Psychedelic Republicans. ‘Nuff said (except thanks to RageBoy for the link).

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Over at Loose Democracy I’ve blogged a memo from the Kerry pollster to the Kerry camp trying to set expectations way high for the bounce Bush needs from his convention.

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Meta-death: Al Dvorin, the man who said “Elvis has left the building” has left the building.

Watching the Olympics is becoming more and more like watching Florida election returns.

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Do we have a word for reacting negatively to someone but not trusting your reaction, and then getting stuck in this oscillation of dislike that doesn’t know whether to attach itself to you or to that someone? That’s pretty much my kneejerk reaction to Gerry McGovern’s column on The Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogging.

I agree with much of the article. I think he gets the advantages of corporate blogging right. He says that the old idea of PR as conveying a message doesn’t work on the Web which is a democracy of voices. Cool. I disagree with him on most of what he points to as disadvantages of blogging. But, my negative reaction went beyond a simple disagreement I found myself annoyed. Not a lot but still unreasonably.

So, I poked around just a little more and found a good and a bad reason for my reaction.

The bad reason is that he’s marketing himself as a consultant a zillion times better than I do. (Since I’m a marketing consultant, this is not just ironic, it’s a sign of my incompetence. But let’s not point that out.) He’s got the quotes from happy customers right up front. He gives you permission to republish his article so long as you include a link that says “Gerry McGovern is a web content management author and consultant.” He’s got the “McGovern Scorecard” that benchmarks your site “against best practice.” I have learned that I react negatively to people who promote theselves overtly, and, knowing that about myself, I try to keep it from poisoning my feelings. I mean, I also have a kneejerk reaction against people who wear too much cologne, but you can’t let that distract you from the rest of the person.

The reasonable reason has something to do with what he actually says. We have an honest disagreement about the following:

Organizations are not democracies. The Web makes many organizations look like disorganizations, with multiple tones and opinions. Contrary to what some might think, the average customer prefers it if the organization they are about to purchase from is at least somewhat coherent.

Sure, organizations aren’t democracies, but the alternative isn’t that they look incoherent. IMO, the multiple voices found in corporate blogs make organizations look human. Ok, so we disagree. Good.

But the disagreement goes deeper. Here’s the opening paragraph of the blurb for his book, Content Critical,:

Content Critical will change the way you think about the World Wide Web. It is built upon a simple but profound insight: The Web is a medium for publishing content.

And later:

Content Critical talks about a website as a publication, because that is the primary function of a website. Yes, it’s a different kind of publication. It’s more interactive and transaction-driven than traditional publications, but it’s still a publication. Like all publications it’s a place where people come to be informed about stuff.

Because Gerry thinks of the Web as a publishing medium — not as a conversation, which I still think is the best way to think of it — his book (based on the first chapter, available on his site) is about how to build good content, edit it, winnow out what is unworthy of seeing daylight, and maintaining your site. All useful stuff.

But, if that’s all your company is doing, you’ve missed the big point. You’re a Web narcissist who thinks that you are the center of your product’s universe, that you are the valued source of the bestest and truest information about your product, that your customers actually want to listen to you prattle on rather than dish the dirt with one another. Dish the dirt about you, by the way.

Ok, so I get to ride my ol’ high horse for a paragraph, acting as if my thinking is more advanced than Gerry’s. How fun. Of course, I’m talking to bloggy readers, not to marketing managers at big, traditional corporations. And, by and large, what I’ve seen of Gerry’s writings pulls his clients in (what I consider to be) the right direction. Much of what I disagree with is like what I might say if I ever let reality influence me.

So, I’m at war with my feelings, an unpleasant brew of resentment and smugness. I feel like I’m back being an academic where the only currency is being right and showing everyone else is wrong and not as advanced in their thinking. The result in academics is that the people whose thinking is closest to yours become your most dangerous enemy.

So, when you come down to it, I can’t find a single reason to hold on to any of my negative reaction. Yet, no matter how much I reason, my knees still jerk.

Sometimes it sucks being a human.

Thanks to Vergil Iliescu for the link.

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After an hour of failing to get my in-law’s wifi up again, I was working up a good lather. I had Adelphia dead to rights: I have two wifi access points, a Linksys and a D-link, neither of which was giving me ping, neither of which was giving me a DNS. I have two computers here, both with the same problem. I tried every conceivable setting on both the access points and the computers. Nope nope nope. Adelphia was going to get an earful, I can promise you that!

I decided to try one last reboot of the Adelphia cable modem. And then, I noticed that the ethernet cable from the D-Link was plugged into the Linksys, not into the Adelphia modem. Um. Er. It turns out it works a lot better if you connect the access point to the Internet.

Heck, I may call Adelphia customer support and unload on them anyway. It may be unfair and undeserved, but it’s cheaper than therapy.

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Socialtext, the wiki and social software company, has closed Round A financing with some investors noted for funding companies that make the world better. Cool! And I say this as a fully biased member of their advisory board.

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First, the appealingly-named TurdHead blogger (time for self-esteem class, Turdy) wrote an ActionScript version of The Jabberwocky poem. It’s an amusing bit of geekery. Then it got Slashdotted, drawing a bunch of fire form people who consider ActionScript, a Macromedia invention, to be the language Satan speaks when he stubs his toe. So, TurdHead has posted his reply, the punchline of which I won’t spoil…

(Those of you who got here by googling “Jabberwocky” who actually want information about the miraculous summer Jabberwocky are probably looking for this or maybe these photos.)

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If you add the number of readers (note: readers, not subscribers) of the paper versions of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and then subtract the number of readers in the metropolitan New York area so as not disadvantage USA Today, what’s the total number of readers? (Information from The Media Audit as reported by The Center for Media Research.)

To see the answer, drag-select the seemingly-blank space between the x’s:

X 15 million: 6.1 million for the NYT, 5.3 million for USA Today, and 3.7 million for the WJS. X

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AKMA writes a must-read post about the police preventing him from using the public library’s free wifi while sitting outside the library:

I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. “I did notice several other open signals in the area — am I allowed to connect to them?”

“Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it’s a new law, sir; ‘theft of signal.’ It would be like if you stole someone’s cable TV connection.”

I responded, “But this is a radio signal thing — it’s not like a cable connection, it’s like someone has a porch light on and I’m sitting on the bench, reading a book by their light. I’m not stealing their light.”

Needless to say, AKMA lost the argument.

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Here’s the formal relationship: My wife’s cousin knows the mother of Micah Garen, the American journalist who was being held hostage in Iraq until a couple of hours ago.

Here’s the same situation, this time expressed truthfully.

My wife and her cousin are very close. They are the same age, grew up together, and live within a couple of miles. You know how it can be with cousins: they are the closest relatives we’re allowed to dislike, but they can also be a friend so close that you share DNA. This weekend we’re together here on Martha’s Vineyard along with our extended family. (The wifi is working and I have a comfortable roost on the couch, so don’t worry about my being forced to go outside.) Micah’s mother and my wife’s cousin are both members of a small craft group that is a central part of my cousin’s life.

So, although I am three or four degrees away from Micah Garen, I feel directly connected to him through two people I love, a close collegial relationship, and the the love of a mother. I have been checking the news frequently and felt a pall lift when Al Jazeera first ran the news of his release.

Some degrees are closer than others.

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