analysis and thoughts regarding kpmg (warning: maximum verbosity!)

[chris raettig <chris@raettig.org>]

in the words of han solo: i think we're in trouble. 


this being my journal, it's purpose is for me to record my thoughts, 
feelings and actions. this being the web, sometimes the medium is
the message. and so i find myself writing about the result of what
i wrote about. despite the fact that (contrary to popular belief ;)
i have some semblance of a life and have been doing a great many other
things over the last two days. :)

i should probably tell this particular story - and i'll try to be
as brief as i can - from the beginning. apologies if you've heard most
of this before. 

near the beginning of this year, the corporate anthems website was
born. it was kind of an accident. a couple of mp3 files arrived
by email to the office of the startup company i was then working at. 
they were your typical rapidly forwarded entertainment messages. 
the mp3's were 'corporate anthems'... rousing songs created and
recorded by large businesses. they were so bad, they were good. 
the kpmg anthem in particular was hilarious. 

because they were amusing i decided to try and track down more
of them. i wondered how widespread the phenomenon was. i found
one or two other gems on the web, but generally they seemed
pretty scarce. but nontheless i knocked out a quick html page
so i could share my own amusement with my friends and colleagues.
i placed this page (along with the media files) on my webserver,
where it remains at;

[http://corporateanthems.raettig.org]

thus it began. and before i knew what had hit me, we'd seen
10,000 hits and chewed up a considerable amount of bandwidth. 
people started linking to the corpanthems site. a few small
sites at first, then when places like memepool.com and ntk.net
caught up the traffic and the number of referrers skyrocketed.
with this popularity came email. interesting, often amusing
correspondences with interesting (often amusing) people. 
some from within the companies whose anthems were featured.
offering encouragement, gossip and most importantly more
anthems. it seemed that a lot of companies /were/ producing
corporate anthems. for reasons best known to themselves. 
in a lot of cases it looks like they eventually realised
just how terrible these efforts at "aural branding" were,
and attempted to bury them. they should be so lucky. 

despite never planning to create a mega-meme, it was worth
the effort of maintaining the site because more visitors meant
more anthems... more amusement for me. 

besides which; i thought beforehand that i knew a thing or
two about the web. but /this/ was an education. 

along, too, came media requests. it was amusing to watch the
story become the story. the fact that a lot of people were
interested in this was what interested a lot of people.  

(i'm in danger of disappearing up my own arse at this point ;-)

i've never really understood the whole fame/celebrity thing. it's
just something i don't *get*. more specifically i've never had
a desire to thrust myself into the media spotlight for it's own
sake. (i'd rather have a mug of soup). but then i'm always happy 
to talk to all-comers about things that i find interesting. which 
was how i ended up giving interviews on the subject to national 
newspapers and radio stations from various parts of the world.  

and making my legendary appearance on the british early morning tv
show 'the big breakfast'. despite never watching television and holding
mild distain for it. and despite being infamous for my inability to
make early morning starts. i have a copy of that appearance on
videotape, and it's still too cringeworthy for me to dare watch it. 
i'm not a morning person. 

it was even quite interesting (for a geek) to follow the assorted
waves of interest. to watch how different events had an affect on
traffic levels. to see just how long it took the mainstream media
to catch up with the web, and then treat it as a 'news' story. 

it was a good lesson for me in dealing with the media. something i'd
never really had to do before. in some cases learning the tricks 
they play. the sliminess, misrepresentation, sloppy journalism. 
how best to attempt to get an accurate side of the story across. 
in other cases the people i dealt with were perceptive, warm and 
diligent. fastcompany is one outlet i remember to have been a 
particularly positive experience. 

inevitably much of the hubbub died down in the end. i'd mentally
put the whole thing behind me after the first couple of weeks, so
much of the later coverage was at best a mild diversion for me. 
most of the projects i do in my spare time are things that i'm
passionate about. but corpanthems, in all honesty, was a piece
of silliness that just happened to catch on. when i started to
get bored of explaining the same series of events over and
over again i started semi-seriously urging journalists to
"just make up any old bollocks."  i found myself telling
one respectable news outlet (when asked for the millionth
time what i do for a living) that i was a chimney sweep. they
evidently thought it was an interesting angle. (to the current
wave of media enquirers - please bear this last paragraph in
mind when you talk to me ;-)   

eventually, as my circumstances changed, i was forced to take
the media files off the corporate anthems website. the html is
still there, and i'm still collecting new anthems and maintaining
many interesting email dialogues. but i simply didn't (and don't)
have the bandwidth to sustain them considering the popularity
of the site. if anybody reading this has a stable pipe, and
would be happy hosting approximately 40mb of media files, i'd
very much be interested in talking to you, and taking this
latest series of events as an opportunity to put corporate
anthems back online again. this is my own hidden agenda. 



i think thats the backstory dealt with. here's the fresher news...



last friday i got an email from a guy called frank dunne. 
the senior manager of global brand and regulatory compliance
at kpmg; 


kpmg...
[http://www.kpmg.com]

kpmg uk...
[http://www.kpmg.co.uk]

kpmg canada...
[http://www.kpmg.ca]

kpmg germany...
[http://www.kpmg.de]


i won't try to summarise it (or my reasons for branding it as 
absurd) here... his message and my reply are online at...

[http://chris.raettig.org/email/jnl00036.html]
-- you're clearly not familiar with the raettig.org
"sending-me-dumfuck-email" policy, then?
 
i'm reassured that the absurdity of his message has been clear
to a great many other people too. 

i really didn't want to be a troublemaker, or to take on so
called authority figures for the sake of it, or my own
agrandisement. something i seem to have inadvertantly cultivated
a reputation for ;)  i tend to do whatever seems to me to be the
'right thing to do'. i rarely consider fully the consequences
deeply because consequences (in my limited experience, at least)
rarely change what that 'right thing' is.    

but frank sent me an email, so the curteous thing to do was to
offer a response. i laid out as straightforwardly as i could
the reasons why i thought his request unreasonable. and i 
carbon copied my website in on this response. this is something
i've been doing as a matter of habit lately when something 
interesting floats past me. 

i thought nothing more of it until monday. i quickly got over
the stupidity i saw in this email and proceeded with my weekend. 
(such as it was!)

i'd just like to stop and clarify a few things that there has 
been some confusion on; 

1. the email from frank is not (to the best of my
knowledge) a legal cease and desist notice. however this doesn't
to my mind reduce the level of absurdity. and it is written
in what seems to me to be quite strong language. 

2. a couple of people have questioned the authenticity of the 
message. wondering if we've all been had. all i can say is that i 
have (as i always do) checked the full set of mail headers (greatly 
abridged on my site) and at least satisfied myself as to it's 
authenticity as a message from the kpmg.com domain. in addition, 
frank dunne has since been contacted (more than once, i suspect!) 
on this issue. 

3. despite what anything on their site might say, the email i
received makes plain that specifically what they're objecting
to is that i am providing a hyperlink to the homepage at
http://www.kpmg.com. additionally, i have never to the best
of my recollection 'deep-linked' to anything within the
kpmg.com domain. 

4. on the face of it, this email seems entirely unrelated in
scope to the issue of corporate anthems, and my hosting of
the kpmg anthem on that site. an mp3 file which is currently
offline anyway due to bandwidth constraints. it's quite
amusing to me that an organisation like kpmg is prepared
to demonstrate it's lack of judgement not once (re: that
godawful but heartfelt anthem) but twice (displaying
a staggering lack of understanding of the web).  

5. some other people have mused as to whether this /is/ stupidity,
or perhaps a very subtle attempt at memetic engineering and
viral marketing. a perfectly reasonable thing to muse, of course.
for my own part, i strongly doubt that the latter is the case. 
besides which; whether kpmg want people to link to them, or whether
they resolutely don't - their wishes (either way) in no way
alter the fact that there's a conversation to be had here. 
whether a large corporation wants me to link them or not, 
if i think there's an issue to be discussed i'll provide a link
if i want to, or not provide one if i dont. their desires
have very little impact on the content i choose to add to
my personal website. also; kpmg are a rather large organisation.
one assumes (based on the market they're in, as much as anything)
that they don't need to resort to such things. and i would doubt
that the level of negative comment and bad publicity generated
would imply that 'this is what they wanted'. the hits are coming
through as much to my own site here, i suspect, as to kpmg.com.
  
6. much has been made of the uri included in franks email signature. 
i am assured that this seemingly broken link points (for reasons
best known to the author of the email) to a page on the kpmg
intranet. which i'm told contains the 27 page document on web
linking policy. ("it actually seems to be taken very seriously"). 



..time passes...


     ...chrisr enjoys his weekend...


   ...(for the most part)...


       ...chrisr buys some very silly trousers...


...gandalf paces up and down...



monday (eventually) arrives. 



the amount of internet traffic routed through my flat began to
rise well above that of a typical monday. whenever i do logfile
analysis, i tend to do so in realtime. so i watched a couple of
referrers race past. 

jon was the first to link to the email exchange on my site
[http://www.moreawayoflife.org]

then i got 'bagged' by tom, who has done much to ensure that every
possible byte of bandwidth that might otherwise be used for, ooh,
picking up my email, lifting source code for office use or
backing up files, was otherwise utilised. 
[http://www.plasticbag.org]  

next i got metafiltered, where an interesting thread took place;
[http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/12831#comment]

then i got kottked;
[http://www.kottke.org]

and on tuesday, i got fucked;
[http://www.fuckedcompany.com]

in reference to kpmg pud at fc uses the word 'fucknozzles', which
i'll definitely be adding to my general workday lexicon. 


fucknozzles.



there are now a great number of other referrers. 

in the lsat 36 hours the single 'jnl00036.html' page on my webserver
has received *well* in excess of 120,000 hits. i'm sure that this number
would be even higher had my meager server, sat inches from the end of
my bed, or my now rather pathetic seeming leased line internet connection
been able to keep up with demand. the server collapsed under the load
at around lunchtime on tuesday. the failover immediately took over and
then crashed itself shortly afterwards. 

media enquiries have started to trickle in. gen is being a trouper in
dealing with most of the initial enquiries; answering most of the basic
questions and bringing to my attention only those things that i might
be interested in. top marks go to those enterprising journo's who have
actually taken the trouble to read the 'contact chrisr' section of
my site. part of the reason that this posting is so (goddamned) long
is that the time spent in writing it will be saved in answering
the same (goddamned) questions time and again. i've just spoken to
someone at wired news. (tom [of plasticbag.org] - you're a bitch!)
and i'm told that someone at the wall street journal is interested
in having a chat. i'm also told that frank dunne, when contacted
by phone, has no comment to make on this issue. which i think is fair 
enough.  

the weblogging community in particular seems to have really picked
up on this. it's not hard to understand why; to most webloggers
linking is *everything*. so something that seems to go against
the free-linking nature of blogdom (and the web generally) is
bound to evoke strong feeling. i've been following a lot of weblogs
today and the comments have amused, amazed and heartened me. a lot
of people have defiantly provided (often a comical number of) links
to kpmg.com. often with derisive or snide remarks. metafilter
declared; "lets make today 'link to kpmg day!'". 

go bloggers! go bloggers!



"thank you for your prompt attention to this matter."
-- frank dunne.

one suspects that this isn't quite what frank had in mind.



franks phone number was included in his original mail to me. 
i have heard that more than one person has sought to get
hold of him, either for reasons of journalistic due diligence
or to offer a basic lesson in how the web works. others have
emailed. thanks to everyone who has bcc'd me ;)


reluctantly i'm back in the familiar though almost forgotten
territory of dealing with the media. and with an amusing
out of control memescape. 

my feelings now are pretty much the same as they were during the
ascendancy of corpanthems; i find the whole thing quite amusing,
though can't take it too seriously. and there are a lot of interesting
aspects. most of which relate to the spectacle itself. the sudden
and staggering insurgency of traffic is quite thrilling. i'm seeing
hits from a huge range of different domains and parts of the world.
do feel free to stop by for a chat! 

though the novelty soon wears off when you can't log in to pickup your
email. on tuesday morning as things were hotting up i performed
a deft bit of hacking; connecting directly to my router and
adapting the traffic shaping so that my ssh connections received
a much higher priority than anything else. this meant that my
email and general administration became much smoother without
too greatly impacting the webserver. 



i had an amusing icq conversation with dan earlier this evening.
[http://www.danhon.com/ec]

his trademark calm acceptance often makes my life easier. as 
danhon.com is hosted from inside my flat i wanted to apologise
that his own website and email access were tortuous. he 
figures that i'm now exacting my revenge for his own overloading
of my internet resources when the online promo for the film
'a.i.' was hitting it's peak, and he was marshalling the troups
trying to crack the puzzle via his 'trail page'. 

dan: "we'll see who wins the war of the memes, mr. raettig :)"
chrisr: memefight!!! 



i love the fact that all of this rapidly mustered support, and
depth of feeling against kpmg has only been possible thanks to
the weblogging community and a lot of individuals choosing to
link to the page on my site, and to each other. if each of those
individuals had been forced to enter into formal linking agreements
with each other before putting hyperlinks in place, none of this
fuss would have occurred. for me one of the amazing things about
the web is the speed at which attention can be drawn to, and dialogue
had about, whatever issues are relevant to the moment. they're
ephemeral, and there'll be another one along in a minute. (i'm surprised
at how much coverage there has been of this, given the equally interesting
news about ginger/it). but i really believe that this is a strength
of this medium.  


tangent...
i want a segway! i want a segway!


as many people have been forced to accept - some more readily than others
(hello to the scientologists!)  the web's medusa affect is hard to
counter. once something has been placed on the web, there is will remain.
if you lop off one of the heads, another will grow. fight for the removal
of one node, and a mirror springs up. with corpanthems and now with
me linking to http://www.kpmg.com, this is simply the way it works. 
as a direct result of frank dunne's email to me, there are now
a significant number of other unauthorised hyperlinks to kpmg.com. 


i know i should shut up when i find myself wanting to say things like
'i remember when', but things used to be so much more straightforward. 
in february bt go to trial against prodigy as ther first step in
trying to enforce their 'patent on hyperlinking'. depending on how
that develops, this might all seem very tame indeed.


meanwhile my legal team is set to stun, as a precautionary measure. 
and i've inverted the deflector array, so hopefully the webserver
can weather wednesday. i picked a fine week to give up solvents. 


it'll all blow over in due course, of course. 

meanwhile i shall await my 'second notice' with mild interest. and 
return to mud code patching and the serious business of preparing
a nice warm mug of soup. 

...and on it goes...

PGP signature