Collateral Damage

As the first blogger to discover the trend of sweets that won’t betray your position under fire, I believe Hershey’s owes me a finders fee. The candy giant is now selling its own version:

No matter how tempted you may be, do NOT send these to those participating the George Bush Desert Classic. A: This is a woodland camo. B: They would melt in the shipping and not in the soldiers’ mouths.

(BTW, found this at the wonderful JunkFoodBlog.)

Regulators have already targeted ads using crude or suggestive language, behavior, and images, tightening their grip on television and radio a few weeks ahead of a twice-a-decade Communist Party congress at which some new senior leaders will be appointed. The latest move by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or SARFT, also bans advertisements for sexual aids such as tonics that claim to boost performance in bed.

So the government wants a monopoly on lying to people?

Said to be the world’s first “energy potato chip”, the line of NRG Potato Chips ushers in a new age of television snacking.

$29.70 gets a case of 30 1.75 oz. baggies of deep-fried caffeinated-infused potato goodness.

Just the thing for the crystal meth freak in your life.

I’m not going to tell you whose short story won Atomjack magazine’s writing contest. I’m not. Nope. Nope. Nope. The story is not called Fading Moon. Nope.

However I will tell you that:

1. Someone is awfully pleased to finally have published and been paid for his Science Fiction.
2. The story hasn’t been posted yet. Someone will tell you when it is.

(This is a cross-post from my new work blog: Business & Networking. Motto: At the intersection of Online, Business, Networking & Search… waiting for a cab.)

You find the strangest things about your company on the interweb. Here’s what some folks have been writing about Spoke over at XOMReviews and a few other places:

• Spoke uses a virus or spyware
• We suck out all the information from your Outlook contacts file.
• We don’t let you change or delete the information in your profile.
• We collect and sell people’s personal phone numbers and direct email addresses.

The odd thing: Not one word of this is true.

1. If you agree to download and install our toolbar we will collect people’s names and job titles. PERIOD. Here’s what it actually does: Members of the Spoke community assist in validating where other members work through email signature files, thereby contributing to the success and quality of the community data as a whole.
2. “You control what types of information are included in your personal contact list. Privacy settings let you decide if phone numbers, addresses, and email communications will be included in your personal SpokeBook. The information in your SpokeBook is visible only to you.”
   
3. “You control how you are linked to others. Only people who already have your email address, or those at your company, can send you requests. You can sever links whenever you choose and control privacy levels for each contact.”
4. GAWD, if only we sold this info. Our members are constantly asking for direct contact information. But everyone who I have spoken to — and that’s part of my job — understands why we don’t. The way we are able to get such good information from our members is because they know we don’t do that. So even people who pay for full access to our product appreciate what we don’t give them because they know we aren’t giving out that information on them.

Here’s what I say (or post or email) to people who doubt we do what we say we do: DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. Go to the site and look for yourself. Claim your profile and correct the information in it or delete it. Do a search and see what information we actually provide.

If we are lying then go and shout about it. We deserve that if we are lying. That’s one of the things I love about being in business on the web: The truth will out.

I know the facts aren’t as fun as saying Spoke Is Evil. But that doesn’t change the facts.

Phil Yanov wrote about us and asked the following question:

Has anyone had any luck getting their information removed from Spoke.com? We’ve had a number of people say that they tried, but not one has mentioned that they succeeded.

Go and try it for yourself: www.spoke.com Type in your name. Claim your profile and see what you can do. Then go tell Phil about the results — whatever they are. Thanks.

… and on a humorous note: When people ask me what I do I love being able to say, “I speak for Spoke.” Mrs. Collateral Damage is always asking, “How are the Spokes people?” We are simple folk in the CD clan, so we take our laughs wherever we can.

Wrigley Alexander Fields was born Sept. 12 at an Indiana hospital. … His parents are Paul and Teri Fields of Michigan City, Ind. They are — no surprise — fans of the Cubs, who have played at Wrigley Field since 1916. The Fields planned the name for years before their son’s birth.

Someone call child protective services, cuz this is wrong.

This kid will turn the 40-year-old virgin into a reality.

Here’s why I don’t wear funny t-shirts: They’re only funny the first time you read them.

My parents’ names: Ann & Nick. Youngest kid’s names: Aristodemus & Constantine. Further proof that people with normal names have no idea exactly how un-fun these names are in grade school. My kid’s name: Greg. He’s lucky it wasn’t Bob.

At issue is a decision to refuse free doughnuts, pies and bread that were being donated to senior centers around Putnam County, north of New York City. Officials were concerned that the county was setting a bad nutritional precedent by providing mounds of doughnuts and other sweets to seniors.

Krispy Kreme? Dunkin Donuts? Homer Simpson? Someone get their PR people in gear NOW!

1. GoDogGo – Throws tennis balls for your dog so you don’t have to.
2. Soda bottles that chill themselves.
3. Komfort Pets Carrier — a box to put Rover with a built in HVAC system.
4. Electronic cigarette — all the danger of nicotine without the tobacco.
5. A suicide bomber toy — From the creator: “We hope that the release of the Uncle Abdul figure will help to ironize the act of suicide bombing and acts of violence in general.” One hope that will not be fulfilled.

In the news on Tuesday:

Wholesale prices fell in August by the largest amount in 10 months, reflecting a plunge in the price of gasoline and other energy products and the fourth straight month of falling food costs.

And then Wednesday

Stocks rose moderately Wednesday as Wall Street extended its rally a day after the Federal Reserve’s big interest rate cut.

Any reporter writing on inflation should be required to go down to the local supermarket and talk to shoppers. As the food-shopper-in-chief for the Collateral Damage clan, I KNOW that inflation is a problem and have known for a while. Around here milk is now running $4 a gallon when it’s not on sale. Frozen vegetables — store brand — up about $.20 per package in the last couple of months. I believe it should be part of every Fed chairman’s job that he do his own grocery shopping.

That’s Nazis. It gives me the creeps just typing it (and no way was I going to put it in the headline). But 65 years after World War II proved exactly how terrible they were, Herr ’s Schicklgruber’s party is still causing trouble on the marketing front.

A month ago we had Barclays Bank drawing flack (88mm, no doubt) for a corporate symbol some thought resembled a N symbol even though it pre-dated Adolf & co. by a century. Since then:

A German public television network Sunday sacked a popular talk show host and former news presenter after she had praised the Nazi’s family policies at a news conference for her new book on child-rearing.

And

Canada’s biggest phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cell phones.

And just today

A prosecutor in Bolzano, northern Italy seized wine bottle labels on Wednesday bearing a portrait of Hitler and other Nazis from a winery near the Austrian border, the company said. The 20 labels from the “Der Fuehrer” line show Hitler raising the Nazi salute and his generals, including Hermann Goering, the Reich’s economic minister, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.

Y’know there are a lot of tricky complex issues in marketing. This isn’t one of them.

UPDATE:  Fashion chain Zara withdraws swastika handbag

(Image courtesy Catalyst magazine from an article on current anti-fascism efforts in Russia.)

With Baidu holding a 69.5% market share in Bejing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, up 7.6% from last year, it’s a warning sign to Google and other search engines in China. Google has only fallen 1.1% to reach the 23% mark, but the growth rate of Baidu is probably a concern for the search giant. 

So does this mean they’d have been better off if they’d actually followed their alleged corporate philosophy of Democracy on the web works  and You can make money without doing evil?

Best line in the Mashable story:

This report comes at a somewhat sensitive time for Google, as the company is currently making its rounds to several countries in an effort to create and promote search privacy standards, and China has taken an opposite stance on what Google proposes.

Ah, the difficulties of trying to sell hypocrisy in the marketplace. Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, your petard is ready for hoisting.

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

… the “Crocs pose a health hazard” meme is about to take off. During a layover in DC on Saturday I watched a promo for one of the local news shows about how wearing the shoes on escalators is a danger. Allegedly the material the shoes are made of is so soft that the metal teeth chew into them. Here’s the headline: Escalators eat Crocs.

OK, so I was a couple of months early but now the AP has taken it national:

At rail stations and shopping malls around the world, reports are popping up of people, particularly young children, getting their toes caught in escalators. The one common theme seems to be the clunky soft-soled clogs known by the name of the most popular brand, Crocs.

Coming up next: Crocs helps FaceBook destroy the economy.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and 13 were wounded when contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad. “We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities,” Khalaf said.

So there’s someone in Iraq responsible for licensing armed groups?

If they charged $5 a license the US could actually turn a profit on this thing.

If any of you are there, please say hi. I’ll be the only one there with the name Constantine von Hoffman on his name tag. I promise. Maybe updates later today.