RETROWURST: Quaint, curious and quirky - The 101 most useful websites (from 2008)

 

Now that I’ve run out of Retrowurst articles, I’m giving a few saved pieces a last airing  before they head for their new life in the paper recycling.

Today’s gem is The 101 most useful websites from The Telegraph, compiled by David Baker in March 2008. It’s a fascinating surf (remember that?) through today’s giants in embryonic form, valiant niche oddities still battling it out and those that sank without a trace in the (ugh) “sea of sameness.”

The article is divided into sections, and here are the first three mentioned in each section.

TECHNOLOGY

Google - well, I never!

Anonymouse - here’s a distinctly retro look. Not convinced I’d try or trust it ... 

iLounge - still around but if I haven’t used it in the last 18 years, I’m not going to start now

ENTERTAINMENT

Digital Spy - keeping up with the Kardashians, I guess

BBC iPlayer - yawn

Whatsonwhen - Not On Now

ADVICE & INFO

Newsmap - shame I misssed this, but it seems to have died a death. Apparently it was some new-fangled thing called an app

The Eggcorn Database - manglings of language, and jolly fascinating, too

Arts and Letters Daily - Est. 1998 - beautifully quaint

This section has the most weird stuff - for more, see picture above.

HOUSE & HOME

Noise Mapping England - killed off by a sonic boom

Prime Location - still in its prime

Rated People - as highly rated as CheckATrade? Not sure

SOCIAL

Facebook - “The most grown-up (just) of the social-networking sites that are fast taking over the world. Excellent for staying in touch with far-flung friends, though pretty good for re-establishing contact with those you hoped you had lost.” But what about all those lovely ads? 

Wordpress - Fair enough ...

Ringsurf - Doesn’t seem to be ringing anyone’s bell today

For the rest, see the picture above. The ususal suspects conspicuous by their absence.

SHOPPING

GiftGen - can you feel sorry for a website? Gifts suggested for me were: a flower arranging experience, a Lord/Lady title, and a Goat (for 3rd world). On the other hand, it’s rather refreshing to go back to the days when cookies weren’t so smart and Gemini was just a starsign.

eBay - no surprises there

Who What Wear Daily - terminally unfashionable

TRAVEL

Sky Scanner - how long before the AI agents come calling?

The man in seat 61 - going from Station to Station, and good on him!

Walk It - limping along

In all of this, I get a wistful nostalgia for the internet of those days, before we were stalked and fed, at the mercy of algorithms. Amazon and YouTube are mentioned in the article, but only in passing, not in the hit parade.

It’s been a pleasant ramble around. A bit like finding an old high street of individual, independent shops, each with their own speciality and character.

Will I find Claude and ChatGPT quaint in ten or even five years’ time?

Infected by the machine

 

Nearly eleven years ago, I wrote of nostalgia for my "pre-internet brain". I was already yearning for a mercurial mystery, an opaque numinosity, a unique contrariness that I feared was slipping away from me.

Today, I had a nagging feeling that, while my pre-internet brain is alive and well, it's gone into hiding. Especially when it comes to its output in the form of work-related writing.

I feel as if my writing is becoming blander round the edges. As if there's a part of my brain that really is infected by AI. I'm not over-keen on putting everything through an AI detector, but gave it a go, nevertheless.   

Client 1

I write articles for their brand communications and media newsletter. As usual, at the beginning of the year, one article is about trends. My first draft was "64% likely human", but by the time I'd incorporated the client comments, it had crossed a line. Into "69% AI probability."

Uh-oh.

I dug out my article on trends from 4 years ago. "98% likely human."

Definitely infected.

Client 2

In this case, I write keynote-type speeches for marketing events. For the 2025 event, the line had been crossed, too: "68% AI probability." For the 2021 speech I was still operating on pre-AI brain: "97% likely human."

There are push and pull factors going on here. From the client side, the feedback is often of the "crisper, clearer, simpler" sort, and I have sometimes been given an AI first draft as a brief, rather than a few bullet points.

It's much harder to extricate yourself from an AI-style as first draft than polish up your first draft with AI.

Then there were the pull factors from my side. As the audience for the articles and speeches is international, I use Hemingway  to keep the language and structure relatively simple. And I probably cut out more colloquialisms than I used to. Killing my darlings for better comprehension.

This is all conscious stuff. But I sense that the infection has worked its way in unconsciously. I am spending far too much time reading stuff online, too much of which is AI-generated. And I suspect my clients are, too. We are all becoming infected. And the expectations of what's a well-written article has changed.

I know that I must push back now. Because I'm not writing for AI and GEO. My audience is 100% human. I'm spending more time on real, paper books. Avoiding AI summaries, going to original sources. 

It's time to wake the non-infected, pre-AI part of my brain up. 

Seek - and WHAT will you find?

 

Something has flickered at the edge of my attention for the last few weeks when I’ve been on Amazon. Up to today, my brain had noted “oh, there’s what looks like an AI summary of reviews” and I hadn’t bothered to read further.

But today I had a look. The feature is headed “customers say” and is “AI-generated from the text of customer reviews.” I started with a music stand I’d bought a couple of years back for £14.99. Here’s what the AI rehashed from thousands of reviews:

Customers say

Customers appreciate the value, ease of folding, and ease of assembly of the product. They mention it works well, is easy to put up, and adjust for all heights. Customers also like its lightweight design. However, some customers have mixed opinions on its sturdiness.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

My pernickety side would probably take issue with some of this, but it’s useful enough for a relatively low-price, functional purchase.

But how would the AI fare with something more literary? Amazon did start out in books after all, whatever their plans for world domination.

I took a book I read last year which, to fit the topic, features a robot as the main protagonist: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro:

Customers say

Customers find the prose wonderful, flawless, and incredibly readable. They also find the story interesting and engaging. Opinions are mixed on the character development, with some finding them well-drawn and unforgettable, while others say they're thin and not satisfactorily described. Reviews are mixed also on the boring plot. Occupants have mixed feelings about the emotional content, with those who find it sad and heartbreaking, while those who say it's unconvincing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews 

Who are those “occupants”? Something to do with inter-planetary craft? This bland and badly-composed summary would hardly help me in deciding this was a book I’d love - or hate.

For contrast, my review of the novel is here. I even get an IKEA reference in!

Now, I know Amazon will be working to iron out bugs, and I may well eat my words when I look back in a couple of years to re-read this. But, to me, it’s yet more evidence of the tendency to lump ratings and reviews together, to go for the lowest common denominator, to smoothify and blandify everything, to dock the long tail and snip off all that’s individual, quirky, odd-but-fascinating, the bits that don’t fit ...

And this is what’s happening in the area of Search. I listened in to a Gartner seminar yesterday on the Future of Search. After some initial and well-publicised hiccoughs, Google now provide AI overviews, (along with a resource carousel of links) to typical search queries. The feature is available in the US and some other markets. The example shown by Gartner was a simple “electric vs gas dryer”:

   

Helpful enough, I guess - and Gartner gave plenty of marketing tips to make sure your brand ends up in the overview or the carousel. 

The functional advantages of electric and gas dryers are one thing, though. Whether to read Klara and the Sun or Brave New World next is quite another - as is any question or decision that involves human intellect, taste, culture, emotion, past experience, hopes, dreams and anything else full of nuance and impossible to measure. 

I’m all for AI providing information that could be helpful when choosing what to buy.  I look forward to Google (and others) rolling out this kind of overview as an option. But, in the race to be first, I hope they don’t cut down the inspire and discover side of search in favour of definitive answers. 

Cory Doctorow’s vision of the AI Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, and the metaphor of feeding cows a slurry made from the diseased brains of other cows is grim, but not entirely implausible. 

Synthetic, fake or just sh*t?

Fur, leather, meat - when you don’t want to wear or eat the real thing, there are alternatives. These are often described as “synthetic”, meaning that they’ve been been artificially produced in order to closely imitate the natural product. 

As well as the “artificial/not natural” connotations, “synthetic” also has associations of insincerity or affectedness. Fake. But fake can be a positive too, especially if presented as a clever alternative to using up natural resources, be they animal, vegetable or mineral.

I’m a bit slow off the mark, I admit. I only consciously heard the phrase “synthetic data” a couple of months ago in a seminar about “The Future of Measurement.” It was used in this context for data generated by AI to patch holes. This made me a little uneasy, but I brushed it off - after all, we’ve been patching holes in data via statisitcal modelling and analysis for as long as I’ve been in this business, and no doubt before that.

But the mention sparked a memory from another seminar, or something I read in the marketing press. That market research organisations such as Kantar are busy with R&D on “synthetic samples” which can generate “human-style responses.”

Does the euphemistic “synthetic sample” really mean fake people?

A year ago, Kantar were still moderately cautious about “synthetic samples”.  While AI has some great applications in market research (coding open-ended responses is an obvious example), the article points out some of the shortcomings of using AI as a substitute for human respondents. For example, look at the differences here:

I’m not surprised that the AI is more enthusiastic than real people about statements that sound AI-generated. Who in their right mind would agree to gobbledegook such as “my product is a way for me to bond/connect with others who share my passion”? Particularly if it’s bog cleaner or something.

The article concludes that: 

Our conclusion is that right now, synthetic sample currently has biases, lacks variation and nuance in both qual and quant analysis. On its own, as it stands, it’s just not good enough to use as a supplement for human sample.

And Kantar advise a blended approach based on “real people” and supplemented with AI.

Fast-forward a year and Kantar are far more gung-ho about it all. They’ve launched an AI Lab and appointed a Chief AI Scientist . And there’s a new GenAI marketing assistant, too. 

Competitive pressure, the race to be first, client demands for faster, faster - or genuine innovation and leadership? Who knows - but Kantar are not alone. Mark Ritson has written enthusiastically about his chums at an outfit called Evidenza.AI

Evidenza say “we survey AI copies of your customers to build finance-friendly sales and marketing plans ... we generate hundreds of synthetic customers based on your product category ... we test your messaging with synthetic customers.”

Meaning, I guess, use AI to generate marketing communication and throw it to the customer copies to get a tick on that box. No messy humans involved.

Self-fulfilling prophecy? Can we look forward to “synthetic sales”, too?

Cory Doctorow takes it a few leaps further in his brilliantly-titled critical piece, “The Coprophagic AI crisis.” From warnings about botshit ("inaccurate or fabricated content shat out at scale”) and human-created content sinking in the cesspit ("As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated “content” in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels.”) he goes on to consider the consequences should AI Search really take off:

The question is, why the fuck would anyone write the web if the only “person” who can find what they write is an AI’s crawler, which ingests the writing for its own training, but has no interest in steering readers to see what you’ve written? If AI search ever becomes a thing, the open web will become an AI CAFO and search crawlers will increasingly end up imbibing the contents of its manure lagoon.

Food for thought, and I feel distinctly queasy.

It’s another example of a contained system or black box that’s easy to control. Like home-grown problem: solution advertising.

And the answer is to get out of the system, go back to first principles, get inspiration from the internot. And remember that we are responsible for the data we produce and how it’s used. This stuff does matter.

A lemming’s life on automatic

 

One of my favourite topics on Extrawurst is how human behaviour is changing in relation to the internet and due to digitalisation. There’s a progression from intrepid surfing to good-natured stumbling to passive feeding - although this current phase tends to be reframed by advertisers in terms of “being served”, conjuring up visions of waiters, bow ties and silver salvers, rather than geese with tubes down their necks. 

I recently read a presentation which looked at this progression with reference to one aspect of behaviour: driving and navigation. Back in the 1990s, this was an analogue process involving maps, atlases and route cards, with the co-driver fully in control - and probably responsible when anything went wrong. Although I still blame our 1995 off-road adventure in Bryce Canyon National Park, testing the hired saloon car to its limits, on a misleading map rather than navigational incompetence on my part.

Moving on to the 2000s and the first navigation systems - very much a digital support which the driver could attend to or not as they saw fit. The navigation system in my 2006 Audi was almost impossible to set up and involved a CD, which of course was rapidly out of date. Quite often, I didn’t bother and drew up a route card, especially if venturing outside Germany.

In the 2020s we’ve moved from the driver/navigator as pathfinder right through to being digitally led and following blindly. The presentation makes a lemming analogy, of which more later, but you get the point. Unquestioning, submissive to the machine, following the orders. And in the future, this won’t just be the navigating side of things but the driving too.

Now some of this is all well and good. Digitalisation makes life easy, so you can concentrate on other things (although I always wonder what other things those could be). But I do worry that each time I enter a new destination, the compass in my head becomes a little less on the ball. I still like to do stuff from first principles: get the old map out and see roughly where I’m heading for. In the last century, labour-saving devices reduced the drudgery of washing and cleaning by hand, but is mental labour-saving, where the cogs of the mind grow sluggish through lack of use really a positive development?

Can pandemic-acceerated digitalisation be seen - in some respects - as a kind of instituationalisation in which we get lazy, start seeing responsibility and independence as burdens, and stop making our own choices?

For brands, there seems to be value in creating mental and physical availability combined with the feeling that the customer has made a conscious choice for that brand, rather than “being served” what an algorithm computes that person might like. And with some brands/categories, the scarcity/discovery/unseamless/difficult to find route could also be of interest.

By the way, back to those furry creatures. The “mass suicide” is a not-so-urban myth. The observed behaviour is more to do with migration - dispersal to resolve population density - and a few accidental deaths in the process. Nature’s way. 

Whatever happened to the inno-net?

 

I've remarked before how the relationship to the internet has changed over the last few decades - from the intrepid surfing and exploring of the early days, to amiable stumbling through to passive feeding. Well, of course, it was never going to stop there. The last couple of weeks have made me wonder if a better analogy for" being fed" could be "unwittingly poisoned".

And I'm also wondering if, these days, it's less Brave New World and more 1984.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, an optimistic and idealistic mood prevailed -  how wonderful that each and every member of the human race could communicate with anyone else they pleased - across and beyond borders. Could social media be the instrument of world peace?

But the realities of what human beings are actually like are now all too apparent, and the answer is: Not Bloody Likely. I'd love to know how often the word "toxic" is used in on- and offline conversations today compared to even twenty years ago.

Human beings don't like other human beings disagreeing with them. Neither do they like to be ignored.

And it's well known that nothing pleases human beings better than having their own opinions confirmed and amplified by others of a similar view. Hence the efforts built into the algorithms to keep people "inside the corral", as Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian, puts it: "the algorithms feed us incrementally more lurid notions of our own dispositions." And this, of course, is in the platform's interest, to sell more advertising space.

I'm not on Twitter, but I did experience the diffusion of an online forum for writers a few years ago. The forum was run on some fairly shaky technology, and in the early days was a convivial and collegial sort of place. Of course we had differences of opinion, but we were all writers, right?

But at some point it started to go sour. A few righteous souls started stamping around and policing the place, which naturally led to individuals of a loud and rebellious nature taking a few pot shots back. Entertaining at first, but inevitably it all got rather tiresome, and writing took a second place. There were even accusations of fixing competition results - a microcosm of what's happening across the pond, if you like. Then at some point the shaky old software finally gave up the ghost.

New groups formed - a big shiny commercial one from the original hosts, as well as others created by individuals of one hue or another. It's accepted we'll never be the big happy friendly cloud crowd we were ten years ago - although maybe that was an illusion, too.

This brings me to this article by Aris Roussinos which suggests that maybe Europe needs to get out of the information and (Big) tech stranglehold as well as China's industrial and economic stranglehold. Could this be the beginning of the deglobalisation of the Internet? A European, civilisational internet?

Or maybe just civilised would be a start.

Digital Quackery

 I am sure that one of the career paths we're going to see developing in the next few years is that of the Digital Nutritionist. This may seem as bizarre today as the idea of someone with no recognisable talent called an "Influencer" earning millions did a decade ago, but hear me out.

The whole idea of Digital Nutrition has been waiting in the wings ever since we started talking of "digital content" (the word still reminds me of stomach contents, so point proved) and "digital consumption" as well as "news feed" and all the other nutrition-related analogies. As I have said before, the whole digital space (aaarrrggghhh!) is one that we started by surfing or exploring, then became happy to stumble and bumble around and finally we've ended up in a passive state of being "served" or "fed." Of course, many of us have overdone it and had to resort to some form of "digital detox".

No surprise that the last few years have brought a plethora of reports and articles about the dire consequences of digital overload to our health and well-being, broken only by a short period at the beginning of lockdown where the internet and all things digital were hailed as a saviour in dark times.

The next logical step is to ask the question: does digital consumption have to be detrimental to our health and well-being per se? Or can we draw an analogy with analogue nutrition (if you like - I mean actual food that you shove in your mouth)?

This article introduces the work of AeBeZe Labs - see also the website from Jocelyn Brewer. It's all about Digital Nourishment, Digital Hygiene, Healthy Digital Diets, Digital Pharmaceuticals. 

OK, I studied a bit of pharmacology and I know that we release mood-altering neurotransmitters (Serotonin, Oxytocin, GABA, Endorphins, Acetylcholine et al) in response to stimuli, which could be watching a film, listening to music, reading an article. And usually one transmitter will alter the mood of most people in a certain direction: calm, happy, motivated, focussed or whatever.

But the flaw is that we all have different tastes and reactions. The awful caterwauling that was Justin Bieber plus Ed Sheeran (who on earth had the grotesque idea of throwing these two together into a studio?) that I heard on the radio this morning might well send some into oxytocin-drenched raptures, but it sent me into an extreme fight or flight reaction.

Bodies are rather more standardised when it comes to what is good or bad in terms of nutrition. Minds and souls certainly aren't.

And, finally, how do you account for good old-fashioned non-digital media in all this? I'm talking about books, be they penny dreadful potboilers, or highbrow works of literature.

Going overground

One of the better articles I've read about Post-COVID-19 culture is this one from Sturm und Drang. What I like here is it's not someone pontificating about the New Normal (groan) and "what we're all going to be doing/thinking" but instead outlines some of the key tensions that will be in play:

Online and Real World
Health & Safety and Getting out and living for the moment
Personal Freedom and Group monitoring
Self-reliance and solidarity
Humanity and nature

One thing that is certain is that the COVID-19 crisis will accelerate transformation and movements that are happening anyway. Take the first of Sturm & Drang's tensions - the shift online. Music and film and gaming were being created and played from bedrooms, our lives were becoming increasingly streamed and the couch potatoes and nerds were inheriting the earth.



People are learning to live without coffee to-go, or anything to-go for that matter. There's a certain power in having the world of work, leisure and everything in between at your fingertips, from the comfort of your four walls.

Maybe there will be a massive, irreversible shift online in all spheres of life.

Or maybe not. In the two world wars of the last century, entire young generations had their freedom curtailed by having to do their duty and go out and fight, or otherwise work night and day for the war effort. For the current young generation, COVID-19 is their war.

People of my generation used to bewail the fact that being confined to their bedroom was no longer a punishment for a teenager.

But maybe it's beginning to be. Days and weeks of unrestricted online access. Not just that, but parents, grandparents, teachers all invading the online world of the young: from making idiots of themselves on TikTok to hi-jacking YouTube for serious learning. One can sense an urge to rebel, to get out. Not going underground, but overground into the wild world of the Internot.

Perhaps this is another trend that will be accelerated by the crisis.

Who knows, maybe the young will spend their summer like Richard Jefferies' Bevis:

"It was living, not thinking. He lived it, never thinking, as the finches live their sunny life in the happy days of June. There was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground."

This. And This. And This ...

The streets outside may well be empty, but the dear old information superhighway is getting mighty congested.

Dormant WhatsApp groups are springing into life with the vigour of April tulips.

Long-lost relatives are emailing and Skyping and FaceTiming and StrangeTiming and StaySafeing.

The middle-aged have taken a crash-course in the media of the young, from Zoom to TikTok to Houseparty.

Streaming services have turned into less of a stream and more of a torrential, gushing river in danger of breaking its banks.

Museums, galleries, cinemas and educational establishments have flung open their virtual doors. I have even joined a virtual pub.

Along with all the memes on overdrive and "useful stuff to do if you're bored" (bored????) there's a unstoppable current of mis-information about COVID-19 and previous pandemics, from conspiracy theories to misleading medical advice to manipulated statistics to fake stories.

"Anywheres" are being forced to becomes "Somewheres" with all the inadvertent hilarity that Home Office brings.

And meanwhile, many of the "Somewheres" are out of the front line, or wondering whether there will be a Somewhere - a small business, a livelihood, a home - when all this is over.

Talking of "when all this is over", there is also a deluge of seminars, studies and articles speculating on what, exactly, will be the "new normal". No-one knows, of course.

I'm not convinced that the world will become obsessed with hygiene. Maybe in combination with more interest in immunity and how to be better prepared next time.

I'm also not sure about the "online as default" prediction that's flying around. There isn't really a substitute for reality and face-to-face meeting. People are social animals and social media will only take you so far. There's already a yearning to get back together, with "meeting friends"  as the Number 1 thing people will do after the crisis.

And will we be better people? Again, for every high-minded soul that's meditating in the morning, dashing off a novel or symphony in the afternoon and delivering essential groceries in the evening, there are plenty sitting around, guzzling down comfort food and too much booze, while bombarding the world with "hilarious" memes. Not to mention the spinners of conspiracy theories and bogus medical advice, the con-artists and the opportunists (thanks, whoever you were with your kind offer of a "free financial consultation" so that I don't lose all of my pension).

Times change, but human nature doesn't.

Real Life Rebels

I've read a number of articles recently about how young people are shopping less than older generations online and more in real bricks and mortar shops. OK, most of these articles focus around the US, and malls, and Black Friday.

But I wonder - in the same way that Facebook now resembles the Darby & Joan club, and grocery online shopping and delivery services are mainly used by the well-heeled and grey-haired - whether younger generations will start to rebel in more and more areas by using the real life option.

Maybe rebel isn't the right word. It's more a sense of doing something different than what you grew up with, or to what your parents did. Discovering, experiencing, trying stuff out - and on.

The wild world of the Internot is ripe for discovery.

Fighting with Algorithms

LUSH UK announced last week (on social media, of all places - Instagram, Twitter and Facebook) that they would be stepping back from social media. The reason? Social media is making direct conversation with community and customers more difficult: We are tired of fighting with algorithms, and we do not want to pay to appear in your newsfeed. If you want to talk to LUSH UK, from now on, you can do it through live chat on their website, email (remember those?) or by - shock horror - picking up the phone.

There is a sense of disillusionment with the internet in general these days, particularly in terms of authenticity and trust. Should people really trust in the stars? This article illustrates the prevalence of fake ratings (I am reluctant to call them reviews) which isn't just an issue for cheap electronics: business books are No. 3 in the "highest % of fake reviews Top 10". Presumably because the people who write and market them also know how to manipulate the system, and have the cash to do so.

Are we really heading for The Inversion, where the internet becomes more bot than human, not only numerically, but perceptually, too?

With an author named Max Read, this article has really made me wonder.

It's not just digitalisation

I have had a bit of an Aha Moment this week. I've been banging on in this blog and in my work, about digital and analogue, and how increasingly the division is disappearing. How customers don't really distinguish between on- and off-line, or the different online channels, and that it's the brand behind it all that matters.

I've now learned that we're in the 4th Industrial Revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, and that this isn't just about "phygital" - it's about the fusion of technologies blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres aka cyber-physical systems. Some of those technologies are robotics, AI, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things and 5th generation (5G) wireless technology.

For the record, here is the series of Industrial Revolutions:

1st Industrial Revolution: in the 18th/19th century, when rural moved to industrial and urban, powered by steam

2nd Industrial Revolution: 1870 - 1914, the age of mass-production, powered by electricity

3rd Industrial Revolution aka Digital Revolution: this started in the 1980s, it's about automation and the internet. We're still in the midst of it although we're now seeing the beginnings of the

4th Industrial Revolution aka Industry 4.0 which is about the embedding of technology into human beings and society

An interesting implication of this is found in the speech by Mark Carney entitled "The Future of Work".  Thanks to Good Business for highlighting this in their super newsletter.

While previous industrial revolutions meant that machines will take on tasks previously done by human hands, today, tasks involving cognitive (head) work are increasingly being automated. Does this mean a resurgence in the importance of the human heart? One can only hope so.

People in glass houses

Careful - your corporate culture is showing!

In the age of rising demands for transparency from brands and organisations, the phrase "Glass Box Brands" is one that's rarely off the brand agenda these days.

I haven't been in the job-seekers' market for a long time, but I do get involved now and again in the question of Employer Brand. Job-seekers' platforms are probably not quite as developed here in Europe as in the US, but a future is certainly round the corner where job seekers can find out anything about a company - warts and all - from TripAdvisor-like review sites.

One such is Glassdoor, no new-fangled shiny thing, this, but established since 2008. It's a site where employees and interviewees can do anything from share salary information to posting reviews of their interviewer, the management, the culture and so on.

It's an interesting development. Over time, to avoid the platform becoming a receptacle for bitter and twisted personal rants, Community Guidelines have been introduced as well as a "Give to Get" policy. The Glass Door has a lock - there's no casual browsing, and after a few peeks through the windows, all becomes opaque until you sign on or sign in.

Does all this policing destroy the object of such a site? Are enough people contributing to make the information valuable?

Or will the increasing wariness of "wot I read on the internet" mean people would rather trust their own experience and instinct when seeking a new job?

The Internot

I read a fascinating article this week in the HBR, entitled Marketing in the Age of Alexa. The article charts the rise of AI platforms and voice assistants, painting of a picture of a life where the skilled digital assistant accompanies its human owner? partner? master? slave? 24/7 in home, car, mobile device and so on and so forth.

But hang on. Voice assistants may become increasingly skilled, through AI, I don't debate that. However there will be some aspects of our lives that they will never have information about, unless we so choose. And that includes most of what happened or was made more than, say, 10 years ago.

Spotify won't have a clue that I may decide to dig out old vinyl from my teens and play Iggy Pop at full blast from my 1980s sound system. Or set up my wind-up gramophone from the 1930s outside on a sunny day and listen to 'On the road to Mandalay.'

The are furniture items, books, toys, crockery, photographs, letters, bicycles, bedknobs and broomsticks that will never be connected to the internet of things (unless we want them to be.)

Beyond that, there is the whole of nature, which grows without a code or chip.

And beyond that, there is the future.

The AI platforms have no connection to this world and don't "know" - as far as they can know anything - that it exists.

Maybe it's one strategy for rebel brands today to plant themselves firmly in the world of the internot.

The Cluetrain comes of age

The Cluetrain Manifesto first surfed onto the internet (as you did then) in 1999, meaning that this famous piece of business literature has now come of age. A somewhat Lutherean piece, with its 95 theses, the manifesto explored the impact of the internet on marketing and corporate communications. The idea running through is that online conversations - the new 'markets' - would make traditional marketing tools and techniques obsolete.

The manifesto has a 'Brave New World'  (in the original Shakespearian sense) feel about it, in its celebration of the human voice. This tonality is a far cry from the cute cats, grotesque gifs, saccharine  motivational quotes, Trump memes and rants that made up my Facebook stream this morning. But let me think back to 1999. It was probably four or five years since I'd first gone online, my Homepage was Yahoo! and my social media activity consisted of something called the Wedding Forum (later Baby Forum) which was a kind of forerunner of Mumsnet. The internet was not for everyone in those days - we were surfing and stumbling, certainly not being fed.

So how is the Cluetrain Manifesto looking on its 18th birthday? I had a re-read, and was inspired all over again by many of the 95 theses. Some of these are basic truths that have nothing to do with the internet, and are just as relevant today as they were in 1999, and probably 1899 too:

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.
22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view. 
23. Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.
24. Bombastic boasts—"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"—do not constitute a position. 
86. When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar website. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job. 

But I do think the authors over-emphasised the potential 'smartness' of the majority. 'Informed' covers a multitude of sins. Informed by whom? With truth or alternative facts? With what you choose to listen to? 

10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally. 

And more worryingly, it is the 'new' internet corporations that are taking the mantle of the 20th century bad boys, speaking in contrived voices (the chummy dude Californian tone Facebook adopts is just as contrived as the old-style corporate pomposity) , gathering data, invading privacy, controlling newsfeeds, bullying and manipulating.

15. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman. 

Another example, perhaps, of where Huxley got it right?

So, Happy Birthday, Cluetrain Manifesto - and let's see how things look in another 18 years. I do wonder what effect bots, Alexa and AI will have on the belief in the 'human voice.'

Make 'em laugh

A week later, and I'm still on my soapbox about humour (or lack of) in advertising. I read a super piece by Paul Burke in Campaign entitled No laughing matter: Why Advertising isn't funny anymore. The guilty are all called out and charged, from the Client to Sir Martin Sorrell and his bean counters, from Tony Blair to the Creative Department. Well worth reading: even if advertising isn't funny anymore, this article is, particularly the paragraph with the ghastly client marketing-speak.

One potential culprit, or group of culprits not mentioned in the article, are what we used to call target audiences. The people 'out there.' With social media, the stereotype of 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' (usually a retired colonel) has been replaced by a whole army of militant social justice warriors, just waiting to spring onto your ad from Twitter, Mumsnet, Facebook, you name it, and give it a good savaging. Advertisers and agencies live in fear of causing offence and outrage. 'All publicity is good publicity' has its limits. It's one thing upsetting a stuffy retired colonel, but quite another offending an entire generation.

But I question: are the new audiences lacking in humour? Do they take a masochistic delight in ads 'making them cry?' I'm not sure. There's still plenty of humour around. But I feel sometimes that it's only the medium that's changed. Youngsters used to tell jokes in the playground, that they'd heard on TV, or through word of mouth. Now they flick through 9gag. And maybe show their mate if it's particularly funny. But the jokes haven't really changed. There's stuff on there that I remember from my schooldays, and that's going back.

20 years ago, it was cool for creative people to be finding inspiration on the internet. But, as I've said before, we've gone from surfing to stumbling to being fed as far as the internet goes. I think - and hope - that there's a huge opportunity for brands and the creative people who work on them to reclaim humour. Fresh, new humour that fits to the brand and comes from observation of life out there, not rehashed old chestnuts from the internet.

I'm convinced that people are even more well-disposed towards a brand that can make them laugh as one that makes them cry.

Happy Anniversary, Darling

In 2017, I will celebrate – if that is the right word – ten years with Facebook. No doubt Facebook will let me know about this in no uncertain terms when the momentous day arrives. A video with plinky-plink John Lewis commercial-type music will appear, showcasing my most-liked photos, statuses, posts, shares, my best friends, most important memories and maybe a few suggestions for new friends – other folk who joined Facebook on the very same day. Wow.

Ten years in the traditional anniversary calendar is the tin anniversary. In literature – children’s literature at least – tin is tied up with characters who appear human, or humanoid, but are found wanting in the emotion department. Or are they? There’s the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz who goes off in search of a heart. And the Steadfast Tin Soldier who yearns for the (similarly) one-legged ballerina and after a series of misadventures ends up cast into the fire, his melted remains forming the shape of a heart. The mystery of tin, the paradox of something non-human which nevertheless has the capacity for yearning seems central to my relationship with Facebook. But more of that later.

Do you remember the first time you went on Facebook? No, I don’t either, but then again I don’t remember the first time I went on the internet, sent an email or watched TV for that matter. It’s a different kind of thing to knowing where you were when you heard the news about Kennedy, or Princess Di, or your pick of the celebrities that have bitten the dust this year.

However, Facebook has an answer to all that in that I can easily look it up and see what I posted. Excuse me just a second while I hop into Safari and find out.

Hop.

Well, it’s disappointing. My first status was as follows: ‘out all day researching and IKEA-ing.’ The second: ‘working at home: last day of school today!’ The third is an attempt at wittiness: ‘half watching Live earth, half watching Tour de France and half baking birthday cake! Too many halves don’t make a whole.’

My first year on Facebook contains all the social media behaviour I love to hate in others. The first photo gallery is a carefully edited collection of shots of a family holiday hiking in the Austrian Alps. There are humble brags (‘doing a 10km run/stagger today’), not so humble brags (‘off to documenta on Monday’) and vaguebooking (‘mortified’ – with no further explanation). And there are photos of homemade cakes. Lots of photos.

In my defence, I was just trying it all out. I had 38 friends, and they were all people I knew, face-to-face. We were early-ish adopters, and although it wasn’t quite as shiny and new as thefacebook in 2005 (‘an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges’), it felt like a private playpen for overgrown students. On my profile from the time, three lines seem to sum up the 2007 ethos of Facebook:

‘Send Susan a flower’

‘Write on my FunWall’

‘Susan has 3 beers.’

But perhaps the oddest aspect of 2007 Facebook is the complete absence of links to other websites.

I won’t deny that Facebook has been a huge boon to me socially. I’ve resumed contact with so many old school friends. I’ve become closer to pals in far-flung areas of the globe, to whom contact had previously been limited to the annual Christmas card. On top of that, using Facebook has enhanced my writing, through contact with other authors, promoting my books and maybe the most fun part: researching. I have joined all manner of obscure interest groups with gay abandon, from ‘The Gloster Meteor Appreciation Society’ to ‘RAF Steamer Point, Aden.’ It’s all there, at the click of a key.

Having said that, I do sometimes yearn (in a steadfast tin soldier type of way) for the early days of Facebook – or even the pre-Facebook days. Douglas Coupland ‘misses his pre-internet brain’ and I’m there, too. Not because of what Facebook is, but because of what it has become: an echo chamber where views and angles on stories are homogenous, exacerbated by an annoying recent development of inserting 'posts you may like' into my news feed. I presume this is the way Facebook want to cheat the ad blocker.

It goes back to the change in the way we use the internet. In the 90s, a few intrepid souls were surfing - adventurous, dangerous, even, and not for everyone. By the early 2000s, the pace had slowed down somewhat, from surfing to stumbling. The internet had become a giant, but rather jolly, obstacle course with people good-naturedly bumbling around and occasionally tripping up on something interesting.

And the last ten years? Sometimes it takes being away from something to notice changes that are, to the rest of us, imperceptible. Which is precisely what happened to blogger Hossein Derakhshan, author of a thought-provoking and very readable article: The Web We Have To Save. 

Derakhshan was imprisoned, in Iran, for his blogging among other things, between 2008 and 2014.  In the article, he points out a number of developments that have taken place on the internet during his incarceration, but that with the greatest impact is the growth of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. As he says, ‘lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there.’  Social media is characterised by what Derakhshan calls The Stream – ‘...getting fed a never-ending flow of information that's picked for them by complex - and secretive - algorithms.’ He adds: ‘... and not only do the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we've already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.’

This is a fundamentally important point. People want an easy life and they want to be entertained. Nothing wrong in that except when it's to the exclusion of the way people used the internet, predominantly, ten or fifteen years ago: ‘The web was not envisaged as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.’

The very expression ‘newsfeed’ says it all – Facebook and other social media are feeding people a pre-determined (or is it pre-digested?) stream of pap and bile. Calling it ‘curated’ doesn't make it any better. When I look at my Facebook newsfeed with its fake news, ‘You Will Be Amazed’ and ‘People Are Sharing This Incredible Tweet’ articles, big shouty font, witch hunts, ill-informed opinions, rants, photos whose captions plainly don’t match the visuals (usually posted by people who should know better), strangely homogenised language and expressions (that most people wouldn’t dream of using in normal speech), angry outbursts and tantrums interspersed with unnaturally fluffy puppies and kittens and adverts that ‘Will Make You Cry,’ the bullying, the boasting, the boring and the begging – then I do sometimes wish I had never signed up for this. It takes me back to my university days and the idea of a homunculus.

A sensory or motor homunculus figure shows proportionately how much of the cortex area is taken up by various body parts. If you’ve ever seen one of these little characters, you’ll notice that it’s recognisable as a human figure (just) but some parts are distended or atrophied in comparison to reality. The overall effect is grotesque. This is, perhaps, the relationship that my Facebook newsfeed bears to what is really going on out there.

Derakhshan’s article is now 2 years old, and maybe it took the double-whammy of Brexit and Trump to punch his points, and the phrase ‘echo chamber’ into the public consciousness. I hope it will also prompt a return to proper journalism, rather than a lazy regurgitation of someone else’s digital diarrhoea (couldn’t resist that visceral mixed metaphor, sorry.)

And my answer to all this? Am I going to continue my relationship with Facebook? Well, yes and no. What I really want to do is change my attitude to Facebook.

I must stop anthropomorphizing Facebook. Facebook, as such, is inanimate. It has no heart and no soul, and never will have. It does not even yearn for a heart in a strange Tin Man sort of way. It does not annoy me deliberately, it does not spy on me, it does not tell me things, it does not manipulate the way I think. Nor does it know my innermost feelings.

Facebook is a digital platform. No more, no less. It’s a medium in the same way that the TV is a medium, or the radio. A medium that everyone in the world potentially has access to (except the countries that ban it, but that’s a whole other story.)

I can choose which people I connect with via Facebook, and if I don’t like their opinions, I can switch them off, in the same way we used to switch off the TV, or change channels.

If you’ll allow me one last anthropomorphic metaphor in relation to Facebook, I won’t be ending our relationship in 2017, but I’ll make sure I am the one wearing the trousers.