Fonts and WhatNot

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Response to Pecha Kucha on Friday night.

Edward Hopper's handwriting

1. I learned typography is not boring. Which I knew of course, but fun to see it presented historically going back thousands of years.

2. The last speaker closed with a slide that said “Create something”. And in his charming youthful, snowboard culture way, said that it didn’t matter if it was good or bad shit, just do it. The slide reminded me of Corita Kent, an artist and a nun, who had this to say on the matter of creating:

“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”

Possibly also written by John Cage, but he’s well enough known, so I rather prefer the idea of the her penmanship being the one. Apparently they knew each other, so who knows, it may have been a collaboration.

Email Send Limits – or Why Spammers Should Be ….

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This week I spent about 8 hours wrestling MailMan to the ground. I got an A in wrestling during my first semester at college, which means I should be good at this, eh?

MailMan is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. I started down the garden path of looking at MailMan for a client was sending out a mass email and bumped into the send mail limit of the hosting provider.

I’m not sure exactly when these limits have been applied or more accurately, strictly enforced, but it seems that they apply pretty much across the board on most web hosts, and even with gmail. The average is about 100 emails per session, or email. We’re talking about number of emails sent from a mail client, if you send from within gmail it’s a higher limit.

MailMan has a lot of features and is pretty decent, all things considered, but as the tech support on the phone told me “it’s not my favourite software”. Mine neither. It feels very dated, like something from the 90s. The 90s were great, but not so elegant.

It seems to me when you are sending through an authenticated account, that you should have a higher limit than 100, but I’m presuming this is the way to keep spammers at bay.

I think I’ve lost a year of my life to dealing with incoming spam, blocking spam, writing SPF records, sifting through junk mail for valid emails, handling comment spam and the like.

There was  a bill passed here in Canada, Apparently the fines are intense, up to $10 million dollars for corporations,  but if it’s had an affect I don’t think anyone’s noticed.

I wonder how many individuals and/or corporations have been fined for sending out spam here in Canada, and what are the stats like for our neighbours in the South? And, when they have been fined, how much was it for, and was the money received?

Canadians receive 68.5% of spam.

Source: http://www.emailtray.com/blog/infographic-email-spam-phishing-trends-2011-2012/

 

 

The diaspora – by nature complex

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There is a rich, detailed article at MotherBoard “What Happened to the Facebook Killer? It’s Complicated” talking about Diaspora: The Community-run, Distributed Social-network , how the combination of its very low initial  budget ($200,000) compared to Go0gle’s billions, the tragic death of one of its founders, and the scale of reach Facebook had reached, amongst many others, as factors that have influenced its failure to take over FB. The project is still very much alive, however I can tell you in one, ok two, points why it won’t reach millions.

1. Too much focus on geekdom. The Big Bang Theory might be a very popular show, but most folks aren’t interested getting their hands dirty. Who wants to install a server?

2. Too much choice. When you go to the diasporaproject.org and click sign-up it directs you to a tsuanami of pod choices to join. They call it an ecosystem of pods.

I would like a social media system that offers full control over privacy and guarantee of respect of individual and collective privacy. I fully respect the impetus behind Diaspora. And I’m disappointed it hasn’t taken over as a viable new model. Especially in the light of FB’s recent privacy transgressions in Europe. (FB recently rolled out a facial recognition system that tags your photos by automatically suggesting names. They have since suspended facial recognition in Europe – where presumably folks have a longer memory of how data in the wrong hands is no laughing matter.)

But who will provide such a utopic system?

The MB article concludes on an optimistic note: “As the Internet shifts to our pockets and everywhere else, it’s right to be skeptical of those who promise to be the next big thing, no matter how big that thing is. What we do know is that the new new thing is always right around the corner. It probably won’t be Diaspora. And it probably won’t resemble Facebook. But it will probably be better. It will need to be, because it’s our choice after all. These things are nothing without us.”

 

Wearing White After Labour Day

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I have 3 pairs of white pants. One a creamy wide-leg linen pair, one a pair of stretchy  arctic white cropped jeans, and the last is a pair of capris. Also a cool white.

It now being the 4th of September, the fashion goddesses decree I must put these items to rest until next year. But wait, the climes are still in the 20s – and sun is in the forecast. Must I obey?

A friend of mine told me this “Origin of the fashion rule: It had to do with laundry and not with fashion. Back, say 100+ years ago … During the summer months, laundry could be hung outside to dry and sunlight would keep the whites sparkling. But once the cottage was closed and people returned to the city, there wasn’t the same amount of sunshine or the same intensity, and in the city there was a lot of coal smoke and dust in the air (because that’s how things were heated in those days) so whites got dingy very quickly and looked dirty. Hence the dictum: don’t wear white after labor day. Browns and blacks didn’t show the dirt so they could be worn a number of times before they had to be cleaned. ”

So where am I going with this?

Basically thinking about how to redo this website – wrestle it into the ground into something that says stylish, but not too conformist, cool but not arctic and so on. White on a website is like how Picasso referred to black “when in doubt — use black” or so they told me in art school.

Soon there may be more white or a lot less. Rules are made to be broken.

 

Taken in August."Jeans"

 

Just How Many Twitter Followers Do You Need?

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numbers

I was waiting in line at my favourite gluten-free bakery, coincidentally right below our studio, as the owner Arlene was chatting with another customer and mentioned that she would tweet her when a new product was available.

The gal replied “Oh I’m not on twitter that much” but that she does refer friends to the bakery via word of mouth not twitter. Arlene then mentioned she was talking to someone else who basically told her her twitter presence was insignificant, that she needed at least 500 followers before it became useful.

I said, well it’s not necessarily true. As a joke I said she only needed 10 followers.

Yes, of course 500 vs 50 is probably better — I’m not arguing with that. It’s the concept that there is a set number out there that  business has to achieve. And, that if you have 500 followers, but over 50% of them are bots, that’s hardly something to write home about.

Also, the whole numbers game and the ideal ratio (you “should” have more followers than following) has always seemed a bit suspect to me. The pump and dump strategies employed by some — they follow you and then unfollow you once you’ve followed them back so they can quickly have a ratio of 2,000 to 10,000. Look at me, I’m popular!

Although I tossed out the number 10 as a joke, what if her ideal client, who also happens to be on twitter,  also happens to be a very popular twitterer….maybe she does need only a few followers. What if one of them happened to be @hummingbird604 ( I don’t think he’s a gluten free person, but who knows?) One RT from him and you’re immediately reaching a much wider audience (>10K in his case), so the logic goes. On the other hand, he tweets probably 300(0?) times a day and so that audience might just miss his tweet about your x, y, z.

A better strategy is to not focus so much on the numbers and focus instead on listening to your audience and responding to them as the genuine, authentic business owner you are.

Forget about the numbers. Really.

p.s. Say hello to Arlene on Twitter.