“For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.
“However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.”
If you are a government agency who uses Login.gov, or if you are a U.S. citizen who has a Login.gov account, I’m not sure about the future of the service.
Back in November 2023, I wrote a post that included the three letters “18F.” Specifically:
Obviously there are a number of private companies (over 80 last I counted) that provide secure access to information, but Login.gov is provided by the government itself—specifically by the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services. Agencies at the federal, state, and local level can work with the GSA TTS’ “18F” organization to implement solutions such as Login.gov.
Now perhaps I’m, um, biased, but I happen to think that identity verification, whether performed by a public entity, is kinda sorta important.
This is from the executive director of the 18F, the digital services agency within the General Services Administration (GSA) that develops open-source tools to improve digital services across the federal government.
“I am the Executive Director of 18F and 18F’s longest running employee- I have been at 18F for 10 years. You may not have heard of us, but last night proved that we are powerful. The way the administration ran to get rid of us under the cover of night and shut us down without warning proves that they were scared. They are too afraid to even speak to us.”
The General Services Administration has eliminated its 18F program, an internal team of tech consultants and engineers that develops open-source tools to improve digital services across the federal government.
The announcement, which came overnight, is the latest in the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to slash the federal workforce. It was foreshadowed weeks ago when Elon Musk, who’s become a highly influential and controversial voice in the White House, tweeted that the decade-old program had been “deleted.”
At this point I am not sure how this affects future updates to Login.gov. As far as I know the service itself remains operational.
I’m a member of a local Facebook “news” group, and the group just emphatically stated that expression of opinions is NOT allowed in that group.
Because facts are free of bias. (Supposedly. I should address that topic in another post.)
Because this post includes two contentious opinions, it’s no surprise that I will NEVER share this post in that local news group. Their loss.
Actually the post is off-topic for the news group anyway. But as you will see, it is entirely on-topic for Bredemarket. I’ll explain, after I discuss a couple of songs and their singers.
Two Facts and One Opinion About “Girl from the North Country”
“Girl from the North Country” is a Bob Dylan song, which he started writing in 1962 while in England. The song was recorded in New York in 1963 and released that same year on the album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
I care about Dylan’s cover of his own song, released several years later on the 1969 album “Nashville Skyline.” But Dylan had a special guest on this album: Johnny Cash.
Here are two facts about the 1969 version:
Bob Dylan has a distinctive voice.
Johnny Cash has a distinctive voice.
These are facts, not opinions, since I am not casting a value judgement on whether they are any good at singing. For the record, I love Bob Dylan’s solo songs, and I love Johnny Cash’s solo songs.
Now my opinion: the 1969 version of “Girl from the North Country” is an unmitigated disaster, because the distinctive voices do not blend at all.
If you’ve never heard this version of the song, let me provide a play-by-play account.
The song begins with Dylan and Cash strumming their guitars, accompanied by a backing band of Nashville stars. (Not Starrs.)
Dylan then sings the first verse, in a lower key than his original version, and the listeners were introduced to the newest version of Bob Dylan. Shed of a rock band, he has not returned to his early folk days, but appears in a new version of a peaceful, satisfied country crooner. More versions of Dylan were to follow.
Then we get the second verse, in which Johnny Cash picks up the story about the girl. Cash himself appears in a new guise, having moved beyond the Memphis rockabilly sound and the horn-infused “Ring of Fire” sound. Cash now entered a period in which he associated with people such as Dylan who were leap years away from both traditional country and the newer countrypolitan sound. Cash, like Dylan, would continue to travel all over the musical map, gaining fame at the end of his life by covering Nine Inch Nails.
Back to 1969. After Cash sings the second verse, Dylan returns to sing the third. Everything is going fine so far.
Then (again, in my opinion) all hell breaks loose at the 1:52 mark in the song, because now the two sing together.
Sort of.
Cash starts singing the fourth verse, Dylan joins in a second later, and then they kinda sorta sing the words of the fourth and fifth verses at kinda sorta the same time, with some harmonizing—some intentional, some unintentional when they couldn’t hit the notes. Hear the result on YouTube.
Now I will admit that my negative opinion of the Dylan-Cash duet on “Girl of the North Country” is not universal. A high school friend who shall remain anonymous (just call her “Editor Extraordinaire” and old school Rick Dees fan) thinks this version is charming. I find it amusing in a not-so-good way.
As far as I’m concerned, this collaboration didn’t work.
Which brings us to Christina Aguilera.
Three Facts and One Opinion About “Birds of Prey”
In 2010 Aguilera released her sixth album, “Bionic,” a massive 18-track album featuring a more electronic sound and numerous collaborations with Nicki Minaj, Sia, Linda Perry, and others.
I care about the Deluxe edition, with an even more massive total of 23 tracks.
One of which was co-written and produced by the (then) four members of the UK band Ladytron. As OC Weekly (R.I.P.) documented at the time, Aguilera was a fan of the quartet:
Ladytron followers were startled to learn that Christina Aguilera was not only a fan, but had also already worked with the band on a variety of songs to be released in the near future.
“We went in with no expectations; the whole thing was a massive surprise,” explains Wu. “But it was incredible. She was so musically talented, a vocalist who really knows her voice. The first takes sounded really amazing, and while we’d made demos, it was only when her voice was on them that it all came to life.
One of the songs was “Birds of Prey.” Not to be confused with “Bird of Prey” or “Sunset (Bird of Prey),” the Aguilera-Ladytron version builds upon the usual Ladytron vocal delivery from Helen Marine and Mira Aroyo by adding Christina Aguilera to the mix.
Which brings me to my three facts about this song:
Christina Aguilera has a distinctive voice, with a four-octave range that she frequently exercises to the fullest.
Helen Marnie has a distinctive voice, featured as the light “singing voice” of Ladytron.
Mira Aroyo has a distinctive voice, whose spoken word delivery blends with Marnie’s in many classic Ladytron songs. (For example, “Seventeen.”)
In my opinion, this vocal collaboration—unlike the Dylan-Cash one mentioned earlier—works out beautifully. Aguilera naturally opens the song (it’s her album after all), but as the song progresses you hear Marnie lightly chiming in and Aroyo whispering, building up to the closing of the song. Hear it here.
Again, this opinion is not universal—Aroyo in particular is an acquired taste—but the combination seems to work.
But what do “Girl from the North Country” and “Birds of Prey” have to do with B2B sales—whoops, I mean collaboration? And Bredemarket?
The art of collaboration
Bredemarket’s services are built upon the principle that I work together with my clients. My process includes a lot of references to “Bredemarket and you,” because we are both involved in every step, from the seven questions I address at the beginning to the iterative drafts and reviews that occur throughout.
But that isn’t the only way to manage a project, as I noted in June 2023. There are two others.
The first approach is to yield all control to the expert. You sit back, relax, and tell your content marketing consultant to do whatever they want. They provide the text, and you pay the consultant with no questions asked. The content marketing consultant is the pilot here.
The second approach is to retain all control yourself. You tell the content marketing consultant exactly what you want, and exactly what words to say to describe your best-of-breed, game-changing, paradigm-shifting, outcome-optimizing solution. (That last sentence was painful to write, but I did it for you.) The content marketing consultant follows your exact commands and produces the copy with the exact words you want. You are the pilot here.
So which of these two methods is the best way to create content?
Yes, I broke a cardinal rule by placing an undefined acronym in the blog post title.
99% of all readers probably concluded that the “NPE” in the title was some kind of dangerous drug.
And there actually is something called Norpseudoephedrine that uses the acronym NPE. It was discussed in a 1998 study shared by the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health. (TL;DR: NPE “enhances the analgesic and rate decreasing effects of morphine, but inhibits its discriminative properties.”)
From the National Library of Medicine.
But I wasn’t talking about THAT NPE.
I was talking about the NPEs that are non-person entities.
A particular freelance copywriter holds similar beliefs, so she was shocked when she received a rejection notice from a company that included the following:
“We try to avoid employing people who use AI for their writing.
“Although you answered ‘No’ to our screening question, the text of your proposal is AI-generated.”
There’s only one teeny problem: the copywriter wrote her proposal herself.
(This post doesn’t name the company who made the false accusation, so if you DON’T want to know who the company is, don’t click on this link.)
Face it. (Yes, I used that word intentionally; I’ve got a business to run.) Some experts—well, self-appointed “experts”—who delve into the paragraph you’re reading right now will conclude that its use of proper grammar, em dashes, the word “delve,” and the Oxford comma PROVE that I didn’t write it. Maybe I’ll add a rocket emoji to help them perpetuate their misinformation. 🚀
Heck, I’ve used the word “delve” for years before ChatGPT became a verb. And now I use it on purpose just to irritate the “experts.”
The ramifications of a false accusation
And the company’s claim about the copywriter’s authorship is not only misinformation.
It’s libel.
I have some questions for the company that falsely accused the copywriter of using generative AI to write her proposal.
How did the company conclude that the copywriter did not write her proposal, but used a generative AI tool to write it?
What is the measured accuracy of the method employed by the company?
Has the copywriter been placed on a blocklist by the company based upon this false accusation?
Has the company shared this false accusation with other companies, thus endangering the copywriter’s ability to make a living?
If this raises to the level of personal injury, perhaps an attorney should get involved.
From imgflip.
A final thought
Seriously: if you’re accused of something you didn’t do, push back.
After all, humans who claim to detect AI have not been independently measured regarding their AI detection accuracy.
And AI-powered AI detectors can hallucinate.
So be safe, and take care of yourself, and each other.
When marketers write content for Chief Information Security Officers, we need to ensure they’re listening. The content needs to speak to their concerns. Understanding their emotions helps us to do that.
Tapping into their emotions helps to ensure the CISOs are paying attention, and that the CISOs are not dismissing our content as unimportant and unworthy of their attention. (See what I did there, dear marketer?)
Are our prospects listening to us?
I’ve talked about emotions and content before. My approach is fairly simple, identifying the emotions encountered at two stages of the customer journey:
The negative emotions faced at the “problem” stage. Perhaps fear, anger, or helplessness.
The positive emotions faced at the “results” stage, after you have provided the customer with the solution to their problem. This could be the happiness or satisfaction resulting from hope, accomplishment, or empowerment.
What do CISOs fear?
I’m reworking a client piece targeted to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), and I needed to re-examine the things that keep CISOs up at night. I started with a rudimentary list.
Cyberattacks. (Duh.)
Technological complexity.
Resource constraints.
Corporate liability.
Job security.
A good list—well, I think so—but is it good enough? (Or big enough?) The elements are rather abstract, since you can discuss concepts such as “resource constraints” without FEELING them.
What do CISOs really fear?
Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is (literally) based upon physiological (survival) and safety needs. Can I translate the abstractions above into something more primal?
Loss of all our information, leaving us dumb and helpless.
Confusion and bewilderment in (as the AI bots are fond of saying) “the ever-changing landscape.”
Overwhelming burnout from too much to do.
No money after being sued into oblivion.
Wandering the streets homeless and starving after losing your job and your income.
How should we express those fears?
Now there are various ways to express those primal fears. I could go for maximum effect (will the wrong decision today leave you homeless and starving tomorrow?), or I could write something a little less dramatic (are you vulnerable to the latest cyber threats?). The words you choose depend on your company’s messaging tone, which is why I recently reshared my original brand archetypes post from August 2021. A Sage will say one thing, a Hero another.
Why?
Anyway, thank you for reading. Writing this helped me, and maybe it gave you some ideas. And if you want to know more about the seven questions I like to ask before creating content (emotions being the 7th), read my ebook on the topic.
When a Bredemarket client was reviewing my draft, the client asked about my use of parentheses around individual letters.
“what is the purpose of the “()” in the “(L)eading organizations…” and “(G)en AI…“?”
So I explained.
“I would have to confirm, but presumably the original text said “leading” and “gen.” To properly use the quote as a partial quote I capitalized the words, but enclosed them in parentheses to indicate I modified the original text.”
“When writers insert or alter words in a direct quotation, square brackets—[ ]—are placed around the change. The brackets, always used in pairs, enclose words intended to clarify meaning, provide a brief explanation, or to help integrate the quote into the writer’s sentence. A common error writers make is to use parentheses in place of brackets.”
Well, at least I’m not the only one. Lewis also provided several examples, including this one:
“[D]riving is not as automatic as one might think; in fact, it imposes a heavy procedural workload [visual and motor demands] on cognition that . . . leaves little processing capacity available for other tasks” (Salvucci and Taatgen 107).
I just corrected my client’s piece before publication, and will try to remember to use brackets as needed in all pieces day forward. I’m not going to go back through the hundreds of blog posts here and correct them.
But I provided external samples of what I do anyway: two client short data sheets, three client long data sheets, three Bredemarket data sheets, two client landing pages, one Bredemarket landing page, and two other samples.
So I will share one of the landing pages with you, but not a client one. This is one of mine, for Bredemarket’s identity/biometric prospects.
I don’t know that Oosto or even Evolv could have prevented this determined hospital attack in York, Pennsylvania.
“A man carrying a handgun and zip ties took hostages inside a Pennsylvania hospital on Saturday, fatally shooting a responding police officer and wounding five others before he was killed by police, officials said.
“The gunman entered UPMC Memorial hospital in York, Pennsylvania, on Saturday morning and went directly to the intensive care unit, where he took staff members hostage…”
An unsolicited Instagram message offering paid placement in NY Weekly Magazine, from an Instagram account with no visible connection to the magazine, and only 1 follower.
Oh, and don’t respond to Sophi for the offer. Respond to a DIFFERENT Instagram account.
And the pitch? For me to appear in “Top 30 Female Leaders to Look Out For in 2025.” Doesn’t Sophi know that President Musk doesn’t allow that stuff any more?
I also get Instagram pitches to promote myself to Canadian users.
Meta is a worse cesspool than Microsoft (LinkedIn).
Bredemarket 