Linked List: June 24, 2007

Sunday, 24 June 2007

Mark Pilgrim: ‘Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Federated Media Publishing Vice President Neil Chase’s Response to the “People-Ready” Ad Campaign’ ★

Neil Chase:

Welcome to the birth of conversational marketing.

Mark Pilgrim:

We’ve reinvented payola and given it five more syllables.

Follow Your Twitter ‘@’ Replies via a Feedreader ★

This doesn’t seem to be widely known, but it’s a great Twitter feature. If you use Twitter, you probably know that you can go to twitter.com/replies to see a list of “@yourusername” replies to your tweets — including those from people who follow you but whom you don’t follow. A better way to follow these replies is via an XML feed: twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss for RSS format, twitter.com/statuses/replies.atom for Atom format. Both feeds are protected by HTTP authentication; use your Twitter username and password to read them. (This “switch the .rss extension to .atom” trick works for all other Twitter feeds, too.)

Macworld: Aperture vs. Lightroom ★

Detailed overview of the strengths and weaknesses of both apps, by Rick LePage. This sort of expansive comparison is exactly the sort of thing Macworld does best. In the old days, Macworld published similar comparisons for rivalries like FreeHand/Illustrator and QuarkXPress/PageMaker whenever there were major updates. Just like in those cases, the truth is that Aperture and Lightroom are both good apps.

Fake Paul Thurrott ★

Fake Paul:

This long-winded T-shirt salesman needs to go back to work. Get a real job, hippie.

People-Ready Elephant ★

Tim Bray:

I think that there’s an elephant in this room: namely, that the Microsoft People-Ready marketing campaign is paralyzingly stupid and lame. Thus, a bunch of allegedly-intelligent allegedly-leading voices of the blogosphere suddenly singing in the chorus totally fails to pass the sniff test; in fact, it stinks to high heaven.

Here’s what I wrote the first time I saw an ad for Microsoft’s “People Ready” campaign:

What the hell does any of this even mean?

E.g., if “people make it happen” in a people-ready business, who or what makes it happen in non-people-ready businesses? Or is it not possible for “it” to happen in a non-people-ready business? I dare you to try to make this copy more devoid of actual meaning than it already is. If there’s any logic at all, it’s circular: that the people in a people-ready business are ready to build a people-ready business.

Pixar Regime Restoring Some Dignity to Disney ★

They sacked Sharon Morrill, who was responsible for the Disney animation division that spat out horrible direct-to-home-video “sequels”.

iTunes Now 3rd Largest Music Retailer in U.S. ★

iLounge:

iTunes now holds a 9.8% share of music purchases, ahead of fourth place Amazon.com at 6.7% and fifth place Target at 6.6%. Walmart remains the nation’s largest music retailer with a 15.8% share of the market, with Best Buy holding 13.8% for second place.