Alexia Golez

Avocado:

From the Aztec word ‘ahuakatl’ for testicle.

Pander:

A pimp.

Nice:

Originally meaning “foolish, stupid, senseless” in the late 13th Century.

Just applied a new theme – Rockstar from Woo Themes – it’s free and has a nice theme config page. Definitely considering popping for their club now.

And the buhbye blog thing – blogs are oh-so-confining, if I could I’d rename this place – a repository of swirled ideas. Enough navel-meta bull, back to sketching out theorems using pixels.

So, last Wednesday a shitstorm regarding Twitter lists hit the Irish Twitterati and as we’re a hot-cold bunch, it blew up in predictable form.

SimplyZesty launched their lists and they had taken a similar approach to signup to TwitIreland. It seemed so anyway. But no. They hadn’t. It appears that they only way you can ask to be added to a list they create is by public hashtagging tweets. These hashtagged tweets are necessary. They are prerequisites.

Not very different from the Moonfruit spam bullshit that happened last Summer, except in SimplyZesty’s case their lists appeal to the ego and not to the Macbook-Pro-shaped hole in your life, right?

These lists represent social capital that SimplyZesty is producing. They are also appear to be visible demonstrations of SimplyZesty’s understanding of the Irish tweeting community, Twitter and beyond. But they are really not.

Spam, spam, spam

The really disappointing thing about SimplyZesty lists requiring users to send that hashtagged message is that it transforms a participant from being part of a community to be part of a cynical PR campaign. And plenty were fine with that.

The sad thing about this is that SimplyZesty are an online PR agency that specialise in giving advice about Social Media. They sell themselves as experts that businesses call into give advice about engaging online. Now, if experts in a tiny field treat their own users as mere meat in a flat, old-school PR approach of mention inches, not ideas then the industry is fucked before we even start.

I took issue with the way SimplyZesty posts were constantly pimped on Twitter untagged and RTed in a circuit of circlejerkery and now I take issue with the way that SimplyZesty are using people as word of mouth pawns. I don’t care if it’s a one-time thing. If SimplyZesty create a service that ends up in spamming the Twitter feed to talk about their stuff, it’s still spam. I’m kind of wondering where they go next because parts of the team seem resistant to learn a damn thing – I took issue with iFoods spamming my email many months ago. A case of blame the intern?

Flawed Thinking

It’s not just the spam issue, SimplyZesty’s list approach has a few major flaws:

Lists are limited

So what happens when a SimplyZesty list outgrows the account it belongs to? The USA and UK lists are perfect exemplars. Do we add ‘1′ or ‘2′? Adding numbers to the end of the name of a Twitter account really means that the atomicity of the original account is lost – so I want a full list of people that live in London, perhaps I’ll have to browse SimplyEngland1’s (or 2, 3, etc) Greater London for London users. Suddenly, the easy 1-click approach of lists that SimplyZesty is advocating is lost in conditions – one must search, read and find now? Scalability is now a problem.

Search already does the job and features-to-be

Typing in “near:location” ( for example, “near:Wexford”), into the Twitter search box returns the list of Twitter users that have entered Wexford as their default location in their Twitter profiles. While some may say that this is too difficult for users to manage, users seem fairly used to using Google to search every single day. Users are not ignorant.

Twitter is just a step away from making lists infinitely more usable by connecting search to list creation, maintenance and sharing. This will be definitely part of a corporate Twitter offering to organisations along with metrics and decentralised ad creation. Connecting search to lists would effectively kill the SimplyZesty effort. It’s the classic question that startups face – “is this a feature or something worthwhile – and how likely is a small effort on the part of an service provider/competitor is likely to kill on what I am working on?”

Creativity Hide-and-Seek?

Community isn’t about transparently using people online to benefit. Marketing and online PR people in Ireland are still not getting this. Requiring people to use hashtags as prerequisites  for anything, cheapens not only the user, but the service/event it is promoting. SimplyZesty and firms like them that sell Social Media expertise need to realise that and need to begin respecting their web users.

Where’s the bloody creativity? Is the mother-lode of online PR and social engagement hashtags on Twitter? Christ. We’re so far behind the UK scene, it’s scary. While they are Wright-Brothersing-it by focusing on ideas and mixed-media approaches to connecting with people on things they actually give a shit about, we’re still scratching in the dirt treating people as buzz meat and congratulating ourselves on hashtags.

We’ve been down this road again and again. Irish PR practitioners keep plugging away at the hashtags thinking it’s a saving metric for their clients. This does not work. Giving invites to Irish bloggers and Twitters to blog and tweet like zombies using hashtags does not work. In fact, the usual faces at the usual events organised by the usual people smells of shill and for sale. How many times must one say it?

Web users are partners. Online marketing and PR agencies need to work with ideas that infect us with wonder, fun, WTF .. etc. Enriching what people care about is something to focus on. The rest will follow.

When SimplyZesty came into the scene, they held so much promise.  An agency born out of the web and dedicated to the online. I really believed that they were going to make a difference. I guess I was wrong.

I attended Interesting last Saturday. It rocked, like I knew it would. This year, like last, I felt inspired by the whole day of talks. Instead of regaling the day, I’m making a list of things I learned.

1. Coffee is meant to be drunk and not splashed on your crotch and about the floor
2. Never, ever, mock a monkey
3. Interesting Saturdays are always the sunniest ones imaginable
4. Dave Funky Pancake has the best commute stories
5. Jarvis Cocker drinks in Camden. He is the most famous person I blinked and missed
6. A girl never stops loving ponies
7. Arithmetic by smell, while inspired, is doomed to dark, dark failure
8. Annie Mole has the coolest tshirts
9. Anyone can conduct an orchestra!
10. Biscuits were created in God’s own image and they need to be coveted
11. Frivolty is important in design

Met the lovely Josie and her Biscuit Mischiefer!, the charming Annie Mole ever so briefly and the sparky Kerry (that I tried to force salty beef on).

My Interesting 09 photos.

It is interesting to see how Climate Camp activists coordinated and organised their London protest on Twitter at noon yesterday, all while the Met monitored online comms to try to police the situation.

Simon notes how the Climate Camper have coordinated their plans over online comms channels:

The ’swoop’ takes place from a number of locations across the city and is being coordinated and publicised via a number of social media channels:

• Live video of the swoop is being Qik’d
• Live tweets from the swoop are being published at http://twitter.com/climatecamp – the hashtag climatecamp is being used for general updates while each swoop location has been given its own unique hashtag.
• The swoop location is being announced at midday via SMS and the Climate Camp Facebook group

Conversely the Met Police are using their own Twitter feed to coordinate and publish live information (although they say they won’t be responding to replies and DMs) and using monitoring tool Radian 6 to track online conversations.

Who won? Can there be a winner?

[Updated: Due to timestamp fail!]

Photo owned by Robert Couse-Baker (cc)

Tonight the Rose of Tralee Festival comes to a head with the first night of the competition to find 2009’s loveliest girl. The Rose of Tralee Festival is one of the most important jewels in Kerry’s tourist crown. Tourism number crunchers expect over €6 million will be pumped into the local economy during the Festival.

The scope of the competition has so utterly changed over the years. Contestants travel from much farther afield. And while there are reels still rolled out as talents, there are certainly less tin whistle solos. The way the Festival is marketed seems curiously traditional. Lovely girls, check.  Circus, check. Parade, check.  Oirish Country and Western acts playing in the open air, check. Richie Cavanagh, er – check. Yes, a hodge-podge of plastic Paddy amusements that don’t really have anything to do with the contestants.

How about a couple of creative ways to connect to the Roses or the idea of a rose signifying one’s beloved to the Festival?

Rose of Roses
The biggest asset that the Rose of Tralee has are the girls that have taken part over the years. They are traces of the history of the contest. Last night, RTE showed some footage of the past Roses posing in a photoshoot. Of course, it was all very safe.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to make dresses of red rose heads or flapper dresses made of red rose petals? Dress past Roses in them. Don’t be afraid of older beauty and be representative maybe a few Roses ranging in age from 25 to 55. Perhaps get them a few of them together, asking each one to pose as a curve in a cubist rose.

Write Your Beloved Box
Roses are the currency of caring. Wouldn’t it rock if the festival left boxes with the head of a fresh red rose in them around selected towns and cities for people to find? The kick would be that those that find the boxes would be encouraged to write, draw or express on the box things they want to say to a person they love or care about – boyfriend to girlfriend, child to grandmother.. etc. You get the idea. Say you didn’t find a rosebox, it doesn’t matter, you could still enter and make your own. The more creative and fun the better.

The Festival could spice this up by, perhaps, asking people to photograph or video and share their personalised boxes on the Festival site. The Festival jury could judge the winners a month before the Festival. Prizes could be bunches of roses, boxes of Irish Rose chocolates, spa weekends in the Kerry wilderness or a VIP trip to the Festival.

Rose Snaps
Beauty is totally subjective. It could be the laugh-lines cracking under brown eyes, the elegant curve of the collarbone or a graceful step. Mostly though, it’s a glimpse of a feature or part of one’s self that we can’t but love. Those irreverent flashes.

Wouldn’t it great if the contest could somehow reflect this? So the girls are probably holed up in the Brandon Hotel this week. How about each of the contestants or their escorts are given cameras to take photos of things they love – people, places or sacred moments.

Or perhaps the Festival could set aside a hotel room to act as snaproom. The snaproom would have cameras on a flexible arms. Almost like stems. Different modified cameras could be set up. Old cameras, Polaroids, cameras with coloured glass mods like filters. You get the idea. The girls could move and position these camera to take pictures of themselves, others or things they find precious. Again, these photos would be shared on the Festival site.

If maths and science Leaving Cert grades are falling, but points for courses centering on them are rising because of the implosion of property prices, does that mean the high-achievers that could have opted to do architecture, law or business will be good technologists? In essence, could the construction bust seed a strong R&D future in science and technology?