September 2010
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Montana in terms of North Dakota
Back in the 1920s my grandparents, Erick and Caroline Oman, took their four kids on the family’s one and only trip west from their home in Napoleon, North Dakota, which is about as far out in the prairrie as you can get. When the Rockies came in sight, Grandpa turned to Grandma and said, “See,… Continue reading
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The escape key
I love this from Dave: The why of it: I want to create, out of RSS, something like Twitter, but not locked up on one company’s servers. Call me an opensorcerer or a rastafarian, but I like networks that aren’t controlled by one company. Esp not a tech company. Doing what needs to be done.… Continue reading
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Some research questions
Here’s some what I’m looking for right now. Any help is welcome. Topic 1: Advertising Size of the advertising industry, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Sums of advertising of various types to which individuals are exposed every day. Breakouts and growth rates of advertising sectors. Online and mobile especially. Weaknesses and/or declines in advertising… Continue reading
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Would you move to Chatanooga for Internet speed?
So EPB, the Chatanooga power (and now high speed Internet) utility, is now offering Internet speeds up up to 1Gbps over fiber optic connections to homes. (A U.S. record, far as I know.) If you ignore EPB “triple play” offerings of TV and telephony alongside Internet connectivity and just go for the Internet connection, your… Continue reading
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Playing the organs
I’m at a fascinating luncheon talk by Al Roth at CRCS with the irresistable title, “Kidney Exchange.” This can’t help but call to mind “Anonymous Philanthopist Donates 200 Kidneys“, in The Onion. which I hope Al has in this talk or puts in his next one. So I’m taking notes here. Lots of good fodder… Continue reading
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Let’s kill Interruptive ads
The Web is not television, and I would like online advertisers and publications to stop treating the Web like it is. Interruptive ads such as this one at Salon… … are meant to get 100% click-through rates, I suppose. But in too many cases — namely mine, repeatedly — they get 100% of multiple clicks… Continue reading
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Cookies for Kiddies
Back on July 31 I posted The Data Bubble in response to the first of The Wall Street Journal‘s landmark What They Know series of articles and Web postings on the topic of unwelcome (and, to their targets, mostly unknown) user tracking. A couple days ago I began to get concerned about how much time… Continue reading
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Keeping relationship humanized
Ten years ago this month, on the morning after I gave this speech in Lucerne, my wife and I were walking through the restaurant at our hotel across the lake when a friendly American gentleman having breakfast buttonholed me to say he liked what I said in my talk. I thanked him and asked if… Continue reading
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Igor vs. Bermuda
It’s a safe bet that most people don’t know where Bermuda is. Here’s the answer: In the middle of the ocean, close to nothing. It’s not like the Bahamas, or the islands of the Caribbean, which are arranged in chains, or near to a continent. Instead Bermuda pokes above the Atlantic eight hundred fifty miles… Continue reading
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Sighs of the times
Several pieces worth noting. From back in February, The Smarter You Are, the Less You Click, in ReadWriteWeb. It begins, If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to… Continue reading
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Where did “Chinese Wall” come from?
The meaning of the term “Chinese wall” is clear. It’s a virtual partition meant to keep potentially conflicted interests apart: a private partition meant to keep interests apart, even if what’s happening on both sides is obvious to the other. What’s not clear, at least to me, is where the term came from. Wikipedia’s Chinese wall… Continue reading
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Talking social way too soon
Just ran across my first regular column for Linux Journal. It was published in in June, 1999, and written three months earlier, about when The Cluetrain Manifesto went up. Here’s a passage that stands out: We’re still less than halfway through the shift from personal to social computing. Most households do not have PCs, and… Continue reading
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Turning the Tracking Tables
The Wall Street Journal‘s @WhatTheyKnow tweet stream is still going strong, but we haven’t seen anything new in the series since Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead, on August 10. That was “fifth in a series” that had many more than five items in it. Dunno whassup with that, but my favorite… Continue reading
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Why Howard Stern’s next act is Internet radio
Howard Stern‘s contract with Sirius XM is up at the end of the year, and it was good to hear on the show this week that the full retirement option is off the table. That was one of five options Howard said he was considering. Says the Stern site (on a wrapup of Thursday’s show), Howard… Continue reading
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A Cluetrain talk turns 10
Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering… Continue reading
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CRM+VRM 2010 Follow-up
It’s been a week since VRM+CRM 2010, and there have been many conversations on private channels (emails, face-to-face, phone-to-phone, face-to-faces), all “processing,” as they say. Meanwhile we also have some very interesting postings to chew on. (Note: This is cross-posted here.) First, Bill Wendell‘s RealEstateCafe wiki has a nice outline of sessions at the workshop. Better than… Continue reading