Walter Sullivan at Salon reports on speeches by the three front running Democrats in Iowa. Interesting for fans of political rhetoric. [Tags: politics iowa clinton obama edwards rhetoric]

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Sorry to be such a Tim O’Reilly fanboy — see my post from a couple of days ago — but now his company has posted all of Esther Dyson’s famous, influential and uniformly excellent Release 1.0 issues for free. Release 1.0 was quite expensive when it was extant. Now all the great ideas an information in it have been set free.

Thanks, Tim! And most of all, thanks, Esther. [Tags: tim_oreilly release1.0 esther_dyson ]

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i’m listening to the slides and audio of a talk by David Eaves on how the Open Source community manages itself in a way that enables it to scale. Very interesting. (And not unconnected to what I’ve been thinking about wrt Web leadership.)

[Tags: open_source community david_eaves mozilla collaboration leadership everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Great op-ed by Tim O’Reilly, holding out the greed stick to the cellphone companies to induce them to open their networks.

[Tags: tim_oreilly open_networks wireless cellphones telcom net_neutrality ]

Stephen Baker has an excellent, provocative article on “cloud” computing, where “cloud” means gigaclusters like Google’s and not the great amorphous mashup of information known as the Internet.

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Alitalia lost my luggage. It happens. It’s been two days and they still haven’t delivered it. It happens.

But here’s what shouldn’t happen. When you’re at the airport registering the lostness of your luggage, the last step before they send you home to live in the clothes you arrived in is the Bestowing of the Toiletries. The little bag contains the cheapest possible bathroom utensils the airline can find: A toothbrush as rigorous as a cotton swab, a chunk of deodorant floating loose in its container, a razor blade fashioned from the sharp edge of a tuna can. But the last straw was the one piece of clothing included: A white undershirt on to which they’ve printed their logo. Not only does this render it useless if you happen to be wearing a shirt of any translucency, why do they think I want to advertise their business for them? What part of “I’m pissed off” don’t they understand?

Likewise, when you’re put on hold by a business, why would they think you’re in a mood to listen to their ads…especially if you’re put on hold while trying to get technical help? What are they thinking?

If you have an emotional IQ above than that of your average rattlesnake, you can figure out that marketing to customers when they’re pissed off at you requires apologies, extra care, patience, and humility, not happy jingles and cheery logos.

Grrrr…

[Tags: marketing business pissed_off ]

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Hubert Dreyfus’ lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time are available for one and all. I haven’t heard them, but back when I was studying (and eventually teaching about) Heidegger, I found Dreyfus to be exceptionally clear and helpful. (Don’t ask me about Dreyfus’ Internet theories, though.) (Thanks to Tom Morris for the link, and for the fun on the LeWeb back channel) [Tags: hubert_dreyfus martin_heidegger being_and_time philosophy ]

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Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej have done a biting report on how well the Republican candidates are using the Web, and what sort of tech policies they offer. (Answers: Poorly and hardly any.)

[Tags: politics e-democracy republicans ]

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Here’s John Edwards on Net Neutrality, plus other responses to TenQuestions….[Disclosure: I occasionally talk with that campaign about Net policy issues] [Tags: politics john_edwards net_neutrality ]

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Cisco’s posted an interview with me about the Net and governance and politics. But most of all, I’m wearing the first suit I’ve bought in 15 yrs. [Tags: politics governance fashion ]

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The striking writers guild (or some faction of it) has an AMPTP spoof site. I thought the logo page was especially amusing. The original is here.

(One lesson: if you’re a dot org, consider getting the dot com version of your domain as well.) [Tags: wga amtptp hollywood parodies humor ]

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