The End of Email and Pain?
Posted On: 2007-03-12
As I write this it's Sunday here in Australia and it's a really strange day for us. Today it's like ... where is the email? There just isn't any ... well certainly not anywhere near as much as we're accustomed to.
Between 8.30 last night and 5am today Steve got nothing other than a bunch of spam that got filtered immediately. Even on a weekend he can count on picking up 20 to 30 emails during that period of time but today he got nothing. For me, it was a little different - I got 20 to 30 genuine emails and no spam at all.
Man that is weirdness on a major scale.
Is the world coming to an end? Is the change to daylight saving in the US and the fact that so many big companies are having problems adjusting their servers to cope with the change going to be more of a problem than Y2K?
Who knows but how is a marketing person going to survive without his or her appointment calendar set to the right time and synched to their PDA, Blackberry and all the other gizmos and gadgets they need to get through a hectic day? Why, business as we know it could all come to an end over the weekend.
Obviously it won't get to that stage but as late as last Thursday there were a lot of very unhappy IT people. They were struggling to overcome the difficulties that Microsoft created when they produced free patches for the change to supported software that didn't work - or charged $4,000 for unsupported Server 2000 patches ... that didn't work.
Oh well I guess when you have no real competition you can do things like that and not have to worry about the consequences.
Out of touch
In many ways it must be a bit like being safely cocooned in a university. Now there are some people who are just not in touch with the real world at all.
On Friday Steve was trying to put together a Flash slide show for a website we were building for one of our clients. It's been some years since he had do something like that and he couldn't remember all the steps he needed to follow to complete the task so he went in search of an online tutorial.
Google produced a fine list of tutorials headed by one that looked perfect for what Steve wanted. The tutorial was written by someone from Berkley University and I suppose that should have been a warning for Steve. However, he's a trusting soul and who could resist a title that offered 'six easy steps to building a slide show in Macromedia Flash'?
By step 10 Steve was getting a little worried and by step 12 he found it was written for people who were building the slideshow on a Mac and there were some keystrokes he couldn't replicate. He was not amused.
BDSM - is the pain about to begin?
Over the last few months we've been working on a contract to supply stories to a new site that's about to launch in the UK. The stories were to cover a small number of niches including BDSM and we were rather surprised when the site owner asked us last week to stop writing anything for that niche.
If you have not had any experience of that niche let me tell you that it's rather popular. There is a lot of interest in the kinky side of human sexuality and it does sell rather well.
However there are now some problems beginning to appear for adult webmasters in the United Kingdom who promote, or run, BDSM sites and our client doesn't want to make himself a target. The government is starting to talk about banning ‘violent pornography' and at least one BDSM Webmaster has taken it so seriously that he's left England and moved to Scandinavia.
I find that rather interesting because a recurring theme that many English escorts find in their more affluent clients is a need to be spanked and even humiliated.
At first I thought that it was strange that those who appreciate that treatment from escorts and, undoubtedly like looking at it on the web, would be interested in banning it. But then I realised that all they're doing is turning it into something even more wicked and kinky and that just makes it all the more appealing for them.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by anything that involves human sexuality and what society thinks. After all, on the surface the Victorian period in England was amongst the most morally correct periods in history ... but it was also a period when there were more prostitutes per head of population than any other time because all those morally correct Victorians were prepared to pay for sex.
There's a marketing lesson there for those who want to think about it - and it applies to everyone regardless of which niches they push.