Buzzwords on trial

As a technology-focused writer who loves to keep it simple, you might think it's safe to assume that I hate, hate, hate buzzwords.

Actually, my feelings on the matter aren't that cut and dry. I tried to articulate this in one of my first posts ever back February of last year.

Basically I agree that they can be evil things and most of them are dreadfully misused and overused. But I also think that at least some of them are actually necessary to kick-start valuable and worthwhile new ideas and help them spread.

The example that comes to mind is Web 2.0. Some may find it cringe-worthy, but I think it conveys a worthy idea:

We've had a few years to figure out the web and this time around we're doing things differently--smaller, simpler, more participatory. More about real people connecting with each other and less about making unscrupulous stock speculators rich.

Of course, the ideas behind most buzzwords are probably not so worthy. But if buzzwords are just the messengers, do they deserve to be shot?

Maybe. Maybe not. I do think that some form of forced retirement would be nice, but I admit it doesn't sound too practical.

Anyhow, two recent pieces have got me thinking about buzzwords again. The first is an article from USA Today. Here's a key quote that highlights a major problem with buzzwords.

Ryan Donovan, a Hewlett-Packard public relations director, concedes that terms like "data migration" and "optimizes agility" — both of which have been found in his company's press materials — might be confusing to your average reader. But he says the company uses those phrases in documents intended for technology experts and executives who might be turned off by more plain-spoken wording.

"This is the language that they're comfortable with, and it's our job to make sure that we're speaking to them in a language that they understand," Donovan says.

Poor buzzwords. They go from conveying a potentially worthy idea to something admittedly much, much sadder--a sort of "nudge nudge" appeal to the ego of a potential customer. "You're in the know, I can tell. Well so am I. Let's do business!".

The second piece that caught my eye was a blog post riffing of the USA piece from Steve at Signal Vs Noise. Here's a quote:

These buzzwords are often a mask. People who use them are covering up their ideas--or the lack thereof. They are overcompensating. They don’t have anything substantial to say so they try to use impressive sounding words instead.

But people who abuse buzzwords don’t sound smart. They sound like they are trying to sound smart. Big difference.

All true. All true. I just think it's more of a criticism of the way some people use buzzwords than a critique of the buzzwords themselves.

Who knows? Maybe I'm just deluded. Maybe I'm just a marketing writer trying to reconcile a love of simple, direct communication with a portfolio that contains more than a few buzzword-heavy pantloads.

So what are your thoughts on buzzwords? I'd love to know. Can you think of more potentially worthy ones? Do you think they will ever go away?

Tags: buzzwords jargon marketing web20 web2.0 tech

Oh crap! I've been splogged (part 4, the happy-ish ending)

This is part three of a cautionary tale entitled Oh Crap! I've Been Splogged. The story so far: sploggers have exploited a stupid loophole in Blogger's system and scoop my Blogspot domain while I'm experimenting with FTP publishing. Nearly a month has gone by and I haven't been able to reach a real human being at Blogger.

Surprise, surprise, the folks at Blogger have finally responded to my cries for help. Yesterday I got an email from Brenna at Blogger, who wrote:

Hi John,

Thanks for writing in and for your comments and suggestions. I
Apologize for the delayed response and for your frustration. I have deleted the pages you requested. They should no longer be accessible from the web, although some search engines may hold cached copies for a short period of time. The "ounpuu" subdomain should be available to reclaim shortly, if you'd like.

Sincerely,
Brenna
The Blogger Team

Just to bring the story up to date . . .

Since I last posted about my adventure in Splogtown I tried one last tactic. I sent Blogger an email with links to all the previous "Oh Crap I've Been Splogged" posts I’d written, just to make sure they knew I wasn’t the only one to hearing about my troubles.

This was directly inspired by Alex’s success using her blog to push local Vancouver mainstay London Drugs into playing fair with the warranty when her digital camera went kablooey. So thanks for the inspiration, Alex!

Whether that last email had any effect or not, I’ll never know for sure--the message from Blogger was very clearly (too clearly?) a reply to an earlier message. But I like to think that the vast power I wield thanks to my dozen or so subscribers had something to do with it.

So anyhow, things are mostly fixed but not ideal yet. My blogspot domain has been stripped bare, which is good. But despite what Brenna says, I’ve still not been able to re-register my original domain. I’m still trying, though.

Besides all of that, though, my larger question remains--what are Blogger doing to make sure this doesn't happen to more people?

Tags: splogs splog splogging sploggers spam blogs blog blogging blogger blogspot customerservice service

Links for September 21, 2006

• Amazon have added comment threads to user-created reviews. An interesting step towards boosting the social, conversational side of the Amazon shopping experience.
  
  
  
• Video of Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk from 2004. What every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. Brilliant stuff.
  
  
  
• More mind blowing video from TED. Jeff Han from NYU demonstrates his “interface-less touchscreen”. Blew my lid clean off. Wow. Cheers to TED for putting this stuff online.

Oh crap! I've been splogged (part 3)

This is part three of a cautionary tale entitled Oh Crap! I've Been Splogged. The story so far: While I was experimenting with FTP publishing, Blogger allowed someone else to grab my Blogspot domain, thereby locking me out of my own blog. Usefull support from Blogger has been nonexistant, but I've been able to piece together what happened based on posts from the Blogger Help Group.

Believe it or not, finally figuring out just how and why you were screwed over doesn’t actually make you feel much better.

But at least now I know who my enemies are. I have two of them:

1. The anonymous splogger or sploggers who scooped up my domain
2. The not-so-anonymous corporate entity known as Blogger who allowed this to happen and have done nothing to fix it.

The first enemy is evil by nature. But the second is a different story. Not evil, just flawed. Flawed how? Let me count the ways:

1. Lousy customer support
Online help is more minimal than a bauhaus rec room. They rely on other users to provide support and they're prone to making lame excuses about being awfully busy right now.

2. A poorly thought out policy
Instantly lapsing users’ hosting agreements without any notification as soon as they switch their publishing options does not make a whole lot of sense.

3. Poor interface design
There are no warnings about this poorly thought out policy. No big red exclamation point. No "are you sure you want to do this?". Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Hey Google, guess what? Evil through inaction is still evil.

Thankfully, I’m a reasonable guy. I’m ready to give enemy #2 a chance to make it better. So my next move is to send a second email to the folks at Blogger. Back in their response to my first email, sent to them August 28th, they said:

"If your question or problem is not addressed anywhere in our
documentation, please simply reply to this message and let us know. We
will help you out as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience."

So that’s what I did.

On August 31st I replied to their impersonal, canned email. First, I enouraged them to fix their broken policy and/or their broken interface so that other suckers don't have to deal with this issue.

And second, I asked them to either A) give me my domain back or, at the very least, B) strip the blog bare. After all, if it’s not my blog why does it have me all over it? My words. My face. I mean, either it's my blog or it isn't, right?.

If the sploggers want it, let them start from scratch like I did.

I sent that email 16 days ago and guess what?

You guessed it.

I’m still waiting.

Good thing they thanked me for my for my patience up front or I might really be getting pissed.


I'll postPart 4 if anything new ever happens. I'm watching my old domain but so far the sploggers haven't changed anything. It's just frozen in time. And I'm watching my inbox for messages from Blogger. Nothing there either.

If you can think of anything I can do besides all this watching, please leave a comment. In the meantime, steer clear of Blogger if you're thinking of starting a blog.

Tags: splogs splog splogging sploggers spam blogs blog blogging blogger blogspot customerservice service

Ma.gnolia Roots

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 19: Roots has been released. You can get it here.

The good folks at Ma.gnolia have been kind enough to let me beta test a new bookmarklet they’ve created, tentatively known as Ma.gnolia Roots. If you haven’t discovered Ma.gnolia yet, they are doing great things with social bookmarking -- think del.icio.us but more human and sociable.

(If that sounds a little fuzzy, don’t worry. This post should make it clear what I mean by “more human and sociable”.)

So . . . on to Roots.

Roots is a simple, sexy, and ultimately very useful way to make looking at any web page a social experience without leaving the page.

And it’s also kind of addictive.

Rather than explain further, let me just show it to you. First imagine you are visiting an interesting site. Any site will do.

So let's say this site has piqued your interest and you start to wonder: what are people saying about this site?

When you click on the Roots bookmarklet, a transparent layer appears fades in over top of the page you’re looking at, along with a little flower to let you know that Ma.gnolia is working up to something.

And a second later, that semi-transparent overlay becomes a window into the Ma.gnolia community. Without leaving the original site, you can now see:

• Which and how many users have bookmarked it
• How they’ve rated it
• How they’ve tagged it
• Their comments about the site

And you can bookmark it yourself and add tags, comments and ratings of your own.

Close Roots and the overlay disappears, leaving you right back where you started. It’s completely seamless. Your browsing flow is unbroken.

Now, I’ve got to admit my first reaction was to bask in the sheer sexiness of it all. But Roots is more than just sexy. It’s also a perfect illustration of how Ma.gnolia are adding a real human, social dimension to bookmarking.

Compare it to the nearest thing del.icio.ous have on offer--post to del.icio.us. Here’s what I see when I use that bookmarklet from the same starting point.

I can bookmark the page. I can add notes and tags. It’s all good . . . but it’s all about me.

Now while “all about me” may not sound like a bad thing -- it’s all about user centricity, right? -- what I didn’t realize was missing until I used Roots was an interface that immediately goes beyond me to the include the community at large. That's the real beauty of Roots. It’s sexy AND social. It’s . . . group sexy!

And it’s coming out of beta soon, so stay tuned. I'll update this post with a link once it's fully available.

Tags: magnolia delicious ma.gnolia del.icio.us magnoliaroots ma.gnoliaroots bookmarking socialbookmarking bookmarklet bookmarklets beta betatest

Links and more links . . . all worth clicking, too

• Kathy Sierra defends herself against critics who accuse her of simply stating the obvious. Best quote: “The Big Secret is not about knowing what magical thing to do--it's about taking the "duh" things seriously enough and actually doing them. If you could pick just one "duh" thing to work on, what would it be?”
  
  
  
• Marc Hedluns, who’s building a site with some Sutori overtones called Wesabe, asks a very simply but very interesting question: Does most of your money go to businesses you like?
  
  
  
• Hugh cuts through the hype and gets right to the heart of markeing via blogs, blogging and bloggers: “A well-executed blog campaign is not rocket science. It is, however, an act of love.”
  
  
  
• Signal vs. Noise point to this excellent Business Week article on the nature of brands by metacool’s Diego Rodriguez. Key quote: “. . . a brand is about what you do, or don't do, and not what you say. It's the sum total of all your actions.”
  
  
  
• The Wall Street Journal put Britannica in one corner and Wikipedia in the other and just basically turn them loose.
  
  
  
• Steve Rubel points out how often Wikipedia entries dominate search results for big brand names. Key observation: “Like it or not, the Wikipedia open-source phenomenon looms large right where companies are increasingly spending billions of dollars to jockey for position: on search-engine-results pages.”

Oh crap! I’ve been splogged! (part 2)

This is part two of a cautionary tale entitled Oh Crap! I've Been Splogged. The story so far: I’m in transition between hosting my blog on Blogspot and publishing to my own domain. For a week or so I’ve been “double posting” to both domains. Finally ready to kiss Blogspot goodbye for good with a post announcing my new home, I am suddenly told that my Blogspot domain is "unavailable" . . .

Feeling frustrated, confused and angry, I shoot off an email to Blogger/Blogspot. They reply with a canned response containing lots of general suggestions that are pretty much useless. The general gist is RTFM, except there is not really an M to R. Just a few basic help pages and a "Known Issues Blog".

Great.

The only possibility of being heard by a real human being is a link near the end of the generic message pointing to the Blogger Help Group.

The general idea here, I suppose, is that if you have a product so bad that a whole group has formed to discuss its many problems and failings, then this somehow abdicates you from any responsibility to provide customer support.

The general approach is nicely summed up in this Help Group post from a Blogger employee. It’s called When to Contact the Blogger Team. Here’s a choice excerpt:

. . sometimes it can be difficult to sort through the fixes and responses provided here. So, if you attack your problem and give it the good old college try with no success, then know that we're still here to help you out if you write in to us. With that said, please keep in mind that there might be a bit of a delay in our response to you, as we're a little busier than usual right now . . .

Oh, I see. You're busy. But of course I've got nothing better to do than plow through posts on your Help Group.

Wow, your commitment to service is breathtaking.

So anyhow. The Blogger Help Group. That’s my next stop. Time to give it “the good old college try”.

After all, what choice do I have?

The first thing I do is search around for posts about a similar problem. No obvious matches, so I do a post of my own.

A few days go by and it seems like no one in the Help Group is feeling particularly, well . . . helpful. Interpreting their silence as another hint that I need to RTFM--ie. dig a bit deeper on my own--I decide that maybe my first college try wasn’t good enough. So I dig around and sure enough I find a string that seems to point to an answer:

In my case, the new blog at my old address was pure spam. . . . I wish Blogger would warn you that that could happen when you switch to FTP.

Hmm.

Now at this point there is no new blog at my old address. It still looks like my blog, with my picture and my content. But the light is starting to dawn. Something bad can happen when you switch to FTP. Something that Blogger should warn you about. Something to do with spam.

Another string brings the picture into clearer focus:

Note that when you switch from Blog*Spot to publishing via FTP, your former Blog*Spot address becomes available and can be registered by other users. Unfortunately, if it has been taken by another user, we cannot reassign such addresses. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Hope that helps to clarify the situation,
Blogger Employee

That’s when I began to grasp the full horror of the situation.

I’ve been splogged!

Some asshole--or more likely some automated tool created by some group of assholes--has swooped in and scooped up my blogspot domain.

The bastards have highjacked my blog!

And my pal Blogger Employee says they can’t--or won’t--do a thing about it.

Crap!


Stay tuned for Part 3.

Tags: splogs splog splogging sploggers spam blogs blog blogging blogger blogspot helpgroup helpgroups customerservice service