I’m going to talk about English. Language evolution. Grammar. Cultural use and meaning. I cannot even talk right. Let alone spell. But me is stupid brave. So here goes.

Language is one of the things defining a group. When you talk the way others talk - you feel part of. But it goes the other way round as well. Groups create languages. Parting themselves from others, BRANDing themselves. It’s a chicken-egg kind of thing (”Which came first”) - Creation of the language by the group or the definition of the group by the existence of a language.

Enough bitting around the bush. Let’s dive into some modern web-world examples:

1. Chat/IM/SMS. Written language is very different from spoken one. It’s more difficult to convey what you really feel or think when you write, without using “so many words” (See: Louis-Ferdinand Céline/”Journey to the End of the Night“, pages 1 through 700). So what do you do when you have a flowing conversation platform (I say something, you answer) using only text? You change the language. You make up short abbreviations of feeling-describing phrases, and Vuala! - you’ve got emotions.
   Oh, add flow of conversation (aka - typing speed) and space limitations and you get something my dad will surely use. Not. Examples?
   • lol - Laughing out loud (that one will star later on). BTW, note the use of non-capitalized fonts. Though we’re dealing with abbreviations. The reason is simple (and are two) - it takes more effort to capitalize (another key - Shift. Let alone mobile phone keys….), hence slower, and capitalization is saved for “shouting” what is said. Put more emotion into it.
   • rofl - Rolling On Floor Laughing.
   • lmao - Laughing My Ass Off.
   • omg - Oh my God!
   • wtf - What The Fuck?

   And so on. Not part of the group? You’re not welcome (and cannot take part) in these conversations:

   “OMG WTF! u nevaz did dat, like, dats like, fkin gay! if i did dat id be like, wowz!!!!” (Actual AOL chat quote)

   and:

   nerd#1: pudding
   nerd#2: lmfao!
   nerd#1: we know ur ass is fat dude… just say lmao… or nothing at all…
   nerd#2: Lmfao! oh wait nvm…

   Not to mention Emoticons

2. l33t. Pretty much the same actually. Only here another group - programmers not wanting to be tapped and gamers (more of the same, actually) - replaced vowels with numbers and other ASCII characters.
   
   Some “l33t” loser “OMGZ0rz WTF n00b u d0n7 5|*34k l33t!!1 u r n0t 4 h4><0rz!!!”

   See this Wiki for more.

3. LOL cats. Not exactly a group-language since as far as I know there’s no group using it as means of conversation, but it’s a cultural phenomena non the less. Called “Kitty Pidgin” or “lolspeak” the language is built on broken grammar, spelling mistakes and made-up words but has sentence building logic and, well, spelling and grammar. It’s most common place of use is as caption to cute images of cats (”kittehs”). You probably got one of those “funny” chain mails from your cousin (just before you added her to the junk sending list):

   

   

   To put the phenomena into perspective, icanhasheezburger, the big player in the “industry” (a-la Compete) gets nearly 500,000 visitors/months (US only). All looking at cats, ye? Care to compare it to Twitter? You’ll find coverage and a great Wiki on the subject and for us closer to Ceiling Cat, you can also find the Bible. Translated.

4. Twitter Talk. This one is new. I would have said it’s an evolution of the above, IM/Text-like communication, but Twitter is not intended to be an online communication tool. It’s broadcasting (I think). And yet, you’ll find many pages looking like this:

   

   Sunshine clear to me.

What’s the bottom line? Two actually. Points for us internet “experts” to remember:

1. Hope to create a community around a product/site? Make them talk the talk. If we manage to create a language - they will stay. Feel part of. Belonging. Humans, I tell ya.
2. We have to remember that where we feel at home not necessarily means our users do. Few examples:
   • How many people really understood what the “beta” residing for years next to the Google logo meant? How many cared?
   • You think this (from here) feedback system is funny? Cute? Useful? For all?

     

   • Is inline smartypants blog editing understood by everyone? Do we care?

<3 you all. Peace.

I got a call from our branch in India at 09:15 AM . “We don’t have internet”, they said.

“Cannot be”, I replied. “Restart your computer”.

But the word started spreading around noon. Two under water cables were cut. The internet in the middle east and India severely damaged. It was official.

48 hours later, a third cable is gone. Speculations as for the reason started arising. Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography asserted:

“…A preliminary investigation links the cuts to a ship’s anchor that dragged and ripped into the two fiber optic undersea cables.”

But a quick investigation conducted by the Egypt’s Ministry of Communications concluded:

“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time“.

24 hours passed and a forth cable is gone. This got me curious so I started an investigation of my own.

I managed to put my hands on some under water cable maps and pinpointed the location of the break down (circled):

I used these coordinates, pulled some strings with friends in the army and managed to get this satellite image, taken at the exact time the cables were torn (I circled the location):

I noticed something funny. There was something there. A dot out of place. Thought it might have been a glitch in the picture, a satellite malfunction of sort, so I asked for a close up image. Again, location circled:

Still unable to understand what I was looking at, I reverted to Flickr, searching for images uploaded via mobile, from proximate locations. I found this one. Fishing vacation it appears:

Nothing out of place. Kept on looking and found another. Again - fishing at sea:

Again - nothing.

I’m still trying to contact the people taking the pictures. I know they have mobiles with them, since that’s where the images came from, but there’s no answer. Probably forget packing battery chargers.

So there. Nothing.

Suppose it was an anchor after all. Greek Maybe?

Update: It seems there’s no end to this story. A fifth cable is gone. I called the Operations Dept. in FLAG Telecom, the company who owns the cables. It seems they have cameras along the line. They sent me a photo (below) taken around 17:30 yesterday (Wednesday). Funny looking fish are swimming there, but I guess that’s how it is in the deep.

But heck. This smells so bad, I had to share what I think.

For a stealth website, NotchUp are doing a hell of a job. I got something like five invitations in the last 12 hours. Some from people I hardly know, and some from people having little to do with the web. The site is going viral like crazy. And for a reason. People are greedy.

The idea is simple. You’re a qualified professional, right? You’re not really looking for a job, but are willing to hear interesting offers? You’re not really being interviewed, it’s YOU interviewing prospect employers? So why not get paid for it? If you’re such a hot shot (which of course you are), make them pay just for meeting you! I’m so good actually, They’ll actually LEARN from interviewing me. It’s like consulting.

So here comes NotchUp. A job site (novel idea, no doubt), where you set a rate for just being interviewed. The default payment stands on $500 but why not make it $1,000? Now that’s new. How come I never thought of that? Why did I agree to be interviewed for free all my life? Darn. Not anymore! I’m going to charge from now on!

Oh. Small problem. It will never work. No employer with little brains to spear (and little experience) will pay. Trust me. I’m a recruiter. That’s (part of) what we do for a living (but don’t just trust my word on that).

Little math: For every open position we have, we’re getting potential candidates in the hundreds (qualifying for the job requirements). Sometimes thousands. We filter and interview tens. Double that by aprox. $500 per interview and you get tens of thousands of dollars paid just for recruiting. Add the first months drop-rate (not fitting after all, or found a better job), and you end up with astronomical recruiting expenses.

So where’s the catch? I’m guessing NotchIn are not at all a job site. They’re aiming to compete against LinkedIn. And they found a way of migrating all of LinkedIn’s database. Using the greedy mob itself.

In the NotchUp signup process you’re offered, for the sake of comfort of course (who has the patience to retype one’s CV?), to enter your LinkedIn user name and password and Voila! All your data is “comfortably” imported to NotchUp, ready to be searched by the stupid, yet rich, employers.

Oh, and of course, if you invite friends (using our comfortable “send to all your LinkedIn contacts” feature) you’ll be getting 10% of every interview they will be paid for (Oops. Now we also have all your friend’s emails. Oh sorry. We had it at hello. When you gave us your LinkedIn user name and password. Did anyone hear “selling your friends”?).

Right.

Ladies and Gentlemen. The king is naked. It’s a hoax. There’s no way any employer will use this service. They are ripping your LinkedIn information.

Nice UI though.

P.S.

I might be missing something here. Please tell me if you think I have. I’ll be more than happy to discuss.

1. Invent a bunch of fiction characters. Boys, girls.
2. Set up a location. Could be more than one.
3. Create a story around them - one being friend of the other, dating a girl freshly parted from her boyfriend, being a friend of another and so on. AKA: a script.
4. (up until now - nothing special, right? but her goes:) Make the story unfold using the internet. Books, plays, TV and movies - Out. Internet story-telling - In.

How is that done:

1. Create fake Facebook profiles people can befriend and follow.
2. Create YouTube movies showing parts of the story from different points of view - one character’s friend (both on Facebook) filming another talking about his side of the story (translation: dating and having sex with a new girl).
3. Create Twitter accounts for the whole bunch.
4. Create blogs, each telling the story from the character’s mouth.
5. Create a blog giving a bird’s-view on the tale, excluding the details. Sort of a “Previously on LA Law”.
6. Let people from the outside interact with the story and characters. Make friends with the characters in Facebook, follow Twitter feeds, subscribe to RSS blog feeds and comment to the lot of them.

Sounds interesting? I agree. But it’s not my idea.

Meet Story2Oh!

If you hurry up, you can jump on the wagon, the story just began.

you can have a taste of the tale in the following link (18+ only :), taken from one of the “actor’s” blogs, and the following video from YouTube:

The story is very underground. Little traffic is coming to the site, few link and discuss it (Google them and see how little results you get), not many friends are following on Facebook or Twitter. They seem to be just a bunch of people with an idea and with zero PR. It’s a shame if you ask me.Actually, they did get a bit of publicity. Mashable (the only main-stream internet blog that picked the story) wrote about them. Actually, they didn’t “write” about them. They slaughtered them:

Some days we get notified around here of really bad ideas. We give a soft chuckle, toss it on the pile, forget about it and move on. Then we get notices like the one for Story2Oh! that seem so bad, they aspire to be “lame”.

I beg the differ. Big time.

It’s a superb idea. Mashable’s main point against the initiative is the attention span required to follow it. “Mind-bandwidth” if you like. True. It’s time consuming. I personally won’t follow. But I don’t watch TV either. And I don’t read Tom Clancy. They’re all time wasters if you ask me. But people like stories about people, romance, sex. And they follow people sharing that info on the web. They starve for it. Otherwise, tools like twittertale would not have existed.

A smart marketer would take that to mind. Remember everyone talking about web 2.0 marketing? building brands around social networks? opening “fan pages” in Facebook? Now imagine Nike doing this:

1. Create a global spy story (Jason Bourn style) with Nike branded into it.
2. Let people find clues to make the story go (If they see a YouTube movie of someone hiding a clue under a bench in Sydney, they will find that long lost friend in Australia to go fetch it. Did anyone say “Viral”?).
3. As the story unfolds, using the surfers, Nike will give them gifts. Expensive ones (Treasure-hunt style).
4. Enjoy tons of PR. Globally. For novelty and the story.
5. Enjoy people’s envolvment with the brand and other fancy marketing words of the kind.

And how about reality shows? Movie trailers?

A new story-telling media is born. Jason Bourn.

No, I’m not the “I’m a Mac” from the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ad. I’m just a Mac. Elad’s Mac.

MacBook to be exact. Black, one and a half years old. 2GB RAM.

See, I’m not the complaining type, actually. I’m a working machine. And I thought to just be quiet and say nothing, but Elad went to sleep, and I was left alone on the kitchen counter (feels nice and cold against my battery, actually). I just couldn’t hold it anymore. Sorry.

It’s been 18 months since I was taken out of the box. Since, I think I was turned off only once, for a three week period when Elad went to India (how do I know? Saw the pictures in my iPhoto, da!). I almost never crash and even when I do it’s his fault with all the software he’s installing and all these silly games he’s trying on me. But hey - I don’t complain, rememeber?

And don’t think I’m not laboring!

Here, take a look at what’s on my menu bar:

And that’s not the end of it. I’m hiding Quicksilver. Oh, and that Plaxo thingie as well!

And what about them Widgets? and iTunes via AirTunes? What do you think, they come from nowhere? From thin air?!

So what’s my problem, you ask?

That’s my bloody problem!

See that little toy on the right?! That’s some spy photo of the so called “new sub-notebook”! (Thank you very much CrunchGear! Hope you burn for this!)

So now I’m going to be tossed aside the second Elad will be able to think of a reason why he just has to have that new shiny, fast, fashionable, hipped piece of junk!

“Multi-touch trackpad” my black ass!

See if he’s going to get any internet out of me on the 15th!

Damn Macworld!

See you in the next life!

They used ASCII art:

If you ask me - plain genius.

Got them 47% increase in clicks.

And Google throwing them down the stairs (for “repetitive punctuation”, which is a known felony).

(Found the story here, they got the word from here and they got from where-else-but Australia (watch the movie). See how I give credit? Ahh…. I’m such a cool blogger….).

Very quietly.

Many didn’t even hear of bots. No one ever met one.

But don’t be fooled. They are here. And they’re going to take over the world.

A bot, to put things into order, is a small “robot” software, designed to interact in a human like manner. One of the more common uses of bots is in IRC and IM (Chat rooms and Instant Massage software). It’s supposed to give us some service, on a conversation-like interface.

It’s been among us for many years. We heard them reporting the weather, giving zip codes, sport scores, converting currency and unites or just “talking” to us to pass the time. No one really paid attention. We knew they’re out there and didn’t care.

But now, there are signs an invasion is imminent.

On December 3rd, a Microsoft-made Christmas-bot got out of control and started sexually harassing the young and inocent. Kids asking questions about pizza, where pulled into conversation about oral sex. This was only the beginning.

Four days later, on December 7th, another bot surfaced. This time - on the other side of the globe. again - suffering from some sexual issues, but this time, it was also harmful. Russian chat room visitors found themselves involved in romantic conversations with CyberLover, ending up trying to pick pocket their identitys. Body invasion in a cyber era?

A week and a half later, again on the other side of the world, Google announced a translation bot. Simple as it may sound - you write the bot something in your language and it replays the translation - this, as Google states, is only the beginning:

For those of you into programming, why not build your own bot? Maybe a weather service or a rock/paper/scissors game. The Google Talk service uses an open protocol called XMPP, and it’s easy to find client libraries and code samples that will give you a flying start…

Bots now have a way of breeding.

I will not be the least surprised to see companies building bot-warehouses, where users can build they’re own bots, like Widget creation platforms, for appliances like shopping assistance, fashion recommendations, vertical news updates, directions assistance and so on. Give me an API (Google maps, Google news, Twitter and a zillion others), a bot platform and I’ll give you talking companions for everything.

You’ll be able to recognize me with ease now. I’m the one wearing the tin-foil hat.

Invasion log, supplemental: January 6th. “They” now know where we are and tell us where to go.

It’s a lost war.

And one where a lot of money is waisted. For nothing.

There’s a big difference between today’s war of formats and the VHS vs. Beta at the early 80s’. At the old days, the winner (ending an almost 10 year’ battle) gained a market share for a decade. A lot of money was spent but more was gained. Blu-Ray and HD DVD are more like Mini-Disks. Who remembers them? No one. It was a format arriving too late. MP3 killed it young. Same with Laser Disks and DVDs.

Streaming media will be the killer of the physical formats for consuming video (and any other “high volume” media, such as video games). As MP3 did (and still doing) to CDs, Streaming media will do to DVD and HD Video.

That’s why:

1. Actually, there’s only one reason why streaming is not here yet. Broadband. If we all had Fiber To The Home (FTTH) no one would have gone to the movie store. Supporting devices would have poped up, and we would all consumed streaming media. FTTH is expensive. So it might take a little while until every home enjoys it, but DSL, over existing infrastructure, is gaining bandwidth and might remove this barrier sooner.
2. Storage. With Hard Disks becoming cheaper and cheaper, and Tera-Bytes not an imaginary storage space in personal desktops, storing movie librarys of 30GB per-movie (in HD) is no problem.
3. Sharing of content across platforms. 4G in mobile is getting closer. With DRM-Free media becoming a reality, sharing personal media libraries across platforms (3 and 4 gen. iPhones and other “combined” PMPs will show up in a growing rate in the following months and years) is becoming something everybody wants and will be able to do. It’s easier if your media is in the right format for sharing in the first place.
4. Media centers going main stream. After years of trying to convince the market to bring the computer into the living room, it seems Bill Gates is finally doing something right. Maybe the little help from Apple, AKA Apple TV, didn’t hurt the effort. Having HD in the living room makes it easier to consume and store a software-based media library . I’ll venture a not-so-risky bet, and say Tivo will be a player in this field very soon as well.
5. Streaming rental services. Like Netflix and Blockbuster (understanding it’s a join-or-close-the-business) and of course “On-Demand” video which is already here, makes it easier to consume.
6. HD in YouTube. Will soon arrive. True, it’s still expensive to broadcast HD, but smaller services are managing (to name one - Vimeo), and with all the money in the bank, HD on YouTube will probably be introduced in 2008. This too will make consumers more comfortable with consuming software-based media.
7. Soft-copy sale points. iTunes selling video over the internet (CrunchGrear over took me by hours to the subject of this post :), Amazon joining in soon and other vendors will make building your own movie library easy and not so much of a revolution. We’re used to consuming music this way for years.

So what’s my bet? Not yet in 2008 (I make joke!).

But 2009’s end-of-year lists will include the funerals of the Blu-Ray and HD DVDs. Hope they’re going to church every Sunday….

This is no a conspiracy theory. I have proof. First, let’s establish the rules for KGB “running” something:

1. Shortage in goods.
2. Long lines.
3. Creation of black-market.

Now that we agree on that, let’s consider the following facts:

Amazon’s Kindle. Upon the issuing of the Good-Mother-Russia-Quality device:

• Ran out of stock within 5.5 hours.
• Created long lines:
  

• Sells on eBay for 1,500$.

Nintendo’s Wii:

• In short supply for over a year.
• Creates long lines.

• And three (not one) black markets - one within stores (”Better to stock for winter, Boris, da?”), one selling on eBay, and one selling with “old Vodka we have in stock”.

The list goes on:

Guitar hero selling for 9,000$ (90$ retail) on eBay.
Rations on the iPhone.

I would have said what I think of it all, but Big Brother is listening. So I’ll just say: “You deserve it, Capitalist свиньи!”.

go to: http://www.isitchristmas.com/

Merry Christmas everyone.