When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.
- Gordy Thompson, manager of internet services at the New York Times in 1993 quoted by Clay Shirky in Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

• Newspaper sites: do not link to us | Online Journalism Blog
  very stupid indeed, and I thought newspapers have shuffled with the times a bit further than this!
  (tags: blog online copyright stupid legal UK newspapers content links)
• Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse – Times Online
  (tags: business interesting MBA management crisis harvard ethics finance)

• Mind Hacks: Car crash over before consciousness kicks in
  (tags: brain cars crash interesting)
• A Question Revisited: Is Capitalism Working? – Knowledge@Wharton
  a very misguided article for many reasons. the ultimate is holding up 'french capitalism' as an example. Shurely shome mishtake?!
  (tags: economics crisis financial wharton capitalism recession stupid)
• Ben Casnocha: The Blog: In-Person Conversation Skills
  useful to remind to geeks in one's life
  (tags: interesting conversation tips communication social)

• Verizon Customers – Just Say No! – ReadWriteWeb
  this is pretty gruesome… you have to opt-out of the company sharing your personal data! and it's not exactly easy for some customers, it seems
  (tags: privacy business TOS weinberger verizon marketing customer mobile policy readwriteweb)
• A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform
  (tags: web2.0 database journalism innovation api open content guardian newspaper)

• Polonius is no longer online
  (tags: shakespeare facebook web funny jp)
• Hacking Education (continued)
  (tags: web tools trends education future learning VC fredwilson university)
• Wine-cellar encapsulated in a staircase – Boing Boing
  (tags: wine interesting home)
• snopes.com: Crane Accident
  (tags: funny photos car)
• Cognitive Edge – trucks toppling over
  (tags: funny story snowden)
• Sony Unveils New Model Customer | The Onion – America's Finest News Source
  onion is getting scarily real, being too funny by just adding a little bit of humour. Doesn't say much good about reality…
  (tags: marketing funny humour consumer onion sony business)

• UK marketers do not understand social networks – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic
  (tags: marketing socialmedia socialnetworks UK metrics branding stupid)
• LoadingReadyRun – Terms of Friendship
  interesting, though it seems the ending is more a wishful thinking.
  (tags: eula terms individuals agreement contract funny)

Two paragraphs explaining why (brand) websites are dead:

Look at this. It’s a Bovril website. With a breath-taking circularity of irony (or perhaps secret plea for help from a web designer), the site’s strapline (and perhaps the brand’s slogan) is ‘give me strength’. And, indeed, what on God’s earth is the point of all this? And who thought it was a good idea (apart from the agency that created it)?

Don’t get me wrong, once you’re there, it’s quite nicely done, graphically interesting etc. But why would anyone ever go there? Even if it wasn’t difficult to use, I still wouldn’t treat it as my number 1 source of information about Bovril itself (that would be Wikipedia), Bovril recipes (is that a thing?) (I’d start in Google and since the site isn’t search engine-friendly, it doesn’t show up), outdoorsiness (ditto, you’d never get there and if you did you wouldn’t stay long because of the thiny veiled comtempt for this audience), or even gurning cows. It’s just bizarre.

Come to think of it, brands are bizarre too. This is what Tom Hopkins has further to say about brands:

But they are a method of communication not an issuer of communication. They are talking points, they are social tokens, they are items of self expression.

I disagree. There is a lot of earnest talking – mostly by marketing and advertising people – about how people want to engage with brands. I certainly don’t want to engage with brands.

I want to talk to – not ‘engage’ with – the person I may be buying things from, or someone who can help me learn more or get me more information about product or service I am interested in. And that is invariably not the brand, with its useless websites, ad and marketing campaigns that interrupt and annoy the hell out of me.

I want to talk to an expert who’ll educate me about food, wine, travel, fashion, cameras, plumbing, perhaps even washing powder, if that’s what I am interested in. And agencies just get in the way of such interactions. Just look what they have done with websites – a pandemic of branded flash-ridden monstrosities, eating load time and bandwidth, with a graphic designer’s wet dream splashing across your screen. Grrrr.

I want to talk to and possibly relate on an ongoing basis with people – individuals, not departments! – within organisations that I might choose to supply me with products and services. My advice to them is know who you are and what you are trying to do, then understand what people – individuals, not consumers! – do and want, and then treat them with respect and understanding. You will get the same in return. That is far more valuable for the long term health of your business (and customers!) than any brand campaign.

• Aaron Greenspan: Why I Sued Google (and Won)
  (tags: google advertising rights power customerservice court)
• Brian Kahin: Microsoft Roils the World with FAT Patents
  tomtom being sued by M$, which is also an attack on LINUX
  (tags: microsoft FOSS linux patents)

• Yahoo! News – Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews by AP: Yahoo! Tech
  this is one of those times when customer is not always right but the way to go is not to bad reviews but educate people about what is a good doctor and what isn't, beyond just their immediate experience. Tough but necessary
  (tags: healthcare freedom doctors reviews reputation medicine eula)
• Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa « Roger Alsing Weblog
  (tags: science programming art AI genetics images graphics)
• A better way to fix the banks – The McKinsey Quarterly – bank bailout government plan – Financial Services – Banking
  (tags: business economics crisis finance mckinsey banking recession government)
• Doctors try to silence negative reviews from patients – Ars Technica
  (tags: web2.0 socialmedia health medical doctors reviews stupidity medicine)
• Lauren Weinstein's Blog: "Google Ombudsman" (Part II)
  agreed, aggravated users should be treated this way. just because the company is huge and successful and users sometimes ignorant, overreacting or even stupid, doesn't mean they deserve to be ignored.
  (tags: google communications customers users)

• Schneier on Security: Privacy in the Age of Persistence
  "Being constantly scrutinized undermines our social norms; furthermore, it's creepy. Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity."
  (tags: privacy data security technology identity future information freedom surveillance schneier society)
• What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09 | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
  This has just been elevated to my Pantheon of 'must read' pieces.
  (tags: web2.0 internet socialmedia technology trends future history culture wired ajax change brucesterling business)
• How About Free? The Price Point That Is Turning Industries on Their Heads – Knowledge@Wharton
  good if inconclusive article. annoyingly, still talk of 'consumers' addicted to free content. Oh boy, 'consumers' who also produce and distribute ain't consumers no more. media industry can't accept that though. better would be looking into 'because of' model – making money 'because of' something, not 'with' something. That means rewiring business models across the board, which is harder than blaming 'consumers' and the interwebs.
  (tags: internet freeconomics pricing wharton free web2.0)
• The Buzz Starts Here: Finding the First Mouth for Word-of-Mouth Marketing – Knowledge@Wharton
  An interesting article about word of mouth marketing in pharmaceutical products. Rather common sense and obvious but you'd need to move away from the traditional 'channel' or even the newer 'influencer' thinking, which seems hard for marketers. Also, from the point of 'relationships' with the community, influencers and other 'nodes' in social networks, the traditional thinking about authority and credibility based mostly on hierarchical or channel models breaks down. And more importantly, the methods used by marketers to try this new 'word-of-mouth' approach are also flawed – they look for self-proclaimed influencers, which causes what I call the Schrödinger's cat effect in marketing or surveys – the observed is impacted by the act of observation
  (tags: marketing socialmedia networks wharton pharma drugs)
• EXCLUSIVE: Google Takes a Stand for Location Privacy, Along with Loopt | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  (tags: google privacy legal location eff GPS)
• StripGenerator: Online Comic Strip Creator
  this is cool
  (tags: comics creativity humour tools)

The World Wide Web sits on top of a turtle, and then below that is an older turtle, and that sits on the older turtle. You don’t have to feel fretful about that situation — because it’s turtles all the way down.
- Bruce Sterling in What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09

• Community-as-a-Service | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon
  does it mean that community is provided as a service the same way software is? I.e. doesn't belong to me and I can't really drive it. SaaS takes the 'provider' model to extremes. nothing is 'owned' by the users. Community as a service modelled on that is pushing social interactions the opposite direction I want to go. I want to enable, not provide (a service).
  (tags: community service SaaS distributed software ownership)
• Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring | Andrew Hyde – Startups. Start Here.
  good points, i agree with it
  (tags: design criticism development crowdsourcing ethics copywriting)
• My Efforts to Stimulate the Economy « Please take my money
  ghastly stuff, no wonder car salesmen have such a bad rep!
  (tags: car sales stories stupid)