’s becoming harder and harder, and those of us in the media already receiving a few thousand emails a week are more likely to ignore them.
Secondly, if everyone’s sending releases and there’s not enough spending on above-the-line advertising, then print publications have no choice but to cull pages—thereby minimizing the chances of that release making it.
It doesn’t make much difference to online publications, either. While the second problem doesn’t exist, the ﬁrst one does—and when you’re international as Lucire is, quantity far exceeds quality.
If the PRs really want to do well, they might consider getting into advertising themselves, and ﬁnd ways to balance their work. Or, there may be new-media ways that remain unexamined—but even there, they need to create trust and relationships with the audience, and it’s not a cheap exercise to do that even with a Facebook page or Twitter account.
There is still a place for releases—especially for those parties who are more limited in choice—but I advocate moderation.
At this point, the rise of PR can’t continue endlessly, and on that topic I’m going to defer to my friend Stefan Engeseth.
I’m still bound by conﬁdentiality but in a few months’ time, Stefan will tell you more about the sort of topic I’ve hinted at in this post.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is post no. 1,000 on this blog. It’s taken three years and three months to get here, longer than what I expected.
This blog has changed since I began. Back in January 2006, I was a daily blogger, keeping up a frequency that proved untenable. Also, I blogged initially about a lot of my working principles—and they don’t change. There seemed little point repeating a lot of those ideas.
When Vox launched into beta toward the end of 2006, I put my trivial stuff there, reserving The Persuader for more work-oriented posts. That cut down the number of posts, as did general fatigue of keeping up the daily routine.
I seem to have rediscovered a little bit of vigour for blogging about work over the last six months—especially as the media began bandying the word recession about.
It’s not as though media misbehaviour and injustice ceased existing because I wasn’t blogging. The challenging business environment, too, created extra opportunities to blog.
I didn’t expect the 1,000th blog to be about PR—I thought it might have been a profound piece on branding. But, remember, we are in charge of the technology, and the above was the topic on my mind. I did tell myself that I would not make the topic a “commemorative” one, one which somehow gathered up all the different interests my company has, and turn them into a TV season ﬁnalé of sorts.
I thank everyone, whether you’ve been with me since post no. 1 in January 2006 or you joined me recently through Twitter. I look forward to continuing the journey with you.

Email to Facebook to Twitter—maybe the next step is becoming Cybermen

2009-04-18T13:19:00.009Z

I thought a Tweetup was a gathering of Tweeters at one venue and they all go on their mobile devices to Tweet on Twitter. Imagine my surprise when my ﬁrst Tweetup, to which I was invited by my old friend Simon Young (@audaciousgloop to those of you on Twitter, and photographed above), was actually a normal social gathering, at the Malthouse on Courtenay Place last Friday.
The differences include the following, and they are indicative of life in 2009:

• people made introductions by their Twitter handles in some cases, not their real names;
• some really did Tweet on their mobile devices while there;
• business cards have Twitter IDs on them; and
• people talked about Tweeting one another when they left, instead of ‘Call me,’ or the last two years’ ‘Facebook me.’

Sy and I had a good chat about how the virtual landscape has changed since we met in 2000, when we thought email groups were still cool things, and we had been using Google for about a year. Sy’s on the forefront on a lot of these new-media, Web 2·0 developments, working a lot on the cloud, and expanding his expertise with a lot of the latest thinking from around the world.
We discussed over dinner some of Loïc Le Meur’s ventures in San Francisco and we both agreed that his approach would be one we’d like to follow ourselves: have a great network with sources to fund new ideas that have mass appeal. But we also reminisced—because to both of us, email is dead as a medium.
It’s a chore, a means to send attachments, but it no longer provides the same level of pleasure as it once did. In most respects it has replaced the traditional letter. I enjoy it on days when I can keep on top of the volume—though I have met people over the last two years who think that my getting 2,000–3,000 emails a week is nothing compared to what they get. I also enjoy it on days when I’m doing business development for my work—I get the same buzz I did when email was open to those early adopters, all willing to build a global network with a bit of Clinton-era optimism.
I said to Simon that I needed to learn to be a rude bastard and not reply to everyone—a bad habit I had from the ofﬂine days. I do, however, wonder what the convention is. I have messages going back to 2003 that need replies—a few weeks ago I had a good catch-up on 2005 emails.
So, in 2009 is it acceptable to leave things unanswered, as people move from one favoured, trendy medium to the next (email in the 1990s–mid 2000s, to Facebook in 2006–8, to Twitter in 2008–9) and that someone in the modern world simply “understands” that one is no longer available on a certain medium? Are people now expected to keep up with which is the next popular medium and get attention with others by predicting where they will be next on the internet? And if I can’t cope as well today with a few thousand emails a week, how are those of you with 5,000–10,000 or more managing—on top of your Facebook DMs, Tweets and SMS text messages?

Vista Print has two cool fonts on their systems, but …

2009-04-15T07:58:00.004Z

Both JY Ætna and JY Integrity are fonts that users of Vista Print can select to make their business cards.
When I ﬁrst found this out from my friend Dale, who uses Integrity on hers, I was quite chuffed. But then I thought: I don’t remember seeing Vista Print among our licensees.
I am not accusing this company of piracy. Far from it. It could well have licensed the fonts legitimately for each location. I am simply curious which of our retailers the deal was done with, and whether everything’s above board. Maybe someone at the retailer end goofed. Maybe the fonts were part of a compilation. Maybe Vista is indeed among the client lists, but I missed that month’s report. Maybe we messed up on the wording of the licence that we provided to that particular retailer. It would be nice for everyone to put things right. This is just regular, everyday commerce. Any explanation is conceivable.
If it is all above board, then I’d welcome the chance to promote the fact that JY&A Fonts’ products are good enough for Vista Print to use. I love the fact that they are being used in an online application.
We win, they win, customers become aware of more choice.
So I contacted Vista Print. I asked if we could do a joint promotion. And I asked about the licensing, just to be sure. How hard could it be, after all, to ﬁgure out where one purchased a couple of font licences from? And why not have the opportunity to promote yourself further?
I appreciate this is an international company, but then I also know that the purchases would be centralized.
It’s been a couple of months and I’ve heard nothing. I’ve also heard from a colleague that he’s been trying to ﬁnd out the same thing—for a year.
Vista Print, your silence has me worried, and you already have some unhappy customers.
Fast forward to this week. I mentioned Vista Print on Twitter. One of my Twitter contacts mentioned she wasn’t a customer, but she gets their spam. (I did, too, and in French—the same company or a licensee? Sadly, I’ve deleted them all, so I can’t back this up.)
And Vista Print itself has a Twitter account. In fact, they Tweeted me, asking if they could be of service:

I said they could and asked for a contact address (presumably via private messaging) so we could chat through the above.
And what did I receive via private messaging?
Spam, entitling me to 25 per cent off.

At the moment, these chaps aren’t putting a single foot right.

Advertising up, and it’s not Adsense

2009-04-14T10:23:00.004Z

I’m three posts shy of 1,000 on this blog. While I passed that number long ago with personal ramblings over at my Vox blog—the one with all my trivialities—The Persuader is a little more special.
It’s the blog that is hosted at the domain that takes my name and is, therefore, more tied in with my personal brand.
Three years ago, not long after I began posting here in January 2006, I asked readers if they would mind if I put in a few ads. The answer was that it was up to me and there would be no objection if I did.
I ﬁgured that since there are nearly 1,000 pages on this blog, I might as well make use of some of the real estate here.
This blog is run with Blogger, a service I threatened to quit numerous times, but the prospect of shifting hundreds of posts to Wordpress was too daunting to a layman. In the last month Blogger has, on its Dashboard, included a ‘Monetize’ link, reminding bloggers that they could sign up with Google Adsense.
I took the bait. After all, I believe I have readers’ blessings to do this.
However, I found, after being a web publisher for 15-plus years, that Adsense is, at best, confusing.
Even LinkExchange was easier when it was set up.
Blogger had some link that allowed an ad to be placed directly into the blog layout, which is ﬁne, but I then noticed that those ads did not have their own IDs in the Adsense menu for my account. I had to re-set a whole new bunch of ads.
On all the other ad networks I have worked with since, well, the dawn of web publishing, it has been a very simple matter of pasting in some code. It’s sort of the same with Adsense, except you have far more screens to go through. And other things are just poorly explained. In fact, Adsense goes against the Google ideals of simplicity of use.
Others may disagree as I realize many people use Adsense effortlessly, but I think I may be too set in my ways.
So the Adsense ads that were displaying on this blog over the past few days are now gone, replaced by another bunch from Burst Media.
The Google agreement prevents me from discussing speciﬁcs but in short, I don’t see what all the fuss is about regarding Adsense.
For some of the blogs with higher trafﬁc, I don’t see why Adsense would make sense.
Burst supplies some of the advertising for Lucire and Autocade, and they have been pretty good to deal with. (Gorilla Nation Media is another company I can recommend via Lucire.)
The ads are not very intrusive, and I have not put them into the feeds. They only appear on the blog’s web pages, and what little they’ll bring in will offset the hosting fees when the Kiwi dollar slips against the US.

It dont matter if youre left or right

2009-04-13T10:32:00.003Z

There are very few people who are all liberal or all conservative. I tend to ﬁnd people are a mixture—it would be wrong to say there’s even a continuum between left and right. We tend to be a pick-and-mix people, coloured by our experiences and our hopes. We change our views as we age.
Last year, I stood in the General Election for a left-wing party but am one of the more centrist members in the Alliance.
I tend to say I am Confucian, which some people have mistaken for socialist when in fact it is closer to libertarian. And some folks think libertarian is an inherently right-wing idea. Yet both the Alliance and the right-wing ACT Party here in New Zealand have incorporated libertarian ideas, if one deﬁnes that as maximizing personal liberty. There are areas where the two diametrically opposed parties agree as a result. They simply disagree on how that liberty is to be achieved: the Alliance believing in the necessity of some state mechanisms and nationalization of some industries for the sake of job creation. ACT is a monetarist, technocratic party, and I think some of you know how I feel about that.
I love the ideals of patriotism and freedom, I believe more in Keynes than the technocracy, and I wish to put people ﬁrst. When it comes to running this country I want to see locally owned businesses get better breaks than foreign-owned ones, whether at the local level or the national level. I want to encourage domestic ownership of international businesses, rather than the other way around. I believe in the innovative spirit of New Zealanders, and that everyone should have pride in themselves and their culture.
So am I right-wing or left-wing, liberal or conservative? Other than economic theory I think both sides would agree that the majority of the last paragraph applies to them. If we have a sense of right and wrong, then I am not sure it is that important we belong in a “camp”. Even the words are meaningless: across the Tasman our Australian friends have a Liberal Party—and that’s the conservatives.
Fight corruption, support the good, build friendships, piss off the evil. Not a bad strategy to have through life.

I cant believe its a law ﬁrm!

2009-04-11T03:39:00.004Z

I don’t know why we didn’t mention it before, but it’s ﬁnally been rectiﬁed on the JY&A Fonts site.
For a good part of my type design career, the legal issues surrounding typography have fascinated me. A few people knew I had this love, and since the 1990s I’ve done a few cases involving typeface design, trade marks and typography.
Mostly it’s been expert witness work in trade mark disputes, and there have been cases where my testimony has been needed to determine whether there would be confusion in the market-place or sufﬁcient differentiation. Occasionally there are the fun ones, where I’ve been asked to determine if a particular document could have been typeset at the time the party claims. There have been legal opinions on the intellectual property protection over designs and metrics.
People who hired me to do this work either knew I had a knack for legal work anyway, usually through the branding side of my expertise—and found this out by accident. Others knew, but they tended to be friends and colleagues who already had a connection to type.
To me, it’s more fun than being a solicitor as I can legitimately pick and choose cases with the expert witness work—I won’t be a witness if I can’t support the client referred to me, and attorneys run things by me ﬁrst.
I always go on about differentiation being a cornerstone of branding and it amazes me that one of the big differentiators of my own company wasn’t noted. It is partly true that we spend time seeing to our clients and not to ourselves.

How not to be a publisher

2009-04-04T10:07:00.003Z

When I started Autocade a year ago, I wrote to a publisher of car magazines to ask if he might have staff who would wish to contribute. If they were car nuts like myself, they might wish to help out—or so the theory went.
What I got back was pretty insulting. Even though I had told this chap I had been a customer of his for a quarter-century, he spent a good part of his message writing a threat to me.
First up, his staff were far too busy to work on anything like this. (Guess there’s no down time there—maybe I’m wrong to encourage my team to have interests and maintain personal blogs.) Secondly, if I took any part of his magazines or books, he’d sue.
I’m not saying he shouldn’t defend his company’s interests but considering this was his ﬁrst-ever contact with a customer of 25 years, you’d think the decent thing to do would be, if he was not thrilled with helping, to wish me well and leave it at that. If there were copyright considerations then his not inconsiderable resources could monitor Autocade.
I run a small company and we monitor copyright infringements online.
A guilty-till-proved-innocent approach did him no favours and if I weren’t a professional, now would be a good time to name him and expose his cowardice and inappropriate behaviour.
Dude, look at my signature ﬁle. I have a law degree. I am a magazine publisher, too. Don’t you think I would understand the situation with copyright better than you ever could? Wouldn’t it have been wiser to run my name through Google to ﬁnd out that I have been advocating copyright protection before making an ass of yourself?
I responded in a gentlemanly fashion and assured him there’d be no infringements, and to that I received no further correspondence.
Which goes to show his only motive was to shoot others down—for what? To risk damaging his brands as I potentially talk about what kind of moron runs that publishing group?
Pity, really. Whatever goodwill he built as a publisher over a quarter-century he lost in an email that greatly wanted for collegial respect.
I would have thought the end of this ﬁrst decade of the 21st century was not a good time to burn bridges for the print publishing profession.

Telecom hires robots, operators ﬁred?

2009-04-04T00:01:00.005Z

This is roughly how a conversation with the Telecom New Zealand 123 operator, with a Russian name, went last Thursday evening.

—I’m Jack, and there are no phone books in this booth at Johnston Street, Wellington.
—Call 018.
—But it would be handy to have these books, right?
—Call 018.
—You’re not very helpful, are you?

(Silence)

—Oh well, goodbye then.

(Silence)

I would have expected, ‘Thank you for letting us know, but we don’t put phone books in there any more,’ or ‘We’ll take note of your call, thank you.’
So the difference between a 123 operator and a robot is what? It must be pretty cheap to mount a tape recording where the only thing said is, ‘Call 018. Call 018. Call 018.’ Who even needs a robot?
I know Russians say goodbye, too, when prompted. It’s not as though this was a cultural challenge even to an operator with a bug up his ass.
I’m none the wiser. Phone books served a greater purpose than just being a directory of numbers. They helped us ﬁgure out addresses in case we had remembered wrongly, for instance. Someone hasn’t thought this through.
And, in some cases, they are more reliable than human beings who can make mistakes.
I’m not going to call 018 as the Telecom signage in the phone booth says this costs me—when I believe phone books, which the company provides free to most of us (that is, when it delivers them, and my neighbours have a few things to say about their non-appearance this year), have always offered that information for nought.
I also do not know how the billing would work on the 018 service. I call using a Telstra calling card sometimes, so how would Telecom know what account to charge?
Perhaps someone from Telecom would care to enlighten me about the absence of phone books and courtesy on the 123 service—and just what we are supposed to do when we need to double-check an address or number.