Crystal Clear

Marketing is changing and becoming much more subtle.

Product placement is not a new concept – but how many of us are conscious of it? Did you notice in the last movie or TV show you watched what kind of computer they used, what pop they drank, etc. Where they brand names? Did it strike you that the company probably paid large sums of money to have their product featured? You can be sure that it did not just ‘happen’ to get caught on film.

Marketing isn’t just advertising anymore.

Here is new one: stealth marketing. Have you ever read book reviews on Amazon? How about consumer reviews on electronic sites? Do you think any of those are done by people being paid to state a positive or negative opinion? How would you know? You can read the confessions here of one such person: The Escapist. He talks about infiltrating online community forums, with multiple accounts, and after gaining respect in the community begins to hype a product. Others of his personas concur, and it looks like many agree – even though it is only one person doing it all! Would you be fooled?

Then there is this new on that turns my stomach: Funding ‘research institutes’ to a corporation’s advantage. Tabacco companies for years have denied that smokes was a health hazard, and are still working hard to convince people that second hand smoke or passive smoking is not a health hazard. They cannot directly point to studies in their favour, so they work by funding other organizations to say the information. Since there is lots of scientific research that shows smoke is harmful to all who breath it, they decided to attempt to discredit the results and scientists in general. If there is a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the danger of smoke, then people may become confused.

And hey, they seem to have hit on a brilliant idea. If they can show that in general, scientists have a hard time coming to a consensus, then they have an easier time to call into question any scientific study that is not in their favour. So it turns out that a major tabacco company is a major backer of ‘research institutes’ that continue to point to a lack of consensus on climate change.

The oil companies also fund these same kinds institutes. But in their press releases, which journalists dutifully quote to show a ‘balanced view’, no mention is made of their supporters.

This article fleshes this out much more fully: The Denial Industry

Do you trust marketing? Do you recognized when you are being marketed to?

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I couldn’t imagine life without the internet. The access to information is incredible. I do not know how people researched small stuff (household items, etc.) without it. Not easily, that is for sure.

What’s next? People talking about Web2.0 are envisioning connecting information to make it more useful. Not just linking pages together, but actually feeding information from one thing into another.

One example is Google Earth – satellite photos and GPS. But now people can add pictures based on GPS so we can see what it looks like if you are there. They are adding weather patterns and other ‘layers’ with data from outside sources.

These sorts of things are called mash ups. And it’s not just Google and it’s not only about maps.

“Information wants to be free”, I’ve heard. And when information is free, then it can be paired with other information to become very useful.

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I want to believe that an article I read (link below) is all doomsaying, but part of me has wondered similar things before. The key is that he says we are now hoping that things will work out when reason says the situation is bad. Previous doomsayers believed the situation was bad, but reason showed things were okay.

Or, will an article like this spur us on to make changes now, so that, like Elrich’s works, this is not the scenario that happens in the end?

A long, but thoughful read: Waiting for the lights to go out by Bryan Appleyard at the Sunday Times (UK).

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We all get spam. We also pay (indirectly) for people to do their best to stop spam before it reaches us (email filters).

Another company tried to do more, and strike back at those sending the spam by flood the spam sender’s server, but this “campaign of intimidation was followed by a sophisticated denial of service attack” against the spam busting company.

Is it even possible to get rid of spammers? Can anyone keep trying when spammers have much more money and resources at their disposal?

Start by reading more here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/17/blue_security_folds/

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The OpenDocument Format (ODF), a file format for office documents (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation), has been approved as an ISO standard. Press release

So what? This means that if you save your information in ODF, you will always have the ability to extract your information from the file. Programs comes and go, and with them go file formats. If a program no longer exists to open your ODF file, since the structure of the file is a freely available standard, you could write or have someone write a program to access the information.

A fellow volunteer on the OpenOffice.org users mailing list spoke about file formats that are kept secret or are copyrighted. In effect the company that controls the files format is saying:

“We don’t really own your house. Just the front door and all the keys.”

Please learn about ODF and the ODF Alliance and see who supports this openness.

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This writer says it better than I can, so I’m simply copying his text verbatim. For more, read the full article.

…Desktop Linux has matured so well that you could deploy it in a greenfields scenario, i.e, one where there were no computers used previously, and the users would take to it as quickly as they would acclimatise to Windows.

That doesn’t mean that migrating to Linux is a quick or painless process, however. Unfortunately, Windows is an extremely difficult platform to move away from. This has nothing to do with the qualities or inherent capabilities of Linux mind you. Migrating from Windows to the Mac would be about as painful. And the Mac is considered to be the most polished and easiest to use of desktops.

…Due to the reality that Windows ships with so little functional software, you need to acquire an awful lot of software – office suites, graphics suites, calendaring, educational, development, technical, specialist business software and more. With few exceptions, most of that software you buy for your Windows PC is in reality only available on Windows. Certainly, almost all of the Microsoft-published software is only available for Windows. This is an example of Application Programming Interface (API) lock-in. That is, lock-in which occurs when software vendors don’t write portable code, but lock their application development to a single (or small cadre) of operating system platforms and programming libraries.

However, there is software available that is cross platform, most of it from the Open Source community.

OpenOffice.org was designed to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office… Firefox is available on Windows, while Internet Explorer isn’t available on Linux. The Gimp is available on Windows, while none of Microsoft’s graphics apps are offered for Linux. Scribus, an excellent entry-level desktop publishing suite runs on Windows. MS Publisher doesn’t return the compliment for Linux. Apache? MySQL? PostreSQL? Sendmail? All run on Windows as well as on Linux. Microsoft’s IIS, MS SQL Server and Exchange, refuse to consider Linux. Programming languages? There are perhaps 50 open source interpreters and compilers which support Windows – not one of Microsoft’s supports Linux.

While Microsoft goes out of its way to curb your every opportunity to migrate away from Windows, the open source community makes every effort to be platform agnostic and ecumenical, once again, giving you as a user, control.

So now what? Try out some of the excellent open source cross platform programs. Once you are familiar with them, if you want to switch to Linux, you would have no problem using it, plus gaining advantages of security and stability!

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