February 24, 2008

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Shootings

February 24, 2008 in Photography, Travel | 3 comments


Getting this one up quickly from my seat in a London-bound 777 before taking off. It’s a set of shots heading westbound from Comb Ridge to Monument Valley in southern Utah during the trip west I’m ending now. The shot above is of Red Lake, a dry lake in the midst of an only slightly less rutilant desert south of Comb Ridge, the town of Bluff, and the San Juan River. The colorful parts of Utah are among my favorite places on Earth. Even though I haven’t been to most of them.

Someday I’d love to take a rafting trip down the San Juan River, through Goosenecks, which are also featured in this series.

The whole trip is here — a long series of shots running from Boston to Los Angeles. I don’t have all of them up yet. All my connections have been too slow. Maybe I’ll finish them in London. We’ll see. In any case, it was the clearest view I’ve had coast-to-coast in many trips.

The Grand Canyon series is pretty good too.

Free speechlessness

February 24, 2008 in problems | 1 comment

I’ve never had laryngitis before, but I do now. I can hardly say a thing. I wanted to make some calls while driving from Santa Barbara to LAX, but ended up giving my voice a rest, which so far hasn’t worked. It was almost impossible to make myself undersood to the United and TSA personnel at the counter and security. Very strange for a talker to have one’s voice reduced to a choice of whisper or honk. Here’s hoping it works by the time I get to London tomorrow.

The lying of politics, and vice versa

February 24, 2008 in Politics | 3 comments

Heard a piece on NPR this morning in which Brooks Jackson, director of , said Hillary Clinton was correct when she said (in much stronger language) that an Obama flyer was misleading. FactCheck goes on to say,

  We’ve also previously criticized Clinton for sending a mailer that twisted Obama’s words and gave a false picture of his proposals on Social Security, home foreclosures and energy.
  We leave it to our readers to decide whether they should be “outraged” or not, and at whom.

The subject of the flyer was NAFTA, and the candidates’ positions on it. Says FactCheck,

  We take no position here on whether NAFTA is a boon to the economy or a detriment, and note only that there are plenty of arguments on both sides. We do judge that the Obama campaign is wrong to quote Hillary as using words she never uttered, and has produced little evidence that she ever had strong praise of any sort for NAFTA’s economic benefits.

Earlier they characterize her position on NAFTA as “ambivalent”. I can see that. Even “free” trade is really freaking complicated, with trade-offs all over the place, and unintended consequences out the wazoo. Of course politicians need to take strong positions to make matters simple for voters (and themselves). But if there’s one thing that’s become clear in this election season, it’s that we’ve reached a tipping point in the voters’ distaste for lying and smearing.

All three remaining major presidential candidates continue to experiment with it. What they’ll find is that it works less and less.

The lesson: If you’re going to “go negative”, at least tell the truth. As Harry Truman put it, “I never gave them hell, I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell”.

And don’t think we can’t tell the difference. If you try to fool some of the people some of the time, you’re only making a fool of your own damn self.

Scattering words

February 24, 2008 in Berkman, Blogging, Places, VRM | 2 comments

People ask why I don’t blog as much as I used to. One answer is that I write as much, but I just don’t do as much of it here. I’ve been blogging more at Linux Journal, in addition to writing for the magazine. (The March issue just arrived. In it are eight pieces of mine: five with a byline and three without.) I write much more in comments here than I did at the blog’s old site, mostly because the design here is a bit more comment-friendly. And there are other places I’m writing, such as the ProjectVRM blog (which we need to fix so that others can write there too… that’s a ball that’s still in my court). Another answer is that I’m on the phone a lot more. Not sure why that is, aside from the need to keep up with the community (which is growing in several directions at once). But it’s hard to write and talk at the same time.

In any case, It’s All Good. It’s jut not all here. Not that it ever was, actually.

So now I’m home in Santa Barbara for the last full day before I’m back on the road (actually, in the air and various subways), first to London for this next week, and then back at my other home in Boston for at least two weeks that should be blessedly free of travel.

Meanwhile, here’s a linkpile, most of which I’ll insult by commenting on them insufficiently.

AOL leaves DC. From critical mass to criticized mess:

  Senior executives looked around the region for talent, but found mostly engineers familiar with business software programming and government contracting, not cutting-edge Web applications. Dozens of creative, technical, sales and operating AOL employees decamped to Silicon Valley, New York and Boston, in search of more promising opportunities.

  “If you worked at AOL after 2002, what would you have learned at AOL that you couldn’t have learned at other places?” said Mark Walsh, an early AOL executive who is an active local investor. “What you learned was how to downsize.”

Sorry I’ll miss Clay Shirky’s visit to Berkman on Thursday and the FCC hearing (with all five commissioners) on Monday. Bad week to be gone, but good for much VRM stuff happening in the U.K.

Jay Deragon asks, Is `The Cluetrain leaving The Station? I’d say the clues have arrived, but are unevenly distributed. Carter F. Smith gets plenty, and asks, If traditional marketing won’t work in The Relationship Economy, what will?

By the way, I’ll be live with Jay on Where is my Customer? The Impact of Social Media on Selling, on Thursday.

Already available is this LinuxWorld podcast with Don Marti. In it I cast doubt on the default assumption that advertising is going to pay for everything. It ain’t.

2008 Web Trend Map.

Mary Hodder: I’ve never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Via this NYTimes piece.

Joe Andrieu: Figure it out for the individual user first, then find ways to use technology to scale efficient solutions. Averages need not be applied. Monolithic approaches to marketing and product development need not apply. Micro-focus at a mega scale.

Higgins 1.0 is out.

I got quoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick from a NewsGang ‘logue, saying Google is vulnerable in search. Others disagreed. Read the comments. The main thing I’d add is that Google needs competition. Search services that zig where Google zags. Not enough of that yet.