Sony Electronics Blog:

The first is the annual Harris Interactive poll released this week ranking American’s choice for the “best brands.”  For the first time in eight years, Sony came in second place behind Coca-Cola. For the previous seven consecutive years, the company was ranked as the best.  And while I’d have liked to have held onto that No. 1 position for yet another year, I am still constantly impressed and very proud to work for a company that has a brand so well regarded by the American public.  Behind us in this poll of 2,372 people chosen to represent the demographics of the nation were such companies as Microsoft, Apple and Dell, along with Toyota, Ford, Kraft, Pepsi and Honda.

Must be the Microsoft version then…

…Office Open XML (OOXML) failed to gain approval in a vote by a sub-group of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), a standards body influential with the US government.

OOXML has strong support from Microsoft, and is a rival to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) favoured by open-source vendors and companies such as IBM. But while ODF has gained important acceptance from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), OOXML is still struggling to be seen as a truly open.

Microsoft can’t bring themselves to use ODF. Is it because it would show that they have little to bring to the table with the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems using it already? All in all, not very credible as part of their ‘openness’ drive.

Note: I have been using ODF based OpenOffice for over a year now and haven’t looked back.

An irony of our age is that, though everyone acknowledges consumers are
in control, marketers still believe they’re running the show, right
down to trying to plan for virality as any creative told to "just go
make a viral video" will lament. Virality is an outcome, not a channel
to be planned.
- Matthew Creamer in AdAge

Dan Santow of Word Wise has a highly relevant post on words over-used by PR and communications people. A candid admission prefaces the list:

The power of words comes, in part, from their meaning and from their
placement within sentences and phrases. It also comes from the
integrity with which they’re being used. In public relations,
advertising and marketing, we’re especially susceptible to latching
onto of-the-moment words and using them and using them and using
them until they’re used to death (their meaning and power dies). Half
the time we use these words it’s because we have no idea what the heck
we’re talking about in the first place.

Apropos, our company is the industry-leader in innovative utilisation of words, strategically leveraging their unique value proposition to uphold its position as the world-class communications solutions provider with unmatched, seamlessly integrated and robust best practice. Turnkey is out, revolutionary is in. Being proactive is the only way to be empowered. Let our highly-seasoned people who can turn the paradigm-shifting and the revolutionary into organic growth, facilitate your transition to the next-generation challenges. A win-win solution, surely.

RIP

hat tip Marc

Just thought that the world needed reminding…

… thanks to Hugh for being able to do that.

There are some great pictures of Oxford, from the last weekend. I spent last Sunday and Monday hanging out with Doc, Stephen and Alec before getting down to some VRM juicy goodness and hanging out with more groovy people. I will post both my photos as well as my notes from the VRM workshop as soon I can. I am now in New Jersey, where I am not the mistress of my time, to put it delicately. Not that I am complaining.

Also, will be moving this blog to WordPress in the next couple of days (many thanks to Alec for much needed assistance). I can’t wait for a cleaner, more streamlined look… and for not being on someone else’s hosting platform.

Ecogeek reports:

In the next 12 months, McDonald’s plans on creating enough fuel to power its 155 delivery vehicles while having enough fuel left over to sell into the public market. The fuel will be composed of 85% waste vegetable oil and 15% virgin rapeseed oil. So, while it will be 100% carbon neutral, it won’t be entirely waste oil.

It’s all very well training executives in communication with the media. Somehow I have a feeling that if the guy was allow to talk normally instead of using the pseudo-technical press-release talk, this might have been avoided.

However, Matthew Howe, Senior VP of McDonald’s UK was quoted saying: “As we get better at the refinement we will be able to remove virgin rape from the process”; a line which we sincerely hope never gets taken out of context. [emphasis mine]

Now please excuse me whilst I clean the tea from out of my keyboard.

William at Ideal Government nails it perfectly when he describes the new Microsoft UK public sector blog. He knows a thing or two about public sector technology, platforms and Microsoft’s fingers on the many pulses as he puts it. He couldn’t find the people behind the blog or a name attached to its voice such as it was. His conclusion…

Hope springs eternal that we may get a human voice with a name attached
to it, and some hot gossip from some of the best-informed people in the
business. When people in corporations find their voices it’s great -
what was it like to work for Lou Gerstner, Jerry Fishenden on almost
anything, raw, passionate stuff. But man, when their PR companies get
going I find myself woken up by the sound of my head hitting the desk.

There was a comment in the best British comedy tradition.

Well, I think it’s great that the UKGOVERNMENT has started blogging.
I had no idea that the UKGOVERNMENT worked for Microsoft. Glad to see
the UKGOVERNMENT has so much time to maintain a blog outside of running
the country and doing world stage stuff.

I wonder if UKGOVERNMENT also gets a £10k pa communications allowance to spend on his/her/their blog?

I have always been of the opinion that a company cannot have a blog, only people working for it can. So a blog without a person is like marriage without love, possible, done more often than we would like but doesn’t inspire, engage or attract anyone, including the people involved in it…

This is an excellent post dissecting the exact reason why I militate against the use anywhere online of the ‘corporate we’ that is found in press releases and in other corporate communications. And also about how not to get your audiences confused… after all there is but one audience and that’s all individuals online.

In all but the last sentence we is the personal pronoun of choice, and that we clearly refers to the company. Obviously, Google as a corporate entity cannot have an opinion,
but what is posted in an official corporate blog will understandably be
interpreted as noted and accepted by someone further up the ladder (and
it seems unlikely that there was no monitoring in Turner’s case).

Not understanding
blog stylistics is at least a part of Turner’s failure. She has applied
a language common in one context to a completely different and
inappropriate one and the result is a bit like someone telling a bad
joke aloud at a funeral.

Boing Boing has a great post about how to smuggle liquids onto an airplane.

All you need to do is surrender the bottle at the screening station, wait for the the TSA to throw it
away in an unguarded trash-barrel on the "secure" side, and then retrieve it from the trash.

The reason this "smuggling" technique works, of course, is that liquids aren’t dangerous.
Everyone knows this — even the TSA. That’s why they don’t guard the
barrel after they confiscate your wine, water, and salad-dressing. The
point of taking away your liquid isn’t to make airplanes safe, it’s to
simultaneously make you afraid (of terrorists with magic water-bombs)
and then make you feel safe (because the government is fighting off the
magic water-bombs). It’s what Bruce Schneier calls "security theater."

I fly to US every month and have become an expert on and a victim of all sorts of security theatre routines. One of the things that gives them away as theatre (apart from their obvious lack of common sense) is that they are inconsistent and vary from airport to airport and even from airline to airline – at one point Virgin suddenly introduced another security check at the gates. More delays and annoyance.

The only time I was ever impressed by a security check was when flying to Tel Aviv by El Al. They were polite but firm, questioning and a bit obstreperous. I had no problems as it was a straightforward business  trip and all was in order. I still remember how after the interview the security guy recommended that we see a Chagal exhibition in Jerusalem and reminded us that our client has an amazing modern art collection. Not a conversation you are likely to strike with Heathrow security people. Not saying it’s impossible but highly unlikely.

The difference is that El Al invests in security people and they are looking not for a terrorist, but for a weapon for a terrorist not for a weapon. Only if you turn this upside down, you can treat water as a deadly liquid that turns into explosives when it reaches an arbitrary size…

Note: last para corrected – that’ll teach me post late at night. Thanks for pointing out.

For my geek friends.

via Tim O’Reilly