:-)

pic via

Their people are smarter than ours

Not because they said Apple was right but simply because I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever (okay you get the point) expect our own advertising regulatory body to say something like this:
"We considered that people would understand [the ad] to mean viruses that infected Windows based PCs would not infect Macs and that Macs were less likely to be infected by viruses than those PCs; not that Macs would never be infected by viruses and did not require virus protection. ... We concluded therefore that the ad was not irresponsible or likely to mislead." Not after I personally have heard such abnormities (invented word, I know) like "the ad tells people to buy this products and this is against the law", "the ad targets kids because it has kids in it", "the ad speaks about the product in a warm way" ...

full story here

Flickr-ing

For a while now, I have been toying with a different way of browsing the Internet. I don't read my feeds, I don't google, instead I flickr...I simply search different words on flickr and see what comes up and from there I move on to actual bits of information. I find that people place on flickr not only visual aids for written text but also actual replacements for text, collages of information, screen crops of interesting trivia.
For instance, searching for "facebook" gives you a lot of profiles, but also a lot of information about app overload, anti-facebook philosophies, facebook weirdness, etc etc. Try it. You may find it more inspiring than regular browsing.

Three memories

I am trying to not put in the context of what is happening today, or everyday for that matter. That is why I only took pics of one and will maybe post it here later. but so far, from this holiday I take away with me:
- walking home from a dinner and looking at my block of flats with its over 200 windows and seeing just ONE window lit up with xmas lights (last year it was blinding, filled with the gaudiest of garlands and decorations)
- an oversized Bugs Bunny doll ( probably as tall as I am, and I'm 6'1) sitting in a seat on the Underground. I saw it going to and later that evening saw it coming back from a friend's place, always in the same seat, like it was waiting for someone
- a chimney sweep, with a huge black hat and red shoes hitchhiking from Deva to somewhere.
:-)

The age of free - today LITERATURE

I just came across this interesting new website called dailylit.com. It's basically a site that serves you installments of the books you choose by e-mail or rss. I have subscribed to get stuff via e-mail and I am currently reading Lawrence Lessing's Free Culture. I have browsed their library which is not extensive but for those who have been unable to go through the classics of world lit and some of the best known modernists, it's not too bad. Some of the books are free, some are subject to a fee but overall seems like a brilliant idea.

will keep you posted

Enterprise IT and its demise

This is Lee Bryant talking about the best way to use IT within corporations. Interesting take on how IT within corporations (as opposed to what people use when they are at home) is limiting staff's creativity and performance. Unfortunately the code for the player is broken so i cannot embed it here but you can watch it on the reboot site here. Start watching about minute 12, bit too theoretical till then (basically about different ways of encoding progress)
Also some more talks by the guy on the same topic here (including one with a case study)

Update to previous

While checking out the reboot copenhagen website here, I can accross a wiki style "free" forum where someone tellingly filled in FREE (FROM) THOUGHT - free FROM thought... LOL

what freaks me out about Facebook

is not the intesity with which it has caught on, nor the intensity with which people use it for a variety of reasons, from "uploading" pics to saying yes and sending off the weirdest of apps. Mind you, these are people I would never have pegged for "the type" - I mean, like me, addictive and unable to defocus from wanting to know if someone commented on my status or what new stuff my "friends" have up there. These are people who have a life outside Internet, who travel, have not developped "Internet humps" [ in case you are not familiar with the term, this is a slight curvature of the upper body caused by overusing your laptop while sitting upright in bed or on the sofa]. So, as I said, the fact that even "normal" people have begun to "share" more with Facebook is really no problem for me - it seems normal. What freaks me out though is the sheer corectness with which Facebook chronicles people's intimate lives via their status updates.

"x xulescu is no longer listed as single" "m mulescu has changed her status to in a relationship" "d dinulescu is now listed as in a relationship and it's complicated". While twitter, as I was writing a while back, requires some introspection to unravel the signs of intimacy, Facebook is, as its name becons, a face value book of private lives. A quick run through my homepage today and I realized that a couple of my friends have gotten back together, a couple broken up, some of them had actually been dating each other.

I love Internet, I think it is a great tool for keeping in touch, linking, finding out useful stuff or simply whiling away time, but sometimes the load of data about other people's lives, combinated with a natural inquisitive nature, is simply overwhelming. and sometimes irrelevant. and sometimes tiresome.

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A culture of "eye to eye"

I have been spending these past couple of days trying to catch up with the books that have been piling up around my flat and lay there unread.

By coincidence most of the titles I had with me were by American authors, Levison, Underhill, Hopkins, so after a while, as I was starting to feel somewehat uneasy reading, I realized there is something particularly annoying/exciting about American marketing books: they are always addressed to YOU - YOU, the person reading them, you, the unadulterated holder of the book, the one whose eyes are facing the page right now. And they always, and I mean always, assume you bought the book because you want to make money.

This I find a disturbing/wonderful quality of American marketing: the directness and lack of any self rightous nuance about the goals of it all. Nobody writes to propose theories, everybody writes to make money or to let other people know that exact way to make money themselves. It is very much like telesales or advertorials and, come to think of it, it may be the reason this formerly great economy was doing so well: sheer, poignant drive to make money, by pig-headedly and without any doubts following a goal.

I read Levison's 50 reasons to do advertising and can find at least 10 which are exactly the same thing worded differently and this does not diminish the strength with which this person-to-person, eye-to-eye writing persuades that he knows what he's writing about.
I wish we had not lost this strength of conviction because I know this is what made great managers like the one we read about. Maybe, with the crisis, we'll see less dilly dally with "the perfect" brand propositions and more decisive money making attitudes :-)

picture via

Before the drive home...

Holiday drive

By general vote this was the heavy rotation tune of the drive to my parents' home for a snowy Xmas :-)

This is a website

it's no joke... it really is; Live here. Pointed out by Victor Kapra as part of a worst websites of 2008 :-)