Bowblog

Is flickr going downmarket?

I love flickr. Every day something new. A proper source of inspiration. I’m a very loyal customer. But dig in and the place is turning into a branch of Athena (British poster shop famous for that poster of the tennis player scratching her arse). Photos ranked by ‘interestingness‘ are frankly cheesy: puppies, semi-nude girlfriends.

I guess what’s happening is that flickr‘s audience is spreading out, losing differentiation, getting less geeky/exclusive as it grows (thanks to Yahoo!). This can’t be a bad thing but it must affect the brand, potentially destructively. Like when working class women started wearing Burberry and the brand practically imploded. I wonder if flickr’s clever, streetwise management are ready for an influx of chavs.

Pinochet and The Partridge Family

Augusto Pinochet, 1915-2006
The thing about Pinochet is that he’s a kind of retro dictator. When I was growing up he was the man: the dictator’s dictator. A proper big-hat, braided demagogue. Funded and armed by the CIA, overthrowing and murdering a left wing icon (Allende), snuffing out practically the only democratic promise on the whole continent (how different things look now) and killing 30,000 democrats and radicals. Pinochet was a proxy for the evil machine of American-sponsored anti-democratic corporate imperialism. He was the preening mascot of a very bad time for democrats and progressives.

From here, though, from the other end of the very long telescope of the last twenty years, he looks almost quaint: another funny Seventies figure, like the Partridge Family. Two decades of escalating horror in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Baghdad, Chechnya (and lower Manhattan, London and Madrid) provide a grim lens through which to view Pinochet’s unattractive achievements. Events thirty years ago and more are difficult to keep in focus anyway but, alongside a rollcall of scumbags that includes Milosevic and Bin Laden and the Burmese generals and the nameless Rwandan slaughterers and hundreds of suicidal nihilists in exploding vests, he begins to look like a comic book villain in a silly hat.

Non-personalities hijack event intended for personalities… again

Zara Phillips, Darren Clarke and Beth Tweddle with their Sports Personality of the Year trophies
More evidence that you don’t actually need a personality to be eligible for the premier prize in British sport. Three blocks of wood (one with way too much hair gel) walked away with the top prizes at the BBC’s increasingly silly annual non-prize last night.

The British media and the public want so badly for these people to have personalities, it’s as if we’re all willing them to acquire one: “Come on Zara! You can do it! Be… you know… something… ANYTHING! You don’t have to just stand there!”

The BBC and its sponsors have built a vast and pointless superstructure of glitz and lights and hairspray around a perfect vacuum – a few dozen humourless sporting monomaniacs who wouldn’t know a personality if it mugged them during another punishing pre-dawn training session. Next year they’re going to honour actual blocks of wood.

Stupid Bush, beligerant Chavez

Venezuela could soon be the largest producer of oil in the world and will almost certainly be sitting on the largest known reserves. The Chavez experiment is to translate epic natural wealth (already producing $120B of income per year) into broad-based national prosperity. No democracy has ever managed this (Norway?). No country has ever turned wealth in natural resources into universal wellbeing (theocratic dictatorships don’t count).

What’s frustrating about the mutual US-Venezuela hate-fest is that both nations are missing a huge opportunity to improve the outcome of the experiment. Friendly (or at least non-hostile) relations could turn Chavez’ plan to extend the most basic benefits of oil prosperity to millions of Venezuelans into reality. But Bush won’t tolerate a commie in his back yard and Chavez can’t seem to set aside his rabble rousing and tub thumping. As a result, inward investment is choked off, regional solidarity is reduced to a self-limiting club of left-wing governments and an opportunity to extend prosperity and peace across the whole of Central and South America is thrown away

I wonder if Democratic control of congress will result in a more accepting stance towards America’s upstart neighbours? Looks like Chavez’s big third term victory won’t bring about any moderation to his rhetoric either. That’s a pity. Result: another stupid international deadlock where agreement and progress would be quite possible (I also find myself wondering if things might have been different if these countries had been led by women).

Stupid Threshers

It turns out the Thresher promotion I wrote about yesterday was a fake viral campaign and, of course, it also turns out that everyone already knew so my enthusiastic Poirot-style revelation wasn’t quite so clever.

Anyway, the whole thing is so wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to begin. I think I’ll just say that it’s not OK to deceive your customers into spending money in your shop and pretending that a quite deliberate promotional campaign was an accident is not going to do more than win you a short term sales boost (a pretty big one, I’ll acknowledge). Sounds like a scam to me. Stupid Threshers.

Is the Thresher discount coupon a fake viral campaign?

Let’s get this straight. The Threshers coupon is a con. Or at least a clever pre-Christmas promotion. Let me sketch the background for you foreigners (although I suppose the thing has probably been downloaded on every continent by now – as we speak, no doubt, there are people wandering the streets of Lusaka and Aukland and Santiago looking for a branch of Threshers).

Here in Britain there’s a chain of off-licenses (liquor stores) called Thresher. A couple of years ago they ran a one-month 3-for-2 promotion (buy two bottles of anything, get a third free). It was a huge hit so the management extended it indefinitely. This, obviously, required a pretty chunky upward adjustment to the store’s per-bottle prices and Thresher is now a very expensive place to buy a single bottle of wine but the effect on the business has been substantial. Thresher is the number 1 UK non-supermarket booze chain, sales are booming and the brand stands out from the mass of crappy High Street wine shops.

So, this week, Thresher accidentally released a ‘staff only’ (or ‘supplier only’ or ‘friends only’, depending who you believe) print-out-and-present 40% discount coupon onto the Internet. The chain estimates 800,000 downloads already and claims to be ‘worried’ about the effect of such a biblical flood of coupons on profits before Christmas. Of course, this is all classic retail bullshit. Even with a per-bottle discount of 40% the store will certainly still make a net profit on all those new sales and, of course, the boost to raw volume will do the chain’s December numbers no harm at all. Note also, that the 40% discount cancels the 3-for2 promotion (you can’t have both) so there’s a good chance that this rogue coupon will actually boost profit for its ten day duration.

I’m genuinely impressed: a 40% discount coupon would have been quite a good idea for the first ten days of boozy December but a highly viral, slightly naughty (“hey, did you hear about that Threshers coupon?”) ‘accidental’ campaign is cleverer still.

In my local branch of Thresher this evening, the buzz was tangible. Empty shelves and lots of excited punters snatching the otherwise-overpriced booze from the shelves. We all, clearly, felt rather pleased with ourselves. We were participating in something cool and contemporary and we felt really canny to be slapping down our ‘dodgy’ coupons. I suppose it’s win-win (I did get a nice discount) but, ultimately those empty shelves mean only one thing: big profits for Thresher. Clever Thresher.

What am I on about?

That last entry was a bit obscure wasn’t it? What I mean is that out there, in the world, there’s an actually existing cyberspace which was invented (or at least imagined) quite a long time ago now by people like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and that now those same people are out there actually contributing to the actually existing thing itself (by doing things like uploading photographs of burning rubbish bins in Belgrade). Which is mind blowing really. If you ask me.

trashfire

In Belgrade the rubbish bins are burning. I know this because Bruce Sterling has been taking photographs of them. Blimey. Kind of sends the mind reeling doesn’t it? Co-inventor of many imagined cyberspaces casually co-creates actual existing cyberspace using his little Minolta digital camera…

21st Century Communications

So it turns out there’s been something wrong with my email. For a couple of weeks about half of my inbound mail has been routed to a trench in the middle of the North Atlantic. Fish have been reading it. Something to do with my dns – and all my own fault apparently. Anyway, I think it’s OK now so you should write to me again if you were expecting a reply (like you were writing to me in the first place).

By the way, I’ll take this opportunity to tell you that I just heard a trailer for a programme about climate change on Radio 4. The presenter signed off like so: “we’re at the very precipice of a runaway train”. Cool.