Why Do We Fear Witches ? We Should Fear Those Who Burned Them

Why Do We Fear Witches ? We Should Fear Those Who Burned Them. 

Y Do We Fear Witches We Should Those Who Burned Them

Alienist = Psychiatrist

I have a personality tick about words. I’ll look up interesting words in dictionaries to find out more about them.

alienist

Apple Dictionary

  • former term for psychiatrist.
  • mainly US a psychiatrist who assesses the competence of a defendant in a law court.

Websters 1913

Alienist \Al"ien*ist\, n. [F. ali[’e]niste.]

  • One who treats diseases of the mind. –Ed. Rev.

Apparently the root is French noun aliéniste from Latin for doctors who treat mental patients.

Outgoing Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer will likely get $186m payout | Technology | The Guardian

I find it difficult to believe that a single person’s contribution, out of tens of thousands people in a single team, is worth $386MM for only 5 years effort.

Yahoo’s CEO holds stock, stock options and restricted stock units worth a total of $186m, according to documents sent to shareholders about the Verizon deal. The payoff comes on top of roughly $200m that Mayer has already received in salary and bonuses over her five year tenure.

Personal enrichment at this scale is a serious problem for society as a whole because its a rollback to Victorian-era business & politics where the upper class had all the money and power.

Outgoing Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer will likely get $186m payout | Technology | The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/yahoo-marissa-mayer-payout-186-million

Before Standardised Time

Standards work sometimes:

Before time was standardized in the U.S. Page from an 1874 railway schedule

Source

via this Source

I Love Ad Blockers For Lots of Reasons

Things about web-based advertising that offend me:

  1. Speed - page load times for images, scripts, videos mean that site performance can be degraded by 400% or more. Bad on the desktop, really poor on the smartphone/ipad.
  2. Privacy - to make ads "relevant" or "better experience" means extracting targeting data about you. Pervasive monitoring is simply a matter of time to build a comprehensive profile of who, what and how you think, emote and care.
  3. Visual Turds - this pervasive profiling includes the sale of your data between entities. The desire to show you relevant content to keep you engaged means that companies exist to show you "relevant" content. These companies get paid to promote this relevant content and only if you read it to see more ads which pay for the service.

Promoted posts crap

I think this is a visual turd. How people can put this on their sites and expect to sustain an audience over time is beyond me.

  1. Paying for Bandwidth in Time & Money - I pay for the bandwidth consumed by these services, especially on mobile. The load times for large amounts of content and lag while my data is analysed and sold in online exchanges is substantial. Note that this sale happens while the page loads and can add seconds to the web content that you expect to see.

I also pay for bandwidth in money. Buying ever larger plans to but still reading the same 800 words articles.

  1. Content Distortion - the human brain is keyed to respond to certain social cues. Our brains evolved to use rapid recognition to "see food" and "notice threat" as a survival trait. SEO tricks likes "5 Reasons", "One big thing" and "you won't believe" work because of this.

The downside is that titles often drive the written content that follows. And the pictures which must be graphicaly intense - obvious, bloody, horrifying, sexualised or stereotypical. And over time, we become inoculated against it, driving ever more graphic depictions of violence, sex or social disorders.

Ad Blockers

I use Ghostery as my ad-blocker today - in combination with an outbound firewall for certain sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) that track you using share buttons on blog posts.

I have used, and donated to Ad-Block Plus in the past but it no longer works as well.

Mozilla’s Privacy Badger might work OK eventually but my tests showed it to be “gentle” and failed to block much.

ScienceShot: Want to Understand This Article? | Science/AAAS | News

With a new crop of speed-reading products on the market, psychologists decided to dig a bit more and uncovered a simple explanation for RSVP’s flaw: Every so often, we need to scan backward and reread for a better grasp of the material. Researchers demonstrated that need by presenting 40 college students with ambiguous, unpunctuated sentences "While the man drank the water that was clear and cold overflowed from the toilet” while following their subjects’ gaze with an eye-tracking camera.

I learned to speed read at University and it’s been a useful skill. Today I have two reading modes that I consciously engage - speed and normal modes. Speed for scanning content to pick up key concepts, normal for learning and research.

I’ve tried the speed reading apps but they didn’t seem to help. This might be the reason why.

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p>via ScienceShot: Want to Understand This Article? | Science/AAAS | News.

Done With Unicorns & Bacon

There are a very few themes & tropes that survive the test of time and Shakespeare got to most of them first. I think I first started with the Unicorn theme in my writing at the peak of the marketing hype for Cisco UCS in mid-2009 when the “social media evangelists” of the day (all since moved on) breathlessly told me that UCS did all of this “stuff” with a fancy network adapter, a few overdue and obvious BIOS enhancements and so much more.

Since then:

  • I've been "saddling up my unicorn" on the podcast to talk about vendor values,
  • the term Unicorn Bacon to describe the highly unlikely or hard to use
  • we used Unicorn Tears to describe ordinary  features built onto an existing product that are massively over-hyped.
  • Unicorn sightings as a metaphor for vendor promises and late delivery
  • My comment at TechFieldDay 1  in 2009 was "bathing an x86 motherboard with Unicorn Tears doesn't make it exceptional".

The concept of unicorns in IT Marketing has been around for a long time and it's time to die.

Equally, bacon has been a recurring meme. I guess I’ve participated in the bacon meme at some point but it doesn’t seem funny anymore. 

New leaf then. I’m ditching Unicorns and Bacon. Time to find new memes.

Suggestions ?

Response: The Internet Killed the Traditional Marketer & New Influencers

I’m not a big fan of what passes for marketing as perpetrated by incumbent technology companies. It’s tone deaf & consistently irrelevant to me. Many others have shared similar opinions. As a “new media influencer” (I just made that up. Yes, I hate myself) I have a few points to make following a blog post from Lisa Caywood highlighting that gap between mass broadcast and point publishing (i.e. blogs, podcasts, SoMe). 

The Internet democratized and sped up publishing, and in so doing swept the rug out from under the codified institutional authorities: newspapers, government spokespeople, industry pundits of various types. Now any schmoe can research and opine; independent, authoritative sources of information about a product or company are suddenly far more numerous and ever-proliferating–which is very hard to manage scalably from a traditional PR perspective–and at the same time they’re very easy for consumers to find, and they’re generally more trusted sources than the corporations themselves.

Rant: The Internet Killed the Traditional Marketer | The Borg Queen.

New Influencers

I think that a possible mindset can be summarised by “marketing where your customers are”. For technology companies, the Internet has changed where & how your customers see your message. While established media is and will remain some percentage of total communication a larger percentage of decision initiators & ’new influencers’ are consuming newer forms of media. Therefore, you need to add new tools/choices to your marketing mix to extend into the mediums of twitter,blogs & podcasts and, more widely, the Internet.This will require some fortitude to develop new metrics and comprehension of a significant process shift.

Most people agree that the existing three-point model of “AR, PR, Marketing” is being disrupted but rarely agree on what model replaces it. As a consumer of all three modes of marketing, I can assure you that none of the old models work well. What would work is a new marketing role based around Influencer Relations or “IR” if you will. You need a process to engage with the ’new influencers’ that is relevant to them and would be drawn from the AR/PR team which should be undergoing resizing (aka downsizing) anyway to match their changing/shrinking influence. 

Now you have five facets of vendor marketing - AR, IR, PR, “Demand Gen” and ’everything else’ Marketing i.e. trade shows, etc.

People are Finite

Autosave-File vom d-lab2/3 der AgfaPhoto GmbH

There are two ideas that I would like to highlight to corporate marketers.

The number of  ’new influencers’ is somewhat limited and probably a similar number to what the Analyst Relations teams manage already. There is some amount of rotation of ’new influencers’ in the same way that analysts come & go. And the quality of each individual varies but this is similar to your average group of “industry analysts”. The mechanics of AR & IR are functionally identical while the delivery is significantly different.

New Influencers have limited time or attention. I have found that industry or financial analysts have much more time to receive briefings. Comparatively, New Influencers need fewer resources, less time but require marketers to do new things.

Possible Habits of IR.  New Influencers have limited time but high levels of skill/training/expertise. Most individuals are influencing in their spare time or as a hobby. Unlike industry analysts, they are real practitioners who have latest skills and directly involved in day-to-day product consumption. Many shibboleths are extinct in this domain. Executives have little influence & rarely impress. Product & technology is the focus. Briefings must be short, targeted and cut to a core message. Unlike financial analysts, there are few legal limitations and no disclaimers that limit the discussion. Industry analysts are conscious of their ‘relationship’ and careful not to offend the company that is briefing them in case it prevents revenue. As a result, they are patient about overly long briefings or off topic content.

IR briefings should be short, technical and delivered by technology leaders who can communicate. Preferably someone who also has a SoMe profile and defined media persona.

Marketing professionals find it confusing that the old/existing methods will continue to work for some portion of the market and have missed the rise of Activist Customers/New Influencers. If you can't see this, I can't help you.

Example of Influence: Consider that I recently presented a 3-hour tutorial session to 200 people at Interop on Data Centre Design / Strategy for the next 10 years. How many people did I influence ? What is the quality of those attendees as potential leads for your company ? And did corporate marketing influence my content and presentations ?

As a sedulous digital native, I get my sources far from the traditional ‘information well’. A company doing ‘wall paper ads’ at airports or even Flipboard banners doesn’t understand the difference between exposure and influence which leads to ridicule.

When will corporate marketeers perpetrate acts of influence that are relevant to me & my peers ?

(With apologies to John Troyer for hijacking “perpetration of marketing acts” for this article. )