The Ogilvy Blog Aggregator: Pipes across the world

I was scratching around for something interesting to say when I noticed, in my Google Docs ‘Blog ideas’ document, a passing mention of an interesting Yahoo Pipe I’d seen some time ago. So, I took a closer look – and, in the process, found the guy who’d created it.

It’s called the Ogilvy Blog Aggregator and you can see it here (although if you take a look, be careful, the Yahoo Pipes editing interface seems to have changed so you’ll need Firefox, Opera or IE7 to see it). It looks like it’s taking a load of feeds via Feedburner from other Ogilvy bloggers and mashing them up into one feed.

The reason it stood out for me was the juxtaposition of a PR company’s name – Ogilvy – alongside ‘Blog’ and ‘Aggregator’, especially when a second glance showed it to be using Yahoo Pipes.

“A PR company?” thought I. “Using a Blog Aggregator? In Yahoo Pipes? I must find out more!”

I’ve only cursorily looked into Yahoo Pipes. I created one once but then found that it tended to chuck out the same content on a daily basis, and so decided to move on rather than fix it. The feeds to the right of this page are aggregated using Google Reader, but it would be an interesting project to try and recreate them in Yahoo Pipes too.

What I like about the pipe is the innovative use of the BabelFish translator. If you haven’t used BabelFish before, it first appeared on AltaVista many moons ago and supposedly translated between languages. This it does sufficiently well to understand the gist of some text – here, for example, is a translation of the recent German comment on my Social Media Resource - but sometimes it does get it a bit wrong. To see what I mean try translating this into, say, French, then back into English.

Anyway, Giles’s pipe makes great use of BabelFish to translate content from Italian, Spanish, French and German, and it looks like this:

Isn’t she lovely? And already added to the Social Media Resource. You can see the pipe’s output by subscribing here.

I think the use BabelFish in this manner ties in with a video I recently saw on the HP Corporate TV website. In it, John Battelle hosts a discussion on the impact of Web 2.0 but what really interests me is his preamble. He talks about the move from back-office (data reports), to front-office (applications), to essentially out-of-office (the web, and back to the company), and how each era had a distinct interface mode: command-line for data; point-and-click for information; and now search for the web (which, I guess, you would class as knowledge in that it feeds information back to source and thereby provides a basis for ‘knowing’ about behaviour rather than inferring it from information). And yet, with all this sophistication, we’re back to using the command line interface for the search.

It’s my hunch that the command line search interface will continue to power the web, but that, instead of people using it, applications will reference it as a layer. So, I used to refer to BabelFish by copying and pasting some text, or referring to a website. But now, Yahoo Pipes is referring to it as a means to translation. In the same way, I’ve already seen how Photosynth uses the search analogy underlying its pictorial composition.

As for the dude who put the pipe together, he’s Giles Rhys-Jones and he’s a director at Ogilvy, London. He runs the Interactive Marketing Trends blog but he’s also pretty much all over the place too. What it must be to have a director so clued-up with this stuff…

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Google Reader now has a search feature

One of my biggest gripes about Google Reader has been fixed: it now has a search feature. It’s that innocuous-looking field at the top of the page with the word ‘Search’ next to it. This makes it much easier to monitor blogs for specific issues.

I noticed this on Thursday, together with some other small changes such as the funky animated ‘Loading’ icon and the ‘1000+’ feature next to the ‘All items’ listing.

Searching was one of the weakest areas of Google Reader. When I show people the application, this is often the first thing they ask about. You can, of course, zero in on content when you subscribe to news searches, but when you want to monitor specific blogs it can become a chore to separate the wheat from the chaff. You could use just use CTRL+F to search on the page, as you would any Internet page, but that was a bit clunky and only worked with the content on that page, not the full items.

Research on this yielded the previous-best solution, the aptly-named Google filter. The new Google Reader feature does exactly the same thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s essentially the same tool but incorporated into the main app.

On using it however I realised that it’s not a filter at all, it’s a search. In other words, it won’t pre-filter content out, it’s up to you to go through all the material and search for what you want after it’s been grabbed. Is this better? Well, I suppose it means you don’t accidentally miss stuff out because it’s been incorrectly filtered, but I think I would prefer a proper filter so I just see what I need without taking that extra step to search.

But let’s hear it for Google. Although very familiar with web-delivered applications – heck, I used to design one – I still find it marvellous when you log on one day and suddenly with no downloads, installs or upgrades, it’s better.

Oh, and yes, I did tell people about it at work but no one listened. In fact the person sitting next to me was looking a bit fed up. I asked why. She said she’d been tasked with monitoring blogs. I asked her how she was doing it. She said she was just visiting each one. And, with that, I packed up and went home.

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Google Reader now has a search feature

One of my biggest gripes about Google Reader has been fixed: it now has a search feature. It’s that innocuous-looking field at the top of the page with the word ‘Search’ next to it. This makes it much easier to monitor blogs for specific issues.

I noticed this on Thursday, together with some other small changes such as the funky animated ‘Loading’ icon and the ‘1000+’ feature next to the ‘All items’ listing.

Searching was one of the weakest areas of Google Reader. When I show people the application, this is often the first thing they ask about. You can, of course, zero in on content when you subscribe to news searches, but when you want to monitor specific blogs it can become a chore to separate the wheat from the chaff. You could use just use CTRL+F to search on the page, as you would any Internet page, but that was a bit clunky and only worked with the content on that page, not the full items.

Research on this yielded the previous-best solution, the aptly-named Google filter. The new Google Reader feature does exactly the same thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s essentially the same tool but incorporated into the main app.

On using it however I realised that it’s not a filter at all, it’s a search. In other words, it won’t pre-filter content out, it’s up to you to go through all the material and search for what you want after it’s been grabbed. Is this better? Well, I suppose it means you don’t accidentally miss stuff out because it’s been incorrectly filtered, but I think I would prefer a proper filter so I just see what I need without taking that extra step to search.

But let’s hear it for Google. Although very familiar with web-delivered applications – heck, I used to design one – I still find it marvellous when you log on one day and suddenly with no downloads, installs or upgrades, it’s better.

Oh, and yes, I did tell people about it at work but no one listened. In fact the person sitting next to me was looking a bit fed up. I asked why. She said she’d been tasked with monitoring blogs. I asked her how she was doing it. She said she was just visiting each one. And, with that, I packed up and went home.

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Similpedia: providing related Wikipedia content

Similpedia is a nice idea. It takes a web page or paragraph of text and cross-references key words in it to Wikipedia entries. In this way you can look up terms or follow the Similpedia suggestions for ‘related content.’

Check out their demo page and you’ll see what they can do. They provide scripts and widgets for WordPress, Firefox and websites generally, as well as an RSS feed which you can see at the bottom right corner of this page. More on that later.

What I didn’t see on their website was functionality for passing a page’s URL to the Similpedia engine. This would be useful for wordpress.com users such as myself who cannot use script. So, I emailed them. And about an hour later, got a reply. The answer is fairly simple, you just pass http://www.similpedia.org/engine?q=[query URL here] to it. So, if I wanted to add a link to the bottom of each post, as I currently do anyway with my ‘BlinkList | Blogmarks | Digg’ etc links (I use a Word file and search/replace a keyword in it with the post URL), I could just add that as a link and off we go.

Almost, but not quite. Here’s one query listing from my recent ‘tecchy’ type post:
http://www.similpedia.org/engine?q=http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/web-20-to-web-30-to-yahoo-pipes-to-pandora-and-back-to-life-10/

As you can see, it lists entries for social networks, blogging and so on. This makes sense.

However, here’s a query on a very different post indeed:
http://www.similpedia.org/engine?q=http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/pr-heaven-and-hell/

… and you get similar results.

How can this be? The posts are totally different. So, let’s see what happens when I copy the text from that last post and paste it into Similpedia:

Pearly gates
The Pearly gates, in Christian mythology, is an informal name for the gateway to Heaven, inspired by the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:21&mdash The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl. The image of the gates in p….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearly_gates

The Wish List
::For other uses of The Wish List , please see The Wish List (disambiguation) The Wish List is a fantasy novel by Eoin Colfer. It chronicles the adventures of Meg Finn, a spirit who has struck a perfect balance between good and evil and as such, is barred from entering ….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wish_List

James Broadwater
Reverend James S. Broadwater was a Republican candidate for U.S. Congress from the southern state of Mississippi. Broadwater is staunchly conservative and an evangelical Christian. He is unabashed in promoting his personal belief that Christianity is the main source of ….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Broadwater

The Farmer’s Curst Wife
The Farmer’s Curst Wife is Child ballad number 278. Synopsis A farmer had a bad woman for his wife, and one day the devil came for her. They reached Hell, and the gates were shut, so she struck him. She made life in hell so bad that the devil brought her back to her hus….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer’s_Curst_Wife

Heaven & Hell (album)
Heaven & Hell was a compilation album released in 1989. It contains songs performed by Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. Tracklisting 1. Bat out of Hell 2. Faster Than the Speed of Night 3. You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth 4. Have You Every Seen the Rain 5. Read ‘Em a….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_&_Hell_(album)

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of William Blake’s prophetic books, a series of texts written in imitation of biblical books of prophecy, but expressing Blake’s own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. Like his other books it was published as pr….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_Heaven_and_Hell

Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames
Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames is a touring evangelistic drama that has been performed worldwide. The tagline on the official website asks, “Where will you be when reality strikes?”. It is based on an evangelical interpretation of the “Gospel”, and presents the message t….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven’s_Gates,_Hell’s_Flames

Morgan Pym
Morgan Pym is a character on the television series The Collector, played by Chris Kramer. Story Morgan Pym was a monk in 1348 who sold his soul to the Devil to save the woman he loved, Katrina, who was dying from the plague. After 10 years The Devil came to take Morgan’….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Pym

Jane (band)
Band history Jane was formed in October 1970 in Hanover, Germany. Line-up * Peter Panka – Lead Vocals, Drums * Charly Maucher – Lead Vocals, Bass * Werner Nadolny – Keyboards, Vocals * Klaus Walz – Guitars, Vocals Discography Vinyl * Together (1972) * Here we are (1973)….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_(band)

LAB (band)
LAB is a gothic rock band from Finland. Their single ‘Beat the Boys’ is featured prominently in the PS2/Xbox/PC game, Flatout. Releases Albums * 3/2000: Porn Beautiful * 3/2002: Devil Is A Girl * 3/2005: Where Heaven Ends Singles * 6/1999: Get Me a Name * 9/1999: ‘Til Y….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAB_(band)

Very different results, and more the kind of thing I would expect to see, although still not perfect. I’m not sure I’d be interested in Morgan Pym after reading the post, less still the band ‘Jane’.

Is this because the URL approach takes the entire page, including my blogrolls to the left and feeds to the right, I wonder? Whereas just copying and pasting the text uses just that text and nothing else? Another email to Similpedia and lo, again I get a response. Turns out I’m right (I occasionally am), and they’re working on making the algorithm a bit ‘cleverer’ to get around this.

But if you use Feedburner you have a workaround. Feedburner just takes the content of my posting and, among other things, creates a straight HTML page without all the other stuff. So, let’s point Similpedia at my Feedburner page and see what happens:
http://www.similpedia.org/engine?q=http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostCopywriter

Something tells me close but no cigar. We’re still getting a lot of tecchy stuff and I daresay this is because of the content that Feedburner places at the top of the page, listing all sorts of quick links to subscribe via different services.

Let’s look at their RSS feed tool. I don’t quite get the point of their RSS demo because it refers to a static page, and surely you’ll always get the same results from it. So let’s give it a page that changes quite often, in my case, my PR feed.

So I  add an RSS widget and point it at:
http://www.similpedia.org/crss?q=http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostPR

You can see the results to the bottom of the right-hand column on this page, under ‘Related content’. They’re different, you have to admit, but I’m still not totally convinced they’re useful (which is why the widget is at the bottom, so that I can test it for a while).

So, what next? Until Similpedia develop a ‘clever’ way to strip the non-specific content from a page, we’re left with the method that works but is manual – copying the text and pasting it into Similpedia. I’ve created a Word macro that takes the Similpedia results and converts them to straight HTML but this is a workaround and not, I would say, an ideal one.

Still, it’s a nice idea, very like the online report I recently profiled which cross-referenced Google hits with Wikipedia and other source entries. If you can use scripts or widgets then you’re laughing. Ha ha.

I get the feeling they’re still developing it so let’s watch it with interest. Perhaps they’ll tweak the search engine to weed out the slightly odd results that can crop up, and zero in more on the specific content than the stuff around it. I would also like to see a quick and easy way to point people towards ‘copy and paste the text’ query results such as the one listed above.

Meanwhile they deserve a big round of applause for taking the time to answer my queries because that makes me a fan, and perhaps that’s our small ‘PR learning’ for the day (above and beyond the main PR reason for posting this, which is that I tend to find a lot of execs spend time looking for stuff and I try to help them by providing cool tools I come across but they very seldom seem to want to benefit from this).

Looking forwards, Similpedia have a teaser on their site promising news and blog services coming soon, and I can’t wait to see what that’s all about.

EDIT: I just realised, how about pointing my Google Reader feed directly at Similpedia instead? This doesn’t have all the added content at the top which the Feedburner page has. Also, why do I have to point a page? Why not a feed? Surely a feed would work better? Tried it, but get virtually identical results. So, how about pointing it at the public Google Reader page for that feed? At last! We start getting related content. But is it useful? At the time of writing it’s giving me lots of lookups for ‘Johnson’, presumably based on a ‘Johnson And Johnson Suit Against The Red Cross‘ story. Hmmm. ‘Johnson’ may have resonance for The Big Lebowski lovers but I’m not so sure…

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Web 2.0, to Web 3.0, to Yahoo Pipes, to Pandora, and back to Life 1.0

This weekend I managed to set aside some space to look into three areas in more depth: Web 2.0/3.0, Yahoo Pipes, and Pandora. It should come as no surprise that all three are linked and provide massive, oooh-hate-that-word-but-must-use-it, leverage (yuk) for PR.

First, the web. My feeds have thrown up several interesting posts over the past week, which I have shared, on the subject of web 2.0 and its soon-to-emerge successor, web 3.0:

• Micropersuasion argues that even though Web 2.0 appears to be in the hands of a few players – Google, Yahoo, IAC, etc - it’s far from a monopoly in this era and nothing to be concerned about.
• New Media in the Land of Manana showcases a fascinating video in which Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) gives us his thoughts on how a Web 3.0 movement might further alter the online universe. His view is that the future of media is in content aggregation and community, and will be built using these types of viral applications.
• Rough Type offers a brilliant discourse on different ideas of what Web 3.0 – and beyond – could be. The Googleplex approach could be ‘Web 3.0: web as universal computing grid replacing PC operating system and hard drive’, while the semantic approach is ‘Web 3.0: web as machines talking to machines’. His consolidation of both viewpoints is: ‘Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.’ He concludes: ‘Stick that in your Yahoo Pipe and smoke it.’

It was the last comment that made me sit up and take notice because Yahoo Pipes was going to be one of my projects this weekend. To take the ISO model, I’ve always believed Web 2.0 is the online delivery of the application layer, and it strikes me that Yahoo Pipes perfectly encapsulates the ideal of people being able to build their own online apps in the Web 3.0 environment.

So, let’s look more closely at Yahoo Pipes, which I came across when looking into feed filtering recently. This enables you to create your own feeds, and how. Not just merging but filtering too, and taking the output from one feed and mapping it to another. So for example a simple pipe could bring together several disparate feeds, filter in/out, and produce an output that you can in turn subscribe to. More complex examples can take news items and attach Flickr images to them: a photo editor’s dream. I have a strong suspicion the Google Report I recently came across could be built using similar technology.

So Yahoo Pipes offers a way to zero in one the web-as-personalisation and web-as-machine-communication. So might Pandora, the online radio service. It takes the results of the Music Genome Project, in which the musical characteristics such as pitch, harmony and rhythm of thousands of tracks have been analysed to provide a ‘DNA’ for a track. This means you can specify an artist – say, Flaming Lips if you have any taste – and Pandora will come up with ’similar’ music. You can give tracks the thumbs up or down if you like or dislike them – very Digg-like – and you end up with your own station, essentially by matching your own DNA to that of music. The results are astonishing.

Now, this is where it all comes together. I see Pandora as a serious exercise in tagging: adding extremely sophisticated meta-data to characterise content. Now, I know there are bazillions of people tagging content in a massive exercise in Folksonomy right now, but wouldn’t it be great if somehow online documents could be automatically tagged to a similar degree of sophistication? Not just sentimenting, but semanticising (is that a word?). This would be the blueprint for a cool search engine which I’ve discussed previously. 

So, get this. Imagine you could take feeds and do the same with them – thumb up or down and increase the useful hits from them. Slowly, a ‘DNA’ profile of the news you’re interested in is built up and matched to the DNA of items floating around. You could then link or subscribe to other sources with similar profiles – other blogs, forums, groups, wikis. It would be an incredible vertical search engine, and if you could then route that through Yahoo Pipes for extra tweaking, and you’ve got yourself a great news engine. Surely this is exactly what a PR practitioner needs? In fact, there seem to be pipes that already do this and I’m busily setting some up for myself right now.

But where’s the serendipity? How do you come across great ideas out of the blue? Well, Pandora for one is offering me entire new areas of related music to find out about, so it would work the same with other content types. And don’t forget, for PR, you could always read the newspapers in the traditional fashion or even just surf the web (remember that?).

There you go: from Web 2.0, to Web 3.0, to Yahoo Pipes, to Pandora, and back to Life 1.0. Don’t ask me about Life 2.0. I may be a ghost but I’m not quite there yet.

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Another thing Google haven’t thought of yet – filtering

One of the first things I’m often asked when I show people Google Reader is: can it filter? It’s a very valid point and further enquiries reveal that a lot of people want this too.

You can perform searches that effectively filter for news. Just go to Google News, Yahoo News, Google Blog Search or a blog platform’s keyword search – for example WordPress’s own feature – type in your search terms, and subscribe to the resulting feed.

This is seriously powerful but just filters like any news filter, that is, across many sources. It would be great if you could filter an individual source – a feed or a blog – for specific items, whether to allow individual items in or keep unwanted ones out. For example, if you subscribed to Friendly Ghost you might only want items which mention Google Reader, or if you’re sensible, not display items from this blog tagged ‘humour’.

One quick workaround is to use the standard search feature for any web page – by which I mean Edit/Find in Internet Explorer or CTRL-F (I used to use Firefox but I can’t remember what the search is on that browser). Simply type in your term, and you can scan whatever Google Reader is displaying for that term. This only works for headlines in List View or headline plus preview text in Expanded view, however, and only what Google Reader is currently showing.

So, enter the Google Reader filter. As with the Google Report I recently came across, this is another smart utility that Google could – and should – have thought of (they probably are thinking about it right now, this instant). The Google Reader filter searches a feed for a given term so, for example, if you wanted to know how many features mention the word ‘power’ in my PR Feed, simply type http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostPR into the feed field and power as the search term, and hit the filter button (see graphic above).

It’s not lightning-fast and it seems to stop at 500 items (which could be the feed limitation) but it does the job. If only Google could bolt something like this onto Google Reader, even as an interim solution to true filtering.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with feeds from news searches. For example I just tried doing a Google News search for PR, taking that feed URL and filtering it for something that appeared in the results of the search, and it didn’t find anything, nor does this work for an equivalent Yahoo News search. I’m probably missing something obvious here but I would class them both as feeds which should be searchable.

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It’s not tech, and it’s not magic, it’s your job.

Why is it that people stubbornly refuse to adopt new technologies even when they’re tailor-made for the work they do? I’m talking RSS and Google Reader here.

I have, in my mind’s eye, a sketch, and it goes a bit like this:

PR: “Hi.”
Tech: “Hi.”
PR: “I’d like you to develop some software for me please.”
Tech: “Sure, what do you want it to do?”
PR: “I want it to tell me when there’s news for a specific topic.”
Tech: “OK. Anything else?”
PR: “I want it not only to look at news, but blogs. There’s a lot of blogs out there and I want it to cover them.”
Tech (scratches chin): “OK. Anything else?”
PR: “I want it to be accessible from anywhere in the world.”
[pause]
“And I want it to be free.”
Tech: “Free?”
PR: “Yes, please. Free. I don’t want to pay for it.”
Tech: “I take it you want it to be easy to use as well.”
PR: “Naturally. I work in PR.”
Tech: “I see your point. So, to recap, you want something that grabs news for you, including blog conversations, that is freely accessible, and easy to use. Have you ever considered Google Reader?”

And so the conversation goes. This is fine in theory but the end of the sketch would be something like:

[several days later]
Tech: “Hi.”
PR: “Hi.”
Tech: “So, how are you getting along with that software that is tailor-made for your requirements, is free, and is easy to use?”
PR: “I don’t use it.”

This is something I go through often. Around Christmas time last year I made a list of things to find out about, and Google Reader and RSS was one of them. Within minutes I was up and running and within an hour it had transformed a large part of what I do at work and at home. To me, it seemed very easy and intuitive and obviously useful.

But the people I work with just don’t get it. Despite blogging specifically and social media generally being one of the most important developments in PR in recent years, I still have directors who say “Oh, I don’t read blogs” or “What’s Google Reader?” So I explain to the first that of course you don’t read blogs by visiting them every day, you use RSS and a reader (for ‘reader’ I may interchange Google Reader simply because that’s the one I use); and to the second, I explain how to set it up and what RSS is all about. On the outside I’m very helpful and approachable, but on the inside I’m usually pretty angry that I have to be telling people this stuff.

It’s the same with clients. I’ve been to clients to present this to them, and I use Google Reader to provide them with a page of the very latest online news for them to use. But they don’t.

I’ve even taken groups of people through it. I actually show them how to access the reader, how to subscribe, how to use nifty techniques such as subscribing to Google News and Yahoo News, or using Google Blog Search, or WordPress tag searches. I explain how tags work and how you can have feeds from them so you can set up a complete news syndication network delivering news direct to clients. But a week or so later, they’ve all stopped using it.

Other people look mystified. They ask how I know this stuff. I just tell them I spent an hour learning about it. And when I had learned about it, despite having only worked in PR for a very short time, I could see straight away how important it was for PR. Not because it’s tech, but because it’s PR.

I’d be interested to know if other people have the same issues. I don’t class myself as particularly forward-looking or visionary, but by the same token I hate having to class a large proportion of my contemporaries as blinkered.

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Surely I’m not the only person to realise Google Reader has been broken?

So over the weekend I tried to change some settings. I couldn’t. Or rather, I could, but only if I clicked the tiny quarter-screen frame that seemed to have been allocated for all the settings pages, and scrolled up and down to see the full page.

I’m not the only person with this problem. I’ve since tested with several other people’s machines and they all have the problem too.

I reported it to the Google Reader forum and the engineer claimed to know nothing about it. And still nothing has been done about it.

I will bet a large amount of Lindens that, in implementing the Offline feature, someone, somewhere has broken the Settings frameset. But the really weird thing is that I cannot find anyone else reporting the problem.

Am I really totally alone?

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Surely I’m not the only person to realise Google Reader has been broken?

So over the weekend I tried to change some settings. I couldn’t. Or rather, I could, but only if I clicked the tiny quarter-screen frame that seemed to have been allocated for all the settings pages, and scrolled up and down to see the full page.

I’m not the only person with this problem. I’ve since tested with several other people’s machines and they all have the problem too.

I reported it to the Google Reader forum and the engineer claimed to know nothing about it. And still nothing has been done about it.

I will bet a large amount of Lindens that, in implementing the Offline feature, someone, somewhere has broken the Settings frameset. But the really weird thing is that I cannot find anyone else reporting the problem.

Am I really totally alone?

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Sometimes it’s better just to laugh

Today, no clever postings about the finer points of grammar or etymology. No long ramblings about RSS feeds. Today, just two vaguely copywritery, bloggy-related items that made me laugh:

• From my copywriting feed, the dictionary.com word of the day is chortle: to utter, or express with, a snorting, exultant laugh or chuckle. What a fantastic, forgotten word. I must use it sometime. Do people still chortle in this age of satire and scepticism? Perhaps chance favours the prepared mind. I’m going to try and catch someone chortling. Didn’t Jasper Carrott introduce the word ‘zit’ to the English language? I’m going to create my own word. Something to express the sound you make when you sigh so loudly it creates a moaning noise of resignation. How about ‘to mognate’?
• From my PR feed comes, bizarrely, this posting: Everybody’s wearing my pants. I can’t explain it, you’ll have to take a look for yourselves readers (all three of you). Some people have far too much time on their hands. And yet, I find this ingeniously viral. Pants: everybody has a vested interest in them. Pants around the world.

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