Weblogs Devour the Earth

I've been blogging with the daily consistency of a true neurotic. In some ways, JOHO is now an anthology of stuff that I ran on my weblog. That's making JOHO even more ponderous, and more onerous to produce. Something's gotta give, ladies and germs. In the meantime, my weblog is at:

ANTHRAXIAN MADE ERROR, SAYS WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Wall Street Journal today reports that the person who sent anthrax in the mail made an error: he or she neglected to remove the electrostatic charge from the powder. As a result, it clings to surfaces rather than dispersing far more widely via air currents.

The Journal goes on to list other mistakes made by the bioterrorists: They could have contaminated much more mail if they'd used an envelope with small pinholes in it which could easily have been accomplished by running the envelope through a Singer sewing machine using a #6 needle and the "Colonial Crosshatch" setting. (Don't forget to leave the thread unattached to the bobbin!) Also, the Journal says that the envelope would have been routed through many more substations, substantially increasing the number of deaths, if it the barely competent bioterrorists had figured out — duh! — that they should make the city not match the zip code. Also, they should have sent it from the mailbox on the corner of Lopate and Elm in East Larchmont on any Friday or Saturday, which is when postal employee Jim McCahey makes his run, because Jim is like real sloppy and if he can't figure out that 98 Lopate isn't the same as 96 Lopate and keeps delivering Teen Seventeen to a house that obviously doesn't have any kids in it, then he probably wouldn't notice that his hands were covered with white powder anyway.

In a related editorial, the Wall Street Journal maintained that it could have done a much better job of it.

* * *

UPDATE ON THE HUNT FOR CHENEY

Al Qaeda spokesman Muhammed Qadir today said at a press conference that the hunt for American terrorist mastermind Dick Cheney is making "slow but steady progress." Vowed Qadir, "Whatever suburban hellhole Cheney is hiding in, we will find him and smoke him out."

Cheney is thought to have retreated deep into one of the hundreds of small towns within 100 miles of Washington, DC, with communication equipment and enough food and water to keep him and his entourage alive for an indefinite period. He was last heard from in taped comments a week ago in which he urged his countryman to "Fight the aggressor to the death in every corner of the world if necessary, including southwest Newport News, right across from Carl's Sports 'n' Stuff store." Al Qaeda believes that the remarks contained a coded message their cryptographers have deciphered as: "Send fabric softener; my shorts itch."

"We are pursuing every possible lead," said Qadir, refusing to reply to rumors that have placed Cheney in a basement rec room in Silver Springs, MD and in a converted garage in Roanoke, VA. Qadir said that the hunt would continue through the unpleasantly moist rainy season. "Make no mistake, Dick Cheney: no bumper pool table is large enough to hide you."

* * *

ASHCROFT AUTHORIZES NEWEST LEGAL WEAPON IN WAR ON TERRORISM: FEDERAL GOON SQUADS CALLED 'POTENT WEAPON'

Attorney General John Ashcroft today unveiled the latest in a series of steps designed "to secure basic American values." Homeland Defense Goon Squads will be formed in order to enforce anti-terrorist policy directives issued by the Attorney General's office, the White House, the Office of Homeland Defense, the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs or Nancy Reagan.

"All Americans understand that we are at war," said the Attorney General in a prepared statement. "In times of war, when public safety is at stake, we can't rely upon the old, slow means of intimidation such as midnight visits by the INS and tax audits that can literally take years. The new Federal Goon Squads will ensure that those who would thwart our freedom will not do so without taking at least some of the lumps they so reichly deserve." [A follow-up statement corrected the misspelling of "richly."]

Democratic reaction was swift. Tom Daschle issued a statement decrying the new move. "When our Founding Fathers created this marvelous invention we call democracy, they carefully constructed a series of checks and balances. We will not be true to their vision until and unless the Legislative branch has Goon Squads equal in number and conscience-free thuggery."

* * *

OUTRAGED PARENTS SUE REALITY

Outraged parents in South Orange New Jersey today filed suit against a consortium of terrorists, militants and fanatics, claiming that their children's interaction with the images of extreme violence is leading them to more violent gaming, television and movies.

"We have nothing against dramatic news or even the use of violence when it's justified for narrative purposes and when the consequences of violence are shown," said red-faced soccer mom Suzie Nielsen. "But they've gone too far. And every parent knows it."

As evidence of the effect of violent reality on video games and movies, Nielsen distributed newspaper reports that Sylvester Stallone is seriously considering making a fourth Rambo movie in which he tracks down Osama Bin Laden. "Why can't we go back to a time when reality was simpler, kinder and more child-friendly?" asked Nielsen.

"Every parent knows," said Nielsen, "that if children see enough violent images in reality, it inures them to violence in games and movies. I hold those irresponsible terrorists and extremists directly responsible for Steven Seagal's comeback. For shame, for shame."

* * *

FBI PROFILES ANTHRAXIAN

According to today's Boston Globe, based on a careful analysis of the letters' content and handwriting style:

FBI behavior scientists have said they believe the person sending the letters is a reclusive adult male with a tendency to hold grudges.

Stop the presses! This just in: FBI announces its analysis of the writer's handwriting indicates that he does not have hooks for hands. Repeat: No hooks for hands.

Also, there's evidence that the writer was probably subject to the law of gravity at the time he wrote it.

The Gonzo of Gonzo Marketing

Notes: 1. As regular readers of JOHO know (not that there is such a thing as a regular reader), Chris Locke is in fact one of my closest friends. This review is therefore not hardly impartial no how. 2. For reasons I cannot fathom, no matter how I tried to make this review Funtertainment, it kept coming out all serious-like, perhaps as a perverse reaction against Gonzo-ism. In short, I'm sorry the review is dull. The book is not.

Christopher Locke's "Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices" is an ambitious business book, putting it on a short, lonely bookshelf. Locke aims at (1) understanding business as a social institution, (2) describing the deep changes in the society within which business is embedded, and (3) pointing business - and marketing in particular - towards a rebuilt relationship with that society. He accomplishes the first two aims brilliantly. There's more room for argument about the third.

Sounds like a pretty serious book, eh? And it is, despite the catchy, clever title. In fact, I think Locke was trapped by his own title. It sets the expectation that the book is about wacky, outrageous stunts your marketing department can pull. Nothing could be further from Locke's intentions. The problem is that while Locke is using "Gonzo" in a technically correct sense, no one else - except Hunter S. Thompson, the drug-addled hyper-rhetorician who invented the term - takes it that way. Locke doesn't think of gonzo marketing as a type of guerrilla marketing that mixes the decorum of Mardi Gras and the social graces of a vomitous hangover. Rather, he and Thompson agree that "gonzo" actually means "subjective and engaged." The fact that when Thompson is engaged he's also chasing acid with Jack Daniels overwhelms the sober importance of his place in our cultural history: the gonzo writer drops the pretense of objectivity and place-less ubiquity. A marketer, according to Locke, likewise doesn't need hallucinogens to achieve gonzo-hood; all she has to do is tell the truth from her point of view ... so long as it's a truth that she passionately cares about.

What may look like a marketing approach is in fact a crowbar for lifting the lid on business's worst nature. How did business get to the point that telling the truth, accepting individual voices and being passionate come across as a radical program? Locke has a complex answer to this complex question. Much of it has to do with the business's adoption of broadcast techniques and metaphors, delivering a "message" to a passive, homogeneous audience. As Locke maintains, this isn't just about economies of scale, it's also about the neurotic need to control one's market. The enemy of control is voice. Thus, corporations have taught us to speak, as employees, in reassuring voiceless tones.

This worked reasonably well so long as the audience was sitting passively on its couches, facing forward. But the Web enables people to find others with shared interests and to engage in spirited, passionate conversations. These conversations are in fact micro-markets that differ from broadcast markets not only in size but also in ... well, in just about every way. Companies need to learn how to enter into those conversations because yelling at them through megaphones just doesn't work any more.

So what's a marketer to do? Locke gives a taste of what "gonzo marketing" means at the start of the book, but he doesn't flesh it out until the last chapter. And that is where I have the strongest disagreement. After all of his wide-ranging, erudite, piercing and, yes, profound discussion of the nature of business as a social institution, he narrows gonzo marketing to a particular set of programs having to do with corporate sponsorship of internal and external sites that employees care about even though they may have nothing to do with the business of the corporation. This may or may not be a good marketing technique - and my guess is that it's both - but gonzo marketing should be more than a single program. Locke has convinced us that marketing needs new ways of addressing the newly fractionated markets, and that those ways need to be "voice-ful" and engaged; corporate sponsorships are just one way marketing can respond.

This doesn't affect the value of the book's ideas. But it does affect its drama. The reader has to wait to the last chapter to find out what to do in the face of the epic market changes Locke has described. We're in suspense. Locke pulls back the curtain and gonzo marketing turns out to be a single marketing program. Gonzo is bigger than that. Sponsorships are just one example of what gonzo marketing can be.

This is another way I think Locke was trapped by his own title. The great service of the book is that it gives us a conceptual and historical framework for understanding the newly-transformed markets. While some examples of what gonzo marketing can become would of course be helpful, Locke's attempt to make the book pointedly practical is, in my view, a distraction from its real value.

I think the book's title distracted Locke in another way. For a guy who's taken the nickname "Rageboy," his book is remarkably coherent. Locke's grasp of history, philosophy, business, sociology and technology is astounding. He deals with complex topics with grace, clarity and wit ... And then Rageboy shows up, trash talkin' like a mofo, dissin' the tone and content of what you've just read. The Rageboy interruptions aren't labeled. It's more like Sybil thing. It's as if Locke were afraid to be taken seriously, as if he didn't trust his story to be compelling enough without the asides and over-the-top rants. But he's wrong. What he has to say is enough to pull us through, for SeriousBoy is as good a writer as RageBoy - and that's quite a compliment. As Locke might put it, RB needs to give SeriousBoy permission to be himself.

On the other hand, there are some hilarious, outrageous sections of the book, including a chapter that goes after the current crop of marketing writers that's only so funny because it's so perceptive. Seth Godin is unlikely to ask have that particular chapter autographed.

This book is like Locke: brilliant, funny, over-the-top, purposefully erratic and more full of ideas than most Fortune 500 companies.

Slumping the Shark

The always insightful Scott Kirsner devoted his column in the Boston Globe recently to the phenomenon of "jumping the shark" as applied to business. Here's Scott's explanation of the phrase, as promulgated by www.jumptheshark.com:

In pop culture, jumping the shark is when something that was once very good — it could be a TV show, a band, or a series of movie sequels — makes a desperate attempt to remain fresh and relevant, and instead goes bad.
The origin of the phrase comes from the long-running TV show ''Happy Days,'' which immediately went south following a gimmicky episode in which Fonzie, wearing water skis and his trademark leather jacket, jumped over a shark

Kirsner suggests some examples of businesses that have jumped the shark - CMGI paying $120M to get a football field named after itself, for instance - but jumping the shark is all too rare in business. Most companies don't get fresh, relevant, creative or silly when they get desperate. They get mean and conservative. They retreat to what they perceive as safe ground. Or, to follow the metaphor, they let themselves be dragged around in the wake of the boat, heading as far away from sharks as they can. Slumping the shark? Humping the shark? Jumping the lark? Stumping the shark? Schlurping the spark? Mini-Bogus Contest: Come up with your own clever pun 'cause I can't. [Note: Scott, in an email, suggests "Jumping the Slug."]

Whatever you call it, there's no shortage of examples: Blue Mountain Arts moving from a funky and personal site to a typical Browsable Taxonomy of Sentiment. Ford backing off its pledge to provide every employee with a free computer and an almost-free Net connection. ThirdVoice reinventing itself as a supplier of third-party links (and then completely de-inventing itself in April of this year). Zaplet moving from providing free, way cool mail applets to becoming a boring "enterprise software and services company." Gator moving from helpful sidekick to obnoxious, rude betrayer. Just about every company when it hits the 150-employee mark or when it nears $100M in revenues.

Sitcoms become outlandish when they're frightened because entertainment depends upon grabbing our attention. Businesses become boring when they're frightened because they prefer the risks they know to the unpredictable risk of being original. Different phenomena. Same tedious, self-defeating outcome.

An Ex-Hippie Learns to Love West Point

I spent Tuesday with Maj. Tony Burgess, Maj. Nate Allen, and the team responsible for a remarkable site, CompanyCommand.com. As an unrepentant ex-hippie and reluctantly lapsed pacifist, I was surprised how impressed I was with the Army's style of business. This was a warmer and more collaborative environment than almost any I've encountered in the corporate world. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. But I was.

Tony and Nate started CompanyCommand.com because company commanders need to talk with one another. Every Army officer serves as a company commander so that she or he will have hands-on experience leading soldiers. But there is surprisingly little guidance given to company commanders once they have gone through their training. And there are no horizontal communication channels. So Tony and Nate created a site at the heart of which are open, unmoderated discussion boards where company commanders can raise issues, ask questions, and share their insights. The site has succeeded well enough that the Army apparently is looking at ways to use it as a more or less formal resource.

When walking with Tony through the West Point campus, every cadet saluted him. Tony saluted back, as expected, but also gave everyone a "Hey, how's it going?" or the equivalent. Not the "Sir Yes Sir!" interchange I was expecting.

The two meetings I had were models of collaboration and enthusiasm. Officers spoke with respectful awareness of rank but simultaneously with obvious affection. At one meeting, the ranking officer had also had several of the participants as students in his leadership courses, and it was clear that they admired and liked him. The conversation was frank in every regard, including in its occasional criticism of the Army, but was also good-natured and funny. The participants always went out of their way to credit others for their contributions to the project and to the conversation. "That's a great point" they'd say before adding on to it, or "We implemented that a couple of months ago and Steve did a great job with it." This seemed unforced and totally natural: a team of people who like one another and who are focused on the same goal.

It struck me that this team of hierarchically-arranged soldiers was so truly collaborative perhaps in part precisely because of the explicitness of the hierarchy. In a corporation, rank is informal and thus is negotiated in every meeting. People position themselves by jousting with others in subtle ways, for explicit jousting is considered pushy. In the Army, you've got stuff sewn into your clothing denoting your precise position in the hierarchy. Thus, there's no need to joust, and teams can be more genuinely collaborative.

Believe me, this is not what I — wearing a tie dyed tee under my professionally-ironed blue pinstripe shirt — was expecting to learn.

Hunt for Strongest Possible Terms Ends

Almost three months after the civilized world was brought together across the political and social spectrum in an unprecedented condemnation in the strongest possible terms of various events, the hunt for what precisely those terms are has ended.

Among those who joined the remarkable coalition hunting for the strongest possible terms are:

In addition, a group of 100 families in New Zealand condemned a new school curriculum in the strongest terms possible, the Maryland Association of Buyers Agents condemned dual agents in the strongest possible terms as a consumer fraud, and Ian Jackson protested in a posting to a Debian-Linux discussion board "I OBJECT IN STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS" to doing a release with the XT security bug unfixed.

It was agreed last night that the strongest possible terms are "the strongest possible terms" with only Angola holding out for "double damn with a cherry on top."

Conference Report: High Tech Lives!

Graeme Thickens reports that the high tech investment world isn't as moribund as it's often made out. He's back from Red Herring's NDA conference and has sent out his observations via an email newsletter that expands on the coverage he provides at www.conferenza.com. (You can sign up for his newsletter at http://www.gtamarketing.com/Subscribe.html.)

Graeme's reports mix reportage, analysis and personal observation. They're often better than being there. Thanks, Graeme.

Misc.

The makers of Kurzweil reading machines for the blind and learning disabled have managed to avoid being taken down by the felonious bastards at Lernout & Hauspie. The management team of the reading machine company has bought it back from L&H. Thank goodness. The reading machines folks are Good Guys. For example, their CTO, Steve Baum, is not only an excellent engineer, but is also truly committed to making life better for others. And there's no one I respect more than my cousin-in-law Mark Dionne who's a senior engineer there. More or less the opposite of Leg-Irons Lernout and Handcuff Hauspie.

Sony is using laws aimed at protecting intellectual property to close down a site that helps owners of their robo-dog modify its behavior. Apparently Sony has sold more than 100,000 Aibos. They go for $800-$3,000 ... enough to buy your own real dog with money left over to hire a dot-com CTO to walk behind it with a pooperscooper.

Sony's being stupid about this. Tivo all but encourages people to hack their machine, adding bigger capacity disks and other tweaks. In return, they ask hackers to refrain from enabling Tivo output to be recorded onto other devices since that would mightily piss off the entertainment industry.

The piece was written by Inke Arn and Andreas Broeckmann but I couldn't find a link to it. Nevertheless, it makes the eternal point that Time Is Everything ... on the Web and off.

Gary also points out that Google — now up to over 3 billion pages — is indexing new files types, including Word, Excel, RTF, PostScript and PowerPoint.

Dean Landsman brings us back to the always-popular autotranslation gaff. He's found a new one: http://www.tranexp.com/InterTran.cgi. He immediately points to a weakness:

Mike O'Dell has a knack for finding odd sites. Here's one that lets you do searches for particular sequences of numbers: http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/index.html Perfect to see if your safe's combination is truly unique.

Politicklish: Death to terrorists, Bush is a moron, etc.

Mark Dionne (him again??) alerted us to the fact that when the BBC and the London Times reported that documents were found in an Al Qaeda hideout describing how to build a nuclear bomb, they were fooled. As reported originally in The Daily Rotten (Nov. 16), the video footage shows a document that was a parody run in The Journal of Irreproducible Results (now The Annals of Improbable Research) in 1979.

Gary "Unblinking" Stock was the first — as usual — to point us to the Economist's incredible statement:

Slate has run an article debunking the oil/war conspiracy (http://slate.msn.com/?id=2059487) but it debunks mainly by saying that there isn't enough evidence. I don't get it. Why would you need a conspiracy theory if there were enough evidence? Besides, the article doesn't give enough weight to this administration's oily predispositions.

Tony McKinley writes in response to my article on why I'm not a pacifist any more:

Tony's a little too happy about this. While I've moved away from the classic pacifist position, I'm still in favor of assuming pacifist positions (e.g., fetal and prone) for the long term and wimping out in all but the most dire of short term situations.

(Aphorisms I Made Up But Don't Quite Understand Dept.: The difference between pacifism and cowardice is which way you face when the scary stuff happens.)

Yes, of course Osama and we say some of the same things. And Hitler loved little kids and was a vegetarian, just like me! So what? The fact that both sides feel justified in their violence doesn't mean neither is. I don't say and have never said that fighting back is all that's required. We also need to make the world fairer, and do so on an unprecedented scale. (See my bogus Generation Alpha speech.) But we also need to kill them before they kill us.

Absolutely. But, then the person eating the chicken is also frame jacking ... at least from the chicken's point of view.

Jock Gill, technology advisor to the Clinton White House, has an article that draws parallels between fundamentalists of both the Islamic and right-wing political faiths: http://www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5021

Jim Wint responds to our suggestion that Osama be punished by being forced to undergo a sex change and then work as a stripper in a club outside Baltimore:

I sincerely apologize for the miscommunication, Jim. I myself come from a long line of Baltimore strippers. Perhaps you've seen my mother, Shirley Tassels. She had been a KM consultant, but she got tired of the tawdriness of it.

Links to Love

Mark Dionne [again!], in response to our comments about haiku, sends us to http://www.tinywords.com/. It's a haiku site, "free to all nice people." Fortunately, they rely upon your own self-assessment. What type of business model is that??

Mike O'Dell, in the spirit of international understanding, suggests www.engrish.com where we get to make fun of Japanese misappropriations of English. I'd get on my high liberal horse if I didn't find the site so damn amusing.

Jacob Shwirtz has reinvented his site, www.gazm.org. It's gone from an edgy discussion space for people whose age is probably mine minus yours, to an edgy group upload site. Here's how Jacob describes it:

Mike O'Dell has found an academic paper that argues that analytic philosophy is:

Chris "RageBoy" Locke, author of Gonzo Marketing, has found a way to spend his long lonely days as he waits for Oprah to call: http://www.vectorlounge.com/04_amsterdam/jam/flamjam.html Chris reports: "I got him going at 320 m.p.h." as if that's something to be proud of.

Gilbert Cattoire recommends www.TheEndofFree.com, a site that catalogs the transition of free sites to for-pay sites, a move the businessperson in me applauds and the part of me wearing the tie-dye underwear finds depressing.

David "Stupid Network" Isenberg has found a "syntho-techno-hip-hop-rap" by Lawrence "Rational Alarmist" Lessig whose two books — Code and The Future of Ideas — ought to scare the bejeesus out of you: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/I_Thought_We_Knew_That.mp3 Lessig is way too smart and too right about the perilous state of the freedom we take for granted on the Net. Be afraid. And do something about it.

Mike O'Dell has unearthed one of my favorite sites: http://kreskytv.com/. It's full of nostalgia about the old Kresky cop show on TV. Brings back memories.

Email, Stray Insults, and Worrisome Flu-like Symptoms

Robert Swanson responds to something I'd written about forgiveness, although I'll be damned if I can remember what:

"Unsolicited Pundit" Glenn Fleishman comments on Peter Fromherz, mentioned in the previous issue because for his integration of silicon and neurons:

Not to mention the other typos on the form. For example, it says "Must be able to fit oversize objects into steamer trunks," when it should say "oversized." The form says "Preferable if assistant has removed their fingerprints with acid," when it should say "his or her fingerprints." And, most damning, the form says "I did it! I murdered Chandra Levy because she was going to secretly tell my wife about my involvement in the Joan Benet Ramsey case!" How embarrassing for the Congressman! You'd think he know by now that he shouldn't split his infinitives!

Grant Whittle points out that Condit also has "a link to a missing and exploited children site."

GS Chandy was apparently intoxicated by last issue's report on searches for words such as "good" and "evil":

Footnote: My search for "GS Chandy cattle mutilation" resulted in 0 hits, so I guess you're in the clear. On the other hand, "GS Chandy has too much time on his hands" resulted in 17 hits.

When I heard the Cat perform in '71, I thought to myself that he had the makings of a crazed terrorist bomber. "Piece Train"? "TNT for the Tillerman"? "Osama, It's a Wild World"? I mean it was so *obvious*.

Mike O'Dell spills the beans about APRS, a group he mentioned in a letter in the previous issue:

Sean Ross writes in response to my saying: "For the KM junkies among you, there's a new issue of Knowledge Manager magazine at its new URL: http://www.chironpub.com"

How interesting. This used to be a KM magazine. Really. Well, it reminds me of the old joke: "What's the difference KM and masturbation? There's less to clean up after you're done masturbating." [Yes, there is an assumptive male in that joke.]

Marketing master David Wolfe responds to my not-very-interested comments on Patricia Bush's invocation of "Cultural Creatives" as a new and important demographic group:

Yes, Livelink is a collaborative intranet system. No, it doesn't suck wind. Yes, I used to work at Open Text. Yes, your employer is completely messed up. No, the framejacking is solely in your own head. Yes, you need psychological care.

(Two mentions of frame jacking in one issue. Maybe this term actually will catch on! Nah.)

Carol Anne Ogdin replies to our article on Microsoft Passport and the Liberty Alliance's alternative, and proposes a different model for maintaining a database of personal information. She wants to keep it on the user's own PC:

Or they could take the Gator (Booo! Hisss!) route and still find a way to compromise our — and their — integrity.

Chris Worth comments on our own attempt to hide the identity of someone with a particularly moronic sig:

Bogus contest: MRUs of the Rich and Famous

Suppose you could visit the Most Recently Used lists of famous people - the sites they've most recently visited. Would that be hysterically funny, or perhaps would it be simply a cheesy excuse for yet another Bogus Contest? Who cares. If you've read this far, you're clearly amused by anything.

Contest Results

Grant "Contrabass" Green responds to our request for little things about web sites that drive you nuts.

Michael O'Connor Clarke helps perpetuate our never-ending search for URLs that are amusingly ambiguous:

This is a site for investor relations (IR) on the Net. (Hint: If you do decide to iron the Net, be careful around the pleats.)

Jonathan Vinson points us to www.reefer.com. He writes that they "sell refrigerated containers, of all things." Well, what else would they sell?

And thus closes another too-big JOHO. We really have to do something about this. Think weblogs. Slim, frequent weblogs. Mmmmmm weblogs....

JOHO is a free, independent newsletter written and produced by David Weinberger. If you write him with corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out to have been your fault.

For subscription information, go to www.topica.com/lists/joho. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected]. Make sure you send it from the email address you want unsubscribed. There's more information about subscribing, changing your address, etc., at www.hyperorg.com/forms/admin. In case of confusion, you can always send mail to me at [email protected]. There is no need for harshness or recriminations. Sometimes things just don't work out between people. .

Dr. Weinberger is represented by a fiercely aggressive legal team who responds to any provocation with massive litigatory procedures. This notice constitutes fair warning.

Any email sent to JOHO may be published in JOHO and snarkily commented on unless the email explicitly states that it's not for publication.

Original	Intertran	Systran (Alta Vista)
Markets are conversations.	Walked are conversations.	The markets are conversations.
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.	Walked consist of be human beings, not demographic areas.	The markets are composed of the human beings, nondemographic sectors.
Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.	Conversations amid be human beings fit be human. They are behave in a be human parson.	The conversations among the human beings seem human. They are led in a human voice.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.	If commit information, estimation, outlook, dissent arguments or humorous asides, the be human parson is typically confide, inbred, [[uncontrived]].	If providing information, of the opinions, the prospects, the unmatched arguments or the asides full with humour, the human voice is in general open, normal, uncontrived.
People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.	People acknowledge each other as so about the fit of this parson.	People are identified as such of the noise of this voice.
The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.	The Intern is [[enabling]] conversations amid be human beings that were merely not likely at the era about mass media.	The Internet allows conversations among the human beings which were simply not possible in the era of the mass media.
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.	[[Hyperlinks]] subvert hierarchy.	The hyperlinks reverse the hierarchy.
In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.	At both [[internetworked]] walked and amid [[intranetworked]] employee, people are confer at each other in a potent fresh lane.	In both internetworked of the markets and among intranetworked of the employees, people speak between them about a new powerful way.
These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.	[Ceux]-[ci] network conversations are [[enabling]] potent fresh form about social organization and know barter at emerge.	These conversations managed in network allow new powerful forms of social exchange of organization and information to emerge.
As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.	As a end product, walked are achieve dainty, more informed, more arrange. Involvement in a network walked changes people basically.	Consequently, the markets become smarter, more with the current, more organized. The participation in a market managed in network changes people basically.

Carli Fiorina, CEO HP	HP Compaq Monster.com
Matt Drudge	NationalInquirer.com WeeklyWorldNews.com jerryspringer.com
RageBoy	GonzoMarkets.com Chironpub.com
Al Gore	BushorChimp.com Democrats.com HarrisPoll.com Monster.com

Contents

The Gonzo of Gonzo Marketing

Slumping the Shark

An Ex-Hippie Learns to Love West Point

Hunt for Strongest Possible Terms Ends

Conference Report: High Tech Lives!

Misc.

Middle World Resources

Politicklish: Death to terrorists, Bush is a moron, etc.

Links to Love

Email, Stray Insults, and Worrisome Flu-like Symptoms

Bogus contest: MRUs of the Rich and Famous

Contest Results