Feel What I Feel When I’m Feeling
It’s all rather amusing when we use the phrase “there’s no such thing as bad publicty” or “all publicity is good publicity”.
It’s silly because there are so many counter-examples.
If there’s no such thing as bad publicity, why do people hire PR firms?
It rests on the idea that there can be such a thing as ‘branding’, that there’s a choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and it doesn’t matter that one does nasty things and the other does nice things, it’s just a matter of how well you can remember their names.
First counterproof: the Motion Picture Association of America, and it’s chum, the Recording Industry Association of America.
Everything they do is bad publicity. Can you name anybody who thought “well, I wasn’t going to buy the new Kanye West record, but now that Sony Records and EMI have sued an old lady without a computer for ‘piracy’ (she doesn’t have a cutlass or say “Yarr” either), so I’ll now buy said record”. No, it’s ridiculous.
With every lawsuit that the RIAA and MPAA bring, they send out the message that their customers don’t matter. And, people may continue to buy records, even in greater numbers, but the cause is not the possibility of getting sued by the record industry that excites them. It’s the musicians.
The record companies are tolerated. People don’t care about Hilary Rosen or the chief executive of Sony Records. People don’t want DRM.
As Cory Doctorow said the other day, nobody wants to buy a television or DVD player with functions removed. It’s not a unique selling point that your technology is worse than someone else’s. And it’s not good marketing to treat your customers like disposable money pits to be taken through the proverbial cleaners of the tort system.
Second counterproof: Ruth Kelly getting pelted with eggs. Her task is to reform the education system in line with the Labour manifesto, and Tony Blair’s statements. How did getting egged help with that? It only gave political cynics like me fodder for a few minute’s chuckling at Ms Kelly’s expense.
“All publicity is good publicty” only works when your market are totally clueless, and are able to willingly blind themselves to counter-examples.
It may be the current zeitgeist. It’s certainly not a law. And, as the Internet (and the free expression that is entailed with it) spreads, it’ll become an anachronism as people spread smart, dangerous ideas instead of stupid, commercially-valuable ones.
Paul Graham, perhaps one of the most refreshing essayists, has a new essay called How To Do What You Love. Read it!
Plastic are discussing the Danish cartoons.
I’ve finally finished half the term. I’ve now got a week off. Next week: my birthday on Monday the 13th, my new Mac arriving sometime from Wednesday onwards and more than enough work to be catching up with including, interestingly enough, an essay for university which parallels one which I did for the website, Church of Critical Thinking, and for which David gave me a Talking Musical Prayer Clock. Oh, good times they were. “;->” Of course, lots more blogging to come as I catch up with my backlog and beat it mercilessly into submission.
Les Jenkins is reporting that Randi has just had heart bypass surgery. I hope he gets well soon.
ePolitix reports that the government are saying that alcohol-related crime has dropped, and this “vindicate[s] the decision to extend pub opening hours”. Perhaps. The fact that the government shouldn’t be restricting the pubs in the first place is what vindicates it. The fact that it spreads more liberty is what makes it worthwhile. If this story is true, it’s a nice side-effect. Of course, the Tories oppose this, thus proving they are clueless.
Blogs and Comments
Mathew Ingram poses an old question: are blogs without comments really blogs? (Via Kent Newsome)
It has become something of a fashion to ask “are blogs without x really blogs?”. Of course, I don’t blame people for doing so.
What blogs are is simple: a page with time-coded posts in (sometimes reordered) reverse chronological order, coming from one person. Comments are absolutely inessential, and I would say, a bit of a waste of time.
Nobody has yet produced a comments system that I find worth using. Blog comments were irreversibly broken until CoComment came along. That has helped make things slightly better. Of course, that’s still not a complete solution because it only tracks comments from fellow CoCo users.
The first thing they should do is make it so that when you comment on a WordPress blog it starts aggregating the RSS. When a comment is made by a non-CoCo user, it should be slipped in to your CoCo RSS feed. WordPress has this built-in, so why not take advantage of it? There are a few little problems - like getting times synced up between the server hosting the blog and the central server - but it would be the ideal way of doing it.
That still leaves blog comments broken in another way: they’re linear. If you want to develop conversations, blog comments don’t scale. The advantage of a comment-less blog with a distributed conversation is that you can find a post you like, Technorati it, find responses and other angles to a thread, then follow them down side paths.
Similarly, most blogging software doesn’t page comments. This is broken. This is really broken if you’re on dial-up (like GPRS).
Blogs may have the hype of creating conversations. That they do. But they’re pretty useless at maintaining conversations. Email, mailing lists, USENET and even web-based message boards are better at it than blogs.
As Dave Winer said (in a comment, nonetheless): “Somewhere along the line blogging got taken in the wrong direction by people who think every little thing you post on a blog has to be a major undertaking.”
That is why outline-style blogging is important, and also why comment moderation is something I don’t want to dirty my hands with.
I’ve just been reading the Apple Support Discussions. Apparently, the PowerBook Duo (sometimes known as MacBook Pro) will probably be arriving on Friday. I’m going to call Apple in the morning to confirm.
