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Mac vs. PC: What does your computer say about you?

If this infographic is anything to go by, you’re likely to be better educated, more popular and younger if you favour Macs over PCs. 

Inflammatory?  Definitely.  Accurate?  Who cares, it’s all about incensing debate.  Pointless?  Most definitely not.  While the content may be tongue-in-cheek and not especially useful to anyone, this little stunt is sure to generate plenty of publicity for its creator – crowd-sourcing website Hunch.

 

Stressed PR officers

by Mike King

US based HR firm CareerCast has just released the findings of its annual survey into the most stressful jobs in America.  Although the findings are vaguely interesting, with PR officer listed as the second most stressful job behind airline pilot, what interests me more is the level of critical feedback the story has received from PR professionals.

As part of the survey, average salary information is listed.  If reader responses at Ragan’s PR Daily are anything to go by, the average salary quoted by CareerCast for PR Officers is way off the mark. 

According to the survey, PR is getting more stressful, with last year’s results showing PR Officer as the eighth most stressful job .  Then again, you have to question the validity of a survey that shows fire fighter going from the most stressful job in 2010 to not making the top 10 at all in 2011.  

Social networks and French ID cards – odd combination?

By Fatima Meddad

With 2009 seeing an alarming level of ID fraud in France, the French Senate passed a reform bill to introduce ID cards.  This bill will be discussed by the Assembly in the coming months and, if enforced, will see electronic forms of identity stored on two separate chips contained on French ID cards.  Needless to say this issue has caused a great deal of controversy.

The first of the two proposed chips will use standard biometrics – fingerprints, retina scans, etc. – to identify individuals, while the second, less conventional, chip, is designed to collect a person’s activity on social networks.  I’m pretty sure that many of my Facebook status updates would be of little interest to officials, but I suppose this reflects just how important social networks have become to society.

Of course, this raises serious questions about privacy.  Personally I think such measures dehumanise individuals – the proposed scheme reminds me of Blade Runner or A.I.!

How real is your girlfriend?

It seems that today, keeping up appearances doesn’t require finding some pleasant and attractive company for the evening.  Indeed, with the growing influence of social networks on our everyday life, our relationships in those networks have become seen as sometimes more important than real life.

So for those who want to pretend to be spoken for, it’s much easier today than it was in the movies. You don’t have to convince someone to come to your school reunion or family celebration, you only need someone to play the role on Facebook.  Cloud Girlfriend does just this, allowing users to rent a girlfriend via the website, and also to define how she is meant to be.  This all seems a bit much to us (and a little creepy!), but it clearly works for some.

How far would you go for your Facebook status?

 

Word master or word slave – how dynamic is your PR speak?

By Bex Surtees

We all have go-to words in times of creative need.  I’ve been known to rely on ‘innovate’ far too much when writing various PR materials, not to mention ‘leverage’ and ‘disconnect’ (yes, I hang my head in shame).  And while we’re on it, let’s face it, there really are only so many times you can use the term ‘solution’ in tech PR right?  Wrong.

Following the list of PR words he compiled in June last year, PR strategist Adam Sherk took the top 25* most overused buzzwords in PR and marketing and ran them through PR Filter (a website from RealWire that aggregates press releases). 

The results revealed that ‘leading’ was the PR world’s word du jour with a whopping 776 occurrences – in a 24 hour period no less.  Not to be outdone, ‘solution’ was hot on its heels with 622 mentions, with ‘innovate’, ‘unique’ and – that old chestnut – ‘leading provider’, all featuring in the top ten.  Are you wincing yet?

I think it’s time to dig out the thesaurus. 

*  To clarify, there are actually 23 (instead of 25) buzzwords as PR Filter treats some words – like ‘innovate’, ‘innovator’ and ‘innovative’ – as single words. 

Follow Bex @BexySurtees if you fancy a word-off!

The need for speed

We all know that slow websites can be a bit of a bore.  Gone are the days of dial-up when we were prepared to sit for what felt like an eternity, waiting for pages to load.  Now, if sites don’t appear almost instantaneously, browsers tend to get disgruntled and many will give up and click on to an alternative site.

But what does this mean for the site providers?  Here’s a great illustration by Strangeloop, courtesy of Mashable, showing how time really means money online.

A look at some of tech’s best April Fools

By Fiona Halkerston

Aaaahhh, April Fools’ Day.  The day when no one trusts national headlines and companies put a hold on distributing “on-message” press releases in favour of some light hearted fun.

One of my personal favourites that I’ve seen so far was that Google announced Google Motion – a way of controlling Gmail with a ridiculous range of movements including miming licking a stamp to send an email.

I also particularly like the Playmobil Apple Store play set, although I know some people that probably wish this product wasn’t a joke!

YouTube also got in on the action with a blog post celebrating a century of streaming videos.  So what have your favourites been so far?  Please get in touch with some other April Fools gems!

Follow Fi on Twitter and see if you can fool her at: @Fihalkerston