SHOUTY CAPS!!!
Over at Meh Glenn Fleishman has put together a fascinating two-parter on the history of using ALL CAPS for emphasis. And SHOUTING.
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Who didn't invent email?
Who didn’t invent email? Shiva Ayyadurai.
He’s not the only one – I didn’t invent email either, nor did Abraham Lincoln, Boadicea or Tim Berners-Lee. So why mention Shiva?
He claims that in 1978 when he was 14, he took some courses in programming. His mum worked for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and one of her colleagues challenged him to write an electronic mail system. And he did just that, creating a basic messaging system in FORTRAN, based on the existing paper memo format, ending up with a non-networked electronic mail system with similar functionality to mainstream applications that were in use well over a decade earlier.
That’s pretty impressive, and is the sort of thing that’ll look good on a college application form. (When I was 13 I designed and implemented a chassis dynamometer management unit that Shell’s research division used to test fuel and lube oil performance over virtual driving tracks – dozens of pages of 6502 assembly code, and you can be sure I put that on my college application form).
Some years later, in 1982, Shiva applied for and was granted a certificate of copyright registration on that piece of software. A copyright is not a patent – it recognizes and protects the expression of the work, not the idea underlying the work. There’s no real bar for copyright, other than it being a piece of work you created yourself – I automatically own copyright to anything I create, including software I’ve written and this blog post. Registering a copyright on a work, whether it be software or anything else, is a trivial exercise in bureaucracy – you fill in a form, you pay a registration fee, it gets rubber stamped. What is protected by the copyright is the work – in this case the software source code – itself, not the ideas, not the name of the package, nothing else. (I have copyright on my software package, Abacus. That doesn’t mean that I invented the Abacus.)
Meanwhile, Shiva moved into email marketing, founded a small ESP, and seems to be doing quite nicely (although a journalist who looked can’t find much evidence of the ESP being successful, or even existing, other than a lawsuit it filed against IBM and American Express for misappropriation of trade secrets in 2005).
Back in 2011, though, things started to get weird. Shiva started to use this copyright filing, and the fact that he used the title “EMAIL” on the filing, to support a claim that he was “the inventor of email”. It’s a compelling human interest / tech story to journalists whose knowledge of email and internet history is vague, so it got quite a bit of coverage.
(Shiva makes an image of his copyright certificate available: http://www.vashiva.com/images/vashiva_patent3_enl.jpg. Note that the URL describes it as a “patent”, rather than a copyright filing.)
It was quickly debunked. It didn’t pass the sniff test. Technical blogs started asking how the Washington Post and other press had fallen for this. The Washington Post clarified that pretty much all the significant claims in the original article were untrue.
It didn’t go away, though. Two-and-a-half years later, there’s a series of articles in the Huffington Post, pitching the same story, this time with a few unpleasant twists in it’s approach. It’s got a glossy infographic, filled with provably false claims. It has the feel of a professional PR campaign, rather than an article written by a reporter. Sure enough, it’s written by Larry Weber, a high powered PR guy (CEO of RacepointGlobal – who “build the right influencer relationships for your brand” – and CEO of Weber Public Relations Worldwide). There are at least five article in the series, all written by different people, but having oddly similar phrasing.
Shiva’s ESP, EchoMail, and their current branding is based around his (false) claim to be the “Inventor of Email”, so there’s clearly money as well as ego at stake. Neither Larry Weber nor the Huffington Post mentioned that Larry Weber is also on the board of EchoMail.
So we’re going through the debunking process again. I was going to write more, but others are way ahead of me.
Emoji – older than you think
It might just be random 17th Century punctuation, but this poem from 1648 certainly seems to be using a smiley face emoji.
(OK, it’s probably not intentional, but it’s lovely intersection of the emoji and the word.)
Email saves trees!
The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp rather than the fancy new web browser called NCSA Mosaic. To share pictures we actually had to send printouts by postal mail.
It wasn’t just getting spam that was memorable (oh, great! now my inbox is going to look like my postal box, stuffed full of things I don’t want), it was the domain name: savetrees.com. Built into the domain name was an entire argument defending spam on the grounds of environmental friendliness. By sending spam instead of postal mail we could save the earth. Anyone who didn’t like it was morally corrupt and must hate the planet.
Why do I mention this history? During a discussion on a list for marketers earlier this week, multiple people mentioned that email marketing was clearly and obviously the much more environmentally sound way to do things. I mentioned this over on Facebook and one of my librarian friends (who was one of the people I was email friends with back in those early days) started doing her thing.
She posted her findings over on the Environmental News Bits blog: The comparative environmental impact of email and paper mail. It’s well worth a read, if only because a lot of companies have really looked into the issue in great detail. Much greater detail than I thought was being put into the issue.
I shared one of the links she found, the 2009 McAfee study, with the email marketing group discussing the issue. (You may want to put down the drinks before reading the next line.) It was universally panned as marketing and therefore the conclusions couldn’t be trusted.
Anyone who pays any attention knows that nothing we do and none of the choices we make are environmentally neutral. Plastic bags were supposed to save trees from becoming paper bags, but turned into an environmental mess of their own.
Simple slogans like “email saves trees” might make marketers feel better, and may have gained Cyberpromo a strong customer base in the early days. But the reality is different.
