Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Seems you can buy love, after all
Of course, there are some of us who will pay to see him eat the rabbit.
What's most amazing is that Snopes bothered debunking (or deconstructing, or explaining) the Toby Affair, and neglected to mention the granddaddy of all these kinds of things: the National Lampoon cover with a gun to the head of Fido, with the headline "Buy this magazine or we'll kill this dog."
I can't find the original, but it's mashed up in this poster here.
Read on
Micah reviews Hugh Hewitt's new book about blogs, at Personal Democracy Forum.
The Long Tale
Steve Gillmor: Waiting for Attention... Or Something like it.
Background: Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him, by Firesign Theatre, with which Steve was once associated.
It's a nice long post about attention.xml, a new spec Steve is driving. The gist:
What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special sauce—the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google’s emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.
With so much going for it, how and where is attention vulnerable? It’s vulnerable to being pigeonholed as an automated artificially intelligent approach to personalization. In my view (remembering that this is my idea, and the problem I wanted to solve) attention metadata is useful in service of the reputational filter of the people and ideas I and the people I track are interested in. This is not about merely reorganizing my feed data based on my patterns of acquisition, but the cumulative weighting of the minds and interests represented by those feeds and items.
I love it when journalists take the lead in solving, and not just reporting on, problems. Steve is a great model here. In fact, I'm trying to follow his lead on the subject of Identity. (One sample.)
Off the err
While other cities struggle to do what's right for wireless citizens in public spaces, Spokane goes against the grain by charging for formerly free public wi-fi access, Jim Thompson reports. Jim's an alpha wi-fi (and everything else) hacker. He adds,
The thinking person will recognize that a nearly infinite number of MAC addresses are to be had. Use one every two hours. That oughta give them fits.
Fresh, yet fishy
Herring & Waffleman, a truly great company, with a truly lengthy mission statement, has arrived. Featured: founder Red Herring's personal blog.