Tom Morris

Fraud victims, lawyers and Roberta from Spotify need a copywriter

I blame the training in logic. Whenever I see adverts, I now seem to try and analyse the logic. I’ve got three I found rather bad recently:

(Paraphrasing) “50% of people in the South East buy their legal services in London. The rest get a better deal locally.” Is that 50% of people who buy legal services or 50% of people generally. Because I didn’t think everyone in the South East of England buys legal services. I once had to ask a solicitor to photocopy my passport and sign the photocopy. She didn’t charge me, which was nice. But I don’t buy legal services locally or in London. Which of these categories do I fall into?

“I’m Roberta from Spotify! As a Spotify premium member, you can listen to Spotify on your Android phone…” This sentence presumes I’m a Spotify premium member. Which seems a bit silly since it’s an advert to try and get me to sign up to Spotify. It also presumes I’ve got an Android device. How about: “I’m Roberta from Spotify. Did you know that Spotify is now available on Android phones? Sign up to Spotify premium to listen to Spotify on your Android device… [blah blah]”

I saw this today while waiting on a train station platform: “Criminals worldwide are sending scam letters which trick, befriend and threaten millions of silent victims of fraud [out of however many billions of pounds per year]”. Technically, the letters attempt to trick, befriend and threaten people who aren’t victims of fraud, and of those who are tricked, befriended or threatened, not all are silent.

Hint for advertisers: get someone with an analytical eye to look over your ads and try to spot logical fumbles.

Because when I see things like this I tend not to think “I really ought to buy this product”. Rather I think “are the designers of this product as clumsy with logic as the copywriters? When I need to get customer support, will I have to deal with this sort of logic? Oh, fuck it. I’ll just get back to my book and let someone else buy your product”.

Margate, Kent, England

What the fuck…?

The Register sez: This is a series about the Linux OS on netbooks, but we need to remind ourselves that these devices aren’t personal computers. The personal computer is a machine you work on . Netbooks are essentially machines you work through, out into the Cloud.

It shouldn’t matter what the operating system is. Or the hardware. Ideally, all your apps and your data are ‘out there’ in the Cloud, independent of any hardware or software you might use to access them.

Also: As a netbook user, Google Docs should probably be your word processor of choice too. It’s a Cloud application, and it also maintains your data out on the net, and this is how netbooks are meant to work. Not only that, thanks to its sophisticated revisioning system Google Docs will store every version of every document you’ve written.

Hell no. Give me a command line. Give me Vim. And leave me the hell alone. Versioning? Install Git. Sync? rsync or just git push/pull. Christ, netbooks have a very small amount of RAM - most don’t go over 1Gb. Firefox + Gears + all that JavaScript is always gonna be slower than just running a small editor like Vim or Gedit or even Ted for rich text or LyX for LaTeX. mutt kicks Gmail’s ass efficiency wise. newsbeuter claims it’s going to have Google Reader integration in the next version.

Margate, Kent, England