Doc Searls Weblog

Archive: 1999–2007

Thursday, February 28, 2002

Fun raiser

I like listening to KPFK in Los Angeles, which is conducting a nationwide fund drive to finish upgrading itself to its licensed status as the biggest signal in the country. More about the whole thing in Skywave.

Among other cool things, KPFK launched the Firesign Theater.

ActiveBlog

J.D. gives a great review to ActiveWords. It truly kicks ass, he says.

Buzz Bruggeman, proprietor of the company, gives a fun report on his Radio blog of our trip to the Duke game (among other things) last Sunday.

Remedial Cluetrain

One of the nice things about a phenom like Cluetrain (a fire no critical drenching seems able to put out) is that its progenitors are conveniently alive and available to offer first-person exegesis on their own output. That's what RageBoy has kindly done in What did Cluetrain actually say?

icant but ucann

Care about ICANN. It's something that I've never been able to do. But people I respect care a great deal, so here's a pointer to one of them. If you care, go there.

A new meaning for viral marketing

A reader who kindly used this blog as her start page in IE5 (Windows) suddenly finds that her new start page is Search 4 It! Your Everything Startpage! Not sure how that happened, but I suspect the S4I people have something going on that robo-hacks browser preferences, almost like a virus.

But I don't know. Any ideas?

[Later...] Thanks to Dan Lyke for pointing us to The Problem. I think it's actionable. The settings we make on our personal computers are personal. Sites we visit have no more business changing them than a store we visit has the right to filch our underwear. This is a privacy issue, it seems to me.

W h a a?

Man, the Net is slow today. I think Cox's DNS server is getting slammed, because the speed test still shows 2.4 Mb down and .95 Mb up. But I dunno.

So I've been pinging around, and getting mixed results. It's slow to the blog (30% packet loss), but hosed to Searls.com (100% packet loss). Same with IBM. SiliconValley.com is better (20% packet loss). Scripting.com is fine (0% loss.). Google, worse (40% packet loss.) No idea what's up with that. (That's with 10 pings apiece, by the way. If I up it to 20, the numers improve.)

[Later... It's worse now. Almost everything times out. If this posts I'll be highly impressed.]

Zñsírt bènüstrk måczny, no?

Hmm. Maybe Marek can explain.

Link in, turn on, store out

Steve MacLaughlin sees the future. I think it's a less exclusive version of Apple's "digital hub" strategy. Tom Matrullo calls it "Steve's thermonuclear home storage network."

And speaking of powerful explosions, something of that nature involving words (and who knows what else) seems to have happened over at RageBoy's blog.

Blogs: color commentary on civilization

It's been fun reading the blogs that fan out from Ken Layne's. His buddy Marc Brown is another L.A. guy who loves the place and pulls no punches. Marc has been blogging the Olympics and writes about b-may, who blogged from there and partied hard (here he is with two members of the Jamaican bobsled team). Interesting fact: he was a security guy there:

It's my job (and the hardest part of it) to make sure only properly accredited people get to the ice for the flower ceremony (which is immediately after competition -- metals are later in the Olympic Plaza). I have a corps of five men and women who assume a triangle, tactical posture to defend the ice. I'm at the top to catch anyone who pushes past the others. We've turned back lots of really mad and unaccredited Russian, German, and American trainers, coaches, and friends.

Derrek Parra came from nowhere (well, Orlando) to take the silver in the Men's 5000m on the first day of competition. Tiffany Parra flew in this week to see her husband go for the gold in his best event, the 1500m. When he broke the world record and took the gold, Tiffany (5'3", 125 lbs.) went flying past three check points and me (6'1", 200 lbs.) to get to her husband. There was just absolutely no stopping her.

Lot of linkable stuff . Makes me wish I had looked around for more live blog coverage from SLC, although Mary's was nonstop rock and roll.

Another of Marc's links goes to Tony Pierce's blog, which has this FAQ, which is so hip that I'll have to ask Eric Norlin to figure it out for me. But I'd recommend that everybody start with Tony's index page, and click through the whole site from there. Great stuff.

The first link came from Michael Jardeen, btw.

Live, from Ken Layne's couch

Ken Layne has been doing an amazing job of blogging the Grammies, live.

I also tend to agree with Ken about the race for governor here in California.

Smart company

David Weinberger reports from TED and gets interviewed in Fast Company. Great stuff.