In this marvellous post, Tim Phillips rails against the proliferation of meaningless filler words in media releases.

Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.

To demonstrate this, he searches through the Factiva database. He found the number of media releases containing words such as ’significant’ and ‘unique’ has remained fairly constant since 2002. However, the number of media releases containing all four words – significant and substantial and meaningful and unique – has tripled.

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Shitkansen (n)

A slow or low-quality train. Portmanteau of ’shit’ or ’shitcan’ + ’shinkansen’, Japanese high-speed train.

Earliest Googleable usage: December 2008.

Dennis Vranic Japan has Shinkansen, we have SHITkansen

Often used in reference to the Sydney-to-Newcastle train journey (eg, Aaron Hewett and Marcus Westbury).

For some time, I have been trying to find a case for my iPhone which provides a degree of protection for the screen. I have been known to put the phone in the same pocket as keys or coins and would prefer not to crack or deeply scratch the display. But for some reason, almost all iPhone cases are only concerned with protecting the back of the phone, leaving the more delicate screen vulnerable.

I don’t get it.

But after a lengthy comparison of iPhone cases online and at a local retailer, I found one which seemed to fit the bill: the Belkin Light Protect Rock (or LightProtectRock), also known as the Shield Flex, for 40 bucks.

First off, let’s clarify why you might need to protect the iPhone screen.

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This week I posted a survey on twtpoll, asking people the following question:

Which would you rather have in your home: Eddie McGuire or a steaming pile of poo?

The results were emphatic:

• Eddie McGuire: 2 votes (3%)
• Steaming pile of poo: 61 votes (97%)

While this was a terribly entertaining result, I did it to point out some of the problems with the many, many survey stories we see in the media. Read the rest of this entry →

In my current source of employment, I often have to apply my immense knowledge of grammar and style (not!) to reviewing other people’s work. Amazingly, most of the time they don’t hate me for doing this.

This gives me an opportunity (and audience) to rant about trends in modern English communication that piss me off. And lately, two words in particular have made my shit list:

1. Via

In recent years it has become popular in Australia to say, for instance, “I received the documents via email”. This is a habit we appear to have picked up from our American cousins, who never use a simple word when an ostentatious one can be utilised. (For instance, a person we call an anaesthetist, they call an anaesthesiologist, which is longer and fancier sounding, and also stupid; the doctor in question does not study the science of pain relief, he or she gives you pain killers).

Anyone who has visited Italy will realise that ‘via’ comes from the Latin word for ‘road’. In English, the OED defines it as:

1 travelling through (a place) en route to a destination. 2 by way of; through. 3 by means of.

If you substitute definitions 1 or 2 of ‘via’ into the sentence “I received the documents via email”, it makes no sense at all. And why would you say “I received the documents by means of email”, when you could just as easily say “I received the documents by email”? This way you save a whole letter and avoid sounding pretentious. I call that a win-win.

2. With

I have noticed it’s quite popular to construct sentences in the form of “With [some sort of trend happening], [some consequence of this trend can be observed].”

It is hard to put in words exactly what is wrong with structuring sentences this way, aside from a personal dislike. This construction is overused and often leads to overlong, overly complicated sentences. Also it is a weak way of showing causation; I always prefer to say “[Something is happening] as a result of/because of/due to [some trend]“. But that’s just me.

In the past five years there’s been a steady stream of social networking platforms du jour which then fell out of favour with geeky early adopters as as the great unwashed discovered them – from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter.

All the while, LinkedIn sat around gradually building momentum without any of the fanfare or media hype. Recruiters loved it, if only for its ability to fill quotas on candidate lists. But the developers also pulled in a few ideas from here and there – groups, events, marketing, status updates – OK, they nicked it all from Facebook and Twitter.

As a result, people looking to network for business – not to share pictures of kids and cats – have been coming back to LinkedIn and thinking, ‘Hey, this is pretty good!’ And LinkedIn gave them somewhere to put all their relevant career and skills information, which is a lot harder to do on Twitter.

Last week I hosted an online seminar with Karen Moloney from Get Me Learning Resources and Faye Hollands from Outshine Consulting. Karen took us through the nuts and bolts of promoting yourself and your business while Faye told us how she had used and benefited from it. And as usual, there were heaps of cracking questions from the audience.

If you’re dead keen to find out more, you can read Karen’s helpful handout notes or watch a recording of the webinar (though you will have to fill in your details to get it).

Marketers often say that men find shopping for clothes frustrating and alienating. It’s almost as though the entire process was designed for women, if you believe the stereotypes.

Some very clever online businesses have sprung up based on this premise, making it easier for men to find clothes they want without having to go through an embarrassing ordeal.

I’m not like that, generally. Over the years I’ve found a few good shops and clothing labels that usually have stuff I like that fits me, where they don’t have crappy dance music at eardrum-bursting volume and where the staff are helpful and unpretentious.

Most of the time.

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Yesterday I interviewed Peter Black, the Queensland University of Technology law lecturer who was recently appointed to manage Electronic Frontiers Australia’s anti-internet-filtering campaign. He’s under no illusions he has taken on a tough challenge.

“There’s no doubt it’ll be quite hard to get the government to change their mind. There’s been a lot invested by Senator Conroy and the Rudd Government in this policy.”

He says the filter opponents have a range of options. His ideal would be to get rid of the filter entirely, either by convincing the Government to drop it or by getting enough opposition from the Greens and Liberal parties to ensure the legislation won’t pass the Senate. Until after the next election, perhaps.

The emerging middle option is to implement some sort of filter but to make it voluntary. You certainly could read Labor’s pre-election policy document as saying the filter should be something ISPs could offer customers, not force on them.

But there’s voluntary and there’s voluntary. It could be a voluntary opt-in filter, which people have to ask for. Or it could be a sort-of-voluntary opt-out filter, which is applied by default unless the customer asks not to have it.

Of course, there are problems with an opt-out filter, particularly with the constant insinuations from Senator Conroy and the Australian Christian Lobby that anyone who opposes the filter is a fan of child pornography.

As Labor Senator Kate Lundy put it on Crikey, people may be concerned that opting out of the filter could “lead to interest by the authorities, even though individuals may simply want to ensure they are not having legitimate content filtered”.

Nonetheless, Lundy now says she prefers an opt-out filter. Over the past few weeks she has shifted from warily supporting the filter to being uncomfortable with it to lobbying within the Government against it. She now says an opt-out filter “respects people can make an informed choice” while fulfilling Labor’s election commitments (to the Christian lobby).

One still has to wonder how many people would be willing to email their ISP asking, ‘Can has kiddie pr0n pls, kthxbai!’

Pity the poor people of Albury-based transport company Border Express. On Friday they posted an innocent job ad looking for a developer with SQL Server and Visual Basic experience. But over the weekend, some wiseguy who had access to the company’s account details on Seek made a couple of sneaky changes. To the required skills, the miscreants added “”DD cup breasts, slim waist, tight twat” and a willingness to undergo “a pre-employment strip search to ensure they meet the requirements of the position”.

Sure, it’s one way to attract a lot of attention to an otherwise dull job ad, but everyone from female job hunters to company management was not impressed. The company and police are looking into it.

In Melbourne’s western suburbs a transport company employee was killed after a server fell on him while it was being unloaded from a truck. He reportedly saw the 200kg fridge-sized machine coming loose from a forklift and decided he would try to save it.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone put their body on the line to try and save an expensive piece of gear. With photographers, for instance, there’s a strong instinct to save the camera even while risking their own health, or body parts. But no matter how expensive the gadget, chances are a limb – or a life – are much harder to replace.

Just about everyone I know thinks the government’s plan to legislate mandatory internet filtering is a really bad idea.

This could lead me to believe the majority of Australians are as passionate about internet censorship as me and my friends. But then I remember that most of my friends are university educated, left-leaning types who work in journalism or the IT industry.

This same selection bias is at work in the online community, particularly on Twitter. The sort of people who use Twitter, who blog, who read the IT media are precisely the sort of people who would oppose internet censorship.

This has led many people to believe if they make enough noise about it online, the Government will drop the filter. Unfortunately, this greatly overestimates the importance and influence of Twitter and social media generally when it comes to real-world politics.

Even an infinite number of angry posts on Twitter, sarcastic blog posts and articles in the IT press would still have no effect on Government policy. Politicians only care about who can deliver them blocs of votes in important electorates.

Onine fame is fleeting, but mine was the top article on ABC's The Drum for a little while

As I argue on ABC’s The Drum blog, so far the Christian lobby – which is for the filter – is doing this a lot better than the disparate anti-filter coalition.

This is not to say the anti-censorship campaign is doomed. However, it needs to focus less on preaching to the choir and more on real-life, professional political lobbying.

It’s a big ask, particularly because many of the anti-censorship groups have little experience in direct political action. But it must be done if we are to convince the Government of the immense folly and dire (supposedly) unintended consequences of its current plans.