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More proof ... that I look like shit in pictures. ... that Santa Barbara is the most beautiful town in California, in spite of its oddities. Rubber + Road One of the knocks on Open Source development is that it's all free and voluntary. This has lots of upsides, most of which reduce to Amish Barn virtues. But there's a growing hunk of it that works like a real marketplace. You can find two at CoSource and SourceXchange. Both are real markets: places where buyers and sellers can meet and do business. I'd like to hear from folks about their experiences with this new version of the oldes model. Say why?
P&G is now so hip that they've copied Amazon's still-unpatented yes/no clicklink — by which consumers can register single-cell opinions. When is one of these Big Old Companies going to provide a way for customers to respond with real opinions? Digging Altitude I'm on the second leg of the trip back from Seattle to Santa Barbara, 29k feet over Lucia, looking down on the New Camoldoli Monastery, where I once spent three perfect days in silence. Off to the Southeast, in the valley bottomed by Lake San Antonio, near the crossroads town of Molan, is a fire. Smoke that oddly matches hills the color of Siamese cats, spreads to the West, just a few thousand feet under the plane. In the time it took to type this, the engine below my window at Seat 6A has soaked up the rest of Big Sur, and then San Simeon, the Xanadu that William Randolph Hearst, inventor of "yellow journalism," built atop a hill with one of the most beautiful views on earth, which he also owned. Perhaps his rudest guest was Dorothy Parker, who wrote this in the guest book, Upon my honor The whore in question would have been actress Marion Davies, as I recall. Off in the distance, running along the west side of the Temblor Range and just east of the dry white desert stain called Soda Lake, is the most visible and obvious stretch of the San Andreas Fault. From this angle, ten miles up over Pismo Beach (nice pier), the fault is a dark line. From overhead you can see where the streams that flow acrosss the fault follow ravines that run down from the East, turn north and follow the fault for a distance then continue west. A much greater offset is also obvious from this vantage: Monterey Bay used to be the outlet for the whole Central Valley watershed, when it emptied through a pass west of Bakersfield. But the mouth was carried north along the edge of that four quadrillion ton millwheel we call the Pacific Plate. For a while the water followed, connecting the Central Valley with the Pacific Ocean through an elongating Salinas Valley. Finally mountainss grew along the fault, closing off the outlet, turning the Central Valley into a great lake that eventually found its way out the Golden Gate. I'm on the ground now, two mornings later, reading this in Slashdot: To talk to most Internet marketers/campaigners these days, you'd think that "targeted" communication was the essence of the Internet, and was the highest form of interactivite communication. Wrong. Targeted communication is not of the Internet. It is of direct mail. It's a method used to improve response rates (like, from 3% to 4%, a 33% improvement!), to save money on postage, to hit the right hot buttons, blah, blah, blah. And it's not interactive; the communication is essentially as one way as broadcast television -- just more accurate. Which is to say that I agree ... that targeting results in more extreme messages and a more stratified electorate, and I think that's dangerous. The speaker here is Scott Reents, co-founder with Michael Weiksner of The Democacy Project, onto which I was turned by Jerry Michalski, who still has the largest brain in the world. Michael and the project were both a big help in preparing for my Seattle talk.
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