Month: August 2005

Stating the Bleeding Obvious

As reported in The Guardian: I’ve never read a book, says Posh.

I would have thought that should anyone have actually wasted their time considering this issue, they would have assumed that was the case anyway?

Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty and Bookish probably wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it. Despite penning a 528-page autobiography charting her rise to the top, Victoria Beckham has admitted that she has never read a book in her life.

The revelation emerged in an interview with the Spanish magazine Chic. Although the issue in question has yet to the hit the shelves, details were leaked to the Spanish press over the weekend.

“I haven’t read a book in my life,” Beckham confesses. “I don’t have the time.” However, the 31-year-old former Spice Girl does shrug off suggestions that she is a philistine. “I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines.”

She also admits that having given birth to three boys – Brooklyn, six, Romeo, two, and six-month-old Cruz – she would like a daughter and could imagine “painting her nails, putting on make-up and choosing clothes” with her. Beckham also said she was not jealous about the attention paid by other women to her husband.

“I know what other women think and I say to myself ‘He is very good looking, he dresses very well, he is great with children and he has an enormous heart’. I am not jealous and when people look at him, I think it’s because he’s great.”

Her library-dodging confessions may come as a surprise to fans impressed with the literary style of her autobiography, Learning to Fly.

In the book, she recorded how seeing the film Fame encouraged her to seek stardom. According to the blurb, “A line from the theme song stayed with her – ‘I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly’. With this amazing book she gives us the chance to fly alongside her on her journey from lonely teenager to international star…”

Links 16/8/05

Will start having a post with various links I have come across which don’t necessarily need any further comment from me. Rather than have a link per post, I will save them up during the day and then post when I am finished. There won’t necessarily be a post like this every day, but they will provide a fairful useful (for me) guide to what I’ve been reading about.

Without further ado, here’s today’s links:

BBC ‘punks’ Wikipedia?

Saw this on Slashdot:

An article over at BoingBoing discusses what appears to be a viral marketing ploy appearing in a Wikipedia entry. Quote: “Someone has apparently abused collaborative reference site Wikipedia in a viral marketing campaign for a BBC online alternate reality game.

The BoingBoing article states:

…In fairness, it is also possible for any individual unaffiliated with the BBC (or an employee acting without network approval) to create a Wikipedia entry on their own. Comments on the Wikipedia “talk” page for this entry, however, suggest that a related entry for a fictional band called “Boy*d Upp” were added from someone operating inside the BBC’s network.

So, some questions: is a person (or persons) acting on behalf of the BBC responsible? What will happen to the entry, if it is indeed a bogus publicity entry? How often does this sort of thing happen?

One thing I do know: Wikipedia tends to be hastily self-correcting. Bogus or erroneous information of any kind doesn’t tend to last long there.

Further updates state that:

The corresponding discussion page now includes mea culpas from persons responsible for two of the bogus entries. One of them, “Jon_Hawk,” identifies himself as someone unaffiliated with the BBC who just digs the game.

Please do not use my edits to slander the BBC. If this were part of a viral campaign, the grammar of the article would almost certainly be better. I suspect the article would have been created at the same time as the game started also. Jamie Kane was mentioned on several blogs on Friday – did not one of you consider it was created by someone who reads such things? I’m nothing more than a student. I’m sincerely apologetic for purposefully omitting the true nature of Jamie Kane.

But the other, “MattC,” identifies himself as a BBC employee:

I created the Boy*D_Upp page from inside the BBC network on Friday evening after stumbling across the Jamie Kane entry linked from the Pop Justice forums. My action was in no way part of an orchestrated marketing campaign on behalf of the Jamie Kane project team nor was it intended for my page to be attributed to the BBC, which has been implied. It was nothing more than common garden vandalism for which I am sorry.

I take two things from this. One: traditional media organisations need to be careful how they use the new methods wikis and blogs present to promote their own output, as credibility can be lost fast. Secondly: community sites such as these are very quick to spot spamming, marketing and suchlike, and are very quick to stamp down on it.

Over on Palimpsest we have had a couple of issues with authors falsely reviewing their own work. We have come to be pretty good at spotting this sort of thing, and once exposed, these people tend to disappear very quickly. Those who populate the ‘net are pretty savvy people, it would appear.

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