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| Monday, September 19, 2005 |
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To toast Times Select, may I suggest some Amontillado? 
| | Question: Why give away online what you charge for in the daily paper, while charging for what becomes fishwrap tomorrow? The Times' answer is to charge for both op-ed writers (why op-ed and not the rest of the paper?) and fishwrap. |
| | This whole thing looks like an ugly political compromise between warring factions inside the paper. |
Markets are _________
| | What it comes down to, I think, is that Dave insists on a literal meaning for conversation on the one hand, while rejecting the metaphorical meaning suggested in Cluetrain on the other. |
| | He also gives extraordinary credit, I think, to marketers for commanding the attention of consumers (a term he uses thoughfully and deliberately), and insists we recognize the persistent asymmetries between corporations and marketers on one side and the rest of us on the other. He adds, |
| | There's more to life than marketing and competing. The real "consumers" in this marketplace are the companies and corporations and marketers in their hire who consume your attention and your authority. There is no "conversation" taking place, and none is possible. That's not a "bad thing," per se, no more than gravity is a "bad thing," but what negative effects accrue won't stop unless or until people begin to understand the nature of authority, their responsibility to themselves, human nature, and begin to assert their own authority over themselves and their attention. |
| | Maybe it just comes down to optimism vs. pessimism. Some of us look at the Net, and the platform for power(s) it provides to both supply and demand, and see lots of possibilities among which conversation (literal and metaphorical) is one among many. Dave looks at what we've been saying about that and responds, |
| | Saying "markets are conversations" or even that they "ought" to be, will no more save your ass than wishing away the law of gravity. |
| | He promises a better metaphor for markets. I'm looking forward to it. |
Some times the little things are bigger than they appear
| | Peter Rukavina: The wonderful irony is that, right in the middle of the hurricane, I had to made a DNS server change. I had no idea DirectNIC was in New Orleans, and blithely made the change unaware of the technical miracles that were holding the infrastructure I was using to do so together. |
Another way of helping the demand side supply itself
| | Kevin Bedell, our new Editor-in-Chief at Linux Journal, makes an interesting case for sticking Linux at the open ends of handy products such as this Linksys attached storage device. In other words, it's a great way to make your product adaptable by customers: If you allow them (and maybe even if you don't), your customer base will add capabilities to it that you never expected. They'll use the products for things you couldn't anticipate. They'll show you market needs you weren't aware of. |
| | Is there anything better to leverage than your own customers' inginuity? |
Living ends
| | Since then there have been the usual zero-sum doom & gloom predictions for the incumbent Live Web engines. Things always look bad for pioneers when a big mainstay company expands into their category. |
| | In a market growing as fast as this one, OR logic is less likely to prevail than AND. When you look at all the potential directions things need to grow, and how many services are conceivable, and how few of them are currently available, and how impossible it will be for any company (including Google) to do it all, it's hard to imagine any future where the pioneers have no room to maneuver and grow. |
| | By the way, I subscribe to lots of feeds of lots of searches, and do a lot of searching on all the Live Web engines. Most of them catch stuff the others miss, and miss stuff the others catch. Including Google. This is a good thing. |
Identifrication
A downer
| | I can see keeping press briefings "off the record" in embargoed or NDA'd conditions, where product plans are being disclosed. Same with customer meetings, which are private affairs by nature. The conditions in both cases are well understood by everybody, and have been for decades. But when you're inviting journalists (I won't make a disctinction between press and bloggers, since both write, or write for, journals) to a "conference" or a "forum" where lots of usual suspects (Scoble, Fallows, Diller) are speaking, and then valve everybody's value with restrictions like, "To ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly, no press coverage or blogging is permitted," you're contriving an environment where only enthusiasm (or other information-poor side effects) can escape. And get bad PR in the meantime. Not good. |
| | There's a reason why we say "open up" and close down", folks. Think about that before you restrict speech about your next conference. |
| | [Later...] That top link goes to Google's Zeitgeist O5 site, for which one needs an ID and password. For details go to Danny Sullivan's post here. |
Friendz in need...
| | No rush. Just a little encouragement. |
Back in the straddle again
| | Made it home around six yesterday evening. Wasn't a bad trip. Got to catch up on a bunch of podcasts, which was pretty easy in the U-Haul. The cab has about fifteen pockets, holders, containers, indented surfaces and other handy places to park or store the mess of electrophrenalia required both for listening to podcasts and for keeping a cell phone operative through a 400 mile trip. These include: cell phone, cell charger, Y-connector for the lighter socket, FM transmitter charger, FM transmitter, iPod and audio patch cable to acts as an antenna for the FM transmitter. The patch cable draped over the visor on the passenger side, only three feet from the truck's antenna, so reception was good and the sound was clear. Except for the KPIGs (one for Monterey Bay and one for San Luis Obispo and nearby parts of the Central Coast), a few small NPR affiliates (and their much smaller translator signals for valleys here and there), and the quickly-passed mess of noncommercials in Santa Cruz and Monterey, radio is pretty sucky once you leave the Bay Area. So I didn't miss much by tuning in to a Morning Coffee Notes, a pair of Daily Source Codes, parts of two On the Medias, a Gillmor Gang, a Roadhouse, a couple Open Sources and some other stuff I don't remember right now (there's branding for you). |
| | I wanted to 'cast back, but lacked a recording device. I stopped at the Best Buy in San Luis Obispo thinking I'd pick up an iRiver or something, but was put off by the fine Windows-only print on the packaging. Also by the packaging, which prevented any kind of pre-sale interaction with the product. I was tempted by a Creative unit on display (one of these, I think), but the UI was awful and I couldn't figure if it recorded or not. So I gave up and hit the road again. |
| | In the process I realized that on-the-road may end up being the best place for me to record podcasts, once I get the right recording device, microphone and vehicle. Right now I can use my Sony minidisk recorder with an old mike and dub it to .mp3 from analog audio (there's no easy way to convert from Sony's proprietary ATRAC codec to .mp3, even on Windows, which I won't use); but I'd rather use something I with more flexibility. It would be nice to have a Marantz PMD660, PMD671, or something like it; but they're a lot of money, so I think I'll wait. The car is another issue. Unless I'm in a quiet rental car, I'm usually driving the old Subaru, which is noisy even when the air conditioning works, which it doesn't right now (or, mostly, ever). |
| | Meanwhile, here at home, especially on a Monday morning, there's too much real work, so podcasting ratchets down the priority pole to the point where all the self-replacing obligations above it make sure it almost never gets done. |
| | Which is the answer to why I haven't been podcasting more. |
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