Sprint May Not Suck As Bad As We Thought

Chaotic Truth did an investigation on the folks calling Sprint customers. I don't know that I agree with his ultimate conclusion, but I do think it's possible this is a phishing scam. While that may be the case, I wonder why the scam seems to affect only Sprint customers. It makes me wonder if Sprint's customer database has been hacked, if they've sold some customer names to the wrong people, or if our personal information has been compromised in some way. Only time will tell, I guess.

In For A Late Night

Eric and I are hung up in the airport in Chicago, our layover on the Dallas trip. There's some weather in between us and LaGuardia. As it was, we were supposed to get in late, with me probably not getting back to Long Island until after midnight. Our flight's been delayed at least two hours. Could be a long night... The worst part is that we have at least three clients in Chicago we'd like to go see, but it's already after business hours, and besides - we can't leave the airport because no one knows when they'll start clearing flights into LGA again.

Grrr...

Decreased Attention Spans

I've had a few conversations lately with other friends who write regularly (whether on blogs or elsewhere) and there seems to be a running theme concerning people who either don't read their pieces all the way through before commenting or who see what they want to see in the piece, regardless of its content. I won't say this is a huge problem yet, but there's been a disturbing number of incidents lately where I've noticed someone has fired off a response to things we've written lately after reading only the first few sentences or paragraphs. I'm sure it's a symptom of our sound-bite media culture, where we often can afford the time to skim things or read story ledes and little else. I can tell you, if I had a nickel everytime someone flamed me for something I supposedly didn't address, but did address further down in the piece than they were willing to read, well...

"User" Sucks, Too

Apologies to Brad Berens and Cory Treffiletti. And kudos to Joe Jaffe. Brad published a piece this morning entitled "There's Nothing Wrong with User" on iMediaConnection.com, which dealt chiefly with trying to find a substitute for the silly phrase "Consumer Generated Content."

In it, Brad rightly points out that the word "Consumer" in this context is offensive. He then goes on to say he's "not crazy about 'user,' but it's better than 'consumer' by orders of magnitude." He then tells Jaffe to "get over it" with respect to his objections to "user."

That we spend so much time on this crap is silly in and of itself, but if we're going to have tiffs over which term to use, let's at least get it right.

"User" is better than "consumer," but only marginally so. While "user" doesn't necessarily have that nasty connotation that comes from corporations seeing their customers as mere consumers of product. But it does do something that "consumer" also did, which is to draw an artificial line of distinction between "ordinary folks" (as Brad termed them in his article) and what we've traditionally thought of as professional content producers.

The truth of the matter is that everybody, is now a producer of content. So if you want to describe the notion of people who have never really produced content before starting to do just that, may I suggest referencing the "Citizen Publishing Movement?" Otherwise, just call the content what it is - a mash-up, a web short, a blog post or what have you.

BTW, we also need to stop referring to everything that goes up on the Internet as "content." Some of it is probably more accurately described as "conversation." New applications and emerging social systems aren't necessarily content, yet many of us regularly refer to such things as content. Probably due to many years of having that now-dead phrase uttered in our ears at every opportunity - "Content is King."

Kudos to Jaffe for dissing "user."