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Monday, June 3, 2002

Author:   Doc Searls  
Posted: 6/4/2002; 5:40:51 AM
Topic: Monday, June 3, 2002
Msg #: 1897 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 1896/1898
Reads: 6299

Speaking of Big J journalism 

Poynter.org has a blog, which points to CyberJournalist.net (another journoblog), Corante's Microcontent News "microblog" and Poynter's own Jim Romenesko's Media News, among others.

I'm still trying to read the small print in the graphic in this Microcontent piece on blogs.

Also the difference between ice caps and solid ground 

My latest SuitWatch is up. It's the short version of a much longer piece that I just couldn't get together, given time and bandwidth constraints (I was floating around Alaska). But it does start to speak toward a need to make distinctions between platforms, which come and go (the best constantly evolve), and the deeper stuff that supports platforms: the computing and networking equivalent of geology.

Markets are mum 

Ever heard of Texas Pacific Group? There's a reason:

 TPG's low profile is strategic, not accidental.

 The firm recently pulled the plug on its perennially "under construction" Web site, on the belief that people who need to know about the firm already do -- and that providing easy information to its rivals is just dumb.

Kinda like "The Firm" or "Parallax View," no?

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:

 Yes, we're all Jews now, even blue-eyed Germano-Celtic goyim like me. We are going to be everything the islamofascists fear and hate, and we're going to glory in it. We're going to embody all the worst nightmares of those butt-ignorant ragheads in Al-Qaeda. We're going to kill them, we're going to subvert their children with MTV, and we're going to teach their women to wear clingy clothing and say "fuck me" and "fuck you" to men whenever they damn well feel like it.

When I go from reading dangerous blogs to reading safe stories like Reuters' Hollywood and Silicion Valley Near Deal on Digital TV, I think let 'em deal. Subtracting value from Hollywood-produced goods will only open the market to grass roots work by countless artists working outside the old system — including everybody with a camcorder, iMovie and a DVD burner.

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:

 The computer industry did not create the personal computer; it was created by people in their 20s who wanted a tool of their own. The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn't know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses — they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation.

 The Web was not created by VCs; it was created by thousands of people, because it was a cool thing to do: a public good.

 The hackers at MIT fed their computers on punched tape, which they kept in an open, unlocked drawer. Anyone could use the tapes, but moreover, anyone could improve them.

 Innovation is the unexpected combination of things: microprocessors and CRTs, newspapers and telephones. The Internet is place where we're no longer "consumers," we're participants. The very best innovations are ones that are platforms for other innovations. The press thought the PC was a toy until some Boston hackers created the spreadsheet.

 The mass-media, with the power to reach into everyones' homes, was based on broadcasting, a small number of people who could talk to the mass. If you were in a dictatorship and you want to take over, you capture the televisions station. Samizdat was driven by photocopiers. In a democracy, television is expensive to run, spectrum is expensive. The Internet won't create the public sphere, but it will create the opportunity to create the public sphere.

It goes on. Great stuff.

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:

 The conversation that we should be having would be driven by what is really revolutionary; the rise of inexpensive, real-time, distributed cross-demographic/geographic/politic conversations that are not ephemeral, and thanks to Google's weighting mechanisms, inherently populist. Continuing to discuss "what is a blog" in technical terms makes the whole thing feel like CB radio.

I never liked the term "distributed," but that's a quibble. I love "inherently populist." Very true.

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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