Landmark used to be one of my preferred haunts each time I visited the Forum mall. And I don’t know what I was thinking when I signed up for their loyalty card (or whatever they call it) some two years ago. I did ask them why they wanted my email id and mobile number. The reply was prompt, “we’ll send you your card number/something sir.”

The nightmare that began like a drizzle back then continues like a torrent, which shows no sign of stopping even as we speak. The appropriate word is SPAM. In my email inbox and in the inbox on my cellphone. At an average rate of five SMSes per week and god knows how many in my email. I really don’t want to know which author is ornamenting their store “this week” or what new delicious discount they have on offer currently. “Furious” is too mild to even begin describing the feeling I have each time I see something with “TMLandmark” on my mobile.

The real issue however, is the clueless marketing guys at Landmark who thought it was a brilliant idea to harvest my email address and mobile phone number without informing me the real reason at the time of asking my personal information. I trusted them when they said it was for sending some information. And they betrayed my trust. They didn’t have my consent to jam my inbox with useless crap. Also, for the record, I’ve received nothing till date except crappy spam messages.

Perhaps they thought this was a clever way to show…what? That they “always have the customer on their mind?” I mean, if they seriously think that spamming people’s inboxes with stupid marketing offers is going get them more customers, someone in their marketing team clearly doesn’t know his/her job. If anything, it drives even existing customers away.

For heaven’s sake, Landmark is a bookstore–okay, they also sell gift items, DVDs, etc but as a bookstore, they do a horrible job even apart from spamming. As any book lover will tell you, people who take their book-shopping seriously will primarily visit a bookstore that meets these criteria among others:

• A wide range of selections, not just the current bestsellers (in any genre/category). That means, the store should stock even the most obscure titles whether it sells or just sits there rusting.
• Enough stock of the said obscure titles. I hunted for How Proust can change your Life, a title not obscure by any means. It was unavailable at Landmark even after following up with them after two months. In contrast, the venerable Mr. Shanbhag at Premier Book Shop unearthed it for me within 5 minutes.
• Conveying information promptly to the customer as soon as the title becomes available. This begins to look like a sad joke after they write down your number and promise to inform you when out-of-stock books become available. To repeat what I already said: what’s worse is the moment they have your number–you don’t need to fill up any loyalty program or scheme–it’s like they’ve given themselves the license to unleash textual hell upon you. They won’t inform the availability but they won’t stop spamming you.

The decor, lighting and general swankiness of the store doesn’t really count for anything. It’s like the tastiest food made without salt. I’d rather go to Select Bookshop or the now-defunct Premier Book shop and know for sure that I’ll find what I’m looking for than go to Landmark and walk away disappointed.

Back to the subject of spamming, I found to my utter delight that they quickly responded to my angry Tweet thusly:

Hey hi – saw your tweet on Landmark bookstore. Any problem? – did you get any email which you did not subscribe for???

To which I responded:

Yes. You took my email Id for a form I’d filled at your store & began spamming me without asking my permission.

What followed was even more retarded.

1. Sorry if that had created any trouble. I would like to remove your email address from our list…

2. can you please drop an email to sundarsrinivasan@landmark-tata.com fwd the last email u recd from that email address.

First they harvest my email ID and begin to endlessly spam me. None of their marketing email-spam has an unsubscribe option. And now they want me to send an email to some dude to remove me from their list? This would’ve been pure hilarity had it not been so utterly annoying. No, I won’t send any damn email to them: I’ve relegated them to the SPAM-and-TRASH folder long ago, bless you Gmail! Though the other problem remains: of receiving spam SMSes on my phone. Talking to the equally-clueless Vodafone hasn’t helped at all. Any ideas?

What’s with these guys who still think that sending email newsletters is one of the best practices of selling? How many of the 6,767,805,208 Internet users (as of June 2009) actually read these well-designed but stupid and pointless newsletters? I don’t argue that email newsletters/campaigns are completely wasteful but think about it: I will read it if I want to read it; forcing it down my throat will cause me to puke. Ask me first. Don’t they realize that spamming is a serious put off and potential business-wounder in an age when more and more people are ordering books online? Their marketing team or whoever is in charge is woefully behind in its knowledge about online customer behavior–people who buy stuff online. As an aside, if you’re in India, Flipkart does a good job of timely delivery. So far.

I never set foot in Landmark the day I realized what they were doing with my contact information. Do you hear me Landmark? That’s about close to 2 years in which time I bought 30-plus books. Not from you.

Tags: Book Shopping, Books, Customer Service, Landmark Bangalore, Landmark Bookstore, Landmark Spam, Landmark-Forum Mall

Google (GOOG) is finally making some changes to its new Buzz product in response to outrage about the product’s glaring privacy flaws.
But these changes don’t include the most obvious and important one: Making the whole thing opt-in and private by default.

As of now, Google’s algorithm just picks people out of your email box for you to follow and be followed by, regardless of whether they are friends, spouses, mistresses, stalkers, or enemies.

Worse, the list of your followers and followees is made public by default, so anyone can see it.

Put simply, Google just let the whole world peek into your email Inbox, without ever asking you if you wanted it to do that.

It’s pretty clear that Buzz is Google’s second desperate attempt to ram its way into the social media/networking largesse. The first was the disastrous Google Wave, which is already history. Between a week after its launch and now, the list of people on my contacts list (which btw is more than 300) who are online at any given time refuses to exceed 5.

And now, Buzz.

What’s visibly common between Wave and Buzz is the terrible amount of clutter on the interface. Too many things clamour for your attention at the same to the point that it can get a trifle overwhelming. This, from one of the first companies to make minimalist, intuitive, and usable interfaces. But both suffer from problems unqiue to them: the biggest trouble I faced using Google Wave: where or how do I get started? I mean, I knew it was an ultra-sophisticated, packed-with-features application but duh? With Buzz, the major irritant was the very Buzz link under Inbox.

Which brings us to a very common observation-cum-complaint millions of users have raised: Buzz is Google’s idea of competing with Twitter, unarguably the #1 social media platform today. The complaint though, is that Buzz is a rip off of Twitter sans the 140-character limit, and sans its respect for users’ privacy (this post brands Buzz as social manipulation).

Twitter achieved skyrocketing popularity with little or no effort on the part of the company that developed it while Buzz stormtrooped into our Gmail accounts, a “strategy” I call indecent. More directly, this is no different from the spammers who harvest email ids: Google simply imposed Buzz on its entire Gmail user base. And neither is Buzz stellar: it adds no value–integration with Twitter, Flickr, Picasa & tons of other popular social media sites is NOT value addition–and reflects what this piece terms as “engineering-focused mentality and arrogance.” Also, we can’t emphasize enough on the real privacy threats that Buzz brings with it: check this out for a pretty scary picture of what can go horribly wrong. And this.

In short, Google’s cluelessness in the social media space is starkly visible. And I’m not picking on Google: this cluelessness is fairly evident in every large technology corporation that’s dabbling in this space. But because Google is one of the so-in-your-face cash-rich companies aggressively pushing itself in social media and has so much to..er..”show,” I had to take it as an example.

If Google planned to replicate Gmail’s success: first, with the “invite-only” Wave accounts (seriously, who wants a Wave invite now?) and now with force-feeding us with Buzz, it has completely lost the plot. Here’s the thing: the social media “revolution (ugh!)” overtook the large corporations without their knowledge. It was too late when they woke up. To use a really ugly cliche, social media is about real people. It’s not a “product” or a business unit with a fancy acronym in a 50-billion dollar company. Twitter succeeded because of what’s known as “easy adoption.” People simply took to it. There’s really no mission or vision statement to platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The “missionary/visionary” kind of thinking happens in corporate boardrooms while real innovation happens when people are allowed to think independently: outside the confines of meeting rooms, which rarely happens in a large corporate set up. That or when people are passionate and desperate–when the concept/idea has the potential to wipe out their savings.

Good social media/networking platforms place control in the hands of real people. As someone who’s fairly active on Twitter, I’ve formed meaningful relationships with people I’ve never met in real life and probably won’t. Which is what a decent platform/tool should do: apart from the very basics–authentication, privacy, etc–it shouldn’t dictate what I must do. Google Buzz didn’t ask me if I was okay to view some dude who’s relentlessly spamming my Buzz timeline with his photography exploits. Or some kind lady who’s having a 40+ comments-heavy discussion about what to wear to her kids’ parents-teachers meet. Which also explains why people are outraged days after it was launched. And then there’s the whole “integrated approach,” which is immensely annoying– Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter… I don’t want friends of friends of friends of friends of someone on my Gmail contacts list to view my Flickr pictures. This kind of approach can partly be attributed to a linear, version-based, plugin-based approach to developing social media products. It’s like, “Okay, so we have Twitter and it’s already 2 years; let’s offer an upgrade, a Twitter 2.0.” The trouble is huge corporates, after some years are so thoroughly divorced from the actual users of their products that they have no idea what ticks (both on and off) people. Microsoft Word was an excellent Word processing tool when it debuted. Today, it’s a pseudo-publishing tool, a web page editor, a drawing/graphics application, XML editor, and a desktop blogging application.

In the end, as a perceptive friend (see postscript) observed, “social networks aren’t generic, they are about choice. Google is moving in the opposite direction.” Which is why giant, faceless corporations are still groping for that magic formula to garner the biggest slices of the social media pie for themselves. I’ll wind up by presenting a fairly common scenario. You’re stuck with a problem with your laptop and you call customer care. After you cross the robotic-IVR firewall and punch more buttons, you get a human voice with a name. A minute or so later, you know where it’s going: “according to our policies,” “please read the customer support agreement,” “someone will get in touch with you within 48 hours,” “I don’t have the authority to,” “we understand sir/ma’am, but…” “Oh! for that you must call…” And then you hang up. On a good social networking site, you simply post your issue/question. Real people will reply with astonishing speed, and they often have solutions to your problem.

This is where Google & co have lost the plot.

Postscript: Thanks to Stefanie (follow her: http://twitter.com/skarbach) for inspiring this post.

Tags: Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Innovation, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networking Tools, Technology, Tools, Twitter

Oh yeah! Here goes.

Before we begin, the previous para is a very substandard illustration of a fancy technique of writing fiction: stream of consciousness, where you write down your thoughts as they occur. Now why am I saying this? In my rude guide, I wrote

…you primarily write to achieve technical and subject-matter accuracy and clarity. Your readers and/or reviewers’ primarily concern is whether you’ve achieved that and not so much for that wicked turn of phrase that you’ve introduced in the second para in the Overview of the Megaphone Connector for JDBC (Heading 1)…in other words, writing in this case, is subservient to technology/subject matter.

And now, back to the “much water has flowed” bit I just mentioned. Over the past month, I was witness to a fascinating discussion the details of which I shall spare you. It was a discussion centered around the (lack of) very basics of writing. Which is why I thought it’s time to re-examine the “writing in this case, is subservient to technology/subject matter” statement.

Problems in most human endeavours–I love it when I sound lofty–can be overcome if you abide by three factors:

1. Solid grounding in the fundamentals
2. Common sense
3. A penchant for not taking things literally

I know I’m sounding like I’m on a high horse talking down to ordinary mortals but indulge me, please. There! I said please. In all sincerity, let’s see how these factors apply in our context:

1. Solid grounding in the fundamentals of language/writing: I never tire of saying this: Technical Writing = Technical + Writing, where writing should be second nature to you. At the very least, writing mustn’t be an effort for you. If you plan to learn the parts of speech, articles, elementary sentence construction, and voices on the job, you’re probably considering a wrong career choice. Like I said, technical writing is not for everyone. Writing is not an optional skill for a technical writer.
2. Common sense: Cannot be defined although the dictionary says it is “exhibiting native good judgment (adj)” and “sound practical judgment (n).” Quite good but nobody can ever say what the judgment in question really is–it is entirely situational. Which is why the world abounds with helpful examples of what common sense is. I hate to do this to you but if you were given a lemon and presented with some choices would you rather squeeze it on your neighbour’s open wound or make lemonade or use it with Tequila (ha!)? Answer carefully. In much the same way, common sense dictates that if it takes you 37 steps to document a feature, you’d rather talk to your project team and simplify the interface. And because we’re talking about writing, common sense tells you that it’s a mistake to use figures of speech in a technical document: You cannot retrieve your files if you permanently empty the Recycle Bin just like trash once taken away by the garbage van cannot be recovered.
3. A penchant for not taking things literally: This is really a variation of #2 above. So when I say “much water has flowed,” you must not conjure mental images of water flowing underneath a bridge or something. The same thing applies for “I’m on on a high horse.” I’m a technical writer, not a jockey, for God’s sake. And so, when I say “writing in this case, is subservient to technology/subject matter” it doesn’t mean you take it literally: it just means that I assume that you possess above-average writing skills (ref:#1 above) when you call yourself a technical writer. If you call yourself a surgeon, remember that at the least I don’t expect you to use a butcher’s knife for performing surgery on me.

Actually this entire post is an exercise in stating the obvious but I suppose I haven’t stated it in vain.

Tags: Advice, Basics, Commonsense, Documentation, Language, Random Stuff, Tech Writing, Technical Writing, Writers, Writing

So ladies and gentlemen, presenting Twexicon.

TWEXICON

1. Twitter (N): Online Micro blogging service to send and view second-by-second status updates, almost instantaneous updates from the entire Connected World.
2. Tweet [pronounced Tw-E-t] (N): A Twitter Message; (v) to send a Twitter message
3. Tweeter (N): A person who tweets, a Twitter user.
4. Tweeting (N): The act of sending a Tweet or Twitter message
5. Tweeple (N): People on Twitter
6. Follow (V): To follow someone’s updates on Twitter
7. Unfollow (V): To stop following someone’s updates on Twitter
8. Twiddle (V): To fiddle with Twitter; no SOP exists but activities range from banging your head trying to think of an intelligent message to Tweet (as opposed to “Gawd, I’m late to work!” or “My cat is puking”), or trying to decide whether to delete your Twitter account or no. Twiddling is limited only by your imagination.
9. Twiverse/Twpoem (N, V): Verses limited to 140 characters or less, the act of writing such verses.
10. Twoiletry (N): Your Twitter-enabled device that lets you Tweet from the loo.
11. Twral (V): To bait someone on Twitter.
12. Twralling (N): The act of baiting someone on Twitter.
13. Tweetus Interruptus (N): Act of interrupting somebody when he/she is in the middle of typing a Tweet.
14. Premature Twijaculation (N): Tweet incomplete because the Tweeter ran out of the alloted 140 characters.
15. Twit (N): Witty Tweet

Leave a comment and I’ll update Twexicon.

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Microblogging, Microblogs, Technology, Tweet, Twexicon, Twitter, Twitter Dictionary

Meanwhile, the BBC plans to do a documentary on Eliot’s private correspondence, which his widow Valerie has recently made public. A fascinating item therein is Eliot’s rejection of George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm. This article calls it the “literary snub of the 20th century.” Eliot’s reasons for rejecting Animal Farm are equally fascinating.

When Orwell submitted his novel, an allegory on Stalin’s dictatorship, Eliot praised its “good writing” and “fundamental integrity”.

However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another matter.

“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

The original rejection letter discloses that Eliot was more concerned about Britain’s friendly relations with the USSR in the time of war. Here’s the revealing portion:

On the other hand, we have no conviction…that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm, which pretends to other interests…than mere commerical prosperity, to publish books which go against the current of the moment. [Ed: Underlined]

Quite a giveaway, isn’t it? Thank God for Secker & Warburg, who ultimately published Animal Farm. We saw the truth fenced behind the real Animal Farm post Perestroika and Glasnost. Recall the Chief Pig who finally stands up and exercises his totalitarianism at the end of the novel?

Tags: Animal Farm, Eliot Rejected Animal Farm, English Novels, Fiction, George Orwell, Poets, T.S Eliot, Writers, Writing

1. Love your job and if possible, your company.
2. Get the job done, titles subserve the job you do.
3. When trouble erupts, focus on resolving it instead of looking to blame.
4. If the work environment sucks, try to enliven it, then live with it, else get out quickly!
5. Critique the work, not the person.
6. Prohibit thyself from taking pleasure in doing #5.
7. Work, don’t please your boss.
8. If you have to fight for a hike or promotion, you are probably in the wrong company.
9. Processes are mere crutches: you need legs to walk.
10. Say it in English, not in bureaucratese.

Tags: Advice, Presumptuous Advice, Random Stuff, Tips to Succeed at Work, Worklife Credo

Ever since I stumbled upon it in the pages of my high-school Latin textbook, I have loved the phrase sub rosa. Literally, it means “under the rose.” In Greek mythology, Eros gave Harpocrates, the god of silence, a rose to prevent knowledge of his mother’s impropriety from spreading. Similarly, a rose hung from the ceiling of council chambers in the Middle Ages reminding members that their meetings were confidential. Today, the phrase means simply “in secret.” I am charmed by the idea that when you step beneath a rose, you enter a private, safe space—not unlike stepping beneath the mistletoe. Indeed, saying the words sub rosa, my mouth almost forms a kiss.

Read the full, short piece.

Apart from the interesting origins of sub rosa, this piece is fine prose. Victoria also refers us to a veritable treasure of favourite words. I’m adding it to my blogroll.

Tags: Language, My Favourite Word, New Yorker, Words

Seawaves never recede, they deceive
By their seductive lull, they shift
And swim a far retreat to recoup their liquid dock and
On unpredicted idyllic noontide or yawning night,
Spurt forth from the center of unfrozen oblivion
And lash the shores repeatedly with liquid whippings like
Buried memories of unavenged affronts,
Of separated friendships forgotten–
The lesson with each recession,
To remind to never forget.

Tags: Original Poetry, Poem, Poetry, Writing