Friday, May 18, 2007

Praise farming

I'm not sure exactly what it is here that has Chris Pirillo so jazzed, but it's hard to ignore praise like this:

I can’t believe this tool is real - and no, they’re not paying me to say or write this.

Is it perfect? No, it's alpha. Is it telling the world that Microsoft is getting back into "the game?" Hell yeah. This isn't a Microsoft project, I swear - it can’t be. It simply can't be. If this is the kind of experience that Silverlight enables, color me sold.

Hope it's not all in a silo. Can't tell yet.

Thinking through identity, privacy and relationships

Stephen Lewis leverages his fluency in Dutch and English (and knowledge of many cultures) in a probing and balanced post titled Identity and Open Space, Privacy and "Gezelligheid".

Get used to it

While U.S. culture and politics remain anchored in 18th-century white anglo-saxon ideals, those ideals will be carried forward by an eventual majority of what we will have to stop calling "minorities", which passed the 100 million mark this past week.

Quote du jour

Lauren Weinstein: Howard nicely crystallized the rapidly declining environment for freedom of speech when he reacted to this case by telling his Sirius audience, "If you want free speech, walk in a closet and talk to yourself." That would be Howard Stern.

Heady times

From CBS and AP: Woman Survives "Internal Decapitation": Car Crash Separates Woman's Skull From Her Spine; But After Surgery, She's Not Paralyzed.

Not quite speaking of which, I saw this video at MemriTV last November and it has haunted me ever since. It's an interview on Lebanon's LBC TV of Abdallah Al-Bishi, a top professional executioner in Saudi Arabia. It's a bloodless talking-head interview, through which I became amazed by the bureaucratic banality of Al-Bishi's job — as well as the apparently large number of people he has killed. Yes, I have beheaded many people who were my friends, but whoever commits an offense brings it on himself... On the personal level, I am very normal. I get up in the morning, pray the Al-Fajr prayer. My breakfast is prepared, and I eat it. Allah be praised. I wait for the police car to pick me up, and I go to work. It's all very normal. I finish the job, and go home. It's all very normal.

Kuwait Times reports that 72 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia this year so far — almost double the rate from one year ago.

Thanks, Long guy

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, names The Cluetrain Manifesto one of his five best business books. It sounded like a pipe dream, like useless utopian wishful thinking. And it's just remarkable to see how the world has basically evolved to demonstrate exactly everything they said.

And congrats to Chris and the Wired crew for winning the latest National Magazine Award for General Excellence in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 circulation category.