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For at least a year, Barracuda Networks has been running large ads in Vancouver’s airport. I think I’ve seen their ads in other airports, but can’t confirm that (anybody?). I snapped a bad photo of one of several large display ads in the baggage collection area:

You can see better versions of their ads on their website.

I’m always puzzled when I see these ads. Barracuda makes humming boxes that companies install in their networks to protect against email spam, viruses, phishing and so forth. This one costs about CAN $650:

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is compatible with all email servers and can fit into nearly any corporate or small business environment. It is used by small organizations with as few as 10 employees and large organizations with as many as 200,000 employees. A single Barracuda Spam Firewall handles up to 100,000 active email users. Multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and high availability.

According to YVR, about 4.1 million international passengers passed through their gates in 2007. What tiny fraction of those passengers are potential buyers of Barracuda’s products?

The math gets murky, but according to BC Stats, there are about 81,000 technology workers in BC. Of course, not all of those are potential Barracuda customers. Plenty of those have no interest in the IT concerns of their companies. Others work for companies that have fewer than 10 employees. Let’s be generous and imagine that one third of these tech workers might possibly be or know somebody who could become a Barracuda customer.

That works out to 6 out of 1000 British Columbians who might be the target market for these ads. That fraction is certainly lower for foreign visitors. So–best case scenario–that ad might be relevant to one out of every 200 passengers. In truth, I suspect the number is closer to one in 1000.

And yet this is a sadly commonplace scenario. Most offline ads are incredibly dumb–they’re irrelevant to 99.9% of people who see them. Barracuda runs these ads as an act of faith. That one or two out of the madding crowd of visitors grabbing their bags might take an interest, and start on the long, treacherous path towards an IT purchase. And do the folks at Barracuda Networks have an accurate sense of the return on investment of these airport ads? What do you think?

On a vaguely related note, I saw an enormous barracuda in shallow water in Panama a couple of weeks ago. It was at least three feet long, and just cruising gently by in about three feet of water.

We took two cameras to Panama: our trusty Nikon D-70 and Julie’s awesome old Pentax K1000. We shot three or four rolls of film (some of which were expired) with the Pentax.

I haven’t had film developed in Canada for, oh, seven or eight years. In fact, the last roll of film I had developed was in Dublin in 2003 (by, if memory serves, the most delightful French girl on Baggot Street). In that case, they provided prints and also wrote the photos to a CD.

What should I do with this film in Vancouver or Victoria? Do you recommend a particular film developer, now that it’s become a kind of horse-and-buggy industry? What form should I expect to receive the digital files (in addition to the prints) in? On a CD or uploaded to the web somewhere, maybe?

I stumbled upon this wikiHow article discussing how to send SMS messages from the Internet to phones and mobile devices. After successfully testing out the email method to my iPhone on Fido’s network, I figured I’d distill the bits specific to Canadian networks.

Send SMS Messages Using Email

If you know which cellular carrier the recipient is on, then you can just send an email to their number at a specific email address:

Bell Mobility & Solo Mobile - number@txt.bell.ca
Fido - number@fido.ca
Koodo Mobile - number@msg.koodomobile.com
MTS - number@text.mtsmobility.com
President’s Choice - number@txt.bell.ca
Rogers - number@pcs.rogers.com
Sasktel - number@sms.sasktel.com
Telus Mobility - number@msg.telus.com
Virgin Mobile - number@vmobile.ca

Send SMS Messages Using a Website

You can also send a message to a mobile recipient using the carrier’s website. I’ve linked to the specific pages on Canadian carriers’ sites (the ones I could find) below:

Bell Mobility
Solo Mobile
Fido
Koodo Mobile
MTS
Rogers
Sasktel
Telus Mobility

As it turns out, there’s an exhaustive list in Wikipedia as well. Other web-based options include Facebook apps (here’s one, though I’ve never tried it, so proceed at your own risk) or a service like Send2World.

Most of these solutions require that you know which network the message recipient is on. Here’s a naive question–does anybody know an easy way to answer that question on the fly?

James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.

How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.

Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.

Seth articulates this idea in a recent post:

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?

Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.

So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?

We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.

Otherwise, they’re operating on faith alone.

Every street and avenue in Manhattan is mentioned in a song. Okay, that’s technically not true. Well, it might be true, but I don’t have time to prove it. Still, in my time wandering around lower Manhattan, every street seemed to remind me of song lyrics. A few examples:

• Delancy Street - “Hey remember that time I found a human tooth down on Delancy” - “That Time” by Regina Spektor.
• Lafayette Street - “Well, I’m standing on the corner of Lafayette” - “That Was Your Mother” by Paul Simon (though, admittedly, this may refer to a street elsewhere in the country).
• Mulberry Street - “I’m a big man on Mulberry street, I play the whole part, I leave a big tip with every receipt” - “Big Man on Mulberry Street” by Billy Joel (also references a bunch of other Manhattan streets, for example, “Houston to Canal street”).
• Sullivan Street - “Take the way home that leads back to Sullivan Street” - “Sullivan Street” by Counting Crows.

Wikipedia lists a (Circle Line) boat load of such songs. That would be a fun crowd-sourced Google Maps mash-up. Get people to identify songs, mark them on a shared Google map and link them to an audio file on the web. You’d end up with this groovy musical collage of the city. Then, of course, you could expand it to the whole planet. Somebody get on that, would you?

We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.

Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.

The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):

I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:

Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.

This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.

Combine three months in Morocco with a very busy year back in Victoria, and it hasn’t been a banner year for movie watching. I’m going to try to make an immediate improvement, though, as the year’s fourth quarter is always the best for quality movies. As you probably know, studios tend to hold the Oscar contenders until the winter months. Academy members have a notoriously short memory.

Here in New York, we caught “Slumdog Millionaire”, the new film by Danny Boyle, at the Angelika Film Center yesterday. The last time I was in New York, twelve years ago, we were here in August. The Angelika was an air conditioned refuge from the blistering summer heat. Yesterday we escaped to the Angelika from a bitter December cold front.

In any case, it’s a terrific movie. It’s kind of a one-stop-shop for Western ideas about India–slums, child beggars, call centres, new money and Bollywood–but Boyle skillfully sews these threads together. He uses a clever format to tell most of the film’s story–a boy from the slum gets a chance at big money, gameshow glory and his long lost love–in flashbacks. Here’s the trailer:

I’ve really enjoyed Boyle’s work over the year. He’s been a pretty diverse filmmaker–from Trainspotting to The Beach to 28 Days Later. I’ve often felt that he struggles with the third acts and endings of his films (see, for example, Sunshine), but those issues weren’t evident in “Slumdog”. I’ve admired Boyle’s inventive cinematography as well, whether it’s that classic bit of Trainspotting where a drugged-out Ewan McGregor drowns in the floor, or when Leonardo Dicaprio’s world is transformed into a video game in The Beach.

Go see “Slumdog Millionaire”–you won’t be disappointed (and the critics seem to agree).

I’m currently working on the ‘other social media channels’ chapter of our book. There will be a sizable section on Twitter. One small question I’m struggling with is “should organizations follow everybody who follows them?” The safe answer, of course, is ‘yes’. That seems to be the prevailing etiquette (Twittequette?). But it’s not one to which I subscribe.

I’ve mused on this subject before, and I’d rather not muse on it again. It’s the kind of echo-chambery silliness that gets much too much play online. But, in the interests of writing a useful book, here I go again.

Is Mutual Following the Predominant Behaviour?

First off, is mutual or reciprocal following the predominant behaviour? I think so, though I haven’t seen any empirical data or surveys on the subject. I receive an occasional coolly-worded tweet from somebody on Twitter that implies that I should be following them presumably because they’re following me. Lee recently mentioned how that he doesn’t adhere to this policy. His approach seems similar to my own views on the subject:

I take a decidedly lightweight approach to social media. If I haven’t met you or don’t know you personally, I’m not likely to add you as a friend or follow you. I currently follow about 200 people on Twitter and it’s still too much. When I follow someone with the @leelefever account, I try keep up with most of their updates. This is how I’ve always used Twitter.

Giving into this perceived social pressure would force an unwelcome change in how I want to use Twitter, and make it a less useful tool.

The New Blogroll?

Julie pointed out that reciprocal following feels a bit like the new blogroll. A blogroll was a handy way of linking to all of the websites you read. It was also a polite way to recognize that another blog or site had linked to you. They ‘voted’ for your site, and in return you ‘vote’ for theirs using your blogroll.

I’m not sure why (though I expect RSS played a role), but blogrolls seem to be going out of fashion. And the difference between a blogroll and reciprocal following on Twitter is that the former is a passive list on a static page or sidebar, while the latter changes how you use the tool.

In both cases, the behaviour feels kind of punctilious–that I’m doing it primarily for the sake of appearances. The two perspectives feel like, I don’t know, like the socialist versus capitalist view of Twitter. What do you think?

Bonus links: There has, of course, been plenty of other discussion on this topic. Plus Rebecca just posted a big list o’ Twitter tools.

Back in July, I wondered why we didn’t have doulas for the process of dying. Several commenters suggested that hospice and careworkers filled this niche, and I thought thought that explanation made sense.

However, there’s apparently still a market for death doulas or, as I read in today’s Miami Herald, death midwives:

An ordained minister from Sebastopol, Calif., Lyons started a nonprofit organization called Final Passages. She teaches workshops about such topics as how to care for a body while it’s in the family home and about burials outside traditional cemeteries.

Lyons also guides families through the legalities and paperwork of at-home funerals — death certificates and body transport permits — while providing emotional support and counseling. Her services can run from $500 to $1,500.

As a very unscientific litmus test of this idea’s popularity, I’ll note here that since July 29, there have been 65 people that found this site while searching terms relating to doulas and death. I’ll try to check back in another six months or a year, to see if there’s any up-tick in activity.

I bought my white mid-range MacBook in August, 2007. About ten months later, little cracks appeared on the keyboard’s faceplate. They were on the seam where the top faceplate meets the front of the laptop, and maybe half a centimeter wide.

Eventually little strips of plastic snapped off the top of my laptop. It was really only an aesthetic problem, but the thing was still under warranty, so I got it fixed. It’s a good thing, too, because I seem to recall the Apple technician telling me the faceplates were, like, $500 to replace.

Another six months later, my replacement keyboard faceplate is suffering from the same problem:

I’m quite a heavy-handed typist. Maybe that’s it? Or is it my incredibly muscular wrists? In truth, it seems like an ongoing defect with the plastic and design of the faceplate. It’s not thick or strong enough to bear the ongoing weight of lazy typists who don’t pick up their wrists when they’re working.

After a year and a half with this MacBook, that and the overly-hot base are my only complaints. Later in 2009 I might upgrade to a MacBook Air, or I might go with another MacBook. Apple has given me little reason to return to the wayward Windows ways of my youth.