washwords

work sends emails that make me laugh out loud sometimes all the time. What follows is today’s but for those who don’t like to read, here’s the bottom line: 1) the email we sent you ISN’T SPAM. DON’T DELETE IT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. and 2) (ha ha ha ha, that this is point 2,) : the infomation in said EMAIL THAT YOU ARE NOT TO DELETE is incorrect. please disregard it until further notice.

Here it is (and nope, I’m not even sayin what’s wrong with the grammar/spelling/syntax/plain English here (but hint: subject/verb agreement) :

In this week’s <newsletter>, we announced that our travel agency, z, would be sending you a pin number to access your Traveler’s Profile. Unfortunately, their parent company sent the email under their name, x, rather than under y, z, or p. This resulted in employees thinking they had received spam. These emails are not spam, they are bona fide emails from y that contain your pin number and password. Please do not destroy them.

On a separate note [me: HA HA HA], we have discovered that the passwords and pin numbers are not working and are we are working to resolve the issue. Please do not try to use them until p can fix the problem. In next week’s <newsletter>. we will announce when you will be able to access your profile using the pin number and password that were emailed to you. Please keep a copy of these emails for future reference.

Okay, so maybe there’s 12. Or 13. But man alive, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there on the Interweb. (and a few non-web goodies thrown in for good measure too). Oh, and first of all, you are using firefox, right? Umm go get it. And you know that you can use tabs to open multiple sites at a time right? And you know that you can simply drag any one of them there tabs right up to your “bookmarks toolbar” where it’s there ready and waiting for you to click, click, click away. Oh boy, we have a lot to cover.

Full disclosure, this is mostly for my fellow blogger buds out there, but, in my typical style not wonkish enough for those of you who REALLY know anything about technology. Still stick around. I’m learning something everyday in this brave new world. Hope you will too!

In no particular order,some of the cooool things I’m using: Read the rest of this entry »

In The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web – Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp examines the media Oversatura-plosion-ama that is the Interweb.

Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING, I’ve reproduced about ten percent of them below — just the headlines and ledes. If you have the stomach to scroll through them all to see what else I have to say about it, check out the sources as you scroll:

This scroll (go check it out; we’ll wait) went on and on … and … It didn’t even count the blogs that repeated the same story or the multiple versions of each one, or editions or…

Conserve paper? Conserve time! and brain cells!

I find I’m facing a similar conundrum with “social media tools.” For someone (me) who once considered going to library school, and has been a lifelong researcher/journalist and social scientist (especially the Read the rest of this entry »