July 2010
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The Data Bubble
The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten links to other sections of… Continue reading
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Opening new common ground
So that’s the logo for the first VRM+CRM workshop, which will happen on 26-27 August, at Harvard Law School. It’s free. You can register here. ProjectVRM, which I’ve been running as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center has been growing nicely over the past four years, and is on its way toward becoming an independent entity. (It… Continue reading
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Remembering Ricochet
From roughly 1996 to 1999, my always-on Net connection at home was a wireless one, through Ricochet. Throughput in both directions was faster than dial-up, and always-on. Customer support was good too. As it happened, both homes I lived in then were atop hills on the San Francisco Peninsula, with panoramic views of the whole… Continue reading
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It’s even worse than it appears
The Common Errors of Telecom CEOs, by Rudolf van der Berg, is required reading for anybody who cares about the future of the Internet, and whose hands it’s in. Continue reading
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Informal vs. Illegal
Immigrants and Crime: Time for a Sensible Debate is a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Francis Fukuyama with the subhead, The gardeners and maids who cross the border illegally are very different from the tattooed Salvatrucha gang member who lives by extortion and drug-dealing. Here’s the gist: There is indeed a huge problem of crime… Continue reading
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A lost moment in email marketing hell
So I get an email from The River: Integrating Web Intelligence, subtitled “Bridging the Web and Physical Channels”. The first section is this: 1. Audio Tweet 4 min. : Clickstream Trust / Privacy in Telcos – Part 1/4 in the “Who owns Clickstream data?” Series – Courtesy of TelecomTV’s Main Agenda Interactive Paul Magelli – Nokia Siemens,… Continue reading
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Padding a category
This graphic, of Apple’s revenues per quarter, broken down by products, tells several stories at once. One is that the iPhone remains huge. (I was amazed by how many I saw in the UK and France.) Another is that the iPod may be getting a bit stale. But the big one is the sudden size… Continue reading
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The Wikileaks Story
… is about Wikileaks. Not the war. But not oddly. All stories have three elements: 1) A character. A protagonist. The main human subject. Sometimes it’s a cause, but it requires personification. In sports it’s a player or a team. In war it’s a side. In novels it’s a character or a cast of them.… Continue reading
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Bring back the old Google Image search
I hate the new Google Image search. I used the old one constantly and understood it well, because there wasn’t much to understand. You clicked on an image, and it went to a page with two frames. The one above gave a route to the original image, and the one below was the whole page… Continue reading
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Nice production on consumption
At Consumer Choice, Judi Clark has a nice interview with Jerry Michalski, Tara Hunt and myself. I learned a lot. Highly recommended. Continue reading
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Maybe this one will actually work
It was Spring of 1969, my last year at Guilford College, in North Carolina. My freind Gene Massey (later of the great Gene’s Books in King of Prussia, PA) and I went into a curb market nearby to get some beer. There we ran into Wayne, a huge former football player at the school, who… Continue reading
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Quote du Jour
On the phone with Britt Blaser, who just said, Politics is so complicated that only zealots get involved. Of course, he’s been working on fixing that. I think this here can help. Continue reading
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Good 2B Back
The weather here in Cambrige is perfect. This is also a test to see if the post goes up. Here’s another line, to see if it shows up on a log. Does. Cool. Continue reading
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Fuel for denial
Got together with four members of my kid’s 8th grade basketball team and their coach (another dad, much younger and better than me) this afternoon for a shoot-around. I was too wasted to play in the real game (I did sub briefly, and scored one lay-up), but we finished up with a game of P-I-G… Continue reading
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Testing again
This time over Starbucks’ (bless them) free wi-fi. First edit. Continue reading
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The train goes the other way
Marketing Needs To Stop Its BS and Wake Up, the headline says. True. The bottom line: “At the end of the day, audiences have moved on and their expectations have changed. The next five years will see drastic changes in the way organizations engage with their audiences. It’s not a choice anymore. These are the… Continue reading
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Sad news
The strangest thing about Dan Schorr dying is that he isn’t here to explain it on NPR. I always liked Schorr’s take on things, even when I didn’t agree with him. When was his last commentary? Haven’t found that yet. Didn’t seem like long ago. He was 93. We should all live so long, and… Continue reading
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Outlining fun
Hanging here with Dave, getting outlining going again here. This is our second test post. This is an update. Continue reading