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June 6, 2002
In Microsoft Word XP, type the phrase
“Information Highway.” (It’s ok, you don’t have to
mean it.)
Notice the subtle purple underline indicating
that Word has Smart Tagged it? Click on the down triangle to see the pulldown list of actions:
Don’t bother clicking on “Display Driving
Directions”; Microsoft MapPoint.net confesses not to
know where the Information Highway is. (It’s everywhere, dude!)
June 5, 2002
The debonair Scott Kirsner, in his column in the
Boston Globe this week, recommends we visit MIT’s
Cambridge Forum’s humor page where they list the winners of
their annual Bad Business Plan contest. These are
bogus companies with truly bad ideas. I won’t give
any of them away except to say that no one is proposing investing in a beef steak mine, much less one in Nigeria.
He just is, durn it. Especially if you think Bush is a moron. His Bush Diary is good, but what I really like are the email msgs announcing new entries in the diary. He writes with great confidence which is hard to do with comedy because humor writing is inherently a type of pandering, and his confidence is justified … which is also rare with comedy. For example, in this week’s message he waxes comedically about the sorry state of readiness of the National Guard patrolling California’s bridges and recommends that we replace them with trolls. He archives his msgs here.
I was disappointed, however, that he makes no mention of W’s dismissing of his own administration’s conclusion – based on information from six agencies, including the EPA – that global warming results from the human abuse of energy and isn’t simply an unfortunate coincidence caused by bovine methane leakage, Iraqi hair dryer usage and Monica Lewinsky. “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy,” said President Bush as he dismissed it. Later he was heard to refer to Mahatma Gandhi as “that career politician, ” Edward R. Murrow as “that journalist-for-hire” and to himself as “that so-called president.”
A few hours after sending a USPS money order Priority Mail with a request for delivery confirmation to an address in Atlanta, I received a message from eBay telling me that the recipient’s account had been suspended because of unauthorized access. Does anyone know how to stop a money order?
Alternatively, does anyone know any goons hanging out in a bar in Atlanta looking to make a few bucks? (Note: I just want my money order back. I am not paying anything extra for throttling.)
Here’s how you do it. You get a form #1509 from your local post office. (It’s not available on the USPS.com site.) It’s an “Application for Recall.” You fill it in and fax it to the post office branch that will be delivering your envelope; you can get that address at www.usps.com. You call the local destination branch and talk to the nice lady there. She gives you the fax number. You fax the #1509. You cross your fingers because it hurts too much to Jewish-star your fingers.
June 4, 2002
From Tom Gross comes a link to Christophe
Bruno’s article “The Google
AdWords Happening” about his experiment with
using Google AdWords to have people see his art. He
bought some keywords so that his ad would show up
when people searched on those words, but ran poetry
instead of an ad. For example, if you searched
Google for “symptom” you’d see:
|
As the clickthrough rates fell — Bruno’s
aim was to present poetry on Google’s page, not to
get people to click through to his — Google’s
bot noticed and decreased the frequency with which
his ad was served. Finally, his ads were disapproved
and Google suspended the “campaign.”
This actually accords with my own experience with
AdWords. I bought the keyword “Lessig,” as an
experiment, and submitted an ad that began “If you
like Lessig…”; the rest of the ad touted Small
Pieces as a book that Larry Lessig liked. But I
couldn’t get the three dots past Google because they
do not permit “excessive” punctuation. The bot did
let me get away with “If you like Lessig-” but I
then received a personal email telling me that my
use of a dash was ungrammatical. Admittedly, but
that’s only because they wouldn’t allow me to use
the grammatically correct ellipsis.
Methinks they’re a bit overscrupulous…
June 3, 2002
Bob Frankston has a clear and provocative article on what needs to change at the FCC. Here’s a taste:
The real tragedy is that the FCC’s existence and mandate has created an artificial and unnecessary chokepoint in the first mile of connectivity. Those whose businesses are premised on the 1934 assumptions of scarcity have control over this connectivity and have an inherent conflict of interest. If they enlarge the commons they lose the scarcity that defines their businesses.
By locking the concept of spectrum allocation into legislation we have taken what is an essentially unlimited capacity for wireless communications and have treated it like property with exclusive ownership and thus minimizes the potential value and societal benefit.
These practices take potentially unlimited resources and create scarcity. And this artificial scarcity gives the FCC and those it charters an extraordinary ability to regulate speech! …
Bob’s proposal:
The first step. Remedy the chokepoint in the first mile of connectivity by applying anti-trust enforcement…A company can either be a connectivity provider or a content/service company but not both. At least not as long as the first mile is a chokepoint.
It’s also chockablock with crystallizations such as:
“The Ethernet demonstrated that one could implement a very simple network without promising that every packet would be delivered”
“The problem is that the entire telecommunications industry is based on the ability to charge a high price for a service that no longer has any costs associated with it. Once you have an Internet connection the phone call is nothing but a fiction!”
Must reading, IMO.
USAToday reports (and Slate re-reports) that Katherine Harris, Florida’s Secretary of State during the first annual Florida Fraud Month, is working on a book about her experience. It’s called Center of the Storm: Practicing Principled Leadership in Times of Crisis.
Other upcoming books:
The Stealth Executive: Managing the New Distributed Business by O.B. Laden
With the Help of My Friends: Succeeding in the New Gift Economy by Senator Robert G. Torricelli
Letting Go: The Art of Creative Severance by Gary Condit
Tough Love: The Slobodan Milosevic Story
(How dare I compare Harris to Bin Laden or Milosevic? You’re right. I don’t.)
June 1, 2002
Jonathan Peterson musing on corporate personae, writes
Corporations similarly have multiple personae, which are used in communicating depending on audience (shareholders, employees, partners, customers, etc.) The Cluetrain concept that those communications should be as human as possible doesn’t negate the need for a company to assume many different persona.
Definitely. And it’s hard to see why that should be even objectionable. I don’t want or expect the notice of the upcoming shareholders meeting to be written in the same voice as the tips newsletter or the corporate endorsement of City Year. The question — which Chris Locke raises sharply in Gonzo Marketing — is whether a corporation can have any authentic voice at all since it doesn’t have a self and doesn’t have a body. Is a corporation all masks and no cowboy? Or, are corporations in the real world distressingly similar to selves on the Web: all public personae without an inner core against which they can be measured as authentic or not?
Jonathan recommends Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, and asks her to write one on corporations as theatre. I just ordered Laurel’s book from Amazon; sounds fascinating. (Thanks, Jonathan.)
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