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Friday, March 23, 2007
Listen hard 
| | I'm sitting in my parked car on Colorado Boulevard in Old Town Pasadena, taking advantage of wi-fi from the Starbucks across the street. My wife's in a store somewhere. I'm listening to the NCAA playoffs. Felt bad for Vanderbilt and Butler, both of which seemed upset-bound before losing to Georgetown and Florida, respectively. Now I'm switching back and forth between UNLV-Oregon and UNC-USC, which have both just started. The games aren't carried locally, far as I can tell from hitting SCAN on the car radio. Which is okay: I'm getting them on Sirius. |
| | [Later...] Watched the rest of the games on TV my brother-in-law's house in The Valley. He went to USC, and is a hard-core fan. I didn't go to UNC, but I lived in Chapel Hill for years and am pleased to play the partisan role. SC kicked Tar Heel butt for about two thirds of the game, but then started running out of gas. Carolina has good players all the way down the bench, and it showed. The Heels also got a lot of baskets on offensive rebounds, and ended up winning by a comfortable margin. Meanwhile, UNLV apparently never got close to Oregon, or Channel 2 would have spent more time on that game. (It switched back and forth between the two.) |
| | Now we need to drive home, another 75 miles. Tired, but chewing ice and listening to sports radio will keep me awake. See ya in the morning. |
Quote du jour
| | Denise Howell, attorney at blog: How and why to we get to reinvent the law? Because in the lack of a framework built to support these activities, sistas (and brothas) are doin' it for themselves. |
| | I like her tagline: Issue-spotting the Live Web. Long after Web 3.0 is a passé, the Live Web will be no less current. Static Web, too. Here's one explanation of the difference. |
More than just talk
| | do I REALLY NEED a conversation with the supplier of toilet paper? |
| | Unique products and services, but commodity items? |
| | Still mulling this over, some products and maybe services are "commodity" by nature. Even some media ... I don't have to talk back to NYTimes, just dip into the info-stream over morning coffee. |
| | First, we weren't being literal. In the Cluetrain chapter that unpacks the "markets are conversations" line, we wrote this: |
| | The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers. |
| | Cluetrain was about making markets real again. We wanted to make clear that markets were real places long before they became a synonym for demographics, regions, appetites and categories. Since the Net was a new world that supported virtual as well as physical marketplces, we thought it would be good to revisit what markets meant in the first place: |
| | The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell -- and to talk. |
| | The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: "Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm." "The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?" "Taste this apple. We won¹t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today." Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don¹t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. |
| | Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names they were known by: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith. |
| | For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations. |
| | These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. "Markets were conversations" doesn¹t mean "markets were noisy." It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other¹s work. |
| | Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets. |
| | For businesses that require no live communication with customers in the course of everyday work, markets are conversations means simply that the company still shouldn't isolate itself either from talk within their marketplace or from talk with customers when the need arises. In other words, it should still be ready to Get Real when the time comes for real conversation. |
| | For example, I don't require daily communication with Dish Network. In fact, I'd have no problem, literally, if I didn't talk to anybody from Dish Network for the rest of my life. But when we get a message on our screen like we got yesterday — an error called '760' that said our hard disk was corrupted and everything on it needed to be deleted — it was good to be able to reach a human being when we called the company's help line. Kudos to Dish for providing a helpful human after a minimum of call center option navigation. Turns out the problem was a software glitch, that it was fixed with a firmware update downloaded by satellite from the company, and nothing was lost. For that call, at least, Dish was both literally and figuratively conversational. |
Making waves
| | Prometheus Radio Project leads barnraisings of low-power (but real, licensed) community FM stations. Been checking out WRFU in Urbana. My nephew Colin did a show there on St. Patty's day, but I missed it. |
| | You can get them here on a radio, or anywhere in the world by its many webstreams. The links appear to be broken, but you can just copy a URL from the linked page and put that in your listening thingie of choice. |
What might have been
| | Betrayed is George Packer's latest in The New Yorker. He's also interviewed by Terri Gross on Fresh Air. Listening now. It's the most certain thing today that Iraqis working with Americans will be killed. Especially interpreters. By kidnap, car-bomb or militia. This is "a grim point of consensus". Especially mind-boggling is woeful and persistent mistreatment by the American occupation bureaucracy of those who most welcomed the Americans and tried their best to help. |
| | Forty thousand per month are fleeing the country. Packer says it's becoming the biggest refugee crisis in the world right . But we can't call them refugees, because the Administration would rather see them as "displaced persons" or something. |
| | After six years what stands out most about the Bush Administration is its incompetence. And that's how history will remember it as well. |
HP and Tabblo, sittin' in a tree...
| | HP and Tabblo have announced that the former is buying the latter. I've been an advisor to Tabblo, and I think this should be a good thing (though I didn't know about it until just before the news went out). HP is looking to expand its printing services, and Tabblo is good at doing the "bits to atoms" thing. Also, it's grown to become a useful and complementary part of the digital photography ecosystem. Hope it stays that way and grows. |
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