Clippings for today:
- Robert Scoble name drops Chris Pirillo (in the same way I’m name-dropping Scoble) and Pirillo puts him onto various cool WordPress plugins, including a Video comment plugin.
- Scoble also points out that the fuss we make of various things (like Rocketboom) is worth keeping in perspective. It turns out that a program director on XBox Live (a Microsoft broadcast) is creating a storm and no one knows about it (well, at least in our part of the blogosphere, anyway). The podcast is as popular as Rocketboom and his blog gets 300-500 comments a day. That’s a lotta traffic!
- Kathy Sierra ponders why some people and products get The Nod and some don’t. Like, for instance, why one t-shirt will get a ‘cool factor’ nod of recognition and another t-shirt won’t. Why one particular laptop will get you The Nod and another won’t. As Kathy points out, when we give each other The Nod it’s not because of the thing we have in common, it’s what having that thing says about us. The Nod is one way for ingroup/outgroup derogation to subtly occur — a peer to peer recognition that we are smarter, more risk-taking, more indie, been at the leading edge longer than others. Kathy then goes on to espouse seventeen different attributes that earn The Nod — does your product or service have any of them and if so what are you going to do about it? As usual, the comments are sometimes as insightful as Kathy’s posts
- My man Jenkins reports on an astounding, shocking and deeply worrying statistic recently reported: that 46% of professional business communicators think that responding to comments and criticisms about their company, products and/or services is ‘not their job’. Goodness gracious — if it’s not their job, then do they really expect some 17 year old office junior, lumbered with photocopying, getting the lunches and running the company blog, to be able to give credible answers on behalf of the company?
- An interesting study suggests systemic cultural differences in the elaboration of social information. Eh? It means that Westerners communicate differently than East Asians (and not just the ‘mother tongue’ language used). The implications are that we westerners use certain modes of language to convey meaning and predict behaviour and outcomes, East Asians a different mode. It will be interesting to see where the studies lead, especially as the blogosphere is becoming less and less linguistically and ideologically western dominated
- Research also suggests that our western idea that ‘plump’ people are more jolly than thinner people is nonsense. Obesity is strongly linked with depression and other mood disorders. Important to know if you are involved in creative output and think that having lots of fat, smiling aunts and uncles and grandparents in your imagery will convey a sense of fun and good times. It might to thin people, but overweight people will continue to feel uncomfortable and cognitively dissonant (read: less likely to buy your product or service or recommend your company)
- Ron Shewchuk brings back a sense of ease at BetterComms Towers — we too believe that the ‘soft’ stuff has a role to play in employee newsletters, as do employee anniversary notices. Yes, give the largest focus to the ‘magic numbers’ that drive the business, but don’t forget the non-numbers ‘people’ stuff (within reason and bearing in mind your audience)
Enough for one post…
