I Think I’m Turning Swissonese…

… I think I’m turning Swissonese, I really think so.

There must be something about the Swiss. Brands, it seems, want to be Swiss.

There was a time, I recall, when everybody, it seemed, wanted to the the Patek Philippe of their industry. “We want to be the Patek Philippe of mobile phones” … “of set-top boxes” … of …

You never actually own one

Nowadays it seems to be Davos. I just got an email inviting me to the Davos of Twitter conferences. And it’s not the first time lately that conferences have been refererred to as the Davos of __________.

Never Qwit Listening

Just after writing about Coldplay watching the exits to see if they’re playing the right songs,  I came across this cleverly named (and actually clever also) app that serves a similar function. Qwitter (made by some developers called Contrast out of Dublin) sends you an email when somebody “unfollows” you on Twitter — and also sends you your most recent Twitter update before they’d headed out the exit for a “hotdog or whatever”. It’s a rough (but better than nothing) way to track the relevance of your content to people.

A screengrab of the Qwitter site

Twittervertising… An Idea

Pushing Twitter

Digital Poetry… The Captioner

The web is filled with subtle little treats. Poems, really.

These poems take many forms… Probably the most dynamic at the moment are SOME OF the words written by people on Twitter. But that’s for another day. These “poems” are the building blocks of the conversations that define a large part of so-called “social media” — they spark conversations, even sometimes repartee.

One form of digital poetry I’m quite taken by is… well I don’t really know what to call it actually. In magazines and newspapers it is practiced by those who write captions for photos. If you read The Economist you’ll know what I mean. Their wry captions are ironic… funny.

A customer recently introduced me to somebody who, I am discovering, is a clever captioner of his own photos. And it makes for fun reading. His name is Martin Varsavsky and, in addition to being a tremendously successful entrepreneur, is a witty guy.

He is a regular user of Twitxr — it’s actually one of his companies. Twitxr (which sounds like it was named by Basques.. in fact, how DOES it sound?) allows people to upload photos they take with their phone and post them with a note or caption.  Here are two of Martin’s recent captions… one is worthy of the best Economist captioners. The second is just, well, quite personal. I like them both a lot.

BTW… Martin is also very good as a longer-form writer. So check out his blog. Here’s the English version.