Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Sweet smell of success for Old Spice, the two-second love affair and the end of the road for the oldest PC games magazine.
• It's not often that Tech Brief feels particularly fragrant but the web is buzzing today over an ad campaign launched by traditional men's aftershave Old Spice.
Former American football player is appearing in voicing personal replies to tweets sent in the direction of - , and founder Kevin Rose are among those to have received a video answer to their tweets.
A rather breathless :
"It's still early in the year, but I think we might have 'the social media campaign' of 2010. Managing to bridge their ATL activity with one-to-one responses via social media is brilliant, but the fact that the responses are so consistently funny puts this over the top."
• Take That once sang that it only takes a minute to fall in love... unless you're a marketing e-mail in which case you have about two seconds, according to e-mail analyst firm Litmus.
blogged about his findings, based on a trail of four million opened messages, where 51% were deleted within two seconds of being opened. He said:
"In the best email campaigns, 77% of people fully read the message - On average, 0.12% of readers printed the email - In one campaign (a coupon), 4% of people printed the message - On average, 0.63% of readers forwarded the email - In the most viral campaign, 9% of readers forwarded the email"
• to , launched in 1993, which is set to close after the next issue is published on 2 September:
"Farewell, then, to the UK's first PC games mag. Trails were blazed. It Was Important. And now it's gone."
• that the web giant will fund 15 research projects totalling almost $1m into the analysis of digitized texts:
"Shouldn't we be able to characterize Victorian society by quantifying shifts in vocabulary--not just of a few leading writers, but of every book written during the era? Shouldn't it be easy to locate electronic copies of the English and Latin editions of Hobbes' Leviathan, compare them and annotate the differences? Shouldn't a Spanish reader be able to locate every Spanish translation of "The Iliad"? Shouldn't there be an electronic dictionary and grammar for the Yao language? We think so."
•Craig Newmark, founder of social network Craigslist, is campaigning in Washington for a more open US government, . The Obama administration could learn a lot from the success of Craigslist, suggests the Babbage blog:
"Perhaps Mr Obama could tap Mr Newmark's experience more widely, appointing him as the government's own chief customer-service representative: if federal services were all as cheap, simple and useful as craigslist, that really would be a public-sector revolution."
over time have included replica Pope hats, 300 stuffed penguins and a bathroom for rent.
Perhaps not quite the sort of openness the Economist had in mind.
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• Babbage | The Economist | Mr Newmark goes to Washington
