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Profiles in flackage I learned about the Clay Shirky item below from a press release-like email sent by Ellen Maremont Silver of O'Reilly. She sends out a one per month, each alerting a list of writers to something O'Reilly is up to. The opening of a technical portal. Building black holes with OpenGL. Installing Eazel's Nautilus. How Jabber works. Stuff like that. Looking back, I see there have been about ten of these since January. I've opened all but two, and found all of those interesting and in some cases useful. That's good PR. It's a relatively conversational low-BS opt-in procedure that respects my time and doesn't suck. Ellen's occasional bulletins, while impersonal, are a moon's distance above the pro forma BS that usually comes from the PR agencies. Today I got one that went like this:
I happen to like this company, and I know its founders personally. I haven't paid much attention to them for awhile and really would like to know what they're up to, but ... 10 new customers?? What kind of a stretch is that? So I wrote a what's-up note to my friends the founders, and quickly got a response, by both phone and email, from the agency. When I gave the flack (who was very helpful) some gentle shit about the pro forma TechnoLatin in the release, she sighed and said "I know." The implication, of course, is that flackage has to look and sound this way. But it doesn't. I've already written plenty about the subject, but pounding it into the a viscous refuse isn't my job. The real Fool Killer on this business is Deborah Branscum, the Newsweek writer whose new Weblog I mentioned yesterday. Today she stepped up (as they say about go-to players on the sports pages) in a big way. As Dave tells us today, "the gloves are off." Here's one punch: Earth to execs: Your quotes are bullshit. You know it. We know it. Don't force your PR folks into fiction writing. Damn straight. Hacking acronyms Nice piece about P2P — peer-to-peer — by Clay Shirky. His definition:
Now I understand why Napster and Jabber are both P2P, even though Jabber is implemented mostly at the server level. Sez Clay:
Near the end is a nicely quotable line: adoption is a better predictor of software longevity than perfection is. Cool stuff.
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