The dreaming was about what one could do with a $100 camera-phone.  A few ideas came to mind.  For those checking venues for events, it would be easy to pop the phone into one's pocket or pocketbook to get pictures of a site.  The views could be phoned back to those selecting where to go and those preparing equipment.  There is no more need for elaborate and sometimes inaccurate descriptions or for delays until site scouts return. 

That was an interesting, but how could an inexpensive camera-phone be used in publicity?  What about a scavenger hunt in which contestants phone in pictures of what they find and the first to phone in all assignments wins?  It might be cool to promote a park, for example. Visualize a Central Park scavenger hunt in which contestants find flora and fauna and send finds to a central point -- a great way to promote the park and teach about nature?  Maybe.  Or what about letting parents and children loose in a large museum with a mission to find and photograph objects to demonstrate what the museum has and to make learning fun? 

What about quick pictures of products or booths or whatever at a trade show?  One could snap photos of the competition and phone them into bosses without leaving the floor. 

The limit of such a tool is one's imagination.  The advertisements for camera phones on TV are mostly for nonessential "fun" purposes.  I don't think people will use them for that in the end.  They want a tool.

But at $100, it's worth experimenting.
 

04/24

This got me to thinking.  How many meetings are necessary?  I think the answer to this question is few.  The more meetings, the less productive an office tends to be. 

I am not against meetings.  I am against gatherings that last too long and don't get to the point.   We normally have unscheduled brief meetings throughout a day to tackle problems we are working on.  They're productive because they move a project forward.  Of the meetings we held yesterday, it would have been easy to cut down the total time by two hours -- with a little expeditious talking and planning.  What we had instead was rambling conversation that covered the same ground several times and decided little.

There is need for coordination in communications because too often there are conflicting messages and efforts working at cross-purposes.  The challenge is how to coordinate without extensive and debilitating meetings.   I do know, in spite of my complaint, that meetings in the U.S. are few by comparison to other cultures where managers sit around a conference table for hours and pick things to death comma by comma.   American managers who have suffered through such meetings say they are difficult to endure.  I suppose I should I should be happy about my status by comparison, but I'm not.

Maybe today we won't have even one meeting.  That would be good.
 

04/23

Neither side will budge, so they wait while the money flows out of the treasury in normal payroll and expenses.  The word is that the state may start issuing IOUs to vendors in order to maintain services -- something vendors are complaining about already.  Of course the public is disgusted and wants to throw them all out of office, but on the other hand, the public is conflicted as well.  It's a case of "Don't raise my taxes and if you cut programs, cut his and not mine." 

Some think California has gone into the realm of magic thinking -- the hope that if the state waits long enough, a miracle will happen and it will all go away.  This same magic thinking seems to have plagued Japan for the last 13 years.  Japan is still in deep trouble and California is not getting out of its predicament either.

Both California and Japan lack the will to act.  This is where the persuasiveness of leadership and cooperation are essential to work through a nasty situation to a resolution.   But anyone who dares to act jeopardizes his or her career by going against the grain.  It's a time for heroism, but it seems heroes are in short supply. 

There is not much communicators can do in situations like this except to pressure all sides and hope for a crack to open somewhere.  I would think Californians and the Japanese would storm the halls of their governments and demand action.  In Japan, something like this happened with the election of the prime minister two years ago, but little visible has happened since.  In California, everyone is still waiting. 

Maybe there is a reason why it is called La-La Land.
 

04/22

The Minister is proposing fines for those who violate the law in Australia but no penalties for anyone outside of Australia who sends spam into the country.  The Minister concluded it will take an international treaty to stop spam from crossing borders. 

The Minister is right about the need for an international treaty and that is the reason why his proposed legislation will not stop much spam in Australia.  People will move offshore as they have done already.  It was in Australia a few years ago that the government shut down a local porn site so the site shifted its material to a US server with a local link for Australia.  There was little the government could do.  The same will happen for spam, especially spam with a high potential for payoff -- like porn. 

A colleague and I dealt with these issues several years ago while working with a law firm that protects intellectual property.  We concluded then there was nothing to stop music pirates from moving servers to countries that do not recognize international law.  That is what happened too.  The same is true for spam. 

On the other hand, if spam could be contained in certain countries and within certain IP number ranges, it can be blocked  -- that is, until spammers find a way around it.

I'm not sure what penalties will work with spam.  They would have to be steep to stop spammers from incurring them as a cost of doing business.  My hope is that some spam will stop if legislation passes in one country after another.  I do not expect all spam will cease, but it would be nice to open my mailbox on Monday morning and not find 190 messages waiting of which 90 percent are spam.
 

4/21

The idea behind time-of-day pricing is that if you want to travel during high traffic hours, you have to pay for the privilege.  This is a way of encouraging people to travel at different hours or to avoid an area completely.   It would be nice to see something like this in Manhattan, which is why the New York Times ran the article.

That started me to thinking because over Easter Weekend, I took a trip from Hell to visit relatives living in Virginia.  One of the largest highway systems in the world was a parking lot for hundreds of miles.  It started Thursday evening and continued through midday Friday.  The traffic on the roads around Washington, D.C. was not to be believed.   For some reason, the Washington area, with hundreds of miles of excellent highways is still behind the curve in handling traffic -- even with a mass transit system serving the town.

Time-of-day pricing points to the limits of persuasive communication.  Telling people to avoid rush hours is not enough:  They won't do it.  You have to penalize them, and they will think about it.  Where self-interest is too strong, persuasive communication breaks down.  For some reason, when it comes to personal transportation and autos, cooperation goes out the window and "personal rights" enter.   Penalize the other guy for jamming the highways and streets, but don't penalize me.   Even metering systems that are in use in places like California don't work well in cutting down traffic.  These are stop signals at on-ramps that tell drivers when they can get on the highway.   All they do is try to regulate the flow of cars and trucks but they don't discourage them from entering the freeway at the same hour. 

PR practitioners should know the limits of their craft, and traffic control is one such instance where it fails.  Of course, you are probably asking why I  was on the road when I know better.  It's a long story.