An article in this month’s Time asks why Abba has gained sudden popularity. Her answer should make us all worry (or perhaps just laugh)… “This capitulation is perhaps a more important moment in U.S. history than it first appears. I have a theory: a country enjoy’s Abba’s music in inverse relation to is own global significance.”

A New York Times article today reveals that Obama has 300 foreign policy advisers. This leaves only one thing to be said… THIS IS OBAMA!

Bad English translations from Chinese have long been a comic favorite. One I like is a menu that offers stir-fried Wikipedia (does it let you edit your own meal?). Another great one I recently came across is a Chinese restaraunt called “Translate Server Error“. Oops.

Personally I find these errors not only hilarious but also endearing. However, the Chinese government is trying to get rid of all these mistranslations prior to the Beijing Olympics. And some of them are certainly offensive enough that it’s good they’re hunting them down. For instance, a handicapped bathroom gets translated as a “Deformed Man Lavatory.”

But perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way. Wired has a great article that suggests that this Chinglish may not be wrong at all, but instead simply a new variety of English. They cite a surprising fact: “By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language [English].”

In the US, we tend to talk more about Spanglish. The response to which is often remarkably similar from Spanish and English speakers alike. I just spent 3 months in Madrid, and there was the same sort of worry about Spanglish “degrading” the language that sometimes gets talked about here. Personally, I think we need to accept that languages evolve, always have and always will. Better to go along for the ride, then fight it. Wired ends their article quite controversially: “Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.” What do you think?

“We can make your email better.” No, really. I can just picture the reader rolling their eyes as they immediately hit delete. It is incredibly hard to write an email selling a product and not have it sound like spam (of course maybe an email selling something is by definition spam, but I’d like to think not).

What if you could make people’s work easier, but you need give five minutes of their time to do it? The answer, it seems, is that you don’t. Logitech did a study that found that users typically have six applications open in their computer at any given time, and generally will only stick in one window for 50 seconds. Not that this should be surprising to any of us, as I write this I have more than the average six applications open and I’m beginning to think my four-year-old nephew has a better attention span than I as I flit between them. Actually, I’m lucky if you’re even still reading this.

So here’s the rub. My job this summer is to try to sell Email Center Pro, which is actually (not that I’m biased), a great product. Seriously, it solves a lot of small business email woes (again I picture the rolling of the eyes, but maybe I’m being overly sensitive). The problem is I can’t explain it well to anyone in less than fifty seconds. Does it make the product unsellable? Can we only sell products that fit our short attention span culture? I’d like to think not, but it certainly is giving me lots of trouble. Hard enough trying to sell a product by catchphrase, but this one doesn’t reduce well to a simple slogan (or maybe we just haven’t thought of it yet).

Are there other products out there that could solve some of our problems, but we just can’t be bothered to take the five minutes to hear about them?

If you’ve got a suggestion, I’d love to hear it. But only if I can read it in fifty seconds