Buzzwords

Recently I have been applying for jobs, and encountering the many "buzzwords" that seem to dominate job ads for the creative and marketing sectors.

This got me thinking about what a buzzword actually is. Some quick research on the always reliable and never wrong wikipedia reveals that, at least from Wikipedia's point of view there is no consensus. From the point of view of Wikipedia a buzzwords and a neologism are essentially the same thing.

The 20/20 hindsight of looking into the past shows that a lot of words used in our everyday vernacular were once considered (at least according to Wikipedia) "buzzwords", which really means that they were actually "Neologisms"at the time.

I think the issue I have with the word "buzzword" is it is essentially a synonym for Neologism but with derogative connotations.

buzz·word  

/ˈbəzˌwərd/

Noun A technical word or phrase that has become fashionable, typically as a slogan.

ne·ol·o·gism  

/nēˈäləˌjizəm/

Noun A newly coined word or expression. The coining or use of new words.

Synonyms neology - modernism

So looking at those definitions what is the difference between an "expression" and a "slogan". Is "coined" really any different from "fashionable". It is interesting that two words can essentially mean the same thing but have different connotations.

Is our attitude just to criticise any new words in the english language by calling them "buzzwords" until they are thoroughly ingrained in the language. It's almost like we want to give them a good rough-housing before we're willing to accept them into the language, like a college freshman initiation.

Perhaps we just need to accept that words are words.

Source: The internet, my brain.

Hats with padding vs Helmets

Giro has released a soft "helmet".

Helmets are uncool, even more uncool are helmets that are big and bulky, I get that. It seems people (read: Hipsters) are forever on a crusade to make helmets smaller and "stylish", often sacrificing function for form. In most instances I would say this is fairly harmless and often happens with design, but the bulky nature and inflexibility of the helmet is essential to it's function, which is to absorb the force rather than it being transferred to your noggin.

I find it hilarious that the flexibility of this helmet is touted as a selling point, because you really want a helmet that deforms and transfers the force to your skull rather than the helmet when your head smacks a tree at 50 kph. The liner would have to absorb a lot of force, to perform it's function.

Ok so I'm not a snowboarder, and maybe in this environment in most instances it could work as snow is softer than concrete. The problem is though that a lot of people will buy this and want to use it on the road with their longboard or bike. It's probably ok for light skating, but you wouldn't want to do any downhill or go much faster than 25 kph.

I'm skeptical, I'd really want to see this tested against an EPS foam hard shell helmet and see how much force is transferred to the skull, and more specifically the concentration of force in specific areas. I don't think it would pass most helmet certifications.

Social TV

There's a couple of interesting "social" TV apps around lately, social in the sense that you can use social media while watching TV. The two most prominent apps I am aware of are Zeebox and Fango.

Zeebox is basically a slick electronic program guide (all I use it for) with some half baked social media application interfaces tacked on which seemingly nobody uses. It's not bad but it's somewhat of a ghost town in regards to people "engaging" in social media while using it, the most tweets tend to be about live sporting events. It's not a bad little app, but I'm sure it is subsidised in some way by commercial TV networks.

"Fango" is Zeebox's retarded cousin from Yahoo 7. There is a fairly uninspired ad campaign on TV at the moment advertising Fango where a generic looking, actor feigns excitement about "engaging" in social media while watching sport and using the ipad app (by himself by the way, on the couch wearing a scarf and beanie in the team colours). This is "social TV", watching programs alone while using the internet to talk to your facebook friends and strangers about watching TV.

As if you didn't feel like a complete retard already Fango encourages you to use the service by earning "badges", the digital equivalent of that "good effort" stamp your teacher put on your year 3 writing assignment that you got a C- on. They are extremely punny, and basically do nothing, they're the equivalent of Xbox live achievements but easier to get and not something you would want to bragg about, example: "Check in to 10 reality shows to win the reality check badge". Yay.

It's an odd concept really, using cutting edge technology to "engage" with a slowly dying technology.

If you really break down TV in modern terms it is essentially a fixed playlist of aggregated content from a variety of sources, with some original content produced by the station. The appeal lies in the fact that it is easily accessible, requires little to no effort to access - just turn the TV on, watch. If you don't like the show change the channel, the main downfall being your choices are very limited, but it continues to thrive due simply to being free to access and requiring very little effort to do so.

The key to TV still being around is convenience and passivity.

This makes the attempt to get people to "engage" with TV via social media kind of stupid as the internet is itself a delivery method for video content, and a vastly superior one in many ways. The disadvantages are the relative inconvenience in sourcing free (legal) content and the effort requiring in basically aggregating your own media. It's a bit like buying a hottest hits CD vs making your own mix tape (showing my age a bit there with that metaphor).

Anyway TV will be around for as long as people are lazy, but social TV flies in the face of that. I don't get it.

You shall not pass!

Interestingly News Ltd has put up a paywall for the Australian . This is old news, however they have recently opened up the distribution figures to scrutiny, although I would like to point out that B&T are wrong in combining the digital figures with the offline distribution to get the total distribution of " 154,697", as News Ltd offer a digital pass bundle with the physical paper, so there would be a lot of overlap there as well.

Anyway the official distribution for online is 31,241, which might sound like a lot but you have to consider that is for the entire country/internet, The Examiner in Tasmania has a physical distribution of 31,947, and the Australian is not a little paper, it's physical distribution is 135,115.

I'm sure News Limited and eternal optimists would tout this as a win for online journalism, and proof that you can get people to pay for online journalistic content, but I'm not so sure. According to my maths (very dodgy caculations using Wolfram Alpha ) the online distribution is only 23.12% of what physical distribution is. Also worth considering is that the physical costs $8.95 delivered per week (only for Monday to Saturday) compared to a digital pass which costs $2.95, a difference of $6, and you get more content with the digital pass.

Of course even if you took the point of view that content is worth very little and distribution and production make up most of the costs, they are still practically giving this content away. With the price discrepancy between digital and physical distribution News Ltd have essentially priced production and delivery at $6, but this would ignore the fact that digital distribution still incurs costs, which I seriously doubt with a distribution of 31,241 they are covering, especially if they are offering ipad editions (the main appeal of the digital pass really).

My point is that even with the paywall News Ltd are practically giving their content away, and the distribution figures are nothing to brag about. If the content was priced appropriately it would be a very different story.

This isn't a tirade against Pay Walls but in fact it's quite the opposite. One of the largest media companies in the world pretty much has to give away their online content for next to nothing to get people to pay for it. Unfortunately the internet has created an expectation that content should be free by sheer saturation, in a way you could point the finger at News Ltd and other papers for contributing to this by not putting up paywalls sooner. Pay or don't pay, but I think the line should have been drawn in the sand sooner.

It could have worked, but I think old ideas are too ingrained to change it now. In essence what I am trying to say is this is too little too late.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australia_by_circulation

http://www.bandt.com.au/news/media/the-australian-opens-up-paywall-for-first-time

The Hulk and Skeletor

I just watched "Super Slim Me", a BBC3 documentary where Dawn Porter attempts to drop 4 dress sizes to become a hollywood size 0 by consuming 500 calories a day. It's an interesting little documentary, which annoyingly on youtube was squashed to what looked like the 4:3 aspect ratio (the square screen shape you used to get on old Televisions before wide screen) which ironically made everything look skinnier than it was. The documentary is a little old but it's worth seeing.

There's not a whole lot of new ground being broken here but it's compelling viewing all the same seeing the drastic change she goes through with changes in mood, health problems and decreased enjoyment of life. There's a few silly parts thrown in, ever the shit stirrer, dawn tries to deliver a piece of cake to Victoria Beckham's house in Spain and tries to get quotes from Rachel Zoe.

Probably the most unsettling part of the program was an experiment at a fashion exhibition where young girls are often recruited as models. Before being told they are part of the experiment Dawn asks the girls how much weight they would be willing to lose to become a model, the amount and willingness is a little unsettling.

Anyway having watched this program I felt that the body image that many women are trying to attain is quite ridiculous, but equally ridiculous is the dangerous path women are willing to go in order to achieve it. That led me to realise that even men now aren't immune to falling victim to body image problems. There seems to be an alarming trend (at least in Australia) of young guys doing steroids to achieve the body beautiful. This is something that is only starting to be addressed now, there is an excellent story on background briefing about the growing steroid culture in Australia .

So in closing there's really something deeply wrong with society when men are aspiring to be the Hulk and women are aspiring to be Skeletor. When I was a teenager I wanted to be Batman.

Blogging

It's kind of interesting where blogging has headed nowadays. The most popular "blogs" nowadays are really just syndicated news services, or feeds from websites posting articles.

I guess the latter kind of is a blog, but really is a feed from something like the huffington post or TMS really a blog?

I guess what started out as a way to democratise content and news on the internet is just another content delivery method for large media companies.

It's hard to really pin what you would define as a blog, is it simply the delivery method that defines it or the content. Is content from a large organisation by multiple authors, which is proofread, edited etc really a blog?

I suppose it is, and in some way's it's better with content that is typically of a higher quality, but then getting most of our information from large news services is detrimental. Sure there are checks and balances, but content also has to tow the company line, then there are advertisers you can't piss off, etc etc.

Megatokyo

Around the year 2000, as a younger, much much nerdier man (I'm still pretty nerdy), I used to read a manga webcomic called megatokyo. Being a regulation anime/manga geek with requisite asian girlfriend to boot this comic obviously appealed to my interests, namely self referential anime/geek/internet humor. It was never really that great, mediocre at best in both writing and art, but it was on the internet, and it was free.

In it's early days, Megatokyo had quite a large following, and equally large forums with an active user base on a wide variety of subjects. My hangout was the art and drawing forum. There were many quite talented manga artists on the forum, which I think was the initial appeal and what drew me to them. It was a place where you could post work and get feedback on your work.

While initially thinking by hanging out there I would learn about new drawing techniques I soon realised it was a very rigid community with a strange hero worship of the better artists. The work was a smattering of weird characters with ears, furries and ubelievably bad work done on lined paper by 15 year olds. I think as time went on I realised the majority of them were really nothing outside of the forums, and staying was detrimental to my creative development. Aside from which I felt I had outgrown the whole manga thing anyway. Eventually I saw the place for what it was: a collection of socially awkward geeks who liked to draw anime characters with ears and jack off to each other's art. Another interesting quirk was no nudity was allowed, a reflection of the very conservative, prudish nature of the forums.

Interestingly my best friend at the time (who I can say, still is my best friend) was into screenwriting, and used to post on the writing forums. He had similar complaints, but I think had the good sense to leave a bit earlier and make quite a bit statement as to why he left. I just kind of slipped away into the night.

Every few years or so I check back on the forums and it was quite interesting seeing the current state of the place. Seemingly ruled with an iron fist by moderators locking down all the threads the place is like a ghost town, about 5 threads that you can actually post in. There seem to be about a million rules that govern the forums, with the moderators doing most of the critiques. Kind of sad as back in the day it was a very active forum.

The forum aside the comic is quite tragic. Rumor has it the guys that made it had a disagreement and parted ways, leaving the creation solely to the artist Fred Gallager. Even back in the day, updates were few and far between, with many excuses as to why (got a job to go to etc), but even after doing it full time it was the same sporadic updates. Nowadays apparently he only updates it every month, and the story is so nonsensical and rambling only the most die hard fans remain. The most active part of the site seems to be the merchandise, of which seems to be the primary focus, with a swag of products selling out to a level to rival even Garfield. Obviously the guy needs to make a living, but it seems he doesn't really care about the narrative or the comic anymore, he's just doing the bare minimum to keep it alive long enough to flog off merchandise to make a living.

It's all kind of sad really.