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| Sunday, January 21, 2007 |
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One more reason to hate your cell phone company 
| | "go away while we deal with people who are paying us more". This is what customer relations has devolved to. Most people don't think about what is going on in these circumstances, but essentially two customers are being denied service that was paid for (not exactly cheap either!). I can only assume that because calls from other carriers generate more revenue, they are given priority over "in-house" calls. |
Where it isn't
| | If it seems odd to leave a place that has been so good to me, and to the blog, that's because it is. Time's editors were wonderfully supportive and never touched a word. I'm immensely grateful to them. They helped me add video and photography and a higher level of professionalism to the blog than I would ever have achieved on my own. They understood that marrying the new media to the old would be difficult, but they made it look easy. |
| | The Atlantic folks will have a harder time, because they lock up most of their editorial behind a subscription wall. Time doesn't. Bravo for Time. |
| | Naturally, readers wandered over to Atlantic.com, clicked around, ran into truncated articles saying the remainders are behind paywalls, and began to wonder about Andrew, who responded, |
| | Are you kidding? The answer is: Nope; nuh-huh; never; not even close; why would I ever do that? The Dish will be free as always and accessible to all - more accessible, once we implement a whole bunch of changes to expand and deepen the blog. Stay tuned. |
| | No, we're not kidding, Andrew. |
| | Locking up editorial only makes economic sense for current goods that are still selling on newsstands. Everything else — especially the archives — should be open and available both to readers and to Google and Yahoo search engine indexes, where (thanks to the @#$% paywall) they are currently invisible. |
| | "Atlantic Ubound", the column of items comprising the right quarter of Atlantic's home page, is all that's open on Atlantic's site. The rest of it all comes off as a tease to sell subscriptions. Maybe that works in some cases, but at what cost? |
| | Andrew, I highly recommend talking to the Atlantic folks about opening their archives. Putting archives (I won't call them "content," which has always sounded to me like packing material) where Google can find them means a lot more of us will read them, and maybe even subscribe to the magazine. |
| | Meanwhile, I won't subscribe, because the paywall policy annoys me. |
Hillary Harbingery?
| | Hillary is essentially saying that we should trust her. She is giving us a clear signal of what a second Clinton administration would be like: all the centrism and responsibility of her husband¹s eight years but without any of the charm. |
| | Is that what Americans want? It seems that what they want is a form of escapism (in the form of Edwards), charisma (in the shape of Barack Obama), or integrity (in the guise of John McCain). But when the decision nears and the stakes, especially abroad, begin to seep in, might Hillary be right? Might they actually be yearning for dullness, competence and responsibility? Americans historically elect presidents who are an antidote to the flaws of the previous one. Nixon begat Carter who begat Reagan. When you think of George W Bush, the word ³reckless² springs to mind. And what is the antidote to reckless? |
| | The tagline "Let the Conversation Begin" is plastered all over her site and she begins her annoucement video with this quote: "I'm not just starting a campaign, I'm beginning a conversation." I hope Cluetrain authors Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger are getting some royalties here. |
| | For what it's worth (not much), I'll bet that Hillary and her crew have not heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto. It's cool in either case. The idea was never to get credit or royalties. It was to suggest some useful ideas about the networked world. If they get used, the pudding is proven. |
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