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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
Friends, Bloggers, Countrymen ... lend your ears to these people. I come not to bury them, but praise them.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 15, 2005
Turing Test for Telemarketers
How to deal with the encroaching menace of telemarketers? You can sign up for the do-not-call list, but that doesn't seem to halt their progress. You can hang up on them, but that's not very community-spirited -- they'll just go off and call some other poor sap. No, the thing to do is to suck up as much of their time as possible without actually engaging them on the phone yourself. Friends of Daily Blah have reported instances where they responded to the telemarketer's opening sally with a helpful "just a minute, I'll go get them", then simply leaving the phone off the hook while they go back to whatever they were doing. Which is great for an anecdote, but not too effective in the long run -- you'll tie up the phone line, and they'll get wise within a matter of minutes.
What we all need, dear readers, is the Telecrapper 2000 Telemarketer Interception System. You connect your PC to your phone, tell this ingenious piece of free software which Caller ID numbers to intercept, and the Telecrapper engages them with random snippets of conversation whenever it detects silence on the other end. (Here are some great examples.) The telemarketer, who doesn't realize he's the subject of a reverse Turing Test, is baffled, but presses gamely on -- after all, crazy people are more likely to make random spur-of-the-moment purchases.
Just think -- if enough of us set up the Telecrapper, we could shut down the entire telemarketing industry. It simply wouldn't be worth the wasted man-hours, or the cost of hiring phone drones smart enough to figure out when they were talking to a machine.
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