Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2011

Love it or hate it: Marmite and social media

Filed under: Britain, Food, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Oddly enough, I just picked up a jar of Marmite recently, not having tasted the stuff for literally decades. I love the stuff, but I can understand why others might hate it:

When it comes to evoking passionate debate British brand Marmite has proven controversy can help build buzz and sales. This brown savory spread made from yeast extract has an incredibly distinctive flavor. 15 years ago Marmite’s own “Love It or Hate It” campaign evolved out of a difference of tastes among the creative team at DDB London. One loved the brown, savory spread and one hated it. The campaign’s longevity and fame reflects the fact that even in its country of origin, the brand’s strong taste is “challenging.” (Few Americans can even stand the idea of Marmite and it is questionable whether many Brits would if they had not been introduced to the taste as children.)

[. . .]

The “Love it or Hate It” campaign brought to an end five years of stagnating sales and a weakening brand and led to sustained, penetration-led growth of around 5% each year for the next five years.

When sales once again started to slow in 2002 the campaign idea proved flexible enough to help revive the brand’s fortunes once again. The campaign was enlisted to introduce a new, “squeezy” container and extend usage to sandwiches. Messing with a much loved brand is never easy, but astute brand management involved ardent fans with the relaunch and enlisted another British icon, Paddington Bear, to bring the brand back to growth. In 2010, the brand spoofed the British elections. Love and Hate parties battled it out to either build a shrine to the brand or rename it “Tarmite.”

The fact that people are so passionate about the brand (for or against) means that Marmite’s “Love It or Hate It” campaign is a natural fit with social media. According to Contagious Magazine, some 200,000 fans were already on Facebook as self-declared Marmite lovers long before the official page was launched in 2008.Today the brand has a fully fledged social media presence with over 500,000 people liking the brand and 182,000 liking The Marmite Hate Party (Dedicated to Stop the Spread of Marmite by reducing, and ultimately terminating, its production and consumption).

Damn. Now I’ve gone and made myself hungry . . .

February 27, 2011

Athletes in the age of Facebook and Twitter

Filed under: Football, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

John Holler makes several good points in this story about a couple of NFL hopefuls who are having to defend their reputations due to the wonderful rumour-spreading abilities of social media and the willingness of sports reporters to try to create controversy:

Saturday at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, we got our first intense view of this media “New World Order.” Cam Newton and Ryan Mallett are two of the top quarterback candidates in this year’s draft. Yet, both of them spent significant portions of their media access to address questions that have nothing to do with football.

Newton, who has been under the media microscope for the last several months, had to clarify a comment he made about wanting to be “an entertainer” and “an icon.” It was a flippant comment made by a kid who is going to turn 22 in May. In his case, the question should be, “Yeah, so?” not a sanctimonious rant by media “entertainers” and/or “icons” to pass judgment that he is not focused on being a football player, but more interested in being a rock star.

Guess what? Newton should have nothing to apologize for. If you’re a star in the NFL, you are an entertainer. People drop hundreds of dollars to watch you perform for three hours. There are thousands of people employed to discuss what you do for a living. There is little difference between Peyton Manning and Bruce Springsteen. They do the same thing — entertain packed houses wherever they perform. [. . .]

Mallett is a different story. He has been called to task by what everyone reporting on it claims are rumors that he not only has taken drugs in college (no!) but might have an addiction to the party lifestyle. If it is true, he won’t be the first and he won’t be the last college football player to do things he wouldn’t put on his résumé. The timing of the accusations, the week of the NFL Scouting Combine, seems interesting. However, his response was hard to justify.

If there was no basis to the accusations, Mallett should have been advised to come out aggressive — denying the charges immediately and owning the situation before he gets his 15 minutes with NFL teams. Instead, he deflected the questions, which only gives rise to more speculation. In the Facebook/TMZ world we live in now, you can bet that media members are going to be provided with information — some will pay for it, others won’t — that will portray a bad side of Mallett that he likely doesn’t deserve, but will surely have to answer to.

The stakes are high for both of these young men: a badly chosen phrase could lose them literally millions of dollars by lowering their chances of being a high draft choice. It’s tough enough for media personalities and politicians to tap-dance around awkward situations, but young 20-something athletes don’t have the experience to avoid falling into the verbal traps.

February 21, 2011

Nun with 600 Facebook friends kicked out of convent

Filed under: Media, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Another amusing story from The Register:

A Spanish nun has been kicked out of her closed religious order after clocking up 600 friends on Facebook.

After 35 years closeted at the 700-year-old Santa Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, Maria Jesus Galan is back living with her mum, and has declared she rather fancies visiting New York and London.

The convent reportedly acquired a PC 10 years ago, believing that by banking online and the like, it would help minimise the sisters’ contact with the outside world, presumably because ecommerce would enable them to avoid known dens of iniquity, such as banks and supermarkets.

[. . .]

However, things went awry when she joined Facebook and quickly built up a network of 600 friends. Her fellow brides of Christ apparently disapproved, and according to Sr Maria, “made life impossible”.

Facebook? Inconsistent enforcement of terms and conditions? Say it ain’t so!

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Facebook is having another of its periodic mood swings on just what exactly their terms and conditions really mean:

Facebook has announced it is actively reviewing its policy of a total ban on all content relating to sexual activities.

The review follows the deletion on 4 February of Collared Events page following a complaint from a site user. This deletion angered and mystified many members and supporters of Collared, which operates Slaves and Masters Club Nights and which identifies itself as a community non-profit organisation with a focus on safety and socialization. It used the Facebook page merely as a means to communicate.

There was no explicit imagery or sexual content of any kind and the page was set to “secret”. The page strictly followed the Facebook Terms. Facebook initially cited its user condition (3.7) that: “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

However, following extensive dialogue with senior staff at the company, including Richard Allan, Facebook’s Head of Policy for Europe, Collared has apparently stirred Facebook into reviewing not just this ban but its entire policy. A wide ranging “internal dialogue” is now under way.

Simon, who runs Collared, told the Reg: “I feel that Facebook are in complete confusion on this issue. The problem is that their policy is inconsistent and whether a site survives or not depends on whether a site is able to lobby the right person in the company — and not offend the wrong one.

Last time it was non-pornographic breastfeeding information groups being banned, and now gay, lesbian, and transgender groups are worried that this new interpretation will have their Facebook pages banned without warning, too. Makes you wonder if there’s been a silent take-over by the religious right, doesn’t it?

February 8, 2011

Hookers with Blackberries on Facebook

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:17

The latest round of moral posturing by politicians has accomplished great things: more sex workers now use Facebook to communicate with prospective clients, fewer are using Craigslist. Success?

A study by sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh on trends in the world’s oldest profession, published by Wired, estimated that 25 percent of hookers’ regular clients came through Facebook compared to only three per cent through Craigslist.

Five years before that, in 2003, nine per cent of the prostitutes regular clients came through Craiglist and none through the then infant Facebook.

“Even before the crackdown on [Craigslist’s] adult-services section, sex workers were turning to Facebook: 83 per cent have a Facebook page, and I estimate that by the end of 2011, Facebook will be the leading on-line recruitment space,” Venkatesh writes.

Venkatesh says that there’s another key indicator for those who frequently hire prostitutes:

Curiously, he found one of the three main ways a sex worker can boost her earning potential is not to get a boob job but to buy a BlackBerry. “This symbol of professional life suggests the worker is drug- and disease-free,” Venkatesh explains.

Of prostitutes that own a smartphone, 70 per cent have BlackBerries while just 11 per cent own iPhones. Feel free to write your own hilarious jokes using that information.

January 23, 2011

John Scalzi on Facebook

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

John Scalzi has been online for a long time. He even “handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.” He’s not excited about Facebook. Not at all:

A friend of mine noted recently that I seemed a little antagonistic about Facebook recently — mostly on my Facebook account, which is some irony for you — and wanted to know what I had against it. The answer is simple enough: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick. It’s a dumbed-down version of the functionality the Web already had, just not all in one place at one time.

Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.

[. . .]

I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices. A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. Facebook shouldn’t be telling me how many “friends” I should have, especially when there’s clearly no technological impetus for it. Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman. Its general ethos that I need to get over the concept of privacy makes me want to shove a camera lens up Zuckerberg’s left nostril 24 hours a day and ask him if he’d like for his company to rethink that position. Basically there’s very little Facebook does, either as a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization.

I have a Facebook account, but only really check it every few days. Twitter, on the other hand I’ve found to be an excellent tool for a blogger: lots and lots of interesting stuff has come to my attention first through a Twitter update from journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and just ordinary folks. And it doesn’t try to worm its way into everything I do.

Some folks felt John was being too harsh on Facebook users, rather than the site itself, so he posted an update later that day:

* In comments here and elsewhere there was interpretation of me saying that Facebook wasn’t for someone like me, but it was for normal people as a) a way to signal that I am awesome and smart and also awesome, and b) normal people are stupid and suck, and that’s why they use Facebook. Yeah, no. It’s not for me because the functionality doesn’t map well for what I want to do or have for my online experience, and “normal” in this case doesn’t mean “stupid people who suck,” it means “people who don’t want to make the time/energy commitment to run their own site.”

It’s always a problem with written work . . . some people will misunderstand or misinterpret what you’re saying — deliberately or otherwise — and it’s difficult to make something so clear that it can’t be twisted. Did I say difficult? I should have said impossible.

January 17, 2011

Another sexting case, with a slightly misleading headline

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

A brief report at the National Post implies something a bit different than the article actually says: Woman jailed after nude photo posted on Facebook.

Eighteen-year-old Angelica Nicholson of Portage, Ind. sent a nude photo of herself to a “male acquaintance” — apparently to the displeasure of the acquaintance’s girlfriend.

The girlfriend in turn posted the photo on Facebook and after an exchange of heated text messaging, Ms. Nicholson contacted Facebook to remove the photo.

Dissatisfied with Facebook’s response time, Ms. Nicholson called 911 and claimed she was 17 to get the photo removed faster.

Police found out the woman was 18 from government records, and Ms. Nicholson was arrested for false reporting.

So, yes, she was arrested, but not for posting a nude photo on Facebook. Abusing 911 services, yes, but not for posting to Facebook.

Another report from Brisbane

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

My friend Roger is doing well (having been outside the worst of the flooding), and sent this update on the rail and transportation situation in Queensland:

A couple of pictures of the western rail line from Brisbane to Toowoomba. The line, mostly double-track has been extensively damaged and willl probably be out of commission for over three months.

This shows flood debris, and a bull, lodged on one bridge. Some 20 people in the area are also missing so there may well be bodies in the debris as well. It is being carefully checked but there is a huge amount. One body was found in her house which had already been searched twice before.

Part of the Moura coal line in Central Queensland. There could be some delays here as well.

Meanwhile, in muddy Brisbane, in an effort to keep cars off the roads all public transport is free for the next few days. The railways parked their electric commuter trains on some tracks that were well above flood level. Unfortunately, graffiti artists, using Facebook and Twatter, called up every idiot on the East Cost that had a can of spray paint. Some even came from Melbourne. About half the train fleet was so badly overpainted that the sets could not be run. Cost estimates are in the order of a couple of million to clean.

The cops can now read Facebook etc. and feel they have enough evidence to throw at least some of the perps in the slammer. Hopefully with their private parts painted a bright blue.

Update: It’s not just flooding in Queensland . . . there’s also now flooding in Victoria. There are always idiots who try to do stupid things, especially around flooded rivers:

A bizarre decision to ride an inflatable doll down a flood-swollen Yarra River blew up in a woman’s face yesterday when she lost her latex playmate in a rough patch.

The incident prompted a warning from police that blow-up sex toys are “not recognised flotation devices’’.

Police and a State Emergency Services crew were called to the rescue when the woman and a man, both 19, struck trouble at Warrandyte North about 4.30pm yesterday.

They were floating down the river on two inflatable dolls and had just passed the Pound Bend Tunnel when the woman lost her toy in turbulent water.

January 10, 2011

Facebook has a repeat of their earlier boob

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

Facebook apparently has something against breasts — specifically those used to feed babies:

Facebook had one of its nipple-related related brainstorms last week, banning, unbanning, then re-banning breastfeeding support group, The Leaky Boob.

The Leaky Boob group allows almost 11,000 mothers to share their experiences on breastfeeding — as well as providing casual visitors with a treasure trove of advice and tips. Well, it would do, if Facebook didn’t keep deleting it — as they did the previous weekend.

This provoked an angry reaction from the tens of thousands of women who use the page for information and support.

Breastfeeding supporters responded swiftly, creating two pages on Facebook, Bring Back the Leaky Boob and TLB Support, which gained the best part of 10,000 fans in just two days.

On Tuesday, according to group founder Jessica Martin-Weber, the page was back up.

On Wednesday it was gone again.

Then, later in the day, it returned and is still up today.

It’s easy to see how the content of TLB might be offensive to closed-minded people, and if the banning mechanism Facebook uses is mostly automated, it’d explain the way in which the group was originally banned. If all it takes is a complaint, and the (I assume automated) follow-up to the complaint only checks for certain things, the first shutdown is explained. The fact that the group has been through this process before shows a weakness in Facebook’s administrative tracking policies.

November 18, 2010

QotD: On the quality of writing, mediated through technology

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

I own a computer. I don’t use the Internet very much. I’m not a technophobe. It just doesn’t help me very much. Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?

P.J. O’Rourke, “Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2010-11-18

September 6, 2010

Fifteen albums/fifteen minutes

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

I got tagged with this Facebook meme by David Stamper a little while ago, but I’m only now just getting around to addressing it. Here’s the description I was sent:

The rules: Do this if it’s fun. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums you choose.

So, because I’m too lazy to do it in Facebook, I’m doing it here (eventually, through the magic of Twitter, the link’ll appear in Facebook anyway). Roughly in chronological order:

  • Rush, A Farewell to Kings
  • Al Stewart, Past, Present & Future
  • Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
  • The Alan Parsons Project, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
  • Dire Straits, Dire Straits
  • Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
  • Neil Young, Live Rust
  • Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
  • King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King
  • Kitaro, Silk Road
  • Stan Rogers, Northwest Passage
  • Dead Can Dance, The Serpent’s Egg
  • The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God
  • John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
  • Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

I had to take it in chronological order to limit it to only fifteen, so no really recent stuff . . . but perhaps that’s fair as it’ll take time to show if more recent stuff will hold up to long-term listening. Not quite making it onto the list was Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis & Gil Evans.

July 25, 2010

QotD: Writing

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:30

Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?

P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke: ‘Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'”, John Brown’s Notes and Essays, 2010-07-23

July 23, 2010

Stalkers enjoy cool new tools to pursue their prey

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Leo Hickman finds that Foursquare is a very handy tool to track down your cyberobsession in the real world:

Louise has straight, auburn hair and, judging by the only photograph I have of her, she’s in her 30s. She works in recruitment. I also know which train station she uses regularly, what supermarket she shopped at last night and where she met her friends for a meal in her home town last week. At this moment, she is somewhere inside the pub in front of me meeting with colleagues after work.

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Privacy and expectations thereof are becoming less and less realistic, but even knowing that, the merging of social media and geo-location services gives me the creeps.

I was an early user of Facebook (once it was opened to non-students) and LinkedIn and have been getting great use out of Twitter lately, but it seems like every day there’s a new social media platform being touted as the best ever. Social media is like any other form of networking: the value increases as the number of nodes goes up. The next boom in convergence will probably be cross-network liaison tools.

Update: Shea Sylvia finds the attention of a cyberstalker very unwelcome.

July 15, 2010

Facebook usage patterns differ by gender

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

I have a Facebook account, but I use it infrequently (the vast majority of my FB activity is just status posts echoed from my Twitter account, actually). For certain groups, however, Facebook is far more critical to their lives . . . young women, for example:

According to a new report released by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research, about one-third of women on Facebook between 18 to 34 in age check this social networking site in the morning as the first thing even before going to bathroom. Some of the other astonishing facts deduced from this research on young women are as follows.

* 21% of women age 18-34 check Facebook in the middle of the night
* 63% use Facebook as a networking tool
* 42% think it’s okay to post photos of themselves intoxicated
* 79% are fine with kissing in photos
* 58% use Facebook to keep tabs on “frenemies”
* 50% are fine with being Facebook friends with complete strangers

Clearly there haven’t been enough stories about people losing their jobs over inappropriate posts on Facebook . . . maybe they aren’t being posted to Facebook itself.

Apple to hold news conference on iPhone 4 today

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

BBC News reports that Apple has called a surprise news conference:

The company has refused to give details about whether the event will address reception problems that some users have reported with the phone, launched just last month.

Apple has faced mounting criticism from analysts and consumers over its handling of the issue.

Industry watchers said the firm was in danger of damaging its “rock star” reputation over how poorly it had dealt with what would normally be a minor problem.

“It seems there has been a real crisis of leadership here,” said Patrick Kereley, senior digital strategist for Levick Strategic Communications which deals in crisis managment and reputation protection.

“There are so many conflicting reports about this issue and a lot of confusion in the marketplace. They need a plan of attack. Today’s companies have to react quickly before chatter on Facebook or Twitter turns into news headlines as is the case here,”

Of course, blaming the problem on Facebook and Twitter users isn’t particularly appropriate: there is a problem with the iPhone 4 and even the most pro-Apple folks are noticing it and complaining. Apple has reacted very badly to their most enthusiastic customers, and (for a change) appears to be damaging their reputation. Now that they’re no longer seen as underdogs, the haughty and uninformative response won’t work.

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