marketroids Archive

8

The ten types of comments on news articles

By
Josh
– 1 August 2011Posted in: marketroids, media, techno-wankery, wordy things

One major criticism of reality TV shows, especially in the pre-MasterChef era, was they profited from encouraging and rewarding all the worst aspects of human behaviour. I think it’s time we recognised comments on online news and opinion websites have exactly the same problem.

It doesn’t take long before you start seeing the same people making the same kinds of comments over and over. The value to the publisher is obvious, in that it encourages readers to come back, click more articles, view more ads, buy more stuff. But what value, really, does it add for the reader?

Certain topics are guaranteed to bring out particular brands of loonies – think climate change or religion. But even reader comments on relatively innocuous topics are an incredibly effective stupidity concentrator.

Essentially, all reader comments on any article ever can be boiled down to one of the following:

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article agrees with that opinion, it is an unbiased, worthy and well written article.
  2. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article disagrees with that opinion, it is illogical, biased nonsense.
  3. The parts of this article I disagree with are illogical nonsense. The parts I agree with are worthy points, well argued.
  4. Some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with surely proves this article correct/incorrect.
  5. This article surely proves some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with.
  6. Personally abusing and/or expressing sexual admiration for author, subject(s) of article and/or other commenters.
  7. The affiliations of the author who wrote this article allow us to discount anything it says.
  8. The bias of the publication in which the article appears allows us to discount anything it says.
  9. Immensely long and off-topic rant containing wild conspiracy theories and LARGE SECTIONS OF ALL CAPS.
  10. Repeating the same point five dozen other commenters already made and clearly demonstrating this commenter didn’t read any of the previous comments before mouthing off.

And…

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Because the article is logically argued and presents the evidence clearly and without bias, I am willing to concede I was wrong about this subject previously. [Note: this never happens]
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1

Significant growth in substantial uniqueness

By
Josh
– 12 March 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, marketroids, media, wordy things

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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0

Belkin’s misleading and deceptive packaging

By
Josh
– 26 February 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, marketroids, money, techno-wankery

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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0

93% of Australians prefer a steaming pile of poo to Eddie McGuire

By
Josh
– 26 February 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, marketroids, media, nerds, wordy things

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.

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0

Busy week

By
Josh
– 3 December 2009Posted in: government, marketroids, media, money, shameless self promotion

Gosh, it’s been a busy week; been doing so much I’ve hardly had time to self-promote about it. Outrageous.

The last issue of Nett with my mug on the editor’s page came out last Friday, including my interview with twin brothers Brian and Vincent Wu, founders of clothing retailer Incu.

The best interviews to do are the ones that defy your expectations. Plenty of small business owners aren’t shy about telling you how great they are, which gives you plenty of material for the story, but leaves you feeling a bit cheap and dirty at the end of it. Not these guys! You definitely don’t expect successful fashionistas to be friendly, humble and modest, but Brian and Vincent really are and I’m sure that has a lot to do with their success.

Over the last year, Incu managed to land a coveted deal: the rights to distribute UK brand Topshop in Australia. Considering how many Australian women buy from Topshop UK online, this is very big. The guys from Incu also told me exclusively about their plans to (finally) open an online store next year, and once again I think they have exactly the right approach.

I’ve also been doing some exciting news stories for ZDNet on stuff like telecommunications tenders, state government IT policies, how bad state governments are at looking after our personal data and ERP consolidation projects.

Aside from this, it’s all been about making clients happy by meeting their insane deadlines, finding somewhere to live and even showing up at the odd IT industry Christmas party. Phew!

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2

Live tweeting from the call queue: a study in consumer activism

By
Josh
– 24 November 2009Posted in: marketroids, media, nerds, techno-wankery

In covering the ongoing AFACT v iiNet case in the Federal Court, local journalists such as The Australian’s Andrew Colley and ZDNet’s Liam Tung have caused some controversy by live tweeting from within the courtroom. While broadcast journalists in Australia are not allowed to report from inside courtrooms, the Federal Court has decided it’s up to individual judges if they want to allow live coverage on Twitter.

In the same spirit, yesterday I called Toshiba tech support for help on a very minor issue with my laptop. Ideally I would have preferred to email a question and then get annoyed when no one responded (59% of companies don’t respond to email queries, you know). But Toshiba doesn’t give you the option; just a phone number and a postal address. So I called, and it quickly became apparent I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast. Because I had nothing better to do while waiting on hold, I started Tweeting:

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1

BigPond messes with DNS: fair or unethical?

By
Josh
– 20 November 2009Posted in: marketroids, nerds, shameless self promotion, techno-wankery

Another yarn I wrote for CRN, this time on Telstra’s consumer ISP BigPond redirecting mistyped domain name queries to a branded error page. In other words, you type google.coj in your browser and rather than receiving your browser’s standard error page, you get redirected to a BigPond page that gives you helpful suggestions – maybe google.com? – but also ads and pay-per-click links.

On one side of the argument are the techies, who dislike Telstra messing with the way the domain name system is supposed to operate, albeit only within BigPond’s network. Whether they dislike this for reasons of technical purity, or because Telstra will make money out of it, is highly debatable. I suppose there’s also a slippery slope argument to be made; if BigPond makes this change to how DNS works, what’s to stop it from redirecting, say, iinet.net.au to bigpond.com or an error page?

The other side of the argument is that Telstra provides helpful, contextual information that more easily gets people where they want to go. (Though if this were purely altruistic, you wouldn’t have any ads or paid links on the page, presumably.) As long as an ISP delivers this service transparently, honestly and with an opt-out (all true in this case), where’s the problem?

Online glory is fleeting, but I would like to point out that for a couple of hours this morning, mine was the top tech story on Google News for Australia.

Who's number one?

Yay me!

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2

Abandon Twitter – the shonks and bogans are coming

By
Josh
– 19 November 2009Posted in: marketroids, nerds, techno-wankery

The delightful Things Bogans Like blog recently went out on a limb and suggested a number of things bogans will like in the near future, and number one was Twitter.

In the past 18 months, the new bogan has belatedly made the switch from MySpace to Facebook as its social networking website of choice. This has caused trendsetters to start making the switch from Facebook over to Twitter. Once the bogan realises that there are celebrities on Twitter, and that no interaction on there is more than 140 characters in length, it will be unable to resist the appeal of broadcasting its every move to its friends via its phone or computer. Even better, the 140 character limit is something that bogans have been training for for years, via generally unintelligible text message abbreviations. The trendsetters, meanwhile, will migrate elsewhere, galled by the flood of tweeted rubbish that the bogan will bring.

Meanwhile Jodee Rich, founder of failed telco One.Tel, has handed the Australian Securities and Investments Commission a can of legal whoop-ass and is now free to be a company director again.

One.Tel dudeABC radio’s Deborah Cameron asked Rich what his next venture might be and, some would say predictably, he spoke excitedly about the enormous potential of social media.

One can only imagine the horrors this may unleash on the social media landscape. It could make a plague of bogans seem like a mild irritation. But at least we might see the long-awaited resurrection of the One.Tel dude (see right).

The question is, if Twitter (and social media) become uninhabitable for techno-hipsters, where will they go next?

2

Mother leaves a bad taste

By
Josh
– 4 August 2008Posted in: marketroids, old, sensitive stuff about chicks, wordy things

For reasons unclear to me, I received a box of Mother energy drink cans in the post from a PR company last week. They were accompanied by a flyer/media release, titled “Mother: New Taste, Double the energy kick*” with a footnote explaining that this was compared to a 250ml can of the old Mother. (The new cans being 500ml each, this is hardly surprising.)

The release said:

OK, we admit it! What were we thinking when we made Mother taste so damn awful? Turns out no-one liked the taste of Mother so we’ve hunted down the idiots that concocted the vile potion and ‘processed’ them accordingly to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.

It continued along the same lines, mentioning gonads at least once in each paragraph:

It tastes nothing like the old one, so man up, grow some balls and take the challenge!

New Mother – it’s here, it’s got double the kick* and it’s got balls  – do you?

To prove you’ve got the balls to handle the new Mother…

The copy on the can was presumably churned out by the same pseudo-hipster idiots who wrote the phoney aren’t-we-cool-and-casual blurbs on Glaceau VitaminWater, another Coca Cola product. The can says:

Warning! High caffeine content… OK, we know that’s why you’re drinking it, but our lame legal guys made us warn you not to feed this to kids, up the duff women or the weak who just can’t tolerate it.

The can makes several other references to testicles and masculinity as well as clarifying that the new formula tastes nothing like the old one.

So evidently the target market for this product is constantly masturbating retarded 14-year-old boys. None of whom read the magazine I edit, which makes the PR exercise highly questionable.

And the new taste?

Utterly, utterly foul. Really vile.

But at least there’s more of it!

0

Enough, fanbois

By
Josh
– 17 June 2008Posted in: marketroids, media, nerds, sensitive stuff about chicks, techno-wankery

SMH’s story on aspiring model Isobella Jade, who perfected the art of freeloading by coming into the New York Apple store every day for 18 months to check her email, should be headlined:

Isobella Jade topless - I get more hits this wayApple perfects the art of freeloading off fanboi journos for publicity

Here’s a picture of Isobella Jade topless. I get more hits this way.

And here’s a picture of Ms Jade from Mac Directory magazine, where the SMH stole adapted the story from.

Isobella Jade in MacDirectory story

I mean, seriously, the two hottest stories in the Aussie tech media lately are:

  1. Apple releases product
  2. Apple opens shop.

I can’t imagine there ever being two stories with a stronger public interest angle.

It’s fine to be a fan of a particular brand or product, sure. But when you let your religious devotion to the Cult of Steve cloud your editorial judgment, you’re doing your readers a disservice and discrediting your publication as a click-chasing whore.

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