herebenotions

A googol sized up yours

This post by Google - remember the TM - is the most arrogant, stupid, pointless post I think I've seen online in a good while.  They just could not have misjudged the tone they used any more.

The best way to protect your brand is by doing the stuff you do well; great functionality, a good range of aps and innovation.  Not by some patronising crap telling me how to speak and what to write.

The post asks us to think about how we use our words, so the logical step seems to be think about actions too.  So, out goes the Goo-spy-le toolbar, just changing my homepage from GoogleTM to Yahoo, dropped the googleblog from my blogroll.  Don't think I can live without G-maps, but everything else has just as good alternatives out there - until about 5 minutes ago I used to like GoogleTM so much I didn't want to use anything else - but now I will. 

This post says pretty much everything I'd want to say, and as frankly I'm too pissed off to want to spend any more time on this I'll leave you with it.

Annoying things online

I was going to talk about a new thing the OED are offering, a look-up service for words (by paid for text).  But if you go to the webpage it’s on that horrible setting that overrides the back function in your browser so you can never leave.  So I’m going to talk about that instead.

It’s so supremely arrogant of a brand to think their content is so fascinating you never want to go back to where you were before. Nike are another brand with a webiste that does this. Hate it. Why do they think the place I was at last is somewhere I'm not going to want to go back to?  Result: site boycotted by me anway.

Another thing that's got me annoyed today is brands who use pop-ups that walk accross your page and get in the way of you reading what you actually want to.  There was a very annoying campaign by Channel 4 a while ago for a documentary that actually looked quite good - but the online ad insisted on expanding every 2 seconds, with no way to turn it off that I could find.  So I didn't watch the show. I'm all for interesting online advertising - but please let me opt in and activate it myself by rolling over it - like this cute one for ITV or this one for Thames Water, both by *play.

Photo by nyssajbrown @ flickr