Friends
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Remembering Peter Sklar, placeblogging pioneer
This is a hard one to write. Peter Sklar, the founder, editor and chief-everything of Edhat, Santa Barbara’s original onine daily, has died. Peter was the Steve Jobs of placeblogging. Like Steve, he was an original genius and nobody’s fool. He could be prickly and sarcastic, and he did things his way. He was also a… Continue reading
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Missing Michael
Uninstalled is Michael O’Connor Clarke’s blog — a title that always creeped me out a bit, kind of the way Warren Zevon‘s My Ride’s Here did, carrying more than a hint of prophesy. Though I think Michael meant something else with it. I forget, and now it doesn’t matter because he’s gone: uninstalled yesterday. Esophogeal… Continue reading
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Digging in The Well
If posts seem a bit infrequent here (I went more than half a month between the last two posts), it’s because I’ve been busy elsewhere. One of those other places is The Well, the deep, durable and original (in several senses) online community. There Jon Lebkowsky has convened an Inkwell conversation between myself and all… Continue reading
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Helping one who helped our selves
Michael O’Connor Clarke is one of the world’s truly great guys. Besides being smart, funny, caring, hard-working, a good husband and father — and pretty much all the other positive stuff you could pack into a bio, Michael was one of the first people to not only dig The Cluetrain Manifesto, but to grok it… Continue reading
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Bridges covered
My sister and I received a durable lesson in generosity in the summer of 1963, in the heart of Iowa. That was where our family’s 1957 Ford Country Sedan station wagon, towing our Nimrod pop-up camper trailer, broke down. It was on a Sunday morning in late June, heading south from Des Moines on I-35… Continue reading
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After Facebook fails
Making the rounds is The Facebook Fallacy, a killer essay by Michael Wolff in MIT Technology Review. The gist: At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium… Continue reading
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An AR treat
Enticed by Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (aka @DutchCowboy) in this tweet, I fired up Layar (an AR — Augmented Reality — browser from the company by that name, which he co-founded), and aimed it at the cover of my new book. What followed is chronicled in this Flickr set. Start here, then follow the links at the… Continue reading
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Discovering Raditaz
Read here about Raditaz, which I hadn’t heard about before. It’s a competitor to Pandora. Some differences: unlmited skips, no ads, geo-location. I started out by setting up three “stations,” based on three artists: Lowell George, Seldom Scene and Mike Auldridge. I’m on the Mike Auldridge station now, and guess what comes up? Dig: Not… Continue reading
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Happy to have been there
That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could… Continue reading
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Remembering Judith
I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had… Continue reading
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Remembering Ray
Ray Simone, my good friend and long-time business partner, died this morning. He was 63 years old. He is survived by his wife Gillian, his daughter Christina, and many good friends for whom he remains an inspiration and a delight. Ray was one of the most creative people I have ever known. Though we originally… Continue reading