November 2009

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2009.

Virgin Blue’s mistake reveals countless selfish whingers

15 November 2009 in Human Nature, Internet, Marketing by Stilgherrian | 55 comments

Thank you, Virgin Blue, for sending your “erroneous” email Friday night. You’ve done us a great public service. You’ve exposed a pack of greedy, selfish, shallow tools who deserve to be ridiculed publicly. Thank you.

On Friday evening, Australian airline Virgin Blue sent an email telling some Velocity Rewards members they’d been upgraded to Gold status. But as documented at mUmBRELLA, the email went not just to those entitled to the upgrade but their entire database — including people who’d opted out of email marketing.

Including me because, yes, I’m a Velocity Rewards member.

“That can’t be right,” I thought. “I haven’t flown with Virgin Blue this year.” Then I saw others saying similar things online and I figured the mistake was more widespread. I chuckled, knowing that someone had a bit of a mess to clear up.

Sure enough, three hours later a second email arrived.

Oops! Due to an error you’ve received our previous email by mistake. Please disregard the free upgrade communication as unfortunately you do not qualify for that upgrade.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Mistake. Correction. Apology. That’s the end of the story, yes? Alas no.

Suddenly a whole bunch of people are demanding their Gold status should stay even though, like, they’re not actually entitled to it. People are “upset”. They’re demanding compensation, some even saying they should be compensated with a free flight voucher.

Compensated? Compensated for fucking what, exactly?

Compensated for being too stupid to realise the email was obviously a mistake? Compensated for having a vastly over-inflated sense of entitlement? Compensated for being so much of a consumer-puppet that you validate yourself by bragging about some confected faux-status symbolised by which colour plastic card sits in your wallet and then being embarrassed because, oh sorry, you’re actually still just another cheap-arsed prole after all?

I don’t think that’s Virgin Blue’s fault.

Losers.

Now of course there’s a metric bazillion blog posts and comments banging on about how this is “epic fail” on Virgin Blue’s part and how they’d have handled it so much better and faster. I won’t link to them because it’s too depressing to realise how many instant fucking experts appear after every little glitch is made public.

However I will link to Darryl King’s excellent piece about what he calls Crowd Spanking.

Why is it that the tools of Social Media make tools out of people?

Yes, companies, people and organisations of any sort can and should be open to criticism and correction of poor behaviour. I agree totally. However I don’t agree that Crowd Spanking of everyone that does something wrong is effective nor necessary …

Add some perspective. This is not a corporation that has exposed their staff and customer to asbestos and are denying compensation. It is an upgrade people! …

Before all the Social Media Gurus come up with the 10 things that Virgin Blue could have done better blog posts think through how businesses and people at work live.

Ex-fucking-zactly.

“Epic fail” on Virgin Blue’s part? Bah! Step back a little and think about the full gamut of things which an airline can get wrong and the potential consequences. Up one end, you’ve got mistakes where hundreds of people die in a ball of flame, traumatising their loved ones. Down the other end you’ve got… gosh! A marketing email that was sent to people by mistake.

To the folks who reckon they’d have handled it better and quicker, well, are you really set up to handle such an unusual situation on a Friday night when people have gone to the pub or gone home for the weekend? Personally, I reckon identifying the problem and getting the second email out in three hours isn’t a bad effort — especially when in the meantime there’s, you know, a fucking airline to run!

Well done, Virgin Blue. Well done.

I reckon — and this is just my opinion here — but I reckon we save the Really Big Stick for mistakes which actually matter. Also, stop being such selfish, judgemental little pricks.

[Update 16 October 2009: To illustrate some points I'll be making in the comments, here's a screenshot of the erroneous Velocity Rewards email.]

Murdoch’s wrong about Google

11 November 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 5 comments

Crikey logo

I reckon Rupert Murdoch’s plan to block Google from indexing News Corporation stories is daft, and I said so in Crikey yesterday with a piece they headlined Dear Rupert, this is how the internet works. Google it.

In brief, my commentary is that people don’t really get their news in a monolith any more, neither the daily newspaper or the nightly TV bulletin. Instead, they gather it from all over in little pieces. If you want people to find your stories, those stories need to be in the indexes.

Crikey editor Jonathan Green has also pointed out the stark difference between News Corporation and Google. I reckon News needs Google more than Google needs News.

Jason Calacanis has a different theory, that News will do an exclusive deal with Microsoft’s Bing.

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazines?

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”

Which might work if News Corporation were the only supplier of general news. Which it isn’t. And which point I make in my Crikey piece.

Media140: How I’ll be responding

07 November 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Whew! Media140 Sydney was exhausting and several kinds of wonderful despite some irritation. Many thanks to Julie Posetti and Ande Gregson and Sarah Allen and everyone else.

Oh, a thousand loose ends to tie up! How will I respond?

I’ll make only a superficial pass through everything today, ‘cos I have other commitments. Mostly that’ll be reviewing all the open tabs in my web browser and quickly reviewing my messages on Twitter and adding things to my to-do list for later.
As I do that, I’ll link to everything I find. You can follow that on my Delicious links tagged “media140″. I’ll also post the more significant notes on my Twitter stream.
While I’m doing that, I may post quick drive-by comments on other people’s blogs, but mostly I’ll leave them for a couple of days.
I’ll also be compiling notes for follow-up posts. One will expand upon my own presentation, which is already getting interesting comments. Others will reflect upon other people’s presentations and the various discussions.

If you want me to expand upon any specific issues raised at the conference, please let me know in the comments.

Further process notes will be added as I go along, in the comments to this post. Or not. It’s going to be one of those days…

Links for 02 November 2009 through 05 November 2009

07 November 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 02 November 2009 through 05 November 2009:

ABC iView Downloader | Whirlpool Forums: Tools and tips for downloading the Flash videos from ABC TV’s iView and SBS Australia. Handy if you don’t have the bandwidth for live streaming, and for timeshifting beyond the limited time ABC and SBS offer.
85 wordpress plugins for blogging journalists | Online Journalism Blog: Not a bad list for trimming down the number of choices out there.
Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Wired: A good summary of Twitter’s history and potential for the future — especially if it’s still new to you.
What price the pace of modern life? | guardian.co.uk: Michael White describes his 14-hour day as a journalist, comparing it with the equally-busy if not even busier politicians, and wondered whether this pace is the right thing.

Media140: What do journos do better, exactly?

05 November 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 18 comments

[This is my presentation for the Media140 Sydney panel "Do Journos Do it Better? Journalists in SocMedia Communities". This is being posted here automatically, at 5pm, just as the panel is scheduled to start. Given that sessions earlier in the day may cover similar ground, I may well re-word things as I go.]

“Do journos do it better?” Do journos do what better? I think this is actually the more interesting question: What is it that journalists actually do in our society?

Or, to stick with the question, what do they do in “social media communities” — although as I’ll explain, all communities are “social media communities”?

Now if I were presenting an Oscar I’d start by quoting the dictionary. “The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘journalist’ as ‘someone engaged in journalism’.”

Very helpful.

However “journalism” in turn is glossed as “the occupation of writing for, editing, and producing newspapers and other periodicals, and television and radio shows”.

So the question as stated is meaningless. Of course journalists are better at “It” — journalism — because they’re the ones doing it. If you’re not a journalist you’re not doing journalism, therefore you’re not merely bad at it, you’re not even doing it at all!

This is why I think the whole bloggers versus journalists debate was and still is so incredibly stupid. Both sets of people are doing much the same thing — creating words and pictures, probably about current events, maybe for money, maybe for the love of it or for professional status. Maybe they’re doing it well, maybe they’re doing it badly.

But during the Industrial Age, journalism with a capital “J” ended up meaning, specifically, the employees of industrial mass-media factories — especially newspapers. Employees whose jobs were to create the specific widgets of news needed by a production line — a five-paragraph story, a 30-second radio news item or whatever.

Or, with respect to my friends at the MEAA, “journalist” meant membership of a certain trade union.

Now, coming back to that word “social” in “social media”…

Read the rest of this entry »

Media140 starts tomorrow, and it’s streamed

04 November 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 4 comments

I’ll be at the Media140 Sydney conference all day Thursday and Friday. If you’re not going, you can still watch everything on the live stream.

I’m taking part in a panel starting at 5pm Thursday, Sydney time: Do Journos Do it Better? Journalists in SocMedia Communities. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m hoping this moves beyond the stale “bloggers vs journalists” (non-)debate.

My fellow panellists are freelance journalist, columnist and blogger Mia Freedman; new media consultant and recovering journalist Bronwen Clune; Valerio Veo, who heads up online news and current affairs at SBS; social media consultant Laurel Papworth; and late addition Dr Lawrie Zion from La Trobe University.

The moderator is Julian Morrow, co-founder of The Chaser, so I suspect they’re looking for a lighter, end-of-day discussion — particularly as there’s a more serious-looking panel earlier in the day called Social Media: Death or Salvation of Professional Journalism?

(I’m not sure why it can’t be both, death and transformation, but still… every headline has to be a binary opposite to turn it into winners and losers. Sigh.)

My own 5-minute rant is summarised in this tweet:

Who cares if journos do It better if It is outdated and no-one wants It? Whatever “It” is. Journalism ain’t newspapers, radio or TV.

Yes, it’s quite deliberate that “It” is capitalised.

The Twitter hashtag is #media140, and I daresay I’ll be posting snippets as it all unfolds. Stay, as they say, tuned.

Are clueless politicians holding back IT?

04 November 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Politicians are notoriously clueless when it comes to technology. Indeed, a Parliament House staffer once told me that it’s impossible to overstate their level of ignorance. But isn’t it time they caught up with the rest of us?

Last year I wrote about this in the business context, “I don’t understand computers” is not an excuse.

If you own or manage a business that handles information (and which business doesn’t?) then you must understand computers and the Internet. If you don’t, you’re incompetent. Yes, that’s right, you heard me. Incompetent…

In short, you don’t need to know the technology itself, but you do need to know its implications for your business.

Australia’s had a Goods and Services Tax since 2000. If you waved your hand and said, “Oh, I don’t understand GST,” your shareholders would have every right to sack you for incompetence.

Yesterday I wrote about this in the political context for ZDNet.com.au, Are clueless politicians holding IT back?, and as in my business-focussed piece I suggested a checklist for what I reckon they should know.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh? Or am I right in using the word “incompetent” here?

Town Hall Hotel Furry Alert!

01 November 2009 in Enmore, Human Nature by Stilgherrian | 17 comments

Photograph of young man with long grey fake-fur tail

Look, I know it was Halloween yesterday, but it’s no excuse.

The Snarky Platypus and I were intending to enjoy a quiet drink at one of our local hostelries when we were confronted with the sight of a young man sporting a long — nay, very long — fake fur tail. In public.

In daylight!

This, Young Man, is the Town Hall Hotel! A reputable establishment. We do not need your bizarre sexual proclivities to be displayed so prominently. We do not need your bizarre sexual proclivities to be displayed at all.

Look, I’m pretty broad-minded, and generally I’m OK if you stay within the order Mammalia. But fake fur? Really?

Just where do you draw the line?

Byteside Tech: the Dark Side

01 November 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Byteside logo

Tuesday night I was on the panel for Byteside Tech episode 4, this time discussing the dark side of the Internet where the hackers and criminals lurk.

The other panellists were David Peterson from Trend Micro; David Hollingworth, editor of Atomic; journalist Stephen Fenech from the Daily Telegraph; and host Seamus Byrne. And here’s the video.

Once more, we seem to be remarkably enthusiastic. What is it about this event?

If the embedded video doesn’t work for you, click through.

One thing I find interesting about this subject is that so much of it is brand new even for people with an in-depth knowledge of their own field of IT. Does this mean that security issues simply don’t get the coverage they deserve?

Links for 22 October 2009 through 27 October 2009

01 November 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | 2 comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 October 2009 through 27 October 2009, published after far too long a break. I really, really do need to work out a better way of doing this…

Nature Child | San Juan Islander: “According to family studies professor, Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, there was a 50% decline between 1997 to 2003 in the proportion of children 9 to 12 who spent time in outdoor activities (hiking, walking, fishing, beach play and gardening).”
FreeRangeKids: “At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.”
How far did you roam as a child? | Watershed: Educator John Larkin continues the thoughts about wrapping our kids in cotton wool.
How children lost the right to roam in four generations | Mail Online: In 1919, an 8yo was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing. Today, an 8yo isn’t allowed past the end of the street without parental escort. This article from 2007 triggered many thoughts, and I’ve glad I found it again.
Forget the young pretenders, Humans 1.0 can lead the way | The Observer: John Naughton riffs off the idea that teenagers don’t know everything and some parts of cyberspace (ugh!) are teenager-free. Although the article then says that “only” 11% of Twitter’s users are under 17 years old. And what proportion of the literate population is under 17yo? 11%? More? Less?
Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009) | Hivelogic: A nice guide to the tools needed to podcast on a budget. Yes, there’s a reason I’m looking at this. Stay tuned, as they say.
Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network | Parliament of Australia: Full transcripts of the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network public hearings, which I’m tagging for my own reference later.
What Information is “Personally Identifiable”? | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Gender, ZIP code and birth date are enough to uniquely identify about 87% of the US population. This has massive implications for publishing data sets, and for privacy policies that claim not to collect “personally identifiable” information.
Nine News twittered by seagull | TV Tonight: It’s nothing to do with Twitter, but there is a seagull. A very big seagull.
Apology for singing shop worker | BBC News: Shop assistant Sandra Burt, 56, from Clackmannanshire, was threatened with a fine for singing without a license by the Performing Right Society. However they’ve now apologised and sent flowers.
Online Ads Not Working for You? Blame the Creative | Advertising Age: A study by Dynamic Logic says that obsession about optimisation and placement is less important.
We can’t turn back the tide of internet piracy, says TV boss | Herald Scotland: “Internet piracy is merely demand where appropriate supply does not exist,” says the commissioning editor for education at the UK’s Channel 4.
Court tweets sustained but paper still lurks | ZDNet Australia: Liam Tung, who tweeted from the AFACT v iiNet trial in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney, reflects on the gaps in courtroom IT.
Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era | NPR: Yet another exploration of ethics an journalism. One point in here I really do not like, though: “You must not advocate for political or other polarizing issues online. This extends to joining online groups or using social media in any form (including your Facebook page or a personal blog) to express personal views on a political or other controversial issue that you could not write for the air or post on NPR.org.” Sorry? Work for NPR and you lose your right to participate in democracy?
Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: Another fine if perhaps rambling essay from Mr Fry about the meaning of “influence” and accidentally gaining same. Worth a leisurely read.
Why journalism's all a-Twitter | The Walkley Foundation: The editorial chief of Sydney’s forthcoming Media140 conference goes beyond the obvious “Is Twitter journalism?” and mechanical how-to issues and explores the ethical issues of journalists using Twitter.
Twitter in the court: Federal judge gets it | CNET News: Another article about using Twitter in courtrooms, from the US an from March 2009.
Call For Opinions | Blackbeard Blog: Tom Ewing’s collection of opinions on market research and social media, “quite unsupported by anything other than grumpiness and prejudice”. The first is that “insights” aren’t Zen koans. “If you can express something that briefly, it’s probably banal.”
The internet doesn’t exist | Business Spectator: Ah, Alan Kohler! I do so love your commentaries! Here’s more of his sensible thoughts on the matter of paying for “content” on the Internet.
How Safe is the HPV vaccine? | Information Is Beautiful: A brilliantly simple infographic showing the incredibly low risk of associated with the Human Papillomavirus compared with various everyday activities.
Ultimate Goat Fansite: Do I need to explain? I thought not.