Prada denies firing “old, fat and ugly” managers in Japan
Just last month much was made of Prada’s ‘voluptuous’ model choices for their Fall/Winter 2010 show where various former and current Victoria’s Secret models walked the runway. But the Italian fashion house are facing accusations that they harassed a former top retail manager in Japan to fire “old, fat and ugly” managers. Rina Bovrisse told [...]
-- This post originally appeared on: SASSYBELLA.com
Prada denies firing “old, fat and ugly” managers in Japan
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Traffic to Twitter and Facebook fell in February in US, says Compete
MySpace was down too - but can we trust the numbers? (Updated)
Figures about web traffic are notoriously hard to interpret - as in, to what extent should you trust them? It can be like trying to discern which opinion poll to believe.
So bearing in mind our story from last night about Facebook passing Google for traffic in the US in a week in March, according to Hitwise, see how you like these numbers: according to Compete.com, in the US in February Twitter's web traffic fell by 9.63%, Facebook's by 4.32%, LinkedIn's by 8.30%, while MySpace lost 11.5% of its unique visitors.
Update: with splendid economy, nutsch points out in the comments that "There were 9.7% fewer days in February compared with January." On which basis Twitter stood still, Facebook actually grew, LinkedIn grew very slightly, and MySpace.. oh dear.
The numbers are posted at Twittercism, and say that Twitter had 21.3m unique visitors in February, and a total of 143.9m overall. Both those numbers are down.
What might you conclude? That Twitter is sooo over? Perhaps - though as the post itself notes, such measures as Compete uses don't include mobile clients or API-based connections. And Twitter's API traffic is the majority of its real traffic - four-fifths of it, according to a presentation by Twitter itself last year. (Which at the time said that if you had 127 followers, you were above average. The average is probably lower now, given that there haven't been many new celebrities joining but lots of normal folk.)
The real problem with the Compete numbers though is that like many web metrics systems they rely on polling people who have toolbar extensions installed, which means that you can't be sure that it's really what happened - only that it represents what happened to the people you polled. Certainly, if you do it well - like polling companies try to do with voting intentions - then it's reliable enough. But just as election polls can be confounded by people who don't respond (or aren't on a landline, the usual system for polling), so toolbar-based metrics can be confounded by browsers that don't take toolbar - notably, mobile-based ones.
Thus is it with Compete, which explains:
"We have a diverse sample of 2,000,000+ U.S. Internet users that have given us permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys. We're betting that the insights we create from consumers' online behavior - whether they're watching, searching, shopping or socializing - is valuable for companies who are looking to radically improve their marketing."
Now, 2m internet users is a good slice - so can we be confident that Compete is always right?
The figure showing Facebook falling off is, frankly, strange - although it may be an artefact of the shortness of February plus the bad weather in the US this winter which meant some people, um, couldn't get to work to update their Facebook page to say "I'm at work, geez". (Note: the picture at the top was taken in December, not Febuary.)
The fall in MySpace is in line with expectations. Is anything ever going to pull it out of the spiral towards the internet black hole that is consuming Friends Reunited, Orkut, and the rest?
Twitter
Facebook
Social networking
Charles Arthur
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Nikon press photographer makes history with Grays of Westminster
Britain’s most decorated press photographer, Mike Maloney, OBE made history when he was given permission to take a group of amateur photographers on a two-hour shoot in the Great Chamber of the House of Lords on Saturday 13th February 2010.
This unique event was sponsored by the world famous London-based Nikon-only shop Grays of Westminster and hosted by Britain’s highest decorated press photographer, Mike Maloney, with the permission of Black Rod – a senior officer in the House of Lords, responsible for security, controlling access to and maintaining order within the ...
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2001, Wizard of Oz, and Top Gun—Fast
Fair Use Trio
New York laptop jockeys The Fair Use Trio "use the picture and soundtrack of culturally significant films, drastically compressed in time, as the sole materials for an improvised set which interrogates our cinematic memories through frenetic audiovisual processing and re-narration of the cinematic object," according to Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.
The Fair Use Trio detourn 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz, and Top Gun on Tuesday 3/16 at The Nightingale.
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