from the apparently-i’m-always-the-last-to-know department, i happened upon 2blowhards by way of morelikethis. good stuff if you’re into loquacious verbosity and wordy witticisms.

given that i’m experimenting with wikis in a variety of private contexts, it’s interesting to see the recent flurry of comments related to wikis and blogs. i think kevin marks comes up with one of the most cogent analysis:

“Blogs amplify individual voices. Unlike mailing lists, they don’t get lost in the hubbub. Wikis are different – they blur authorship, and drive towards a consensual style. Blogs’ temporal flow creates an affordance for conversation that is diluted and washed away in Wikis.”

i think this is why blogs and wikis are perfectly complementary, and in most cases can live together in perfect harmony. sometimes a little blurred authorship and consensus building is good and sometimes you need a strong voice with a conversational style. this is a far more important to picking and using the right tool in the right context, as compared to the relatively trivial criticism that wikis are ugly [ which, of course, they sometimes are ]. but i don’t think ugliness is an inherent trait of wikis. the osaf wiki certainly has as much going for it, aesthetically speaking, as your average blog.

so i boxed-up the ibook, which if you’ll remember is a lemon disguised as an macintosh and took it to the local office max to be shipped back to apple. i walk up the counter and have the following conversation, which is yet another bit of evidence that i’m not the freakish outlier that apple keeps insisting i am:

me: walks up to counter holding boxed lemon
clerk: got a laptop?
me: yeah.
clerk: what kind?
me: mac. laptop.
clerk: yeah. we see a lot of those. it’s incredible. i’m glad i have only peecees, they sure seem like they’re less trouble.

it looks like i missed a bullet with all the issues at cornerhost. somehow, luck was on my side, and my machine wasn’t affected. michal, the force behind cornerhost, has put together a nice set of packages and has managed to attract a cadre of smart people as customers, including brent simmons, sam ruby and mark pilgrim [ just to name a few ].

how do you get and keep customers like this? service. almost without fail, michal is in constant, early and often communication when things go awry. they always will. and when they do you want to have someone like michal around. he’s a great example of using genuinely great service to differentiate yourself in what would otherwise be the cut-throat commodity trenches.

oh yeah. serverbeach sucks.

that’s right. in one week i’ll be huffing and sweating around cincinnati. it’s almost sad that the training is winding down. who knew that this endurance running thing could be so addictive?

it’s interesting to juxtapose the
comments

from
anil

about computing and communication:

“One of the things that I keep coming back to is the importance of communication. I started using computers regularly when I was about 5 years old. At that time, we thought computers were for, you guessed it,
computing

. Even some of the people who invented the PC itself took 10 or 15 or 20 years to figure out that a personal computer’s highest calling was for communication.”

with an oldie but a goodie from the archives on
why content isn’t king

:

“”Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war… It didn’t turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred “self-generated” content.”

“Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world.””

there is nothing new under the sun.

now that’s
dedication

to a cause:

“The leader of a prominent U.S.-based animal rights group said she had drawn up a will directing that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products in protest at man’s ill-treatment of animals.”