Agog at my own Blog log

Seconds of mindless fun to be had from cruising the referral logs. Once again, I’m baffled by the convoluted and unlikely routes people have taken to arrive at this site. I’ve noticed similar comments from other bloggers after inspecting their own logs.

If the Web is “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”, maybe the inchoate subculture of weblogging is “Small Pieces Oddly Indexed” or some such.

Here’s a hand-picked lucky bag of the most improbable search strings that have so far washed surfers up on my own personal mudflat:

- pictures and photos of Dodge charger off of the fast and the furious

- robot jesus french taliban (quoi?!)

- god million dollars second you "exchanged sandwiches

- movie quote "I've gotta get me one of these"

- beans 2003 email addresses

- I won The East Coast Top Model Search (35,000 hits, but I'm one of 'em)

- afghanistan existentialist berets

And I swear, I have not made a single one of these up.

Then there’s the Austrian connection, of course – under the newly created sub-filing tab of: “Straightforward searches from far distant lands”

And my personal favourite: “sleazy fucknozzle”

If I were seeking a good indication of my overall position in the great scheme of things, I think I’ve found my answer in the fact that I’m the #1 hit (out of a mere two) returned by Google when someone searches for the words “sleazy fucknozzle”. Thanks. I’ve prepared a short acceptance speech...

The second hit, of course, would have to be something like this.

About blinking time...

Being meaning to post a link to my friend and neighbour Joshua Fireman's Sixth Column site for yonks now.

His latest update finally spurred me to action. Here's Josh's invitation to the "Sixth Column Passover Singalong":

"While the Passover Haggadah has many lovely, traditional Passover songs, Sixth Column is pleased to present some Passover show tunes to liven up your Sedar meals!"

A small sample of what awaits you:

Sheik to Sheik
music by Irving Berlin (“Cheek to Cheek”)
lyric by Rick Finkelstein and Tony Schuman 1998

Egypt, I'm in Egypt, and it's exodus to Canaan that I seek
If the Pharaoh tries to stop us with his clique
They'll be swimming in the Red Sea sheik to sheik

Egypt, we left Egypt, as we plunged into the sea despite our fear
That's when Moses made the waters disappear
Now we're safe in Sinai grinning ear to ear.

I know I'm missing some of the references in the other examples on the site (we didn't cover Haggadahs at Catholic school), but they're still bloody funny. A simple half twist to the cultural lexicon, and all of a sudden I can't hear Ella Fitzgerald's voice in my head anymore...

Also worth a read is Josh's account of tangling with Calgary's legendary Hart clan - the first family of wrestling. Josh is a complete wrestling loon and had one of his wildest dreams fulfilled in "The Dungeon" at Stu Hart's Calgary home:

"I was pinned on the kitchen floor. I had narrowly averted an eye gouge, but my arms were pinned back, my shoulders were being pulled out of their sockets, and my head was quickly running short of blood and oxygen.

Patiently explaining the pain he was inflicting on me was an 86-year old man. “Your lips are turning purple,” he muttered into my ear as I realized I was moments from blacking out.

I could not have been happier."

Prefer a nice cup of tea and a Kit-Kat, meself - but it takes all sorts.

Go-go Sakamoto

Thanks to a fellow blogtanker, the funny and charming Elke Sisco Zimmermann, I've just been reminded about Ryuichi Sakamoto.

I got well into Sakamoto's groove thang in the late 80's but then somehow managed to completely, utterly forget about him until about 40 minutes ago. Holy merde, this guy's got some hardass talent.

His own site gives a good flavour of the sort of things the bloke turns out. 21st century renaissance man, kind of a Japanese Laurie Anderson, at least in terms of the range of media in which they're both experimenting.

The Sony Classical site for Sakamoto has some good stuff going on too - including a trancelike, ambient screensaver with cuts from his recent BTTB ("Back To The Basics") CD of solo piano works. Erik Satie meets John Cage. (OT: "Back To Basics" also happens to be my favourite Billy Bragg rekkid too. Not that that signifies bugger all, but...well...you know...serendipity or sumfing).

Just scampered off and Amazoned for BTTB and his Cinemage CD too.

Beautiful, life-enhancing gear. Ta, Elke.

And thanks again, Gary T - without blogtank, I'd be lacking some tasty new tunes to tweak up me lugholes.

(hey - is this post linktastically overlinkified or what?)

"Land of Mountains, Land on the River..."

Land of obscure and slightly puzzling Google searches.

Idly browsing the referrer logs today, here's an oddity - someone came into the site by searching for my name at http://www.google.at

Check that ".at". That's Austria.

I've never been to Austria, don't know anyone from Austria, can't even think of anyone I know who might be visiting Austria. So, does this mean I can add "internationally renowned" to me boilerplate now then?

Ah yes..."Michael O'Connor Clarke is an internationally renowned global leader in somebollocksorother, with offices strategically located in one country and a highly-trained staff of one expert, serving clients in the improbably-wealthy-but-really-foolish-with-their-money sector."

Yeah, right.

Anyway. Welcome, Austrian friends.

Salon's Cintra Wilson at the Oscars

"I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid spines..."

and:

"Ron Howard is a completely adequate and, I feel, aggressively nongenius director. His choices are deeply, unapologetically pedestrian. He possesses lots of clunky homegrown skill and absolutely no lightning bolts of wild inspiration, which is why that script was a brilliant choice for him."

Very bad. Very funny.

Late in getting to this, but still immensely worthy of note is the freshly reinvented blogtank™:



Only a week old and already we've outgrown the garage. Huge and effusive thanks to the genius of Marek J who pulled an heroic all-nighter to relocate our internationally renowned global consulting firm, thinktank and bike shop into much funkier digs.

Not a lot happening above the surface just yet - we've popped down under radar for a short while as we marshal our meaning. But watch this space...

For those outside the context of the early blogtank™ threads as the meme first arose, I know you may be wondering what fresh hell blogtank™ actually is.

What it *is*

...is recruiting.

(To quote liberally, with a little added colour, from our founder and chief imagineer:) In the spirit of the best collaborative relationships (think: X-men, A-Team, Ocean's Eleven) blogtank is an experiment in focusing the special powers, knowledge and talents of the world's blogizens to create a new force for creative good, thought development, problem solving and debate on a wide range of topics including (but by no means limited to):

World Peace
Which is best Coke or Pespi?
Is document imaging really dead?
What makes a good mobile phone?
Where's the best Italian restaurant in Paris?
Can the notion of a free press survive in the face of ongoing media convergence/consolidation?
Why does Lotus Notes randomly chew up email attachments?
What's wrong with QWERTY and should we fix it?
What shall we do with the drunken sailor?
And all manner of things...

More pragmatic version: blogtank™ is a team blog (a clusterblog?) where an amazing collection of the best minds in blogdom can get togther to brainstorm, develop solutions to problems, give birth to ideas and generally read the riot act to the rest of the world.

An issue, idea, problem or whatever is posted / requested as a blog entry, each with a category e.g. Business, Web, Global Peace, Best Apple Pie Recipes and what have you. We then use comments on each post to develop, trash, create, discuss, solve, grieve as appropriate. Our findings (if we ever get any) will then be made available as independent research for...er...we haven't worked that bit out yet - let's just go with: for the good of all humankind.

In the future, the good people of blogtank™ will be contracted by willing parties to opine, solve or research absolutely anything we want to. There may even be some money, there will certainly be community. And cake (I think there should always be cake. Don't you?)

blogtank. collective genius.™

Er...hello?

Think I must have misrepresented my response to the mail.com crap (below) in some way - I've had a bunch of email from people castigating and/or chuckling at me for being surprised at this turn of events. Really, I wasn't that surprised.

We knew the "free for life" thing rang hollow even when we signed up for it. Fully expected them to throw the billing switch at some point in the future. Even if natural TANSTAAFL suspicion were not enough, soon as you see something like this (from mail.com’s parent co.) you could pretty much read the writing on the wall.

So. For the record once again: I promise I’m really not that dumb. Ask David. No, it was the manner of the thing, not the thing itself, that pushed me over the edge.

You know, if they’d asked me, I guarantee I would have responded entirely differently. Sausage and I were quite attached to our all-purpose email forwarding address thingie, and it really is quite a pain to have to switch. I’m sure we probably would have agreed to cough up a nominal annual fee to keep it active. All they had to do was ask - use the freakin' voice, Luke.

In fact, knowing what it can be like living inside a cash-strapped tech company, struggling to make a bean – if they’d appealed for help I would probably have forked over a not inconsiderable amount for the continued service out of straight sympathy.

But no. They chose blackmail. And with Columbia House, of all things - give me strength.

All this demonstrates quite clearly their qualification as a shining example of what Chris once memorably described as one of those: "...companies so lobotomized that they can't speak in a recognizably human voice..."

So bollocks to them.

This is what dead feels like.

I know now that I must be legally dead. Hadn’t realised before, but when I checked email this morning I learned that it must indeed be true.

Back in 1996, I signed up with iName.com for email forwarding to the address “thelotofus@earthling.net”. The main reason – no, the only reason for doing this was the promise of a "free for life" email address with free forwarding.

Pretty straightforward promise there: Free. For Life.

Well as they’re now telling me that the service is no longer going to be free, I can only assume that I am, in fact, dead. Thanks for clearing that up...

I’m deflecting my initial rabid furious response to this as best I can by trying to laugh about it. This is my way of dealing with the entirely natural and righteous urge to slam these sleazy, scum-sucking, fucknozzle, money-grabbing, toe rag, brain-dead, clueless, motherfucking, bastard, arsehole, douchebag, tosspot wankers for the praetorian, racketeering, underhanded, lawyer-infested slimebuckets they are.

Signing up with iName seemed like a reasonably smart idea at the time – allowing my wife and I to choose a general-purpose family email alias that, in theory (and according to their promise) we’d never have to change, no matter how often we switched ISPs. Of course, I’m not that naïve – I’ve read Hansen and Heinlein. I know what TANSTAAFL means. “Free” accounts are worth at most what you pay for them and can often be worth considerably less – that much is clear.

So, while it’s an unexpected pain in the butt to have to try and reach all of the many hundreds of people to whom we’ve given out this email address over the years – it’s a switch I guess I’ve known I would some day have to pull.

That’s not what really twists my melon. It’s the approach those iName/mail.com filth took in telling me this.

Here’s what blackmail looks like in the Internet era:

From: MAIL.COM Forwarding
To: thelotofus@earthling.net
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 6:21 AM
Subject: Preserve your forwarding e-mail account!!!
Dear thelotofus,

This is your second and FINAL notice regarding e-mail forwarding at thelotofus@earthling.net. You need to act now to continue to receive e-mail at this address.

Well, actually, no. This is the very first I’ve heard of this. Oh – and maybe somebody there should take a customer service course or something. You’re about to tell me something that’s guaranteed to be really unpopular – try not to sound like a debt collector, moron.

From this inauspicious opening, the comedy only gets richer. Without skipping a beat from the “Dear Sir: shit on you” opening, they segue directly into this:

Special Promotion
Signup for Columbia House and get one year of forwarding FREE!
For a limited time, Mail.com is running a promotion which will allow you to receive an annual subscription to E-Mail Forwarding services - FREE!! Click here to Apply for this great offer!!!

Hmmmm. How does “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Oh, and er...FUCK YOU” grab you? Breaking your promise and screwing your customers in the ear – that’s a “great offer!!!”? What spazbastard school of marketing taught you this you cretinous pigfuckers? Have you any idea how insanely angry this makes me? And for the record: Columbia House sucks ass. And I have proof.

How did we get from “Free for life”, through iName getting rolled into Mail.com and telling me (by email, 1999): “This name change will not affect your current email service in any way” all the way to “join Columbia House now or we’ll kill your forwarding service”?

The rest of the message is more Columbia Arse spam and then a “FAQ” that doesn’t include any of the questions I bet their customers are frequently asking right about now (like – “Why are you such crudsuckers?” or “Where do you get off?”).

Perhaps my favourite moment, though, is the final delicious irony of the “privacy” statement at the very bottom. This is priceless:

“You are receiving this Service Announcement to notify you of important changes to your Mail.com-powered e-mail account. You cannot unsubscribe from Service Announcements, as they are necessary for keeping you informed about changes to your account. Service Announcements will never include a sponsor...”

Bastard assmunch idiots.

So – in case anyone reading this uses our “thelotofus” email address, please note that we will no longer be using that address as from today. The main sympatico account (michaelocc AT sympatico DOT ca) will work – please update your address books. This one we pay for and will gladly continue to pay for unless they ever hire anyone from the management team at iName, Mail.com or their parent company Net2Phone.

*nuff*

Crikey DM

Quite massively flattered to note that the luminous twinned minds of Dethe and Daniela at Livingcode.ca have linked to this blog in their "Blogneighbors" list.

Duly returning the compliment. I can highly recommend a leisurely amble through the savoury riches available at their site. Far more interesting than this load of bollogs, anyway...

Thanks chaps.

Growing Into Your Voice

I'm in one of those between books phases - finished everything on the bedside table, pixelled-out reading the (admittedly fabulous) screeds available throughout the halls of bloggerdom, not wanting to get into any new ink&paper pleasures until my eagerly awaited copy of David's new Small Pieces book arrives...

So naturally, as a kind of karmic cleansing, perhaps, figured I'd pluck down the old copy of that book (aka "The Book That Dare Not Speak It's Name”).

I’d forgotten a lot of the really good stuff in this book. One section, in particular, that jumped out at me on the way home tonight, is the speech by John Jay Chapman inserted as a sidebar into the middle of David’s chapter on “The Longing”.

This piece, from Chapman’s Commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College in 1900, is missing from Chris Locke’s online edition of the Cluetrain, but the complete text of it is available elsewhere.

There’s much in this prescient piece that still resonates with startling clarity over a hundred years later. This is the bit that really popped my contacts out:

“I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. 'In a few years,' reasons one of them, 'I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good.' Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.”

Stirring stuff, but it’s only on reading it again, in the context of everything that’s happened since the dawn of the Cluetrain, that I’ve recognized how my own courage of voice has evolved.

In Chris’s first chapter (“Internet Apocalypo”) he writes about the point in his early career when “...one afternoon I was banging out an article, and I wrote a paragraph that stopped me cold. It stopped me because something new and very different had just showed up on the screen: my own voice. It's hard to explain, but the paragraph I'd just written resonated with something that had been sleeping all my life, something potent, something deep. I realized I could say things I cared about, and I could say them in a way no one else could.”

I can’t claim to have had quite such an arresting moment of epiphany – mine has been a more gradual awakening. Yet I still see exactly what Chris is talking about.

So I fully support Chapman’s position and admire the clarion call, but I think Chris’s revelation, or something slower version of it, is probably closer to the typical experience.

I feel more like I’ve been growing into my voice through all these years of writing under the shadow of corporate wage slavery. Maybe I’m simply outing my own earlier cowardice here. But something like honesty, or maybe courage seems to be a defining characteristic of the notion of voice - at least, as it’s explored in the Cluetrain, in Gonzo Marketing, in Small Pieces and in much of these blokes’ earlier writings (Doc’s famous ’98 essay about Presentations, for example).

It’s taken me a good while to reach the point where I can write and speak with my own true voice, without fear of the Man, with as near as I can get to absolute moral honesty. And not just here, of course – in everything I do. It’s made my work better, improved the counsel I offer clients, and left me sleeping better at nights. And right there is something devoutly to be wished.

Now I don’t know why, but this also got me to thinking about one of the first times I got to really trot the voice out for real in a corporate context. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this is another Weinberger-linked story.

David and I once, briefly, worked together on some marketing strategy/positioning kinda stuff when I was running marketing at PC DOCS/Fulcrum (sadly long-since defunct). This was the forced spooging of a document management company (the PC DOCS bit) into the much cooler mindset of a recently acquired knowledge management company (the Fulcrum bit).

We tapped David to help us tell our story in something other than the standard corporate gafflebab. His depth of KM expertise, natural enthusiasm and clarity of thinking helped us all find our voices and put together some stone cold rock ‘n’ roll marketing materials. Guess I knew we’d found our voice when I stood up in front of a conference audience of 1500 punters six months later, and delivered a pitch built around the idea that they all, at heart, really wanted to be like Michael Douglas. And this was a Knowledge Management presentation, fercrissakes ;-)

It’s a loooong story, and I need time out to knit up the ravelled sleeve here, but net net it was the single most successful conference pitch I’ve ever made. The power of voice.

BTW, David’s remarkable written contribution to that particular marketing effort is still available out there, in the form of the most entertaining technology whitepaper ever produced in the history of the known universe. See for yourself (largeish pdf file). And this is from 1998, way back when The Cluetrain Manifesto was less than a twinkle in their collective eyes.

But now...

*yawn*

Collective Genius

We're in at the birth of something great, for once - less than 48 hours old, but growing fast:



With offices in ten countries around the globe, staffed by a hand-picked team of almost 30 expert consultants available 24/7, positively vibrating with surplus intellectual capacity. Blogtank pools experience, knowledge, expertise and patented super powers in one zero cost, zero infrastructure organization, hell bent on challenging the supremacy of the big five four three consulting bastards firms.

"There's still time to join us in the very pleasureable experience of pulling random levers, flicking whole columns of switches and pressing all the red buttons at once on this machine they call the web."

God bless Gary Turner

Unseasonably mild

The most popular topic of smalltalk around Toronto right now is how remarkably mild and almost pleasant our winter was this year - hardly any snow, reasonable temperatures, far less-than-average gloominess.

Easy to join in all this cheery discussion and revel in how lovely it is being able to get out in the garden so early in the year. Until, that is, you read something like this Guardian story about a 200-meter thick Antarctic ice shelf just under the size of Cambridgeshire that has entirely collapsed in less than a month due to the impact of global warming.

Holy crap.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

U.S. Assails Mugabe, But Chrétien Holds Fire
The Globe & Mail - March 14, 2002

President George W. Bush, in his harshest statement yet about Mr. Mugabe, said, "We do not recognize the outcome of the election because we think it's flawed..."

Mwah ha ha hah hoo ha ha haaa hah ha ha bu wu wooooo wah ha heee hee hee heeheeheeheehee wooo huh buhuh wah ha hah ha ha ha ha hoo... gasp...oh god...I'm sorry, I ha ha HA HA HA HA HAAA HAAAH AA HO HO HEE HEEEEEEEEE HUH HA HA HO HE AHA AHO UHUH heh eh heee heeheeheeheehee SNORT fu...ya bu.. yu bas... fu...uh ah...pffftt...

oooof. phweef. I'm so sorry, I just can't HA HA HAA HAAA HAR HAARRRR HU HO HOOO heheehehheeheheheeheheee...

*pant* *gasp* Oh fuck...

Look - I'll try and post some more later or someth...FAH HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAH HOOOO HEEH HEE HEE HEE ARRRRGH huh uh hu.........HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR O HOH HO HO HU HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA heeeeeeeee...

Oh, number Pi,
Oh, number Pi,
Your digits are unending.
Oh, number Pi,
Oh, number Pi,
No pattern are you sending.
You're three point one four one five nine,
(And even more if we had time).
Oh, number Pi,
Oh, number Pi,
For circle lengths unbending.

Today is international Pi Day (3.14, geddit), in honour of which it seems only fair to bring you some mindless fun with really big numbers. Course, if I'd been paying attention earlier, it would have made more sense to time this post at exactly 1:59 today.

Seeing the world through others' eyes.

Found this extraordinary site, can’t remember how, of Polish poster art.

As well as some stunning, beautiful sports, theatrical and political posters, there’s also a whole section of original Polish posters for well known American movies. This is wonderful and startling stuff.

When you think of films like The Godfather, High Noon, Apocalypse Now – a certain part of their iconic power comes from the oft-repeated images burned into our retinas from over exposure in the North American media. Taking one of these icons and viewing it through a different cultural lens makes for some surprising results.

Some of my favourite examples from the site:

Apocalypse Now

Dogs of War

Empire of the Sun

...similar, but just different enough from the original U.S. poster (slow link, btw)

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Graduate

And then there’s this:



Which seems much closer to the dark atmosphere of the movie than the expected image of Hoffman and Voight huddled into their jackets on that street corner...

Full archive here. Lots to enjoy...

"He leapt from his chair and raised his fist to the sky as the words "oral sex" flashed on the screen."

Fascinating story in yesterday's Guardian newspaper from David Brock, former scandalmonger with George Gilder's arch rightwing mouthpiece "The American Spectator".

Brock has seen the light and published a remarkable confessional about his years as a paid character assassin hounding the Clinton administration with allegations of sexual impropriety, abuse of power, even drug-running.

Much of what he reveals is already in the public domain, but it's no less extraordinary for that. A seriously disturbing insider's account of the Get Clinton conspiracy machine in operation with plenty of anecdotal colour.

To further fuel the conspiracy theory, it's a little strange to note that the piece has evaporated from the main Guardian site. I read it last night on my Palm (through the Guardian's beautifully implemented AvantGo channel), but when I went hunting for it online this morning, it's nowhere to be found.

I emailed the newspaper and was told "This article has been removed from the online database and is therefore only available in print format. Please note that not every article that appears in print is automatically put onto the web for copyright reasons." Hmm... but this piece was published online already, so surely it's not a copyright issue? Curiouser and curiouser...

Thanks be to Google (yet again) for keeping the cached piece, here: "How I almost brought down the president..."

Another recent example of the Guardian in full righteous leftwing indignation mode from earlier this week was John Sutherland's piece on what the Nixon tapes reveal.

Some choice excerpts from the private Oval office conversations of this "slimy, paranoid, foul-mouthed and anti-semitic" president and more juicy fodder for conspiracy fans everywhere.

Killer App Wish List

I need someone to build me a Killer Sixdegrees App that would help me maximize the latent value in my rolodex.

Lemme paint a scenario to illustrate what I mean: got a call late last week from one of our regional offices in full scramble mode. Just had a potentially amazing new biz opp walk in the door, one of those "if you can pull this off in no time flat, you'll get the whole gig" things.

So we’re running around like nutters, pulling together everything we can bring to bear on this opportunity, as it’s definitely the kind of deal we'd want to win.

Like any other flack, part of my process in situations like this will always be to go straight to the "About" section of the prospect's website, find out who’s in the mgmt team, who’s on the board – try to figure out who do I know that knows someone that knows them, what can I find out about their hot buttons?

I’m playing rapid-fire sixdegrees on the fly – trying to map a network of relationships that ultimately leads back to someone I might be able to beg insight from or might possibly have some relationship, maybe even some influence with.

In the middle of all this, I realise I jump through this set of hoops every single time we sniff a new biz opportunity – and I’m probably very far from unusual in this respect. It’s the standard lifeblood of the agency business – who you know genuinely is as important as what you know.

Of course, every time I do this, it’s a somwhat patchy, labour-intensive and time-consuming process. Doing it manually, there’s no guarantee I’ll figure out all the linkages, or uncover all the potential contact points and/or pain points.

So – wouldn’t it be great to have some kind of role/relationship mapping KM tool, driven by external search capabilities from Google, or whatever, that could automate a large part of this process for me? I type in the names, job titles, company names and any other info about the people I want to map – it takes my own contacts database and some nifty searching and builds a graphical "P-Web" display on the fly.

This might be a little like mapping the "Relationship Capital" element of Tapscott & Ticoll’s whole Business Web thingy, but on a much simpler P2P scale.

Imagine something kind of like this. Just way freakin easier to figure out ;-) I can handle the parabolic tree thing, just give me better info when I drill down.

Maybe it's something these guys could do? Or maybe such an app already exists and I've just missed it...?

Email forward from my mate Mark:

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to Convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God

The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taleban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking."

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmens' endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

Speculation was mounting last night that Britain may also contribute to the effort by dropping Professor Stephen Hawking into Afghanistan to propagate his non-deistic theory of the creation of the universe.

Other tactics to demonstrate the non-existence of God will include the dropping of leaflets pointing out the fact that Michael Jackson has a new album out and Oprah Winfrey has not died yet.

This is only one of several Psy-Ops operations mounted by the Allies to undermine the unswerving religious fanaticism that fuels the Taleban's fighting spirit. Pentagon sources have recently confirmed rumours that America has already sent in a 200-foot-tall robot Jesus, which roams the Taleban front lines glowing eerily and shooting flames out of its fingers while saying, 'I am the way, the truth and the life, follow me or die.' However, plans to have the giant Christ kick the crap out of a slightly effeminate 80-foot Mohammed in central Kabul were discarded as insensitive to Muslim allies.

Knocked the clock cursor off. Flipping thing was driving me batty. If you've no idea what I'm talking about, I've left it on the Archives page so you too can be irritated.

*gawsh*

Thank you, David, that was really kind of you.

Compelling evidence, yet again, that:

Cruising the logs, found inbound links from two referers I'd not come across before. Got lost in the lush nuttiness of both.

Obligatory, but well deserved links back to:

The Pretentious Fucks

and

Dangerous Monkey

Er.."props"...or something equally street to you both.

A friend sent me the clock cursor thing, btw.

Clever, but could get annoying. No idea who wrote it.

Frankly, not sure if I really like it or not. WDYT?

News from a fucked up parallel dimension

Sun Sues Microsoft Again

The latest installment in the neverending story of the tech industry's single most toxic relationship.

This time around the asking price is "north of $1 billion" in damages over the Borg's decision, announced back in July '01, to leave Java out of Windows XP; a decision taken in response to Sun's successful lawsuit, launched in '97, that charged Microsoft with infringing Sun's Java licensing agreements, in settlement of which, Microsoft agreed to no longer license from Sun any current or new versions of Java, which led to them pulling it out of XP, for which Sun is now suing them again, as not having Java in XP is killing them...

Er...I think I've got to lie down for a while...feeling a little dizzy...

Let's try that one again, in bullets:

- (flip) 1995 Sun launches Java

- (flop) 1996 Microsoft signs licensing agreement with Sun for embedded Java

At the time, Bob Muglia said that Microsoft intended “...to be the premier supplier of Java-compatible tools to Internet developers." To which his oppo at Sun responded: “Microsoft's commitment to Java is both impressive and comprehensive...”

- (flip) 1997 Sun sues Microsoft for breach of Java contract

- (flop) 1999 Sun kind of wins round one in ’98, but loses on appeal

- (flip flop) 2000 A US district court rules that “Microsoft must ship products featuring the Java programming language that conform to standards set by...Sun Microsystems”

- (flop flip) 2001 Microsoft forks over $20 million; promises not to license Java any more and is barred from using the “Java compatible” trademark. A blessing, Sun’s rhetoric would lead one to believe, devoutly to be wished.

Quoth Sun EVP Patricia Sueltz: "Microsoft has proven time and again that it is unwilling to abide by the common rules of the internet. Its behavior with regard to the Java technology was just one instance. And when presented with the choice of compatibility or termination, Microsoft chose termination."

Scott McNealy: "It's pretty simple: This is a victory for our licensees and consumers."

Mind you, the Borg's posturing was no less bullish on this: "Microsoft is very pleased with the successful conclusion of this litigation," said Tom Burt, deputy general counsel for litigation at Microsoft.

Ah, but wait...

- 2002 (flop flippity flip floppy flip feckin flop) Sun sues Microsoft for >$1 billion, asking that: “Microsoft be forced to distribute Sun's latest version of Java with Windows XP”

In...Out...In...Out...Shake it all about.

I mean, can anyone other than visitors from the planet Litigate follow what the fjørk is going on here?

Yeah, I know what’s really going on (I’m not stooopid). It’s "get Microsoft anyway you can at any cost by any means". But let’s say you’re a federal judge being asked to wade through this twisted rococo millefeuille; wouldn’t you get to the point where you just want to say “Bollocks” and have done with it?

Oh, and check this out (just for the sheer petty amusement value):

Go to the Sun.com search page and search on: microsoft lawsuit - 3,914 hits.

Hmmm...quite a lotta hits there, bub. I'd call that pretty relevant.

Then try a word search for “Microsoft” on this page: Sun History. No hits. Not one. Zip. Naff all.

"Impressive and comprehensive" indeed.

Harumph.

You give me five hundred dollars...
...I give you the negatives, and no one has to know you were parking the groovy sly ferret

Abso-blogging-lutely

Doc Searls nails it every frigging time. Here he is on the semi-mystical creative idiocy that spurs "stealth" marketing campaigns:

"One secret to success is not to keep secrets. Yes, there are times it makes sense. Hardware companies especially need to be careful about not "Osborne-ing" their old products with promises of new ones. But in most cases secrecy is based on the almost military notion that Enemies of the Company are going to steal our good ideas. Here's the problem: all qualified enemies are busy. They're doing their own thing. No matter how cool your new idea is, they don't care. They're overcommited to their own problems."

So right.

I'm not really a big Ayn Rand fan, but for years I've been using a Rand quote in counselling clients: "Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others." In fact, this quote just won't die - it resonates for me like a struck wine glass. This is the way you run things if you don't want to be Larry Ellison - it's both a business and a life choice.

In other words: while you're barrelling down the highway in your startup mobile, if you're too busy watching the rear-view mirror to see who might be edging up on you, you won't notice the sixteen-wheeler in front till you're already half way underneath it.

Stealth marketing is mostly complete pants, yet it appeals to egocentric startup CEOs/CMOs because of the perceived ninja coolness of it all - "yeah man, it'll be like Transmeta - awesome stealth, baby".

Knickers.

The worst extreme is when you see companies that genuinely do have something cool on the go becoming more and more paranoid that the fearsome Microborg is going to wake up and eat their lunch. What bollocks - get on with your life and build some cool stuff that makes you proud. And if Microsoft or anyone else really does wake up and give a rat's arse - if they want to beat you or buy you, make like Sabeer Bhatia and sweat 'em for it.

But I'm repeating myself. I already blogged about this exact scenario at a friend's company a few days back.

My irony detector needs an upgrade

So I'm finally ad free. Woo hoo!

I just realised last night: all this time I've been griping about banners and other forms of online advertising. Like here or here. Meanwhile, I was still merrily pottling away with the standard cheapskate freebie version of Blogger. The one with banners.

Cretin.

Listening to Alanis on the tube in the mornings must have hosed my sense of irony.

Coughed up the measly twelve bucks last night. Well worth it.

Stumbling into something meaningless...

Sometimes people bump into this blog through the most curious, roundabout routes. Couple of today's referrals, for example:

Someone in Canada, googling for: Movie quote "I've gotta get me one of these" - I can pretty much understand. Sounds like the kind of thing I might say. Er...

But then there's this which is just weird.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

*grin*

A Sunday afternoon spent futzing about with templates.

I've wanted to do something a little more interesting with this site for months. Now, thanks to Myles Grant's excellent BlogSkins project, I've been able to kickstart the whole thing, still with zero knowledge of HTML.

Along the way, I also discovered a brilliant little utility rejoicing in the name "Nadger".

Nadger, as the site will tell you, is simply "a small utility used for grabbing a colour from the screen and getting the hex value of it without the need for some big expensive graphics editing utility."

Comes in very useful when you want the borders on yer blog to echo the paintjob in the downstairs bathroom...

This is just a really useful idea. For all sorts of reasons.

In direct line of descent from @Man (remember him?), comes this:

And the puffy vests, my god, the puffy vests...

Which also appears in the midst of the screaming outrage surrounding CmdrTaco's reluctant decision to whore the site to Mammon.

Which brings us all the way back to Kevin "still smilin" Ryan's infamous NY Times comment from almost a year ago:

"... online publishers must increase the amount of space devoted to advertising from about 20 percent to something closer to the 60 percent seen in newspapers. There is not enough advertising on the Web ... and it's not as intrusive."

This rattled my cage back then, and it's rattling still...

@Man said it first - later quoted by both Doc and Dr. W. in chapter 4 of that book:

"When you think of the Internet, don’t think of Mack trucks full of widgets destined for distributorships, whizzing by countless billboards. Think of a table for two."

Crisis of confidence

The present dilemma: What exactly does a bloke who makes his living as a PR flack to high tech companies think he's doing getting into the middle of a flame war with John C. Dvorak, fercrissakes?

Ack. Whatever. Keep thinking: "authentic voice...authentic voice..."

Crikey.

Andrew Orlowski, writing from San Francisco for the UK’s The Register, weighs in on the Dvorak/Cluetrain smackdown, and sends a link this way.

Andrew’s been writing good stuff for publications I admire for years. Before I left the UK, I used to enjoy following his New Statesman and Private Eye work and the occasional piece in the Independent.

This prompts a confusing layering of emotional responses that I’m trying to grok as I write. I dislike some of his remarks on the Dvorak/Cluetrain thing, even where he’s clearly right. But I really, really like other parts of the piece, even if it’s sometimes hard to figure out exactly what he’s saying (comments like: “what we've seen is that the style of the Manifesto is perceived as an attack on the substance of the book itself”, seem to have been tortured and stripped of their original meaning by a sleepy sub-ed).

One of the tricky things about blogging, as Andrew points out, is that the whole phenom is necessarily fuelled by ego octane. And, sad but true: it’s taken me a good 40 minutes to get over the rush of having my blog referenced by a tenured journalist in the esteemed pages of The Register - a site that's been high on my essentials list for a good while. Together with their sister site, The Inquirer, the Reg' should be mandatory reading for anyone in PR.

Soon as I managed to get over myself, I went back and re-read Andrew’s piece. There’s some smart, balanced commentary in here. He does a good job of trying to get past Cluetrain’s self-conscious, deliberately tub-thumping tone to think about the end behind the means. There’s useful contributions to the ongoing self-examination of the blog explosion too – I love the fact that he oscillates between the “blogs are a blip” and “blogs really matter” camps, then ends up admitting that he’s about to participate in the Register’s forthcoming Editors' Blog project at the US version of the site.

Anyway... it’s Saturday morning, I should be playing with the kids. Read Andrew’s piece for yerself – this one’s sure to stir the pot some more.

BTW: Andrew also coins the utterly perfect word for what’s going on here: It's all a load of “Bollogs”. Damn, damn, damn – wish I’d thought of that one as the title for this blog in the first place.