Maybe they should select Making Light contributors if they wish for literate staff. I shudder to think what they're really looking for.

Oh, right, spammers.

Two rounds, centre of mass. There's no reason to be extravagant.

That said, TIME does have a contact-us link on their page; I was just struck by the fact that it's not part of "Interact With This Article."

The command module pilots of 8 (Lovell), 9 (Scott) and 10 (Young) all led missions to the moon (13, 15 and 16 respectively) - I gather Collins in his turn was offered the command of 17 but decided to pack it in (so instead the lunar module pilot from 10, Cernan, got the job).

I swear, I have to stop reading alternate-history fiction before I just have a breakdown. I blame James Hogan.

For example see http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/02/01/ottawa-transit.html

Controversial stories like my city's recent bus strike could attract 300-400+ comments (many of which would have been better unsaid, but it does show a vibrant level of interaction).

A friend who worked for various IDG businesses -- Network World while it existed, a magazine which was involved in cable programming, and maybe some other IDG publications, said that publications have a limited, often very limited life, that corresponds to advertising/advertiser interest in the focus of the magazines--or maybe the friend didn't say outright, but implied it strongly.

A few weeks back, I went to a Television Preview presentation, which presented two potential pilot TV episodes, and a bunch of test commercials.... it was quite evident to me that the entire purpose of the presentation was to gauge the effectiveness of the material as regards "commercial messages".

Bottom line--commercial interests rule/own/control the media, and regard them as venues/channels for "revenue enhancement" -- either directly, as in businesses such as Internet Service Provides who charge access fees, advertising industry businesses which receive income from producing commercial messages, and he advertisers which want to capture and own your eyeballs and ears and force you to buy their products, by eliminating all alternative options and advertising and information flow.

(RIAA and MPAA play this as a monopoly game, trying to eliminate anyone who is not a member from producing music or films and discouraging/attempting to eliminate distribution by non-members, and prevent informaion flow about non-member's music and AV work.... )

As for "buzz," I hate the marketdroid/commercial/etc. use of that term.

To me "buzz" is that annoying threatening whine from mosquitoes and bees too near my skin/my ears, which especially for mosquitoes, are about to BITE me. So, for me there is a very visceral, very negative kinaesthetic reaction to the term in an of itself, of a highly annoying, irritating, unpleasant noise, presaging that even more unpleasantry is going to follow....

The marketing universe however, wants all sorts of noise and promotion done for the products they are pushing, at the least cost for them.... I also hate the term "viral marketing" as opposed to e.g. word of mouth and such. I don't WANT to be "infected", I don't want to be targeted like something in a weapons gunsight, tracked and locked on and a missile or gunfire incoming at me. Being informed of stuff of interest to me, I might appreciate, being commercial EXPLOITED and expected to without pay promote something for some large conglomerate for free.... infuriates me. And particularly, astroturf-type promotions, ticks me off.

Stinkin' fascists....

That said, I have to agree with Patrick: we're lucky to have uncommonly commonsensical marketers at Tor. Emphasis on 'uncommonly'—having worked in advertising for some time before coming to the world of publishing, I'm well aware that they are the exception, not the rule.

Of course, they could do it the way the Wall Street Journal's blog does, and only display the comments that agree with them, but that would be work.

Actually, that seems like a very good metaphor for advertising, q.v. my comment on the "Web advertising fail" thread. ;-)

"Viral marketing" is about the advert. The other is about the product. If I'm pointing to an amusing advert, I'm not quite recommending the product.

But, done well, viral advertising gets the product name out, without leaving people feeling abused. I don't feel guilty about linking to the Furry French Orangina advert because it's done so well. And, I suspect, it's fed into some of my writing. It isn't Wolf Baginski courting his Sylvie, and Wolf wouldn't quite carry on like that. Polish name, he's a bear, but I rather think the advert was why Sylvie was a deer.

So drink Orangina, and get laid by non-humans?

You will certainly remember the brand. Me, I think I shall go stroke the cat.

Maybe I'm too literal, but:
1) That first "Flashdance" riff immediately made me think -- eep, sticky orange stuff all through her fur!
2) Octopus with breasts -> brainfault (core dumped)!

I've seen nothing since then to indicate that their accuracy level has improved.

3) Female peacocks.

What we have here is a clear case of TIME's people applying print production and distribution thinking to electronic media, thus my quip about the news hole. The markup text for a "Contact Us" link would consume a tiny fraction of the server load used by the inline graphic used to display the first and smallest of their three separate advertisements for their "Get 4 FREE Issues" promotion. It also might produce more useful feedback than than the cost of receiving it, which one assumes is not a matter under consideration. It seems highly likely that TIME regards all reader feedback as an information processing cost that must always exceed its potential benefits.

I suppose when your business model assumes that your readers are as contemptible as your advertisers believe them to be, then the process of lifting the useful reader feedback from the dross will by necessity be extremely time consuming.

Anyway, these folks clearly just took every animal pattern they had handy and layered them over the dancers, along with the boobs and "sexy stretch" proportions. (Did you look at the "making of" clip? They took the motion off real dancers, but clearly not the body shapes.) And notice how most of the octopussette's tentacles just curl out of the way? I could think of much more interesting things to do with those....

Why? For the same reason there are no female roosters. 'Peafowl' is the generic; the females are called "peahens."

(This lesson in useless information presented by PedanTech™ International.)

Say it ain't so! What about genderqueers?

Humans are nicer than birds. Not MUCH nicer, but at least we don't make omelets of our children like they do.

Yeah, they have frying pans and everything. They just hide them when they see humans coming.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a foil hat to make.

Likewise, it is much harder to market something crappy. Most of the time (90%, if I remember my Sturgeon) they have to work very hard to sell the crap.

I'm very well aware of that, but in that video, well... Let's just say that the makers of the video were confused and leave it at that.

Trying to explain Spam Bad to marketing people is like talking to a brick wall and expecting it to respond. It's insanity.

Part of my job entails using Constant Contact. I limit the use to a weekly newsletter but they constantly try to justify ways to send out multiple mailings a day. Telling them that we would loose our account and/or get sued doesn't seem to deter them.

Not us...they say. Marketers...even the young ones seem to have very little grasp on the web.

(They never did learn, though. That they don't exist anymore isn't directly attributable to that particular incident, but it is an example of the business ideas that led to their demise.)

Businesses that annoy their customers is a self-limiting problem.

(And for those who've accused me of being anti-commerce for opposing their spam: my total spending on the net is well into six figures.)

There's also the fact that if they spam the wrong person (e.g. me), they might suddenly find their mail blocked as spam a lot of places. They are likely to find this counterproductive.

Depending on how they get access, they could find their entire connection cancelled.

Constant Contact will fire customers who spam. They should also have some good explanations on their web site in marketroidese.

It may also be that the marketing droids are responding to their incentives, which are probably more about being seen to do something to improve sales than about safeguarding the company's long-term reputation.

I learned this lesson long ago, at a dot-com that got itself committed to all kinds of money-losing crap by salesmen who were driven entirely by the need to make their quarterly quotas so they made enough money to live on. (And then, a new VP of sales came in and, in order to consolidate his power, ousted the guy who was personally responsible for getting and keeping our biggest consulting contract at the time going. This lost us a huge pile of money which we badly needed, but it did make sure the new VP of sales didn't have anyone willing to disagree with him in public anymore.

IMO, when you see an organization doing stupid things (often!), the explanation is almost always found in the incentives of the individual decisionmakers, and the way those contradict the goals of the organization as a whole.