Author: Steven Garrity

taking aim at the brand bullies

by Steven Garrity

no logoJust finished reading No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein. It was an interesting book about the “brands, not products” phenomenon and provided a balanced historical look at the culture-jamming movement. Klein was careful to distance herself from organizations such as Adbusters that, despite earning my readership and respect, receive some much-needed criticism.

While interesting, No Logo does tend to drag a bit with an encyclopaedic style as is pointed out in a fine Slashdot review.

This probably shouldn’t matter, but I was drawn to the book in part by the fact that Klein is the wife of Avi Lewis who stands alone in the field of intelligent Canadian TV as host of the CBC’s Counterspin (Ralph Benmurgi is pretty cool too but I don’t know if he’s still on the air).

 

“steven = idiotic comments”

by Steven Garrity

After making a post on the IslandEdition.com message board suggesting that ExaComm’s websites PEISearch.com and IslandAuction.pe.ca where horrible Yahoo and eBay rip-offs, respectively, I was surprised to find out that I was unable to convince the mob that some form of theft has taken place. Before descending into inanity, including a post which read, in entirety, “stephen = idiotic comments” which was posted by an anonymous coward. Read the thread yourself and you decide, but please don’t email me if you disagree because you are an idiot.

On a remotely related note, I would like to acknowledge inspiration from Peter Rukavina’s Reinvented.net, and 37signals‘ Signal vs. Noise. Both sites are absolutely brilliant, and while I did appropriate the general concept of the sites, I was careful not to borrow any features of the design and layout beyond what is common to the popular but unfortunately titled “blog” phenomenon.