BIMA Best Blog Award & Gratuitous self promotion warning

Unlike the vast majority of my posts, this one will be short and to the point. It will also contain hitherto unknown quantities of ego.

For I have, dear readers, been nominated for a BIMA Best Blog award and I am dead chuffed, to say the least.

Let us not ask how the hell that happened, when the rate of posting has been only slightly higher than the speed of the actual postal system for the past few months. Let us also ignore the fact that, when I have bothered to put pinkies to plastic the topics have been as inspiring as Grace Jones snotting on stage, why I think white goods should remain stupid and why people in general are stupid*. Let us also ignore that there are other blogs who are far more stimulating, entertaining and frequently updated, such as the rather excellent Broadstuff blog. Instead just accept that this is possible the greatest blog you’ve ever read and take a moment for this momentous news to sink in.

Suggestion, while you are taking that moment, why not just pop over to the award page and vote for me.

See that didn’t take long and the dirty feeling goes away after a while, honest. If it doesn’t then return and vote for someone equally deserving such as Broadstuff or Boing Boing.**

*Except you, you are of course not stupid, your very presence here proves this, btw you hair looks great.

**Obviously for every vote cast that is not for this blog, a fairy dies

Twibbons equals twokenism

For the first time ever my Twitter Avatar is decorated by a twibbon, this particular one is in support of the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. Although only another 9,000 fellow twitter’s are doing the exactly same as I type, there are over 500,000 twibboned profiles of some sort, either in support of their favourite charity, their coffee, sports team or gadget.

The act of betwibboning my avatar, along with a post from Alan Patrick over at Broadstuff on freedom of speech and the 24 hour outrage mobs that were spawned in response to the very recent Trafigura Guardian gagging and the Daily Mail piece of the death of Stephen Gately, made me consider yet again the actual impact of online actions compared to offline. Which was then neatly echoed, in one of those weird coincidences of timing, in a retweet by Chris Brennan. All of which combined to remind that despite the supposed success of the online world beating back tyranny in real life, we shouldn’t overestimate the difference in impact between doing something online and offline.

Putting the pixel poppy on my picture took all of two seconds,  it helped to remind me that I needed to buy one in real life but in the grand scheme of things for the Royal Legion it did bugger all. I doubt anyone who has seen my profile has been driven to add a poppy to their own, or that they jumped up and ran out to find their nearest poppy vendor that very instant. Or if not at that very moment, then later when they saw them being sold at the tube that one specific person’s twitter avatar, or indeed any, came to mind as they handed over their cash.

This is pretty much the reason why I haven’t previously added one, nor have I blacked out my avatar or made it a delightful shade of green, not because I don’t agree with the various causes that have suggested these moves but because it’s almost too easy to do and then forget that it has actually achieved diddly. From a marketer’s point of view, it’s also too difficult to measure. Yes, you can pop over to Twibbon and see the current numbers, but what about from previous campaigns? There’s also no way of measuring how many people did black out their avatars for New Zealand or Ireland, which makes it fairly ineffective as a campaigning tool.

I am sure the naysayers here will point to the record number of complaints to the PCC over the Jan Moir piece, to demonstrate that mass online (re)action does matter. Except there is nothing to say that Stephen Gatley’s family, or anyone else directly mentioned in the piece, would not have complained anyway. Yes, the PPC made them aware of the article off the back of the twitterstorm but if those directly involved don’t decide to complain, then all the PCC will write a letter to the Daily Mail before considering further action – not exactly a long lasting impact on a paper that saw it’s hit rate rise by around 20 percent off the back of that one article and no doubt will be slipping Jan Moir a nice Christmas bonus for driving that traffic.

I’m not actually having a go at just Twibbons here, well I am, but it is a neat symbolisation of the inactive activism that salves our busy modern life souls into thinking that we’ve done something meaningful when we haven’t.  One could almost level the same criticism at those who buy charity ribbons and wrist bands, their saving grace is that the charity does actually get some cash in return, with a click on line they get nowt.

The sentiment of this entire post is much more eloquently and succinctly expressed in the following Tim Minchin video, one can only assume that he didn’t say I’ll give you a click to take away my guilt as it didn’t scan as well as the actual words.

The problem with ‘Don’t be Stupid’

Is that people are stupid.

This was going to be a post around social media policies and how perhaps we shouldn’thave them. The Microsoft policy, apparently, can be summed up as ‘Don’t be stupid’. Which is to be frank, rather stupid in itself. It is rare that a person does something knowing that it is indeed a stupid thing to do. Even if they say, this might be a stupid thing to do, clearly they don’t really believe that or they wouldn’t actually go ahead and do it. They may believe that other people might think what they are about to do is stupid. However they secretly they believe that they are being very clever and their apparently stupid action will be proven to be as cunning as ‘a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University but has moved on, and is now working for the UN at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning’.

The bones of this post has been kicking around for a while, fueled by the occasionally visit to LameBook, from which I’m sure you’ve seen examples, such as the one to right, floating around various blogs and even more mainstream sites. Then Brian Sollis offered some advice for businesses and employees in his latest post on how to protect yourself online, concluding:

Perhaps the best advice is to not rely on common sense at all. You, and only you, are responsible for creating and defining your destiny. Instead of giving companies reasons why they should block important social networks and ultimately new opportunities, show them what they’re missing through your actions, research, and words.

Which resonates deeply with my belief that you can’t make a policy that stops people being stupid and that all the wonderful web has done has made it easier to be stupid in different and far more public way than ever before.

To illustrate my point about human stupidity I thoght I’d pull up some stats around how many people are injured in the UK by seemingly benign objects. Except what I discovered is it now possible to play a bastard child version of Cludeo (or Clue for any passing Americans) and Googlewhacking. All you need to do is pop along to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) website and select one option each from the eight categories (where, type of accident, type of injury, body part, victim’s age, object involved, gender and activity) and see if someone has indeed been injured in that manner. Or you can just pick one or two varaiables, such as item and gender,  to make it easier and find out that men seemed to be very careless with chopsticks in 2000 and 2002 but escaped any oriential eating implement injuries in 2001. Give it a go, it’s a fascincating waste of time and can lead to some interesting discussions, for example how did 144 people get injured by blood 2002? Blood as a result of injury seems more likely than it being the cause.

More sensible post on social media policies will follow, prolly.