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| Thursday, December 6, 2001 |
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Nabbobery 
| | Preparing to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee where to get off today, Attorney General John Ashcroft lashed out at all who dare to uphold our bedrock rule of law as "voices of negativism." (A nattering nabob, moi?) |
| | Polls show terrorized Americans willing to subvert our Constitution to hold Soviet-style secret military trials. No presumption of innocence; no independent juries; no right to choice of counsel; no appeal to civilian judges for aliens suspected of being in touch with terrorists. |
| | This greased the way for what Safire later calls The sudden seizure of power by the executive branch, bypassing all constitutional checks and balances... |
| | I heard a couple minutes of Ashcroft's belligerent testimony this morning. I thought it was somewhere between paranoid and flat-out insane. |
| | By the way (for those of you who don't know), the parenthetical aside in that first paragraph refers to Safire's first claim to fame (or shame, depending on your point of view): when he was working as a speechwriter during the Nixon administration, he put the words "nattering nabobs of negativsm" in the mouth of Vice President Spiro Agnew. |
More clues
| | Yesterday I neglected to mention that Hanan Cohen, who queried me on the matter of secrecy around Segway, is in a good position to know what Cluetrain says about this and that. He translated the manifesto into Hebrew. And for that we are most grateful. |
Dear _____, We regret to say we no longer have any use for ourselves
| | . Newspaper and radio interviewers are primarily interested in featuring authors whose books are relevant to current events. |
| | . Overall, the media is reluctant to accept unsolicited materials via regular mail due to the threat of anthrax contamination. Email solicitation is ineffective unless it is coupled with mailing print media. |
| | . Book signings are being cancelled because of low foot traffic in book stores. |
| | . Book conferences are being cancelled due to low attendance based on the public's fears of flying and traveling long distances. |
| | In the best of times, the aforementioned media outlets showed little interest in showcasing the work of unknown authors. And now, with everyone's attention focused on the events related to the terrorist attack on September 11th and the threat of further attacks, the opportunity for a new author's book to receive any type of media coverage is virtually non-existent. Without media coverage, it's impossible to sell books. |
| | This outfit is in a deeper cave than Osama's. And their prospects are just as terminal. |
| | Let's help B!x' sister get this thing out, and then show these fools what real "media coverage" is about. |
Digging deeper
| | So he followed up by bringing Jennifer into the conversation. Her point-by-point response is all class. |
| | I don't have time to say more. Hope I will later today. Meanwhile, thanks to Mike for moving this thing along. |
| | [Later...] Okay. Clearly Jennifer's issue is with Big Media, and her perspective at CNET is a unique one — kind of midway between media giants like CNN, ABC, the NY Times and NPR (whose active audience dwarfs CNN's) and the countless new Web journals among which bloggers are a highly visible cabal. And her problem is mostly with the relationship between the BigMe content pumps (to borrow from Dave's BigCo label) and their millions of contented consumers. For those who would rather be viewers than users, the tube-to-potato relationship has ported nicely to the Net. She's right about all of that. |
| | But it's early. Extremely early. We're about two femtoseconds into the Big Bang here. |
| | Yesterday evening I was over at a friend's house. She's a real estate agent, and new to the world that opens up when you've got a nice new laptop and a fat-bandwidth pipe to the Net (in her case, a new iBook she uses wirelessly over a T1 at work, a fast cable system at home, and at various other places where WiFi signals are available). She's eager to get going on all kinds of stuff, but the range of What Can Be Done is almost scary. Meanwhile every weenie with more tech knowhow than hers is busy ladling programs onto her hard drive and telling her How It Oughta Be Done (including, of course, moi). That slows things down even more. But give her time and she has the power to become one scary-good real estate agent, and then some: an authority. That's what publishing power on the Web really gives you. "Reach," "audience," "hits," "traffic" and "stickiness" are all advertising-powered BigMo notions of value. Say interesting, knowledgeable stuff — or just ask good questions while talking out loud on the Web about your professional life — and point to others doing the same, and you've got something much more valuable than traffic. You've got respect. Very useful stuff, respect. |
| | In Cluetrain we said "networked markets are getting smarter faster than most companies." I think some kind of major intelligence crossover happens when the preponderant supply of intelligence comes from employees and customers rather than from the company's controlled internal sources. And damn few companies, especially big ones, have experienced that yet. Just wait. |
| | As that happens, professionals like my friend are going to be critically important. |
| | Over at the Cluetrain list, there's a collective critique going on, where folks are asking and answering questions about blogs, and where all this stuff is going. So I put myself in a critical frame of mind and started looking at the huge variety of interest categories that are not yet well-represented (or represented at all) in the blogging community, starting with real estate. (Aside: I just went to Google, looked up real estate weblog, and found a Platypus blog entry mentioning my blog in the #4 position. Amazing.) |
| | It's wide open. There should be blogs for every business category you can name. Every avocational obsession, too. Right now there isn't, by a very long shot. |
| | As for news (and the critiquing thereof), we've got J.D., Deborah, Jim Romenesko and a few others. We could use some more. So Jennifer: how about starting a blog, hm? |
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