Marshall Kirkpatrick's the reason I get to draw these here every week, and on Friday, he announced he's going to be launching a startup.
For me, this is one of those things that triggers the same surge of admiration, awe and vicarious terror that I have when I hear the words "So, we had our ultrasound and it's triplets."
Siri, can you write the cartoon blurb for me?
I found 12 Italian restaurants... 6 of them are in Vancouver.
(sigh) Can... you... write...
Oh, relax, I'm just messing with you. Listen, sense-of-humor tasks aren't my thing, okay? I leave that to the humans.
So it's happened again: a company comes under fire for some misdeed — perceived or actual — and gets a few critical comments on their Facebook Page. And their crisis communications strategy is to pour gasoline on that little flame by deleting those comments.
The latest folks to do this are the people at ChapStick, who ran a print ad that offended a few folks. Those critics posted their complaints on ChapStick's Facebook page (most of them quite civil). ChapStick's page administrators then deleted the comments; this case adds an ironic new wrinkle because of the ad copy pointing people to their Facebook presence, which reads "Be heard."
Brand extension: a marketing strategy in which a firm marketing a product with a well-developed image uses the same brand name in a different product category. — Wikipedia
The greatest movie of all time, Demolition Man, taught us that in the future every restaurant will be Taco Bell.
What they missed was that everything else will be Angry Birds. Here's the tally to date, as far as I can tell:
There are times in our lives, extraordinary times, that call on us to open our hearts like never before. To embrace those who are suffering, and offer them comfort and support.
This, my friends, is such a time.
If you know a BlackBerry user, reach out to them. (Not with email. That's just mean.) Let them know you care, and that just because they were offline for a few days, you still love and respect them.
Where the hell did all the infographics come from, anyway?
One moment they're relegated to the pages of USA Today, enlightening people about such burning issues as How is America getting to the mall today? (private auto, 57%; public transportation, 25%; foot or bicycle, 12%; part of a marauding mob of looters, 4%; taxi, 2%).
Another week, another massive change to Facebook. I've done the developer workaround to get Timeline added to my profile, and now I have to plow through several years of my life to remove hideously embarrassing incidents lend some coherence to it.
And listen, I'm all in favor of them innovating and offering amazing new features to their users. I haven't decided whether I actually like Timeline yet, but I'm impressed as hell with what they've done with it.
Many breeds of professional have been mighty busy coping with digitally-driven changes over the last decade or two: journalists, musicians, travel agents, PR practitioners, job recruiters...
Let me suggest one more group of people who must be learning to live their lives in constant flux: ethicists.
In Vancouver, BC — thousands of miles from Ground Zero, the Pentagon and a field in Stoneycreek Township — you couldn't see any outward sign that something unusual had happened on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Except for one thing. The sky was empty. Nothing flying in or out of YVR, no contrails far overhead threading their way to Asia. I thought that day of Jane Siberry's song "One More Colour", and how her stream of beautiful, peaceful imagery culminated in "the speckless sky"... which was suddenly one of the scariest things I had ever seen.
Not only did he skate to where the puck was going to be, he reshaped the rink, redefined the arena... and replaced the puck with the Mighty Mouse.
The debate will rage for a long time over what piece of technology best encapsulates Steve Jobs' influence on our world: The iPhone? iPod? iMac? iPad? OS X and Aqua? But I'm going to argue for something a lot more low-tech: the turtleneck.
