Her? Oh my. Today’s lesson in projection and prejudice, indeed.
UPDATE:
Not offended at all. I know I’m pretty!
See, with this …
The ‘certain obvious scent’ of which you speak smells more to me like someone’s projecting her ideal
… you obviously referring to someone, and either a) plain thought I was female, in which case you should remember to check your assumptions when angry, or b) are just driving trollies, now.
Frankly, your sputtering retreat into “hypothetical girl” and indefinites–and trying to cast me as offended by the suggestion!–is another reminder of why it’s a bad idea to impose potentially offensive analogies and comparisons (you know, like "sluts, meant not as an insult’) to unrelated discussions. At the end of the day, you justed end up with spittle on your own monitor.
I don’t think s/he was itching to call women sluts, if that’s the “scent” you’re detecting. For the record, there are a nontrivial number of women who feel strongly about reclaiming and deweaponizing that term, much as “queer” has been (to take one example). Of course, there are also a nontrivial number of women who feel as you apparently do, and men on both sides, and so forth.
I’m very reluctant to ascribe any motive to anything done by a for-profit website and its managers (very definitely including BB) besides “increase clickthroughs,” but if I had to make another guess here, I’d say the scent coming off your comment translates to “at the end of the day, I’m okay with trading a few clicks for the satisfaction of teeing off on some dude who’s fussing about how I do my job… and by now I’m pretty good at it.” Someone compared you to Antinous above. That’s taking it a bit far, but only a bit. And for all anybody on the outside can tell, the modship of Antinous ended when BB itself wandered into the path of his orbital weapons platform–not that that’s going to happen to you, but it’s why a lot of other successful comment-driven sites do their thread-curation invisibly and without “we don’t like your odor here” scolding. You could always sock-puppet in as a mere mortal user, if you just wanted to mix it up.
Also… I’m not positive why a website would go to the trouble of even having a comment section that they moderate, except to drive traffic. So really… expect moar grammar commentary. Monies in pockets.
Please, let us abandon the place where, when discussing unrelated topics on the internet, a rummage in the analogy drawer results in “Ah, here we are, sluts.”
I’m sure one could explain at great length why it is perfectly appropriate and innocuous to bring sluts into discussions of journalistic virtue but there are already perfectly good subreddits for that sort of thing.
You know, we don’t really think about clickthrough rates at all. On the level of a site like BB, it’s not part of the reward system, which is all about aggregate, long-term trends. Most editors basically look at the gross total uniques and page views once in a while, and that’s our vague guide for how good we’re doing. I track things a little closer, as I keep track of freelancer contributions.
Antinous offered unfettered and welcome criticism of Boing Boing for years. He left because he didn’t like moderating the new comment system.
We’re not a comment-driven site! At least in the sense you mean (clickthroughs, traffic, etc.)
If your site isn’t about the comments, then adding comments will not grow the site.
The given wisdom around “comments driving contents” is basically an early-mid 2000s marketing fantasy about “captive growth” that was likely never really true to begin with. For example, adding comments to BB in 2007 reduced the amount of incoming referral traffic to the site. Best guess? Discussion of BB posts at other sites moved into BB itself. We like it here, for sure, but could always bump the stats by forcing y’all out onto twitter and facebook, where discussions like this would generate referral traffic to us from all your friends, instead of being read by, like, the 4 people still participating in this discussion.
I think 7-11 is the trademark, rather than the company name, but that’s not as much fun as the interesting story behind the parent company of 7-11 which you can read on Wikipedia here.
So in other words you have invented a totally pointless piece of jargon for something that isn’t really a thing, and will proceed to troll boingboing readers for the rest of the year by spelling ‘iPhone’ wrong. Gotcha.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I actually do, every time my iphone auto-capitalises iphone, cancel the autocorrect and keep it all lower case.
The stores have been called 7-Eleven since shortly after World War II, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of their logos or anything from the parent companies (The Southland Corporation before the 1998 bankruptcy or Ito-Yokado and then Seven and I afterward) that used “7-11” as the trademark. But in any case, if you write that you went down to 7-11, everyone remotely familiar with the store will know whereof you speak, just as well as if you mention going to Wal Mart or Walmart or Wal*mart. Comic book nerds usually remember that Batman is not hyphenated but Spider-man is (oh, wait–I mean “Spider-Man”), but outside of nerd circles or Marvel HQ, nobody gives a hoot if you write “Spiderman” instead.
But those alternate spellings are, strictly speaking, incorrect. It kinda reminds me of that time in the ST:TNG pilot when Dr Crusher mispronounced Data’s name with a short A. When he objected, she asked what the difference was, and he replied, “One is my name. The other is not.” That was intended to set up our empathy for Data as a character rather than as a machine, and iPhones and convenience stores are not, in fact, people, my friends. But we might as well call them by their proper names, I figure, at least up to the point of what we consider reasonable. Consensus agrees upon iPhone (which happens to be formally correct) and dumpster and kleenex (which have become correct through genericism over the decades) and 7-11 (which is incorrect but nobody cares) and Toyota (since TOYOTA is no more NASA than Ford and Honda are). I feel that if you decide to fight this consensus by typing Iphone instead of iPhone, it puts you in the position of having to explain why, every time you encounter a new reader who wonders why you employ this relatively unorthodox spelling of what has become a very common word.
Because I can totally verify that “Teapot” works in marketing. For all I know, you do, or your marketing might consist of suggesting add-ons during your shift at McDonalds. I don’t know.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m still responding…
I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m still responding…
Me either, considering I tear you a new one every time you try. Considering I’m constantly on here making points about anything graphics/web/video related and my graphics have been included in BB posts several times I think it’s safe to say I work in marketing. Keep trying though man… I know you’ve got a vendetta against me because I dared mock your beloved sky wizard.
It is odd (and just fine for setting up authorial citation Canon, not least for people who mark who is curating their meme. Not Dentistry; rarely curmudgeons.)
Clearly iStuff was named in a context following Japanese putting ‘my’ in front of everything (mySeder, myMRI, myMcFryup…myMobi) and SoCali Imperative of saying say, ‘if he wants to be mayor again he’ll have to write his name ByRroWnE.’ It is however kind of Cory to wait until the second day of the year to introduce the symbol (not counting the byline of Dorian Gray (A California S Corporation Division of Dorian Gray Holdings PC, LLC; We’re Beatrix) showing how many London Transit F****s he gives for the propriety of caps. Her Nerves! Avoiding incaps when referring to iPhone 3 apps as fiOSsilised; check! Have fun with the ‘goring a citation of Her Ox’ thing.
Cory, mate, I like your writing, posts and you seem like a cool dude (and I won’t be dragging Alice into this as others have, I’ve met her, and she’s awesome, even though I met her through a rejection when she was a commissioner at channel 4!). You’re also free to take part in this activity (as if you need our approval) and if it makes you feel better about the content you produce then that’s awesome and empowering, best of luck to ya.
However… please don’t do it in the name of ‘journalistic integrity’, because that’s bullshit. Journalists favour clarity and accuracy, something better served by the correct formation of an entities name (whether it be a business or an individual). Not to mention the reasoning seems flawed, intentionally mis-capitalising brand names does nothing to stick it to the man, it’ll just make you look like you don’t proof read properly, or have a spellcheck from '94. If this were an unbiased non-profit id understand wanting to avoid ‘free advertising’, but even if that were a factor I don’t see the impact on BB, which is full of ad content anyway (so that’s more corporate than journalistic). As others have mentioned as well, if you don’t want to promote something, then don’t write about it. THATS integrity.
If you want to boost your journalistic integrity (which is an awesome New Years resolution, btw) then scale back on the sensationalist headlines, and react to audience criticism of sources and misinformation when you’re called out on it. Seems like a far more logical place to start.
What about musicians? How much do you respect them? e.g. do you always use the correct “spelling” for AᗺBA, KoЯn, Ke$sha, P!nk, The Wh♂, *NSYNC, Mike + The Mechanics, o(+>, Jackson 5ive, etc?
I’ve got a friend who insists his name must be written in a monospace font. Would you cater to that whim if he was a famous artist or a big company?
Cory, are you going to link to this post every time you behave in deInCapsification on a post? Because if you don’t, any new readers coming upon your post are going to think you need a copy editor every time you write “Iphone” or “iPad”. Although, come to think of it, probably the only time anybody will ever notice this is when you’re writing about Apple devices. Maybe eBay, but I doubt it. Paypal, certainly not (I don’t know anybody who ever bothers writing it as “PayPal”.
I mean, it’s your writing, do what you want obviously, it just seems silly to me. But then, a lot of the things you do seem silly to me, so carry on, I guess
