|
| Wednesday, July 3, 2002 |
 |
Note to everybody 
| | I'm still slogging through the email backlog in slo-mo. It's kind of a random process, and some e-babies are at risk of going out with the spamwater. Anyway, that's my pre-5th (when I get back to work) disclaimer. Stay cool and safe. |
Frontiers of Value Subtraction
Markets want to be worthfull
| | Over in Objectionabe Content, Jim offers a pro-market rebuttal to Bruce Sterling's Information Wants to be Worthless, which ran a few months back during SXSW. Jim even takes issue with my own glowing review of Bruce's piece, which I called "an approximately perfect piece of writing." (Aside: Jim, spell my name right. Thanks.) I hadn't picked up on Bruce's apparent antipathy to markets and business in general, but hey: Jim's here to help. And he makes a buncha good points. |
Layne change
| | It has always been this site's tradition to go dark at least once a year. In good years, it goes dark for months at a time. But this hasn't been a good year, as the losers holding worthless stock can tell you ... if they can even form words between their horrible gasping sobs. |
| | The bar has been raised when it comes to being an American Loser. You got problems, poochie? Tell it to the family burying a martini-shaker full of construction dust in lieu of daddy's body. Tell it to the elderly couple who actually paid attention to the jabberducks on CNBC and put their life savings on WorldCom. Tell it to the hundreds of people who watched their houses burn down thanks to fire-bugs employed as firefighters. Tell it to some unlucky Muslim sitting in solitary today while a Jeebus-freak nutcake runs the Justice Department as actual terrorists eat at Pizza Hut and plot the destruction of DisneyWorld. |
| | You need Big Heap Problem to get a rise out of anyone today. Satan himself could burst from your lawn and impale your teen-aged daughter with his combination pitchfork-penis-DustBuster in front of a dozen Network News cameramen, and they wouldn't even look your direction. Nah, they can't be bothered. They're focused on the pretty house across the street, where a real devil made off with the little girl. |
| | He also goes into the irony reduction project we call the Blogosphere: |
| | Tonight, my wife found an interesting story about controlling the flatulence of cows using kangaroo anti-flatulence genes. She saw it on the wire section of a Florida news site. Because she's a smart news consumer, it only took her a few seconds to discover the story was a month old. That's what we're up against, bloggy buddies and journo-bigshots. For 150 years, wire reporters have been meeting their quotas by recycling old news sitting around the office. But now any weirdo can blog the same stuff. And the audience can quickly find out if it's new or just a Sunday night filler piece. |
| | As journalism continues to get real on a massive scale, this filler-grade stuff is the "professional" shit that gets put out of business, folks. Not the freaking New York Times. Nope: the Times gets bigger. So do the Wall Street Journal and all the other first-tier bigtime papers. Same with trade pubs: anything so good, specialized or both that you love reading it over coffee, on the train or in the can. Yep, print will continue to rock, and to pull advertisers and readers toward each other. Y'know why? Because you can turn the page. For the most part, it's opt-in for both sides. You might have to sift through ads to get to editorial stuff, but you don't have to sit through fifteen minutes of it just to see or hear twelve minutes of "news," about 50% of which isn't. |
World Cup Football Fever Explained
| | I believe this puts football madness in terms most American men can understand. |
Retrowarwalking
The obvious becomes apparent
| | Thanks to Kevin for the link. Also for pointing to this pile of good sense from Janis Ian, whom I first saw perform ("Society's Child" and "Janie's Blues") at the Electric Butterfly in the East Village when she was fifteen and about half the size of her own guitar. That was two years, presumably, before she lived through the inspiration of her subsequent hit, "At Seventeen." |
Blogging has surely joined the mainstream
| | when Peggy Noonan lists it among The Lights That Didn't Fail us. She's got it right up there with the U.S. Military, Cops & Firemen, and The American Dream. |
Why not allow scrolling UP to the U? Just a thought.
Congrats, big guy
| | Back in the Black is the cover story of the latest Fast Company. It's about Dale Fuller and Borland. Dale is one of my favorite CEOs (and it isn't just because he's one of the very few who have actually taken my consulting advice). What he and the rest of the folks at Borland have done over the last several years is just terrific, especially considering how down-and-out they were, back in the midst of the dot-com boom. |
Maybe they could give the guy an old Compaq or something
The government that governs least, blogs best
| | So I see by Matt that Phil Windley, the CIO of the State of Utah not only has a Radio blog, but is actually deploying wi-fi all over the freaking place, and even approves of warchalking, adding (by his blog), I have to come down in the less is more camp. The icons need to be kept simple and relatively few if we expect them to be used. |
Kynance 1, Entire World Telco Establishment, 0
The most interesting item
ThumbsUp
| | Scott Heiferman, whose creation MeetUp is, hunted me down at the eThePeople (another terrific effort) launch last Thursday in New Yawk, and we got a bit of hang-time there and at the party that followed a few blocks away. It wasn't enough. We'll get more, I'm sure. So will everybody, with everybody else. That's how convivial MeetUp is. Just amazing. |
Who am we?
| | Digital Identity: This is the third state of identity; a bridge that crosses the chasm between the virtual and real worlds; bringing with it a level of trepidation as it adds trustworthiness and accountability to virtual behavior. This identity is both persistent and malleable. |
Superterranian Vacation Greens
| | Today, on her birthday, Sheila Lennon, of Subterranean Homepage News fame, has joined the growing ranks of BigPub journalists with off-paper blogs of their own. Hers is Lennon2, also titled The Reader, which she's tapping out on her vacation, already. Dig it. |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
