Day 253

Been a bit slow to jump on the US election bandwagon, but as it’s going to be some ride, there’s still plenty of time. Lots has already been written about the candidates, but with two woeful voting displays under the country’s belt, I’m going to start by asking the question – should every vote be equal?

In many people’s eyes, the right to an equal vote defines a democratic society, but I have to say that seems a little flawed to me. Yes, it’s important that a government is representative, accountable and all that good stuff, but shouldn’t a vote be something that you are obliged to exercise with care.

In the US primaries, two terms of complete incompetency seem to have brushed away a little voter apathy, but a few ticked ballot boxes once in a blue moon hardly constitute engagement in the political process. Not for one minute saying everyone should be studying politics and the merits of the different candidates in great detail, but surely if people had been a little more informed and engaged in the process the last two times round, the US and you could argue other parts of the world, wouldn’t be in the same position. 

It’s the sense of entitlement that really gets me. Even if a person knows nothing about the candidate’s policies, and is simply making their decision at the polling station based on the colour, sex or religion (more on this later) of a given candidate, they are entitled to vote and what’s more, it equal to a well thought-out and carefuly deliberated one. As my newfound Polish friend would say – If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he entitled to happiness?

Perhaps it’s about weighting them according to the knowledge and/or understanding of the voter. This would probably create a virtuous circle, as by giving people an incentive to learn what each candidate and party really stands for, more informed votes would be cast and in turn, better decisions made. Little chance of it ever happening, but hey, if the US election goes the wrong way again, maybe it’s a thought for the future. 

Food for thought

Recently discovered the work of a rather clever Polish gent who is considered one of the most influential aphorists on the 20th century. This guy certainly had a way with words and while I rambled on the importance of what’s not said last month, I thought this little collection really shows the power what lurks between the lines.

• The exit is usually where the entrance was. 
• He who limps is still walking.
• In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.
• The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.
• Even a glass eye can see its blindness.
• I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
• You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
• Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.
• Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
• No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
• All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.
• If you are not a psychiatrist, stay away from idiots. They are too stupid to pay a layman for his company.
• Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.
• The first condition of immortality is death.
• Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?

Wasting time?

One of my friends sent me a bunch of articles from the UK this week. So with a bit of time on my hands on Saturday afternoon, I decided to go enjoy the weather and read them in the park. The pick of the bunch was a piece by the FT’s excellent Michael Skapinker.

The article was about how we use our time and the importance of stepping back to reflect. Skapinker used the 45 minutes saved on the Eurostar from London to Paris, looks like they finally got the high-speed track installed on the English side, to point to a broader problem of having to make every minute count.

As he points out, this is nothing new, particularly in business, but it is important as it’s often assumed that focusing on making every minute count is somehow better, but is that really the case? To a certain extent the answer has to be yes. Hopping back on the journey analogy, my flight to England would certainly be “worse” if it suddenly became longer, but can that be applied more broadly?

I started to think about this and the very fact I was reading an article from a December issue of the FT that was cut out and sent 5,500 miles in the post. Now I don’t often receive articles in the post or anything else worth having for that matter (bills and mountains of junk mail make up 99 percent of all my post), as most of my friends send links via email, with two or three clicks of the mouse beating the good old letter on speed and efficiency every day of the week. But would I have stored up links to take them on my computer to the park? Doubtful, in fact it’s about as likely as Bush being able to point out the countries he’s visiting in Africa on a map. 

Making every minute count is really all about perspective then. Yes, in certain cases time is of the essence, but focusing on doing something every minute of every day rather than stepping back, taking time out and reflecting on the bigger picture is often the equivalent of donning a pair of blinkers. 

Searching for…

It’s not like search is anything new. From cavemen to spacemen, it has always been important and is part of everything from religion to science. It could even be said that basic search is what we’re doing when we don’t know what we’re doing. Deep hey.

 

The difference now is that its big business in it’s own right. Cometh the Internet, cometh the search engine and happy days for the bank managers of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. A three-year research project at Stanford University resulting in an industry goliath that made 4.2 billion dollars in profit last year. Not that that should be such a surprise, as the last time students at Stamford experimented with technology to search and categorize the Web, a little company that Microsoft seems to have taken a fancy to was born.

Granted, Yahoo is now far more than just a search engine. Its 426 million email account holders across the world are testament to that, but $44.6 billion seems a bit on the steep side even if the number one stake on the Internet is up for grabs. The markets agree, but despite Microsoft offering a 62 percent premium, the plucky Yahoo board has decided to reject the bid.

Once with a perceived strong-grip on Internet search, Yahoo has for some time been searching for something to hold onto and closed the door in Microsoft’s face last year in the belief that it would be better off alone. The ongoing courting has certainly upset a certain somebody, with legal folk claiming that a marriage could undermine the Internet’s basic principles of openness and innovation.

Whatever the outcome, there’s one answer we don’t have to search for. Search will undoubtedly remain big business, whether it’s consumer, enterprise or perhaps the ultimate winner, mobile. We may even one day look back at the popularity contest, in which website owners pimp out their sites in a never ending quest for that top of page one search result (urbandictionary.com get out of my way), that is today’s search engine and wonder how we ever found anything at all.  

PS – A post on search and Internet giants without the G word, now that must be a first!

Show a little respect

Evoking so much emotion and passion gives sport a certain responsibility. In English football, this has typically been shared across players, managers and the clubs themselves, but with the chequebook changing the balance of power, the clubs’ owners now have the ultimate responsibility as their actions have a domino like effect on everything else.

This is playing itself out at Liverpool, which happens to be my  team. After dominating in the 70s and 80s, we fell behind rivals and in effort to keep up, went looking for new investment. It arrived last year in the form of two US gents with sizeable bank balances, but little respect. Steeped in history, it would have been advisable for the new owners to swot up on what football means to Liverpool fans.

Undermining the manager is one thing, but then discussing it in public is something else. This isn’t rocket science, these gents even own sports franchises in the US, but for some reason they don’t seem to understand.

Could they be getting it confused with American football? Have been watching the US variety and while the two games are not without their similarities, the fans involvement, passion and intensity is not comparable to the global game. Think about it for a minute, it has even triggered wars in certain parts of the world.  

Liverpool is not a franchise or a business; it’s a football club. Yes, the players’ shirts carry sponsorship, yes it sells its TV rights and yes, it has to make the books balance, but importantly, it’s not part of a game that’s defined by its business model. Instead, it is the most successful club in a sport that has an inseparable role in a country’s history, even causing a break in WW1.

Maybe news of the fans uniting to try and buy the club back might help them understand how much people care, but if they cant hear the Kop, then they probably want to get their ears checked.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Is without doubt the word of the week! With the Super Bowl today and Super Tuesday just round the corner, it’s simply:

 

For those of you trying to remember where this gem of a word comes from, think everyone’s favourite nanny, Mary Poppins. Not sure if you have the urge, but if so, here’s the lyrics to sing along.

Catching breath

People have mentioned that there’s not been much in the way of themes so far, so with the benefit of a couple of weeks to catch up on, here’s a themetastic selection of ramblings on my posts from the first month.

Damn those pesky mobiles – Is it just me; or is CNN a little sensational? I thought the media reaction to the University of Utah research on mobiles and driving was bad enough, but inferring that they are to blame for children being molested by paedophiles at school takes it to a whole new level. If scare mongering and stupidly sensational reporting is the name of the game, then CNN has done itself proud with this one.

When grim means GRIM – As masters of the understatement on all things negative, The Chinese government rarely concedes that there could be a problem. So when reading about the current weather conditions and seeing a government statement advising citizens that the “situation remains grim”, I started think about what’s not being said. Figures currently available estimate that 100 million people have been seriously affected, but incredibly only 60 have died. Here’s hoping that’s true and things start to get better very soon, but like the BBC, I fear that it could be a lot worse.

Red pens at the ready – Have touched on a couple of language escque topics in previous posts to the point where one of my friends suggested I check out a weekly New York Times column called “On Language”. Makes interesting reading and along with a colleagues’ blog on improving our writing to convey clearer thoughts (btw I think makes a nice change from the usual tech PR blog focus), it should help me make these posts a little more snappy.       

Thought that might be popular – So I wasn’t the only one impressed by the Davos Question. TechCrunch seemed equally enamoured after spending time in what it called “The Super-Awesome YouTube Room At Davos”. Not sure about super and awesome being together,but guess if everyone from Bono to Tony Blair and Pervez Musharraf are calling past, good or average simply don’t cut the mustard. Going to echo Mr Arrington here, great move Google.   

Soap boxes at the ready

It’s all too easy to sit back and knock ideas, so when I heard about the Davos Question, I thought it merited a second look and a tip of the cap.

Bringing together the who’s who of leaders from business, government, the media, academia, the arts and society, the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos this week isn’t just your average tea party. As with topics like the environment, economic development, and energy security topping the bill, the guys really have their work cut out to secure public buy-in on decisions impacting both local and global issues. Not only that, but as with anything like the WEF, there is always the danger of it being perceived as distant and unrepresentative of the real issues, which is exactly why the whole Davos Question concept caught my eye.

Teaming with YouTube, the organizers have laid down the big one – What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008? – and asked people to post video responses, the best of which will be shared with the attendees. Now I know not everyone has the access or technology needed to get involved, but never the less, it’s a good move by the WEF big wigs. 

Been having a look through myself and watched videos on everything from setting up a think tank exploring a moneyless society to focusing on buying mosquito nets. Granted there were some weird ones, and with people like the Neotoy, there were certainly a few strange contributors, but by in large, I came away with the impression that people had really thought about it. What did you think, any good ones?

As I haven’t entered a video, I can’t see how the voting’s going – guess they didn’t get everything right – but lets keep an eye out later this week to see which ones get picked and whether it will be mosquito nets for all.

Word abuse

Ever thought about the number of words we use?

We all certainly have our favourite ones, whether at work or out with our friends, and there are certain words that just seem to crop up more than others. In my job, it’s all about “leading”, with every technology vendor under the sun “leading” something or another. Begs the question who they are leading, but let’s not dwell on that.

Outside of work, the word that seems to be flavour of the month is “like”. Again, this is used rather carelessly and scattered across everything and anything people are saying. Like what? You may well ask, but you are not going to get very far, as it’s like everything. Glad we cleared that one up.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to profess any kind of exceptional grasp of languages as while I probably know a word or two more than the average Joe Smoe, I only speak English and certainly haven’t swallowed a dictionary.  In fact, people like that just annoy me and I couldn’t help but feel the arrogance pouring out of this piece in the Guardian.

Anyway, I digress. To the original point, there are actually almost 1 million words in the English language – the good people at Language Monitor are actually counting down to the one millionth one – which is far more than any other language on earth.

But how many of these are actually used? I did a little couch-based investigation and came across this site, which states that an average educated person knows about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 of them a week. Not bad, but seems only the tip of the iceberg and makes me wonder how this compares to the “non” average. Well, good old Mr Shakespeare used 24,000 words, which considering the number of new words since then; isn’t too shabby. On the other side of the scales is Basic English, a made up language that maybe a few too many people subscribe to, consisting of only 850 words.

Now, there isn’t going to be any great epiphany here as ultimately, it is what it is, but next time someone keeps abusing the same word over and over again, like Hillary among others did recently in Iowa (if you missed it, check this out), this might make you smile as you think just how many other words there are to chose from.

You don’t say

It has been said many times before, but the more I think about it, the more apparent it becomes; in today’s world it is not what is actually said, but what isn’t that really counts. 

Slightly drunken conversation last night got me thinking about this a little more. Since I moved to the US, I have been fascinated by the way people communicate with each other. Now I am not going to go down the usual well-trodden stereotype route, partly because I now live here and partly because there are always exceptions, but all the little differences have caught my attention and made me think again about what is lurking between the lines.    

 

It’s funny really, as often the most pertinent points are left out. We all probably know people that are experts at this, but the closer you look, the more it manifests itself in almost every interaction you have. Whether at work, home or anywhere and everywhere in between, the information that people chose not to convey can be very telling.

As this post is straying into the deep end, I am not going to go too much further down this path. Instead, I am going to ask you to help me keep an eye out in a “Where’s Wally” kind of a fashion for what’s not being said, and see if we cant fill in some of the missing gaps on future posts – think quote of the week, or something along those lines.

To lighten things up a little, lets take our hats off to the master, as lets be honest, no one has a way with words quite like him

P.S. To get us started, try out the word search and let me know how many countries you can find…