If this wasn’t true, you wouldn’t believe it.
I needed to store a bunch of stuff as I move my office (the new office, no surprise, is months behind schedule). I went to one of the handy new storage companies (Public Storage), answered all their questions and got this response (click to make it bigger).
That’s right. They don’t service my area. Their solution? I should move, then try again.
“Honey, we need to move to Florida!”
“Why?”
“Because we can’t store our stuff here in New York.”
“Oh.”
To be fair, I called the number they asked me to call. I spoke to Cheryl, who was very friendly. I read her the message. She said, “Oh no, we don’t serve your area.”
“Why,” I asked, “did they want me to call you then?”
And her answer, which is priceless, was, “So we could officially tell you.”
October 19, 2004
A classic article worth a look: ChangeThis :: The Talent Myth
akiba.sorobangeeks.com via Gizmodo.
Yes, these are USB flash memory units.
Dave Lennox is the guy whose voice answers the call handling center at Lennox. He also appears in their ads. “Hi! I’m Dave Lennox!”
Dave always talks in exclamation points.
I just discovered that Dave Lennox died more than fifty years ago. That he’s an actor. That there is no Dave Lennox.
Contact Us :: Lennox International Appropos to my previous post, the number you call to reach Lennox (only a couple clicks down on their site) starts with the eponymous Mr. Lennox answering your call. Very quickly, though, you discover that this isn’t really Lennox, it’s an outsourced call center that can only do one thing… tell you where your nearest dealer is.
So, first they lie about Dave, then they lie about contacting them.
I still don’t get it. Maybe one day I will.
October 14, 2004
You’ll hear more about this from me closer to January once the embargo is lifted, but I think you should pre-order this right now: Amazon.com: Books: Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell (he of Tipping Point fame) has done it again.
This is a subtle, powerful book about first impressions and the way we make decisions. It completely changed my thinking about a number of things and inspired the new book I’m playing with.
I know it’s unusual for me to come right out and endorse a book like this, but Malcolm’s latest is that good.
TravelBlog | Travel Journals, Travel Blogs, Diaries and Photos
Thanks to Andrew Rupert for the ping.
Things are happening in this medium a lot faster than things changed after they invented that printing press thing.
October 12, 2004
Yes, that’s exactly what she said.
I was at a conference the other day, and when I recommended a book to someone, panic flashed across her face.
As media gets ever more nichey (is nichey a word? If it isn’t, it should be), it’s now easy to expose yourself only to messages you already agree with, to see things you already know.
It’s comforting to be reminded that you’re right. It’s good for your ego to discover that you already know everything that’s important so you can go back to doing what you were doing yesterday.
But where’s the growth in that?
There’s more information on more topics on blogs and in the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia than has ever been published before in the history of the planet.
And yet, with all this data, most of us resist the opportunity to obtain information. We don’t want to be confused or stressed or put in a position where we might, just maybe, make a mistake.
What a shame.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Internet keeps bringing this pair of issues to our attention, and they seem to go together more and more often.
Sinclair Broadcasting wants to use the spectrum (our spectrum) to broadcast political messages through its company-owned stations. Once again, regardless of our politics, I think we need to ask the following question:
“Whose spectrum is it?”
Computers have completely reinvented what we can do with a slice of spectrum. In the bandwidth your local CBS-affiliate uses, we could easily broadcast dozens of channels of digital information. We could create free internet access around the country. But it sits there, stuck, because the FCC licensed that spectrum years ago. Just because someone has built a business around it, should it stay that way?
What if we decided to use the spectrum in ways that benefitted everyone, not just media companies? For example, why not require that anyone broadcasting on the public airwaves devote one hour every night in prime time to public interest programming and commercials? With that much inventory, the cost of running for President could be driven close to zero (all your media buys would be free).
Which brings us around again to copyright, which always manages to get me in trouble. Whose copyright is it? What’s it for?
Why not have patents last 100 years? They don’t because we know that allowing a patent to go into the public domain makes it far easier for society to benefit… other inventions can be based on that first idea.
So why not make copyrights last for 5 years, not 100? A five year copyright would not dramatically decrease the incentive to make a movie or write a book, would it? Looking at my book sales, I can tell you that the vast majority of sales come in the first five years. Sure, JD Salinger would get hurt in the long run, but would that have kept him from writing Catcher in the Rye?
The purpose of copyright is simple: to encourage people to make stuff worth looking at and using. Not to protect the people who already wrote something. And CERTAINLY not to protect the companies that market movies or publish books.
Both cases are the same: our spectrum and our access to ideas are being held hostage by big companies who are dependent on the status quo. The ability of our culture to quickly evolve ideas and then to broadcast them to ever larger audiences is a fundamental building block of our success. Why do 98% of us sit around while big companies with no interest in us legislate against our interests?
Two quotes from page E1 of today’s New York Times:
“Sports Illustrated has designated the book “Friday Night Lights,” an account of a year the author spent in 1988 following a high school football team in Odessa, Tex., one of the top five sports titles ever, and called it the best book ever written about football–a verdict that’s hard to quarrel with unless you’re partial to Roy Blount Jr.’s “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load.”
“…the 1990 work is titled in part “Three Little Boys” in parentheses, preceded by a description of a sexual act.”
Is it just me, or is the (unedited/unprofessional) writing of blogs significantly clearer and more straightforward?
It’s a movement.
Viral & Buzz Marketing Association
Nice manifesto as well.
October 11, 2004
