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started 6/9/2001; 8:20:00 AM - last post 6/9/2001; 8:20:00 AM
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Doc Searls - 
6/9/2001; 12:20:00 PM (reads: 1961, responses: 0)
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Location, Location, Location 
| | So go ahead and shop at Radio Shack after all. Or at least... chose the right one. |
| | Now safely back home in Santa Barbara, Joyce just went to the Radio Shack on West State Street with her broken phone and in less than five minutes of caring service got a loaner phone and a promise to fix or replace the broken one in around ten days. |
| | I have no idea what Policy is involved here. I will say that the Radio Shack on West (or is it Upper?) State Street rocks and the one on Woodside Road in Redwood City sucks. |
The obvious dawns
| | A couple years ago I began subscribing to Yahoo! Internet Life when I had to do something with the freebie points I got for spending time on the phone after agreeing to an AT&T promotion that mostly guaranteed an endless flow of crap mail. For the longest time YIL, as the magazine calls itself, was barely a cut above AOL in the way it seemed to have the same relationship with customers as ants have with aphids. The title might as well have been Sticky Behavior. |
| | But lately YIL has been getting a bit more interesting. It seems to be turning into more of a magazine and less of a cheering section for whatever neat new stuff all of us eager surfers could fill up our time with at the top content pumps. I don't have any back issues I can point to, but I have noticed that, given a choice between, say, Time, Forbes and YIL, there's been a steadily improving chance that YIL is the one I'll take down the hall with me to read on the john. Partly it's because the entire magazine seems comprised of short items — a kind of editorial hors d'oeurvre tray. And partly it's because I'm always interested in the ever-ravenous producer's-eye view of popular culture. Oddly it's never because I want to find pointers to neat new sites. Funny, I just realized that. |
| | Anyway, the cover story of the July issue has only one aphid farming feature ("Spielberg's A.I. Web Puzzle"). The other two raise suspicions that the editors climbed aboard the Cluetrain and started reading Jakob Nielsen. The top cover story is "TAKE BACK THE NET! How the people reclaimed the Web," by Douglas Rushkoff, the scourge of hype who wrote Why We Listen to What "They" Say and Media Virus. The next cover piece is "50 Most Incredibly Useful Sites." Not the 50 most funny, hip, funky or sticky sites. No, the 50 most incredibly useful sites. |
| | The Rushikoff piece is good. There's this: |
| | The Internet's unexpected social side turned out to be its incontrovertible main feature. Its other functions fall by the wayside. The Intenet's ability to network human beings is its very lifeblood. It ... promoted an agenda all its own. it was as if using a computer mouse and keyboard to access ogther human beings on the other side of the monitor changed our relationsihp to the media and the power the media held. The tube was no longer a place that only a corporate conglomerate could access. It was Rupert Murdoch, Dan Rather and Heather Locklear's turf no more. The Internet was our space." |
| | The inevitable collapse of the dot-com pyramid was not part of some regular business cycle. And it was certainly not the collapse of anything to do with the Internet. No, what we witnessed was the Intrnet fending off an attack. |
| | Of course we knew all that. But they didn't. (And they probably still don't, but the bait is out there. Maybe they're sniffing.) |
| | Blogger gets the first bold-face (here's a site!) mention. MetaFilter follows. You can guess the rest. |
| | Who knows. When I get back online, I might even look up a few of those Most Useful sites. I hate to admit I never heard of most of them. |
| | [Several hours later...] I've got a few minutes on line here at the office while Joyce & Jeffrey pick up some chow, and I'm looking around YIL's incredibly useless site. If there's a search function, I sure can't find it. There's an Incredibly Useful Sites link that points to ... one page. There's nothing that points to the current issue. The are links to another issue... is it last month's? August's? I can't tell. But whoa: it does have a piece called Who Let the Blogs Out? Judge for yourself. I gotta go. |
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