From the Spam Pile (Category: Self-Disproving):

Hello, my name is [redacted] and I am an internet marketing specialist. I was looking at websites under the keyword playing cards and came across your website http://www.hyperorg.com. I see that you’re not ranked on the first page of Google for a playing cards search.

Nice targeting, Mr. Redacted! As a quick look at my blog reveals, I am heavily into playing cards. I am a playing card fanatic, a playing card speculator, a playing card industry watchdog. Why, my readers are exactly the Influentials anyone in the playing card industry would want to reach.

Sheesh.

[Tags: marketing spam ]

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Chris Brogan recounts the scary tale of Nick Saber getting locked out of his Google accounts for no apparent reason. Did I say “his” accounts? That’s just the problem. Technically, all your accounts are belong to Google.

I am heavily invested in Google as a user (although totally not invested as a shareholder…maybe I got that backwards). A lockout would be a disaster for me. If Google wants us to love it enough that we’ll unite our data in holy matrimony, Google really really needs a way to let us regain and re-own our data. All of it all at once. A big red “Export up everything onto my hard disk button” would be great, although I understand that Google doesn’t want me re-downloading 800,000 emails every night. Some reasonable limits would be reasonable. Even authorizing a third party or two to mirror data for those of us who choose to subscribe to that service would give us some measure of reassurance.

If it’s going to be ’til death do us part, Google should not be allowed to decide exactly when it thinks we’re dead.

[Tags: google ]

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David Reed has posted a reminder that communications is only understandable from the top of the stack down. It is about the we, not the individual acts, much less only about how messages get passed. Keep in mind that this is coming from someone involved from the beginning in the protocols of Internet message-passing .

From my little corner, what David says is a good example of why considering the Net only or primarily as an information medium is insufficient (although obviously information theory is crucial at various layers of the stack).

[Tags: david_reed information infohist ]

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Here’s an interview with Dr. Jo Groebel (director of the German Digital Institute) and then with me, from the DMMK German multimedia conference a month ago… [Tags: ]

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Peter Shankman, a marketing/PR practioner/speaker, has set up a service called HelpAReporter.com that intends to bring together journalists and sources. It’s free and very informal — you sign up for emails, you respond to requests for help — which is an appropriate way to start. But it’s so ripe an opportunity for abuse by people pushing their clients’ points of view, or just pushing their clients’ brands, that it’ll be interesting to see whether journalists avail themselves of it. Because it’s a mailing list that arrives up to three times a day, my guess is that it’ll mainly be PR folks and lobbyists who attend to it closely enough, and that will (?) drive down its utility for journalists. But, I’m rarely right, so we’ll see…

[Tags: marketing pr journalism media ]

[Later that day: See Peter S’s comment about how he handles abusers. Sounds pretty effective to me :)

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I hadn’t heard of this highly existential and meaningful comic strip until I read a comment about a BoingBoing piece on a different strip that it calls the worst ever.

Tags: garfield comics

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1. I took an extra napkin from a Taco Bell for unspecified use “later.”

2. I sat on a bench on a hot day, enjoying the breeze as the man next to me fanned himself.

3. I read the headlines of a newspaper that was for sale in a kiosk box.

4. I divided a single-serving DingDong in two, and had it for dessert on two consecutive days.

5. I listened all the way through to a Metallica song emanating from my neighbor’s radio, but closed my window when the commercial came on.

6. I remembered the movie times in my newspaper from the day before so I wouldn’t have to buy a copy of the paper today.

7. When a friend’s cat chose my lap to sit in, I petted it, precisely to discourage it from moving to the lap of its rightful owner.

8. I said “What a long, strange trip it’s been” without air quotes.

9. On the Amtrak “quiet car,” I listened to a man in the seat ahead of me explaining to the bored woman next to him how he gets such a great shine on his shoes. I have since used his technique, successfully.

10. I have stared carefully at reproductions of great paintings.

11. I asked for and received a “tasting spoon” of mint pistachio ice cream, anticipating, correctly, that I would not like it.

12. I smelled the aromatherapy candles through their wrappings at the Stop ‘n’ Shop.

13. Frequently have I browsed stores with absolutely no intent to purchase. On some such occasions, I have felt fabrics I did not intend to buy.

14. I placed a bag on the seat next to me on the subway.

15. I continued to wear in public running shoes after the Nike “swoosh” wore off.

16. In a Italian restaurant, I entered their “win a free lunch” contest by putting into the jar a business card from a job I had recently left, with my new phone number written in by hand.

17. I have retold the joke about the man who meets a pirate in a bar without ever once explicitly acknowledging that I was not its author.

18. I gazed with lust at another man’s bikini-clad wife.

19. I deeply inhaled the smell of popcorn in a movie theater, but I did not buy any.

20. One late summer evening, I purposefully and with intent committed to memory the purple of the clouds. That I still remember the edge of the chill was unpremeditated, however.

[Tags: copyright ]

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Via Slashdot (with a link to the authenticating photo):

“Preparing for English-speaking visitors, a restaurant in China recently ran its name through an online translator, took the result, then purchased and mounted a large sign displaying the English version of their name: Translate Server Error.”

[Tags: humor ]

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Harry Lewis puts just right the way Homeland Security goes off the rails with its decision to give itself permission to confiscate laptops at the border:

I love Michael Chertoff’s explanation of why border guards won’t bother with the niceties of probable cause provided for in the Fourth Amendment: “As a practical matter, travelers only go to secondary [for a more thorough examination] when there is some level of suspicion. Yet legislation locking in a particular standard for searches would have a dangerous, chilling effect as officers’ often split-second assessments are second-guessed.”

He’s right, of course. The Bill of Rights has a chilling effect on the government. That’s what it’s there for!

[Tags: harry_lewis homeland_security laptops privacy creeping_totalitarianism ]

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I’m reading Seth Lloyd‘s breezy book “Programming the Universe.” Breeziness is a good thing when you’re writing about quantum mechanics and information theory for a lay readership. But I’m finding myself frustrated that he’s not digging deeper into the ontological questions about information. I find myself asking whether he could just as well say that the universe is a dance because the particles move or stand still, which would be true but a not particularly fundamental metaphor. (Oh, don’t dance the Wuli dance to me in response! Seth seems to mean information to be more than a useful metaphor. He thinks it’s alongside energy in importance as a scientific phenomenon. It’s not like saying the universe is like a dance, or a game (oh, don’t Glass Bead me!), or a lovers quarrel.) I lose him even in his assumption that the universe is made of digital bits. Why think things — tossed coins or spinning particles — always reduce to simple on-off states?

Maybe I’ll understand it better as I read more of the book. On the other hand, I’ve also struggled through other books on this topic, including “The Bit and the Pendulum” and “A New Kind of Science,” to name the two that spring to my dialup-unaided brain. I just may lack the education, imagination and context required to understand this. [Tags: seth_lloyd information_theory quantum_computers ]

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