The Shortlist: Part 3

9) Loyalty to dead media formats

·         The bosses at Independent News & Media
-- Editor turned MD Simon Kelner thinks the web is like a horrible noisy bar. Really

·         The Financial Times
-- Crap online, brilliant in print. Memo to Mr Barber: Resign and hand the show over to those Alphaville boys. Before it's too late.

·         Incisive Media
-- When he shut down IT Week, MG Graham Harman told Press Gazette: “You have to say to yourself ‘If I was launching into this market now what would I do? What do [readers] want now and how do I service them?’”
Fine advice. So why the hell is Incisive still publishing Computing as a weekly newspaper? Answers on a postcard, please.
 

10) Rebrand of the year

Company in trouble? Call it something else…nobody will ever guess. Product not selling? Give it a new name…that'll boost sales. Do they think we're stupid? No, they don't think it. The research said so.

·         Enfatico
-- Jesus. What's this? A pizza 'n' pasta chain? No, sorry. . . it's the appalingly weak name given to WPP's standalone agency dedicated to Dell. Apparently, Enfatico signifies: "a hyper-responsive, truly integrated marketing agency designed from the ground up to create value for our clients". Or should that be client?

·         CNET Networks becomes. . . CBS Interactive
-- Take one hallowed digital brand and flog it to a TV company whose DNA owes more to Mad Men than dot.com. Granted, we quite like CBS's logo. It has stayed the same for so long that it's become hip again. Back to square one? You betcha.

·         CSC
-- The "leading global consulting, systems integration and outsourcing company" isn't quite the world's leading anything. But the guff it used to explain its rebranding this year was very dire. El Reg's gag about cutting corners is priceless.

11) Bandwagon jump of the year

·         McAfee warns of terrorists in virtual worlds
-- But if they’re virtual, can they terrorize us? Er, no. don’t think so.

·         HP, Sun & Teradata: Wind power madness
-- Why have hardware manufacturers started using pictures of wind farms on their websites? Like, everywhere. . .

·         IBM: Project Big Green
-- Big Blue promises to spend $1bn on a bid to "dramatically increase the efficiency" of the company's software and hardware. But IBM has told no-one how it intends to spend this money. . . And oddly, the company stopped issuing Big Green press releases around the time (late August) that the price of oil started to plummet. Funny that.

The Shortlist: Part 2

5) Rudest hack

·         Charles Arthur

·         Gary Flood

·         Giles Coren

6) Media budget cutter

·         Graham Harman, MD of business-technology at Incisive Media

·         Sly Bailey, CEO, Trinity Mirror

·         Geoff Wilmott, chief executive of Centaur

·         Jerry Yang, CEO, Yahoo

7) Up its own arse

·         Google's Zeitgeist conference
-- Queen whatsername from Jordan? What's all that about?

·         The "merger" of Computing & IT Week
-- Er, wasn't it a closure?

·         Steve Ballmer: "Vista is the most popular OS we have ever produced"
-- Come again? What metrics you working with there, Uncle Fester?

8) Wank 2.0: User-generated twat

·         Ben Hammersley, deputy editor of Wired UK
-- Blacklisting PRs? Outrageous. Is Tim Dowling's Ben Lagen really Ben Hammersley?

·         Jeff Jarvis, author of Buzz Machine & Guardian columnist
-- Whining New York professors coming over here, telling us how to run our media? No thanks mate

·         Richard Bailey, lecturer, Leeds Metropolitan University (PR Studies)
-- A platter of self-promotion garnished with essential oils of arslikhan

·         Richard Millington
-- Still at it. Working with Seth Godin. FeverBee? WTF?

·         Brendan Cooper, Fleishman-Hillard
-- Cooper calls himself "Your friendly digital social media PR, ummm, thingy". He didn't come last year because he thought he'd have to pay to get in. But on his blog he's boasting about "blagging" a ticket to work on the registration desk tomorrow night. So here, to entertain you, is an extract from one of Cooper's recent posts:

This year, the focus of thousands of bloggers from around the world is on poverty.

There are plenty of statistics on global poverty, and you can see many excellent posts on the Blog Action Day site. But what does poverty actually mean?

Poverty can take many forms. Today, for example, I’ve been intending to post on the subject all day but found I simply could not find the time to do so. This is poverty of time. . .

Increasingly I also see poverty of relationships. . .

The Shortlist: Part 1

1) PR agency of the year

No shortlist for this one. Just one winner. You'll find out who tomorrow night.

2) Tech hack of the year -- freelance

·         Jessica Twentyman
-- Murinho reversed (kind of): Britain's loss, Portugal's gain

·         Danny Bradbury
-- You lot like Mr Bradbury. A lot.

·         Nick Booth
-- "Damn fine writer, full of great story ideas and always up for a laugh." And did we mention boxing?

3) Tech hack of the year -- staff

·         Chris Williams (The Register)
-- Excellent run of exclusives on Phorm. A bit polemical. But so what? 

·         Martin Veitch (CIO)
-- For services to magazine editing. Worth £200 to Mike King.

·         Charles Arthur & Michael Cross -- Technology Guardian
-- Free Our Data: So good, HM Govt sikked lobbyists on the authors

4) Biggest fuck-up

 ·         O2 PR calls Register readers "a bunch of techie nerds"
-- It might be true, but take your elbow off the redial button, mate

·         Bloomberg News: Steve Jobs is dead
-- Er, sorry about that.

·         John Browett, CEO, DSG: "We're not a retail disaster in an absolute sense"
-- So how do you feel about things in relative terms, John?

·         Shiny Media co-founder tells TechCrunch it's sooo hard to be a start-up
-- . . . and then loads of critics line up to tell him his sites were crap

·         Reed Elsevier decides to sell off Computer Weekly amid Great Depression Mk.II
-- MiniMag (Ministry of Magazines) staff now so totally alienated that it'll be a nightmare whether or not the deal succeeds. 

·         Microsoft: The Gates/Sienfeld ads
-- Delusional creatives from half-witted Mad Men in Florida. Do we need a link for this one? Nah. . .

Is Martin Veitch worth £200?

Fans of Flackenhacks' Adopt-A-Hack might have thought that the £86 bid by Paul Doran of Switch Communications for Phil Muncaster of Vnunet was the end of the story.

For most of last week, Muncaster seemed confirmed in his role as the nation's favourite tech hack.

But there's a been coda, folks -- a corollary, a pendent development. . .  involving runner-up Martin Veitch of CIO, whose auction closed last Tuesday.

In case you missed it, the best closing bid for Veitch was £82 -- made by Johnson King.

. . . But on Friday afternoon, in after-hours trading, Mike King of Johnson King dramatically upped his winning bid for Veitch to £200.

Which means that Muncaster has now been consigned to second place in the Adopt-A-Hack sweepstakes.

On Friday afternoon, Veitch was displaying his sharp elbows on Google Mail. The world's leading Geordie tech hack had this to say: "Just so long as it's made very clear that I won the race, albeit after the race had officially finished."

Uh, our tickers can hardly stand it. Here's where we're at right now:

1) Martin Veitch (CIO) -- £200.00

2) Phil Muncaster (Vnunet) -- £86.00

3) Mark Dye (Freelance) -- £36.00

4) Bryan Glick (Computing) -- £30.99

5) Mark Samuels (CIO Connect) -- £26.00

6)= Michael Dempsey -- £19.99

7)= Andy McCue -- £19.99

8)= Rupert Goodwins -- £19.99

And if your pulse isn't already racing, how about this?

We've just added auctions for Gordon Kelly (news editor at Trusted Reviews) and Tim Phillips (the freelance who has written Computing's Backbytes column for the past 12 years).

You've got 48 hours to bid on either (or both) of these blokes. Plus, of course, Jeremy Kirk, Rob Kerr, Eric Doyle and David Meyer, who will continue to twist in the wind for another day or so.

As always: low start, no reserve and 50% of whatever we raise goes to Byte Night. (Although in the case of Mike King's generous bid, we'll obviously be revising that proviso. . . )

. . . Get clicking!

250 guests and counting. We don't want to be alarmist, but. . .

. . . We are conceivably getting close to a sell-out.

Of course, event organisers say this all of the time. But on Monday next week, we'll have to forecast final numbers for the purposes of booze economics. And food.

So it's possible -- just possible -- that we might have problems dealing with a last minute tsunami of bookings. Something akin to that seems to be building up right now. . .

Just thought we'd mention it.

Footnote: Some of you -- typically hacks for some odd reason -- have been asking us whether The Flackenhacks has been credit crunched. Will we get the numbers to fill our venue? Might we fall victim to Dick Fuld's tsunami of collateralised debt obligations?

The answer comes in two parts. A deep silence did descend on our box office on, or around, 1st October. For the best part of two weeks, we all waited to see whether the sky would fall (along with the markets). And no-one booked anything much.

Then Gordon Brown announced his bank bail-out. And hey presto, the bookings resumed. If we get a moment before next Wednesday, we'll post up a spreadsheet containing the numbers. They're eerie. Probably a bit like UK GDP numbers, we reckon.

Anyway, bottom line: things are looking OK. We're expecting an increase in numbers over last year (not sure how much yet..). And despite the odd blip in terms of sponsorship, that side of things came good in the end, too. (Thanks to our sponsors BTW including those who have pitched up late in the day -- your help is massively appreciated...)

It's shaping up to be a great, great, night...

C'mon you lot

Boys and girls, we need to talk.

We've now got nine hacks up for auction. Some of these auctions will be ending in a day or so. But only two of the auctions have bids.

At this point, we're going to get serious with you for a minute. You bloody well know that Byte Night is a worthy cause. And it's not as if we're asking for thousands -- or even hundreds -- of pounds. You don't even need a pressing business case to make a bid. (Well, we hope not. . . )

Yep, we know about of that recession malarky. We bored sick of it already.

We've had more than a few conversations with cash-strapped MDs in recent weeks who reckon they can't afford to send any staff to The Flackenhacks. (You want names? Ah, modesty forbids. Thus far, anyway. But if enough of the buggers snaffle up for themselves the small number of complimentary tickets being offered by our sponsors, we might change our tune. . .)

But really. . . can your corporate coffers not accomodate just a few more trifling bids on EBay?

Ferchrissakes, the folks at Spark, Johnson King, Escherman and Switch Communications have made some sterling bids so far. Plus some others we can't quite identify from their EBay handles. Thanks to them.

As for the rest of you: you really don't have to dig deep. Shallow will do. We're talking small beer that could mean a lot to someone less fortunate than yourself.

And we don't mean journalists, either.

C'mon, let's do this thing. . . 

Rob Kerr: Tight prop head demands to be served

That Rob Kerr's been on again. He really does want to be auctioned off.

This all started a week ago, when The Man Himself got in touch and suggested we auction a ticket for him plus the added attraction of "a (separate) night or day of heavy drinking" in his company.

The latter, Kerr suggested, might result in his host experiencing "a spell in hospital" and a "lengthy period of recovery in The Priory".

With this missive, Kerr sent us the pic appended to this post, plus several more.

Now, seven days later, he sounds a bit irritated by our inaction. And pissed off by our jibe that we'd need to raise £300 in an auction to cover the cost of his pie-and-booze consumption at The Flackenhacks.

Here's what he's saying now:

It's probably better to have me on your side than not :)

Do you really want to upset and turn away the voice of Brian Blessed?

For good measure, Kerr adds that his physique is the way it is because he plays tight head prop for London Scottish.

. . . We know when we're beat. Kerr is going upon EBay tomorrow -- with a reserve price of £250 on his head. Don't say you weren't warned.