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Zombies Less Annoying Than MySpace Users

Zombie biting iMac at the San Francisco Apple Store.
“Hey, buddy! You bite it, you bought it!”

I’ve always suspected it, but now I have proof. Consider what happened when a flash mob-like gathering of zombies in San Francisco passed by the downtown Apple Store:

It may be worth noting that the Westfield Mall and Disney security tried to bar the zombies from entering, but Apple store security did not. In fact, salespeople were jostling one another for a position where they could take the best photo of the zombies (or themselves with the zombies, or their brains being eaten by the zombies).

MySpace mom and daughter.
Note the blank, soulless eyes, the mindless expressions, and the hunger for destruction and human brains. These are MySpace users.

Contrast that with why Apple Stores have made it so you can’t access MySpace pages on their display machines:

An Apple Store employee (who does not work in the Fifth Avenue store), confirmed to CNET News.com that this has been an ongoing problem. “MySpace is a big issue for the Apple stores because people come in, Photobooth themselves (using Macs’ built-in webcams), then stick their picture up on their MySpace account and loiter at machines for hours,” the source said in an e-mail. “It is especially troublesome at the flagships and high-volume stores, and for a while there was no official word on how to deal with it.”

Based on these two stories from this week, I must conclude: the shambling, bloody and moaning legions of the undead are far more easy to put up with and less disruptive to business than the shambling, moody and whining legions of MySpace users. And now we have proof.

Excerpt from Wondermark! #223.
Excerpt from a Wondermark! comic. Click the image to see the full comic.

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Sony’s Very Special Screws

This screw had better double as a PlayStation 3 controller, because Sony wants 61 Euro and change (US$83.46 as of this writing, according to xe.com) for it:

Sony’s very expensive replacement screw

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Advertising: Best Left to the Professionals?

Scene from Dan Burke’s Heinz Ketchup ad, in which he uses ketchup as toothpaste.

The New York Times article The High Price of Creating Free Ads covers Heinz’s contest in which its customers are challenged to create their own television advertisement for Heinz Ketchup. The subtext of the article seems to be this: Leave this kind of work to the professionals.

Note that while advertising execs and a couple of contest entrants are interviewed in the article, there isn’t a single quote from “the audience”. Perhaps the constraints of a press deadline would’ve made it too hard to gather some “average person” reviews of some submitted ads, but it would’ve been informative. Remember that the original ads for HeadOn (“HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead!”) were created by professionals and apparently passed focus group muster.

In my opinion, at least one of the customer-submitted ads is quite good. I laughed out loud when it hit the punchline, and I thought it would work perfectly in “edgy” time slots, such as Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (or in Canada, Teletoon’s The Detour):

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Lara Croft, Then and Now

Courtesy of my friend Miss Fipi Lele: click on the image below to see how Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has evolved from game to game:

Preview image showing the evolution of Lara Croft.
Click to see the full image.

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Why PR Doesn’t Work for High Tech (or: Guy Kawasaki is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!)

Cover of the book “Toxic Sludge is Good for You!”

Back during those heady dot-com days, George and I worked for OpenCola, a start-up that was spending US$40,000 a month on the services of a PR firm that shall remain unnamed. I got the feeling that OpenCola was getting more PR bang for the buck from me and OpenCola founder/Chief Evangelist Cory Doctorow. We were based in the San Francisco office, pressing the flesh with as many geeks and tech press as we possibly could, and we had a much better idea of what OpenCola could do than the people to whom we were shoveling 40 grand a month.

I suggested that we could cut our PR budget by having me and Cory holding a monthly “chicken run” a la Rebel Without a Cause. We could jump into a cheap used car with the OpenCola logo plastered all over it, and drive it towards a cliff, bailing out at the last second. Spectacular, far cheaper than the PR farm, and by the standards of those days, a not-too-harebrained publicity stunt. Like any good idea in those days, it was ignored.

My dot-com era experiences have caused me to generally have a dim view of PR firms and the people who work for them — my feelings run the gamut from “necessary evil” to “waste of space” to “waste of ammo” (and sometimes “waste of skin”). The book Toxic Sludge is Good for You has only served to reinforce this opinion.

Hence I cannot help reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog entry, The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work with a jaundiced eye. Guy could’ve saved me valuable seconds by boiling his list down to the single opinion from which it stems: It’s the client’s fault.

Guy, I’ll see your list of 10 items and counter you with a simple two-item list as to why PR doesn’t work:

  1. PR companies suck.
  2. PR companies are stupid.

Much better, and far truer.

(This pains me. Guy’s one of my role models.)

I far prefer the items in the list provided in the article Top 5 (or 6) reasons PR doesn’t work. if you’re a geek., an article written in response to Guy’s:

  1. The PR firm doesn’t understand the product or technology.
  2. The PR firm is seen as a spinner, blocker, or gatekeeper to access the CEO/CTO/braintrust.
  3. The PR firm hasn’t been properly trained on how to communicate with bloggers or social media.
  4. The PR firm prefers doing a few big traditional media over lots of smaller online media & online channels.
  5. The PR firm doesn’t understand SEO, SEM, widgets, blogs, tags, social networks, pictures, video, or other online & viral methods, aka “all that Web 2.0 stuff”.
  6. Most PR folks have no clue what the hell TechMeme is.
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Dialog Box of the Week

Worse Than Failure asks: in the dialog box below, which button do you click to reset to the factory default settings, and which one to you click to cancel the reset operation?

“Reset to Factory Default” dialog box featuring two buttons: “Apply” and “Reset”.

Even this redesign featuring CB radio slang (I watched Convoy and many episodes of BJ and the Bear as a kid) makes more sense:

Improved “Reset to Factory Default” dialog box featuring two buttons: “10-4 good buddy” and “That’s a negatory”.

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iPod Amnesty Bin at Zune Headquarters

Microsoft may not always crank out the best products, but I will have to hand it to them: they certainly can tell jokes. The best part of any Microsoft keynote is the spoof video — consider their parody of VW’s “Da Da Da” tv spot, their Matrix spoof and the “Bill Meets Napoleon Dynamite” clip. If their stuff worked as well as their spoofs, my Vista laptop wouldn’t be relegated to second-banana duty.

Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz recently experienced some Microsoft self-promo humour when paying a visit to Zune headquarters. Here’s what he saw near the entrance: an iPod amnesty bin:

“iPod Amnesty Bin” at Zune headquarters
Click to see the photo on its original page.

The Mac fanboy/fangirl reaction seems to have largely been one of amusement, and as one commenter on The Unofficial Apple Weblog puts it, the Zune Amesty Bin is the store shelves.