Some of the marketing efforts I’m most impressed by are the little, obvious things. I recently ordered some replacement ink cartridges from The Ink Factory (excellent service, by the way - next day delivery and cheap prices, as well as good quality non-OEM cartridges). I’ve ordered from them twice now - this time round I had to dig out their name from my email archives - searching Google for printer ink uk brings up a lot of sites. They’ve now sent me some tiny stickers, with their website and phone number printed on them, one of which has now gone on the inside of my printer hood. Next time, I won’t have to do that hunt. So obvious, so simple, so clever.

Easy Rider is cool: and as it’s from the decade that invented cool, the 60s, it’s everything you expect - messy, drug-riddled, hairy and hippy. There’s no slickness or shine here: just folks kicking back.

Easy Rider presents the world as suits it best: there’s no suburban American, just little towns and vast expanses of beautiful and wild desert. The visuals are perfectly offset by classic American music - country and rock ’n’ roll - and even the editor seems to be high at times, with wild cuts and babbled scenes.

I’m undecided on information design. For a long time, I’ve been a big fan of Edward Tufte: his wordy-but-worthy book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is a classic of non-fiction (“Best 100 books of the 20th century.” - Amazon), and is self-exemplifying to a fault: the typography is beautiful, the illustrations rich and detailed. It’s also a classic treatise on how to visually abuse statistics. His other publications, whilst they cover some of the same topics, aren’t quite so easy to follow, although the short essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint is worth a read if you’re a Powerpoint hater like me (also see Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint).

Passing along Chelsea Embankment yesterday, I noticed that the British Heart Foundation is running a series of adverts designed to encourage people with chest pain to call 999. Sounds eminently sensible as a first step. However, Robert Fischell, presenting at TED 2005, stated that 75% of patients arriving at Emergency Rooms (Casualty in Brit-speak) with chest pain aren’t suffering from a heart attack: and thus aren’t taken very seriously - i.e., they are triaged below other patients (Fischell was presenting on an early warning device that provides more certain diagnoses). The BHF says on their website: ‘If you think you are having a heart attack, dial 999 immediately’. But almost no-one will know whether they are having a heart attack: they will merely feel the symptom of a possible one. Obviously trying to educate people in health matters is important. But isn’t it only sensible that we be given a bit of statistical context? I’d like to see the BHF be a little more responsible and a little less alarmist. I want to be able to weigh up my health risks sensibly to make good life-style choices: this kind of education doesn’t help.

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky’s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering. There’s a large overlap between business and software engineering here, and this is why IBM sells products like WebSphere Process Server together with business consultants to help customers implement them. There are a number of other essays in Spolsky’s excellent book which also discuss related subjects.

I’ve noticed that my blog’s been splogged - unsurprisingly, using one of my film reviews that contains some ‘adult’ words (see here for the NSFW copycat). Does this mean I’ve made the blogging bigtime? I’m still only at Technorati rank 147,804 - although (in a not-at-all-sore-loser fashion) I feel the same about Technorati as Richard does about Sun - what exactly is the point?

Fascinating. This 2-day old article regarding a German plane bomb plot made the front page of the Der Spiegel website, but never came anywhere near the front page of the BBC one (this eventually made an appearance, hidden away). Perhaps British folks are expected not to care about German travellers? Maybe alleged terrorist threats are now that commonplace? Or is the BBC just not quite as capable as it many believe it to be? Our ’trusted’ news source slips past day by day without asking the most basic of questions in most situations (mostly, ‘show me the evidence’). It’s immoral that I would face a £1000 fine for having a box of electronics and refusing to pay for this (I don’t own a TV).

I went to a summit on Second Life and virtual worlds in Hursley today, hosted by Kevin Aires, Jack Mason, and Roo Reynolds - it’s becoming obvious that there’s a big buzz about Second Life both inside and outside IBM - a primary bit of evidence being IBM’s recent announcement of a $10m investment in virtual worlds such as Second Life. For obvious reasons, I can’t relate everything that was discussed. However, the discussion did get me thinking about Second Life in a slightly different way from before: as a basis for social networking applications, rather than as a basis for any application: an example of the former being The Greater IBM Connection, an IBM alumni community. In this respect, it seems to be more analogous to, say, LinkedIn, than another application platform (Windows, the web, etc.). This scope seems realistic - as I’ve stated before, meetings and conferences seem to be the best application of Second Life that’s been demonstrated so far. The consumer impact of Second Life is still TBD.

A sign in the Winchester branch states that WHSmith have joined the list of retailers who have stopped accepting cheques - Shell made headlines when they announced they were to do the same back in September last year. Apparently WHSmith are concerned about fraud, and this news story implies that it’s only an experiment, but it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the decision is also related to the cost of processing and handling, and that this will become permanent - after all, it’s rare that you see a cheque being used in a shop now, and with good reason - they are tedious, awkward, and slow to process.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a murder mystery. It’s sexy, witty, and fast-paced. Lead actors Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer (the latter as the superbly sarcastic Gay Perry), are a fabulous duo and perfectly cast. Michelle Monaghan adds a saucy touch. The plot is intricate and has more twists than a pretzel, just like any decent murder mystery. It has car chases and guns. Downey Jr. breaks the fourth wall all over the shop - and the icing on the cake is his aside about the poor ending to the last LoTR.