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I’m watching myself on TV. Actually, on the Web, at the MobileMonday.nl site, where they’ve done a remarkable job of cross cutting between the screen and my balding self.
It’s about making each of us a platform. And, of course, VRM.
Bonus vink on why I don’t like web analytics. For me, anyway. Like judging somebody’s creativity by their shoe size.
[Note: I wrote this yesterday, 18 June. But the blog wasn’t working. Now (1pm, 19 June) it is.]
Yesterday, when I started feeling better, I had dozens of one-liners about the absurdity of hospital life. Crapping in “hats” for example. One’s humor gets low here. Mine especially. It also helped to have friends stop by, chew the fat and joke around.
But by late evening I was at the “one step back” stage, after two forward. Since then, lots of pain, barfing, discomfort and worse.
I’m maybe getting better now, at least in some ways. I also have so much “fluid retention” that I look like the Michelin guy. My weight is now well over 200. I’ve never broken 190 before and was dropping below 185 when I got in here. Given the fact that I’m eating my body rather than food, who knows what my “real” weight is, other than absurd in any case.
Finding the time, and the means, to take or make calls is nearly impossible. Blogging and twittering are hard too. So this is a group message of thanks to all who wish me well (and there are so many of you… I’m lucky that way). Not sure how much more can be done. I am sure that the hospital folks and local relatives and friends will try to do it.
And we’ll see how it goes.
Two days ago I had a colonoscopy. The doctor found and removed a polyp. Routine stuff. Today it was what I guess is called an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography. The first looked up my ass, the second down my gullet, in this case to look inside my pancreas to see if cystic lesions appearing in an MRI were communicating with the pancreatic duct. Nothing was found. Not sure what that means. Probably nothing.
Both involved so much sedation that I remember approximately nothing from either. Well, I remember waking up enough to see the polyp on TV. It looked like a sea anemone. I slept through the second procedure entirely, or forgot it thanks to the drugs’ amnesiac effect.
There is a risk of pancreatitis with the latter procedure. Makes for icky reading. It does concern me that my tummy hurts a great deal — enough that the work I hoped I could get done tonight is nowhere near my mind. My tummy always hurts when I’m hungry, and it hurts the same way now, so I don’t know what the deal is there. All I can eat is sherbet; and all I can drink are broth and water, neither of which leave me feeling filled.
I can’t sleep. And all I can think about is health shit. Or vice versa. So I blog. Comes naturally.
Got a lot of travel coming up. Supernova in San Francisco. VRM-related stuff in Utah. “Home” for a day in Santa Barbara before going to London and Copehagen for business and more VRM-related stuff. (Reboot is at the latter.)
People tell me that travel is bad for me, but the truth is that I love it. The thrill of flying over and studying the Earth never leaves me. In fact it only gets more interesting every time I fly somewhere because every flight is a chance to learn more about what’s on the ground — and whatever else is in the sky. Such as rainbow ice and auroras.
Anyway, all this stuff is about getting older. The failings of the body and the enrichment of the mind. Another of life’s wonderful ironies.
[Later…] Meanwhile it turns out that Maarten’s tumor is a mediastinal germ cell one. It’s treatable, and he goes in for chemo shortly. As cancer goes, that’s good news.
This isn’t pretty. On the other hand, Comcast also says it is increasing upstream speeds. Taking advantage of DOCSIS 3.0. Appears to have promise.
Anybody have any thoughts about that? Experiences? I’ve had zero with them, but I know a lot of the rest of ya’ll have. Just wondering.
Something about 3/4 of the way into this here. From MoMo last week in Amsterdam.
Here are my still shots from the show. Also from Maarten’s barbeque the night before. I’ll have more Amsterdam shots up when I’m done dealing with life & stuff.
[Later…] Here they are.
| Putting the ME in. That’s what this NCMR2008 thing is about. So I have my personal secret plan… (not evil, like gapingvoid’s is), but the sustainability piece is missing…. monetizing…. business model… cash… shekels… ducats… does it have to be an advertising magnet? They’re not really talking about that here. |
| More seriously they’re talking about the media role in the Iraq war. Amy Goodman, Phil Donahue, Norman Solomon (moderating), Lennox Yearwood (“Make Hiphop, not war”), Naomi Klein, Sonali Kolhatcar… a lot of this is preaching to the choir. The people here already get it. Many of us knew it in 2002. The administration manipulation of media from 2002 forward was a certainty. What we need is for the libertarians like Doc Searls and his ilk to get exposed to this information and find a certainty they’re willing to declaim. |
Well, politically I’m a registered independent, though I do have some libertarian sympthies, to the degree that I like business and think we make too many laws and have too many regulations. But I’ve also called myself a “defective pacifist” and have come out squarely for Barack Obama. Also, I’m not aware of having an “ilk”, and I don’t like being accused of having one. But, whatever.
I don’t think I have any areas of disagreement with Frank here. What’s more, I haven’t been silent about it. Look up searls media iraq war and you’ll find plenty.
Among those items is some recent pointage to a talk Forrest Sawyer gave at UCSB last year. I think I reported on it at the time, but I can’t find it. Still, I do appreciate being prodded, because Forrest’s talk is one of the best indictments I’ve yet heard of mainstream media capitulation to the Bush administration’s railroading of the nation, and the world, into a war that was flat-out wrong and dumb to begin with. Forrest also does a great job of stressing the importance of other streams besides the main one. So go watch it. One quote…
| Over the past six years we have seen a failure of the tradiional media to live up to its obligations of oversight and challenging the government, greater than any we have seen in the nation’s history… Those who have not yet come to feel ashamed will feel ashamed of their performance and their letting down of the American people. |
(I might be off by a word or two there. Transcibing from YouTube is no bargain.)
Also, for what it’s worth, at ProjectVRM we also have some ideas for Frank’s “sustainability piece”. I can’t imagine anything more reforming of media than giving it an easy non-advertising-based business model driven by listeners, viewers and readers — in alliance with journalists and artists on the supply side — rather than ever-more-targeted advertising.
I also recommend hanging at NCMR2008 while it’s still going on. Great conference. Wish I were there.
I’ll be streamed live at Mobile Monday today in Amsterdam. The top link there this AM is an interview Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald shot at LeWeb3 last December. As I recall it was, as he says in his post, fun. I can’t tell because my connection is too slow and flaky, but I trust he’s right.
For some reason this blog has failed to post the comment that I just wrote in response to Simon Edhouse‘s latest comment in response to the Clues vs. Trains post. It’s within a good dialog that involves Simon’s post here, which makes some subtle but important points about the degree to which the client-server nature of commercial activity on the Web contributes to normative acceptance of the many silos there. I’m trying to convince Simon that we’re on his side in opposition to that. Anyway, here’s what I just tried to post:
| Simon, |
| We need the invention that mothers the necessity. One “bite” I hope will hold is the relbutton on iPhones and other mobile devices, giving listeners a way to interact with, and pay for, otherwise free online radio streams and podcasts. I haven’t said too much publicly about this yet because we have a lot of details to work out. But on the “sell” side we already have the interest of (and participation by) Forces That Be in public broadcasting, just for starters. |
| Q: “It’s going to need vendor buy-in to actually work?” |
| Not at first. But we have a data type escrowed on the buyer’s side called MLOTT, for Money Left On The Table. That should help. |
| Q: “You can’t shame them into action” |
| Not the plan. |
| Q: “or count on enlightening them” |
| Not the plan either. Some of “them” are among “us” to begin with anyway. |
| Q: Vendors are not going to volunteer to be ‘managed’ |
| Carrot before stick. It has to be attractive. That’s the plan. |
| Q: “… the name of the meme itself, almost jinxes it, for non-adoption by traditional product/service suppliers in the value-chain.” |
| It’s a big world. There are lots of vendors, some more traditional than others. We don’t need to boil the ocean here. We just need to get a few lagoons heated up first. That’s why starting with public media will help. |
By the way, after I failed to post that on this blog, I tried posting a comment on Simon’s blog, which is on Blogger. There I was given three choices for identifying myself: Google/Blogger, OpenID and URL. Sxipper, which is normally helpful, got in the way of the first and wouldn’t let me get it to work. I forgot all of my OpenID IDs, and Blogger told me I had “illegal characters” in http://doc.searls.com.
I’ll tell ya, if all we ever do with VRM is eliminate that kind of gauntlet, I’ll be happy. Oh, by the way, I don’t think any current identity system by itself will cut it — worthy as each may be. When an individual shows up at a site, or otherwise interacts with an entity or a service in the networked world (and not just on the Web), we need to know if a relationship is already in place, and then skip consciousness-required-identification (hell, let’s call that CRI) of ourselves. And no vendor alone is going to give that to us. We need to make the user the point of integration and origination. We have to make the individual the driver, and not just the center of vendor-side “attention” or whatever. Code has to be present on our side that says to the other side that a relationship already exists, or could exist (on our terms and not just theirs), and then let computation take care of the rest.
I don’t begrudge anybody going after advertising money. And I don’t have anything against advertising itself. For many products and services advertising will remain the best way for supply and demand to get acquainted.
But advertising also involves guesswork and waste, and always will. It is also, by its shout-to-the-world nature, not a “conversation”.
This is why I’m uncomfortable with the notions of “conversational media” and “conversational marketing”. Especially when Cluetrain gets used to justify it. Such is the case with the awful current entry for Conversational Marketing in Wikipedia. It begins, “Conversational (or Conversation) Marketing arose as a current buzzword after the [ClueTrain Manifesto], which starts ‘All Markets Are Conversations’.
First, it’s Cluetrain, not ClueTrain. Second, it begins “People of Earth…” Third, it’s true that the first of its 95 Theses says “Markets are conversations” (no “All”, no headline-type caps); but the next 94 unpack that point, along with a few more, none of which are justifications for advertising. In fact, we mention advertising only once, at #74, which says, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” (Even if that’s not true, it’s what the thing says, so at least get that much right.) Fourth, a phrase is not a word, even if the phrase buzzes.
I could go on, but why bother. I just hope the Wikipedians delete or bury the whole topic until its promoters start thinking and stop buzzing.
Anyway, this all comes up because I’m thinking about what to talk about tomorrow night at There’s a New Conversation in Palo Alto. (Details here.) The event is one in a series occasioned by the upcoming 10th anniversary of Cluetrain’s publishing on the Web; but I’m not much interested in talking about that. Instead I’d rather talk about what’s going to happen after we finish throwing both media and marketing out the window.
Both will live, of course. But not the way they’ve lived in the periods that began with their common usage and can’t end soon enough.
More to a piont, I’d like to explore what happens after buyer reach exceeds seller grasp. Because that will happen. And when it does neither media nor marketing will be able to live in their old halls of mirrors. Even with Wikipedia’s help.
