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Friday, January 30, 2004
Calling 
| | Ran into Stewart Alsop the other day. He said he hadn't contributed a Fortune column since last summer, and that his fingers were getting "itchy" to write again. I know the feeling, so I suggested the perfect balm: start blogging. He'd be great at it. |
| | Stewart has been a VC for the last few years; but for many more before that he was an A-list editor and analyst on the computer industry's case. His annual high-dollar event, Agenda, was also first-tier. |
| | I also believe he coined the term "vaporware." Even if that distinction belongs to somebody else, Stewart's "vapor list" of unshipped products (with monthly listings of each one's age in vapor state) was one of the most influential editorial (w)hacks of all time. |
So much to disagree with, so little time
Orkut it out
| | Emailed declarations of Orkut friendship now outnumber spams in my mailbox. And the durn thing is... it's fun. Orkut is an amazing thing. Highly viral, very artfully designed. (Even though I'm going to turn off the email feature. I can find these people on the site too.) |
| | Truth is, all these "friend" systems aren't about friendship but acquaintenceship. A minority of the named friends reallly are real-life friends in the generally accepted use of the noun. Most are acquaintences. They're people I know, and who know me. Add a little "like" and you've crossed Orkut's friendship threshold. |
| | Kevin just called it "baseball card collecting." How many can you collect? (Hmm. Can you trade them?) |
| | Mary says I'm the only card in the deck who's wearing a tie. She also compares Orkut to a video game. (Earth to Google: There's your revenue model.) She also spots some potential problems with giving away all that personal data, and so easily. (Great fodder for Orlowski there.) Danah agrees. Comments disagree. |
| | And Joey has a long dream about it. Does an excellent job of elucidating the not-quite-a-friend issue. |
| | Still some scaling issues... since it seems to be down about 1/4 of the times I try to log into it. |
| | Has me thinking... Google was about the 7th mover in search, the 300,000th mover in advertising, and now the 8th mover in social networking. Not sure there's a betting line there, but it's... interesting. |
Beyond the bubble
| | Draw a Venn diagram around what Ed Cone says here, Chris Nolan says here, Richard Bennett says here, Dan Gillmor says here, John Perry Barlow says here, Britt Blaser says here, Jim Moore says here, Micah Sifry says here, David Weinberger says here, Dave Winer says here, Chris Lydon says here, the PrezBOPpers say here, and Jay Rosen says, period. (To name just a few folks.) Follow the links. Look where wise words overlap and see if you don't find something useful in the middle. |
| | This may help: factor out the finger-pointing (and flipping), and just look for what (not who) succeeded, failed or both. |
| | Then remember that we've only had two primaries so far, and that November is a long way off. |
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