From Adina:

There’s a discussion on the Well, in the publicly visible Inkwell.vue area, about Thom Hartmann’s recent book: Equal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

In our current legal system, corporations are considered persons, with the civil rights due people, like free speech, and freedom from search and seizure. Hartmann argues that these rights contribute to corporate abuses, and argues in favor of restricting corporate personhood.

If you read only one message there, make it #5 from Hartmann. But why stick with just one?

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I’m doing a commentary on wifi on the syndicated NPR show “Here and Now” today, probably around 12:20. (SPOILER: I’m in favor of wifi.)

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Here‘s a balanced article on the impact of Palladium on colleges and on Fair Use and the enforcement of the UCITA

Thanks to Seth Johnson for the link.

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Dear Sir,

My name is Andy Hudson.

I’m an online marketer, and am currently searching for like minded individuals and web site owners to network with, and to explore potential opportunities that can bring mutual benefit to both of us.

I just visited your site, and would like to congratulate you on a nice clean, crisp site – it’s very professional.

Oh yeah, this is a guy who’s looked at my site. If ever there were three words to describe it, I think we’d have to go with “clean,” “crisp” and “professional.” Hah!

So, by the time I got to the line in the spam that said:

“No false promises, but I think this could be the start of an excellent win/win relationship.. “

I was already thinking “Gotta blog this!” But then it got even better. Here are the closing lines from this Seasoned Internet Marketing Professional:

Many thanks.

Your name.

Andy Hudson

Yo, Andy baby: It’s ok not to realize that “Your name” is placeholder text in the spam generator you’re using, but it is most definitely not ok to spray your spam around without even mailing it to yourself first to test it.

So, when I say “Shove your spam up your integrated marketing portal, Andy Hudson,” I hope you understand that I mean this only in the most clear, crisp and professional sense.

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Kevin Marks takes a look at the data Clay uses in his application of power laws to blogs, concluding that “Clay’s paper is correct as far as it goes, but it makes a couple of classic mistakes.”

Kevin’s article is all math-like, with graphs and numbers with six digits to the right of the decimal point, so I was disqualified from understanding it well before the lightning round. But both Kevin and Clay are waaaay smart, so if you’re in their league, you might want to mosey on over.

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Now we see what Google is made of.

Google got to be the #1 brand name world-wide, beating Coke and Osama not by out-spending them or by having a catchier jingle. No, they did it the way (frankly) Cluetrain said: by having value and values.

Marketing was invented to solve a distribution problem: How do we let potential buyers know about what we have to offer? The answer was to buy distribution channels that, by their nature, reached a mass audience with a one-way communication, AKA “a message.” With thirty seconds to make their case (or, in the print world, with the time it takes to flip a page), companies treated their messages like dumdum bullets: hollowed them of content hoping for maximum impact. Marketing, which should be about communication and conversation, became a cynical numbers game, the apotheosis of which is spam.

But the Internet has solved the distribution problem. Everyone is connected to everyone. We fill the Net with talk about everything we care about, including the products we buy, bought, or will never buy again.

In this environment, a company like Google succeeds by offering something of value and by acting with values that let us trust it. So far — despite some fear-mongering recently — Google seems to have earned our trust. It’s one of the best examples of a company adopting the “End-to-End” principles I talked about in the lead article in Friday’s issue of my newsletter.

But Blogger offers such a temptation to go wrong. What, after all, is Google’s business case for the purchase? For example, the purchase of Deja.com gave Google content that drew more users and, more important, gave them more pages on which to sell ads. Google’s ad policy maintains its value and its values: the ads are unobtrusive and are listed in order of their utility to users (based on clicks). But with Blogger, there are two tempting ways Google could violate the trust they’ve earned: They could start charging for all Blogger accounts, and they could weight searches towards Blogger blogs.

Weighting searches would clearly violate the principle that has built Google’s presence: rankings that try to reflect the Web’s own preferences. Charging for all Blogger accounts would violate the implicit bond that has made Google not only known and used but loved, for it would make the Web a worse place overall. Google’s record so far has been great: Whatever the business reasons for rescuing Deja, the purchase also preserved the UseNet archives, making the Net a better place. And, of course, the superiority of Google’s searching ability has made the Web a far better place than it was before.

Many companies get stupid when they get big. So far, Google has bucked the trend. Let’s hope it doesn’t give into the temptation to get stupid now.

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For your West Wing enhanced entertainment experience, here’s a site for true junkies.

And this is from Joe Conason’s preview of an Esquire article (which should have come out by now) on life in the White House. It quotes John DiIulio, former director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives:

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis … Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera …”

Mike Muegel points to the Esquire article in question. Thanks, Mike!

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Why has the hardback edition of Cluetrain been ranked in the 600s for weeks on Amazon? The paperback edition, ranked at #18,671, has been out for years. It’s available free online here. Don’t you people have anything better to do than buy hardback copies of an aging barbaric yawp?

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See them all here.

Thanks to Gary Stock for the link.

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Salon has reported that it will be out of business in weeks unless something changes.

It has about 47,000 subscribers. HINT: It could use one more.

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