What is the Perfume Project?

This blog is a constantly evolving forum for thoughts on perfume, perfume-making, plants (especially orchids and flora of the Pacific Northwest) and life in general. It started out chronicling the adventures of Olympic Orchids Perfumes, established in July 2010, and has expanded in other directions. A big part of the blog is thinking about the ongoing process of learning and experimentation that leads to new perfumes, the exploration of perfumery materials, the theory and practice of perfume making, the challenges of marketing perfumes and other fragrance products, and random observations on philosophy and society. Spam comments will be marked as such and deleted; any comments that go beyond the boundaries of civil discourse will also be deleted. I am grateful to all of you, the readers, who contribute to the blog by commenting and making this a truly interactive perfume project.

Monday, July 1, 2013

FIVE ANNOYING ONLINE TRENDS


Now that everything, including newspapers, news magazines, and person-to-person social interaction has transitioned to online form, I’ve noticed some really annoying trends. One of these trends is making a list of everything. I’ve nothing against lists. I make grocery lists, lists of materials I want to put in a fragrance, and a few other sorts of lists. What annoys me are the gratuitous lists that appear every day in online media. In keeping with this very 2010s trend, I’ve decided to make a list of five online trends that I dislike. You may or may not agree with me, and you may have a list of your own. After all, I don’t get all over the ethersphere, so may well have missed some that are even more annoying than the ones on my list. Without further ado, here’s my list of the top 5 that annoy me today.

1. “Top 10” (or choose any other number) lists of whatever it is (pet chicken breeds, best public toilets in Paris, eyebrow grooming tips, ways to leave your lover, stupid interview questions, ugly celebrities, colors to paint the caps of your garden gnomes– ad infinitum). The kicker is that these aren’t simple lists, but rather “slide shows” that you have to click through item by item if you’re really interested enough to do so. Who puts these illustrated flash-card lists together and why? Do people really want to take 10 times as long to read a slideshow-format list as they would to read a single, unified list? And what’s the obsession with lists, anyway? The only explanation I can think of is that the slideshow format greatly increases the number of clicks on the website in question, but the obsession with the lists themselves remains unexplained.

2. News articles that aren’t. A few times lately I’ve clicked on what appears to be a bona fide news headline only to find myself looking at an ad. These aren’t even the online versions of infomercials, they’re ads pure and simple. That’s blatant deception, and the publications that engage in this behavior should know better.

3. Political or charitable organizations that continuously bombard my e-mail inbox with messages begging for donations. Just today I received five redundant messages from a political organization wanting me to contribute to whatever their latest campaign is. As I was writing this, a sixth one arrived. No matter how much I sympathize with these people and their causes, their constant begging turns me off. Because of their failure to distinguish between bringing critical and important issues to our attention and simply whining about business as usual, they lose all credibility.

4. Unauthorized charges by services that set up a monthly automatic charge to a credit card. Recently there have been instances of small extra charges appearing for “upgrades”, “insurance”, and various other “fees”, even though no one requested them and the charge was not authorized. Resolving the issue requires a struggle to speak with a real person or, in the worst-case scenario, canceling the service in question. My suspicion is that the companies that engage in this practice think that their customers won’t notice a few dollars here and there. With millions of subscribers, those few extra dollars add up.

5. Mass invitations to small, private events. A while back I received an invitation to the birthday party of a person I work with. It seemed like a nice gathering at a restaurant right down the street from the university, scheduled for an evening when I was planning to be in the neighborhood, so I thought about going. Then I saw that the wife of the birthday boy had invited 98 people. At that point I started to feel like the target of a mass marketing campaign rather than a friend or colleague. The restaurant probably isn’t even big enough to hold 98 people, assuming they have other business besides the party. Of course, I’m sure no one expects all 98 people to come to the party, but what if they did? What’s the percentage yield on a mass-distributed birthday party invitation? Five percent? If five people and their family members or guests showed up, that would be just about right for the venue, and could have been accomplished with personalized, targeted invitations.

I’m all for mass invitations to public events like theatre productions, trade shows, perfume launch parties, concerts, and big outdoor festivals, but not sit-down dinners that should be shared with a few good friends and close family members. 

[In idly looking for photos to illustrate the concept of "pet chicken" I came across a lot of bizarre pictures of poultry wearing various sorts of garments, harnesses, or diapers, and walking on leashes. They're not all that relevant to the post, but are simply provided for your amazement and entertainment. Photos taken from today.com, backyardchickens.com, hensaver.com (home of the "hen holster"), and etsy.com.] 

8 comments:

  1. I've been sucked into those stupid lists too many times but I've never received a mass invitation to a birthday party! That is something totally out there as are the photos of chickens in their fashionable harnesses. I especially like the hen in the pink dots.

    I've known that keeping chickens and other domestic fowl has been a suburban trend for a few years now but I didn't know that the trend had devolved into a poultry parade! Its great! I would love to see chickens attired in "holsters" and "hensavers" sharing the runways with fashion models.

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    1. When I visited Bloomington, Indiana a number of years ago I was struck by the fact that many houses had statues of ducks on their front porches, and most of the duck statues were dressed in costumes with sweaters, aprons, caps and such. It looks like the poultry garment industry has migrated from garden statuary to real, live birds.

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  2. HA! I have never seen anything like those duck mannequins you describe! Maybe the dressed up ducks make people feel better about Bloomington?

    Parrots have been subjected to harnesses for many years. It seems it was only a matter of time before poultry got the same treatment. I would never even consider putting a harness on Gomez. He would rip my hands to shreds.

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    1. Gail, I had no idea that people put harnesses on parrots. There seems to be no limit to the strange things people do. Good for Gomez, not allowing you to mess with him.

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  3. Your list is good, and I love the chickens! I would add something that I've noticed happening more and more in the last several months. I pull up a page, and I'm trying to scroll down while reading, and ads keep expanding, doing their little video thing, then pop down again. This completely screws up my scrolling,and I can't orient on the page at all. I guess it's the marketing response to pop-up blocking, because they aren't pop-ups, they are expandable ads. Really annoying.

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    1. Marla, I've noticed those expanding and contracting ads, too, and hate them. Usually it's possible to close them, but that's another good item to add to the list.

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  4. I'm glad you explained the poultry photos; I was wondering if birds on leashes was a trend you disliked or something! Re the mannequins; someone in town used to have a white goose statue that was dressed up seasonally i.e. Santa suit, pilgrim hat, Easter bunny ears, patriotic, rain gear, etc.

    Anyway, I hate slide shows. Web MD has a nasty habit of putting everything in that format. Each slide has very little information with it, but it takes a long time to go through the entire article. Which is the intent, of course, to keep you on the pages with ads. The site I write for encourages slide shows and videos to keep people on the page longer.

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    1. Laurie, I can't say that I like the idea of birds on leashes, but that wasn't the intent of the post - I just got carried away with the bizarre photos. I did some further research and you're right that the poultry mannequins are not ducks, but geese. Dressing goose mannequins seems to be very popular in some parts of the US.

      We all seem to agree that slide shows are a nasty trick to keep people on pages longer.

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