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Thursday, June 16, 2005
Dept. of @#$% 
| | We're searching for a latest-dropoff time for Fedex, somewhere here in Santa Barbara. I've tried several browsers, on two platforms, and I get different errors every time. NONE is giving me the information I want. I get 403 responses, blank pages... |
| | The latest says " To continue, please address all comments in red below." There are no comments in red. |
| | [Later...] Okay, I finally got a result by using AND logic where the form wants OR. I put in my State and zip, plus my phone number. (It wants one "or" the other.) If I put in my street address and city, however, it fails. Got to have just the state and zip, plus the phone. Strange. |
Somewhat clear
Really Simple Demonstration
| | I'm showing my kid what syndication is, and how a subscription works. This paragraph demo's the syndication part. |
| | Okay, so now this item has showed up in my aggregator, which demonstrates the subscription part. The kid says "that's cool" and then asks me "Who pays you to do this?" I tell him I do this on the side. Then I show him what I actually do get paid for. Then he makes a joke about my getting paid for "what's in the middle." And about this here blog being "on the side" is "like a sauce." Because I clearly didn't get the joke in the first place. |
Raising a plank
| | You might be familiar with my snowball metaphor about how some ideas grow as they roll from blog to blog. Or from one writer or talker to the next. |
| | I bring it up because not all snowballs keep rolling. And not all snow balls should keep rolling. In fact, if we think a particular rolling snowball is a bad idea, it's good idea to raise a plank out of the ground and smack that sucker when it comes our way. |
| | This is one thing we were trying to do when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, six years ago, at the height of the dot-com madness. This statement — |
| | — was a board to the face of a Frosty rolling down an incline elevated by what, at its max, was about $25 billion in annualized venture money poured into start-ups in Silicon Valley alone. |
| | It was after Cluetrain came out as a book that Jakob Nielsen observed that we had defected from marketing, and went over to side with markets in a revolt against marketing. |
| | So now Cluetrain itself has become, in some ways, a (not the) new marketing canon. It has certainly earned its authors the kind of respect that brings invitations to write, to consult, and to speak at conferences. (For David Weinberger and Chris Locke, additional demand has been created by other books written since Cluetrain came out.) |
| | At the very least we hear "conversation" (a cluetrain theme) a lot more than we used to. "Voice" is getting more respect as well. And the dot-com avalanche did meet the sea at last (coincidentally right after Cluetrain came out as a book). |
| | But, blessedly, there is also resistance. (And not only to Cluetrain, but to other ideas of ours, such as those in World of Ends.) The best is lately coming from Dave Rogers, whose Groundhog Day blog can wax snarky but also cut deep. His voice is an especially valuable one. He's made me think about what I'm doing here, far more than any other critic I've ever engaged. |
| | I don't have time right now to respond to everything Dave is saying here. But I'm glad he's saying it. |
| | His posts are also a reminder for me to put up the visuals from several of my recent talks. I believe a few of them will help clarify where Dave and I agree and disagree. Because I don't think that's entirely clear yet. |
| | Meanwhile, go read Dave's posts. And Steve's speech too. |
| | Oh, and while we're speaking of planks, dig what Walt Whitman says about one here. |
There is no yesterday
| | If you click on Wedensday the 15th, on the calendar over there on he right, you'll get some kind of error message. This is okay. It's tomorrow now, and we can get on with it. |
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