Communications and Perception Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be...
The Sign of the Times Pentagram, the designers of the website, signage, marketing materials, and stationery for the new New York Times building , have a fascinating blog post...
Making the News The gist: A lighthearted unscientific poll that was created as a PR ploy for a tech company is quickly evolving into a “real” news story, being treated as fa...
The Called Shot I’ve been amused for weeks by 37signals marketing for their upcoming micro-CRM app Highrise because of the example contacts they’ve been using. Every...
A Four-Armed Grimace Because this came up at work today, I’ll repost a link to Pop Culture Addict’s look at Grimace , the terrifying/cuddly McDonald’s mascot-blob. The key point...
Rethinking the Symphony Earlier this year, the New York Philharmonic started distributing some recordings of their works through the iTunes music store. On its own, that’s not a par...
Badvocacy One of my recurrent sources of frustration with my fellow geeks is that most are just plain lousy at convincing others to try technologies. It’s only because...
Putting the "G" in Fugly When the site first appeared and all the cool kids were using it, I could forgive the logo. I thought, hmm, ugly and dumb but they’re just starting out and t...
A Million Dollar Idea A while back, Gillette released the M3Power Razor , a motorized razor based on their fan-favorite Mach 3. Now, as many of you may recall, I care about ra...
A city covered in coasters Last week, my former employer decided to include an AOL promotional CD in each copy of the newspaper that was distributed in Manhattan. Now, the thing you ha...
keeping it all bottled up Perhaps the finest testament to the power of marketing and distribution is the fact that I regularly buy bottled water. In case you don’t know, bottled water...
secrets of music promotion You know, if you had a band, and you were really determined to stay an underground band, instead of putting a vulgarity in your band name like in the olden day...
privacy through identity control Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning , the issue of privacy in a pre...
corporate doublespeak I find corporate marketing mumbo-jumbo to be much more entertaining if you replace key phrases (like the company’s name) with the phrase “My Butt”. This can le...
Gotta love marketing speak. An Gotta love marketing speak. An excerpt of an actual email I received today for testing a new service reads: In exchange for participating in the trial, you...
