If anyone were to give you a horse, would you peer all the way past its teeth to check for, I don't know, human heads?
I only ask because a site called ItemNotAsDescribed.com (tagline: Free is a Four-Letter Word) has dedicated itself to examining some of the free offers on Craigslist. Specifically, the site exists to expose the worst of the free in the Land of the Free.
For example, from Tucson's Craigslist come some book shelves, which have seen better days but clearly can't remember them. The ad for the shelves declares: "in the alley by the dumpster is a utility shelf made of wood for free. Someone left it there - please dont inquire - just come and get it."
The ItemNotAsDescribed poster adds: "For storing your least valuable possessions - the ones you're openly hostile towards. 'Here you go, fourth-place trophy, 2008 Fourth of July Chili Cook-Off. Enjoy your new home [mumbles obscenities]'."
Perhaps, though, you'd prefer these smashed-up ceramic tiles from the Humboldt Craigslist? Advertised as: "About 150 broken tan colored ceramic tiles that would be great for art projects," they look a little, well, utterly useless.
The ItemNotAsDescribed contributor puts it far more elegantly: "Strangely, the artworld has not yet recognized your genius. Keep trying. Place these tiles in a heavy plastic bag and throw them away. Made the cover of ArtForum, yet?"
The contributor, as so many on this delightful site, continues in eloquence: "At the very least, you will be helping this poster with her performance art project. She tries to get people to come over and take out her trash, to demonstrate human gullibility. You are her first victim. Sorry, I mean, collaborator."
The site even has categories that might help you sift through these worst of the free offers according to your predilections: "Classy", "Delicious" and "Spooky" are just three of the subsections.
Perhaps my favorite is this most delicious offer from the Bay Area's Craigslist: Gerber Cereal for Infants.
You might wonder why someone might give away baby food for free on Craigslist. Well, the advertiser is very open about the flaws in these wares: "One expired on Sept 08 the other Nov 08. But they still have the cellophane on them."
The ItemNotAsDescribed poster is effusive in his good fortune at discovering such a multi-layered bargain: "Sweet, they still have the cellophane on them. Something for the baby to play with after we've fed him long-expired food."
It almost makes those most generous posters who, earlier this week, used Craigslist to try to sell their free tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial seem like altruists. Almost.
It used to be a long day's journey into night.
Great writers would craft feature-length scripts worthy of the performers who would swallow each word as if it were their own, give it full dramatic meaning, and lift the whole spectacle to sublime levels.
Then the Web came along to debase the art that was pornography.
According to a report in The New York Times, some of the finest pornographic actors are bemoaning and bemoaning and bemoaning the demise of the great 90-minute carnal classic.
Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, one of the apogees of pornographic production, told the Times: "On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes. We have to cater to that."
The Times' report claims that three years ago almost all of Vivid's productions were full-length movies. Each, no doubt, had deeply nuanced characters whose dramatic arc curved across the 90 minutes like a rainbow over a hilly horizon.
Yet now, the purveyors of porn are resorting to subscription-based business models. Apparently you have to pay a monthly fee and the sites have to boast about the frequency of new, shorter uploads. (Some estimates, the reports says, suggest that sales and rentals of porn DVDs are down by as much as 50 percent.)
Is the Web and the supposed ADD of its users to blame for this? Perhaps, though somehow the sound bite and the visual bite seem to be more the creation of television in its joyous heyday.
However, is it possible that what the Web has done to mess up these delightfully lucrative porn businesses is that it has ushered in the advent of that nasty little disease called free?
Purely in the cause of researching this vexing question, I called those who live and breathe this world and asked them what the equivalent of YouTube might be for those interested in pornographic exploration.
Remarkably, I was told there is something called YouPorn. And several other sites whose veins are entirely similar, in that they offer pornografree.
These sites appear to enjoy films of varying length and depth. Some last a mere 29 seconds. Others go on for as long as an hour.
Some, indeed, are abbreviated versions of movies that the more vivid of porn producers would like you to pay for. Others are merely real people who would like it very much if you could share some of their more blissful moments.
The most viewed movie on YouPorn this week, at the time of writing, lasted 335 seconds and had been espied more than 1.5 million times. However, the third most viewed, with more than 1 million clicks, lasted more than 30 minutes.
Which might suggest that decreased attention span is not the whole story.
Indeed, is there any evidence that the vast majority of viewers, even in the times of the 90-minute porn extravaganza, didn't merely fast forward through the dialog in order to gain immediate access to the, um, action scenes?
Perhaps you could ask your friends for me.
Do you suffer from tweeting envy?
In all likelihood, someone you know is being followed by far more people than you have mustered. Someone you know has more followers than followed. And someone you know is laughing at your dreadful Twitter stats.
Are you scared that this says something negative about you? Well, now you can pin your fears up against a wall and say "boo!" because the enterprising souls at uSocial.net want to help you be touched by thousands of people out there.
Yes, you have to pay uSocial some money. But in this world, money buys you love, adoration, and it seems, socially networked groupies. The splendid thing is that uSocial.net truly wants to fulfill your dreams--that is, if your dream is to be followed by 1,000 new and very interested people. That service will cost you a mere $87.
For $147, uSocial will get 2,500 people to hang on the end of your every 140 characters. However, for those who dream really big, it will use the might of its sleuthy intellect to get you 100,000 new Twitter followers; that'll cost you $3,479.
Perhaps you are wondering why this is such an odd fee. uSocial is offering the service at a 30 percent discount from the usual fee of $4,970. How long might it take to muster up your 100,000 followers? 365 days from the commencement of your order, says the uSocial site.
Now, there are those among you who simply like to organize large parties. But surely there will be some who actually care who the attendees might be. So, while uSocial does say that the more followers you have the likelihood is that each follower will be worth 10 cents to your business, one wonders if that will be true.
According to the Telegraph, uSocial does try to be a little like Match.com and find followers with some interests similar to your own. Are there 100,000 people out there who, for instance, enjoy the novels of Michael Dibdin, the lamb ragu at Frantoio, the smell of plane fuel at an airport, and people-watching in Seville? Maybe not.
Still, the company may have tapped the vein of a zeitgeist. Perhaps it will soon offer even more refined plans. One day, the company might be so powerful as to get celebrities to follow you. Who wouldn't dream of being followed by those whose money, charm, and talent are as infinite as the horizon? You know, people like Oprah. Right now, despite having more than 1.8 million followers, the doyenne of all human life is following a mere 14 people.
Just imagine what a business uSocial might have if they could bump those 14 up to, oh, 20 million? Or perhaps Oprah might consider that a nice little side business for herself. How much would people pay to be followed by her?
We all live to dream, don't we?
Humanity knows no depths.
On Monday, Craigslist and other sites were adorned with many of those lucky to have won tickets to Tuesday's Michael Jackson memorial service celebrating their good fortune--by trying to sell the free tickets.
On Craigslist's LA site the bereaved are brazenly asking buyers to take away the burden of their pain. One, for example, wanted $2,000 for two tickets. His posting, however, has been flagged for removal.
As, it appears, have most, if not all related postings on Craigslist and eBay.
Naturally, many of these posters knew this might happen, so, in a pre-emptive strike worthy of a paparazzo, they have put their phone numbers and e-mail addresses into the headlines so that the grieving and the gullible can contact them directly.
While some of those who were not lucky enough to score tickets are posting requests craving the indulgence of others, might one just wonder whether these are equally squalid scoundrels who, if someone took pity, would merely try to sell the tickets on?
Several Craigslist posters have, however, made reference to a Los Angeles Times blog post that suggests that even if people buy tickets, they won't be able to get in. This poster, for example, prints the blog post in its apparent entirety.
The post quotes Michael Roth, a spokesman for AEG, the company that was organizing Jackson's 50 London concerts and is organizing the service, as saying: "Several apparent ticket holders posted intentions to sell the tickets on eBay, but Roth warned that the security system in place will prevent anyone from doing so."
Roth makes very clear the layers of security that have been put in place: "In addition to the vouchers received via a special code, ticket holders will have to show a valid driver's license, and those whose IDs do not match the registration information will be eliminated as guests.
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But then there's the case of Rob O'Sullivan. O'Sullivan, from Houston, Texas, was featured on NBC's "Today Show" on Monday (video embedded here). He decided to enter the memorial service lottery as "a lark." He won.
However, he is unemployed and cannot afford to go to LA to pick up the tickets. So he put the tickets up for sale on eBay for $15,000. Then he says he dropped the price a little.
Interviewed by Meredith Viera, O'Sullivan explained that his daughter needs heart surgery and he therefore believes it reasonable to try to sell these tickets. He also said he would offer a money-back guarantee if, for some reason, the buyer could not pick up the tickets.
Is his case different? Perhaps you can decide.
You don't want some old chap in a large check jacket with a florid pocket handkerchief staring up into a basketball player's nostrils and asking him inane mundanities.
No, you want to hang on the every direct word of your favorite, or perhaps not quite so favorite, athlete.
For you, therefore, there is Jockipedia. Oh, yes, the very name might make you think that this is Wikipedia for jocks. But it's more than that. Well, not really.
Jockipedia, the creation of a former network news producer called Douglas Warshaw, is your own encyclopedia of every musing that emerges from a famous athlete's tonsils or touch-screen telephone.
It allows you to surf by athlete's name, by league, even by country. And each entry looks not merely at such frippery as Twitter. No, it delves into the athlete's personal blog site, their Facebook page, MySpace page, their charity site, and even their contributions to Flickr.
You can absorb Estonian tennis player Kaia Kanepi's personal Web site (it's really a little dull), just as readily as you can speedily keep up to date with the Twitter feed of Red Sox power (occasionally) hitter David Ortiz. Yes, all two of his tweets.
Warshaw told the New York Times: "The Tower of Babel is getting bigger (....) The desire to find people will just get bigger. It just is. It's like gravity. Every day, more and more athletes, not just the professionals, are doing this online."
Warshaw also has very lofty goals for his informational tower: to have every athlete in the world included on Jockipedia. Naturally, he will need a little help from many eagle-eyed Estonians, anal Albanians, baseball-loving potheads, and others before he can reach his goal.
Still, would life really be worth living if we couldn't have instant access to the Twitter musings of, say, Lakers' splendidly erratic shooting guard, Sasha Vujacic? Here is the very latest: "No matter what they say to you! No matter what is thrown upon/against you! Never lose your believe! Never lose focus! Dreams DO come true!"
Jockipedia. Where the Shakespeare in every athlete is revealed in all its glory.
It is always a case of some considerable concern when a lady reveals too much on Facebook. The site has standards, after all.
The lady in question this time is Lady Shelley Sawers, the wife of Sir John Sawers, the new head of British spy agency MI6.
According to reports in the Mail and numerous other media outlets, the fair lady may not have been quite aware that Facebook can be seen by a rather large number of people if you don't specify that you want to keep your information vaguely private.
Lady Sawers saw fit to wander onto the site and reveal where their London apartment is located and where their children are. This might not appear to be the wisest course of social action if your children happen to be the offspring of the head of an international spying network.
Lady Sawers even posted 19 happy pictures of the family's last vacation.
(Credit: CC Anonymous9000/Flickr)These pictures seemed to have spurred the her enthusiasm for uploading, as, the following day, she furnished 26 more, including shots of Sir John in his swimming attire. She apparently displayed several pictures of Sir John hanging with some actors, even one thespian who performed in that apogee of popular English culture, the TV series "Footballers' Wives."
According to the reports, Lady Sawers' Facebook account had no privacy protection. All those in the highly open "London" network could espy the head spy in his swimming cozzie.
Moreover, Sir John, who by tradition will be code-named "C," received notes of congratulations on his wife's Facebook page. One note, for example: "Congrats on the new job, already dubbed Sir Uncle "C" by nephews in the know!"
When the Mail contacted the British Foreign Office to alert them to the socially networked revelations, everything was sharpishly effaced without a trace.
Now, I know that there will be those who will feel critical of Lady Sawers' remarkable trust in the Web's world-wideness.
However, I feel her actions show a considerable faith in her husband's skills in weeding out nefarious bodies from the dark camouflage of life. And her social openness is surely sending a clear message to those who do Britain ill that the fine old country fears nothing and no one.
Update at 8:50 a.m. PDT: The video has now disappeared from the ad agency's site as well.
Earlier this week, we were all rather intrigued by the appearance of a Microsoft ad, in which a wife borrows her husband's laptop and suffers a technicolor nightmare when she espies a site that he has been, um, enjoying.
By Wednesday night, however, Microsoft had second thoughts about the pulling power of puke.
The ad has been pulled from the IE8videos channel on YouTube. It's also has been removed from the BrowsefortheBetter.com site, which is part of the ad campaign. The vomit ad's slot has been replaced by a tag that says "coming soon."
This could have meant that a new ad is coming soon, or that the upchuck was uploaded too soon.
The truth is that Microsoft wasn't 100 percent happy with vom-com.
"We make a point of listening to our customers," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail Thursday morning. "We created the OMGIGP video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."
Although many CNET commenters on Wednesday thought that the ad was funny, some criticized the piece as condoning surfing for porn (shame, shame, shame), as well as the generally less than perfect taste associated with yellow stuff exploding from a nice-looking lady's mouth.
However, Bradley and Montgomery, the agency responsible for the whole campaign--which features Superman actor Dean Cain--still proudly displayed the ad on its own site as of early Thursday morning.
And so it should. The ad has already created exactly the aftereffect for which the agency likely hoped.
But, as so rarely happens, I spoke too soon. Here we are at 8:50 a.m. PDT Thursday, and the ad has now been removed even from the Bradley and Montgomery site.
Even though the wife in the ad might, one feels, stand by her man, it appears the agency has decided not to stand by its ad.
Editor's note at 10:25 p.m. PDT: Since this blog was published, the video has been removed from the hosting pages. But this copy of the video remains on YouTube.
I know a girl who gets somewhat uptight when she's in the passenger seat of a car going any more than 70 mph. However, put her on some insane roller coaster, and she's just fine.
The driving dangers are real, you see. Whereas the roller-coaster ride just feels wonderfully stomach-turning.
And so it is with this charming new online ad for Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft. In most of its advertising, Microsoft has rarely reached 70 mph. But someone, somewhere deep within Microsoft, finally had the craving for the roller coaster.
Here we have a couple at the breakfast table. The husband is examining his laptop. It is not a Mac.
His wife asks to borrow his laptop for a minute. To be fair, shortly before she does this, she shows all the symptoms of being a little stressed. Her lips are tight. Her eyebrows seem even tighter.
She looks at her husband's screen. She is surprised at what she sees and says: "What's this?" Then her body begins involuntary motions. Will an alien being pop from her stomach, leap onto the table, and begin to sing a Celine Dion number?
Will she turn toward her husband, enraged at what she has just seen and assail him with words and fists and spittle and quotes from Joan Crawford?
Not quite.
In fact, she turns away from the kitchen table, not wishing to soil his PC. And then she vomits.
Yes, she vomits. She pukes. She throws up. She upchucks. She phones Huey and Ralph down the big white telephone. (This last phrase is peculiarly English. You need to say the words "Huey" and "Ralph" with an echoing timbre.)
Her vomit is yellow, powerful, and a decent, if distant, relative of the turbo-charged green liquid emitted by Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." Although, truly, one wonders what there really could have been on that screen to make her do so. Most wives have surely seen it all.
Still, her husband, the sinful, disgusting, smug pervert, slips on the vomit as it hits the kitchen floor.
What could possibly happen after all this drama? Does Superman turn up? Actually, he does. In the shape of actor Dean Cain. Dean, who appears unaffected by the detritus at his feet, asks, "Do you suffer from OMGIGP?"
This acronym, for those of you still in control of your diaphragm, stands for "Oh my god, I'm gonna puke."
Superman then goes on to explain that IE 8 has InPrivate Browsing while the husband, still prostrate on the kitchen floor, is privately adorned with even more of his wife's mellow yellow.
As the wife wipes her chin, all I can think about is that Superman's turtleneck is yellow too--and that, even a year ago, no one would have ever expected Microsoft to make a spot like this.
This work is not, as some have surmised, the work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency responsible for both the "I'm a PC" and Gates-Seinfeld campaigns. It is the brainchild of Bradley and Montgomery, the folks that brought you the Mojave Experiment.
The vomit ad is one of a series, all featuring Cain. The series is taglined "Browse Better," and like the Mojave project, it has its own site, BrowsefortheBetter.com.
Interestingly, and perhaps, for some, ironically, the BrowsefortheBetter site says that for every download of IE 8, the company will donate 8 meals to Feeding America, an organization trying to stop hunger in the U.S.
Of course, some will say of this vomiting ad: "Out, damned spot." Harry McCracken of Technologizer has already dubbed it as "Worst. Tech. Commercial. Ever?"
I will say this. Microsoft has realized that it needs attention. It is finding many and varied ways of doing so. In this case, I suspect that someone has said in a long, long marketing meeting: "Hmm, maybe snot-nosed, filthy T-shirted, gross-out humored, socially inept children really do have an influence."
A little while ago, I was working with a client who wanted to change his very large company's brand name.
His greatest concern was that the new name should make for a simple URL.
I wondered whether it wasn't more important that the brand name should be memorable. Isn't that where it all starts? And ends?
I was reminded of this conversation Tuesday when I arrived in Austin, Texas. By chance and a glass of viognier, I encountered a photographer who wanted her work to enjoy a wider audience. She gave me her card, headlined by her URL: CourtneyChavanell.com. Which, given that Courtney Chavanell was her name, appeared to be appropriate.
(Credit: CC ChrisDlugosz/Flickr)However, I secretly wanted to tell her to change her name like actors do- because Chavanell is tough to remember. She said the key to her work was optimism, so I wanted to suggest that she change her professional name to Courtney Optimist. Everyone would remember that, URL or not.
There was a time when people thought URLs were the key to getting hordes to throng your site. Make it short, have one of the most important keywords--sex, free, go, eat, my, and porn being examples--and your fortune was made.
People still try to trade the most simple URLs for hopeful hundreds of thousands. They will still line up in the hope of getting a vanity URL from Facebook.
But don't most people simply go to the little search box, type in the name of what they're looking for, and search?
If it's something they want to go back to, they'll bookmark it. But they won't remember what the URL is. For the simple reason that they don't need to. The Bingoogle fraternity does it for them.
Indeed, in Japan, a country so often so clever about these things, the trend in advertising is not for companies to slap their URLs three feet high in the bottom right of the ad--it's to have search boxes with suggested search terms.
Every time I see a URL in an ad that tell you to go to COMPANY NAME/special offer or some such, I wonder if there's anyone who would ever do such a thing.
Perhaps there are those generic words that people absent-mindedly type, perhaps just out of boredom. I don't know, URLs like kitchen.com. Or music.com. But could this still be a significant number?
How many people really do bother to type URLs these days?
Just wondering.
It's one thing to go and play with LeBron James. It's quite another to face Bruce Manley.
Perhaps you are not yet familiar with the name. Manley is something of a YouTube cult hero for his rather picturesque basketball trick shot skills.
Somehow, Shaquille O'Neal, the newest Cleveland Cavalier, saw the video. Apparently, his ego was piqued even more than when he saw Orlando's Dwight Howard claim to be Superman.
So what did the NBA's king of social networking do? He Twittered a challenge to a HORSEing duel.
"i wanna play this guy n horse for a thousand dollars, find him pls http://bit.ly/CK5nk," read Shaq's tweet.
According to the HoopDoctors.com, Manley has accepted Shaq's challenge and the contest should happen some time in July. So I really would encourage everyone to look at the YouTube video I have embedded.
If you are not utterly astonished by his tree-point shot, then your emotions have left you for another woman. And, yes, I said tree-point shot--no spelling mistake.
As for the shot Manley hits totally blind from behind a wall, well, if that isn't extraordinary talent then I am the new chief executive officer of the Golden State Warriors.
Will Shaq be able to compete against this kind of ability? It will be very interesting which H-O-R-S-E rules they choose to play. But, if I were a betting man, and perish the thought, I would be betting Manley.
Unless, of course, there's some very fine editing going on here.
