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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
7/9/2001; 12:26:24 PM |
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832 (top msg in thread) |
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Fun to the rescue 
| | Gotta be back at the house to meet a contractor. No other obligations have been met today, save one: my friends Bernie and Rocky are here to drive me over to our new place and then to a long-delayed dinner. |
| | See ya tomorrow. (Message to all those to whom I've promised something and who are reading this now: yes, it will be ready. Really.) |
Merci!
| | The Drucker piece I bashed Business 2.o about a few items ago has been found in France by our friend JY. |
| | Others located the piece as well, through Google caches and such. Thanks to all of you for coming through on this. And dig the piece. |
Hailstorm or drizzle?
| | It  was so glorious Saturday in Santa Barbara that it shoulda been a crime to stay indoors. There in our hollow on the south slope of the Santa Ynez mountains, I could see these magnificent thunderstorms building up on the far side — to the North, up over the San Rafael and Siera Madre mountains. The whole area got a lot of tropical moisture over the last few days, so the return of sunlight produced spectacular results. |
| | Looking at weather pictures (like this one here), I was sure the storms were full of hail. Which made me wonder, for no reasons other than the puns involved, if we're off base worrying about Microsoft and Hailstorm. |
| | By we I mean all of us professional hand-wringers. Here's an excerpt from Dan's take on Hailstorm: |
| | The open-source community needs to focus its considerable attention on a serious new threat. Microsoft's bid to control the Internet is more realistic than most people understand. Web services, the idea that we'll move traditional software and services onto the Net and pay subscription fees, is built to order for the Microsoft empire, and the appeals court ruling appears to give the company running room. |
| | The most dangerous piece of Microsoft's strategy is its user-authentication system, called Passport. You can't have a Hotmail account without a Passport, which collects all kinds of personal information about you, and it won't be long before Microsoft is demanding that everyone who uses Windows also get a Passport account. |
| | I expressed similar concerns to the open source community through my editorial in the current Linux Journal. |
| | But then, as always, there's Craig, who wrote this in an email the other day: |
| | I think you are way off the mark about Passport and Hailstorm (you are leaving out DotNet of which Passport and Hailstorm are sub-initiatives. DotNet is a strategy, a framework, and individual initiatives.) Microsoft is caught in a Catch 22, which is beautiful and so cool because everyone always panics about the little things. (Smart tags and such). |
| | Microsoft is continually being forced to comply with some level of standards-HTML, XML, SOAP, and so on. This makes them vulnerable to highjacking. Let me explain. This is called "redirection." This is what Novell did to the DOS and Windows file system. Redirection software just sits in front of the client and intercepts incoming and outgoing service functions and "redirects" them to a different server. The next level of redirection is the next level of Microsoft's services. |
| | Not a damn thing they can do about it. |
| | If I were an open source vendor, I would stop bitching about Microsoft and let them do what they do and subvert it with an open source strategy. So simple, unstoppable and makes money. This is immensely better than suggesting Microsoft "join" the movement. |
| | I didn't want to publish that until he said okay, which he just did. |
He's front!
| | After a brief period of quietude on his blog, Craig returns with some interesting stuff about redirection (not the killer app, but better: the killer concept — the very same concept he used to kick serious ass at Novell in the '80s). |
NoLogoDot
| |  Naomi Klein's book No Logo came out at around the same time as Cluetrain. I haven't read it (though I've ordered it more than once from Amazon... not sure what happened). But from the reviews it appears to move on tracks parallel to Cluetrain's. |
Found and lost
| | Fast, perhaps better known as AllTheWeb.com, was my second-favorite search engine after Google. Like Google, it was relatively ad-free, respected the user's intelligence and easily allowed searches for word strings — in Fast's case with a pop-out menu that allowed choices between "all the words" and "exact phrase." I also liked its multimedia search facility. |
| | Now the choices are gone. There is no obvious way to call up a search for a phrase (though it appears to be a default... I can't tell yet). The multimedia search is now on the same page — an improvement, I guess. But I notice that "offensive content reduction" is now defaulted. Since I say "fuck" and "shit" a lot (hey, I'm from New Jersey), this is a matter of some concern. |
| | I dunno, maybe it's not all that bad. But it's still a loss, which isn't what you want in a place you go to find stuff. |
New business model: subtract value by becoming just laughably useless, then charge for a fraction of the usefulness you once had
| | While working on a rather urgent piece, I just went to the Business 2.0 site to look up one of the best things the magazine ever did: an interview Peter Drucker last summer. I've pointed to the piece before. Maybe I even helped sell a few subscriptions by doing that. I have no idea. But now I have to wait two minutes while it looks first for code.netbreak.au and then either hangs or continues looking for ad.doubleclick.com, then 489.akamai.net, then m.doubleclick.net, then ads.enliven.com, then ads.focalink.net (thanks to the highly parallelized sloth induction system involved, I able to transcribe this live over a T-1 line) and so on... and on... and on... and on... before finally loading up a blank white page." |
| | There's the title: "Peter Drucker Doesn't Buy It: The Boardroom Prophet Tells Why the New Economyh Isn't Here Yet." There's the dateline: "08/08/2000." Below that is "Page 1 of 1." Then a a long white space created by the pile of ads that flank its frame, no doubt. Finally, at the bottom of the page, there's an irony garden: two sponsored links — one for "Publishing on the web: a Stanford Course for Publishing Professionals and another for "eMarketer, The World's Leading Provider of Internet Statistics"; and a choice of links that say "Request Reprint," "Save This," "Email This" and "Print This." |
| | Do they actually think I'm going to request a reprint? Something I can't point to? Something that I threw away by hauling down to a waiting room at the hospital last September? Do they think they're going to generate revenue by charging for the "reprint" of a page to which a few people have linked? What they'll generate is bile, not income. |
| | In fact, they'll reduce their authority, as well as the urge to subscribe. I see my subscription runs through June 2002. With moves like this the magazine will be dead before I get my chance not to renew again. |
You are what you don't eat
| | I want a browser that lets me set specific cookie acceptance preferences. I would set mine not to accept any from X10, hitbox, doubleclick, ad.(anything) and ads.(anything), to name a few I've just evicted from my cookie inventory. |
| | Are there any browsers that do that? |
There are responses to this message:Re: Business 2.0, Glenn Fleishman, 7/10/01; 11:19:28 AM Re: Cookies, Ryan Vermeys, 7/9/01; 9:30:38 PM Cookies, Nate Rowe, 7/9/01; 8:39:40 PM Re: You are what you don't eat, John Fratus, 7/9/01; 12:41:23 PM Re: You are what you don't eat, Andreas Schaefer, 7/9/01; 11:39:44 AM Re:, Joe Beda, 7/9/01; 8:51:48 AM
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