THE TRADE in Internet addresses—URLs—gets more and more
bizarre.
According to a bulletin in The Associated Press, journalist Ted
Fishman registered the name FreeWheelz when he was writing an April Fool’s story
for Esquire magazine about the excesses of e-commerce. In the story, he
invented an online company that gave away free cars and made money by covering
the vehicles with advertising slogans. He registered the company’s fictitious
name to make sure he wasn’t treading on the toes of any real businesses.
The story was peppered with outrageous details intended to alert readers that
the whole thing was a send-up. But that didn’t stop a group of entrepreneurs who
had been planning just such a business from telephoning Esquire after
the article appeared. “At first when they called, we thought they would be
really annoyed with us,” said Jay Woodruff, an editor at Esquire. “But
it quickly turned into this discussion about how they wanted to buy the URL. I
guess irony pays.”
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It certainly did pay. The founders of the real company, Freecar.com, paid
Fishman $25 000 for the rights to the address—the URL he paid
$70 to register. Freecar.com hasn’t officially been launched yet, but
founder Larry Butler says the responses from readers who believed the parody to
be true “validated our business model”.
Meanwhile, another of Fishman’s spoof ideas has jumped into the real world.
The phoney founders of his FreeWheelz had an earlier venture, I-Coli.com, which
invited restaurants to post their health reviews online. Shortly after the
article came out, the New York City Department of 91ɫƬ began posting health
violations by New York restaurants on the Web.
At the time of writing, you can still see Fishman’s article at
www.freewheelz.com.
CONCERNED about rising levels of obesity among the British population,
retailers are switching to low-fat products and promoting “diet” ranges of
foodstuffs—such as the Waitrose “Diet Choice” range, which includes its
honey roasted cashew nuts.
But hang on a minute. The information on the packet states that 100 grams of
these nuts typically contain 42 grams of fat, 35 grams of carbohydrate and a
whopping 595 calories. So how on earth is this a “diet choice”?
Because it’s also a “source of fibre” at 3.2 grams per 100 grams, that’s
how.
CONFUSION abounds about Australia’s newly introduced goods and services tax
(GST), which we mistakenly called “general sales tax” a month ago (24 June).
People are so muddled about the tax that the Australian Competition and
Consumer Commission has set up a “pricing hotline” to help them out. Very useful
too, we are sure—but we can’t help questioning the way the recorded
message greets enquirers. It begins: “If you understand English, please press 1.
If you do not understand English, please press 2.”
EVEN the most laudable schemes can fall foul of corporate intellectual
property lawyers. Don Mueller, president of a company called Good Guy and a
science tutor in New Jersey, wants to market cookies stamped with physics
formulae to “make science more palatable”. Unfortunately, he also had the neat
idea of calling his product “Nutri Brain”—until Kellogg’s drew his
attention to the fact that this infringes their Nutri-Grain trademark.
We are indebted for this little item, by the way, to Bob Park, a member of
the American Physics Society, who posts bits and bites like these at
www.aps.org/WN.
THE BBC recently ran a page in its online news section about the stress
caused by increasing e-mail overload, headlined “Office workers drowning in
e-mail”. The “Talking point” section on the page concluded with: “Are you
suffering from e-mail overload? . . . Send us your views and experiences”.
Somehow, we don’t think this is going to help matters.
APART from overloading people, we had never thought of e-mail as particularly
dangerous, but apparently it is. The terms and conditions of ONdigital’s ONmail
e-mail service include this alarming clause: “We will always be liable to you in
full for death or personal injury caused by our negligence.”
What, we are forced to wonder, could ONdigital possibly do—or not
do—to cause death or personal injury through its e-mail service?
IMPARTING important information by telephone, on the other hand, can be
dangerous.
New Scientist recently received a review copy of a French book
called Le Coeur en Action. The inside cover states that the book was
originally published in the US with the title The New Living Art.
The original title was actually The New Living Heart—but try
saying that with a French accent.
FINALLY, there will be no Feedback summer competition this year. But look out
for the Opinion section competition, to be announced in full next week. There
are books and bottles of malt whisky to be won, and all you have to do is write
the first lines of an imaginary science book that are so gripping readers can’t
fail to buy the book.
