Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Freemarks
JP:
Even if we got conned downstream, many of us were attracted by adjectives like "green" and "organic".
Generation M will look for different kitemarks. Shareable. Copiable. Mashable.
Note that they don’t look for Free as in Gratis. It has always been Free as In Freedom for them.
While we mope around trying to look for just Playable.
I look forward to seeing things marked SCM for Shareable Copiable Mashable. Or maybe the Creative Commons CC already does this…
Buttnet
2002: Warchalking. 2006: Yellow chairs.
White monoliths spotted in Northwest
John Markoff wonders out loud about what Google's up to with the giant moonbase it's building in Oregon.
Rough treatment
Nick Carr gets the sourpuss award for a post on Scoble that calls Dr. Lecter to mind. It begins,
So Microsoft's self-styled human face is now some other company's human face. This must be the first corporate human face transplant ever attempted. Will it take? Or will the new body reject the used puss? And what does it say about this whole human face business when a person proclaims himself to be a company's human face and then, when a better offer comes along, tears himself from the old noggin and stitches himself to the new one? That seems a little untoward to me. If I were in a punny mood, I just might call it a mugging.
His point:
A company should probably be a little nervous about letting some blogger set up shop as its human face. The earnings the blogger pulls in through the attention economy may accrue more to his own bottom line than the firm's.
Damn. That's a problem with Nick. Though he specializes in finding the dark lining under every cloud, he's often right as, well, rain. And hey, ya gotta admit that companies like Google* and Apple, which stand out for their absense of stand-out bloggers, don't seem to suffer for it.
Or do they?
Questions: What huge company Scoble was blogging at before he went to Microsoft? And what's that say about both companies?
*With apologies to Matt Cutts. But... you still get my point.
The past it still here. It's just not evenly distributed.
Here's a report that says online and offline newspaper advertising were up in the first quarter of this year.
Hear a pinhead drop.
Pinhead I and Pinhead II are the latest pair of Gillmor Gangs.
A new meaning for "scobleized"
Maybe Dave is right about Scoble being a mountain and all. Because yesterday Robert made Netcraft, for bringing down his new employer's website.
Making Netcraft is kind of a big deal in geek circles. Among Web hosting weenies, that's, like, bigger than Slashdot.
As a site-smasher making Netcraft News, Scoble is right up there with The United Kingdom, the World cup, May's ten top hosting companies (only one of which runs on Windows, for what that's worth) and Cogent network outages.
That's heavy.