|
| Monday, October 14, 2002 |
 |
Western Lights 
| | If you live in the West, look up above the horizon to the West or Southwest for a stellar light show from the rocket that just took off from Vandenberg. Amazing. |
| | And to Sony for making a bitchin' camcorder: the PC-110. The viz is digital video. Climbed up on the roof with the kid and just stood in awe. |
| | Now me'n the kid are wondering if we got the first pic up on the Web: 7:35pm. Probably not, but nice to get it up real fast. |
| | The blue glow is still up there, by the way. Beautiful. |
We need an all-user drive to get unstuck
| | The connected computer is fast approaching ubiquity. We've created cyberspace, but we haven't yet really colonized it because we lack the organizing principle to do so. Having abolished time and space, nothing remains but identity. How we project our identities into cyberspace is the central riddle. Until we solve that, we can't move on. |
Halley does Coke
Switch hitting
| | Microsoft paid for a group of bloggers to attend its Mobius 2002 product briefings this weekend. This raises a serious ethical question. I am not implying it is necessarily unethical for a blogger to accept a trip to Microsoft, just that it requires some thinking about the way companies might manipulate the blogger to get favorable coverage. Before this gets confrontational, I am not saying that bloggers are rank amateurs and that you should pay attention only to professional journalists, who, as a general rule, would not accept a trip at the expense of a company they were covering. |
| | He goes on to cover the whole Conflict Issue quite well, adding this about big-J ethics: |
| | Journalists are trained to be outsiders, even when they are getting inside. At the point that they start to interact as partners in the process of marketing (for good or ill, in that the express opinions rather than simply report the technical facts), they are not journalists anymore. They've either graduated to PR, to writing columns in which they express explicit opinions, they are activists, and they might start a newsletter. But, they don't take the company's money, its largesse in the form of hotel or airline expenses or otherwise while working as a journalist. The idea, albeit imperfectly realized in practice, is that there is as little conflict of interest as possible. Good columnists don't take expenses for these trips, either. I have never taken a paid trip, except to give a speech once, for the U.S. State Department to address the Malaysian Securities Commission, at a time I was writing two columns about investing. I've turned down speaking fees from companies many times, but do speak at companies occasionally. |
| | Well, I'm a journalist. I'm also a speaker. I make money both ways — and sometimes also, like Mitch, by consulting. |
| | Mobius 2002 was a speaking gig for me. Maybe I was hired so the company could spin me in some way, or use me to spin the crowd, but I doubt it. In fact, I got the clear impression that it was the other way around. I'm sure Beth Goza (whom I met on a plane headed to Gnomedex in August) brought me in because she knew I'd be challenging and contrarian (which I was). So were Jason Perlow and Chris Pirillo, who were also there (here's Chris's latest report). Jason is an editor for Linux Magazine and one of the prime movers behind Sharp's Zaurus, which runs on Linux and competes with Microsoft's Pocket PC PDAs. Neither are the kinds of guys that hold back their opinions; and both, like me, tend to gag on PR spinnage. I sat in a room (a bedroom, actually) where one of the top guys on Microsoft's Multimedia PC project showed off the HP version of the product while Chris grilled him (and the product) like a chef. In both cases I got the clear impression that the journalists were educating the Microsoft folks more than the other way around — and that this was a big part of what Mobius is about. But I was only there for our evening in the Home and for my speech in the morning. I wasn't there for any formal briefings (if there were any... I dunno). |
| | In any case, the event was clearly Beth's show, and was mouch more about her very catholic passion for geek toys than about any Microsoft agenda — unless that agenda was conversation: to inform and to be informed. Which, from what I could tell, it was. |
| | All the other attendees I met at the event were gadget freaks. Their sites and blogs were about gadget passions. From a markets-are-conversations perspective, bringing them together was good marketing. Gonzo, even. So was inviting me (Senior Editor of Linux Journal and Cluetrain co-author) to come up and speak, with no direction whatsoever about what to say (other than "whatever"), and with every right to expect that my rap wouldn't be anywhere close to the Microsoft company line. |
| | Frankly, it didn't occur to me to disclose in the blog that I was paid to speak. As both a journalist and as a speaker I am paid to tell the truth, share some insights and (quite often) make trouble. If I wasn't, I wouldn't do it. |
| | And hell, if it wasn't fun, I wouldn't do it either. |
Next blup: PopTech
A richness of embarrasments
Nice to see he's still at it
| | Although he doesn't blog, Michael Ventura's weekly Letters at 3AM columns are kindly archived by the Austin Chronicle. I hadn't read Ventura in years, although I had always liked his stuff. Seeking an old quote, I looked him up on Google, and voila. |
| | It turns out Ventura is a righteous critic of the upcoming Iraq War, by the way. If you're looking for a different drummer to march to, read his stuff. |
Speaking of Identity
| | [Note: read the last paragraph of this item before proceeding. It'll put the mistake in the middle two paragraphs in perspective.] |
| | If you're looking for evidentiary corollaries to the stuff I said about identities in my talk at DIDW, get some hang time with Vowell, Birnbaum and their many friends. |
Model misbehavior
| | It's easy to fail in e-business; what's hard is failing magnificently. |
| | The Big Five music recording companies have been transcendent in this respect. |
| | It nails the RIAA in fewer words than any other piece I've seen. |
| | Thanks to Kevin for the pointer. |
Consume, but not freely
Cruisin'
| | It's also an appeal for background poop on the subject of the keynote address I'll give on the boat: The Silent Majority: How Linux Got to Be Everywhere While Nobody Was Watching. It's about the story no big company wants to tell: that Linux adoption is rarely a top-down "strategy" but usually a bottom-up fait accompli. |
| | If you've got anything on the subject, add it to the article's comments section, or email me. |
Separated at birth?
| | Heard an interview with Richard Avedon this morning on NPR. While the accent was different, the qualities of his voice, and of his intelligence, reminded me of Don Norman. The resembance was so high that at first I thought Don was the one being interviewed. |
| | Like Don, Avedon sounds accomplished, authoritative and deeply insightful; yet not eager to make a big deal out of it. And even though neither are young men, both are also still open and curious about their work and what it means to the world. Listen with your eyes to the Norman's voice here and Avedon's voice here. Interesting, no? |
We interrupt this problem to bring you nothing at all
| | The home network is fucky this morning. Everything is rreeeaaalll ssslllooowwww. Not sure what the problem is, but I'll have to deal with it later. |
| | [Later...] Reparking the wifi base station on a stack of books (so it could look out the window at my office) seems to have done the job. |
| | While wifi is way cool and all, I'm still going to pull some CAT5 over here, so I've got Ethernet to the world as well. I'll need it anyway for the other computing stuff that doesn't have wifi. |
discuss
Copyright 2008 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
