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| Monday, November 7, 2005 |
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Spammer SLAPPs around critics 
| | SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuite Against Public Participation, or a form of litigation filed by a large corporation or in some cases, an individual plaintiff to intimidate and silence a less powerful critic by so severely burdening them with the cost of a legal defense that they abandon their criticism. |
Not saying how many times I've grounded out, after pointing at the same damn stands
| | Doc Searls appears not to be paying attention, but watch how he points at the centerfield stands and then drives one over the wall in the bottom of the ninth. |
Why I'll always love William F. Buckley
| | The dude is wickedly smart, vastly educated, thoroughly principled, a wicked wit and helluva writer. Here's the whole kaboodle, in one paragraph, from a column titled Who Did What? |
| | An autobiographical illustration. When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens. |
| | Yet his closing punch moves like a finger in the dark, toward the button of a trap door: |
| | The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted. |
There's something not bloggy in Denmark
| | Jon Froda makes it rather clear that blogs ought to be blogs. There is a collective call to action against the cancer society to either "re-build" the sites or skip the name weblog. |
Markets are mud
| | ...blog attacks are particularly pernicious. Blog attacks are viral, meaning that even if you respond in a timely fashion, cross-linking and syndication means the original attack lives on in the wild, archived and cached in perpetuity to pop-up later or to slowly erode your standing. Attacks that possess "first mover advantage" will galvanize the debate against you. |
| | Bloggers would argue this is all OK. The Blogosphere creates an Adam Smith-style free market of ideas, where the ebb-and-flow of commentary and posting means "bad ideas" are dumped or fixed and "good ideas" thrive. BuzzMachine for example, reflected discontent with Dell¹s appalling levels of customer support. |
| | As with Adam Smith, though, so with the blogosphere: there is no such thing as a truly free market because people and events work the levers of power to produce certain results. |
| | In the case of blogging, companies promise to increasingly operate the levers of power. Business has recognized the potential that blogging has to shape markets and connect with new and existing customers. Blogging is becoming used by business in the way internet 1.0, email and IM were adopted. |
| | ...GQ expects growth in negative blogging, with posts sponsored anonymously and quoting only selected facts particularly in burgeoning markets like open source software where money, politics and egos clash. |
| | You doubt this? Look at advertising. You get good ads - like those encouraging you to drink milk or encouraging teens not to smoke. US business though thinks nothing of getting in the gutter, particularly car and drugs manufacturers who have a sad habit of knocking the competition with selected and unsubstantiated facts in their ads. Politicians also smear rivals using "independent" or paid-for proxies. |
| | Any of this sounding familiar? |
| | It goes on. The bottom line: |
| | The lesson is clear: he who keeps an eye on the blogging horizon and posts first, lasts longest. |
| | I dunno. You do good work. You talk to your customers, plus everybody else you can in the marketplace. You help your partners. You hire and retain people who are competent and excited about your company's work. You compete, invent, innovate, solve problems, disrupt or whatever else current Management Wisdom tells you to do. All that stuff is helped by blogging, infinitely more than any of it is threatened by blogging. |
| | Bonus thought: Blogging threatens nothing. Splogging, however, threatens blogging. |
Sets
| | A couple nights ago, I couldn't resist shooting a conjunction between the Moon and Venus that seemed to resemble a stretched out version of the flag of Turkey or Pakistan. The resulting shots, along with more sunrises. are now in this photo set. |
| | To see how I got to the shot above, start here and follow the links in the description text. |
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