a thaumaturgical compendium

Too fun to be flash. Making faces. (Via Burg.)

Today (Wednesday) is a good day to vent your anger at Dow, who decided to
send their complaint about a parody website NOT to the site, and NOT to
the host of the site (Thing.net), but to the upstream provider of the host
of the site (Verio), who promptly brought down the whole ISP and is now
cancelling their contract.

Besides that, Dow is just plain nasty business. Visit
http://www.greenpeace.org/ on Wednesday, Jan. 22 to find out more and to
see how to let off some steam.

(Ray Thomas, via Nettime)

Or… not. Seb pointed out my score on RateMyProfessors.com. Sample size is everything… especially on anonymous surveys!

Love the Cash cover of NIN’s “Hurt” (though the video could use a little help—via MF).

Also liking some of the songs from Vienna Teng. She was apparently on Leno a couple of nights ago, which probably signals a rise to stardom. The San Jose Mercury said she’s “like a child of Chopin and Sarah McLachlan,” which at least gives you a basis for what to expect. And as cities as names go, it’s hard to beat Vienna ^_.

And while we are on the subject of music, check out Ween’s rejected jingles for Pizza Hut (via Boing).

I’m not usually into marketing research, but as soon as I clear enough projects to start a new one (cf. NY resolution #2), this seems like an engaging question:

3) Do weblogs have the power to shape public opinion—i.e., get people to buy products, use services, etc.?

In terms of shaping public opinion, then certainly. I don’t feel that there is any real statistical data point to support whether blogs support product decisions. I’m sure that it happens all the time—I myself have looked at some blogs to help me evaluate certain recently launched products—but I haven’t seen any real research data on this point. (If it exists, I’d love to see such data.)

However, look at the folks who have put up blogs, especially within the journalistic community. They certainly have the power to shape opinions and, thanks to blogging, they can do so on a more frequent basis that a typical daily paper or a column’s publication schedule allows.

It was posted as part of an interview on blogs and PR. If the domain was limited somewhat, it seems like it would be a very doable survey. Particularly if blogs could be co-opted to help with word-of-mouth.

Yes, there are the crying babies, the annoying drunks, the field trips, and college hockey teams. I even shared a redeye with the erstwhile WWF out of Seattle one night. But anyone who has done his or her fair share of air travel has encountered the most hated man on the plane. He’s the one who brings a piping hot pizza on-board a short flight as a pleasant reminder to his best friend of home. The smell wafts through the cabin, and you are forced to eat airplane cardboard-lunch while smelling pizza. The guy sometimes offers a slice to his seatmates, thinking this is the “right thing to do” and not realizing that it is (a) only making the scent travel more quickly down the length of the plane and (b) he isn’t nearly as original as he thinks he is for doing this.

No, I am not reminded of this because it recently happened to me. I’ve been safely on ground for the last few months. But a couple of days ago our friendly FedEx lady brought us a Dutch apple pie from the Julian Pie Company. I know, apples to upstate New York is a little like coals to Newcastle, but this pie is special. Julian is famous for bikers, weed, and pie, three things that seem to go together well. [Before I get any angry emails, I recognize that bikers get a bad rap, and that not all of them are heavy users. I can’t even count the number of times a biker has told me he ate pie once or twice, but it never really did anything for him.] The Dutch apple pie from JPC is so good it that it has its own word in haliblabi, which can be romanized as ppayee.

This was a little slice of SoCal right here in Buffalo. I think that this kind of comestible arbitrage constitutes a significant impact of the internet. Even perishable items like Julian pie, or Portillo’s Italian beef, or Amazonian roses, are now available world-wide, even when there is no significant local market to support them. It raises the question of just how much of the experience of a place can be relocated.

This was a question Jamie and I asked daily when we lived in Japan. The degree to which you want to immerse yourself in a foreign culture is increasingly up to you, especially if it is “American” culture you are seeking. At the time, we could get hold of American cultural products fairly easily. Part of that was that there was a company that would ship American groceries to you in bulk. Part was that we could order from CDNow or from the UCI Bookstore (which beat even Amazon to the online book trade as I recall). I suspect, now that cheap internet access is easily available in most of Japan, the experience is even less foreign today than it was ten years ago, if you choose not to immerse yourself in the local culture.

I’d like to bring a conference to you knowledge and ask you
for your possible participation.

BlogTalk – A European Weblog Conference: Web-based publishing, communication and collaboration tools for professional and private use.

http://blogtalk.net – the Conference will be held in Vienna, Austria May 23-24 2003

Read the rest of this entry »