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November 28, 2005

Didn't we mention the company? Dunno how that happened

Jeremy Pepper's spidey sense tells him that a PR was instrumental in BusinessWeek running a piece on blogging, largely built around the experiences of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein with wikis as an alternative to emails with enormous cc lists. As a PR, Pepper noticed one thing most people not in that industry would not have bothered to think about: the name of the supplier of the wiki to DRKW was missing.

In the world of wikis, this maybe should not be a surprise. Most of them are open-source, freely downloadable chunks of software that DRKW could have installed without any outside help. However, a few quick checks indicated a vendor was involved in the wiki project. The pesky hack had simply left their name out. However, that did not seem to tick the supplier off too much, judging by the way they flag up the piece on their website, found after a quick Google.

Pepper sympathised with the PR flack's situation. What was going to be top of the cuttings pile for the client was no longer such a shiny piece of placement. It's not a rare complaint from PRs - and I can understand why. It's not unusual, after you've done all the research needed for a story or feature, that some information just falls off. And, in the case of stories about companies' use of technology, the name of a supplier is often the first victim. It's not malice or forgetfulness, it's just not pertinent to the story that actually runs.

If the PR asks what happened, the hack has one or two answers to fall back on. Blaming the subs (UK jargon - desk editors in the US) is a good first attempts for the cowardly. Just telling them that the supplier of the software just wasn't pertinent to the piece is the brutal truth but can get into a long, often circular discussion. But at least it's honest.

It's whatever gets the job done that counts. If you read the piece, there is no need to mention a wiki-software supplier. The piece is about wikis versus email, not wiki supplier versus wiki supplier. So, who needs to know which wiki was involved? There are many, both closed and open source. And, right now, there is not much in any of them that really makes them stand apart, at least not from the point of view of the general business reader. Maybe the people trying to stick one up on the Intranet care that TikiWiki's documentation is about three sub-releases behind the latest version of the software or what the security of PHPWiki is like. A commercial version may likely to have the edge there (although not necessarily). But the business reader does not care about those details. Just that wikis might remove them from email hell.

As I was halfway through reading the piece, I found myself disagreeing that the piece was inevitably PR-inspired. Maybe the CIO at DRKW had popped up at a conference about social software and the story developed from there. Then I remembered my good friend, and yours, Google. I wasn't expecting the supplier to come out right at the top, but there it was at Socialtext. And it was then a wry grin cracked across my face. The company has posted great big chunks of the piece, including a mention of one of Socialtext's other clients. Halfway down, it claims: "The article goes on to describe the Socialtext wiki solution and it's [sic] benefits."

This, you will recall, is despite the name Socialtext not actually appearing in the printed copy. Maybe it did make it to the top of the PR's cuttings pile after all.

Posted by Chris at 10:37 PM | Comments (2)

November 25, 2005

You think it, we own it

Presumably as it falls in with Jeff Jarvis' view of the world that anything remixed or mashed-up by the people has to be good, the former mainstream-media editor turned citizen-everything advocate, has declared the Washington Post's decision to launch a remix page as a thoroughly good thing. Of course, he chides the WaPo for not going far enough and putting up the contents of reporters' notebooks, lunch receipts and innermost thoughts for the world's citizens to pore over and mash up as they see fit. But he sees the newspaper's effort as a "great first step" with the "perfect attitude".

I presume Jarvis has not actually read the terms of service that the WaPo has applied. The newspaper is not being entirely altruistic about offering up RSS feeds for a bit of Web 2.0-style remixing. Like the first commenter at the remix terms of use page, I understand that the newspaper would like to retain copyright. However, the third condition is perhaps pushing the idea of making the world your serf a little far. Not only do not get anything from the WaPo for doing something funky with its news feeds, "Washingtonpost.com may incorporate your ideas into future projects it develops". The commenter, quite charitably, would just like some attribution. I think the ability to negotiate terms of use with the newspaper would be nicer. On the bright side, at least the company has not demanded indemnification against any possible legal nastiness, unlike organisations such as CNN. Not yet, at any rate.

On closer inspection, even in return for giving up your first-born, you still only seem to be able to access RSS feeds. There is no direct API as yet. Gotta hand it to The Man.

Posted by Chris at 03:50 PM | Comments (3)

Stunning phrases

If a company told you it made "electronic control devices", you'd probably think it specialised in thermostats or the computers that manage a car's fuel injection system. In fact, this description is so anodyne that when one company used it, I wondered whether I was looking at the right company. A provider of "electronic control devices for use in the law enforcement, military, private security and personal defence markets" in the boilerplate of a statement narrows it down a bit. Yet the name of the company, which is fighting delisting from Nasdaq for not filing its third-quarter 10Q on time, gives the game away immediately: Taser. I wonder how long it took the publicity people to dream up "electronic control" as an alternative to "stun gun".

Posted by Chris at 02:15 PM

November 11, 2005

It's a spade, not a soil-management solution

If there is one thing that ticks off hacks, it is the buzzword-loaded language that finds its way into business presentations and releases. Some of it is material so devoid of content that you feel as though information is being sucked out of your head when you read it. So, we moan about the language with a regularity that leads PRs to collectively roll their eyes. It is not as if the Web is not short of articles written by PRs telling each other that they just cut out the claptrap. From the hack's side, this week it was Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek who publicly took exception to the word 'solution', a word that now permeates the world of business-speak. PRs responded, claiming they do all they can to eradicate jargon, but that it's hard to translate technical stuff into English, in the view of PR John Wagner, and even that, according to Tech PR Gems, some people like it that way.

Unfortunately, the PRs who commented on yet another plea for plain language claiming that they really do try to technical lingo into English have again confused jargon with the weasel words that get used to pad out press releases and presentations. And those are the bits that drive most sane people up the wall.

There is a difference between jargon, the dialects that make technology just that little bit more distant, and euphemism, the attempts to polish a turd into something shinier and more attractive. They are different, because the turd-polishing phrases turn up everywhere, not just in technology-related material. There is a simple test to work out which is which. Just try to rewrite the sentence in plain English. The euphemisms will drop conveniently out of sight. But that is the source of the irritation that most hacks have with this kind of language. It is entirely unnecessary and just wastes your time.

Take, for example:

SoftBrands’ POS (Point of Sale) solution is a complete management tool combining flexible functionality, platform stability and scalability with excellent customer support. SoftBrands provides a state-of-the-art, touch screen POS system, seamlessly integrating all front-of-house and back-office functions in one easy-to-use solution.

If you're wondering why I picked on Softbrands, the company's marketing people only have themselves to blame. I typed my least-favourite weasel words into Google - solution, functionality, platform, seamless and scalable - and their web page came out top. This particular paragraph looked to be the worst offender. However, the copy is no worse than the content of many press releases.

POS? That's jargon, clear and simple. It's tough to replace with one simple word or phrase and you need to know a bit about what they are really selling to recast it accurately, assuming you need to translate it for your particular audience. A trade audience will understand POS far better than any attempt to translate what it means into really plain English. For a consumer audience, it's the "computer that handles hotel bookings", or something similar. It won't be completely accurate but it's close enough for somebody who isn't really bothered about hotel POS systems in the first place.

However, the rest of this paragraph can certainly get the bonsai treatment. "Management tool". Ever found a computer system that wasn't some useful to management in some way. That can go. Flexible functionality? You can get it to do lots of things, presumably all hotel-related. "Platform stability". Doesn't crash. Actually, this could mean they won't change the design without telling you. Who can tell? That's the other problem with this kind of language: it's not even precise. Let's move on. "Scalability". You can run big or little hotels with it. "Excellent customer support". Why, do you also offer software with crappy customer support?

"State-of-the-art". A cliché that is a little bit old-fashioned in marketing circles this one. From this, I assume they make this POS computer out of current technology rather than some clapped-out technology. And then, the breathless sign-off: "seamlessly integrating all front-of-house and back-office functions in one easy-to-use solution". Gotta get that solution in again. So, it does stuff like take bookings from customers and makes sure the system that allocates the rooms gets updated. Stellar. Plus, it's not hard to use, they say. And it remains a computer system, just in case you got to the end of the paragraph and you were a bit confused.

In short, Softbrands says its POS computer does all the stuff you'd expect a system to handle hotel bookings and stuff to do. It doesn't crash and it has a touchscreen. "We make it out of new bits, not old bits and we take support calls without diverting everything to voicemail." (OK, I made the last bit up as I have no idea of what the company considers to be excellent technical support).

What's even more depressing is having to sit through someone talking in this kind of language. Reading has the benefit of being fast. You can tear through a release in seconds. Having this phraseology mixed in with copious amounts of Powerpoint is enough to send you straight to the window, Peter Finch-style. I have sat through a half hour of this kind of thing and found that my first question at the end was: "So, what's it do then?"

So, I have to ask if most of these words are useless, why are they there? This was the argument used by Tech PR Gems. Somebody approved this stuff. Indeed, they did.

Although they inflicted 50 more unnecessary words of text on the public, I feel a little sympathy for the copywriter on this one. They had to pad it out for a while and all they had to work with was that the company selling the POS system told them it was the dog's bollocks but had absolutely no evidence to back it up. There was no single feature the company could identify to make anyone think: "That's a bit different, I'll take a closer look". But, there's an empty Web page sitting there, and you've got to fill it with something that the client thinks puts them in a good light. Well, it doesn't say "this product both sucks and blows" in flashing 80pt letters, but that's about as good as it gets from the point of view of the reader.

The copy will have been approved by the marketing manager who probably thought that was just the thing to get sales rolling in through the door. Maybe the marketing manager is right. There could be mug punters out there who, dazzled by the loquacious promises for a POS solution, just pony up the cash there and then. In truth, the marketing manager has probably looked at everybody's else site in that market and thought, "if that's how they do it, I'd better too". That is not to say there is not one group of customer who buy into turd-polishing language lock, stock and barrel: managers.

The motherlode of this guff lies in the management-training courses and self-help that have spread like a cancer through every industry. Management gurus expound on how to leverage synergies and maximise core human resources assets to achieve excellence in the business organisation. Or rather, do what your good at and don't piss off the workforce. You can see why I'm not a top management guru.

Because gurus talk the fancy way, managers have come to believe that everyone should. It may even be worse than that, the mantras have become the message. Rather than translate the exhortations to "be excellent" - something that even Bill & Ted seemed to understand better than most people who attend these courses - they just parrot the phrases. Because, if they did translate them and think about them, they would be ringing up and demanding their money back: "You mean I paid ten thousand bucks for you to tell me to employ good people? What kind of a con is this?"

Posted by Chris at 08:03 PM

November 10, 2005

Sometimes you can't be too careful

Hacks' newspaper Press Gazette does not want to overestimate the intelligence of its subscribers. Just in case a hapless journo wants to sign up for sub with a credit card and isn't sure what all that mumbo-jumbo on the card means, the publisher has a pointer or two. Underneath the form field for card number, some text helpfully points out that the card number is made up of "the large numbers across the middle of the card".

Glad I'm clear on that one. Now just another, if you'll indulge me. The expiry date, would that be when the card runs out by any chance? I'm not sure I've got the hang of this e-commerce malarky.

Posted by Chris at 09:36 PM

When you've got a hammer...

In his search for yet another nail to whack with his mighty Bloghammer, Steve Rubel takes aim at a piece in Businessweek on the imminent death of the focus group, the market research tool that involves sitting people in a room and then asking them questions about whether they like their chocolate bars crunchy or chewy.

Apparently, marketing people are getting fed up with focus groups because they get misleading answers from them. But marketers have been fed up with focus groups for a long as I can remember. The difference now is that they have an alternative: direct contact with punters through the Internet. This is where Rubel wields his Bloghammer: "shockingly [the story] ignores monitoring blogs and other consumer channels".

Quick, call the blog police. An online article that does not mention blogs? That has to be stopped, clearly.

The article is a 1000-word piece about focus groups and the alternative offered by the Web. It's not professing to be the complete guide to technology in marketing and it has a 1000-word space to fill: focus is good when you are writing for that length. The angle in the piece is primarily about consumers providing information confidentially through the Internet to companies because they dislike the peer pressure of focus groups, which seem like scenes from 12 Angry Men in comparison.

Now, unless I've misunderstood something about blogging, it is not confidential. It takes place in a public forum, which will inevitably lead to self-censorship - which is not necessarily a bad thing when writing for an unknown audience - and peer pressure. I have no idea whether the writer considered adding something on blogging, but the confidentiality angle they used to my mind would have ruled out covering blogs and forums pretty early on during the research phase.

And let's face it, does anyone want to use blogs to do the same job as focus groups? as a company are you going to blog about some secret project have going on and then get everybody else to blog about what a great/lame idea it is? Even the seemingly endless stream of Web 2.0 companies offering controlled alpha and beta programmes ask bloggers not to er...blog about them too much.

Posted by Chris at 08:49 PM | Comments (1)

Sourcewire adds custom RSS feeds

I'm a bit late to write about this one, but I got an email from Daryl Willcox Publishing, the company behind Sourcewire, the other day. The company has gone from offering a just a set of pre-packaged RSS feeds for press releases to providing alongside a roll-your-own feed, similar to the one offered by Businesswire but not, unfortunately, PRNewswire.

One little twist to the custom feed idea that Sourcewire has added is the ability to use keywords to either filter the basic categories you have selected or pull in releases from other sectors you don't normally cover if those keywords pop up. The second option is potentially handy as it should come up with material from companies who you would normally not bother with, but who might on one occasion have something in my area that is worth covering. I'm not sure how useful this particular feature will prove to be in practice but it's worth a try.

Posted by Chris at 08:03 PM

November 01, 2005

The attention deficit pulls the mainstream nearer

When RSS first happened along, I had some difficulty working out why it was so great. OK, it told me when a website was updated but the thing that troubled me was the issue of filtering. There was no readily apparent way to filter the feeds themselves, only subscribe to ones that kind of fit my needs and unsubscribe from those with too much irrelevant junk. I still have to categorise my feeds manually in NetNewsWire rather than rely on tags or content matching to sort things into the right piles. And it does not look as though things are going to get better. More people are noticing that feed tracking is chewing up way too much time.

Blogebrity pulled a few posts together that noted the problem. Fred the NYC VC asked about the saturation point for feeds as he struggles to keep a lid on the number of feeds he subscribes to. Om Malik has apparently been chopping the list he uses down to a bare minimum. Fred has called what is happening "the looming attention crisis":

I am way past the point of saturation and I keep adding feeds. At this point, I have over 100 feeds subscribed to in various readers. And I have frankly stopped paying attention to most of them...I feel in my gut that we are facing a "poverty of attention" and something is going to give.

This is clearly not good news for Steve Gilmor, who has yet to get his attention economy off the ground. Gilmor, you may remember, was the man who wanted to kill off hyperlinks and replace them with feeds because links were no longer good blog currency. And there lies the root of the problem: financing the blog. In the same breath that some bloggers condemn the old ways of magazines and the bad old MainStream Media (MSM), they worry about how they themselves become mainstream. There is a lot of talk about the Long Tail; about how everybody has a voice. But the concerns that shine through many blogs are about building an audience, aggregating content, getting money for it. The things that the MSM has been trying to do for the last couple of hundred years. The only thing that has changed in between has been the technology.

People forget that the dreaded MSM started with changes in technology: cheap printing presses; mass-produced paper; the railways. Combined, they made it possible to shift from a world where information was relayed by word of mouth to one that was much more efficient because you did not need someone to shout in your ear every piece of news. Newspapers rapidly moved from being local scandal sheets to national institutions. Subsequent changes in technology simply increased the rate at which news could be relayed.

The web brought a few extra things. It became almost free to become a publisher. The ability to alter content online meant people could answer back and see the changes almost straightaway. Blogging has, to some extent, formalised an arrangement where readers can influence content after it has been created. This quickly turned into the "join the conversation" policy espoused by many bloggers as the saviour of society. If anything goes wrong, blog about it, talk to people, let them talk back, then talk about it some more.

Unfortunately, conversations do not scale all that well, with the result that, for the most part, we just skim over blog headlines in the feed bucket, read some of those entries, comment on even fewer and, finally, unless you are Robert Scoble, blog about even fewer. There just isn't time to do more. The result? Most blog consumption is a passive process that is not unlike the thing technology writers have been predicting for the last 15 years or so: the DIY newspaper delivered to you by your friendly PC. OK, blogs are a bit low on news and high on commentary, but the feed aggregator is not very far from what people envisaged before the blog. The difference today is that a vocal section of the blogosphere wants to get there before the dreaded MSM works out how to do it.

The problem that Fred the VC and Om Malik have, together with many others, is that they know too few feeds will give them a poor outlook of what is going on in blogland. Too many makes it too hard to get anything else done. And what about Ethan Zuckermann who wants some attention for things, such as the situation in Darfur, that tend to get little coverage in blogs or, at the moment, the MSM? Wasn't the promise of the blog to provide people with a wider purview, not a narrower one? This has long been a concern of mine ever since researchers began to describe how, one day, computer agents would fetch news that match my interests. What about the stuff I might be interested in if only I knew about it beforehand? Knocking back a list of feeds to 40 "trusted" sources seems a retrograde step for the Long Tail.

The answer? Well it's already here and you won't like it. It's the aggregator. And it doesn't work very well. There are plenty of options and they seem to be growing every day with each one claiming to do a better job of avoiding the monoculturalism that afflicts aggregators that rely on ranking mechanisms to provide top picks. Apparently TailRank is one that will let us monitor 5000 feeds without pain by ranking "blogs that YOU care about not necessarily global rankings". It will be interesting to see how that one works, but I fear it will fall into the same trap as Memeorandum and Digg. However, the aggregators will get better at ranking stuff by relevance to you and they will gradually become the new MSM, like it or not, as they stand the best chance of syndicating content from blogs to a wider audience. A bit like a newspaper, only different.

The problem is that, while they hunt for ranking algorithms that work users want rather than by using blogjuice as a proxy for relevance, the aggregators will continue to promote lengthy diatribes on political scandals that will make you wonder what the original news story was mixed in with snippets about sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.

Posted by Chris at 11:47 PM | Comments (1)