technogoggles

Happy New Year... from the Republic of Hout Bay.

Mail order

mail order, originally uploaded by JamesB.

My uncle has been selling cloth by mail order catalogue now for over thirty years.  the operation is a might slimmer now that it was all that time ago, as is he.

He's retiring soon.   For those thirty plus years though he's managed to sell cloth by text alone.  Text.  No images.  I tell a lie, they produced a glossy brochure back in the halcyon days on the mid 80s.  It bombed.  There is something in his rather 'lateral' descriptions that people like.  He gives you the gist of what it is but doesn't quite tell you.  It's a bit of a game and people like playing, not loads, but enough to pay a wage.  I'm sad to think it won't be around for much longer. There aren't even that many archive copies to well, archive and keep for posterity and perhaps even repackage as a nod to a more fun yet innocent and certainly quirkier bygone business age [remember The Gaffer?]. 

He has a lot of fans does Uncle Alan, most of his customers buy because of him or rather their perception of him; they send him 'fan mail' disguised as orders.  He also pisses a lot of people off.  He can be pretty direct in his humour [I dare not show you the front cover of the recent catalogue].  No political correctness here which is quite refreshing in an age when everything seems so anodyne, watered down to offend no-one but please no-one either.  A friend of mine who works in advertising said it was the best bit of copy-writing she'd ever seen.  I think I agree.  Just thought I'd share that with you.

Not here, over there...

I'm mostly living at Stickrattling which was meant to be a place to post the odd ditty about advertising and planning type stuff but has become well, a home of sorts.   In particular my attempt at Russell Davies' Planning School of the Web exercise 7 set by the uber smart Grant McCracken has been fun, that and engaging with some of The John Grant's stuff which is proper head food.  Anyway, don't all dash at once otherwise the whole web-o-world would collapse.  Technogoggles still has a role, serving up kiddy pics and family banality with the odd blindingly brilliant bit if insight ;-)

And, while you're still reading, I'm still struggling with this joined-up-web business.  Why oh why oh why is it so difficult to create a truly semantic web?  Clever people I used to work with promised me it would happen and it would be the saviour of humanity - some democratising panacea.  FOAF seems to have died on its arse, or at least stayed as niche as it ever was.  Co-comment is a truly partial tool, useful to follow where I've posted but not much else. And to make value from the network from this whole point-at-thing web and the shadows or traces of use [via jones], kind of depends on a simple way to see who is saying what, where.  Otherwise we're all talking at the wall, rather than each other, pointing at things not knowing who or what else is pointing back.  Perhaps that's no bad thing, I mean, we'd have to entertain the notion that no-one else really gives a shit at all. That it's all been for nothing and everyone is down the pub. 

Elliot Elvis Boardwell

Elliot Elvis Boardwell, bn. 15 June 2006

Other Elliots:
Missy Elliot
Elliott Gould
Elliot Ness
Billy Elliot
Elliot Smith
TS Elliot

Good company.

addendum:

Realised I only had 1 day to go before registering the boy [you get 6 weeks] and on a bit of  whim outside the registry office he got Elvis as a middle name.  Woo hoo.