Here’s an email I just received; presumably in response to my Museum of Foreign Groceries, but of course not someone who pays very close attention.

Subject: my cv
To: steve at portigal dot com

Hi I have 8 years experience in potato chips processing with Heat and
Control,Kiremko,H&H,FMC equipments.Also in frying oil formulation and
potato chips flavor fomulation.If you need some one with this experience
please E mail me.I am food processing technology engineer.I willbe waitting for your E mail.

Reminds me of similar weird and inappropriate contacts received before (here and here)

This story in the New York Times describes how companies are looking at what customers have to say online, and are indeed turning that into an opportunity to understand and connect. No mention this article of companies trying to suppress or remove negative comments made by their customers.

Early in April, Continental Airlines played host at a gathering in Houston for members of FlyerTalk.com, a travel Web site best known for its message boards where travelers discuss, dissect and often complain about pretty much anything related to travel, but mostly airlines and their frequent-flier programs.

…

Not that it was all warm and fuzzy, Mr. Burri acknowledged. The dinner guests “didn’t necessarily like all the answers they got” to questions about the removal of first-class seats from some aircraft, the challenge of qualifying for elite status and the difficulty of redeeming frequent-flier miles for free tickets and upgrades.

…

In fact, blogs may be grabbing all the media headlines, but online communities like FlyerTalk are wielding a different kind of influence in the corporate world, providing instant feedback from those critics who marketers have called influencers. Just by logging on, companies can study, learn from and even respond to the cacophony of opinions about what they are doing wrong and what they are doing right without spending a dime on focus groups or market research.

…

Some travel companies have even assigned employees to act as authorized representatives in monitoring FlyerTalk’s message boards and answering questions, reporting back about hot topics and occasionally putting out fires – ideally without sounding like a corporate mouthpiece or disrupting the Web site’s natural give and take

Although Continental does not have anyone participating in the FlyerTalk fray in an official capacity, “Lots of us will go to FlyerTalk and pull up our forum and see what our customers are talking about,” said Mark Bergsrud, Continental’s vice president for marketing programs, who attended the Houston event.

“When we see something that’s factually incorrect,” Mr. Bergsrud said, “we’ll work with the moderator, but we don’t like to put our own posts on there. We’d have to be real careful about how we word everything.”

That said, Continental has responded to suggestions that have bubbled up through the FlyerTalk forums, Mr. Bergsrud added, like creating a customer service desk exclusively for its elite fliers, changing the format of frequent-flier statements and tweaking some of the tools on continental.com.

One company that has assigned an official representative to FlyerTalk is Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, owner of the St. Regis, Westin, Sheraton, W and other chains. William Sanders, better known to FlyerTalk regulars as “Starwood Lurker,” says he spends six or eight hours on Mondays getting caught up on all the posts and messages that have come in over the weekend, but four hours a day is closer to normal.

Figuring out how, and how much, to participate has been a learning process, Mr. Sanders said. “I used to respond to everything I knew an answer to, and then I figured out they’ll often answer it for you.” He said he now tried to observe the delicate balance between being helpful and disrupting the exchange of ideas the site was meant to foster.

From Canadian Press

Peterborough, Ont. Canadian journalist and author Scott Young has died at the age of 87. Mr. Young, father of pop music icon Neil Young, died Sunday in Kingston, Ont.

He travelled the world covering the Second World War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and nearly every major sporting event in North America.

“He was someone who preferred to be at home,” Margaret Hogan, his wife of 25 years, said Monday from Kingston.

Mr. Young began his journalism career as a sports reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press. He moved to The Canadian Press in Toronto at the age of 23 after the paper refused to give him a raise. Mr. Young told CP in 1994 that Free Press managing editor George Ferguson told him, “You will never be worth more than $25 a week to the Winnipeg Free Press.”

Mr. Young covered both news and sports for CP, and covered the Second World War from London. In 1957, Mr. Young joined The Globe and Mail as a sports columnist.

He covered Grey Cups, World Series, Stanley Cups, the Olympics and even appeared on Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts. Mr. Young also worked for Maclean’s magazine and the Toronto Telegram. He gave up newspapers in 1980.

Apart from his accomplished newspaper career, he also wrote 45 books. His novels and non-fiction work included The Flood, the two Arctic thrillers Murder in a Cold Climate and The Shaman’s Knife, and 1984’s Neil and Me, about his relationship with his famous rock ‘n’ roll son.

Ms. Hogan said her husband hadn’t written anything in years. Peterborough Mayor Sylvia Sutherland said Mr. Young, who owned a farm in nearby Cavan, left a void in the landscape of Canadian journalism.

“He was one of the outstanding journalists of his time,” she said. “He had an incisive intelligence. He knew how to get a good story. I love Scott. I miss him a lot, everybody will. He’s one of the great legends of Canadian journalism and it’s a loss to those of us who love journalism.”

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a website that monitors Cease and Desist letters that bloggers and website creators may receive. One can submit such a letter and have it hosted there as well. The EFF offers legal liability guidance for bloggers as well.

Both these sites caught my eye today. I’ll probably write more about this later, but I was asked this morning to remove a posting from my blog. I don’t intend to do so, and I do intend to blog about the request. Soon.

Looks like I’ll be back in NYC later this week. My second trip in 2 (or 3?) weeks – sometimes it’s years between opportunities to visit New York, now my cup runneth over. I’m pretty excited!

The New York Times reports on a grassroots taxi redesign effort: A nonprofit group called the Design Trust for Public Space plans to ‘define the ideal taxi and taxi system of the future.’ At a workshop on May 24, designers, architects, city officials and representatives of taxi owners and drivers sketched out an array of ideas. Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has given cautious support to the effort. “This is a good exercise to get the perspectives of consumers and passengers, and also of architects and designers who are not involved in the day-to-day business of cabs.”

Yet the perspective of consumers and passengers is not included in the process! This seems like a fantastic opportunity to try to understand the needs of the users of the system from another point of view, rather than as users of the system who presumably arrive at these workshops already ready to solve the problems they’ve defined. Let’s take a step back and try to understand what isn’t working for someone else. Ethnographic study of the cab-riding experience, anyone?

I created a flickr tag “autophagia” for any signs of animals preparing to serve and/or eat themselves in the name of cuisine.

I’ve started things off with the Chick -N – Coop Hof Brau sign in Daly City, CA, depicting a chicken in an egg-cup serving up a platter of chicken. Mmm, mmm, tasty!

You can read all details in this story but basically

palmOne, Inc. has announced an agreement with PalmSource, Inc. for palmOne to acquire full rights to the brand name Palm. The brand had been co-owned by the two companies since the October 2003 spin-off of PalmSource from Palm, Inc. palmOne will pay PalmSource US$30 million for PalmSource’s 55 percent share of the Palm Trademark Holding Company. Payment will be made in installments over 3.5 years. palmOne will change its company name to Palm, Inc. later this year.

Yeah, that’s clear. Because they’ve had such great success in the past with their names. I think people still refer to the entire category as the Palm Pilot (which could be a success, except that they dropped the Pilot name about 6 years ago), but then it became Palm, but then the company split into PalmOne and PalmSource (although I guess Palm was still an umbrella organization) – but really I was never able to tell which one was which, and mostly that just meant that the email addresses of contacts who were employees of Palm were suddenly no longer usable. Now, they are switching again.

And me, I’ve still got my Handspring Visor Edge, a spin-off from the Palm empire that they got brought back in and then dropped. I don’t think they make any Handspring products any more, let alone a Visor model, let alone the rare Edge sub-model category.

One would need a PDA to organize all of this information!

It’s now about one year since we adopted Brody, a golden retriever. Not quite an anniversary, not quite a birthday, but worth reflecting upon. It continues to be an interesting journey and learning process, but most relevant to this blog perhaps is how fascinating it is to observe and interact with a creature who operates without any social norms or cultural rules, whereas we do and say almost nothing without hearkening back to those same constraints.

I find myself constantly observing him and remarking to myself with surprise or bemusement how he can do something that I want desperately to attach human meaning to. His body language, his lack of body language, his sighs and facial expressions, what and where he licks or sniffs, his reactions to stimuli (other dogs, strangers, cats, alpacas, trucks, food, water), on and on – all are driven by a completely different set of motivations, yet like most dog owners, I do nothing but project upon him.

It’s a reminder to me as an ethnographer that so much of what we do ourselves, or what I observe in others, is constructed through the rules of our culture.

(and sure, there are millions of PhD theses about nature vs. nurture, about sociobiology, about culture-in-animals, no doubt, but really, I hope you take my point for what it is).

I should have known better.

I just wrote an extensive bug report to Yahoo, and filled out a detailed form about my account and my system and all that, and after submitting it, find out that Sorry, but we’re experiencing temporary technical trouble. Please wait a few minutes, then try to send your inquiry again.

And my form is gone. The Back button trashes it, they haven’t saved it.

Isn’t this a problem that was solved years ago?

First of all, why is Yahoo so lame that they can’t fix this? Second of all, how can they have problems that prevent them from receiving bug reports? Because this is exactly what happened last time I had a problem.

Forget who is more innovative, Yahoo or Google, let’s think about who is more basically reliable?