Amusing anecdotes & random ramblings
Online life
Dear eBay seller…
Aug 31st
You advertise goods for sale, and I – not unreasonably – ask to see a photo of said goods.
Asking why I want to see a photo of said goods does not necessarily engender reassurance that you have the goods on offer to begin with, y’know? Even if you do have a 400+ point feedback rating…
Doing content is easy, right?
Aug 26th
Judging by the worth by which journalists and writers are generally paid, you’d have thought writing would be an easy task, right? Something that any old mug can do on the cheap? Well, it seems that these days, some places are paying peanuts. But of course, when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. One example I came across today:
You’re organising a week in which school children are encouraged to go to the cinema and watch films. The campaign is rather laboriously called National Schools Film Week – and you can visit their website at www.nsfw.org.
However, I’m pretty sure that most schoolkids will just giggle at the other meaning of NSFW – which is to today’s generation what the red triangle on the top-right of a film being shown on TV meant to my generation.
Those evil Last Exorcism marketeers
Aug 23rd
I’m a very jumpy person, and I hate shock videos – after an evil friend sent me one, I couldn’t face my computer for a day. I stopped playing Quake 2 when they threw an alien spider in my face, for goodness sake.
So I feel nothing but sympathy for the poor sods who were surfing Chat Roulette looking in vain for a woman to take their clothes off on camera. Then they found one who seemed to turn into a posessed devil woman – of course it turned out to be a scary viral video promoting The Last Exorcism.
If they were really strangers – then they may well be charred for life. Although I suspect that they were actually actors or people paid to surf Chat Roulette for a while – how would you get the clearance rights?
Working for the BBC….
Aug 16th
means a few surprises from time to time. Like telling people that it’s not a place where they shower you with money while you hang out backstage with Matt Smith or even Huw Edwards, for instance. Although there are a few fantastic non-financial bonuses, of course – like working on election night. Really must blog about that one day.
Anyway, it also makes for the occasional surprise in the rest of your life – like this ad I spotted on my Facebook page, basically begging for a job.
Suffice to say that most of the people that I know who are in a position to hire someone at the BBC don’t have Facebook accounts, as far as I know. Although I dare say the person who placed that advert would find such non-social-media people to be freaks of the highest order…
FourSquare in the UK – finally there’s a use. Oh.
Aug 13th
Like many people who use FourSquare, I often wonder if there’s actually any point to checking in to a location, aside from point scoring and the fact I’m usually bored at a bus stop.
American friends of mine tell of strange legends whereby if you show you’re a Mayor at certain locations, the staff there look kindly upon you and give you a bonus. But I thought that’d never come here.
Until I heard that the West12 Shopping Centre in Shepherds Bush is offering a free SuperShake to the Mayor of that location in any one week. They’re incredibly active on the social media front, what with having a Twitter feed and a Facebook page.
Unfortunately, social media can only go so far. The reality of the West12 Shopping Centre is that it was a slightly dowdy and dying shopping mall even before the heavy big-guns of Westfield moved in opposite. There’s a gym, a supermarket, a cinema and a pub but most of the units are to let and there’s nothing there to draw people in aside from for the basic needs of the week.
So how are companies in the UK actually using FourSquare? Or is it doomed to go the way of the even more pointless Twitter game Spymaster, which at one point everyone seemed to be playing until they all realised it was useless and had no end goal?
You can link in any time you like…
Aug 11th
LinkedIn has become the defacto premiere website for making business connections, so as a consequence all these groups have sprung up promising to connect you to more and more people. I joined a few groups, but they weren’t quite what I was looking for. So I wanted to leave a group.
You’d have thought a website dedicated to business professionals would make it easy to do what you need to do – like leaving a group. But oh no.
You can’t leave a group from your group settings page. Oh no, that’d be far too obvious.
Instead, you have to go to a listing of all your groups, and click on the tiny word that says Actions by each link. And I had to do that by consulting the Help page.
LinkedIn, sort it out!
(Headline courtesy of @suitov)
When ping doesn't get you much pong
Jul 21st
(In other words, great, you got sponsorship, where’s the return?)
Across London, ping pong tables have sprouted up to encourage Londoners to have a go at ping pong/whiff whaff. All nicely decorated with the various sponsors’ logos, including Yahoo!
Accompanying these tables are some leaflets about the Ping London project, which also – of course – encourage you to share your participation, by using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or maybe even Flickr
Note that of those four websites, only one belongs to Yahoo – one of the main sponsors.
Surely a major dotcom company, upon committing some sponsorship money to a project, would want their websites or services to be promoted – perhaps Buzz or Pulse – alongside the rest of the web offerings?
Who on earth is Margaret Atwood?
Jul 13th
Edit: Ahhh, the author behind The Handmaid’s Tale. Must read it one day.
Fighting a losing battle against copyright
May 17th
Sarah Cameron not quite standing by her man, David Cameron
So… on the night when David Cameron finally became Prime Minister, HyperHam and I had the following conversation:
HH: “Why is Mrs Cameron standing at the back, pregnant and far away from her husband?”
AW: “Well, we’re living in Tory times now.”
To me, this was so amazingly funny and of-the-moment, that I immediately posted it on Twitter and Facebook. After all, what’s a joke if it’s not instantly shared to as many people as possible?
While a couple of friends graciously shared the joke with credit, another friend of mine reposted the joke without attributing it towards me. Indeed, when I pointed out that I wrote the joke, she deleted the comment, and then we had a slight disagreement before she decided to delete the joke to begin with. But she genuinely thought she was in the right to just copy a joke without any form of attribution.
Record companies and artists everywhere bemoan how we now live in an age where people copy works without even thinking of paying for it. But at least we all know a song by Lady GaGa is by Lady GaGa. How soon is it going to be before people can’t even be bothered to acknowledge that someone else wrote that song or book or joke?