Writing, marketing and technology
I just came across this when signing up for flickr on Yahoo!
I really liked the way they say “capitalisation matters.” It had never occurred to me that the usual phrase “Passwords are case sensitive” might not be obvious to most users. But of course, it’s really obscure when you think about it.
Bravo Yahoo!
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes, it is obscure, probably even to very young typesetters who may never have seen either actual case, upper or lower. As a schoolkid, many moons ago, I visited, with the class, the offices of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. If I remember rightly, this was a first year high school trip, so it would have been late 1977 or early 1978, the height of punk and just as the paper was switching to hot metal.
Maybe it is that visit on which my foray into journalism hinged. Probably not, but it’s nice to romanticize. The other thing they had, which was still very new-fangled (to them and certainly to our troupe of pupils and teachers) was a fax machine!
db
…and when the site is offline or having technical problems, they say “Flickr is having a massage”.
But I think the choice of language is more about flickr than yahoo: they were using the “plain speaking” approach long before yahoo bought them out, and one of the problems they’ve had since the buyout is “Old skool” Flickr members bemoaning the fact that while flickr still maintains that funky start-up attitude, they’re actually now just another corporate behemoth.
The dumbing down of America!
Good story, db. I wonder if your visit was just too late for you to have met the poets Basil Bunting (friend of Ezra Pound; spy in Tehran) and Barry MacSweeney? They were both subs on the Evening Chronicle. It is nice to romanticise, isn’t it?
(Matthew, wouldn’t the concrete ‘Capital letters matter’ be better than the abstract ‘capitalization’?)
I’m with Shaun on this on – they’re moving along the right lines but I’d be curious to know how many people know what capitalisation means – or have ever used the word.
That visit to the Chronicle was a long time ago, and I don’t remember who we met at all…I doubt that they would have let a marauding group of pupils near the subbies’ desks though regardless of which poets they did or didn’t know
db