Bb's RealTech

Talk about webloggers being had…

Frank Paynter had a couple of odd posts about Stormhoek, the South African wine made famous by weblogging.

It would seem that Stormhoek was really nothing more than a concept in search of a vineyard in 2003, and now that some level of success has been reached, is scratching the vineyard. Or is that the true story?

According to another story, something calling itself "Stormhoek" in South Africa is trying to raise capital, by again depending on social media. This time, instead of hosting a dinner with free booze, the folks are asking people to buy a vine:

First, buy a vine. Then ride on the coat tails of Stormhoek's powerful marketing campaign: blog about your purchase, send out a press release, tell your existing customer base about it. You will be aligning yourself with a feel-good story, that has a proven viral marketing value, and at the same time you will be doing some very, very good for the local wine industry.

But who is the real Stormhoek? And how powerful is that "viral marketing value" if the prime instigator behind the campaign is in Texas, snacking on Bar-B-Que, lecturing on marketing on a trip sponsored by the people who seemingly own the Stormhoek name, but not a drop of the grape?

From Grape Wine News:

The Stormhoek website is handling the situation with what one must assume is panache, and a continuation of its mastery of internet communication, by almost ignoring the financial collapse of the brand's owners. It’s blog format has brief, downplaying coverage, wedged between rather longer entries on a marketing guru and a cartoonist. ‘While the issues are being sorted in the UK’, it says with rather splendid airiness, ‘back at the vineyard, we are busy thinking about harvest and the more mundane things we need to do to get wines made and in the hands of customers around the world.’

mundane things we need to do to get wines made… Like, having grapes?

Update

According to a UK trade publication, Off License, Hugh Macleod and the two who owned the original company that went bankrupt, Orbital, will be continuing the marketing campaign. There is no mention of the fact that the Stormhoek "name" is no longer associated with any actual vineyard. Or at least the new owner of Orbital's assets, Origin's Stormhoek is not associated with any vineyard.

One must be excused for displaying a sour face when hearing about the "success" of the Stormhoek marketing effort, after trying to wade through the mess that is Stormhoek. However, I won't make a comment on the lack of transparency associated with this issue, because I've been reliably informed that the players associated with Stormhoek never promised transparency. It was another Web 2.0 pundit who promised transparency. The Stormhoek Web 2.0 pundit promised something that isn't as interesting.

I frequently get my Web 2.0 pundits mixed up. It's a failing of mine.

In the meantime, may I suggest a local wine? It's not as chi-chi clever, but at least you know you're paying for the grape, not the meme.

Second Update

An older article on the origins of Stormhoek confuses the issue of what is "Stormhoek" even more. Money quote:

Deal with it quickly and diffuse the situation politely. After a while the trolls will get bored and go home.

Wired.com:

At least one heckler thought the backlash was because of Lacy's gender instead of her questions. MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier, who twittered a few swipes against Lacy during the talk, told Wired.com after the keynote that Lacy's gender might have been behind the reaction of the geeky masses.

"I think there's some degree of sexism," he said. "Because she's a chick, her ingratiating nature is taken as ass-kissing. If it were some guy at Forbes asking the same questions in the same manner, we just would have thought he was drawing Mark out."

I found it interesting that few people commented on the fact that Zuckerberg is an uninteresting, colorless individual, who has been variously accused of stealing code and spying on his clients, and in this case, tossed the interviewer to the wolves rather than suck up to his own responsibility. Seriously, would the audience have been more comfortable if Lackey had balls, and scratched them during the talk?

Ohmigod, she twirled her hair during the talk! She's flirting with Zuckerberg! Here's a clue for you guys: women with curly hair often twirl it when they talk. It's not a mating move.

I watched the video and did not think Lacey was "bad". I didn't think anything about it was "good", either. This was obvious a canned interview situation, probably vetted by the Facebook PR people to make sure Zuckerberg doesn't say anything outside of the box.

If there's a failure anywhere, it was this type of situation being staged as a "keynote". Fake interviews to make the "interviewee" seem more personable, one of us, lack honesty, whether they're deemed successful or not. Did people really expect this to be a true interview? I guess there is one born every minute.

All in all, everything I've heard about SxSW this year tells us this party is over. Oh, and if women are going to interview demi-gods like Zuckerberg, they better be butch while they're on stage.

I was a double major in university, psychology and computer science. Double majors weren't all that unusual, except that most doubles were in fields that had some class overlap, such as computer science and math. The only overlap I had in my two fields were statistics courses. I could take undergraduate and graduate level statistics classes in the psych department to meet a portion of my computer science math requirements.

There were only two of us signed up for graduate level statistics class, so the professor had us meet in his office. The statistics were so complicated, we had to use computers and software created in the days before "usability" was a criteria for all of our course work. I've since managed to forget most of my statistics training except for one valuable lesson: don't trust statistics. If you're determined, you can manipulate statistics to prove any point, regardless of how extreme.

A case in point is a New York Times op piece by two gentlemen, Michael Cox and Richard Alm, from the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. According to their statistics, there really aren't two separate classes, rich and poor, in this country. In fact, the poor live a comparable lifestyle to the rich.

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society […] if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.

The data the authors use to perform their statistics is based on the fact that though rich people invest or bank their extra income, while poor families "magically" live beyond their means, they all "consume equally" and therefore are more equal than not.

Of course, Cox and Alm gloss over the fact that most poor people are overridden in debt, barely keeping ahead of bankruptcy in order to indulge in frivolous expenditures like medical treatment.

No, Aunt Sally has a 19 inch color TV in her mobile home while Aunt May has a 60 inch top of the line plasma TV in her pad overlooking Central Park, so there really is no difference between the two.

It’s true that the share of national income going to the richest 20 percent of households rose from 43.6 percent in 1975 to 49.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data. Meanwhile, families in the lowest fifth saw their piece of the pie fall from 4.3 percent to 3.3 percent.

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards.

Speechless. I'm just…speechless…

update More from Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, especially in regards to flawed sampling forming the basis for the pretty charts.

update 2 Excellent commentary from The Big Picture, who focuses only on exposing the flaws in the statistics applied (because there's not enough time to expose all the other flaws in the writing).