By Francis Moran
Who’d have thunk that my self-professed word nerdiness could come together with my social conscience on a single web site with a terribly addictive premise?
Well, in the world of the web, all mash-ups are possible, and the quirky but fascinating site Free Rice manages to marry these seemingly disparate interests of mine with a little game that sees rice donated to feed hungry people with every correct answer visitors give to a vocabulary question. For every word you get right, the site’s backers donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program to help feed hungry people. The money to buy the rice is generated through banner ads on the site.
Twenty grains of rice doesn’t sound like much, but since launching the site in October 2007, Free Rice has donated more than 41 billion grains of rice to people in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. That’s an amount approaching 900 metric tonnes of rice!
And the game is dangerously addictive. You rise through levels as you play, climbing one level every time you correctly answer three questions in a row. Get one wrong, though, and you slip down a level. A little counter at the bottom tracks your progress. I got to level 48 before having to quit yesterday evening so I could join my family in that other highly addictive current preoccupation, the Olympics.
(I am indebted — I think! — to Nicole Ferraro over at Internet Evolution for bringing this site to my attention. I am afraid, Nicole, to go anywhere near the other great time-wasters you list…!)
By Leo Valiquette
There’s been no shortage of commentary about the threat and opportunity posed to traditional media, and the PR profession for that matter, by social media (reference too, my post of yesterday). But, while these new tools of mass communication and interaction are truly disruptive, have we developed the maturity to use them wisely?
Chris Brogan today offered some key etiquette points to keep in mind with social media, whether it be basic e-mail use or the more advanced features of Facebook. It’s by no means an exhaustive list.
There mere fact that Chris finds it necessary to start off his list with the email etiquette, of all things, demonstrates the utter thoughtlessness many of us demonstrate with the casual click of that Send button. Email is the original social media tool (no doubt, others will disagree about that). It’s been widely available to the masses for more than a decade, and yet we still have to be reminded about how to use it judiciously?
It’s the utter convenience of these things that I believe is the problem. These tools are so ubiquitous and available it’s easy to focus on employing them as the ready means to a goal without giving sufficient thought to the impact on those with whom we’re trying to communicate, or those around us we shouldn’t disturb.
Mobile phones are the ultimate example of this. Movie theatres still find it necessary to preface the feature presentation with that annoying “Please, don’t add your own soundtrack” PSA to ensure ringtones have been muted. And that’s a casual social setting. I’d estimate that 90 per cent of the time when I am attending some kind of business function that includes a presentation, at least one person in that audience will receive a call with their ringtone at full volume to interrupt the speaker. Rather than mute the volume, quite often they’ll leap up and sprint from the room with the phone still ringing.
The important thing to remember in this age of instant communication — all communication doesn’t have to happen instantly, people don’t have to respond to you within minutes and the world really doesn’t need to know what you had for breakfast or share in that snazzy new Facebook app you’ve found.
By Francis Moran
I have been an enthusiast of the Clover coffee brewing machine ever since the new Bridgehead café a few blocks from our ByWard Market offices opened up a year or so ago, featuring one of these shiny devices that brew a perfect single cup of steaming hot Java exactly to my taste and specification. I’ve become so regularly devoted that my morning cuppa is often being brewed before I even get to the cash to place my order!
And now, courtesy of a Wired magazine article on how Starbucks has gobbled up the maker of this impressive machine so it can have it all to itself, I learn that Ottawa’s Bridgehead, with two of the roughly 200 machines in the market at the time of the Starbuck’s takeover, represents fully one per cent of all the Clovers anywhere in the world, and will continue to hold that share of all Clovers not owned by the bean-burning Goliath of the coffee trade.
It’s a coup for my favourite coffee shop coming on top of this innovative chain’s already laudable business approach that sees it support a broad range of community initiatives here in Ottawa and buy most of its fair-trade, shade-grown beans directly from small grower-owned cooperatives throughout the world.
By Francis Moran
Many, many years ago, I worked at the then-decidedly down-market tabloid Halifax Daily News. (See my post on the closing of the News earlier this year by Transcontinental.) It was not unusual for our newsroom to receive odd missives, their senders clearly counting that our bent sense of humour, appreciation for the scandalous or unmitigated curiosity would drive us to investigate.
But nothing from my Daily News days compares with the letter that arrived here at inmedia this week. My colleague Leo, who was not without his occasional peculiar piece of mail when he worked with Ottawa Business Journal, has also never seen anything quite so strange.
In a plain brown manila 5¾x9½-inch envelope accurately addressed to the company rather than an individual (but with the peculiar second line, “The Public Relations General”), I found a single sheet of 8½x11-inch paper folded in half and a Canadian five-dollar bill. The envelope bore correct postage and a generic Canada Post frank with the H4T 1A0 postal code, corresponding to Montréal, near the airport.
The sheet of paper seemed to be a colour copy of an original, which may mean additional copies were sent to other people. (So far, I have been unable to find any Google references to clumps of the text for which I searched.) In block capitals, and with all the spelling, grammar, punctuation and paragraph breaks faithfully reproduced here, the text read:
The Bell Canada Express Vu Satellite Dish Startments.
When The Customer Indicates The Desired Programming Has Not Yet Released Payment Maker lings. If A Ten Percent Mathematical Root For A Special Turn Key.
A Perma Frost 700 Perma Lock. Or A Short National Mail Out.
August 1, 2008
That’s it folks. Colour me utterly bewildered. If anyone out there can shed any light on this, please do.
