I was reading a piece in the New York Times about goings-on at Gawker when I came across this quote from Choire Sicha (the outgoing managing editor as far as I can tell):
“I don’t want to write a top 10 list in my life, ever. I don’t want to construct a charticle.”
I’m not really that bothered about the rumour-mill at Gawker.
However, I do care about is the Charticle!!!
I’d never come across the term ‘charticle’ before. And I can’t be the only one as it’s not even included in Wikipedia (yet). I thought that might mean that it didn’t actually exist?!?
But with some digging around it appears that the charticle is real. This discussion featuring lots of people who work in newspapers seem to generally be cool with charticles. It basically seems to be like a hybrid between an article and an infographic.
There’s really not that much info on charticles online – a few people claim it’s a Tufte thing, but I reckon if it was one of his there’d be much more mention of it on the internet. Plus I’ve had a flick through my Tufte books and can’t find anything.
I did find another use of it on Technorati, ironically it was in an article written at Gawker by the aforementioned Choire Sicha…
Forbes.com is pleased to announce their most transparent and value-free bit of traffic-grabbing web content to date—a list of America’s Most Lustful Cities! It’s like—what is it even like? It’s like intellectual impoverishment in charticle form. I’m almost proud of them!
I wonder how simple a charticle can get before it becomes simply an article? I guess my question is: “is a list a charticle”? Choire seems to think so.
Any charticle experts out there? What do you think?
All this Pecha Kucha stuff is starting to get a bit dreary.
The idea of PowerPoint Karaoke seems a lot more random and challenging.
Basic idea is: people stick real presentations ‘in a hat’, then presenters get allocated a random presentation and have to present it as best they can.
There doesn’t seem to be many of them on popular video sharing sites (yet). There’s a few in German, but here’s one in English from BarCamp LA. You’ll get the idea:
Hoorah! The big paper plane and paper boat are real, and they’re down by the Thames.
Don’t forget to sign up to lobby for a stronger climate change bill (one that includes shipping and aviation for starters) at: http://getonboard.wwf.org.uk/
Then, once you’ve done your bit, you can nip down to Gabriel’s Wharf and see them (if you’re in London that is). If you need directions here they are:
For me Frat Houses were always a thing of great glamour and mystery. I guess it’s the teenage viewings of films like Animal House and Porky’s that make it all seem so exciting. But this film really changed my mind about all of that. It makes fraternities look like a bunch of knucklehead jocks that rule the US education system using fear, bullying and general badness. Whether that’s the case or not I’ve got no real place to say. And the authenticity of the documentary comes in for some stick over at Metafilter.
It just did a good job of shattering my illusions of frat life.
I’m finding that the Google Video ‘Download to iPod’ thing is a real winner for my commuting.
I wasn’t going to post this as it’s not all that enlightening. It’s from a few months ago and is Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) talking about web 3.0 as a bunch of lightweight free distributable micro applications / services. Which is all very well, but he doesn’t make it sound all that sexy.
The reason I posted the clip is out of sheer hatred for the journalist who asks the question.
“Easy question. What is web 3.0”
“We know what 2.0 is”
He’s such a tool.
But thankfully in the YouTube comments Atomgott brings the debate right back to reality
I dont care what they call it. As long as the amount of porn on the interwebs keeps growing.
If you’ve not seen it yet Street View in Google Maps is amazing. Lifehacker reports that it’s now in 15 US cities (and it’s coming soon to the UK judging by the fact that we saw a Google cam car driving round London the other day).
I’ve you’ve not mucked around with it, get on a map of NY or Chicago and have a play with Street View. It’s almost more impressive than Google Earth.
While I was playing I came across this:
And wondered what’s the value of a bus side inside Google maps? It’s lot more appealing to me than the Coke Zero ads in the UK ;-)
I’m doing some pitchy type stuff and ran out of inspiration so I typed into Google “most creative website ever” hoping that I’d find something to inspire me.
I’ve seen it before earlier in the year, but I’d forgotten how simply brilliant it is. If you’ve not seen it before you ought to take a peek. It might not be the most creative site ever, but it remains really rather charming…
In retrospect I shouldn’t have had a go at the Ogilvy PR Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics – incidentally they’re back with a V2 which you can find here. Having looked at some of the things I’ve been getting recently, people involved in this kind of activity really do need some help. So sorry for being cranky about it before, you guys are doing a good thing!
Just to make it clear I’m not having a pop at anyone here. And I’ve deliberately removed any traces of who sent it and what client it might be for as that’s not the point. The post is designed to illustrate some of the clangers that people are still making when they try to approach bloggers. Or at the very least some of the things that work (or don’t work) when you’re approaching me.
1. Why did you pick me?
From my contact form I can see how people got to the site, in this most recent instance it was through: http://scampblog.blogspot.com/. For those of you who don’t know Scamp has a very nice chart of Ad Blogs. So the fact that this person who mailed me had come from there immediately makes me suspicious.
My guess would be that most of the blogs in that chart have had an approach from this person. That makes me feel cheap and used. Not a good start point.
2. The Greeting
Hi,
Thought you might be interested in the latest [client name] digital campaign from [agency name].
Well it’s not personalised, which is bad. But at least it doesn’t say ‘Hi Crackunit.com’ which really annoys me. But I’m immediately suspecting that this person has done no research and has made absolutely no effort. Straightaway I’m thinking ‘blogspam’!
When doing blogger outreach, or whatever it’s called today, you have to realise that it’s a 2-way relationship. By putting your campaign on my blog I’m going to be delivering you traffic (at some small level), a bit of awareness and link juice (the stuff that makes your Google search ranking better). The very least you can do in return is give my ego a tiny little stroke and pretend that you’ve written a mail just for me. All it would take is to look at the title of my blog and copy my name into the mail.
Even better if it felt like you’d read my blog, and you thought I’d be interested because… Or even better be a bit honest and say something like “I’m a bit nervous about sending you a viral because I know you’ve got a bit of a thing about virals”. If someone did that I’d have huge respect for them.
But the really sad thing is that I know a few people that work in the agency that this came from. And geographically they’re only a few streets away from where I work. So a tiny little bit of research and a line that acknowledged some of that very basic stuff would have made all the difference. Honestly it would.
I’m not sure how many people this approach went out to. But I’m almost certain spending 10 minutes crafting each mail would end up driving significantly higher and more positive coverage. (Actually I bet someone’s done some research on that, or if they haven’t they ought to).
3. The Content of the Mail
Here’s a link to the campaign hub and a movie featured on the home page of the site: [link goes here]
While here’s a link to a viral that only lives on youtube:
Be interesting to hear your views on these
Cheers,
[sender name]
Well I guess it’s short.
As an aside my view on the ‘films’ in question. They’re quite good. I really love the skyscraper ads that go alongside them though. They really work for me. And I would have blogged about them if the email had been nice.
As I said I’m not having a dig. The email is a bog standard one, and I’ve had much much worse. Do go and have a look at the Ogilvy PR Code of Ethics, you’ll start to see that it’s not an easy thing to get right and there’s lots of things to consider.
