Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Although you might not think there was a whole lot of scope for advertising in a medium that only gives you 140 characters to play with, there are a growing number of ways to advertise through Twitter although whether or not they’re actually effective is an entirely different question.

The means for handling the advertising varies quite a bit as you’d expect for a fairly new type of media. For instance, since the tweets themselves are rather fleeting affairs on the tweet streams of the more prolific twitterers, Twittad takes the approach of using the background image to place the main advert and uses the tweet stream to announce that the twitter account is sponsored. The system works in a similar way to blog sponsorship platforms which is to say that you write up a little profile of your twitter account and advertisers can choose you based on that or alternatively you can choose some advertisers. Payout seems to be around the $2.50 a week level which is OK in that you don’t need to do much for that.

Another service that’s possibly more interesting to the advertisers than the twitterers is Twtad which works on the pay per click model. The problem with this one is that the payment is typically 5 cents or less which would be alright for a system that was entirely automated but this system isn’t. Since click-through is typically quite low this system isn’t really worthwhile unless you have LOT of followers (10,000 or more perhaps) and if you have then you should be able to pick up more money elsewhere.

A more comprehensive version of this is Be a Magpie which is an automated service offering pay per view, pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale. You can set it so that you have to pre-approve tweets but leaving it on automatic seems best and will put a Magpie tweet every 5 ot 10 (you set the interval) of your tweets. All else being equal this one seems by far the best bet for the twitterers in that once it’s set up it can be fully automated. It’s good from the advertisers point of view too in that it offers the four different payment methods.

The latest entrant seems to be Betweeted which I gather operates on the basis of the twitterer choosing advertisers to tweet about so is quite similar to the usual blog sponsorship services. So far it’s only for US bloggers and nobody else can even register to look at how it works.

So, you can advertise via Twitter, but the question is: should you? If you followed the original principles of Twitter ie that it’s a service for “friends, family members and co-workers to stay connected” then the answer is probably not. After all, you wouldn’t hand out advertising leaflets to these people, would you? However, the service has moved a long way from that and most people have followers who are complete strangers and lots of others are tweeting to promote themselves or their business, in which case the answer is: why not? Aside from advertising third parties, more and more companies are moving on to Twitter to promote their products and, of course, there’s always been the self-promotion of bloggers tweeting their posts (some cross-promote their tweets on their blog) so advertising is very much a feature of Twitter that seems here to stay.

Finally, there’s the question of effectiveness of Twitter advertising ie does it actually work? Well, I’ve been tweeting my own blog posts for a while now and it would appear that it’s quite an effective way of gathering new readers for the blog so presumably it would be equally effective for advertising tweets, or at least those that fit in with the general interest of the followers.

As expected the new Star Trek movie did rather well in the opening weekend, pulling in over twice that of the previous box office record Star Trek movie way back in 1996. Of course, that’s broadly what the studio were hoping for and the reason behind the making of this movie by them in the first place.

One complication that always crops up with long running and popular series is that sooner or later the writers end up essentially writing themselves into a corner and the Star Trek franchise is now into its 40th year which leaves Dr Who as the only other science fiction that’s been around longer. In the case of trek, the original NCC 1701 was destroyed in one of the films which makes later series featuring it a non-runner and now we’ve sort-of seen its origins in the latest movie which basically uses it up and the NCC 1701D from the Next Generation series was also destroyed in another film so it’s out of the picture. At least the NX-01 from Enterprise managed to survive into retirement but that also means that a successor series based on it seems unlikely to be a runner even had that series been more successful.

The short gap from the Phoenix to the Enterprise era doesn’t seem to leave much scope for further prequels and in that the NG Enterprise timeline stretches into the origins of the Department for Temporal Investigations there’s an implication that there would be something of a discontinuity in technological development around that time and besides if the DTI are operational then that implies that explorations in time are becoming more important than explorations in space were by that time in the Star Trek universe. That leaves open the potential for a spin-off series, possibly along the lines of the proposed Gary Seven spin-off back in the days of the original series and that could be a relatively open series in that there hasn’t been an awful lot of information put out about the future time cops in any of their interactions within the various series.

So, given that there don’t seem to be any gaps to fit in a new series based on a USS Enterprise, the writers have collectively written themselves into a corner. Unless, of course, one moves to an alternate timeline and a whole new NCC 1701 as they’ve done in the new film. This potentially opens up in effect a remake of the original series and one wonders if that’s what the studio are hoping to do? Interestingly, it also moves knowledge of the potential for time travel and alternate realities into the foreground in this reality so perhaps the DTI or its alternate reality equivalent would be formed much earlier in this particular universe?

Over the years I’ve been making efforts now and again to track down various friends from places I’ve been ranging from primary school through to university.

Thanks to the likes of FriendsReunited, FaceBook and LinkedIn it’s gradually become an easier task as the years went by. However, there’s a surprisingly high percentage of people who don’t use any of those services and particularly surprising in my case as I did computer science at university so I’d have expected the percentage of those from the course using these services to be higher than average. I even had the idea some years back that presumably there’d be quite a high percentage of the computer science people who would have their own domain name by now but, so far, I’ve only tracked down one person that way. Still, now and again there’s little flurry of activity on one or other of those sites and suddenly you find people you’d been looking for over a number of years.

One of those little flurries happened over the past couple of months and I’ve added more contacts from the past than I’d done in the previous several decade from primary school right through to university.

Obviously the people I’ve not seen from primary school have put on “a few years” with their appearance. However, what’s really striking is how differently people have aged from university. Probably a silly assumption to make but I figured that we’d all look like we were 22+X years but in fact the range of appearances is something like 22+X-10 through to 22+X+10 ie some look around 20 years older than others even though we’re all just about the same age.

Now, I can understand the shows like 10 years younger have 40 year olds who look like they’re 50 to begin with and who look 35 after their transformation because they’re picking people from a whole host of different backgrounds and lifestyles. It seems strange that you can get a similar range from people with quite similar backgrounds and, by and large, fairly similar life histories since the last time I saw them at university too.

What I must do next is to compare what people said they were going to do with what they actually did… I’m sure between this post and that one I’ll end up having nobody speaking to me 🙂

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.

As a standalone movie it certainly has all the aspects that you would expect to see in a big budget Star Trek film ie the grand CGI effects, the fast paced action, unexpected plot twists and so on. On all those fronts it succeeded very well with spectacular CGI sequences right from the impressive start through to the space battles towards the end, a number of Spock-centred surprises along the way and a sustained fast pace that produced a sense of urgency that made it feel like a normal length of episode.

However, the bigger question is: is it actually a genuine Star Trek movie or merely one that had that label tagged on to improve the box office success? Yes, there are characters that have the same name as those from the original series and, yes, you’d expect their younger selves to be less developed than they were in the original series and, of course, they’d be different in some ways due to changes in the timeline but, taking all those into account, was this a Star Trek crew? I think so but I’m not convinced that it was the crew of the Enterprise: it just didn’t feel that if you ran time forward a few years that you’d have a group of people working together in the same kind of way as you should have done. To my mind this film was created because the studio felt they needed another Star Trek movie but didn’t want to pay the big bucks to make one using an entire set of existing actors from any of the Star Trek series so instead they tried to create essentially another Enterprise style prequel but one that little bit closer in time to the original series.

Being really picky, as some have been, you might wonder where the Temporal Integrity Commission were when a rather major league change to the timeline was being made. Arguably this could be explained by the temporal change having taken place before the formation of the TIC itself thus they are never created (much like in Asimov’s End of Eternity). However, in other contact with the TIC this seems not really to be possible in that it appears to take a while before changes ripple up the timeline and, of course, there’s the issue of various people coming back in time in Enterprise (which, of course, is set before the events in this movie) to correct the timeline…

You could also wonder how come the Enterprise here which has just been built seems more modern than the older Enterprise as depicted in the original series? However, that’s not really as big a deal as you might at first think. Even in real-life places can change their look substantially over a few years and who are we to say what which Enterprise style would really be more modern? We’ve seen ourselves that really modern meant that home electronic devices must be silver (10? years back), that they must be black (5? years ago) and that they must be silver again: which look is really more modern?

What this movie does allow is for the studio to kick off another series based in the Star Trek universe but because it’s an alternate reality version of it, they won’t have all the baggage that’s built up over the years from the Star Trek franchise which, let’s face it, has begun to complicate life no end for the writers. After all, who but the most dedicated fan could remember everything that’s gone before and write a new series of episodes that’s consistent with that? What they’ve effectively done is the equivalent of firing Voyager off to the delta quadrant only more so in that there can’t be any contact with the regular Star Fleet headquarters which would, of course, require consistency with 40 years of episodes.

Worth watching, but don’t get too hung up on the inconsistencies.