it’s really sad when an article from friday seems old and stale. one of the unintended consequences of mainting the snowdeal.org family of sites, is that it’s making me “hypervigilant” of when stories come online – with anything over 12 hourse being past its prime. anyway, the article is yet another ‘mainstream’ reference to The Cluetrain Manifesto, ‘blogging’ and the changes that are afoot – using the amazon patent ‘situation’ as context:
“The traditional media sources — The Wall Street Journals and the BusinessWeeks of the world
— have opined on Amazon’s recent patents. Online magazines such as Salon have run their
pieces. Web sites such as stopamazon.com have been started. But the heart and soul of the
movement to criticize Amazon’s patents is the Weblog.
The Weblog is the raw voice of the people — your customers. Essentially, a Weblog is an
online diary with hyperlinks. It’s a point of view and a collection of links to anything on the Web.
It’s a remarkably potent means of communication. A Weblog is a lens to view the world through
someone else’s eyes. ”
to beat a dead cliche in the mouth – i resemble that comment!
someday, i’ll actually see being john malkovich. i’ve read good things about it, but for some reason, i don’t get out to see movies very often. for good or ill – my attention span doesn’t really seem to accomodate most of the fluff that hollywood dishes out. anyway, the new york times magazine is running a bit on charlie kaufman – who is the author of being john malkovich and it seems like he has some interesting projects in the works. unfortunately, from the sounds of it, he is being given more than enough rope to hang himself with.
wow. smack dab in the middle of browsing, i find something honest:
“It’s hard to find people that “get” the web anymore. Everyone’s scampering for the next big profit model, doing whatever it takes to create the next successful IPO. These are people that “use” the web or “do” the web, it’s just another medium to them like television or radio (remember when people used to think television could educate us?). The people that really “get” the web are the people that can still remember how magical it was to hear stories from the other side of the world, they can remember the first time a complete stranger emailed them to share experiences similar to the one’s they wrote about, and they know an interconnected world isn’t just about selling stuff to everyone that can operate a mouse.”
1. build search-centric site with lofty statements pronouncing that anonymous private searching is as important to you as mom, god and apple pie:
“Protect the disclosure of your personal search profiles to on-line search engines by using our excellent Search the Web Service, that guarantees your personal privacy at our site.
Our Private Search Engine will never deliver an unsolicited banner advertisement to you. It will also never use cookies or other invasive Personal Profiling technologies to build any personal profiles on your search requests. ”
2. reveal in sec filing that you really don’t think private searches are as important as being an overblown amazon affiliate:
“The Company has developed a substantial privacy-based information site with thousands of links to privacy issues, news, books and organizations. The company is constantly updating and improving this site and when it is ready for proper launch it will replace the existing search-based site as the home page and central focus of the web site in February, 2000. At such time, the existing search-based web site will be retired from service.”
whoa. but the real question is – can m$ keep developing bloatware that wastes all of those spare processing cycles? i think we all know the answer. o.k. – that was a cheap joke and a mute point:
“Power4 is on schedule to ship in the second half of next year in IBM’s RS/6000 Unix servers and its AS/400 servers for small and medium-size businesses running Unix or Linux.”