Stuffola

June 07, 2006

Toilet Pros

"World Toilet Organization has started World Toilet College because there was a need for an independent world body to ensure that the best standards in Toilet Design, Cleanliness, Maintenance, Quality of Work and Sanitation Technologies are kept."

Who could argue with that?

"WTC is a dedicated institution that offers training programs such as Restroom Design Course, Restroom Specialist Training Course and Ecological Sanitation Course.

"The Restroom Specialist Training Course is intended to redesign the restroom cleaner's tasks and bring it to a new professional level. The Ecological Sanitation Course is the first of many that will train much needed sanitation human resource to help alleviate the 2.6 billion people worldwide that do not have a toilet. Lastly, the Restroom Design will teach the finer points of designing a public restroom for those responsible."

Not ready to enroll in the World Toilet College? Be of good cheer. You can always attend September's World Toilet Expo in Moscow or the second World Toilet Expo & Forum in Bangkok between November 16 and 18.

The "Happy Toilet, Healthy Life"-themed event is practically guaranteed to offer "a stimulating platform for networking, sharing of ideas, and sourcing solutions and innovations for the improvement of toilets and hygiene standards." Don't miss the technical tour of Bangkok's toilet hotspots.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2006

Pampered Pooches

"Based in Hollywood, [Rockin' Rodeo] caters to celebrity clients - Parker Posey has stopped by with her pooch, Drew Barrymore has browsed, Sharon Stone is a fan, etc. - along with oodles of poodles and pugs and pomeranians and their people, stylish persons who'll probably never bump into some secret Bloomingdales twin.

" 'We find or create truly unique pieces. So whether it's a concert T-shirt, cowboy boots, or a dog collar, each item is really a reflection of that individual or pet wearing that treasure," says Fauser. 'Our clients are people who want the exclusive, one-of-a-kind items that we find in vintage wear. And they certainly don't want anything less for their pet.'

"Fauser and Rockin' Rodeo co-owner Mary Ossanna would know: they've puppy loves of their own-Coco, Lucy, and Prada-who keep casually outfitted in custom collars made of antique leather. Like the finely aged leather belts, boots, and bags offered to Rockin' Rodeo's two-legged customers, the dog collars and leashes (priced between $80-450) can be further personalized with antique studding."

You can read more but doesn't the idea of personalized vintage collars with antique studding pretty much tell you everything you need to know about Los Angeles, pet owners, the innate lust for stuff humans are cursed with, plus late-stage capitalism in the United States?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2006

Pitching the Press: LG Mobile Phones Edition

Recently a PR practioner mailed me (and presumably many others) the following pitch. Is it good? Is it bad? Weigh in with your own critique.

"Once again, LG Mobile Phones is at the forefront of innovation in marketing efforts and initiatives. In particular, LG has entered two realms of marketing opportunity previously left untapped by mobile phone manufacturers.

"By aligning with superstar music producer Jermaine Dupri and Grammy nominated recording artist Mariah Carey, and developing 'LG Presents the Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri Post Grammy Celebration,' LG phones is intertwined with the entertainment industry on a level never before seen, with both performers and entertainment media.

"With their sponsorship of Cirque de Soleil's 'Delirium' tour, LG will have an intimate presence with the upwardly mobile, young professional audience that Cirque de Soleil performances tend to attract. These marketing initiatives have to potential to greatly expand LG's presence in key (and hard to reach) celebrity, young male and female demographics.

" 'LG Presents the Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri Post Grammy Celebration' was the hottest post-Grammy event in Hollywood. This exclusive event was attended by high-profile entertainers including Britney Spears, Anthony Keidis, Mischa Barton, Cedric the Entertainer, Carmen Electra and many more.

"All of these celebrities received their invitation on a video message featuring Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri, which was pre-loaded on a 'V' and sent to each individual. This opportunity offered LG the chance to supply product to the entertainment industry's most key influencers, with custom phones having been gifted to the two celebrity hosts (hi-res images of these one-of-a-kind 'V's by LG and the phone invitation are available upon request) in addition to the unique invitation.

"Another unique partnership that LG has forged during this process is with Red Engine Jeans, who have created a very tasteful co-branded jean that was included in the celebrity gift bags (images available.) Furthermore, LG's presence at this event--along with their entertainment devices like the 'V'--will give them exposure from entertainment media outlets that traditionally do not cover consumer products.

"Cirque de Soleil has long been one of the most surreal and mythical theater experiences available to audiences in North America. By signing on as one of three title sponsors, LG Mobile Phones will have the opportunity to generate greater brand awareness with the aspiring professional adults and sophisticated, affluent audience that attend Cirque performances. This 64 market tour allows LG to promote it's brand in cities and regions that are largely considered afterthoughts by mass marketing campaigns, essentially taking the form of a high-profile grassroots initiative."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

Stockholm Furniture Fair: Bliss on a Stick

I went to my first Stockholm Furniture Fair yesterday. I don't know if all designers are nice or only the ones I've met, but I had a swell time and Apartment Therapy fans would cream their jeans over the nifty items on display.

There are too many cool things to mention in a single posting so today I will limit myself to reporting on a cheeky design duo called Save Our Souls. Johannes Carlström and Magdalena Nilsson, the two young designers behind this spanking new company, found inspiration in last year's global disasters, including Hurricane Katrina.

Yes, it is as weird as it sounds. As the company describes it, “Save Our Souls makes harsh, beautiful furniture with bitter-sweet aesthetic. The pleasant combined with the threatening and dark.” That’s an apt description. Later I’ll post a photo of the two designers against a backdrop of their Gunner wallpaper. It’s a subversively traditional, almost old-fashioned looking wallpaper with a repeating pattern in pink against a background of deep maroon. It takes a while to realize that the repeating image is a revolver. A revolver. I nearly burst out laughing when I got it.

The company showed four products: the wallpaper, a gorgeous black glass table (modeled on an oil spill), heavy, hanging black glass lamps (modeled on—you guessed it-oil drops), and a black bookcase I really love called "Fuckin Far From Ok" that has that phrase built into the shelves. If that's not modern life summed up neatly, what is?

To quote from the company’s statement (which I’ve cleaned up a tiny bit), “The greenhouse-effect is getting more severe every day with storms and hurricanes sweeping our world. The glaciers are melting. We produce. Consume. We buy more stuff than ever before and materialism is a way of life. We believe that almost every cultural worker has a dream of, if not saving the world, at least make it better or more beautiful. It's problematic to want to make new products. In fact very little new stuff is needed.

“What to do? Fold one's hands and pray, like sending out a SOS-signal, hoping for someone to rush out and intervene. Save Our Souls became the working name and we made a series of furniture that comments the world around us. This is not a moralizing sermon, we are just like anyone else, in fact we live happy lives in the industrial world. What we want to do is to use that silence between the catastrophes and remind ourselves. Instead of trying to forget, we put the light on the problems and make a visual experience of it."

Save Our Souls presented its new products in the Greenhouse, a special area of the Stockholm Furniture Fair devoted to new and young designers and design programs from colleges as far away as Tokyo. Few of the products displayed at the Greenhouse are in production, and many of them will remain prototypes. That's the nature of the business. But there was tons worth seeing, and I'll add more examples next week.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2006

Google, Censorship & the Feds

When it comes to the Google flap, my friend Pete Gontier said it best in comments yesterday: "I gave up on 'don't be evil' when Google announced its IPO. Hello, Internet pundits? Google is now obligated by law to be evil, just like any other public company."

But the outcry continues. Execs from Google, Microsoft and Cisco have reportedly declined to speak at today's briefing on freedom of expression and Internet censorship in China before the Congressional Human Rights Cacus. (No word on Yahoo yet.) Can't say I blame them.

The briefing is an excellent opportunity for Amnesty International to spread the word about repressive, sucky Chinese policies and how American companies support them. And it's a fine platform for American representatives to market themselves as upstanding, freedom-loving, censorship-hating policitians who really, really deserve your vote next time around. But it's a no-win PR nightmare for company execs. Since they weren't legally compelled to show, they were smart to pass on the public grilling.

The exercise has piqued my curiosity, though. If Congress is so fired up over freedom of expression and Internet censorship, why stop at China? There's been a raft of expression-trampling behavior and censorship, Internet and otherwise, occuring right here at home.

*NASA's top climate scientist says the federal agency is trying to silence him.

*The New York Times fought OSHA for several years to get information on national injury and illness rates (which the Memory Hole, god bless it, has made public.

*Inconvenient information has a way of disappearing from federal web pages. (That a photo of President Bush and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is no longer available for public purchase and that the president refuses to authorize the release of others is really small potatos, if you ask me.)

Then again, perhaps it's best not to look to Congress for action on Internet censorship.

"The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat" on Wikipedia, according to the Lowell Sun. "The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month."

Since there's such rampant tampering with Internet info in any case, why not turn it to your advantage? There's no Wikipedia entry for Deborah Branscum, for example, but I might warm up to rewriting history online if there was a Wikipedia article that made me seem younger, smarter and blonder than I am. My mom, Robbie Branscum, shaved a few years off her age for an autobiographical entry in a reference book. Guess she was ahead of her time.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

Google, China + Business as Usual

Google's under fire for its decision to follow Chinese law and censor some search results. This isn't news to any technology fan with a pulse. But I've been a little taken aback at the volume of the outcry over Google's new service in China. But then, perhaps it's anything but surprising that the blabosphere gets its knickers in a knot over the intellectual insult of restricted search results and not, say, the broken bodies of the people in China, Mexico, and elsewhere who churn out a big chunk of the goods we buy.

People I respect are among those critical of Google's move, but I don't get it. The company is simply practicing business as usual and, unlike Microsoft or Yahoo, without directly harming any individual Chinese citizen thus far (although, lord knows, that could change in the future).

Google isn't Enron. It's not Halliburton or even Hill & Knowlton. So why the enormous outcry? I think it's so fierce partly because it feels so personal. Journalists and bloggers can't imagine what it's like to sit inside a sweatshop sewing name-brand jeans with bleeding fingers. But we use Google services every day of the week.

And so we gnash our teeth, wax indignant and cite Google's infamous "do no evil" creed in support of our case. But it's beyond naive for an adult to take that language at face value and believe that anyone or anything outside of Google might be allowed to define its meaning. Some people are shocked, shocked that Google is participating in legal commerce. But that's the idea, after all.

On Friday Google's senior policy counsel, Andrew McLaughlin, claimed the company debated the issue for years and ultimately decided that "filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely."

That spin wildly overstates the case. As McLaughlin himself pointed out, Google.com is a bad experience for users in the Republic of China because the service is slow, incomplete and unavailable to users there about 10 percent of the time. Sucky service does not equal "failing to offer Google search at all," however, no matter how far you stretch it. But unlike the new service, Google.com wasn't optimized for Chinese users. Google's China baby will be fast, available and, yes, incomplete. The company decided it was a fair tradeoff.

Critics don't agree and they don't have to, but the company's reasoning makes sense to me. Whether Google can escape additional complicity with a horrific regime remains to be seen. The slippery slope is, after all, damn slippery. In the meantime, there's ample opportunity to be outraged over additional legal business dealings in China and elsewhere, and Google bashers should get a grip. The idea of censored search results will hardly be a surprise to Chinese Web surfers, although it seems as though the company could do a much better job of flagging it.

Google *is* a scary company but not because of its China policy. I don't use Google mail, for example, because I think it's creepy and potentially dangerous for any entity--animal, vegetable or mineral, government or corporation--to have access to all my e-mail, all my contacts, plus details on practically every step I take in cyberspace via cookies that track my IP address during all my Google searches.

It's not much fun to be seen as Darth Vader in the public imagination. But Google execs had best get used to it. Their vast ambitions, coupled with the nearly inevitable arrogance that so often builds within enormously successful companies, virtually guarantee that a Google backlash will continue to build.

It's how the world works. And maybe that's just as well.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 30, 2006

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Tet, Sol-Nal, Losar, etc. to Asian Americans and others who celebrate this festive holiday. According my friends at Chopsticks, Please, "This year’s celebration ushers in the Year of the Dog. Those born under this sign are extremely loyal, honest, and keep secrets really well."

Chopsticks, Please has gorgeous Chinese Zodiac cards for all the Dogs, Hares, Tigers (and Rats) in your life, along with New Year cards and all-occasion cards for Asian Americans and the people who love them. I especially like the adoption cards for adoptive children and new adoptive families.

Am I shilling? Ubetcha. This is a shameless plug for Chopsticks,Please. Buy some cards and spread a little cheer by sending them to your nearest and dearest.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2006

Glenn Fleishman Stalks Corporate Spin

I've long admired Glenn Fleishman for lots of reasons. He's really nice, he's really smart, he writes well (not as common as you might expect, even among professional writers) and he's alarmingly prolific. The freelance journalist, book author and blogger behind seven blogs is soft launching his eighth, about radio and the future of AM and FM right here.

Over at Wi-Fi Net News, Glenn has been covering the struggle to create municipal wireless networks for ages. He recently weighed in on plans (hopes?) to build a 1500-square-mile wireless network across Silicon Valley and highlights the gap between reality and the highly polished talking points parroted by corporate critics of municipal wireless.

“ 'Andrew Johnson, a Comcast Bay Area spokesman,…said companies that have spent billions of dollars to build wired networks shouldn’t be undermined by taxpayer funds focused toward a rival.' "

As Glenn notes, "Interestingly, virtually no municipal RFPs now involve taxpayer funds, but incumbents continue to play from that script. This RFP will involve roughy $40,000 from a few dozen cities."

” ‘The free market should be allowed to play out,’ he said. ‘A municipal subsidy, or a provision of a municipal WiFi network would not be the best use of taxpayer funds.’

"In other words, regardless of the fact that broadband firms have been spreading the notion that high-speed access is critical to individual businesses and entire communities, those communities have no right to ensure that they have what they want if they’re paying for it directly despite massive public subsidies paid to incumbents, which are never mentioned in the same breath as the 'billions' spent."

Exactly. Because if it's good for Comcast, it's good for the nation. Just keep saying it, no matter how bogus. Much of the time, spin wins.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

What Big Ears You Have, Mr. Disney

According to the Wall Street Journal (sub required), "Walt Disney Co. is in serious discussions to buy Pixar Animation Studios after months in which the two animation giants have been exploring ways to continue their lucrative partnership, according to people familiar with the matter.

"In the deal under discussion, Disney would pay a nominal premium to Pixar's current market value of $6.7 billion in a stock transaction that would make Pixar Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs the largest individual shareholder in Disney."

So here's my question: If Jobs becomes, in essence, Mr. Disney, will the Mickey Mouse TV be tweaked to transmit program selection info back to the mother ship? I ask only because Apple was happy to do the same with the latest version of iTunes, at least until privacy fans got their knickers in a knot and the company backtracked. Which was only appropriate.

In any case, I prefer Target's 13-inch Hello Kitty TV/DVD player combo to the Mickey Mouse TV or the Disney Princess model. Even though all three of them are deeply twisted products. They're designed for 6 to 10 year olds. Because little kids need, deserve, and want to own personal TVs in the sick world we live in today, and their parents let them.

And that, dear reader, is even more depressing than Apple's slimy, utimately successful strategy for marketing stuff to us by monitoring the songs we click in iTunes.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2006

Elderly Crooks

Happy Etc. I totally missed last month's crackdown on elderly criminals.

"Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.

"The woman who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts."

And sometimes more. Ms. Neeley, it turns out, was selling weed and methadone, not exactly standard-issue items in most medicine cabinets. But let's not be distracted by this case from the larger lesson: the upbeat in crime among old farts. Since April 2004, a Kentucky anti-drug task force "has charged more than 40 people 60 or older with selling primarily prescription drugs in the mountains."

" 'When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they'll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries,' " is how Floyd County jailer Roger Webb explained the situation to AP reporter Roger Alford.

Not everyone agrees it's about poverty. "Dan Smoot, a former state police drug detective who heads the task force, said the elderly people being charged are not necessarily struggling to put food on the table. 'Most of the elderly we arrest are merely continuing a family tradition,' he said. 'It has been part of their culture for a long time.' " Like poverty, I'm willing to bet. (Link courtesy the Elderly Law Prof Blog.)

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

Bribes R Us, Jewelry Division

"Her failing grade on the licensing test everyone must pass to teach in Massachusetts was a big problem for the aspiring Haverhill teacher. But Department of Education clerk Terrance Yancey Jr. was allegedly ready with a solution." Hmm, a helpful state bureaucrat, what are the odds?

"Yancey, a clerk in the DOE's licensure department, was arrested after an undercover investigation by state police from Attorney General Thomas Reilly's office. Yancey, 36, is accused of taking bribes between $1,500 and $1,700 to provide fraudulent licenses to three other would-be teachers. He was captured after a brief foot chase near his house, authorities said."

I can handle corrupt politicians, pundits and even state bureaucrats. But the story below, my friend, is the last straw.

"The secretive world of diamond dealing has been rocked by a bribery and corruption scandal that has shattered the authority of the Gemological Institute of America, the body responsible for grading and valuing the world’s most precious gemstones," according to the London Times (and any number of other places).

"The GIA, which values almost all diamonds on the market from the giant Hope Diamond to the quarter carats in a pair of earrings, was accused in a lawsuit of issuing false valuation reports for two stones bought for $15 million (£8.5 million) by a member of the Saudi royal family and an associate. After an investigation, the GIA found that at least two clients were paying bribes to four GIA staff members to issue false valuation reports on stones worth millions of dollars."

Good thing I chose pearls. The ad claims a diamond is forever, but a diamond valuation? Better not to ask.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:45 PM | Comments (1)

Conservative Punditry Pays (As Usual)

"As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants - all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.

"Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.

"Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts with lush fairways; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two."

It's entertaining to read embittered AP writers carp about Tom DeLay's lavish lifestyle but it shouldn't come as a shock. Rulers are supposed to exist on a higher plane than the mere mortals who elect and support them. That's one of the reasons Time magazine was so relieved to see the last of Jimmy Carter's cardigan and embrace Ronald Reagan's imperial presidency. It was a long time ago and my memory may be going but I vividly recall reading an exceptionally gushing article about Reagan's stylish inauguration. The subtext was obvious: Washington breathes sigh of relief as low-rent peanut farmer and spouse slink home, replaced by classy, more appropriate power couple.

So Mr. DeLay represents business as usual, allbeit cranked up a notch or two compared to some of his peers. Apparently paying columnists--at least, conservative ones--is business as usual, too. Even more than I realized.

"A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service, told BusinessWeek Online that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s."

How'd I miss that gravy train? Nobody offered me a bonus for my columns at Fortune.com or FamilyPC. Damn, I should have interned with the National Review instead of Mother Jones in college.

" 'It was a lapse of judgment on my part, and I take full responsibility for it,' Bandow said from a California hospital, where he's recovering from recent knee surgery." One is tempted to hope the surgery came after a kneecapping by indignant members of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Or Jon Carroll even. But that seems unlikely. As Dave Barry once noted, working journalists tend to have poor do-it-yourself skills.

"Bandow isn't the only think-tanker to have received payments from Abramoff for writing articles. Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist's clients. 'I do that all the time,' Ferrara says. 'I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future.'

"Ferrara, who has been an influential conservative voice on Social Security reform, among other issues, says he doesn't see a conflict of interest in taking undisclosed money to write op-ed pieces because his columns never violated his ideological principles."

You know the punchline: That's because he doesn't have any.

"Ferrara's boss has a very different take on the Abramoff op-ed writing than did his peers at Cato. 'If somebody pinned me down and said, Do you think this is wrong or unethical? I'd say no,' says Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Giovanetti says critics are applying a 'naive purity standard' to the op-ed business. 'I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.' "

I'm beginning to get that sense myself. I'm lovin' the logic here. Other people do it, so it's okay. I'd write it anyway, so it's okay. I truly believe it, so it's okay.

If these payments are on the up and up, then why weren't they public knowledge to begin with? Why were there no disclosure statements so the poor saps who read the columns and watch these guys preen during TV appearances and listen to their self-important utterances over the radio know exactly where the pundits get their paychecks?

And if payments on the side are such a fine practice, if they are simply rewards for doing what the pundits would be doing in any case, then why aren't other people getting them? Why aren't you getting a little extra from those nice lobbyists for the good job you did last month? Why isn't the grocery clerk getting a little extra for her great bagging skills? Or your doctor? (Oh, right. Maybe she is getting a little something extra, although not from Abramoff.)

There's a term of art for people like Bandow, Ferrara and Giovanetti but sleaze doesn't entirely do them justice. These folks aren't journalists or editors but they play them on TV. As a result, their slimy dealings taint actual journalists and editors. Which sucks for a lot of reasons, including the fact that we're plenty capable of screwing up on our own. So guys, give it a rest.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:03 PM | Comments (1)

December 16, 2005

Strictly Optional: Chewing Gum Edition

Words of wisdom. "Success is like gum. It is fine till it's in your mouth but if you swallow it, it'll lead to indigestion."

Guess what crime you commit if you're a 34-year-old Australian twin suffering from anorexia? "Earlier this year, Clare received a two-month jail term for stealing chewing gum, a soft drink and a blender."

Too much information. "Cheryl Ankrom had set aside a minimum of one week for hospital recovery after her colon resection last August. Thanks to chewing gum, though, she headed home after four days. 'My intestines started working almost immediately,' says Ankrom."

Up next: pomegranate-flavored sausage, no kidding. "Ford Gum & Machine Co., Inc. of Lincolnshire, IL recently introduced Pomegranate Power Sugar Free Chewing Gum, a pomegranate and wild blueberry flavored gum made with natural pomegranate extract."

Americans gum up the works. "The Irish Business Against Litter group is seeking Government action to tackle the problem of chewing gum on Ireland's streets. ...The Government had planned a number of years ago to introduce a plastic-bag-style levy on chewing gum in an effort to combat the problem, but it abandoned the move following lobbying from US Ambassador James Kenny on behalf of the Wrigleys corporation."

In news beyond gum-chewing circles, it appears that Google has a worthy rival at last. From today's New York Times: "President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States..."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

The Ghostwriter in the Machine

"Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that a 2000 article it published highlighting the advantages of Merck & Co.'s Vioxx painkiller omitted information about heart attacks among patients taking the drug. The journal has said the deletions were made by someone working from a Merck computer. Merck says the heart attacks happened after the study's cutoff date and it did nothing wrong." Merck should have tried a more fashionable excuse and claimed, say, that a company editor mistook the study for a Wikkipedia entry.

Merck's not the only one suffering. Poor Michael Anello. Tuesday's front-page story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) probably didn't much help his freelance writing career. "Ghost Story" leads by describing a 2001 article in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases that was ostensibly written by one Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Why then was it included as one of Anello's writing samples on his business web site? Because he wrote it. Most of it, anyway. The pharma companies have plenty of spinmeisters on hand for the pesky press but Anello is a solo practioner. Imagine picking up the phone and having a WSJ reporter on the other end. Yikes!

Anna Wilde Mathews writes about ghostwriters as the "open secret" of medical publishing. "Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the bylines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats."

A handy chart illustrates how pharmaceutical companies fund medical researchers to study their products, then hire medical marketing and communication companies to oversee the production of articles based on those studies and bearing the name of those researchers as primary author even though, in some cases, they may not have added so much as a comma. (The comma example is mine, based on a conversation I had with a friend in the industry.) Talk about your closed system: it's sheer genius at work and the WSJ has excerpts from various documents to prove it.

The bad PR about Merck and the New England Journal of Medicine is probably just a brief hiccip for this smoothly humming marketing machine. As Wilde Mathews points out, ghostwriters help scientists (it's easier to author lots of articles if you don't have to actually write them all), journal editors (it's easier to edit clear, professionally written articles than amateur prose) and the pharmaceutical companies that underwrite them. You can bet pharma cos pay for approved marketing messages and approved marketing messages only, no matter what the companies claim publicly. I mean, would you pay to be trashed in print, even if the damaging facts were true?

Me neither.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2005

Occupation: Gumbuster

"Britain has a gum-control problem. Look down at any well-trodden pavement and you'll see thousands of white and grey discs flattened across the stone. Each marks the scene of a crime, the moment when a gobbet's minty charm wore off for one idle chewer, who then decided that they couldn't be bothered to wrap it up or wait for a bin and just spat it out where they stood.

"This would be just a minor nuisance - unimportant, even - were it not happening on such a vast scale. It is estimated that three quarters of the British population chew gum regularly. They buy 980m packs a year, and spit out more than 3.5bn pieces - most of which they dispose of 'inappropriately'. The result is millions of little blots on the country's urban landscape, mapping out quite clearly the population densities on each street: great stripes of spots wait outside railway stations, tacky penumbras gather round bus stops, not to mention the hidden horrors of the bus seat and the handrail."

Despite the one-they disagreement, I'm in love with The Guardian's Leo Benedictus. He had me at "gobbet's minty charm." The piece is packed with unexpected statistics and hands-on reporting. Read it.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

Foreskin Follies

How did I live so very long without Strange New Products? Thanks to Steve Johnson I'm now hip to "SenSlip," a new product "being marketed as 'the world's first ever artificial retractable foreskin for circumcised men.' " No, I don't get it either but Steve says a (presumably educational) video is available on the maker's web site.

Yuck.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:30 PM | Comments (1)

December 12, 2005

Wiki Author Apologizes, Would the Tabloids?

The guy who posted "false and scandalous entries" about a journalist on Wikkipedia as a joke has not only apologized for his unfortunate behavior but also resigned from his job. This is part of the scandalous entry, now excised from Wikkipedia: "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."

There's more, all of it nonsense, about the journalist's move to the Soviet Union, starting a PR firm (no, that wasn't the scandalous part), and other phony tidbits. Seigenthaler was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant and one of the pallbearers at Kennedy's funeral so the 78-year-old was angry and horrified to discover that the lies in Wikkipedia had spread to Answers.com and Reference.com. It didn't make him any happier to discover that it might be impossible, without a lawsuit, to discover the hoaxster's identity.

The responsible party came clean without any prodding by a lawsuit and appears to be a stand-up guy in several ways. "Brian Chase, 38, a manager at a small delivery service in Nashville, presented a letter of apology Friday explaining his role to the journalist, John Seigenthaler, a former editor of Nashville's Tennessean and a founder of the First Amendment Center there," notes the piece in USA Today. "Seigenthaler urged Chase's boss, James White, not to accept his resignation."

Here's the baffling part: Brian Chase voluntarily identified himself as the author, apologized in writing, then resigned from his job over this incident, which appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with his employment. Zip. Nada. Noll. Meanwhile, media professionals (let's not call them journalists) over at the National Enquirer made hay on Friday over the alledged overdose and collapse of Michael Jackson, everybody's favorite future dead celeb. I know about this only because my kid voraciously reads the lurid front pages of the Swedish tabloids every chance she gets. On Saturday, as we stood in line to pay for our groceries at a local market, she kept darting away to read a little more from the Expressen's front page, which featured a huge pic of Jackson and a screaming headline: "Michael Jackson Found Lifeless After Overdose." (Here's the web version.)

Because I only saw the headline, I thought Jackson was a goner. Later, when I read the piece online, it claimed that the guy was basically in the hospital fighting for his life, "according to several American media" (my translation) but not, as it happens, Wikkipedia. I kept reading, and discovered that "several" apparently meant two: the National Enquirer and the Drudge Report. Now anybody who pays attention knows that Matt Drudge mostly links to celebrity news and does not usually constitute a source in his own right. (Sometimes he breaks a story but rarely and he's not regarded in the industry as the most reliable source.) In this case it's very clear that Drudge linked to the National Enquirer's report, which promptly got yanked. Traces of the story remain but I can't locate even a Google cache of the original. It wasn't hard to find a story disputing the claim.

Jackson is one sad, scary, messed-up guy. I wouldn't want him in my house or near my neighborhood. But his character is not the issue when it comes to accurate reporting. Jackson's spokesperson has denied the overdose report. That hardly resolves the issue. No offense intended to Jackson's mouthpiece but it's not unknown for press handlers to misspeak on occasion. If the National Enquirer's report turned out to be bogus, I wonder what would happen. Would the upstanding media professionals at the Enquirer and Expressen demonstrate as much honor as Brian Chase, media amateur, by apologizing and then resigning?

I think we both know the answer. Not a chance.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

Strictly Optional

"The Integra Total Facial System is an invention which would not look out of place in The Jetsons, the animated portrayal of domesticity in an interplanetary age. It is Mr Campbell's hope that within a year men and women across the country will sit with it in the evenings pressing two prongs against their faces. These emit micro-currents of electricity which exercise muscles beneath the skin and slow the ageing process." Of course they do. Clearly Mr. Campbell's spent a fair amount of time with something pressed up against his brain.

"It took nearly running over a young girl on a pony one night for Lee Annie Kelly to act on an idea she'd had for quite some time: headlights for horses." Fine but where's the beverage holder?

"Mobile Assets Corp. announced today at the conclusion of its annual strategy review that it will continue its primary commitment to developing predictive intelligence applications and add a new complementary technology initiative that may revolutionize the mobile communications industry." No word yet on the company's commitment to developing intelligent PR applications.

Last but certainly not least, "ExxonMobil has introduced a new line of proprietary gourmet breakfast sandwiches at its 680-plus On the Run(R) convenience stores in the U.S. ... The sandwiches are made with a premium mild white-cheddar cheese; an extra-thick smoky bacon round; a higher-profile egg; and a premium sausage patty that has a flavor unique to the On the Run Cafe brand." I find it *so* easy to believe that ExxonMobil's sausage patties have a unique flavor. Don't you?

I didn't find any of these items via Strange New Products but if you're a glutton for punishment--and there's no On The Run store in your neighborhood--it's a great place to find many more items that are strictly optional.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 08:36 PM | Comments (1)

December 06, 2005

Hello, New Job for You

Gentle reader, because I live in Sweden I cannot take advantage of the fabulous job offer below. It was mistakenly sent to me--twice--so I'm sure there are many many openings for smart self-starters longing to start a career in the glamorous field of international shipping. Especially for individuals wanting to acts as hubs for sending mysterious packages from unknown persons to other strangers who may be using stolen credit card numbers to buy lovely consumer goods for themselves and their loved ones. So good luck with your application (below) to rue, er, RuAmerica Trade Company.

Date:Mon, 5 Dec 2005 6:50:54pm
From:hansiain catherin
To: Deborah Branscum
Subject: Hello, new job for you

Hello

My name is Mark Birman I'm job manager in RuAmerica corporation.
We're searching for new partnerships in continental USA.

Let me say few words about our company.
We're working for several years worldwide, providing the best
service in Shipping and Transporting. We work with European
countries for 4 years. Our partners are USPS, FedEx, DHL, Ebay, Amazon and many
other shipping companies and shops. We're providing financial services too.

Let me say about the position we offer.
It is called Correspondence Assistant/Representative. It is new
position for us, and it is very valuable now. In August 2003, many
European countries changes their rules for customs and taxes for
merchandise, sent from countries, that don't belong to EU. This
means, that package that is sent from a company - will be a subject
for VAT in Europe, but the package that is sent from a person -
doesn't have VAT. Because of that, prices for shipping services
grow, and we try to reduce them. And we need YOU.

Your task - to receive packages that will be delivered to you, and
redirect them, following our instructions.
Packages will be delivered by courriers to your location.
Then you will be given money for shipping fees.
Your fee is 35 USD per package you receive.
No start up fees! No out of pocket fees! Nothing to pay!

IMPORTANT. We put names of our customers on the packages, so names will be different from yours.

We will inform you about incoming packages. We pay you via PayPal,
wire transfer, Check, Money Order or Western Union. Your
commissions will be paid every two weeks.
We will make agreement which you will sign and return back to us.
In this document all responsibilities and duties will be conrirmed.
If you are interested in this offer, or have more questions
please fill application form.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards, Mark Birman
Tel/Fax : (910) 401-1021

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2005

Spinning Iraq: Immoral, Ineffective or Both?

Why am I not surprised to discover that the U.S. military is paying a contractor to manufacture pro-U.S. articles that Iraqi publications are secretly paid to publish? That's right: Because the administration did virtually the same damn thing here in the United States. As you may recall, the main difference is that the secret beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse here in the U.S. were freelancer (or freelancers, who knows?) and columnists rather than newspapers and radio stations. (Speaking of largesse, The Hill notes that many of the former colleagues of bribe-glutton and ex-Republication Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham "are mulling what to do with tens of thousands of dollars they received in campaign contributions from Cunningham’s co-conspirators." Hey, life's a bitch.)

"As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military 'information operations' troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times."

Kudos to LAT reporters Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi for their scoop, although you gotta wonder if it was practically handed to them given one clearly pissed-off anonymous source: " 'Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it,' said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media." He or she must be late to the party. All the reigning rulers plant propaganda.

The lucky contractor churning out what the LAT calls "basically factual" but one-sided news stories is the Lincoln Group. The unsurprisingly closed-mouth company "won a $100 million contract with the Special Operations Command to assist with psychological operations," according to GovExec.com, which covers the Lincoln Group's sketchy history and the founder's Republican ties. (You just know the author got carpel tunnel trying to google the company into submission.) The 30-something founder, it turns out, has a Silicon Valley connection. Hey Dan Gillmor, know anything about Christian Bailey? He apparently moved to SF in the late 1990s, started an e-commerce company called Express Action in 1999, sold it, and moved on to better and clearly bigger things.

There are a couple of amusing items in the LAT piece.

"The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media ... comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled 'The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.' Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations."

Even though many of them are enormous profit-making enterprises, standards must vary widely among U.S. newspapers as well. How else to explain this nifty new reward program? (In the U.S., government propaganda is bad, while corporate propaganda is simply business as usual.) Then there's the following quote, which made me chuckle.

"Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, said that he did not believe that planting stories in Iraqi media was wrong. But he questioned whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the insurgency. 'I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it,' he said. 'I just question whether it's effective.' "

That is the question that has always haunted the people who pay PR practioners, covert or not. But that's not an issue for the Lincoln Group. The client is always right, and the Lincoln Group has 100 million reasons not to question the project. As it happens, I have a real flair for news headlines, especially in Arabic. Just holler, Chris, if you need another freelancer.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

Snow Falling on Tech Dreams & Harried Parents

"What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work." Be balanced is the tenth rule of Evan Williams' rules for executives of Web startups. Finding balance, or at least trying to allow employees to find it, is excellent advice for all Silicon Valley companies, web-related or not. Over many years the Valley work ethic and the cell/pager mentality of constant access has dramatically transformed home life for many residents and not for the better.

"As information technology allows households and communities to become places of production, it also changes the way such social institutions think of themselves. Families and communities, like upgraded software can be 'refreshed' or 'reinvented.' Families can then become a kind of product. Finally, the pivotal assumption that work is done at a workplace and family life is lived at home is much too simplistic. Many forces, not the least of which is the technical ability to work from home, have blurred the domains. If time at the workplace does not really reflect the time spent working, how does that effect family leaves or the length of a work week?"

That's a rhetorical question from one of the anthropologists at the Silicon Valley Cultures Project. Dr. J.A. English-Lueck knows exactly what that does to the length of a work week and offers examples:

"John is a middle-aged product development manager at a high tech company in Silicon Valley. ... He tries very hard not to take too much work home with him, preferring to work late on site, but the international nature of his work means he is on the phone at midnight and at dawn. He is grateful for E-mail and voicemail since they can fit his schedule. Realistically, he thinks about work problems constantly, in his garden, and in his car. He talks about his work all the time with his wife and volunteers to install network servers at his daughter’s school on NetDay.

"Meanwhile, his administrative assistant, Sharon, complains that her work load is overwhelming, even to the point where she is expected to move furniture and take out trash. She is expected to learn new programs and upgrades on her own time. Both John and Sharon now take work and worry home. Sharon checks her E-mail and voicemail in the predawn hours before her children wake to prepare for any tasks that may need to be addressed immediately. She carries a pager and a cell phone so that she can stay in contact with her teenaged children after they come home from school."

The modern work grind is no news to most people but that doesn't make the challenge of balancing work and family life any less real or important. I haven't read Po Bronson's new book, Why Do I Love These People, but I'm always interested in the drama of families: what brings them together and what pulls them apart. When it comes to family life, is balance even possible?

I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure I ever will. I can say that Sweden seems like a more promising venue to create a more balanced family life. Which does not mean the three members of my family hew to a party line on, well, anything. The snow has returned. My kid, ever gracious, muttered "I hate snow" and rolled back into the bedcovers when I delivered the news this morning. But I was happy then and I'm happy now. The grim winter lanscape has become a paradise of white and black line art punctuated by occasional flashes of color.

There may be something more beautiful than tree branches laced with fresh snow but, offhand, I can't think of what it might be.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2005

More Grillz

Call Ray D. for a custom grill. Check out his dazzling handiwork.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:31 AM | Comments (1)

Marketing: The Dental Connection

Sequestered in Sweden, I miss out on most developments in hip-hop. So the rage for dental jewelry is news to me. Don't miss the slideshow running with a great LA Times article by Chris Lee, who writes:

"Hip-hop has had a well-chronicled love affair with conspicuous consumption. Gold 'rope' necklaces and 'iced out' wristwatches covered in precious stones have become standard issue within the field. And over the years, rap paeans similar to Nelly's 'Grillz' have been devoted to sky pagers, Adidas sneakers, chrome hubcaps and the diamond affluence of 'bling-bling.'

"But according to Bun B, whose grill spells 'Trill,' the title of his recently released album, across six top teeth, dental jewelry is more than simply an assertion of rappers' purchasing power.

" 'Gold teeth have evolved from being just pieces of metal on your tooth,' said the hard-core rapper. 'For some people, it's an expression of who they are: their 'hood, what they represent.... It's marketing, a promotion.' "

An expression of the hood? Yeah, right. But promotion? Ubetcha. This trend didn't make any sense to me until I got to that line. The hip-hop artists profiled in the piece all got their grillz at a place owned by a fellow hip-hop star but you can get something similar from Mr. Bling. I'm rather taken with the $500 fang covers but there are plenty of choices.

I still don't get it. Gold choppers remind me of Jaws, the James Bond villain in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Of course there's no reason this particular trend would speak to me but clearly it has an audience or Mr. Bling would not be in business.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2005

Sony Wounded, Politicians Smell Blood

"Sony insists on its Web site that it has recalled all affected CDs. However, Attorney General’s investigators were able to purchase numerous titles at Austin retail stores as recently as Sunday evening," according to a press release issued by the office of Greg Abbott, Attorney General for the great state of Texas.

Texas is great--it actually has a law against Sony's behavior. Did I not (along with about a billion other people) say it should be illegal? And, as it turns out, it is in that chunk of the country.

"The Attorney General’s lawsuit alleges the New York-based company violated a new Texas law protecting consumers from the hidden spyware. ... 'Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers. Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses and expose the consumer to possible identity crime.' "

Abbott, who is darned photogenic in cyberspace, is probably doing a little happy dance right now. Attorneys eneral, who are politicians, after all, love to defend citizens, or at least appear to, especially when they can do it in highly visible, low-risk ways. (Bet other state officials will join him, if they can.)

My friend Pete commented a few days ago that we shouldn't really blame Sony executives for their behavior, the company has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize value, etc. But Pete's all wet on this one. In practical terms, any attempt to maximize shareholder value by using spyware has been completely eroded by this costly PR disaster and resulting lawsuits. (Not that anybody at Sony was smart enough to foresee this and stop it before it happened.)

But that's not the main reason I disagree. The main reason I disagree is because even if no one had ever discovered the spyware, secretly placing it on customer computers was wrong. Adults are supposed to understand the difference between right and wrong. Every damn thing shouldn't have to be spelled out and legislated. When you were growing up, did your mom need to tell you not to put bugs in her dinner plate? Probably not, and you were just a kid. We're talking about grownups here.

I'm not claiming that the difference between right and wrong is always clear but in this case, it's no contest. If the profit motive is a valid excuse for Sony's bad behavior, then everyone has a valid excuse. Because there's always a need to protect an industry from pirating or to win more air time for acts or to protect market share or to keep a company afloat or to donate to good causes or to prop up a stock price.

Pete suggests we need more legislation in self-defense. He's clearly right but it irks me. It irks me that individuals inside some companies so willingly demonstrate how little respect and consideration they have for the people who keep them in business. A company that cared about its customers would not do what Sony did. Sony's contempt was visible. As a result, it's pissed away a fair share of customer good will.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:45 PM | Comments (1)

November 19, 2005

The Internet Metaphor Battle: Place vs. Plumbing

As mentioned earlier, Bruce Schneier has reported on what he calls the real story behind Sony's rootkit misadventure: "the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us." ZDNet's David Berlind agrees that's noteworthy but says the overall digital rights managment situation is the larger issue.

"Sony's rootkit, as bad as it was, isn't the real story. The way the entertainment cartel is applying DRM as a whole is the real story. They're applying DRM in a way that the Sony fiasco was inevitable. This wasn't the first time lack of DRM interoperability manifested itself in the end-user experience in an ugly way, and it won't be the last. ... Unbeknownst to most people, what started with music (let's just say audio) already applies to video and it's not going to stop there."

Where will it stop? With total corporate control if we're not careful, and we're not just talking audio, video and text. That's not how Berlind put it but it's a fair description of the bleak future painted by Doc Searls in the passionate plea for activism pointed to by Berlind. Doc is in rare form and no wonder: he's a modern Paul Revere trying to spur his beloved community to action before it's too late.

"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?

"Do you believe a free and open market should be 'Your choice of walled garden' or 'Your choice of silo'? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers.

"And we're not stopping it."

Doc's scary links document the threat to the Internet as we know it and explains why the words we use are so important.

"In this debate the radicals are the carriers. We need to fight them, just as Larry and crew need to fight the copyright extremists: by re-framing the subject. To start we acknowledge the necessity of the transport metaphor; but also its insufficiency. Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or 'content' or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context."

Read Doc's essay, then read his blog for responses and contributions from other folks. I'm no visionary but I worry that Doc is right. After all, corporations do whatever necessary to make a profit. If telcos and cable companies need to gate every little stretch of the Internet to thrive, they'll do it--if we let them. (For a historic perspective on how corporations exercise power, don't miss Ted Nace's book "Gangs of America" for educational and entertaining reading.)

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2005

Sony: Weirder and Weirder

Before the move to Sweden, I envisioned my kid embracing age-old Swedish traditions. I saw her in the woods, picking berries or mushrooms. In summer I imaged her splashing in the Baltic Sea while, in winter months, she'd skate across frozen lakes. Yeah, right.

The global sway of American pop culture had completely escaped my notice before the move. These days I get frequent reminders of it. The one this morning arrived in the form of earnest 11-year-olds swaying on stage while mumbling the lyrics to "Wake Me Up When September Ends" under the considerably more energetic direction of the spiky-haired music teacher at our elementary school. (You haven't lived until you've heard class 5A sing "twenty years has gone so fast.") I like Green Day too but jeez, whatever happened to "Du Gamla, Du Fria"?

Luckily Sweden isn't so Americanized yet that corporate execs here could secretly collect information from customer computers without expecting a jail sentence. Sony's probably big enough to survive this debacle (including lawsuits and more nasty PR) but what about First4Internet, the British company that provided both the flawed copy-protection software and the flawed uninstaller? To the glee of many, it appears that some of the free code used by First4Internet in the digital-rights management software it developed for Sony was used in a way that violated the terms of its copyright. As The Register put it, "The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM - without even saying 'Thanks!' - will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes for years to come."

Confused yet? I have been so Andrew Kantor's column in USA Today is a gift of clarity about the degree of evil Sony has wrought. I understood that Sony's DRM format caused a security problem. But not the all-important fact that Sony's patch for "removing" the original software also created a security problem--among other failings. As Kantor explains:

"In order to get the patch, you have to provide your name, e-mail address, and other personal information to Sony. When you finally download the thing, it does the patch thing, and then it installs all sorts of new stuff that Sony doesn't tell you about. And it continues to send your listening habits to Sony and its partners, but now it has a bunch of your personal information too. But wait. Incredibly, there's more. The patch itself, it turns out, opens another big security hole."

Talk about criminal cluelessness. Sony first produced CDs that 1. secretly installed software on your computer, 2. secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to, 3. created a security hole in your PC and finally, 4. damaged the operating system if anyone tried to remove it. Sony's considered response to the outrage provoked by this news was first to deny there was a problem, then to demand lots of personal information before giving you a software fix that 1. secretly installed software on your computer that secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to and 2. created another, larger security hole in your PC.

No wonder I couldn't keep the story straight. It's pure Hollywood. And while it may be Sony's biggest screwup, it's not the company only screwup. "Sony's general incompetence when it comes to digital music boggles the mind," notes David Pogue. "First there was its 'iPod killer' music players, which were initially released without the ability to play a little file format called MP3. Then there was its disastrous Connect music store, whose design was so wasteful of screen space it was almost unuseable. And now the astonishing move to copy-protect all of its music CD's--ironically, in some cases, over the strident objections of the actual bands--with software that behaves like spyware."

As David points out, angry consumers aired their complaints in public forums like Amazon reviews, where they vowed not to buy affected CDs. Information Week went to town with this headline: Bloggers Break Sony. "There's a whole new set of rules that people have to live by," Factiva CMO Alan Scott told Information Week (Factiva just happens to make text-mining software to help execs track the gossip about their companies). "Whether it's blogs or user groups or NGOs, it's all about honesty and authenticity. This is just the latest painful example of a major company finding that the old tools and the old actions don't work."

Those old tools and old actions, also known as lies and lying, do work often enough. Just not this time. And as much as we'd all like to see these go away, I'm confident that in certain circles dissembling will always be in style. Even now I bet there's a bunch of executives nationwide using Sony's situation as a case study in crisis PR when it should be a case study in ethics. Sony's actions were wrong before they became public knowledge and they're wrong now. Too bad the company hasn't figured that out.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)

November 17, 2005

The Real Story Behind Sony's Rogue Rootkit

Bruce Schneier delivers the goods in a terrific Wired News article that ticks through several entertaining aspects of Sony's use of a secret software tool, a rootkit, to protect its CDs and its bungled attempt to help people remove it. There are so many twists that it's hard to see the big picture. Sony's hubris, he notes, is plenty large.

"Sony BMG's president of global digital business demonstrated the company's disdain for its customers when he said, 'Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?' in an NPR interview."

That attitude, while breathtaking in its miscalculation, is not the real story, according to Schneier.

"The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us," Schneier writes. "What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers? ... This is exactly the kind of thing we're paying those companies to detect -- especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

"But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich's discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case."

Read Schneier report's for names, dates and details. Schneier, a security wiz and cofounder of a corporate IT security firm, is asking questions that need to be answered. "What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware? ... Who are the security companies really working for? What will they do the next time some multinational company decides that owning your computers is a good idea?"

My guess? Roll over and play dead for as long as they can. Just as many of them did this time around.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 30, 2005

Journalism 2.0: It's Not the Meat, It's the Motion

A while back I linked to Nicholas Carr, who had some interesting things to say about the rise of Web 2.0. For a guy who appreciates diversity of opinion, Jeff Jarvis seemed quick to dismiss Carr as an elitist curmudgeon after "linkjuice." Plenty of other smart folks have hammered him as well. Carr may be wrong about some things but he's not wrong about the near-religious cult inspired by the Internet and all the delicious, gleaming possibilities that seem to hover just beyond our grasp. Jarvis dismisses that point, perhaps because he hasn't spent as many years as I have interviewing tech execs peddling products that are Going To Change The World For The Better Forever and that, ideally, we're supposed to drop to our knees and worship on the spot.

But no matter--bloggers will blog, vloggers will vlogg and professional media companies will continue to morph if they must. So fuck the amateur vs. professional debate. Fuck the Web 2.0 debate. I want to see a debate about public service and the practice of journalism. What does it mean? What should it mean? Is do-gooder journalism even possible?

Here's the media revolution so far: Individuals, such as myself, get to play pundit from the comfort of our homes, while companies have tumbled to the wisdom of hiring bloggers to promote their brands. That the blogosphere is safe for both gasbag cranks and corporate communications isn't my idea of massive progress. Yes, I'm being cranky. There's tons of great stuff as well. But where's the public service journalism? The press has a duty to keep the public informed in large matters and small. Community listings are a public service, to be sure. But where are the muckrakers? There are a few, very few, practitioners and you gotta wonder if ambitious public service journalism has a future in the United States in any medium. Lord knows it hasn't made much of a splash in the recent past. That's no surprise. There's always been a conflict between profit-driven journalism and public service, and there always will be. As well as disagreement about what constitutes public service.

Here's what I mean by public service: life-saving or life-enhancing journalism on behalf of the public good. Journalism that triggers meaningful change (hectoring Dan Rather or Trent Lott, however satisfying, doesn't qualify). Journalism has never been an especially effective means for improving life for citizens (particularly the less-powerful ones), and it seems even less effective now than it once was.

My first journalism job was as a fact-checker for Mother Jones, which was a bastion of investigative journalism. I was young enough to believe that simply working there constituted a kind of public service. I was wrong. Writing about injustice is not the same as righting injustice. Even if conventional media organizations cared about making the world better, odds are they couldn't. Tell me I'm wrong about this. Show me how journalism--not all of it, just some of it--is actually attacking corruption, eradicating pollution or maybe just making life a little easier for the elderly neighbors next door. Seriously. I'm begging you.

A smart and happy crew of true believers is busy building a better Web. Will we build a better journalism? Dan Gillmor and others are working on it and good luck to them. I hope so-called citizen journalism doesn't stop at online bulletin boards. And that journalism 2.0, once it jells, will be a genuine cause for celebration rather than business as usual in a slightly flashier suit.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:41 PM | Comments (1)

October 28, 2005

Closet Tips and Rental Handbags

Now even the guys are supposed to be obsessed about storage. Exhibit A: The October issue of GQ includes a one-page article called "5 Point Plan for October: Get Your Closet in Order." But that's not the big news. The big news is that there is not one but two businesses that rent handbags, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Guess it's kind of like leasing a Lexus. Why own if you can rent and trade in an outmoded model for something snazzier? Especially when designer bags cost nearly as much as autos these days.

"Bag Borrow or Steal is the more established of the two. For $19.95 a month, customers can rifle through the Trendsetter "closet," stocked with less expensive brands like JLo and Liz Claiborne. Access to the mid-level Princess closet costs $49.95 a month. And for $99.95, the Diva membership offers the latest in Marc Jacobs, Emilio Pucci, and Louis Vuitton - bags that can retail for up to $1,000. ... Prices at From Bags to Riches range from $19.95 to $89.95 per month. High-end inventory includes Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabanna, and Fendi."

From Bag Borrow or Steal staff writer Teresa M�ndez rented "a small mint-green Marc Jacobs (similar bags retail around $700).To my admittedly untrained eye, it looked like the real thing. The silver hardware was substantial, the leather gently worn and buttery - presumably from previous borrowers." So far so good. But then: "The Dooney & Bourke I chose from From Bags to Riches looked to be grass green in the photo (approximately $250 retail). But the bag that landed on my doorstep was much darker. It resembled and vaguely smelled like something my grandmother might carry, and appeared unlined - unlike most of handbags in the Dooney & Bourke line."

I'm not a bag hag but my kidlet has developed a keen interest in designer bags, I'm sorry to say, thanks to teen movies like Mean Girls, in which the queen bees carry Prada bags. A shoe fetish makes sense to me but handbags? Handbags?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:19 PM | Comments (1)

October 05, 2005

Chopsticks, Please: Great Greeting Cards

Nearly twenty years ago my friend Judith Pollock sent me a birthday card in the shape of a head. The head of a flirty blonde gal, to be exact, who can flutter 3D eyelashes (if you give her a little help, anyway). I've been thinking about that card (which I still have) and the meaning behind it today because a friend of mine, Hae Yuon Kim, has a new company called Chopsticks, Please.

Hae, a Korean-American, is a talented artist and graphic designer who wasn't happy with the cards at the local mall. She couldn't find contemporary greeting cards with an Asian twist, so she created her own. That's great news for Asian-Americans and all the people who love them.

That includes people with little pumpkins and sassy girlfriends, people who adopt, friends of people who adopt, people born in the Year of the Rat, New Age practioners and notecard fans. My advice? Shop early, shop often, and stock up (there's a $14 minimum).

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

Ringtone Marketer Must Turn Down Volume

I'm not a total luddite but I'm just elderly enough that I had no idea that there was such a thing as the Crazy Frog ringtone (based on "the sound of a revving moped"), or that it had a Swedish connection (it was "spawned seven years ago by a Swedish motorcycle enthusiast") or that in the U.K., at least, it was "the first ringtone to enter the pop charts, where it stayed in the No 1 slot for four weeks." So what's the marketing angle? Here's the London Times:

PARENTS claimed a victory over the Crazy Frog after the High Court upheld a ruling that will banish the annoying ringtone advertisements until after the watershed.The company behind the mobile telephone ringtone breached advertising restrictions by appealing to children without making clear the true cost of its products.

Almost 300 people complained that Jamba!, based in Germany, did not make clear that its mobile phone services were offered on a weekly, subscription basis rather than a one-off payment. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) found that children had unwittingly run up large phone bills and ruled that the commercials cannot now be shown before 9pm.

The Crazy Frog advertisements were shown on 40,000 occasions during a single month on British television. The post-9pm restriction is intended to place it outside of children’s viewing hours. ... The ASA had previously criticised the commercials for their failure to make clear that the £3 weekly charge was not for one ringtone but a weekly subscription. The watchdog has found that the on-screen warning “16-plus and bill payer’s permission” was insufficient to stop children subscribing to the service via text message.

Not fair, whined the company:

Jamba!, which has sold 11 million Crazy Frog ringtones, argued that its advertisements were not aimed at children and produced evidence that the target purchaser of a Crazy Frog ringtone was aged between 18 and 29.

The company said that a ringtone was “a fun item, of no harm to adults or children, and no more expensive than many small items on which a child may spend pocket money”. But the ASA said that the characters had a “strong appeal” to children and that “peer pressure”, and a No 1 Crazy Frog single, had exacerbated the phenomenon.

Jamba! is appealing the ruling. Meanwhile, says the Times, "the telecoms watchdog Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services ... fined the company that supplies the Crazy Frog ringtone to Jamba! £10,000 for sending out unsolicited text messages for a premium-rate auction."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2005

Creepy Osama bin Laden Souvenirs

New Zealand's Scoop is all over the creepy and cheesy 911 sourvenir story:

A Thai shop selling lava lamps, magic tricks, and embarrassing gifts to surprise recipients, also offers a small, inexpensive hand puppet of bin Laden wearing boxing gloves.

Stick your fingers inside and wiggle them, and little Osama punches the air.

On Bangkok's popular Khao San Road, where thousands of international backpackers flock to cheap hotels, restaurants, discos and an avant garde street market, stalls sell Halloween masks of a droopy, rubbery bin Laden, alongside other scary faces.

The trickle of souvenirs appear to be made not by Osama's supporters, but by profit-seeking factories which have slapped bin Laden's visage, and symbols of his international Islamist war, onto existing generic toys and other items in a crass effort to reach a fresh demographic of buyers.

Which is not to suggest it's the only obscene act of commerce the planet has ever witnessed. Not by a long shot.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 02, 2005

Happy Birthday Alertbox; Farewell Free Agent Nation

My stroll down memory lane continues today thanks to a couple of items in my inbox that highlight the dot-com era. The first is an Alertbox mailing from Jakob Nielsen announcing the site's tenth birthday. Congrats, Jakob. Influential people tend to attract both fans and critics and Jakob (who spoke at one of my conferences and is a swell guy) is no exception. His work on web useability guidelines inspired lots of things, including a a brief, sarcastic "what would Jakob do?" movement. You don't have to agree with his specific recommendations to agree that the web was a design mess in the beginning. Jakob has done a kick-ass job of encouraging appropriate, user-friendly design. (It's not Jakob's fault when companies ignore his research--such as how to make their sites useful for PR.) May Alertbox live long and prosper.

The second is news that the Free Agent Nation enewsletter is no more. Remember the galvanizing December 1997 cover story ("The Brand Called You") in Fast Company? "There's a new movement in the land. From coast to coast, in communities large and small, citizens are declaring their independence and drafting a new bill of rights. Meet some of the 25 million residents of Free Agent, USA." The stirring call to arms was written by Daniel Pink and dazzled many of the free agents and wannabe free agents of my acquaintence, including a Swedish friend. As the article explained, "Free agents gladly swap the false promise of security for the personal pledge of authenticity. 'In free agency,' says Burish, who now designs training programs, 'people assume their own shape rather than fit the shape of some corporate box.' "

The idea of working on your own terms, work that is "personal, authentic, fun, and rewarding," is a compelling concept and led to Pink's Free Agent Nation book ("The Future of Working for Yourself"), which came out in 2001. Pink's manifesto offered a kind of liberation theology for the cubicle set. It was also representative of a type of utopian thinking common then and common now. According to "The Hidden Work In Virtual Work," a paper prepared in 1999 for the International Conference on Critical Management Studies, Pink's article was just one example "of visions of a world of more flexible, mobile, temporary and technologically mediated work. There are many more: as marketing imagery, as journalistic reports from the world of work, as presumably well-researched case studies and theoretical analyses in journal articles, as popular culture thinking, as lunch talk in business circles, as themes of conference and magazine launches, as explicit goals for organizational restructuring policies and implicit bases of technology designs."

As the paper goes on to explain, these cheery reports share an unwillingness to acknowledge that most of the costs of shifting to a supposedly swell, flexible, impowering, Free Agent Nation are borne by individuals; indeed these bright, shiny articulated visions of a techno-powered future usually are unwilling to acknowledge any real costs at all. (In a similar vein, I remember contributing to a Newsweek piece, around the same time, about the seller's market in tech labor by interviewing a programmer who could insist on twice-a-week tee time as a condition of employment. As he explained, he expected to be at the office practically 24/7 and needed some daylight time for golf. Not exactly my ideal term-setting situation.) For most individuals, there are always real costs: for self-employment (see the paper for pre-bust examples); for full-time gigs; and for unemployment. That how life is--nothing comes free. And during the tech slump, which created massive unemployment, many talented individuals had tons of skills but discovered that setting their own terms of employment was no longer one of them. (I'm sure there are truckloads of thriving, accomplished free agents, like Dan Pink, out there somewhere. I'm just more of a disgruntled rogue.)

Pink is now concentrating on a new book, A Whole New Mind. "The era of 'left brain' dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which 'right brain' qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times." Given the continued success of bastard bosses, I find the premise a bit rosy but that won't stop me from reading this new book from a terrific writer.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 01, 2005

Dotcom Wayback Machine

Just found out about the database of failed dotcoms thanks to Katherine S. Mangan. "When future historians look back on the dot-com era, they may be surprised to come across records of companies like Tagarama.com, which was dreamed up as a way for passing motorists to connect with one another later by plugging license-plate numbers into a matchmaking Web site. The company, dreamed up by an entrepreneur in Grass Valley, Calif., has disappeared from the Internet, but an assistant professor of management at the University of Maryland at College Park is making sure that it --�and thousands of other little-known dot-com ventures --�are not forgotten.

"David A. Kirsch, an assistant professor who teaches management and organization at Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has created an online archive that chronicles the rise and fall of Internet-related start-ups in the heady and tumultuous years from 1996 to 2002. ...'I view myself as a biodiversity specialist going into the Amazon,' says Mr. Kirsch, when asked how he decides which dot-coms to list. 'If you see the Amazon is filled with piranhas, you don't need to collect piranhas. But if there are only three of a rare species of bird, I try to save one of those. It's not that I'm not interested in the thriving species, but it's the at-risk species we need to collect now or lose forever.' "

News of the archive, which requires free registration to access (and none of those temp disposable e-mail addresses thank you very much) triggered my nostalgia reflex. So I had to pull out my copy of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's June 1999 Internet Company Handbook, which covered the top 90 Internet companies of the time, many of which survive to this day (RIP eToys, insert your own joke here). I've also been leafing through my copy of Principles of Internet Marketing from 2000. And right there at the end of chapter 9 (Traffic and Brand Building) I find my friend Laurie Flynn, savvy and lovely contributor to the New York Times, cited in Endnote number one ("Alexa Internet: The Search as a Communal Effort.") I don't miss the attitude of the era but I do miss that sense of possibility.

Luckily, blogging and podcasting and videocasting have made tech exciting again and for normal people, not stock speculators or executive-suite swine. (That comes later.) Right here is where I planned to add a snarky comment about how preserving the business plans of loser companies isn't exactly comparable to rescuing endangered flora and fauna. It's not. But the database *is* oddly compelling and now that I've poked around a bit I have a better understanding of why it might be catnip to academics.

The database contains, for example, a PDF of a single page from a PowerPoint presentation by the once-thriving (1800 employees) Scient consultancy. The image shows a close up of an emergency vehicle and emergency tape is stretched across the front of the image. The description explains, "This is a page from a Scient consulting pitch in 2000. The original powerpoint slide has sound effects to increase the visual impact. In the one known instance in which this slide was used, the client hired the Scient team." Doesn't that make you desperate to see the entire thing?

Other juicy bits include video clips (including "La Vida Loca," a Quicktime clip "from what appears to be a Scient karaoke night"), more than 6MB of files on the company culture, and news that PhD student Andrew Russell is working on an open-source history of Scient for those who'd care to collaborate. But there are no files, at least not yet, on Scient failures. Which is exactly how I'd like to be remembered after I'm gone. Professor Kirsch, I salute your smarts. By promising informants confidentiality if they want it and by restricting some documents to bonafide researchers (unlike daytrippers like me), you've created an amazing wayback machine that should only grow in depth and complexity over time. Very cool.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 30, 2005

When Greed Partners With Stupidity

White Collar Crime offers up a classic tale of greed gone wrong: "Blick was a principal and one-third owner of a consulting firm, with the responsibility for managing its business affairs. Over the course of about a year, he embezzled approximately $1.4 million, transferring the money overseas. Eventually, the embezzlement caught up with him, and he informed the other owners of the firm and was eventually indicted on wire fraud charges. He repaid about $750,000 of the money he took, and was sentenced for defrauding the firm of $655,000. Why did Blick embezzle all that money? It turns out that he was 'assisting' a person in Nigeria to remove $20.5 million from that country into a safe account in Europe."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 20, 2005

Google's Terms of Service for RSS Ads

Dave Taylor examines Google's Terms of Service for AdSense for Feeds. "Here's how you mess with someone now: grab their RSS feed, strip out the AdSense for RSS data, present the rest on a Web page or in a new 'clean' feed, and blamo, they'll have their account terminated.

"The Terms of Service continues: You agree you will be responsible and liable for any and all use of the AFF Ads by any feed user and will indemnify Google for any lawsuit or proceeding (a) relating to or arising from any feed user's use of AFF..."

There's lots of interesting, vaguely alarming stuff for wannabe publishers.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 28, 2005

Events: Reboot and "Cultures of eBay"

I'm slobbering over two events that I probably can't attend. Please go for me and report back.

The first is Reboot, which is slated for June 7 to 10. (Its search for "practical visionaries" is endearing.) While I would crawl over moderately sharp glass to hang with Doc Searls and Robert Scoble in the flesh once more, I can't spend money I don't have. Not even to meet and/or hear from interesting tech folks who are speaking in a city that's practically in the neighborhood. It's painful that I haven't been able to convince an editor to subsidize a cheap trip to Copenhagen to cover this tech conference, which is run by a guy named Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. He appears to have modern Scandinavian values, and I mean that in a good way. How do I know? Well, Reboot has been around for awhile but wasn't held last year because Madsen-Mygdal was on paternity leave after the birth of his first child. (The very thought makes my feminist heart beat a little faster in joy.)

Not that I have a clue what Reboot actually is. "After more than 10 years of old ways of creation, old values, and old models for communicating and organizing ourselves, new ways are emerging. That is what reboot7 is about." Hmm, only 10 years? I was sure the planet was a tiny bit more elderly than that. In any case, Reboot's "heroes are the mavericks who live the new ways and thereby lead and validate their possibilities—The Sharing Way, The Creation Way, The Web Way, The History Way and The Natural Way." So it's a little confusing to this girl, sign me up for a sponsor, I don't want to miss it.

As a Material Girl (yes, I know there are many of us), I don't want to miss "Cultures of eBay" either, an intellectual slamdance slated for August 24 and 25 at the University of Essex in Britain. "The overall aim of this conference is to bring together academics and practitioner groups from both business and the voluntary sector, to explore and ‘make sense’ of the cultural, social and economic aspects of eBay, the Internet auction site, and consider its social and business implications." Yes, yes, yes but will there be a boot sale?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2005

Earth-Friendly Goodies

Just dropped off two big bags of clothes at the local Salvation Army and it feels great. But I'd be a bad Buddhist; there's so much to lust after and I do, every day in every way. I have little talent for buying big new stuff (only because I don't have the cash to finance a home-decorating spree that would include a black Noguchi table, a brace of Hans Wegner Wishbone chairs and perhaps a Josef Frank cabinet or two). I'm much better at making do with what I have or scavenging from second-hand places. I tell myself that's not so bad. In a small way, second-hand shopping is good for the planet.

Plenty of companies are eager to market new stuff as a boon to the environment as well. I'm not necessarily convinced but here's one example: "At least 65 percent of the handle of the Preserve razor is made out of Stoneyfield Farm yogurt cups. To recycle, the handle can be easily separated from the blade, which isn't yet recyclable. (Mr. Hudson insists they are working on it.) The handles can be pitched into a recycling bin or mailed back to Recycline in a company envelope," noted Mark Clayton in the Christian Science Monitor in a tribute to last week's Earth Day. Clayton mentions several great gadgets, including the Juice Bag, "a large bag with a flexible solar panel sewn to the back" that let's you charge a phone, laptop and iPod, say, if you walk to work as one enthusiastic owner does. (The appearance of this gal in the article suggests a successful marketing effort. Which is fine with me, given the topic. But the bag's not for sale yet, according to the company web site, so how the hell did she get her paws on a bag? Is she an Edward Bernays-style plant, a relative of the owner, a beta-tester? That's the kind of information readers should have.)

For parents, something called KidBean.com is thrilled, utterly thrilled to announce the debut of new Organic Hemp Children's Sneakers, as they Insist On Describing Them. According to the release (note to company or agency: enough with the gushy adjectives already): "These amazing children's shoes are 100% vegetarian (vegan) and are: cruelty-free, sweatshop-free, leather-free, and are quite simply the most sustainable children"s shoes you can buy! They are made with only environmentally-sound materials, including organic hemp uppers and soles made from reclaimed used tires."

If the shoes can make the kid wearing them nag-free, I promise to buy a dozen pairs. But what about the grownups? I need new sneakers. Where's my vegan, environmentally sound and affordable option?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2005

Media Overkill Plus Big Closet News

Eric Boehlert's "A Tale Told by an Idiot" on Salon (subscription or day pass required) is blunt about the recent Terri Schiavo circus:

"It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning. When one man began to play the trumpet moments after Schiavo's death was announced at 9:50 a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him, two or three deep. Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a 'furious debate' nationwide?

"... The 'furious debate' angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream. Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine interest. It did. What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks ..."

An important topic, sure, but Salon really dropped the ball on the closet front. Could this be a match made in heaven? "MINNEAPOLIS, March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- For homeowners with l