The fact that the piece had quite a few visitors isn’t too surprising, I suppose – it was a take on a newsworthy and important topic that dissented somewhat from the conventional wisdom, based on hours and hours of discussion with people who were on the scene across different English cities and/or who really understand counterinsurgency strategy. And it was pleasing to see strategy/COIN experts talking about it favourably.

The odd thing, though, is that whenever I’ve written a piece in the past that has gained masses of attention, it’s been through links from bigger blogs, news sources, or occasionally forums. This time, as far as I can see from my logs, there haven’t been *any* blog links to the piece. All the traffic is coming from retweets and reshares on Twitter and Facebook.

I wouldn’t go quite as far as to say that blogs are dead as a medium: the existence of a self-publishing platform with a fairly powerful off-the-shelf CMS, and that isn’t restricted to a particular social network, remains useful.

But it’s looking like the sense in which we’ve traditionally understand blogs – roughly, a community of people who link to each other’s posts, comment on them, and write pieces that track back to them – no longer really applies. Facebook and Twitter have killed it, in favour of something flatter and much less based on the blogger’s personal brand.

Not because it’s my favourite paper – I subscribe to the New Yorker, Private Eye and Crikey, and would subscribe to the Grauniad if it went PPV – but because it’s interesting, shapes debate, has a good Facebook presence, and the Facebook comments mechanism gives a better view of “what people think” than the “solely for ubergeeks and psychopaths” den of web comments.

One of the things that I’m looking at right now, both academically and professionally, is the challenge presented by dealing with things that have historically been marketed and customised territory-by-territory in a social media environment that’s global. The Economist provides an excellent example, since every week, it lists its covers on the Web.

Now, if you don’t commute far too often between the US and Other Places, you’re probably not aware that the Economist has covers in the plural: both in the US and outside the US, it purports to be a global newspaper (and, compared to US newspapers, it has a fair point). But it isn’t: there’s a US edition with specifically US-focused content, ads and cover, whereas the global edition only has a US cover if the most exciting thing occurring is actually in the US.

If the Economist admitted to its US readers “yes, actually, we do realise you’re a bunch of insular tits just as much as the rest of your countrymen; stop pretending you’re some kind of cosmopolitan international relations knowall just because you read a paper written by slightly-right-wing people in London instead of raging-right-wing fanatics at home; and we all know we only bother printing international news at all in the US version because otherwise we’d lose our USP; we know perfectly well – and it’s clear from our ad placings – that none of you lot read it”, then it might just about risk losing some of its mystique as an international oracle. Which would kill its whole point

So for the Economist’s Facebook presence, where discriminating between visitors from different countries is hard, it definitely wouldn’t want to show a separate “US Edition” and “World Edition”. That would break the spell.

The way it has dealt with this is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BRILLIANT. Every week, it adds a “Worldwide Excluding the UK, Europe & Asia Edition” and a “UK, Europe & Asia Edition“. That way, Americans – who are sufficiently geographically disendowed to realise that the world, in any meaningful sense, consists of North America, Europe and Asia – can keep the illusion that they’re reading the World Edition, unlike those silly Europeans and Asians who’ve got a customised edition to suit their own parochial concerns. And we (Asia edition is sold in Aus and NZ, obviously) can work out the conceit and laugh at the Americans.

Overall, this is a great win. Except for the poor sods in Canada, South America and Africa, who presumably have to make do with the lobotomised edition containing news that’s irrelevant. Although I suppose for the South Americans it might help them understand when they’ll next be invaded by CIA-backed guerrillas.

[*] my slavish adherence consisted of making the claim that “pretending that basic economics and tax are hard, if you’re someone who purports to understand postmodernist literacy criticism, is embarrassing”. This isn’t because I rate one over the other, but simply because both neoclassical and Keynesian economics are Very Easy To Follow, whilst Derrida and Deleuze are The Opposite.

Here’s the transcript of the Offensive Top Gear Mexico Routine.

Richard Hammond: Cars reflect national characteristics, don’t they, so German cars are very well built and ruthlessly efficient, Italian cars are a bit flamboyant and quick, a Mexican car’s just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight… leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle as a coat.
James May: It is interesting, isn’t it, because they can’t do food, the Mexicans, can they? Because it’s all like sick with cheese on it, I mean…
Hammond: Refried sick!
May: Yeah, refried sick.
Hammond: I’m sorry, but just imagine waking up and remembering you’re Mexican: ‘awww, no’.
Clarkson: No, it’d be brilliant… because you could just go straight back to sleep again. That’s why we won’t get any complaints about this, because at the Mexican embassy the ambassador’s going to be sitting there with a remote control like this *mimes being asleep*

Hammond’s initial comment is a reference to a fairly stupid but well-known stereotype. The comic phrasing and timing is decent – and the concept of a car leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus and wearing a poncho is entertainingly surreal. If followed up by “but this Mexican car is actually rather good”, it wouldn’t be particularly offensive – it’d be clear that the speaker was citing an old stereotype and then pointing out that it didn’t apply.

May’s follow-up is entirely witless, pointless and offensive. Hammond sycophantically tries to come up with something slightly funny based on May’s routine, which May then repeats to claim The Witty Thing for himself. Then Hammond goes somewhere very bad indeed (switch “Mexican” for “black” in the “Imagine waking up…” line). This is the appalling bit, and it seems to come out of Hammond’s attempts to amuse May.

Clarkson’s involvement is more interesting: rather than running with the invective Hammond and May have started, he shuts it down with a meta-joke about the whole routine. Unlike Hammond’s comments, and very unlike May’s comments, he’s got a good line followed up by a great line – and it moves the main attack from ordinary people to lazy, pompous bureaucrats. Which is another stereotype, of course, but hardly one that’s worth puncturing.

Anyway. Steve Coogan’s article on the debacle is worth a read – but to me, the dynamics of that routine highlight the truth of Stewart Lee’s Top Gear routine from five years ago. Clarkson is witty but lazy, Hammond is a desperate sycophantic tosser, and May is a thug.

Overall, it was absolutely right for the BBC to apologise for Hammond’s comments about Mexico, and it’s a pity that Jeremy Clarkson isn’t surrounded by smarter and more interesting people.

Meanwhile, from the entertaining-if-smug QI (I’ll note in passing that when Clarkson appears on QI he’s much better than he is on Top Gear, probably because he’s surrounded by smarter and more interesting people. But he wasn’t on this one. I can digress if I like; it’s my blog):

Stephen Fry: Now what is so lucky about the unluckiest man in the world?
Rich Hall: He got killed by a horseshoe?
Fry: Well, this man is either the unluckiest or the luckiest depending on which way you look at it.
Alan Davies: Something like he’s had more accidents and operations than any other man in the world and he’s still alive?
Fry: Bear in mind we’re after places beginning with H, and if I tell you his name this may help – his name was Tsutomu Yamaguchi, and he died in January 2010 aged 93. He lived a long time, so he wasn’t *that* unlucky…
…
Davies: Hiroshima?
Fry: Hiroshima.
Davies: Bomb landed on him and bounced off?
Fry: He was in business in Hiroshima when the bomb went off. He was badly burned, spent a night there.
Davies: …and he went to hospital in Nagasaki?
Fry: The next day, he got on a train, bizarrely, which shows you that even though the atom bomb fell, the trains were working. So he got on a train to Nagasaki and a bomb fell again. He became a sort-of hero, but only got the recognition in his 90s.
…
Fry: He’s either the luckiest because he survived an atom bomb twice, or the unluckiest because…
Bill Bailey: Well, he lived to 93, so his life was not curtailed.
Rob Brydon: Is the glass half empty, is it half full? Either way it’s radioactive. So don’t drink it.
Davies: He never got the train again, I tell you.
Fry: The astonishing thing to me is, you drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima and the train service is working the next day. In our country…
Davies: “Keep Calm And Carry On”
Bailey: …a couple of leaves and that’s it.
Fry: Yes, for the rest of the winter.
Bailey: “The wrong kind of bomb”. *station announcer voice* “Sorry, the wrong kind of bomb”.
Fry: Well, it was clearly the right kind of bomb. “It’s fine everyone, don’t worry, this was the right kind of bomb”.
Bailey: *station announcer voice* “The right kind of bomb has landed on the 4:30 from Potters Bar. Please proceed to the nuclear area. The sandwiches have not been affected”*.

So, there’s absolutely no trashing of national stereotypes, nothing at all racist, and nothing that even personally attacks Mr Yamaguchi. The only national characteristic or trait mentioned is the fact that Japan’s trains are better than the UK’s. The whole thing is good-natured whimsy, based simply on the fact that for some poor bastard to get caught up in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings – and to survive for 65 years afterwards – is a funny coincidence.

And yet the Japanese embassy still complained.

The text of the embassy’s letter isn’t available. But the BBC’s apology is available – and it’s completely and utterly inappropriate.

The difference between the QI piece and the Top Gear piece is obvious to anyone with more than half a brain: one is saying insulting things about individuals based on their ethnicity; the latter is pointing out the humour in a tragic situation, while also engaging in light self-mockery over the UK’s ineptitude at public services. The former, although it can be justified on occasion, often ends up as bullying and perpetuating racism. The latter doesn’t. It’s just what comedy is.

The BBC shouldn’t be making shows that insult brown people for being brown (sure, it can make shows that include racist lines or stereotypes, but only if there’s actually a point behind them – which wasn’t the case in Top Gear). But if the BBC isn’t allowed to gently and non-scornfully mock tragic events that occurred more than 60 years ago, then it might as well close its comedy department for good, and focus solely on pleasing mad arseholes who wouldn’t understand a joke if it bit them on their, erm, mad arsehole.

Technology makes it cheap and easy to distribute news for anyone with Internet access, but producing journalism is expensive.

True. Phones don’t just illegally tap themselves, and making police investigations magically disappear is also an expensive business…

However, his implied public service argument falls down on an obvious point: none of the expensive reporting the soon-to-be-paywalled News of the World does is of any benefit whatsoever to anyone. So a footballer’s dad is willing to buy some Bolivian marching powder, or a vicar shagged a tart; see my rock of indifference the size of the Ritz.

On the other hand, the reporting that the non-paywalled New York Times did into the NotW’s crooked ways, and super-dodgy relationship with the Metropolitan Police, is well worth anyone’s money. Funny the way that tends to work…

However, it still strikes me as very strange, bordering on lunacy, for a US reviewer to take an Australian book by an Australian writer set in Australia about Australian suburban life, and use it to hang the conclusion:

The Slap’s the work of the moment for a nation that I met more at the pubs and picnic tables of England than in any other book I’ve read. It’s the book of the great muttering resistance of England, a dark-witted, vote-nay group who could rival the American Tea Party for influence if they could only agree on a bar at which to meet.

Read the whole thing, if you’re also in the market for bemused American reflections on how Cheryl Cole sounds like Dick Van Dyke (this may explain his difficulty in telling Brits and Aussies apart), and how Londoners are violent, Friends-obsessed drunks who sound like Liam Gallagher making a cameo in Trainspotting. Alternatively, don’t.

But if I was in serious financial trouble, and I owned a money tree, but I couldn’t afford to harvest the money tree due to my serious financial trouble, then I’d sell someone the rights to the next harvest of my money tree. Then, I might be able to do the following money tree harvest myself. At a worst case, the money tree’s money crop hasn’t just rotted on the branches.

So I’m genuinely perplexed about the weird machinations that mean we’re not going to get another Bond movie until forever. What incentive have MGM’s management got to not sell the rights to make a new Bond (which will make copious quantities of money, unequivocally) to someone with dollars, rather than sitting around making nothing until they go painfully bust?

I suspect it’s an accounting / US law / principal-agent problem, but would appreciate guidance from anyone who either knows, or can come up with a vaguely sensible reason for MGM’s management to do what they’re currently doing…

[S]ales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.

SymphonyIRI get their sales data direct from the tills in all major US supermarkets except Walmart (who figure they’re big enough that they’ve got more to lose than to gain from sharing their data with competitors), so it’s pretty reliable. I wish I had access myself – I have done for projects in the past, and damn it’s good, but a subscription costs millions of dollars…

However, even without access to the data, we can easily show that the Brandweek piece is absolutely irrelevant. First, a quote from Forbes last Thursday:

Total sales for Old Spice body wash at supermarkets, drugstores and mass market retailers excluding Wal-Mart were up 16.7% in the 52-week period ending June 13, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm.

In other words, assuming both articles are accurate, a specific sub-brand of Old Spice has fallen in sales, but the overall brand has risen in sales. Since the campaign primarily promotes Old Spice as a master brand (I didn’t even know it was plugging Red Zone After Hours Body Wash, and nor did you), the Brandweek article is somewhere between misled and misleading in its selective data usage.

Even if Forbes has somehow got its numbers wrong, and the Brandweek data is representative of the brand’s overall performance, this still wouldn’t show the campaign had failed. The IRI data covers a 52 week period – it’s comparing Jul 2009-Jun 2010 to Jul 2008-Jun 2009. The interesting comparisons for a breaking campaign (the ads started in February, and the social campaign’s been building since) are week-on-week (wk20 2010 vs wk20 2009) and month-on-month (Jun 2010 vs Jun 2009), not averages for the whole year. If sales fell in the second half of 2009 and were gradually revived this year by the campaign, the 52 week data wouldn’t show this at all.

The most awesome thing about IRI data if you’re a marketing-stats-data-geek (guilty) is that it’s updated daily. So Procter & Gamble and its agency, Wieden & Kennedy, will know exactly, day on day how sales have reacted. They (well, they plus SymphonyIRI, Unilever, Colgate, and their respective marketing agencies) are the only ones currently in a position to say whether the campaign has worked. Until and unless they, or SymphonyIRI, or a naughty leaker working for a company with access to IRI’s database, tell us what the week-on-week comparisons are, we’ve got little idea whether or not the campaign has succeeded.

Well, except that Old Spice had been in decline as a brand for a very long time – so if there has been a 17% rise in 52-week sales as the Forbes piece suggests, then that’s a good indication that the rise in sales since the campaign launched in February is larger still.

Lesson: while everyone wants smug marketers to fail (yes, of course you do), a campaign that captures the public imagination to the degree that Old Spice has is bloody unlikely to fail to drive sales, at the very least in the short term. Relatedly, most people don’t understand data.

2) which famous 20th Century American science fiction writer wrote Blade Runner: a movie?

…and then, the same bloody day, the sillier ends of the UK press have the same idea, although with far less research and more pointless nationalistic ranting. Had I known they were going to do that, I wouldn’t have bothered – there’s a difference between contrarianism where you float a viewpoint that nobody’s promoting, and Clarksonism where you float a viewpoint that lots of people are promoting and pretend that you’re being oh so brave and daring for doing so. The latter is no fun at all, and even the perception of the latter is a bit embarrassing.

Anyway.

There are elements of Obama’s public references to BP that can only be explained by Brit-bashing. The underlying problem in the US oil industry is regulatory failure, and if the US oil industry were to operate under the same regulatory framework that the UK oil industry adopted after Piper Alpha, then the disaster wouldn’t have happened. And the best way to deal with safety in general is the aviation industry’s one of heavy, preemptive regulation, with accident inquiries that avoid blame and stick to making recommendations that are enforced, rather than doing nothing until there’s a disaster and then throwing around massive amounts of blame and infinite lawsuits [*].

I’m in two minds about the US administration’s behaviour at the moment, though.

As I mentioned in comments to the other post, I don’t understand their strategy here: the incident is fundamentally George Bush’s fault, in that his government deliberately cut regulation from its already poor start and also granted permits for unprecedentedly deep-sea drilling, which the current government has had no time to fix. Any UK or Australian PM worth their salt would be milking this fact for all it was worth, and saying “unlike our inept, industry-beholden, corrupt predecessor, we’re going to create a proper regulator to ensure this doesn’t happen again”.

But assuming that slating former presidents is off the menu in US political debate, and given that the public are baying for blood, I can see what they’re doing on self-preservation grounds. And if it ends up with BP paying the expected actual cost of $20-30bn for the cleanup, compensation, and fines for any specific violations that led up to the disaster, and not being charged crazy punitive damages, expropriated, kicked out of the country, or similar, then that’s a reasonable outcome.

Whether the fact that the markets seem to think a worse outcome is likely is because there’s a genuine political risk that Obama is going to go Putin-y on foreign investors, or whether it’s because markets are paranoid beasts at the best of times, remains to be seen. I’m not sure it’s a good thing that the US president is using the kind of rhetoric that makes markets believe he might – but I’m not sure he has much of a choice.

In short, let’s see what happens. If the end outcome is a reasonable settlement, coupled with massive increases in regulatory requirements, enforcement and spending in the US oil industry, then bring it on and three cheers for Mr Obama.

[*] relatedly, my attitude towards dead oil rig workers is very similar to my attitude toward dead volunteer soldiers: “that’s sad for you and your loved ones, but it’s also why you were paid so much more than someone with your skill-base could have earned in a job that didn’t have a substantially elevated risk of death”.

Most informative of all is the final proof that Times associate editor Danny Finkelstein is not, in any meaningful sense, a journalist:

I asked Danny Finkelstein whether it bothered him that from now on none of his journalism would “go viral”, with the risk that he’d be left invisible on the sidelines as the online debate raged through news sites without paywalls. “No,” he insisted,”I want my employer to be paid for my intellectual property.”

In my current role as a freelance market analyst, I want my client to be paid for my intellectual property, because I write reports that are only of interest to the people who pay for them. Those reports can fairly be categorised as intellectual property, and my relationship with my client can fairly be categorised as one of mutual commercial advantage.

As a result, I tailor the reports I write to meet the client’s brief as closely as possible (having used my experience in the relevant sector to ensure that we can agree a brief that helps their commercial objectives). When I find information that doesn’t help achieve this, I don’t try to include it in the output I pass onto my client, even if it’s interesting – why would I? It doesn’t help the main goal, of ensuring my employer is paid for my intellectual property.

This, pretty obviously, is not journalism. It’s the opposite – I’m finding things out selectively, based on a commercial brief, and the things that I do find out will be kept secret and used by people who’re willing to pay for them.

My blogging (at least, the data/analytical stuff I do on LC, and the transport stuff that goes up here) is journalism – I find out new things, whether previously unknown or hidden in plain sight, and then try and disseminate them as widely as possible.

If, when faced with the choice of “shout as loudly as possible so that as many people as possible can hear what you’ve found or what you have to say” or “back the boss in his plans to make more cash by stopping people from hearing what you have to say”, you pick the latter, then whatever you may be, you’re certainly not a journalist.