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Speaking of Big J journalism
Eurocell strategy?  Question: when I'm in Europe for a week, what should I do, if anything, for cell service? I assume there are companies that lease GSM phones for a short while. I'd like to line something up ahead of time, if I can. A short, free course in Marketing 401 I just got an ggressive and unwelcome telemarketing call from AT&T. We're compariing rates in your area... I usually try to disengage gracefully from these kinds of calls, but they guy wouldn't stop, so I hung up on him. Earth to AT&T: How would you like it if hundreds of your employees ran around spray-painting "rude assholes" on the walls of your buildings and on every surface where your logo appears? Guess what: making aggressive unsolicited calls to millions of homes has exactly the same effect. If you think your brand is worth something, please fucking act like it. (By the way, I while I don't use AT&T for my home phones — I use a cheap and good no-name that Dean set me up with — I do use them for my cell phone, and they're the best of the lot.) Ironologeury Jonathan: How ironic is it that the government is busy sticking Carnivore boxes all over the place to they can evesdrop on every bit of information that crosses the internet, but they can't actually prove when one federal agency sent an email to another one? Just playing my part as a microbe Dawn tells us that Rolling Stone told her (by way of Amy Reiter in Salon) that Natalie Portman's Barbies had sex with each other in the tub. I think this is good for Natalie's image, even if, y'know, she's still kind of squeaky. Blogrolodexterity N.Z. Bear has a very complicated way of bringing order to the chaos of his massive blogrolodex, which he sorts, in a darwinian link-eat-link kind of way, into "Higher Beings," "Mortal Humans," "Large mammals," "Rodents," "Lowly Insects," and "Insignificant Microbes," which together comprise the Blogosphere Ecosystem. I'm in the last category, probably because a few Higher Beings and Mortal Humans link to me. Blog gods Dave and Ev don't make the list at all. (Hey, I'll settle for Google's opinion on the matter.) Meanwhile, Dave and pals have created the much less labor-intensive Weblog Neighborhood. I need to find a way to make it work on this blog here, since my blogroll is getting a little stale. Semi-unrelated: Eric Olsen on permalinks. By the way, I wasn't that familiar with N.Z. Bear before Lynn clued me in. Songlines "You're building castles in the sky, I'll move in with you by and by..." Those are lyrics from a song by my friend Freddy Herrick. Reminds me of the best line from the just-completed Geek Cruise. Adding a corollary to the "Neurotics build castles in the sky, but psychotics live in them" line (for which Freddy claims at lest indirect credit), Andy Gore said, "New Yorkers build castles in the sky. Then they complain about the landlord." Other than Microsoft is Evil, yada yada? I'm liking Mozilla more every day, but I still use IE for the stuff that only works on it. Yesterday, however, IE became useless after I used it while trying to access the Net wirelessly from Vancouver International Airport. Since then I have been redirected the airport login page every time I try to go to Google, which is my default page. Changing the default page to something else makes no difference. My copy of IE now thinks http://www.google.com ought to be http://66.119.164.1/login_user.html. (Irony: the Airport's system didn't work anyway.) Anybody know what's going on? You are about to perform an illegal operation Marek: Visitors to this Soapbox site are warned not to visit as it might crash your brain. And it's a serious risk. He says strong shit. Also funny shit. So does Eric Raymond, who threatens to become the most powerfull warblogger of them all. He's fearless, felicitously indelicate and helluva writer. A sample:
Thanks to blogs, it's already happening with journalism. Blogs are free-range journals, and bloggers are free-range journalists. That's why there is more good news and commentary within two clicks of this post than in all the morning newspapers and broadcast news reports put together. And I'm not saying this to knock mainstream journalism, or to say there isn't stuff you can only find there. (That's why I still get the morning papers and listen to NPR.) I'm just giving full credit to the abundance of journalism growing wild, free and linked all over the Commons. It's fucking huge. [Later...] I should clarify my dislike of the term "distributed." It has nothing to do with Jonathan's context, but rather with our tendency to describe all of business in terms of shipping metaphors. We wrote about this in Cluetrain and I've beat it to death elsewhere. Running the Commons credits If you read nothing else today, or this week, read Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk, which Cory just blogged at BoingBoing. And give a big thanks to both of them for bringing us back to first causes, first principles. You know what it's like when you hear a great song for the first time — one that makes you want to pound the steering wheel, cry, or jump up and dance? That's the way this piece reads. There are quotable one-liners in nearly every paragraph:
From the Goofy But Cool Dept. This may have been blogged while I was gone; but anyway, I love Tinsel Town Club. Thanks to Kevin for the link. Jism? Jonathan Peterson: Death to Blogs. A sample:
At the end he asks "What obvious things have I missed?" I'm not sure it's obvious, but I do think it's important to recognize that blogs are, in the literal sense of the term, journals. And what we're doing with blogs is, just as literally, journalism. No matter what else we say about it, that's the durable ism it is. Off the road again We're back. It's good to be home. Next stop, next week: München.
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