Paul Jacobson

I’m not sure if this is clever marketing or going just a little too far but there is apparently a perfume an apparently erotic scent called “Vulva” which is being marketed through a very NSFW website at the url www.smellmeand.com (look at that carefully).

As for the actual product, let’s just say it brings new meaning to the term “scent of a woman“, so much so that I wonder if this isn’t a hoax of some kind (and if it isn’t then this is definitely reminiscent of the “olive” thread on Tertia’s blog recently). The idea seems to be to carry this small vial of this scent around with you and dab a little on the back of your hand whenever you have the urge to take in the scent of a woman. The ad portrays a seemingly sophisticated man using this stuff but I have to wonder about the market for this product. I am sure there is one but this is not exactly the kind of scent you dab behind your ears on a first date (although, different strokes …).

The way this product is marketed is pretty in-your-face and the intention is clearly to use erotica/sex/soft porn to sell the perfume scent. It you take a look at the meta tags in the site’s code you will find just about every sought after sex-related search term on the Web:

Not only are there provocative images on the landing page but there is a gallery of even more images, a couple desktop backgrounds you can download and add to your desktop (definitely not for your work computer though!) and a short video in case you prefer your media to be moving.

All in all, an interesting one.

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vulva, perfume, sex sells, marketing, sex advertising, sex keywords, images, video

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Scoble has asked a question that has been in the back of my mind for a little while now:“What do you think about Facebook? Has the patina worn off for you?”

I have found that my visits to Facebook have grown less and less frequent, mainly because the time has reduced to such a point that I barely have time to update my own social spaces, never mind monitor other people’s updates. What I also find myself doing is spending more time on Plaxo’s Pulse which is starting to mimic some of Facebook’s functionality.

Facebook is a great social service and I think my wife has Facebook open just about all day. I have over 300 friends on Facebook but I just don’t have time to track what everyone is doing over and above the myriad applications people are using and inviting me to use. It can get a bit much sometimes. It also doesn’t help that I prefer using services like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter for photo and video sharing and status updates. Pulse recently added Twitter/Pulse status update synching which is really handy (although Pulse’s updates use the old “Paul is …” format and although you can delete the “is”, you have to think carefully about what you post so it comes out right in Twitter).

In a way it is a bit silly to not take advantage of the community of friends I have on Facebook but the service doesn’t excite me as much anymore, especially when I hear that Facebook cans people’s accounts for getting too chatting with their friends or whacks you if you post too much external content to your Facebook profile.

Technorati Tags:
facebook, plaxo, pulse, social graph, social network

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Man I am pissed off this morning. I have been doing work for Acme client for almost a year now and have submitted my work every month expecting to be paid for that work. For the most part I have been paid for it although I noticed a couple months ago that my client had missed a couple invoices, at least that is what seems to have happened according to me reconciliation of my invoices and payments.

I sent my reconciliation through and initially didn’t receive a response. When I did receive feedback the information I received didn’t contradict the apparent shortfall. The person who I was liaising with (I’ll call this person “Frank”) was dealing with payroll and came back to me in January with news of some advance I apparently requested in December. This was completely bogus and seems to me to either be a clerical error or a fraud and yet there has been no comeback on that.

I terminated by contract with Acme at the beginning of February, submitted all the work that was due to the end of the month and asked that the shortfalls be reviewed and if my reconciliation is correct, that I be paid, in full, at the end of February. I checked my bank account this morning to find that I haven’t even been paid in full for February, nevermind the arrears.

I haven’t named Acme here because I have seen too many of these sorts of disputes aired on blogs and just poison the air but what do you do when you are dealing with a large company that simply doesn’t respond to anything you do. I could sue the company for the arrears in the Small Claims Court (the amount is so small that this is the appropriate court) but that would take months and enough of my time to make the whole exercise a waste of money in the end. The people who I reported to don’t seem too interested in helping me finalise this issue despite their initial eagerness to work with me. Frank has been hard at work trying to help me but he can’t make the decisions that need to be made so I am basically stuck and it pisses me off. This may be about a relatively small amount of money but that is money I worked for and if it is due, it should be paid.

This is just another example of how important it is to look at how companies treat their employees and contractors at the end of the day. Often these projects start with such promise and over time the companies forget that they are dealing with people who do this work for an income so they can pay bills, pay staff, develop their businesses further. I’d like to characterise the whole company as a collection of so and so’s but I know some of the people working there and I am friends with some of those people and they are great people.

So, I wind up here writing this post about some anonymous company that has stiffed me and gives rocks about it and with no satisfactory end in sight.

Technorati Tags:
stiffed, no pay, unscrupulous companies, pissed off

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Anyone know if there is an option to subscribe to a digest feed of Thought Leader posts? I sometimes find some great posts in the feed. The rest of the posts don’t really appeal to me all that much and just wind up cluttering NetNewsWire.

Lifehacker dealt with this a little while ago although I can’t find the post at all. What the Lifehacker people did was publish a couple feeds for people who don’t want to subscribe to the full feed which populates your preferred feedreader with a couple dozen posts a day. Instead people can choose to receive a digest of sorts, the most popular items and some other options.

So, Vincent, how about it? A daily digest feed that lists each post and a summary as an easy reference?

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feed reader, feedreader, netnewswire, rss, thought leader, options, choices, daily digest

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I just saw this on CNN:

I wonder if it hit the ground or just burned up before it could …

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meteor, portland, cnn, video

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