What happens to old computers when they die? If they’re very lucky, they get turned into music and dance.

In the 60s, engineers found that the IBM 1401 mainframe could be ‘tuned’ to produce music on a nearby AM radio. A recording was made and 40 years later, it has been turned into a song and dance performance.

There’s a video of the performance on Wired. It’s extraordinary.

What’s next? I hope someone’s going to do “Sinclair Spectrum loading from tape, the un-musical.” Or perhaps “Jet Set Willy, the Opera.”

Following hot on the heals of Tony Blair’s appointment as peace envoy to the Middle East (Satirists are already bitching about unfair competition) comes the news that Facebook’s privacy person doesn’t take outside calls.

Wired reports that ‘private’ FaceBook profiles, which can include information about religion, sexual orientation or relationship status, can be still be searched.

For instance, if you are a Facebook member of your college, you could run a search to see all the people who are Christian women who are lesbians, all the women interested in women or all the Muslim men into other men. Your search results will likely include people who thought they marked their information as private, but didn’t also change their search settings. (These links all require a valid Facebook account.)

A reader sent me this classic: Apparel Flow Replenishment. In other words ‘restocking’. Similarly, I’ve always thought that Customer Service Representative is about two and a half words too long. And how do you ‘represent’ customer service? Also, have you noticed that companies with ‘CSRs’ usually have lousy customer service. As in Guy Kawasaki’s experience with AT&T or my experience with McAfee.

I am embarrassed to say it but sometimes, especially when I get something wrong, I take solace in the cock-ups of other people. And this is a beauty. In this week’s Flight International magazine, there’s a story about a billion dollar misprint.

On 13 June, the army claimed the contract amount for $2.04 billion would purchase up to 78 aircraft. The next day, L-3 Integrated Systems told Flight International that the $2.04 billion is actually for purchasing 55 aircraft … But the air force is challenging both sets of numbers, claiming information in the army’s announcement was “misprint”. … The current contract represents a planned procurement of 40 aircraft

Wow! Either they’re getting 78 aircraft, 55 aircraft or 40. Neither the buyer, the supplier or their buddies in the air force agree what the right number is. This is a week after the contract was signed.

Technorati Tags: Flight International, press releases, army, air force

There were storms in Chiswick. My PC power supply stopped working because of a transient overvoltage caused by lightning. the outlook is still uncertain. For June, the weather is pretty grim. Where’s global warming when you need it? As a pilot, I collect weather websites and here are a few useful ones for weatherholics like me.

• UK Met Office: www.meto.gov.uk
• Meteo France: www.meteo.fr
• KNMI (Dutch met office): www.knmi.nl
• Meteo Suisse: http://www.meteosuisse.admin.ch
• The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. I went there once - it’s a little bit of Europe just outside Reading and they have some really cool supercomputers.
• US NOAA’s National Weather Service worldwide METARs and TAFs: http://adds.aviationweather.gov/metars/index.php (Type EGLL for Heathrow weather and EGWU for Northolt - the closest station to where I live.)
• Plus a couple of pilot specific sites: AvBrief (which I use a lot), Avbrief for PDAs and phones, and the USAFE European weather forecasts.

Technorati Tags: Weather, Global Warming

I help a number of organisations with corporate blogs and I have run several seminars and workshops for marketing and PR folk about blogging.  This experience has made me realise that blogging is high on their agenda but often misunderstood.

• It’s an education sale. Even when people have heard about the concept of blogging, they are often unclear about what it actually involves, what works and what doesn’t. The most common misconception is that only one person can write a blog. Another is that it will involve unbridled reader criticism in comments. There are some good examples of corporate team blogs and corporate marketing sites that work well:  Southwest Airlines and the Boeing marketing blog).
• You have to allay their fears before you can appeal to their ambition. People in big companies rely on agencies like PR companies and marcomms (and, yes, copywriters like me). Writing makes them nervous. Similarly, they don’t have much free time. (Who does?) Also, they are very nervous about going public with something new that might get them fired. Addressing these concerns is critical. Running the blog like a magazine with contributions, interviews and proper editing with tone of voice guidelines helps because it is familiar territory to most marketing departments.
• Marketing matters. In big companies, marketing departments care a lot about whether the blog will conform to company design and style guides. Prototypes are helpful in addressing their concerns.
• Oh no! It’s the IT department. Sometimes you have to use a blogging platform that is safe but not as feature rich as, say, WordPress.  Big company IT departments are often, understandably reluctant to let you deviate from company standards.
• It takes longer. With my own blog, I decided to do it on a Monday and I had built it by the Wednesday. All the corporate blogs I have been involved with took months to get started.
• More people are involved. Getting things done is a meeting-heavy and consensus-driven process that, as an entrepreneur and also as a blogger, I find alien. However, it’s how big companies work.

Technorati Tags: GTD, corporate blogs, blogs, blogging, marketing

I’ve been reading Bruce Pilgrim’s book, Talking to My Cats: A Small Business Journal, and it’s a hoot. It’s more of a memoir than a book of guidance for budding writers. And when I say memoir, I mean bitingly funny stories of copywriter-abuse.

As a marketing guy myself, I can sympathise with the situations he describes - the crazy bosses, the do-more-for-less clients, the ups and downs of being your own boss. In fact the only point on which we seem to differ is that he has cats and I do not.

It has one especially valuable piece of advice: “Don’t let your babies grow up to be copywriters.”

I know it’s a bit recherch? to review a book review but I read one this morning that I thought was particularly well written.

It’s a review of Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The book is by Vincent Bugliosi and the review is by Thomas Mallon and it is published in June’s Atlantic. You can read the review online and also an interview with Mallon.

It’s an interesting example of the reviewer using a book to talk about their own experiences. It’s also an example of a review that says more about the reviewer than about the book. In this case, it’s no bad thing but I wonder how long this has been happening.

There are two phrases that I thought were particularly arresting:

“In explaining the assassination, the conference’s registrants cast aside Occam’s razor in favor of a Texas chain saw…”

Incidentally, Occam’s razor is very useful. It says “entitia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” or, in English, entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the most likely. Incidentally, In Our Time did a great programme on William of Ockham (their spelling!) a couple of weeks ago.

Another line that I liked is near the end:

“Similarly, in knocking down the conspiracists’ shantytown of constructs, Bugliosi has had to save the village in order to destroy it…”

I think both examples are clever, to the point and entertaining. It’s hard to write like that and too much of it gives me indigestion but a little bit is pure fizz and ginger.

PS This post was typo city when I first wrote it.� Thanks to readers who spotted them.

My proofreader, Sarah Bee, sent me a link to this debate about saying ‘thank you’ by email. (Sarah doesn’t check my blog, so the typos here are all my own fault.) The debate started with one person saying:

A new book on the way-valid topic of email etiquette has offered the following suggestion:

Do not send thank you emails.

They clog up folks’ in=box. One’s thanks for help rendered is assumed. No need to say so.

In fact, no thanking is the new polite thing to do.

My personal view is that just saying thanks as a way of acknowledging an email is pretty pointless. But expressing gratitude in the right context is a necessary part of courtesy. One person’s comment, that highly educated professionals often have the manners of skunks, isn’t invalid just because it is overstated.

This whole discussion reminded me of an article, Elements of E-Style, which I read in the New Yorker in April. It challenges some recieved wisdoms, for instance:

The authors, astonishingly, come out in favor of exclamation points (”Thanks!!!!” is way friendlier than “Thanks”), abbreviations (”Is LOL . . . really inherently more opaque than FYI?”), and emoticons (those smiley faces and the like may “bug many people but they make us smile”).

I’ve noticed that my own emails are getting shorter and I’m seeing more and more one-sentence paragraphs. My theory is that people won’t read long emails and skip long pararagraphs after the first sentence. It’s probably the same for blog posts.

One last question. Is it e-mail or email? I’ve seen both and I use the unhyphenated version, but I’d welcome discussion and feedback on this crucial point.

Well, thanks for reading this post. I really appreciate it!!

Anyone living in Britain will remember Tony Blair’s tawdry efforts in 1997 to ‘rebrand’ the UK as “Cool Britannia.” What we actually got was Oasis visiting Number 10 and a giant dome-shaped folly in Docklands. Actions speak louder than words. You can’t spin a non-event.

Now, Fred Kaplan reports on a US State Department official who has written about the reasons for his resignation. Kaplan has a good summary (sorry for quoting at length):

Ever since Sept. 11, the State Department, he noted, has embarked on “an unprecedented effort” to explain U.S. foreign policy to both American and foreign audiences. His office arranged more than 6,500 interviews, half with international media. On any given day, senior officials were doing four or five interviews. And yet, poll after poll revealed rising animosity toward America.

But the problem wasn’t our words; as he put it, “What we don’t have here is a failure to communicate.” Rather, it was our actions, “which speak the loudest of all.”

Rejecting the Kyoto treaty, dissing the International Criminal Court, revoking the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo*—”these actions,” Floyd wrote, “have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. This is the policy we have been ’selling’ through our actions.” As a result, our words are ignored or dismissed as “meaningless U.S. propaganda.”

* My mother describes this behaviour as “Do what I say, not what I do.”

I visit the USA regularly and it is often the source of embarrassment to hear Tony Blair praised or to be thanked for our support in Iraq (and surprising how often people say these things to me). I’m not anti-American. I love the country and have visited it over fifty times. It’s a cliche but no less true because of it - my best friends are American.  But I think Kaplan and Price Floyd have put their finger on exactly why I feel embarrassed.  There’s a huge dissonance between American values, American actions and what America says about both. From a PR perspective, this is a recipe for disaster. 

Technorati Tags: PR, Slate, Fred Kaplan