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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘research’
07.12.2020

TechCrunch/Creative Commons 2¡0
I summarized this article to my friends as: âHow can we trust Big Tech? Google didnât like hearing the truth from an intelligent woman, so they forced her out.â And my friend Cathy pointed out itâs a woman of colour.
And if you take the basic position that Google lies, just as I take the basic position that Facebook lies, then youâd rightly take Googleâs Jeff Deanâs explanation with a grain of salt. The MIT Technology Review noted that it doesnât hold water based on practice.
The ousted woman, Dr Timnit Gebru, was the co-lead of Googleâs ethical AI teamâyou can already spot the oxymoron as there is no place at Google, a company exercising monopoly powers and paying little tax, for ethics.
Dean claimed Gebru resigned voluntarily, which is being disputed by both current and former Google employees. The Review notes:
Online, many other leaders in the field of AI ethics are arguing that the company pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its researchâand perhaps its bottom line. More than 1,400 Google staff and 1,900 other supporters have also signed a letter of protest.
Dr Emily Bender of the University of Washington said in Ars Technica, âFrom the outside, it looks like someone at Google decided this was harmful to their interests.
âAcademic freedom is very importantâthere are risks when [research] is taking place in places that [donât] have that academic freedom.â
It wouldnât be the first time Google attempted to silence a critic, then claimed it did nothing of the sort.
And if it doesn’t like being warned about the dangers of AI, then what sort of horror awaits us from Google in that space? It’s not hard to foresee AI bots operating online being harmful or generating misinformation, with nothing to hold them back. Again from the Review:
In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian manâs post, which said âgood morningâ in Arabic, as âattack themâ in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.
We are letting these companies get away with being accessories to crimes and, in Facebook’s case, to genocide (over which it withheld evidence).
Tags: 2020, academia, academic freedom, AI, freedom of speech, Google, language, research, technology, Timnit Gebru, USA Posted in culture, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
14.10.2017

Above: Brand Kate Moss was probably seen by more people when the model collaborated with Topshop.
In 1999, the late Wally Olins sent me his book, Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies are Taking on Each Otherâs Roles, a fine read published by the Foreign Policy Centre that argued that countries were trying to look more corporate, adopting the practices of corporate branding. Conversely, as corporations gained more power and their need to practise social responsibility increased, they were adopting the ideas from nation branding. There was an increasing amount of this swapping taking place, and the 21st century has seen the trend continue: more countries have finely tuned nation brands and guidelines on how to use them, while many corporations are trying to look like good corporate citizensâDilmah and Patagonia come to mind with their work in building communities and advocacy.
Weâve been discussing at our firm another area where a similar switch has been taking place: that of corporate brands and personal brands. Personal branding is a relatively new development, with (in my opinion) Managing Brand Me the best work on the subject, authored by the late Thomas Gad with his wife Annette Rosencreutz, dating from 2002. (Thomas, of course, founded Medinge Group.) Managing Brand Me features an excellent break-down of the four dimensions involved (functional, social, mental, spiritual) in any good personal brand that still hold true today. They were well ahead of their time given that they had written their book long before selfies became the norm, and before people were being hired by companies as ambassadors based on their Instagram or Twitter followings.
Those spokespeople are practising their brands almost haphazardly, where some are getting to the point that they cannot be sustained. Others are balancing authenticity with commercial demands: we know that Kendall Jenner probably doesnât drink Pepsi, and no one wants to be seen to sell out their values. Nevertheless, there is a group of people mindful about their personal brand, and itâs only a matter of time before more begin taking on the trappings of corporate brands: inter alia, guidelines on how theirs is to be used; what products can be endorsed by that brand; how it can be differentiated against othersâ. Kate Moss may well be one example with a recognizable logotype that appears on products that have her seal of approval. (If I can be slightly macabre, the estates of Elvis Presley, Steve McQueen and Audrey Hepburn all think carefully on how each celebrity can be used to endorse products today; while lacking symbols or logotypes, their faces themselves are more than a substitute. With technology democratizing, it is no surprise that living and less iconic people might adopt similar ideas.)
What of companies? Many now find themselves on an equal footing, or even a disadvantage, to personal accounts. The biggest companies have to fight for attention on social networks just like some of the top personal accounts in the world, and they cannot succeed without speaking to the audience in a personal fashion. A corporate account that reposts publicity photographs would gain little traction except from fans who are already sold on the brand through non-social media; and there is some wisdom in assuming that millennials do not possess the same level of brand loyalty as earlier generations. Theyâre on the hunt for the best product or service for the price and adopt a more meritorious approach, and among the things that will draw them in will be the values and societal roles of the company. Therefore, there has to be a âpersonalityâ behind the account, aware of each of Thomas and Annetteâs Brand Me dimensions.
It has not escaped me that both Lucireâs fashion editor Sopheak Seng and I do better than the magazine when it comes to social media interactionâgetting likes and commentsâbecause weâre prepared to put our personalities on the line. The automated way Lucire shares articles on Twitter, for instance, hasnât helped build its brand there, something which weâre remedying by having team members around the world post to Instagram for starters, giving people a glimpse of our individual experiences. The images might not all look polished as a result, but it is a step toward fulfilling the four dimensions. It is a quest to find a personal voice.
In the wider media game, this is now more vital as news has become commodified, a trend that was first expressed in the 1990s, too. Perhaps those authors saw that most media outlets would be getting their news from a more concentrated base of sources, and demand on journalists to be first and fastestâsomething not helped by a society where speed is valued over accuracyâmeant that whomever controlled the sources could determine what the world talked about. Global companies want everyone to see when theyâre involved in an event that a good chunk of the planet is likely to see; in LâOréal Parisâs case itâs the Festival de Cannes. If every fashion publication has its eyes on Cannes, then what differentiates that coverage? What stamp does the media outletâs brand place on that coverage? Is there a voice, a commentary, something that relates to the outletâs role in society? Should it communicate with its best supporters on social networks?
Lucire does reasonably well each year at Cannes with its coverage, probably because it does communicate with fans on social networks and alerts them to exclusive content. The rest of the time, it doesnât do as well because as a smaller publication, itâs relying on those same sources. In 1998 we would have been the only English-language online publication specializing in fashion that talked about each H&M launch; in 2017 many fashion publications are doing it and our share of the pie is that much smaller. Individuals themselves are sharing on their social networks, too. This is not a bad thing: others should have the means to express themselves and indulge their passion of writing and communicating. Exclusivity means traffic, which is why we do better when we cover something few others do.
However, I recently blogged that Google News has shifted to favouring larger media players, disincentivizing the independents from breaking news. It comes back to needing a distinctive voice, a personal brand, and while we still need to rely on Google News to a degree, that voice could help build up new surfing habits. The most successful bloggers of the last decade, such as Elin Kling, have done this.
These are the thoughts milling around as Lucire heads into its 20th anniversary this month, and we reevaluate just what made us special when the publication launched in 1997. Those values need to be adapted and brought into 2017 and beyond. But there are wider lessons, too, on just where corporate branding and personal branding are heading; this post did not set out to discuss fashion media. Itâs not a bad place to start our inquiry, since fashion (and automobiles) are where a lot of brand competition takes place.
Indeed, it signals to me that in the late 2010s, companies need to do well as corporate citizens and have a personal voice on social media, ideas that build on my 2013 paper for the dĂŠbut issue of Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing (where I discussed brands in the age of social media and put forward a model of how to manage them) as well as Thomas and Annetteâs earlier research. Itâs the next stage of where branding practice could goâJY&A Consulting is primed, and weâre prepared to let those thoughts loose on Lucire and our other projects. The book of the blog, meanwhile, is the next target. What a pity Iâm not in Frankfurt right now.
Tags: 2010s, 2017, academia, Annette Rosencreutz, blogosphere, book, branding, celebrity, corporate branding, corporate social responsibility, Festival de Cannes, France, Google, Hennes & Mauritz, Instagram, Jack Yan, journalism, JY&A Consulting, Kate Moss, Lucire, LâOrĂŠal, media, Medinge Group, nation branding, personal branding, research, social media, social networking, Sopheak Seng, Sweden, Thomas Gad, Twitter, Wally Olins, Web 2¡0 Posted in branding, culture, France, globalization, internet, marketing, media, publishing, Sweden | No Comments »
10.03.2012
It’s hard to believe but Autocade is four years old this month. In fact, its actual birthday was some time last week.
It’s been busy at work, so Autocade has received a little less attention in the last 12 months, though things were buoyed when Keith Adams (of AROnline) added a whole bunch of models. It’s also about to cross the two million-page view barrier.
When I look back at the previous year, we’ve added a lot of Chinese models, for the simple reason that China is where most of the new-model activity is these days. There are a lot of translation issues, but Autocade may be one of the only references in English to the more obscure vehicles coming out from behind the Bamboo Curtain.
Still, there are some oddities from other countries that have appeared over the last 12 months, including a Ford made by Chrysler, and a Hillman Hunter with a Peugeot body (kind of). Here they are, for your entertainment.
Changcheng Phenom (éˇĺ ĺĺ˛/éżĺ ĺĺ˛). 2010 to date (prod. unknown). 5-door sedan. F/F, 1298, 1497 cmÂł (4 cyl. DOHC). Supermini that looked to all the world like a Toyota Vitz (P90) with an ugly grille, with the same wheelbase. Essentially a clone, though interior changed over Toyota version. Even Chinese media noted the similarity to the Vitz at the rear, but did not find the grille distasteful. Engines of Changchengâs own design, with decent performance from the 1¡5.
Chrysler GTX. 1968â9 (prod. unknown). 4-door sedan. F/R, 2414 cmÂł (V8 OHV). Performance version of Esplanada, with go-faster stripes, apeing US imagery. Filled the gap of the earlier Rallye and Tufao in the Chambord series, which had been missing since the RegenteâEsplanada took over in 1966. Offered only till the platform was finally retired in favour of the A-body cars from the US.
Dongfeng (ä¸éŁ/ćąé˘¨) CA71. 1958 (prod. 30). 4-door sedan. F/R, 2000 cmÂł approx. (4 cyl. OHV). First passenger car built by First Automobile Works of China, with bodyshell and interior apeing Simca Vedette (1954â7) and 70 bhp OHV engine based around a Mercedes-Benz 190 unit and chassis. Self-designed three-speed manual transmission. Laboriously built, as China lacked the facilities, and bodies were not cast but beaten to the right shape. Initially badged with Latin letters before Chinese ones replaced them on the order of the Central Committee. Used for propaganda, and Mao Tse Tung even rode in one around launch time, but faded into obscurity after 30 examples.
Dongfeng Fengsheng (ćąé˘¨é˘¨çĽ/ä¸éŁéŁçĽ) A60. 2011 to date (prod. unknown). 4-door sedan. F/F, 1997 cmÂł (4 cyl. DOHC). Uglified version of Nissan Bluebird Sylphy (G11) on a Renault MĂŠgane II platform, developed for Chinese market by Dongfeng. Basically the Sylphy with the Dongfeng grille grafted on it, with production commencing December 2011 for 2012 sale.
Emme Lotus 420/Emme Lotus 422/Emme Lotus 422T. 1997â9 (prod. approx. 12â15). 4-door sedan. F/F, 1973, 2174 cmÂł (4 cyl. DOHC). Very obscure Brazilian luxury car, built on Lotus principles of lightness, with early Lotus Esprit engines. T model denoted turbocharging. Claimed 87 per cent of components locally sourced. Manufacturing techniques with advanced materials not particularly refined, leading to questionable build quality. Little known about the vehicle, but it faded without trace after currency changes in the late 1990s.
Hawtai (čŻćł°/ĺćł°) B11. 2010 to date (prod. unknown). 4-door sedan. F/F, 1796 cmÂł petrol, 1991 cmÂł diesel (4 cyl. DOHC). Ugly first attempt by former Hyundai affiliate at its own sedan, using Roewe 550 engine. Media centre with sat-nav and entertainment perhaps one of its few stand-outs. Petrol model first off the line in late 2010; diesel followed soon after.
Panther De Ville. 1974â85 (prod. 60 approx.). 4-door saloon, 2-door coupĂŠ, 2-door convertible, 6-door limousine. F/R, 4235 cmÂł (6 cyl. DOHC), 5343 cmÂł (V12 OHC). Panther creates a new flagship to sit about its original J72 model, based around Jaguar XJ mechanicals. A pastiche of the Bugatti Royale, creator and âcar couturierâ Robert Jankel targeted his De Ville at the nouveaux riches, and they found homes with the likes of Elton John. Lavish, though never as quick as the Jaguars due to the weight and poor aerodynamics. Humble bits included BMC âLandcrabâ doors. Cars were custom-made and De Ville was usually the most expensive car on the UK price lists. Few redeeming features other than exclusivity; caught on to the 1930s retro craze that seemed to emerge in the 1970s.
Peugeot RD 1600/Peugeot Roa. 2006 to date (prod. unknown). 4-door saloon. F/R, 1599, 1696 cm³ petrol, 1599 cm³ CNG (4 cyl. OHV). The Rootes Arrow lives on, but with a Peugeot 405 clone bodyshell. Basic model offered by IKCO of Iran, blending the platform of the obsolete rear-wheel-drive Paykan with a more modern interior and exterior. Initially offered with 1¡6 petrol and CNG engines; G2 model from 2010 has 1¡7 unit.
Renault Pulse. 2011 to date (prod. unknown). 5-door sedan. F/F, 1461 cmÂł diesel (4 cyl. OHC). Nissan March (K13) with a nose job, aiming at the premium compact sector in India, expecting to form the bulk of the companyâs sales there. Designed by Renault staff in Mumbai. Largely identical under the skin, with diesel at launch, petrol models following later.
Siam Di Tella 1500. 1959â66 (prod. 45,785 sedan, 1,915 Traveller). 4-door sedan, 5-door wagon. F/R, 1489 cmÂł (4 cyl. OHV). Licensed Argentinian version of Riley 4/68 but with Traveller wagon (from 1963) adapted from Morris Oxford V Traveller. Very popular among taxi companies, especially as twin-carb OHV was willing, although compression ratio had been reduced to 7¡2:1, affecting power (55 hp instead of 68 hp). Modified suspension to cope with Argentinian roads. From 1966, Industrias Kaiser Argentina (IKA) took over, modifying and renaming the cars. Pick-up (called Argenta) also developed, with at least 11,000 manufactured.
Syrena 105. 1972â83 (prod. 521,311). 2-door saloon. F/F, 842 cmÂł (3 cyl. 2-str.). Syrena switches factories to FSM at Bielsko-BiaĹa, though it was briefly at FSO in 1972 before the company switched to producing only its Fiat-licensed models. Suicide doors now replaced with conventional ones hinged at the front. Lux from 1974, but with the same 29 kW engine.
Tags: 2012, anniversary, Aotearoa, Argentina, Autocade, Brazil, cars, China, Chrysler, database, Ford, India, Iran, Jack Yan, Keith Adams, media, Mediawiki, New Zealand, Peugeot, Poland, publishing, Red China, research, UK, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, cars, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, UK, USA, Wellington | 2 Comments »
05.03.2011
Since discovering that Firefox 4 Beta 13 is stable, I have spent less time with Firefox 3¡6, the buggiest, most oft-crashing program I have ever used in 30 years of computing.
But I used it today enough times to net myself five crashes, though this is above average. The ‘unmark purple’ bug that plagued me for so long has disappeared, which indicates it was an error with an extension (Flash, maybe?), and the average of four per day has decreased to two to three (on the days I use Firefox 3¡6 exclusively).
However, since the âquake, I have still netted a number of errors, and apart from one, there is no pattern to them. Here are the last 13 on this machine (I’ve used it a bit more on my laptop, which doesn’t have 4 Beta):
1 Ă [@ nsTArray::IndexOf >(nsAppShellWindowEnumerator* const&, unsigned int, nsDefaultComparator::RemoveObject(imgCacheEntry*) ]
1 Ă [@ InterlockedCompareExchange ]
1 Ă [@ PR_AtomicDecrement | nsSupportsCStringImpl::Release() ]
1 Ă [@ hang | mozilla::plugins::PPluginScriptableObjectParent::CallHasProperty (mozilla::plugins::PPluginIdentifierParent*, bool*) ]
1 Ă [@ hang | [email protected] ]
1 Ă [@ nsRuleNode::WalkRuleTree(nsStyleStructID, nsStyleContext*, nsRuleData*, nsCSSStruct*) ]
1 Ă [@ WrappedNativeProtoMarker ]
1 Ă [@ F_592283983_____________________________________________ ]
1 Ă [@ nsExpirationTracker::RemoveObject(gfxTextRun*) ]
I have no idea what any of this means, but to the layman it suggests the gremlins are everywhere in the program. (The defence by Firefox proponents in claiming that post-3¡5 versions are the most stable releases falls on deaf ears here: 3¡0 and 3¡6¡10 crashed far less often.)
I’ll sure be glad when Firefox 4 rolls out, and I have been really impressed by the bug-fighting and beta-testing programmers. They have actually listened to what I have to say and confirmed that most of the bugs I have reported existed. It’s already a darned sight better than Chrome and its nearly-every-session âAw, snapâ pages, of which no screen shot can be taken.
But based on the above crashes, there is, of course, no mystery on why Chrome’s market share has increased and Firefox’s has decreased. Chrome crashes, but not as oftenâand most won’t care about its typographic problems or the lack of support. Mozilla needs to get 4 out ASAP: the more 3 crashesâand judging by the comments in Bugzilla, the rate of crashing remains remarkably highâthe more likely users will hop over to the competition.
Tags: 2011, bugs, Chrome, computing, customer service, Firefox, Google, innovation, Mozilla, R&D, research, technology, web browser Posted in business, design, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
24.02.2011
Firefox 4 Beta 13 works, and I have not found any bugs with it.
I may be wrong, but I believe this is the last beta before release.
What’s amazing is that the bugs I have been complaining about for a long time have each been fixed. In other words, the reporting system works.
While for many versions, most of the Beta 4 text was unreadable, eventually bug reports to both Mozilla Support and Bugzilla got things on the radar.
That took a bit too long for my liking, and you do have to persist. But once I was “in the system”, things got resolved fairly quickly.
One of the Mozilla boffins created a patch that I could use to tell him what fonts I was using, to trouble-shoot the unreadable UI.
When those font issues were fixed, I noticed that there were still some errant numeralsâa bug that Chrome also has. The difference: at Mozilla, it got fixed. Someone (Jonathan Kew) believed me, had at the back of his mind what it was, and wrote code to sort it out.
We all worked it out together, with a layman like me providing screen shots and some public domain fonts on request, and the real experts then doing the hard yards.
The main thing was that I was believed and it was confirmed, on each occasion, that I had a valid complaint.
Unlike a certain other browser from a company which, I must say, did a good job with the Google Person Finder in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake.
I don’t deny they do good sometimesâit’s just that they slip up far too often other times.
The Chrome bug reporting and forums are about as useless as those for Blogger.
Features I’m discovering in Beta 13 are really nice, now that I am no longer being distracted by the wrong fonts displaying.
The box in which I am entering this text can be resizedânot something I could do on Chrome or Firefox 3.
More fonts’ kerning pairs are being read (see above left): someone at Mozilla likes typography. Some text-sized pairs look a little tight, but that’s a small complaint.
Some alternative characters in OpenType fonts are showing upâwhether that was intended or not, I don’t know. But it seems Firefox 4 is, at least, accessing them.
It’s not a memory hog: I estimate the memory usage is on a par with Firefox 3.
The promise of Firefox being reliable seems to have been realized: it took me days to crash Beta 12, and Beta 13 is so far, so good.
The user interface is cleanerânot Chrome-clean, but pretty good.
The speed seems improved, though I still feel Chrome is quicker. But I’d rather wait the extra hundredth of a second and have the page displayed properly.
Hopefully, once installed on my system, Firefox 4 is going to work a treat. Well done, guys.
If you’re going to have speedy R&D, it sure pays to have a system which embraces user experiences, working as much in parallel with your own team as possible.
Tags: bugs, Chrome, customer service, design, errors, Firefox, Google, innovation, Jack Yan, Mozilla, open source, R&D, research, technology, typography, web browser Posted in business, culture, design, internet, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
08.01.2011
Earlier today, while sorting out revisions to a piece I’m submitting to the Journal of Brand Management, I discovered that the new Facebook profile layout no longer has my collection of links.
Once upon a time, you could save your links to Facebook and they’d all be there, in a list, shown just below your most recent notes.
If you want to dig up an old link today, you have one choice: go through all your old Facebook posts. That meant going through a lot of stuffâin my case, it took around half an hour’s reading to get back to mid-November, looking for a link I thought I saved around then.
After all that, I came up empty.
This, in my book, is the biggest gift to Digg and Delicious ever since Facebook has been around. Pity, then, that Yahoo! is killing Delicious, leaving Digg as the principal bookmarking service on the internet.
With Digg, I can save and search through my favourite linksânever mind that Digg has ceased to work with Friendfeed, which used to share my Diggs with my Facebook friends. If I really need my Facebook friends’ nods, I’ll post the link twice. Often, I’m linking for my own purposes, of articles that I find interesting and that I want to go back to.
It was predicted that because people can now link-share on Facebook, Digg would no longer serve a purpose. After today’s experience, I beg to differ. Delicious might disappear soon (and that is a shame, because I used it for my branding bookmarks), but if Facebook continues to take useful features away, these other sites might come back into their own again. In November, we stopped sharing the Lucire RSS feed on its Facebook fan page. It might only be two changes, but 2011 could be the year of un-Facebooking.
Tags: academia, Digg, Facebook, internet, research, social networking, USA Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
07.01.2011
Autocade hit 1,250 models today, with a car that’s slightly unusual to non-antipodean eyes:
Ford LTD (FE). 1984â8 (prod. unknown). 4-door sedan. F/R, 4089 cmÂł (6 cyl. OHV). First LTD series with no V8s, with EFI six as standard, delivering 120 kW. Alloy head as with Falcon; electronic engine management, called EEC IV, delivering more low-end power. Three-speed automatic only. Almost identical to Fairlane in appearance, distinguished by flush-look alloy wheels, vertical bars on grille, bonnet ornament and body-coloured door mirrors; interior shared with Fairmont Ghia and Fairlane, with then-trendy LED instruments. Mid-term revisions 1986.
Because of my mayoral campaign and just general busy-ness, it’s taken longer to get to 1,250. Looking back through a quick search, these milestones were noted in my blog posts:
March 2008: launch
July 2008: 500
November 2008: 600
June 2009: 800
December 2009: 1,000
June 2010: 1,100
July 2010: 1,200
January 2011: 1,250
That means the first 500 took four months, but the next 500 took 17 months. It’s taken just over 12 months to get another 250 into the databaseâif this rate holds, which it might not, it’ll take another year or so to hit 1,500.
I’m going to continue building the site as one of my no-brainer activities. The next milestone to report is 1,500, which might take some time. Over the last year, I thought that if I ever did a Ph.D., it would be on brands and product life cycles and this site would form my research.
Tags: 1980s, academia, Autocade, cars, database, doctorate, Ford, history, Jack Yan, JY&A Media, marketing, product life cycle, research, retro Posted in branding, business, cars, interests, internet, marketing, media, publishing | No Comments »
21.07.2010
Writing about cars calms me. So call me a freak. And maybe Iâve just needed to chill more in this last month as we head into the last few months of the mayoral campaign.
It surprises me that Autocade has reached 1,200 models: 100 in the past month. And since I knew we were about to hit 1,200, then subconsciously I did want something flash to mark that number:

Audi Sport Quattro. 1984 (prod. 224). 2-door coupĂŠ. F/A, 2133 cmÂł (5 cyl. DOHC). Homologation special for Group B rallying, based on regular Audi Quattro but with 320 mm lopped from the wheelbase. Standard turbocharged engine producing 306 PS, though competition models tended to be up in the 450 PS-plus bracket. CarbonâKevlar body, steeper windscreen rake (of Audi 80 (B2)) for greater visibility as demanded by rally drivers, wider tyres. ABS, four-piston caliper brakes. This all came at a price: 203,850DM when new.
I didnât want a repeat of 1,100 when the Nissan Cherry was the landmark model. (There actually was a miscount, but I wonât go in to that.)
And in the 1,100â1,200 cycle, I managed to find yet another likely error (about a Ford development code) in Wikipedia which I harped on about over at my Tumblog.
As I said in the 1,100-car post, Autocade is not perfect and I find errors in my own work. However, I donât intentionally put wrong information in, and the Wikipedia error with the Ford CE14 code is like saying, in car-nut terms, that Margaret Thatcher was a member of the Labour Party. This error has now propagated all over the internet so that, if Wikipedia editors were to check, they would find plenty of pages to support a mistake of which their site could have been the source.
Tags: Audi, Autocade, cars, error, Ford, Jack Yan, Mediawiki, research, Wikipedia Posted in cars, internet, media, publishing | No Comments »
22.06.2010
My friend and colleague at the Medinge Group, Ava Hakim, passed on a few papers from her day job at IBM. The first is the latest edition of a biennial global CEO survey, while the second asks the next generation of leadersâGeneration Y. The aim: to find out what these groups think about the challenges and goals for CEOs.
Unsurprisingly, both studies (involving thousands of respondents) had commonalities, though Generation Y placed global awareness and sustainability more highly on their list.
Creativity, however, is ranked as the most valuable leadership trait. What society doesnât need, they tell us, is the same-again thinking if we are to make progress in the 2010s. The old top values of âoperational excellenceâ or âengineering big dealsâ no longer come up top in this new decade.
Or, as I heard from one gentleman yesterday, we canât afford to have the sort of âexperienceâ certain people tout, for they do not have 25 yearsâ experienceâthey just have one yearâs experience, over and over again, 25 times.
You know Iâm going to say it, so I might as well: this sounds like the sort of âexperienceâ some of my political opponents have had, day in, day out. Groundhog Day comes to mind.
Indeed, the studies indicate that we have a far more complex world, and same-again thinking isnât going to cut it.
In the first study (emphasis in original):
Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Later:
Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.
And:
Creative leaders consider previously unheard-of ways to drastically change the enterprise for the better, setting the stage for innovation that helps them engage more effectively with todayâs customers, partners and employees.
The study also highlights an increase in globalization, especially in developing markets, leading to greater complexity. It also says the most successful leaders are prepared to change the business models under which they operate.
In fact, the world we now live in demands that our leaders are globally aware, and see the need to compete in a global market-place.
The implications for this city are that Wellington can no longer afford to see itself as merely the capital of New Zealand or the geographic centre. It is one of many cities that must compete for attention and resources at a global levelâwhich means creating world-class centres of excellence for our industries. Creating such clusters can even help them stay domestically owned.
The study indicates that the style of leadership is going to be, necessarily, internationalistâwhich means we canât afford to have leaders who are monocultural, and fake multiculturalism. This, like any aspect of a brand, must be embodied for real. It doesnât mean giving up what âbeing a New Zealanderâ is; it does, however, mean that we have to be able to communicate with other nations and cultures, seeking advantages for ourselves.
Innovation is a driver both in terms of internal processes and as a core competenceâso leaders had better be prepared to do this. And being closer and more transparent with customersâor in the case of a city, citizensâis something practised by the most successful leaders, says the study. It reminds me of the topics in the first book I contributed to, Beyond Brandingâwhere integrity and transparency were at the core.
When it comes to the Generation Y study, the results were similar. This table summarizes the two quite well, and notes how the two groups differ:

I donât want to be giving the impression that the second study is less important, but realize that some of you are sorely tempted to see me wrap up this post.
I will say, quickly, that the lessons are clear: the next generation expects leaders to be globally minded and sustainable.
Chinese respondents in the second study, in fact, valued global thinking ahead of creativity. This perhaps highlights where the Peopleâs Republic, above the other Chinese territories, is heading: looking outwardly first and delivering what customers in export markets want.
As creativity is naturally a trait among Wellington businesses, itâs nice to know that many are already prepared for the challenges of the 2010s. And some of our most successful names would not have got to where they are without global thinking, even if some have been acquired by overseas companies: 42 Below, Weta, and Silverstripe come to mind.
However, I canât see these traits being reflected in politicsâand thatâs something I hope we can change in the local body elections, for starters.
Tags: Aotearoa, branding, CEOs, China, city, city branding, co-creation, complexity, creative clusters, creativity, customer relations, globalism, globalization, IBM, integrity, internationalism, Jack Yan, leadership, management, mayoralty, Medinge Group, multiculturalism, New Zealand, policy, politics, research, transparency, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in branding, business, China, culture, leadership, marketing, media, New Zealand, politics, social responsibility, Wellington | 1 Comment »
26.02.2010
My Wired for March 2010 arrived today (things take a while to reach the antipodes), with the most interesting article being on the Google algorithm. And hold on, this isnât a Google-bashing blog entry.
Steven Levyâs article was probably written before the furore over the Google Buzz privacy flap. And it points out how Google has learned from users for search, producing more relevant results than its competitors. With 65 per cent of the search market (and close to 100 per cent of my searches for many years), it has a bigger pool to learn from, too.
Recently I have noticed in ego-searches that Google is now smart enough to distinguish between searches for yours truly and those for Jack Yan & Associates (both in quotes), so that the former results in a mere 53,800 references, and the latter with 124,000 (quite a bit down from yesterday, when I first hatched the idea about blogging this topic). That is smart in itself: knowing when people are looking for me (or my blog) and when they seek the company. By comparison, Yahoo! lists 280,000 for the former and 42,500 for the latter, as the latter is (if you look at terms alone) a more specific search.
Once upon a timeâeven as late as 2009âa search for my name would result in both my personal and work sites.
Iâm pretty proud of my company and the people who work with me, and in election year, if someone were checking out my background, I sure would not mind them getting to JY&A as well. On the other hand, thanks to this distinction, my mayoral campaign site comes up in the top 10 in a search for my name. Either way, itâs relevant to a searcherâso all is well.
But is this really how people search? If I were searching for, say, Heidi Klum, I would probably want (I write this before I even attempt a search) her bio, a bit of news, pictures to ogle, and Heidi Klum GmbH, her company. This is exactly what Google delivers, with her Wikipedia entry in addition (as the first result). (Bing does this, too; Yahoo! puts Heidi Klum GmbH at number one.) Maybe someone could get back to me on their expectations for a name search although, as I said, Google is doing me a huge political favour by distinguishing me from my business. The ability to distinguish the two is, by all accounts, clever.
Levy cites an example in his article about mike siwek lawyer mi which, when fed into Google at the time of his writing, gets a page about a Michigan lawyer called Mike Siwek. On Bing, âthe first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, thereâs no direct referral to Siwek.â (A Bing search today still does not have Mr Siwek appear early on; in fact, most now discuss Levyâs article; sadly for Mr Siwek, the same now applies on Google, with the first actual reference to his name being the 18th result. Cuil, incidentally, returns nothingâso much for supposedly having a Google-busting index size.)
But I have one that is puzzling to me. Ten years ago, Lucire published an article about the 10th anniversary of the Elle Macpherson Intimates range. One would think that the query “Elle Macpherson Intimates” “10th anniversary” would bring this up firstâin fact, I did have to search for the URL last year when writing a blog post. On Google, this is, in fact, the last entry. On Bing, it is the first. On Yahoo!, it is second.
Of course, Google may well have judged the Lucire article to be too old and that the overwhelming majority of searches is for current or recent information. And being 10 years old, I hardly imagine there to be too many links to it any more. However, I thought the fact that we can now, very easily, sort our searches by dateâespecially with the new layout of the resultsâ pageâit might just give us the most precise result. The lead page to the article is in frames (yes, itâs that old), which may have been penalized by Google. But many of the leading results that turn up that have these two terms do not have them with great proximity (in fact, numbers one and two do not even have the term Elle Macpherson Intimates any more). However, I donât think the page I hunted for should be last, especially as none of the preceding entries even have the words in their title.
I am not complaining about the Google situation since a 2009 Lucire article that links to the old Elle Macpherson one comes up in the top 10, so itâs still reasonably easy to get to via the top search engine. (Cuil lists the 2009 article from Lucire in its top 10, too.) Thereâs also a blog entry from me that links it, and that appears on the second page.
Itâs just that I hold a belief that many people who search using Google (or any search engine) do so for research. They want to know about Brand X and, sometimes, about its history. If I type a personâs name, there is a fairly good chance I want to know the latest. But when I qualify that name with something that puts it in the past (anniversary), then Iâd say I want something historical. That includes old pages.
While few rely on a fashion magazine for historical research (though, believe me, we get queries from scholars who want citations of things they saw in Lucire), Google results nos. 1 through 53 and the majority of Cuilâs results (which are very irrelevantâthe first two are of a domain that no longer exists and a blank page) donât hit the spot.
For the overwhelming majority of searchesâwell over 90 per centâGoogle serves me just fine, which is why you donât see me complain much about the quality of its results. Even here, itâs not so much a complaint, but professional curiosity. It would be sad for Bing or Yahoo! to be labelled as search engines for historical searches, but someone should fairly provide access to the older, yet still relevant, pages on the internet for everyday queries (so I donât mean the Internet Archive).
PS.: Thereâs one more search engine that should be considered. Gigablast, which I have used on and off over the years, does not list the 2000 article, either. Like Google, the 2009 one is listed, and only five results are returned.âJY
Tags: Bing, Cuil, fashion magazine, Google, history, internet, Jack Yan, Lucire, media, Microsoft, research, search engine, supermodel, Wired, Yahoo! Posted in internet, politics | 1 Comment »
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