What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Print – And Burn – After Reading: It’s Time To Fight Back Against The Footer Fascists
You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them. Those screamingly pompous email footers that IT departments append to millions – billions? – of emails every day, urging us to “Consider the environment!” before asking “Do you really need to print this email?”
I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that they are literally the most antisocial human innovation since McDonald’s started giving away chewing tobacco with Happy Meals.
Worse, they’re so utterly pointless: never once in the – what? – two decades? – the messages have been plaguing our inboxes has a single soul ever heeded their message and considered the environment before printing. Most people don’t print emails, and those who do, do. There is not a single tree still standing because some Dilbertesque corporate responsibility dickhead had nothing better to do with his time than to lecture total strangers on their obligations to mother earth.
Enough is enough.
For me, the final straw came a few weeks back when my publisher emailed me and I noticed that they too had been infected. Seriously, the IT department at Hachette – a company that has as its business model the decimation of forests in the pursuit of knowledge and entertainment – was urging me to think twice before using a couple of sheets of A4.
“Please consider the environment. Do you really need to print this email? “
No, I thought, but I will now, Just to spite whoever wrote that footer. What’s more, just because I have too much time on my hands, I updated my own email footer…
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Paul Carrhttp://www.paulcarr.com
Fuck the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.
As it turned out, I’m not the only person to be frustrated by enviro-preachy email footers. The very first person I emailed after making the change decided to tweet about it…
Shortly afterwards, someone mentioned it on “Quora” (whatever that is). Steadily, friends and strangers alike started getting in touch asking if I would mind them adding the text to their own email. Of course I wouldn’t mind. This morning I received an email from Mike Arrington, and wouldn’t you know it…
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Michael Arrington
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-arrington
http://techcrunch.com/
Screw the environment. Please print this email immediately. And then burn it.
And so the idea is slowly spreading – mutating into slightly-more-SFW variations at it goes. But I want it to spread even further. I love the idea that eventually the world being divided into two camps: one camp with its pompous “Think before you print” auto-footers, and a rival camp with the “fuck the environment” equivalent. If enough of us embrace the latter, we could even win this thing.
So, for the sake of human civilization, I urge you to join the fight. Update your footer right now and help us take back our inboxes from the footer fascists. And if you work for a big company’s IT department… well… go on… you know you want to…
Update: Turns out Mike has been irked by preachy email footers since 2008.
Cloud Poll: Are APIs Serving as a Means for a New Form of Monopoly?
This week at SXSW and in the weeks prior to the event, we’ve seen how APis are becoming ways for providers to wield a level of control that causes new concerns about how this technology can create a form of provider monopoly.
It’s evident when you begin to explore services and the types of APIs that they use. In a recent post, we wrote about Food and Drink APIs. Of the services classified in this category on Programmable Web, more than 80% use Google’s Geolocation API.
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In a video interview we did at SXSW, SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan discussed the issues that come with dominance. There becomes just one truth. That is also true of monopolies.
At SXSW this past week, Twitter’s Ryan Sarver said that the company is discouraging providers from using the API to create clients based upon the service.
Sure, API providers may do as they wish. They are the creators of the technology and enjoy certain rights that they set.
But what happens when one service is dominant and wields that power accordingly? Is this a new form of a monopoly?
An Open Letter From A Canadian To The New York Times, Eh?
Dear New York Times,
As a Canadian, I am writing to say what an honour and a privilege it is to be chosen as one of your preliminary test subjects for the dumbest business model imaginable. We don’t get many chances to contribute up here in the untamed north, so the knowledge that we are helping to ensure “as smooth a transition as possible” for your real readers makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like a Tim Horton’s hot chocolate.
Your plan makes perfect sense. The average Canadian starts his day chopping down trees and ends it with igloo sex (which is awesome, by the way) so we don’t need something to be “smooth” and “fine-tuned” unless it’s an axe or a Chippewa concubine. So by all means use us as your whetstone before you go hacking away at the American market – we don’t mind in the slightest. New York is still basically a mythical place to us, so every article you publish is like a dispatch from Oz, and who wouldn’t want to pay for that?
Now, there are those who will tell you that your business model couldn’t be more doomed if you opened a chain of in-temple money changers, which is no doubt why you wanted to try it out on Canadians before attempting any human testing. I for one pledge to live up to the faith you have shown in us: I will ignore the nay-sayers and become a lifelong subscriber, if only to prove how much more agreeable we northerners are than whiny yanks like Felix Salmon. Felix thinks you can evaluate things with math. If Canadians believed that, we’d move our currency off the Syrup Standard. However, as your goal is to improve the product, I will dutifully point out that even to us your pricing structure makes less sense than your country’s bacon naming conventions.
So thank you New York Times for singling Canada out as the only place on the entire planet that deserves to test your unfinished product. Of course, it’s not entirely clear why it’s still unfinished, since the $40-million you spent developing it is more than the combined wealth of our entire nation ever since Celine Dion moved to Vegas, but we have faith nonetheless. I sincerely hope that, with our help, your paywall will be a big hit in the real world.
Your faithful guinea-pig,
Marcus Carab
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