"sunday sermons" entries
On Wikipedia, storms, teacups, and _why's notability
In which our hero ponders the Internet's underwear, the oxymoronic nature of social software, and that not only should you not hate the playa but you shouldn't even hate the game. It must be a weekend, the interwebs have their panties in a bunch again. This time it's about the Wikipedia entry for _why the lucky stiff, one of the…
What We Have vs. What We Want
After reading Dale's post The Rest of the Rest of Us, I have to share a link that my brother sent me to a story about an Indian businessman's venture to give the poor of India a taste of modern life: An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus…
Outsourced identity
I'm a big fan of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and I still count David Weinberger and Doc Searls as some of the best thinkers I've met. The big message of the Cluetrain Manifesto was, of course, that markets are conversations. There's a short but well-crafted piece in the New York Times about the conversational marketing of political candidates, which started with…
Getting the Market to Tell the Truth
We like to believe that what we see and hear is real, or at least a reflection of reality. But in fact, our perception is conditioned by what we already believe, and the language we have that lets us recognize the raw data that's coming in to our senses. For a vivid example of this phenomenon, walk out into a…
Yearly Database Self-Examination
27b Stroke 6 has a useful list of sites that can help you track and manage your profile in all the databases marketers are collecting on you. I like their idea of a yearly self-examination. It's easy to moan about the loss of privacy. But it is actually possible to learn about and correct some of the data that people…