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| Monday, October 29, 2001 |
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A miss 
| | I love Google, and think their approach to advertising is inspired. It comes closer than anything else I've seen on the Web to the ideal of demand-driven advertising (think: advertising I might even pay to see) long defined in print by classifieds. |
| | But their banner ad, which I just followed from Dan's blog, said something about "owning" words. |
| | I don't think so. Look me up on Google and you'll find the top item on the page is an ad for books at Amazon written by Doc Searls. I have no sense that Amazon owns my name. Nor do I have a sense that anybody owns anything other than that which is uniquely theirs. |
| | What the hell: it's a quibble. Maybe a better measure of the near-perfection I've come to expect of Google than of anything else. |
What it was
| | Rusty made JD's panel, at the ONA conference, which I was originally going to be in, until I found that I'd be on the water somewhere east of Florida. Rusty's write-up in Kuro5hin is wonderful. One excerpt: |
| | Who's the "author" of a conversation? |
| | Journalism, right now, operates as an industrial process. The reporter collects "raw material" from "sources," and "packages" it all up into a "product." This product is then "delivered" to "eyeballs." It's a very neat, very simple, very 19th century way of doing things. |
| | Why is it that when I look at any so-called "mainstream" news source online, all I see is a newspaper with pixels? |
Strong as irony
Frontage
| | For more than a week, we were out on the ocean — a bunch of geeks, fergoshsake (I'm on the phone right now with Rick Levine, talking about "friends and enemas," and I'm describing being dataless with geeks at sea as "lots of sphincters and no shit," present company included... the scatology just cascades away) — and we had no connectivity. At sea without a Net. |
| | CNN International, the video equivalent of lukewarm water on tap in the cabins, was like watching paint talk. No way it could compete with limitless food, swimming, and first-rate hang time with some very interesting folks all equally liberated from their daily datagrind. |
| | I'll be writing up the trip tomorrow for Linux Journal (look for it there). But the main thing I want to report is that I didn't miss the thousand-plus emails I couldn't get, about half of which (and I'm hardly exaggerating) turned out to be spam. It was great to go on a data fast, especially since so much of it now sticks in my mental craw. I feel mentally slimmer, more trim and agile. The data-filled obligations seem no less urgent, but far less complicated. |
| | So I guess it's good to be back. |
Backage
| | Sitting in United's Red Carpet Club in Miami at 6:12am, killing time while the email client downloads umpty hundreds of emails. |
| | The trip was a trip. More about it when we get back to the other coast. |
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