Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Universal server, narrow client
I believe the "messenger" at stern.de (the Web site of Der Stern, a major German magazine) is Jabber-powered. Alas, the client only runs on Windows. I'm planning on speaking at JabberConf 2002 in München, by the way.
You go girls!
Dig Blog Sisters, "where men can link, but they can't touch."
Seems low to me
Corante says weblogs influence over 1,000,000,000 searches per week. We also thank Hylton Jolliffe of Corante for this pointer here.
Just a question
Are there any nonstop flights from San Francisco or San Jose to Tampa? Can't seem to find any. Not urgent.
Bad news
Nothing on the Reuters site about how they're laying off 200 people. But the site features banners pointing to their Olympics coverage (60 people on site, as we speak!).
Context: The main sources of fill'er'up news for papers and broadcasters everywhere are Associated Press and Reuters. And they're shrinking away.
New World at work
Just one explanation
John Ashcroft sings. (You've GOT to hear this. Really.) Thanks to B!X for the link.
And now for somethingcompletelydifferent.com
I've got several domains coming up for renewal at $54.95 for 2 years. I'm willing if it's cheaper, but otherwise I'll let them go. Advice on alternate registrars?
Matterings
Tom nails it. Michael does too. And the Head Lemur gave us the context a year ago. He writes to remind me that there are other things that matter, too. If there's a Them worth worrying about, it doesn't include John Dvorak. It does include Jack Valenti.
It's the markets, stupid
Halley's comment on the Dvorak vs. Cluetrain case takes the same insightful angle on the thing that Jakob Nielsen took when he told me — ironically right after we had both been panelists on John Dvorak's TV show — that what the Cluetrain authors had done was "defect from marketing to side with markets." In retrospect that seemed obvious, but I had never heard it put that way before, and it knocked me out because that's exactly how it felt. Consider the first person plural voice here:
That wasn't a flame. It was a statement of fact.
And it was made against the market-blind ideas behind so many dot-com "businesses" that were never anything more than IPO projects. That's one big reason why Cluetrain came along when it did.
Rather than give Supply one more pipe for pushing crap at Demand, it gave both Demand and Supply a place where everybody could talk about everything. Which is why we wrote "markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies." Blogs are one very efficient means for that. And dot-com crash was a highly dramatic effect.
I invite John to take another look at where Cluetrain comes from, and who it really speaks for. I have a feeling his heart disagrees a lot less than his attitude.
Here's more on the subject.
He's back!
After a long (too long) hiatus, Craig is back blogging again. And I'm back to flogging Eric Norlin, who is becoming ever-more-necessary reading for me.