Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Blah Blog

John Edwards' blog reads like a scroll of press releases. A nice start maybe, but... compare & contrast.

Proof it's getting harder to write fiction

Denounce: RIAA to force ISPs natinowide to adopt color code system. A sample:

Most people will be coded green and sail through, but up to 30 percent of Internet users will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening. An estimated 5 to 6 percent will be labeled "red" and will have their Internet connections cut, their homes raided within an hour, all computer equipment seized, dogs shot, and themselves arrested and sent to the RIAA's massive detention facility in Mojave, CA.

Kinda like this, I guess.

Figures

Looks like the most qualified (or at least interesting) Republican challenger to Gray Davis is dropping out of the California recall race.

Of course, he's done almost nothing, other than one meetup (pathetically attended by just four people in San Francisco, I read last week), to build a grass roots movement.

Worse (I was just notified), he spammed his way to failure. Obviously he was very poorly advised, to put it kindly.

More freight

Interesting dialog invoking Cluetrain (read down through the comments) in response to Ross Mayfield's The Network is the Market, in AlwaysOn. His full post is on his blog (the comments are below the lengthy AlwaysOn excerpt).

FWIW dept: both David Weinberger and I (half of Cluetrain's co-authors) are on the Advisory board of Ross' company, SocialText.

Thanks to the Head Lemur for the pointer.

Blogging into the sunset

Nice collection of posts about Warren Zevon, who died Sunday, over on Blogcritics.

Irony deconstruction

Greg at BegToDiffer:

This Monday the following independent, but not unrelated, events occurred:

1. The RIAA filed lawsuits against 261 individuals.
2. Apple sold its ten millionth song through its iTunes Music Store.

I'm confident our readers can make the connection and fully appreciate the irony. So why can't the RIAA?

Speaking of the RIAA, Serona at Cyber::Ecology offers an excellent critique of the RIAA's shockingly lame "amnesty program."

One fun line of Serona's:

I think that anyone interested in "amnesty" from RIAA lawsuits should send RIAA a notarized form promising to not stop buying CD's from their companies if they promise to stop the litigation frenzy.

Going outside for the facts

Hanan Cohen has an interesting post on the Cluetrain list:

In a conference I attend "Computer Networks and Social Networks" in the Haifa university, Prof. Dutton from Oxford university told us about a research he had conducted on the use of mobile phones during the events of 9/11.

One point he made was that there were communicaiton networks that gave less information that could have saved lives because they were hierarchical. He gave three examples:

1. People in the towers were told throught the intecom to stay where they are while people outside the building told them to leave because they saw what happening.
2. Firefighters got information from their communication networks (C.B's) and not from people outside, thus where less informed.
3. Prof. Dutton did not find any record in the media of a mobile call made from or to the pentagon.

Bonus Link: Hanan also points to the Cluetrain entry in the Devil's Dictionary.

Also nice to see that the brilliant Gluetrain Manifesto is still up.

Better Blisiness

eCommerce Times: Blogs Starting To Make their Mark in the Workplace. A sample:

"Not an hour goes by here in which someone isn't interacting with blogs," said Jim Coudal, president of Coudal Partners, a small Chicago advertising firm that has embraced the technology. "It's an effective, simple repository of information that saves keeping track of a bunch of e-mails on Outlook Express and figuring out who to carbon copy."