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Seriously. I had to click an X in the top right corner and use Firebug to set "display: none;" for three boxes just to get the distractions out of the way. It's

by drostie 15y ago

Seriously. I had to click an X in the top right corner and use Firebug to set "display: none;" for three boxes just to get the distractions out of the way. It's a site called "KISSmetrics" which cannot "keep it simple stupid" and is telling me about how images can distract people from your articles? One cute statement about their final image example: whenever I have to pay a new web service, there are just an absolutely tremendous number of options for me to be dealing with. In order to narrow down the field to companies who actually care about my time, I have some peculiar general rules: (1) Name must not be concatenated CamelCase words. This still eliminates about 50% of my options, while GitHub is among the only known exceptions where it might be worth paying them for something. (2) No autoplaying flash. This no longer eliminates so many services as it once did, but it should still be standard. (3) SSL is a must. You would seriously be surprised. (4) May not contain clip art of a white woman wearing a headset. It can be an Asian woman, or a white man, or she can be holding a phone, or it could not be clip art (here is our cofounder Olivia...), whatever. This actually seems to further limit the field by over 50%. Web service hosts apparently have really odd stereotypes, or else they expect me to. I give that list here, again, because their last example of ineffective image use is, naturally, clip art of a white woman wearing a headset.

simonbrown 15y ago
What's wrong with CamelCase names?
- eli 15y ago
  Got me. It sort of makes sense since you can't have whitespace in URLs.
- evincarofautumn 15y ago
  Medial capitals have always been around in English, but the use has exploded of late, and a lot of people think it looks silly, as though a word is missing a space or a letter is randomly miscased. It looks alright in personal names because we’re used to it—no one complains about MacDonald, DeLuca, LeBlanc, or O’Shaughnessy. But the phenomenon of medial capitals in company names is really only about 40 years old. There are many well-known examples—YouTube, PayPal, RadioShack, PlayStation, &c., but I think they succeed by sheer volume and dot-com kitsch. The only time it really bothers me is when budding authors are trying to come up with fantasy names. They use (what I lovingly call) Dread Intercapitals alongside Dread Apostrophes and Dread Accents to make names that look like Harâk’Thür—presumably in imitation of Tolkien, who actually knew what he was doing, and had internally consistent language models.
  - aaronbrethorst 15y ago
    The only time it really bothers me is when budding authors are trying to come up with fantasy names. Neal Stephenson has a fairly long, very amusing riff on this in his latest book, Reamde. Well worth the read.
  - KC8ZKF 15y ago
    "RadioShack" was "Radio Shack" from 1921 to 1995.
- drostie 15y ago
  Because there's supposed to be a space there. You can be forgiven perhaps if the things you're concatenating are not words, like ServInt does where Serv Int would look weird, but when you just take words and mash them together, that's not suddenly a brand: that's a typo. I guess the problem is that it just gets dreary. Just to confine myself to web hosts: DreamHost. HostGator. HostMonster. HostOrca. KnownHost. StartLogic. TotalChoice. Go on, try to say NearlyFreeHosting in one breath, no pauses. That's the name of that company. Someone actually named their company "neerlafrihostin." You don't have to go as far as A Small Orange does, where you choose a branding that makes me think of a webcomic. You could just be like Liquid Web and Media Temple -- give me your name with those spaces intact. CamelCase is for programming languages and the occasional wiki -- and it's still ugly in those places too; I just don't see great alternatives there.
talmand 15y ago
What is wrong with a white woman wearing a headset? I believe this says more about you than it says about a company that just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset.
- drostie 15y ago
  I totally agree. Let me explain. What's wrong with it, when it's clip art, is that it's contrived and overly specific in an oddly sexist way. Even worse, it's not explicit in its sexism, but it appears as a statistical pattern -- that is, the gender distribution is not 50/50 but more like 10/90; and the headset-versus-phone distribution is similarly out-of-touch with reality, at least at those offices without a dedicated customer support team; and minorities and Asians are almost completely absent because you might think of that bad word "Outsourcing". The problem is not with whiteness, womanness, headsetness, or clipartness, but the intersection's ubiquity in the face of its unlikelihood. It appears everywhere and the problem is precisely "I just saw that on ten other sites, and I'm willing to bet that this is nothing like the person I'd actually be talking to if I called them up." If you just gave me real people working at your company, rather than clip art, that would already be a great start. But, as I said, I agree. Yes, it says a lot about me that I see such a pattern, interpret it as "someone's trying to manipulate my subconscious" -- even if that wasn't their intent, it somehow hits me that way -- and then refuse to do business with people who I interpret as manipulative bastards. It also says a lot about me that I can't escape that feeling even after I have cogitated it. But I still feel justified, because the companies who grab random images because they haphazardly think "this is what my customer wants to see" are not the sorts that I want to subsidize. I would rather have a company that's so lazy that they don't look for clipart at all, than a company that sets out to find clipart and then gets lazy somewhere midway along and, as you say, "just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset." Laziness is good, but if you're not going to be lazy, be special.
  - itmag 15y ago
    I like having my subconscious manipulated by headset-adorned white women, you insensitive clod! (Serious point: the reason it works is because it works. Ie "sex sells".)

by drostie 15y ago

simonbrown 15y ago

What's wrong with CamelCase names?

eli 15y ago
Got me. It sort of makes sense since you can't have whitespace in URLs.
evincarofautumn 15y ago
Medial capitals have always been around in English, but the use has exploded of late, and a lot of people think it looks silly, as though a word is missing a space or a letter is randomly miscased. It looks alright in personal names because we’re used to it—no one complains about MacDonald, DeLuca, LeBlanc, or O’Shaughnessy. But the phenomenon of medial capitals in company names is really only about 40 years old. There are many well-known examples—YouTube, PayPal, RadioShack, PlayStation, &c., but I think they succeed by sheer volume and dot-com kitsch. The only time it really bothers me is when budding authors are trying to come up with fantasy names. They use (what I lovingly call) Dread Intercapitals alongside Dread Apostrophes and Dread Accents to make names that look like Harâk’Thür—presumably in imitation of Tolkien, who actually knew what he was doing, and had internally consistent language models.
- aaronbrethorst 15y ago
  The only time it really bothers me is when budding authors are trying to come up with fantasy names. Neal Stephenson has a fairly long, very amusing riff on this in his latest book, Reamde. Well worth the read.
- KC8ZKF 15y ago
  "RadioShack" was "Radio Shack" from 1921 to 1995.
drostie 15y ago
Because there's supposed to be a space there. You can be forgiven perhaps if the things you're concatenating are not words, like ServInt does where Serv Int would look weird, but when you just take words and mash them together, that's not suddenly a brand: that's a typo. I guess the problem is that it just gets dreary. Just to confine myself to web hosts: DreamHost. HostGator. HostMonster. HostOrca. KnownHost. StartLogic. TotalChoice. Go on, try to say NearlyFreeHosting in one breath, no pauses. That's the name of that company. Someone actually named their company "neerlafrihostin." You don't have to go as far as A Small Orange does, where you choose a branding that makes me think of a webcomic. You could just be like Liquid Web and Media Temple -- give me your name with those spaces intact. CamelCase is for programming languages and the occasional wiki -- and it's still ugly in those places too; I just don't see great alternatives there.

talmand 15y ago

What is wrong with a white woman wearing a headset? I believe this says more about you than it says about a company that just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset.

drostie 15y ago
I totally agree. Let me explain. What's wrong with it, when it's clip art, is that it's contrived and overly specific in an oddly sexist way. Even worse, it's not explicit in its sexism, but it appears as a statistical pattern -- that is, the gender distribution is not 50/50 but more like 10/90; and the headset-versus-phone distribution is similarly out-of-touch with reality, at least at those offices without a dedicated customer support team; and minorities and Asians are almost completely absent because you might think of that bad word "Outsourcing". The problem is not with whiteness, womanness, headsetness, or clipartness, but the intersection's ubiquity in the face of its unlikelihood. It appears everywhere and the problem is precisely "I just saw that on ten other sites, and I'm willing to bet that this is nothing like the person I'd actually be talking to if I called them up." If you just gave me real people working at your company, rather than clip art, that would already be a great start. But, as I said, I agree. Yes, it says a lot about me that I see such a pattern, interpret it as "someone's trying to manipulate my subconscious" -- even if that wasn't their intent, it somehow hits me that way -- and then refuse to do business with people who I interpret as manipulative bastards. It also says a lot about me that I can't escape that feeling even after I have cogitated it. But I still feel justified, because the companies who grab random images because they haphazardly think "this is what my customer wants to see" are not the sorts that I want to subsidize. I would rather have a company that's so lazy that they don't look for clipart at all, than a company that sets out to find clipart and then gets lazy somewhere midway along and, as you say, "just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset." Laziness is good, but if you're not going to be lazy, be special.
- itmag 15y ago
  I like having my subconscious manipulated by headset-adorned white women, you insensitive clod! (Serious point: the reason it works is because it works. Ie "sex sells".)