Linked List: April 12, 2017

Wednesday, 12 April 2017

Burger King Launches Commercial That Triggers ‘OK Google’ 

Sapna Maheshwari, reporting for The New York Times:

A video from a Burger King marketing agency showed the plan in action: “You’re watching a 15-second Burger King ad, which is unfortunately not enough time to explain all the fresh ingredients in the Whopper sandwich,” the actor in the commercial said. “But I got an idea. O.K. Google, what is the Whopper burger?”

Prompted by the phrase “O.K. Google,” the Google Home device beside the TV in the video lit up, searched the phrase on Wikipedia and stated the ingredients.

But within hours of the ad’s release — and humorous edits to the Whopper Wikipedia page by mischievous users — tests from The Verge and BuzzFeed showed that the commercial had stopped activating the device.

Sort of a jackass move on Burger King’s part, but it was harmless, and it certainly got them a lot of publicity. I’m sure they expected Google to shut them down — what they wanted were all these news stories about the prank.

My question: If the commercial had used “Hey Siri” or “Alexa” instead of “OK Google”, how long would it have taken for Apple or Amazon to cut it off? And why didn’t they address Siri or Alexa?

Columbia Journalism Review: Walt Mossberg on the Future of the Tech Beat 

Walt Mossberg on the origins of his Personal Tech column for The Wall Street Journal back in 1991:

There were a bunch of computer columns in a lot of other newspapers, and certainly there were computer magazines, but these were all written by geeks for geeks. My pitch to The Journal was that I wanted to write a column that didn’t use a lot of jargon, that treated people with respect for their intelligence and that did two things. One, it helped people figure out how to make this journey into technology by telling them what was good and what was bad on the market, explaining when some new development happened what it meant, what it was, who it might be for. That was one of my goals. The other one was to the use the power of the platform and the voice that I would have in this column, because it was an opinion column in a way, was to push the industry to stop ignoring normal people and stop treating them like they were stupid. That was it. That was my idea, and it worked.

So true.

Don Rickles on The Tonight Show 

Speaking of late night talk show personalities passing away, I haven’t yet written anything about Don Rickles, who died last week. I just don’t know what to say. I fucking loved Don Rickles, and I loved the era of talk shows he embodied. I feel like he was the last person standing from the Carson era.

I blew most of the weekend digging into YouTube clips of Rickles on The Tonight Show. It’s a goldmine. Hours and hours of great bits. Seriously, if you liked Rickles and the old Tonight Show, just dig in. You’ll get lost quickly, and you’ll bust a gut.

A few of my very favorites:

Dorothy Mengering, David Letterman’s Mother, Dead at 95 

Daniel Kreps, writing for Rolling Stone:

Dorothy Mengering, David Letterman’s mother, or “Dave’s Mom” as she was known to Late Show audiences, “died peacefully” Tuesday at her home in Carmel, Indiana. She was 95.

Awful Announcing has some links to footage of her coverage of the Winter Olympics for The Late Show in 1994 through 2002. Classic stuff.