iPads, iPods and consumer phonology

Apple has launched the iPad and got everybody talking. There have been questions about the concept and gags about the name.

Being the smart kind of company it is, Apple probably monitors its media spend and return on media investment quite carefully. I’d expect it, as with any big brand in the industry, to keep a close eye on its share of voice, to monitor buzz and even to monitor sentiment. Brands, after all, need to be good at listening to their consumers.

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The Long Give

This is off-topic (normal service resumes shortly), but I think it’s important. @sarahewalker and I have been thinking about the situation in Haiti, and in particular about how principles of effective giving apply to disaster relief situations. When problems arise suddenly it’s easy to let the understandable will to help immediately get in the way of a more even-handed and possibly more effective approach to aid.

So we’ve come up with The Long Give – a short list of principles which people might find useful when they want to make effective giving decisions that stand a chance of having long-term impact. It’s designed to be quick, not perfect, but we hope it helps.

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Tweeting the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

This post is to announce @saxonchronicle, an automated Twitter account that is posting the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle one sentence at a time every hour.

Details first. The text is the public-domain version of the 1912 edition of Rev. James Ingram’s 1823 Modern English rendering of the Chronicle, taken from the online text prepared by Douglas B Killings. Ingram’s edition is a collation of readings from the nine different Chronicle manuscripts. His translation is not always great and some of his readings are very out of date, but the text was available, and it seemed a bit unnecessary to start tweeting in Old English (though maybe one day). If you’re interested in the text of the Chronicle, see Tony Jebson’s excellent online edition of the manuscripts.

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Books and communities in the making

A year after it was published, I’ve just read Russell Davies‘s wonderful post on the lure of paper in a digitised (or digitising) age. In it he writes (of Dave Grey’s Marks and Meaning):

Mr Gray was smart enough to realise two things; firstly that Lulu have made the mechanics of book-making so cheap and easy that you can move straight to the physical form of the thing as soon as you want. The best way to write a book is bundle all your notes and rough thoughts together and stick them in a book. Then carry that around, make amendments, even invite other people to do the same, until you fancy making another version. And one day, who knows there’ll be a definitive ‘finished’ version. But maybe there never will be.

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Obama and the word terrorism

This post on the PR Watch discusses the accusation that Barack Obama avoided using the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in his recent weekly address. The idea was apparently discussed in a debate on Chris Matthews’s Hardball (a US political talk show on MSNBC) on January 2nd. The notion that the word ‘terrorism’ is taboo for the Obama administration has also been floated elsewhere by conservative political commentators.

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