I couldn’t resist
March 9th, 2009
Interview With an Actual Blogger
March 9th, 2009There’s frequently a long delay between posts on this blog. This is because I like to take the time to get things right. I bet you didn’t know that I’d been working on that last Kit Kat review for nineteen months; it started life as a 505-page epic crime thriller , but after an extensive editorial review process the board ultimately decided that its current format and length would be most appropriate. Frequently I’ll spent up to a month in a sensory deprivation tank, ruminating painstakingly on the topic of my missive to you, my single reader (thanks!)
I had been working under the assumption that such a level of care would guarantee me a place in internet lore — if not now, then at least posthumously. In 2079, when our children’s children are kitesurfing the 7-dimensional neural holoweb, they’ll say: “Remember that guy in the naughts? I think he wrote a few blog posts or something.” Or maybe not. As it turns out, my obscurity may be a ticket to nothing more than obscurity. I came upon this realization through a recent meeting with Hans Aardensen, blogger extraordinaire and inventor of the up-and-coming outernet. Hans reminded me that most famous writers are famous for actually writing, and I reminded him that he was a poopyhead. He challenged me to write a blog post right at that moment, which is actually what I’m doing now. Yes, this is all happening exactly at the same time you’re reading it. Or, wait — maybe not, sometimes time confuses me.
DF: So, Hans, is this basically the idea?
HA: Yes, pretty much. The trick is to not think too much. Thinking is for lazy-goers and nowhere-getters. Scientists have recently shown that the “best before” date for a thought is inversely proportional to the number of thoughts that you’ve already had in your life. So if you’ve been having a lot of thoughts and writing them down pretty quickly, then you’re not going quick enough! If you go by the optimal thought-to-output ratio, then ideally you should be finished writing slightly before the thought first occurs to you.
DF: Something like this?
HA: Not good enough! Faster! Better!
DF: Canteloupe!
HA: That’s more like it.
DF: Maybe you could tell us a little about your own history of blogging and your path to success?
HA: Well, I blog about a number of things, and that’s always been the case. My first blog was actually on a geocities page back in 1996. So as far as I can tell I actually invented the blog. I started it because I was engaged in this war with a local restauranteur who had violated local waste disposal bylaws. It was then that I realized what an amazing tool a blog can be for influencing the thoughts of “normal” people — you know, the kind of people who experience deadlock in the cereal aisle. It doesn’t matter, they’ll all the same. Scientists have recently shown that Cocoa Puffs are the exact same cereal as all commercial brands of premixed muesli.
DF: But these days you’re more of a social web commentator, right?
HA: Amongst other things. I also dabble a bunch of in general technology, and a little in politics. Occasionally all three overlap, like when Rush Limbaugh’s cameraphone misfired and uploaded a picture of his swollen penis to Facebook. The “social web” is a very broad topic, however. I’m interested in things like privacy, communication, collaboration, and also, you know, porn.
DF: What’s the connection between porn and the social web?
HA: See, this is really interesting. You know how physicists are constantly discovering all sorts of things about the universe that defy conventional human understanding? It’s like that famous light hole experiment. If you cut two holes in a wall, and shine light through them and measure each photon, they appear on the other side as photons. But if you don’t measure them, they appear as waves. Similarly, if you post a Twitter update to an account with no followers, it will turn into a link to fox/velociraptor fetish porn. We believe that somewhere at a quantum level, all social media is directly connected to furrydom in a way we can’t quite grasp with our primitive brains.
DF: What blogs do you like to read?
HA: I don’t read any blogs. As someone who blogs quite extensively I know better than that. However I do comment on them.
DF: How do you manage that?
HA: Well, summarize a hypothetical blog post for me, and I’ll show you.
DF: Um, okay. Media companies have largely missed the boat when it comes to the web… they still think of it as a broadcast medium, whereas many-to-many communication is actually a game-changer.
HA: Great post, Jim. Not sure about the boat, but the broadcast is definitely a good way to examine the situation. Of course, now Twitter is changing everything! Check out my own post on the topic. Link to unrelated post.
DF: Second Life failed to fully capitalize on the hype it received because the common user is fundamentally uninterested in engaging with a complex virtual world.
HA: Interesting post, Sally. In my experience the common user enjoys quite a bit of hype, even though virtual worlds are increasingly uninteresting. Of course, now Twitter is changing everything! Check out my own post on the topic. Link to unrelated post.
DF: People still think about privacy in terms of protection from Big Brother or Little Sister, but with things like Facebook it seems that the issue is protecting yourself from intrusions not by institutions, but by other users.
HA: Okay, that sounded like a coherent thought. We talked about this. Faster! Better!
DF: Friendfeed is the new Myspace!
HA: Anne, I think you raise an excellent point. Given the recession and the increase in hungry friends, Friendfeed is bound to increase in popularity. Check out my own post on the topic.
DF: Doesn’t the emphasis on currency and rapidity indicate a scarcity of truth, though? I mean, if you write as fast as you think, isn’t that going to mean a lot of opinions that are poorly thought through, and just plain wrong?
HA: Look, truth is as overrated as it is meaningless. I mean, we’ve been living in postmodernity for what, 200 years now? I think Andy Warhol ended the debate when he did that painting about the pipe. Any opinion you can possibly have will be the truth for somebody, somewhere. I can write a post arguing that the moon is a collective hallucination, and I’ll get at least 5 commentors agreeing with me. Besides, do you want to be remembered for being right, or being popular? The correct answer is popular, because if you’re not popular, noone is going to remember you enough to remember that you’re right. So, in effect, truth is self-defeating. If truth were an animal, it would be one of those lizards that died out in the cretaceous because its razor sharp tail had a habit of accidentally slitting its throat.
DF: What if you’re not good at that style of writing, though?
HA: McDonald’s is always hiring.
DF: Well, thanks for your time, Hans. This has been really helpful. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
HA: My pleasure. Just don’t think too hard.
Revenge of Kit Kat
February 5th, 2009(more Tuna Cupcake nonsense)
Chocolate Overload. What can I say? What can you possibly say about a chocolate bar that has entitled itself thus? There isn’t really any wiggle room here. There isn’t space for technicalities or loopholes. The verdict has been passed and there will be no appeal. Chocolate Overload is full of chocolate. It is overloaded with chocolate. If there were more chocolate, it would achieve some sort of transcendent status, some sort of meta-chocolate state, where chocolate itself actually ceases to have meaning. Did I mention it has chocolate?
Do you like chocolate? If you are reading a review about a Kit Kat I suspect that you do. Would you like to eat chocolate? Again I feel can safely answer yes. Would you like to eat highly condensed chocolate, with varying textures—layers of different sorts of chocolate, but ultimately just basically a whole fuckload of chocolate? What I’m basically trying to say is that writing a review about the Chocolate Overload Kit Kat is like writing a review about Jesus. Either you feel it or you don’t. If you follow a different sort of faith—say, you believe that the messiah is embodied by strawberry, or caramel—there is simply not anything for you here.
This is good, actually, because it leaves me a bit of room to call Nestle out on their whole Kit Kat agenda. Last time I wrote jokingly about dubious Kit Kat flavours, but as it turns out I was not far off from the truth. Research has revealed varieties that are not merely amusing, but will actually make you question your reality: Rock salt? Beans? Corn?
You might think that Nestle has a truly disturbing corporate culture if it thinks these are roads worth going down: a pit of imbred insanity, sisters marrying each other and adopting a baked potato to raise as a child, etc. But the real punchline is that all these esoteric flavours taste exactly the same. There is a joke, here, and the joke is on all of us—we, who believed in the multifarious possibilities of an unbridled palette. Somewhere, a supercomputer robot designed to crush dreams is sitting in a corner office and laughing maniacally.
Yes, I am calling you out Nestle. The time has come to answer for your crimes. Bonbons at dawn.
Stop Blogging, Start Blogging
January 15th, 2009A man recently came to see me in my office. This man was a marketing guru. He had a hat, and in this hat was concealed 1.4 kilograms of pure web marketing expertise.
“Stop blogging,” he said, “and start blogging.” I nodded gravely. His sage advice passed into me like a seagull flying into a jet engine. The implication of these words was clear: If you’re going to leverage your presence in the Web 3.0 datasphere, you’ve got to make the most of your social brand differentiators. This means leaving the old thinking at the door — no longer is it merely about creating value, you now need to link that value to a framework of brand relationship using the latest and greatest digital tools. The challenge thus becomes implementing fully realized multi-dimensional ultra-interactive mega-relationship between a brand and its customer base using numerically conceptual end-to-end space media. With a bit of effort you soon discover predictable business results in your pants. “Stop blogging and start blogging” is code for the key paradigm of web marketing in 2009: stop doing whatever you’re doing, and start doing something else.
But how to facilitate such a profound shift in thinking? After all, your CMO is just learning what Friendster is. Here are some tips for generating results:
Clear Communication. Clearly communicating with your team is essential for ensuring the sustainability of your initiative. Say, for instance, that you would like a tuna sandwich for lunch, but instead you ask for a chicken salad sandwich. In all likelihood, you will get the chicken salad sandwich, which is not what you wanted, now is it? Now consider the outcome if you had asked for the tuna sandwich instead; I think we can agree that you would be much more likely to get the tuna sandwich, and then you would have a better lunchtime experience, and more capable of making key decisions throughout the rest of the day, such as: what will you have for lunch tomorrow? This simple example really exemplifies how crucial it is to use clear, comprehensive language.
Identify Your Stakeholders Early On. It really is essential to have a very clear picture of your stakeholders from an early stage of the project. This picture may be a photograph, or it may be an artist’s rendering — perhaps a sketch or a painting, an cutting-edge 3D model if you work for one of the larger firms. Regardless, you will be able to clearly recognize the stakeholders by the sharpened sticks they will be holdings: these are their stakes. The stakes may be wood, metal, or more recently, a mylar/kevlar combination. Either way, they generally stand out. Make careful note of the size and shape of these stakes, as well as the expressions on the holders’ faces — do they look like they’re happy? Like it’s lunchtime? Like they need to pee? These observations will form the linchpin of your Stage 2 delivery platform strategy.
Activate Your Powerups. Let’s face it, you’ve been keeping those things in your inventory for ages. What are you waiting for? Is Michael Arrington going to descend from a UFO and demand you justify your professional existence in 10 words while battling you to the death in a swordfight? You’ve probably got like 20 Ultrapacks just lying around, that’s like +10 Persuasion for 79 rounds. If you just use them, you’ll find your task significantly easier.
Above all, the trick to success on the web is learning to avoid targeting problem areas in ad-hoc manner. You need to start with a sturdy foundation, like a block of cement. If you put your website on top of a 50kg block of cement, nobody is going to mess with you.
Kit Kat Doom
November 12th, 2008(x-posted from Tuna Cupcake)
When Kate asked me if I wanted to a review a new Kit Kat flavour, I was initially suspicious. I know that Kate is quite fond of her esoteric Kit Kats, particularly when they’re in limited supply. Plus, having followed her long, tortuous journey through the warped world of Nestle’s imagination, I’ve long been suspicious of an eventual decline into the “regrettable” range of flavours: Decaying Flesh, Childhood Trauma, Poison. Fortunately, it just turns out we’re dealing with Cookie Dough here.
Unfortunately, things went a little awry before I had a chance to dig in. You see, the “first” half of the bar was purloined by Kate before I could sink my teeth into it. You know the half I’m talking about: the half with the initial bite, the bite that is pure chocolate. The bite that cleanses the palette, sets the chocolaty baseline in advance of the complex flavours to follow. Without this half, a meaningful reading of the complete experience is difficult to fathom. For all I know, half of the Cookie Dough chocolate bar could be covered in moss, or filled with rotten teeth. Maybe that sort of thing is big in Asia. You’ll have to ask Kate. In the meantime, all I can do is my best.
My initial impressions went something like this: There’s not much going on here. This is certainly one of the more conservative Kit Kat offerings; it’s quite a ways from the explicit, unabashed flavour of Mint or Strawberry. That doesn’t make it bad, mind you. When you think about it, Cookie Dough flavour is perhaps the logical zenith of the core Kit Kat trajectory; the Kit Kat, after all, is largely a cookie. So if you add more cookie-ness, are you really doing something new? Or are you just lifting the traditional offering to a new level? As a fan of the fundamental Kit Kat prototype, I’m not against this way of doing things. I’m enjoying this Cookie Dough Kit Kat — it feels like coming home to an old friend, who has just purchased a slightly larger house with a pool. It’s nice to hang out with my friend, but it’s even better when we have a pool.
However, upon passing the first draft of this review to my editor (Kate), she stormed over to my desk and demanded to know what kind of hack food journalist considers caramel and cookie dough uninteresting. I informed that all Kit Kats had caramel, and she reminded me that I’m used to eating Kit Kat Caramels. It turns out she was right; and this is an important distinction. The Kit Kat Caramel represents a significant improvement over the basic Kit Kat model — in fact, may represent a local peak in candy bar evolution. To say that the Cookie Dough Kit Kat, then, is a minor improvement on the Caramel, is to say that it is a minor improvement on near-perfection.
There is, of course, the creaminess to speak of. The “cookie dough” in question here isn’t so much dough, as a dubious paste. To some, this may be off-putting. However, if you’re any sort of Kit Kat aficionado, you’re probably used to these sorts of shenanigans. The idea isn’t to focus on the individual textures, but on the gestalt; and the creaminess is, for the most part, lost in the familiar crunch of wafer and chocolate. You can tell it’s there, but it doesn’t interfere. It’s nice, but not *too* nice, like a creepy uncle.
As you can probably tell, I would recommend this chocolate bar. It’s nothing revolutionary. But if you want something revolutionary, why are you eating a Kit Kat? Kit Kats are about minor but solid variations on a consistent, underlying theme. In this respect, the Cookie Dough Kit Kat succeeds marvelously. I give it 8.5 Kits out of a possible Kat.
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