From The Guardian:

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual – no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands – but they regularly indulge in “attempted rape flights” when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. “Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards,” explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. “I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

“Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his ‘mate’: when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note ‘raeb-raeb’ calls (the ‘conversation-call’ of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling ‘raeb-raeb’ and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer).”

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. “When one died the other one just went for it and didn’t get any negative feedback – well, didn’t get any feedback,” he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest – especially in Britain for some reason – but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

Not much happened over the weekend, spent a lot of time helping out with the Elmcroft Associates website.

Other than that, didn’t get near the computer at the weekend. Plenty of stuff to catch up on…

From Scoble.

1) Make sure the “brand” you’re building in people’s heads matches what you actually want people to think about.

2) To have something go viral, you actually need to do something that will make people talk. Games that are fun are generally good, but won’t work for all products. With Honda their “cog ad” for the Accord went viral and that was only a video.

3) Be sensitive to the leading “connectors” — they’ll be the ones who’ll really kick off your viral campaign. Convince them to link and you’re really on your way. Know who the connectors are in the communities you want to reach. Want a political community to talk to you? Glenn Reynolds. Gadget freaks? Engadget or Gizmodo. Tech Geeks? Dave Winer, Boing Boing, MetaFilter, or Slashdot. Etc.

4) Test the campaign with 40 leading connectors before embarrassing yourselves. Listen to the feedback you get.

5) Make sure that the viral thing matches the image you’re trying to build. A VW ad (not commissioned by VW) went viral, but because it used a terrorist blowing himself up it didn’t match the image that VW was trying to build for itself.

6) A good test is whether employees like it or not. These things can be used to increase morale. “Look at my cool company, they even have cool viral campaigns.” But, they can decimate morale too. “What a lame campaign.” Be careful here. Ask coworkers if they would be proud of sending this to mom.

7) A good viral campaign lets those who talk about it manipulate the campaign. If it is designed to manipulate those who are talking about it, be wary. We hate being manipulated, but we love to manipulate. Translation: can I add something to the campaign? Even a comment of my own? If it’s a game, does it listen to me, like the Subservient Chicken does?

8) Be wary of doing fake blogs. That gets bloggers fur to curl up. You might get away with it (ILoveBees, for instance, did) but if done poorly you’ll just get derided for your fake campaign. Be especially wary when what you’re advertising is actually real-life stuff. Search engines and blogs, for instance, need campaigns that accentuate the image of “reliable, trustworthy, always up, relevant to real life, etc.”

Great article on Wired about Wikipedia. As linked to by Ken Leebow.

Wired 13.03: The Book Stops Here

URL. As linked to by Buzz Marketing with Blogs by Travis Smith.

Why executives should steer clear of the blogosphere
By Lucy Kellaway
Published: February 28 2005 02:00 | Last updated: February 28 2005 02:00

The chief executive of a US company recently put a question to his board. Why was it, he asked, that so few of his 5,000 employees took the blindest bit of notice of the memos, videos and voicemail messages with which he continuously bombarded them? And why was it, he asked again, that anything remotely secret whipped around the entire company before you could say Jack Knife?

They pondered this uncomfortable truth for a while and decided on an experiment. They would start “rumours” by word of mouth, warning the person they tipped off to keep their lips zipped. Sure enough, the “secret” information was known by the entire company instantaneously.

The trouble with this ingenious trick is that you can only pull it off once. The thought behind it is so cynical that if the workforce found out what was happening, trust (which is pretty fragile in most companies anyway) would be blown forever.

This CEO’s problem is one that affects all executives. Employees don’t want to listen to what they are saying – mainly because they communicate too much and most of it is too boring.

But now there is a new way that executives can reach not only their internal audience but the world at large – through the blog, or web diary.

According to an article in this month’s Fast Company magazine titled “Exec meets Blog. Exec falls in love”, this is a trend with legs. What better than a chatty letter a couple of times a week saying what is going through the boss’s mind? A gift, surely. The great thing about blogs is that people actually read them.

To introduce you to the form, I will start with Randy’s Journal, the outpourings of Randy Baseler, vice-president at Boeing.

“It’s always an exciting time when we roll out a new airplane, because it doesn’t happen all that often in our industry. And it’s an especially exciting time for our employees because they’re the ones who build these fabulous airplanes,” he writes in his latest entry.

Randy is new to the blogosphere, and I’m afraid it shows. The point of blogs is that they are personal and fun to read; his is a tarted-up press release. Randy battles on: “Meantime, there’s some really cool stuff coming up this year with the 777-200LR.” Evidently someone has told him that groovy people read blogs and he must alter his prose accordingly. This was bad advice. The result is a case of Dad at the disco.

More promising is the blog of Rich Marcello, senior vice-president of Hewlett-Packard. At least he has got the idea that a blog should contain personal reflections. A day or so before his boss, Carly Fiorina, got the boot, he was musing thus: “Last week was a good week and it reminded me of something I’ve believed for a long time – we are all Michelangelos. Sometimes we don’t like to call what we do artistic and we certainly are much too humble to equate ourselves to Michelangelos, but I believe it’s true.”

To test this novel theory, I seized a Biro and a scrap of paper and sketched the back of my good friend Michael Skapinker’s head and, as it happened to be his 50th birthday that day, I gave him the picture as a gift. “My head isn’t that shape,” he said, frowning. “Do you think I’m like Michelangelo?” I asked. No reply.

Back to Rich’s blog. The following week he had something to write about. His boss had been sacked. “So what was the reaction to Carly’s departure internally?” he asks in his blog. Answer: “It varied.” He says that he was a Carly fan but that she didn’t execute her vision quickly enough, which doesn’t get us much further.

Rather than tell us anything interesting he quotes a line from ee cummings about how difficult it is to be oneself. His conclusion: “No matter what you believe about Carly during her tenure at HP – friend or foe – I think you will agree she would have gotten along well with ee cummings.”

As it happens, I think Carly F would have eaten ee cummings for breakfast. Either way, the question of how the sacked executive would have got on with the overrated poet is not a pressing one.

A third sort of executive blog gives authors a chance to air their opinions on world affairs in a self-serving fashion. This is how Richard Edelman, chief executive of the PR company named after him, describes the recent Larry Summers foot-in-mouth episode where the Harvard president enraged some academics with remarks about the under-representation of women in science and engineering: “The Harvard controversy pains me deeply. I have three daughters and an accomplished wife. In fact, my eldest will be going to Harvard in the fall. I also know Larry Summers, not well but well enough. He is a decent man, a serious intellectual . . . ”

This entry bangs on and on. Alas, no one is listening. When I looked it had been on the site for a week and had attracted not one comment. But at least Mr Edelman invites comments. Neither the HP nor the Boeing blogs do, which is typical of the bad old ways of executive communication. It is the age-old message: I talk and you listen.

And now, finally, the executive who does get blogging. He is Bob Lutz, vice-chairman of General Motors. To me his blogs are excruciatingly boring because they are all about models of cars. What isn’t boring, though, is the way he does it. He defends his new Saab as if he means it, but then invites comments. On the same day 20 longish replies were posted – many of them critical. All there on the GM website for anyone to read.

The point about blogs is risk. If they are made risky in any way – either through publishing negative comments, or because the author is honest about themselves or their business, people will take notice. If they are merely another conduit for sanitised corporate information, or exercises in executive vanity, they will go the way of the corporate mags, the voicemails and the company spam. lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Travis makes the following comment, amongst others:

She starts with a long introduction about how rumors spread through a company, then says that blogs by executives can spread information as widely and quickly.

She says traditional communication fails because executives are boring. Actually, I’ve often found executives to be extremely interesting. Even if they’re a little less than scintilating, they certainly have a lot of interesting news to talk about. However, the ones I’ve known usually feel that knowledge is power. What’s changed, I think, with blogs, is that shared knowledge can help build personal power still.

The Red Couch blog features a post about the issue of credits. One experienced blogger seems to be annoyed that the spoils of a book deal has elluded him.

Richard Tallent, another blogger, sticks up for the Red Couch guys.

It’s hard to be sympathetic about the credit gripes. Why not write a book himself, before the Red Couch was even mooted?

update: the disgruntled blogger, John Robb, posts further:

I think Scoble misunderstands me. I am very happy for his success in landing a major book deal (and all that represents). It is also totally understandable why he got the deal. If I was in publishing and I wanted to do a book on podcasting for example, I would most certainly try to get Adam [Curry] to team with a ghost writer to put one together. Even though Dave did a huge part of the heavy lifting on podcasting and could offer amazing insight into the trend, it wouldn’t matter. Adam would be much more marketable alone (as a poster boy for podcasting) and he would get the deal if he wanted it. Fairness and Dave’s needs for a financial and public reward for his long years of effort (or the need for options in the future) wouldn’t factor into the equation.

The first chapter and table of contents for a new book, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies (slightly awkward title) by Susannah Gardner is available for download from Buzz Marketing with Blogs.

It makes for interesting reading.

Traditional business marketing is changing. More ads, catchier slogans, louder television commercials, brighter colors…everything’s been done to catch the consumer’s eye. Your company may have a great product that people love, but if you can’t make them pick you out of a crowd, you’re sunk.

So what’s the solution?

Stop talking at consumers, and start talking to them. Begin a conversation with them that encourages them to talk to others about your business or product. That’s what buzz marketing with blogs is all about: getting a conversation going between business and consumer.

Good article by Bill Thompson on the BBC Technology News Site.

The political classes will be surprised indeed if the next General Election doesn’t take place on 5 May.

In fact Tony Blair might even lose votes if he disappoints us and goes for another date.

Apart from the date, the other thing that is clear to all observers is that the internet will play a key part in the campaign, with exhortatory e-mails, party websites and candidate weblogs all being wheeled out to persuade voters of the merits of one party over another.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to have said something bordering on the truly reactionary.

Is Boris trying to get back in Michael Howard’s good books?

Still, a lengthy and serious post from Boris which shows that he is at least trying to use his blog constructively!

Is now online.

In that it stopped. Sorry. Was playing with my new toy:

It’s pretty good. It can send emails, which is great, and means I can post to this blog on the move. Using Flickr I can even post pictures straight onto here which I take with the camera! Wonders will never cease.

Had stacks of feeds to get through this morning. Plenty of stuff been posted on the link blog.

Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons:

Creative Commons offers free copyright licenses to artists and creators. The purpose of the license is to enable the artist or creator to mark his or her copyrighted work with the freedom he or she intends the work to carry. Those “freedoms” are the exclusive rights that copyright grants the copyright holder which the law permits the copyright holder to waive. The design of the system is to be automatic. No contract, or meeting of the minds, is intended. It is simply a license that says “if you use my copyrighted work in ways that would otherwise infringe my exclusive rights, I won’t sue you if you have abided by this license.” (The law makes everything ugly, but anyway, that’s what it does.)

I must have a look at Feedview, an RSS reading Firefox extension.

As linked to by Steve Rubel.

Ken Leebow links to this article by Radley Balko (!) on Fox News.

U.S. News & World Report reported last week that several senior Republican senators — upon hearing that “blogs” had uncovered the Dan Rather scandal, helped to defeat Tom Daschle and pushed for the resignation of CNN executive Eason Jordan — demanded that “blogs” be added to their official Web sites.

Even though, as a Capitol Hill Web consultant told the magazine, most of them hadn’t the slightest idea of what a “blog” actually is.

It’s an amusing story, but the more I read about the weblogging phenomenon from traditional media sources — the more I hear about it from talk show hosts and pundits, and the more triumphalism, tribalism, and group hurt we’re starting to see from the “blogosphere” — the more I’m convinced that even “hip” reporters and tech-savvy bloggers themselves don’t really “get” blogs any more than those senior Republican senators do.

In truth, “blogs” are nothing more than a relatively new way of distributing information, just as radio, television, newsprint, and conventional Web sites once were. Blogs differ from other media in that they provide links for easy referencing, they’re more easily and quickly updated (and, consequently, many times less carefully edited), they allow for more interaction between reader and publisher, and there’s virtually no barrier to entry — meaning just about anyone can start his or her own blog. You don’t need to win the approval of an editor. You don’t need start-up money from a publisher. You don’t need a radio tower.

I have started to plan a new site which will aim to collect together all the information anyone could ever possibly want to know about blogging, from introductory stuff for the beginner right through to techinical articles for the experienced web wonk; taking in personal and corporate blogging; and offering hints, tips and hacks for every blogger out there.

I’m planning that it will be a Wiki, so that once it is up and running, bloggers can come in and add points and discuss entries at will. Hopefully it will be pretty well populated with content by then, so the ground can be hit running.

Where’s the content going to come from? Well, some of it will have to be written fresh, but I am wanting the vast majority to come from blog posts from the blogosphere. Each will be linked to and quoted at length. So, you want a quick summary of how to write a corporate blog? You will be able to read Robert Scobles’s Corporate Manifesto, with a link to the post, and therefore the blog, in question to follow it up.

There is a vast amount of information out there, some really, really good stuff and this will be a way of bringing it all together.

The first thing to do will be to come up with a name for this project, and register the domain. The other will be to decide on a Wiki engine.

Any suggestions will be greatfully received. Likewise, any offers of help. If you have some great blogging articles saved away, let me have them! Send me links, either through my comments or through email. If anyone wants to help put the site together with me, that would be extra cool too.

Cheers!

Great article on the use of RSS, blogs and wikis at the BBC.

Just a few minutes ago, I got an email with the title “Your blog could cost you your job.” Needless to say, I sat up and took notice. It turns out to be a link to this article, which paints a dystopian picture of the institutional blog. However, there is more positive news out there, if you look. Late last year I paid a visit to Euan Semple in the BBC DigiLab, and he has graciously allowed me to interview him about the very forward-looking way in which “Auntie” is taking the new on board and putting it to meaningful use.

…and More Compelling Comments.

How To Write Killer Blog Posts

Some very good advice here. Here’s the first 3 to give you a flavour:

Writing Blog Posts

• Declarative sentences are good. Web readers demand them.
• Link like crazy. One thing that distinguishes blog posts from dead-tree journalism is that bloggers link prodigiously. Link to any mentions in your blog to other blogs, websites, articles, books, products, bios or explanatory materials on other sites. Always provide links to information that clarifies or gives background on information and opinions in your post.
• Write less. Omit all unnecessary words. The best advice I ever got about writing was from my first boss, the late “press agent” Leo Miller, who taught me a game to play with sentences. He’d keep taking out words until removing one more word destroyed the meaning of the sentence. Taking this last sentence for example, the sentence would end up like, He’d take out words until removing another destroyed the sentence meaning. Aim at keeping your posts at about 250 words.

I have made a few changes to the blog layout, all on the strip down the right hand side.

Most noticable is the list of recent links from the Link Blog, which is created using FeedRoll. Not entirely happy with the presentation at the moment, but it might be useful for casual readers to see what I’ve been linking to.

Also, I have added a new subscribe button for users of My Yahoo! Not entirely sure if this works properly as my experiences with My Yahoo! have never been terribly positive.

The other day I added a link to an image of the cover of the book I am currently reading. This links to an Amazon associate account for Palimpsest, the book discussion community I help run, for which any financial help is much appreciated. This will obviously be updated as I get to read more books…

Lastly, links have been added to BritBlog, which is a directory of British bloggers; and also Technorati.

Stephen Pollard, a UK based political journalist and quite regular blogger, has sadly been forced to remove the comments facility on his blog:

I’m afraid I have had to disable all comments from now on. I do not have the time to monitor the site for the abusive, defamatory, racist and anti-Semitic remarks which some people seem to think are fine to write in the comments section. Even though the overwhelming majority are sensible, as always it is the minority who cause sufficient trouble to end up penalising everyone.

I’m sorry to have had to scrap comments. I might reconsider, but don’t hold your breath. Life is too short to spend hours scrutinising the rantings of morons.

I’m not certain what facilities he has on his blog system for moderating comments, but it seems a shame that this has had to happen. Perhaps if someone were to volunteer to do the moderation on Mr Pollard’s behalf he might reconsider?

Have attempted to trackback to his posting, but it isn’t clear whether that part of his site is disabled too…

IT Safe is a new site created by the UK government to keep the populace updated with IT security news. The BBC report is pretty thorough:

A rapid alerting service that tells home computer users about serious internet security problems is being launched by the UK government.
The service, IT Safe, will issue warnings about damaging viruses, software vulnerabilities and weaknesses on devices such as mobile phones.

Alerts tell people how the threats affect them and what they can do to avoid trouble and protect themselves.

The service will be free and those who sign up can get e-mail or text alerts.

The scheme is aimed at home users and small businesses. The government estimates it will issue security alerts about six to 10 times a year, based on previous experience of virus outbreaks.

“There is a clear need for easy-to-understand and simple independent advice for non-technically minded people who use computers either at home or at work,” said Home Office Minister Hazel Blears.

“The purpose of this new government service is to ensure computer users are aware of the risks involved and how to deal with them easily and effectively without causing alarm.”

Those signing up will only be told about the most serious security threats that have the potential to affect millions of people.

Bugs and flaws

Full-time staff are being employed to comb through the many hundreds of alerts issued each year by computer security firms to spot which ones have the potential to catch out a large number of people

Between alerts the service will occasionally send messages giving people advice about safe ways to use their computers and phones.

“IT Safe will take our technical expertise and use it to help home users understand the risks and keep their computer systems, mobile phones and a range of related consumer electronic items, safe,” said Roger Cumming, director of the National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC).
The NISCC, which is running the service, also stressed that those signing up would still need to use anti-virus software, firewalls, and software updates to stay secure.

Warnings about security problems will tell people what the problem is, how it affects them and what they can do to avoid trouble.

Alerts will not be issued unless users can do something to protect themselves against the threat.

This might include downloading an update from an anti-virus vendor or updating software to close loopholes and fix vulnerabilities.

However no software patches or programs will actually be dispensed through the site. The alerts will tell people how to go about getting hold of patches from security firms.

The NISCC spokesman said the site and alerting service would stay in existence for as long as there were security bugs on home computers and other gadgets.

Unprecedented volume

Government statistics show that more than half of all UK households own a home computer. It was estimated that almost 13 million of these were able to access the internet in 2004.

The launch comes as the number of viruses and other malicious programs in existence is reaching unprecedented numbers.

In September 2004, the number of malicious programs circulating topped the 100,000 mark. Some fear that this figure could hit 150,000 by September 2005.

The creation of the national alert service follows similar efforts in the Netherlands and US.

The National Alerting Service for the Netherlands (aka De Waarschuwingsdienst) and the US National Cyber Alerting Service also tell citizens of serious security threats.

The site itself is pretty poor stuff at the moment, the sum total of the How To section being Updating Windows XP, How to use Windows Automatic Update and How to update Microsoft Office. Great.