Molly Malone just let me know that the little podcast I do with J. David Markham about Napoleon Bonaparte has cracked the Top 100 in the Australian iTunes directory. It’s currently at #90. Who would have thought that many people are interested in Napoleon?Â
I’m speaking tomorrow morning (Thursday Sept 26) at the Australian Marketing Institute breakfast about "Brands and Blogging". Also speaking is Paul Crisp who (according to the bio on the AMI site) manages public affairs for Telstra’s Consumer Marketing and Channels Division. He also leads Telstra’s New Media Project, managing the company’s corporate blog at www.nowwearetalking.com.au and its podcast service.
Does anyone know what Telstra’s podcast service is? Ever even heard of that before?
Feeling confused about whether or not climate change is really a threat? Good. That’s exactly what they want you to feel. Confused.
I was having a conversation about this with a friend over lunch during the week and he explained to me how the big oil companies fund hundreds of small lobby groups who purport to be scientists and who put out misleading and contradictory evidence deliberately to confuse the general public.
Here’s an interesting statement I read tonight:
According to Ward’s own analysis of Exxon’s Corporate Giving Report, the company last year funded 64 groups conducting climate change research, of which 25 were in line with mainstream climate science and 39 were "misleading." The latter category included the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, to which Exxon gave $25,000 in 2005, the Exxon website shows. The Centre’s website says: "There is no compelling reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2."
This is from an article in Al Jazeera stating that The Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, is criticizing Exxon’s attempts to mislead the general public by confusing them with contradictory reports.
So, here’s how it seems to work. You give money to both the dodgy groups who make up their science off of the back of a breakfast cereal box but you *also* give funding to the real scientists so you can’t be accused of just funding the bad guys. You can say
"These organisations do not speak on our behalf, nor do we control their views and messages. They may or may not hold similar views to ours."
But what you *really* want to do is create confusion. It’s Alexander of Macedon’s old "divide and conquer" strategy updated for the 21st century corporation. Plausible deniability.
Now, when you read about the confusion in the newspaper, all you read is that Politician X said "Climate change is important and we need to do something about it now" but then you read that Politican B said "Such-and-such a group of scientists says it isn’t as big a problem as everyone is making out, go back to your Reality TV". Of course, what you *don’t* read is that the group Politican B quoted from was funded by Exxon.
Who has the responsibility to tell you this last fact? The newspaper? You would think so.
That and other very fine words of advice can be found in "Satan’s Training Brochure", WW Turmel’s guide to Middle Management behaviours. I’m pretty sure some of my past bosses had read this, especially the chapter entitled "Getting To Maybe:- Delayed Decision Making For the Budget-Constrained". In fact, I think I know some venture capitalists who have also read it. If you like the read, make sure you also check out WW’s podcast "The Cranky Middle Manager" on TPN.
Is Andy Delin the new Scoble? A Microsoft blogger with enough balls / management support to say what he thinks even when it may not be completely obsequious? Let’s hope so… especially after I post this up there!
His recent review of Outlook 2007 : "so far I haven’t found too many changes of significance… In my opinion, Outlook is an irony – a productivity tool which distracts and overloads. Outlook knows so much about me – my contacts, my activities, my communications -Â and yet it doesn’t use this knowledge to guide what information should be given or hidden in a given context."
He’s also made some very interesting insights into why my decision to go back to pen and paper is a good one (and, by the way, I’m still loving it):
An elegant moleskine notebook may be expensive, but in fact, the cost and quality brings a certain respect for your thoughts. You won’t throw that thing away when it’s full, and the book itself is robust enough to preserve your thoughts for years. In time to come, you’ll pick up that elegant moleskine book and flipping through, you’ll recall what you were thinking about in 2006, what you were trying to achieve, what you aspired to and what you were struggling with. This is beautiful. Dare I mention PDAs and Outlook in the same paragraph? Those things are disrespectful of human markings, they are almost programmed to forget. They aren’t trustworthy containers (remember ‘trustworthy computing’Â ?).
Trustworthy. Exactly. I’ve lost SO MUCH DATA from Outlook and my PDA over the years it’s disgusting. The whole OST / PST mindfield that Microsoft imposes on you in the name of an Outlook backup is still a complete joke. If I want to find a particular email from the last ten years that I wrote in Outlook, first I’d need to find the right PST. I’ve got them all backed up on CD somewhere, but there is about 20 of the suckers. Each time I re-built my laptop I had to back it up and then would normally start a new one to get the old one off my harddrive. Not to mention the many times I had to re-build Outlook due to PST corruptions. So I’d have to import various PSTs into Outlook and then search the lot of them for the right email.
Now compare that to finding a Gmail message from 2004 (when I started using it in anger). Takes two seconds. One maybe.
Anyway… paper is good. I’m loving it. However, I still haven’t worked out a good way to back it up without doing a daily scan.