Category: Marketing

Posted on

Your career as a “Timeline of Understanding”

My good friend and colleague Zern Liew has updated the website for his business, Eicolab. It’s glorious. And one of the most glorious parts is this visually stunning timeline of his career — presented not as a list of employers and projects, but as a record of his evolving professional thoughts.

Career timeline of Zern Liew (thumbnail version)

If you click through to the full-size graphic, you’ll see how it begins in 1998 with observations like “Flash is bad” and variations on “Appropriate technology” through to current observations like “markets are conversations” and “business is personal” — things I happen to agree on.

What would your career look like in this format? What were the observations, tools and guiding principles which shaped your career path?

Posted on

Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, Day 1

[Update 30 January 2008: More analysis of this has been posted since this article was written. Look for items tagged “heath ledger”.]

Screen grab of Google AdWords advertisement: Heath Ledger jokes. Only just dead, but the tacky jokes have begun. Outrageous! stilgherrian.com

Just 24 hours ago, actor Heath Ledger died. Before most people even knew he was dead, I’d set up a web page asking for jokes about his death and I placed an advertisement (pictured) on Google. Tasteless. But there was a porpoise. This was Science!

Here’s what I’ve learned so far. If you have any questions as you read this, please ask them. I’ll be exploring the data more deeply over the next few days.

Continue reading “Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, Day 1”

Posted on

Quick! Call the shredders, stat!

Photograph of truck for mobile shredding service, with amber flashing lights!

Nothing wrong with shredders. Nothing wrong with having a shredder in a truck to come visit if you’ve got plenty to shred. But a truck with orange emergency-vehicle lights on top?

I guess it’d come in handy if the race was on. Who’ll get to your office first? The emergency shredder? Or the federal police with a search warrant?

Photographed on Stanmore Road, Enmore, in Sydney the other day. The Volvo is innocent.

Posted on

Sensis lawyers bully small fry over Yellow Pages trademark

Section of screenshot of Yellow Pages website taken today

Sensis, the Telstra subsidiary that owns things like the Yellow Pages and Trading Post, has kicked off a legal attack on small websites for “trademark infringement”. Why? Because they haven’t got an ® after every mention of “Yellow Pages”.

Apart from the daftness of attacking little fish, which only makes your company look like a bully, you’ve got to wonder why they’re doing it.

  1. They’re re-branding as “Yellow” anyway. yellowpages.com.au identifies itself as “yellow.com.au”, and their new logo just says “Yellow”. Here’s a screenshot of their site as of a few minutes ago.
  2. There doesn’t seem to be any actual trademark infringement. At least not by my reading of some material I’ll mention shortly.

I found out about this yesterday when Professor Roger Clarke posted to the Link mailing list. I’ve become more and more astounded at the stupidity of it all as I’ve read people’s comments…

Continue reading “Sensis lawyers bully small fry over Yellow Pages trademark”

Posted on

It’s an organic… what?

Photograph of sign advertising Organic Root Stimulator

Maybe it’s just because I’m an Australian of A Certain Age, but I find this sign in an African grocery shop on Enmore Road rather funny. The fact that it’s “organic” is even better.

Posted on

My new hero: Hideki Moronuki

[Update 15 July 2010: There is identity confusion in this post. See my update.]

Photograph of Hideki Moronuki

Hideki Moronuki Minoru Morimoto (pictured) is the Japanese Fisheries Agency’s chief of whaling. While I’m reasonably sure I’m not in favour of whaling, and certainly not if people are fibbing about its true purpose, you’ve got to admire his ballsy, direct language.

In a lengthy opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald last Monday, Moronuki Morimoto defends Japan’s “scientific whaling” with the observation that to commercially manage forests, fisheries and other “natural living resources” but not whales makes no sense. He dismisses as a “fallacy” that there must be one commercial activity (whale watching) to the exclusion of the other (whaling).

There are enough whales for both those that want to watch them and those who want to eat them.

I fully respect the right of Australians to oppose whaling for some “cuddly” reasons, but this does not give them the right to coerce others to end a perfectly legal and culturally significant activity that poses no threat to the species concerned.

And on Wednesday, with two of Sea Shepherd‘s unruly wankers aboard his ship, he said the pair would be given an opportunity to try whale meat while aboard the ship.

Hat-tip on that last quote to The Road to Surfdom.