Day: November 7, 2005

Anthro’s eNook

Like most everything it sells, Anthro’s eNook is ridiculously overpriced at $399, but it is so cool you don’t really care.

Unfortunately, Anthro insists on using stupid Flash to display pictures of the eNook so you’ll have to visit the site to see what it looks like, but it is essentially a wall-mounted storage area designed to hold (and charge) gadgets like cameras, cell phones, iPods and laptops. According to an Anthro press release,

eNook makes the most of limited space. When closed, it extends only a few inches from the wall. With a simple press of the push-to-open magnetic door latch, the ¾” thick work surface safely eases down a 30-W workspace that is deep enough to accommodate a laptop computer, mouse, and a notepad.

Accessories can be added to customize the e-Nook. Several peripheral perches will enhance storage space for items such as cell phones, PDAÂ’s, and cameras. A power strip can be attached inside the flip down electronics door area to provide 8 outlets for charging the electronic equipment.

The e-Nook has built-in ventilation to protect electronic equipment from over-heating, and an integrated cable management to keep cables out of the way and out of sight, with an accessible power and cable storage area at the bottom of the unit, for quick access. The laptop can be safely stored in the laptop storage tray provided.

That’s exactly the sort of thing I need to organize all of my portable gadgets. The eNook will be shipping in November. Hmm . . . Christmas is coming . .

Forbes, Blogs and Kryptonite Locks

Forbes recently published a much-discussed article (at least in the navel-gazing blog world), Attack of the Blogs, that opened by defining web logs thusly,

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.

As an example of the horrors of web logs, Forbes’ Daniel Lyons offered up the example of poor lock manufacturer Kryptonite,

No wonder companies now live in fear of blogs. “A blogger can go out and make any statement about anybody, and you can’t control it. That’s a difficult thing,” says Steven Down, general manager of bike lock maker Kryptonite, owned by Ingersoll-Rand and based in Canton, Mass.

Last year bloggers posted videos showing how to break open a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen. That much was true. But they also spread bogus information–that all Kryptonite models could be cracked with a pen; that it is the only brand with this vulnerability; and that Kryptonite knew about the problem and covered it up.None of these claims is true, but a year later Kryptonite still struggles to set the record straight, while spending millions to replace locks.

But Kryptonite’s problems were all largely self-inflicted, and Down’s comments show that Kryptonite has learned a thing since then about crisis management.

Kryptonite is the leading lockmaker for bicycle locks, and backs up its locks with a guarantee of up to $3,500 to replace your bike if it gets stolen while locked with a Kryptonite lock (though there is a lot of fine print to that, obviously). But in the Fall of 2004, a bicycle enthusiast posted a video of how to pop open an $80-$100 Kryptonite lock with a cheap ballpoint pen.

Kryptonite faced a severe backlash, and some stores pulled the vulnerable models off the shelf. And the company didn’t help by having an extraordinarily weak crisis management response.

Down complains that while there were vulnerabilities in some Kryptonite locks, that misinformation quickly spread that all Kryptonite locks were vulnerable. But even a week after the story broke and was featured in the New York Times and on NPR, Kryptonite had still not bothered to updated its web site with a single word acknowledging the problem, much less providing a list of what models were and were not subject to the vulnerability. As Business Blog Consulting noted,

Incredibly, Kryptonite’s site (which is loading veeerrrry slooooowly today) still has nothing about this issue, a week after the story broke, despite the homepage ironically proclaiming “This is the place to get the most information about our products, our dealer locations, our company and more.” The most recent news on the homepage is about their having moved office locations in June 2002.

The worst thing in the world for a company doing when facing a crisis like Kryptonite faced is to not quickly make information available. If a company does not quickly respond to such a problem, of course rumors and other nonsense will quickly propagate. How are people to know which locks were and were not vulnerable when Kryptonite itself could not be bothered to quickly address that issue on its web site? If I were considering buying a Kryptonite lock but I cannot find out anything on the company’s web site about which models, if any, do not have this vulnerability, it is completely rational of me to decided not to buy any model at all manufactured by their company.

Down’s other response — Kryptonite’s constant whining that it is not the only lock manufacturer whose locks had this problem — is even more egregious. The last thing customers want to hear after learning that their expensive locks can be unlocked with ridiculous ease is to hear PR flacks saying, “yeah, but so can Company X’s.” If you go to a restaurant and the food arrives late and cold, do you want the manager saying, “yeah, but the restaurant across the street is even worse?” It is just unbelievable that Kryptonite is still bemoaning that point.

Look, your customers care about the product they bought from you. Passing the buck with the “everyone’s making lousy locks” line doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

But what about the bigger question of blogger accuracy and accountability. Look, 95 percent of what you read on the Internet is crap. People just do not bother to check, much less double check, what they say. But that is no different, frankly, than much other media. And contrary to Lyons, most mainstream media folks rarely face sanction or censure for getting a story wrong unless it is egregiously wrong and very public, such as the CBS story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service that relied on bogus memos.

For example, Lyons himself distorts the truth in this tidbit,

In the case of a CNN executive they didn’t stop until they had claimed a casualty. Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, noted at an off-the-record conference in January that journalists had been killed by U.S. troops. He used a touchy word:”targeted.” A blogger present, Rony Abovitz, ignored the off-the-record ground rule and posted an account. Other bloggers soon piled on. One created a site solely devoted to the topic, easongate.com.

Jordan instantly and repeatedly denied the assertions, but the blog hordes kept wailing away. Jordan resigned in February, engulfed by a concocted controversy. Blogger Michelle Malkin crowed online, praising nine other bloggers and “legions of smaller” ones in the hunt. She wrote that the mainstream media “calls it a lynch mob. I call it a truth squad” and included a warning:”Cue the Carpenters music: ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.'”

This is essentially a lie. The reality is that to this day few people know exactly what Eason Jordan actually said at Davos about U.S. troops “targeting” journalists. Some in attendance reported that Jordan had said that American troops intentionally targeted journalists. Jordan and others in attendance disputed what Jordan said and/or meant. But despite all the hoopla and controversy it generated, neither a videotape or a transcript of the incident were ever released that would have allowed people to decide what Jordan really said or meant.

As Lyons notes, Davos is officially “off the record” and the conference organizers refused to release even portions of the tape or transcript, but it is difficult to believe it would not have done so if Jordan had requested that it release just the relevant portions so that his version of events could be confirmed. That Jordan ended up resigning, while saying his comments had been “not as clear as they should have been” — apparently without ever making a request to release a partial transcript or video — simply fuels suspicion that he really did say that the U.S. military was intentionally targeting journalists.

It is also more than a bit amusing to see Lyons cite as an example of responsibility blogger John Hinderaker,

Even some bloggers see the harm they can pose. “Some people in the blogosphere are too smug about free speech. They’ll say it’s okay if people get slandered or if people make up fake stuff because in the end the truth wins out,” says John Hinderaker, a lawyer in Minneapolis, Minn. who helps run a right-wing blog, Power Line, which hounded CNN’s Jordan and CBS anchor Dan Rather. “But I don’t think that excuses it.”

Is he serious? Hinderaker’s blog, Powerline, is simply a right wing hack site that frequently publishes outright lies and falsehoods. Powerline outright lied about how they covered the leaked Republican memo on how to spin the Terri Schiavo memo, and Hinderaker simply made stuff up to impugn an Associated Press photographer who captured a hideous act of terrorism in Iraq on film.

The bottom line is not that bloggers are inaccurate or mainstream media or newspapers but that you cannot trust anyone (including me). On the other hand, thanks to Google and other tools it is possible now to confirm or repudiate a story very quickly.

Ronald Reagan had it right back in the 1980s — trust but verify.

Sources:

Attack of the Blogs. Daniel Lyons, Forbes, November 14, 2005.

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Lock. Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, September 17, 2004.

Engadget: Kryptonite Evolution 2000 U- Lock hacked by a Bic Pen. Business Blog Consulting, September 2004.