vobios.blog

I remember the day when you could not use the word blog in public due to an excessive amount of blank stares that would surely result. Fast forward a few years and now it’s almost a requirement in certain circles to have one. You know things have gone too far when someone decides to create a Business Blogging Index. From The Long Tail:

Earlier this year I was at a dinner with Doc Searls and we got to talking about why some companies blog and some don’t. Microsoft blogs, and Apple doesn’t. Sun blogs and Intel doesn’t. GM blogs and Toyota doesn’t. And so on.

Perhaps, Doc wondered, the risks and uncertainties of public business blogging are so great that big companies only do it under duress, when their traditional corporate messaging has lost traction. So companies on the way up don’t want to mess with their success by introducing a new lens on the enterprise that isn’t controlled by the PR department. But companies on the way down are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers.

Hmm, I thought. That’s testable. Let’s look at which of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging and compare their past twelve month share performance with those that aren’t. If this theory stands up, the blogging members of the F500 will have underperformed the nonblogging members. And then we can also see if blogging makes a difference going forward, by continuing to follow the two cohorts.

What grew out of this is the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. I’ll be checking it frequently to make sure I do not miss these exciting new blogs:
Bed Bath & Beyond – pillow news
Exxon Mobil – more reasons to get that SUV
Heinz – ketchup ain’t just for hot dogs anymore
Walgreen – you have to fill your prescriptions somewhere
Wendy’s – square burgers are better

This is my favorite section, though:

Over time, as the list gets more robust, we’ll add the share price performance back in and turn it into a Business Blogging Index so you can see if blogging is indeed correlated to company performance (and who knows, maybe someday some smart mutual fund will actually turn it into a fund you can buy).

The unfortunate part is that some people would actually buy that fund. Forget the management, the cash flow, the product lineup, or the industry. Blogging is what drives the corporations of tomorrow. Amazon.com and Microsoft are more likely to blog than Berkshire Hathaway or Dollar General because they simply “are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers”. Everything is so clear to me now.

Upon reading this piece by David Pogue, I just had to fire an email to the author.

Hello David,

I just read your 10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year article. For the most part, I thought it was a good lineup. Unfortunately, not all of them are new or entirely accurate.

“THE FREE DOMAIN NAME A domain name is what comes before the “.com” in a Web address – like NYTimes.com, verizonwireless.com or MarryMeBritney.com. Getting your own personal dot-com name has its privileges – for example, your e-mail address can be You@YourNameHere.com – but it costs money and requires some expertise. It took Microsoft, of all companies, to make getting your own dot-com name free. Its new Office Live online software suite for small businesses, now in testing, will offer a domain name, Web site and e-mail accounts free. Yes, you’ll see ads on the screen (unless you pay for the adless version) – but plenty of people won’t mind viewing them in exchange for a free, professional-looking Web presence.”

It was not Microsoft that came up with the idea of a free domain name. Around 1999-2001, during the final days of the tech bubble, there were several free domain name registrars. They have long since changed their business models, but their place in history cannot be ignored.

Also, since Microsoft’s free domain comes with Office Live, a relatively expensive product, is the domain really free? What about all the companies that offer free domains with their hosting packages?

As I said before, you produced a good lineup. However, some parts were somewhat fudged. I really would like to expect more from a publication like The New York Times. This is more than just a local paper. If I find errors in the information I am familiar with, how can I trust anything else in your publication?

I hope such reporting is avoided in the future.

I wonder if I will at least be honored with a response.

The Wikipedia saga continues. The Register had a beautiful article today:

For CNN viewers, and for NPR listeners again the following day, Wales repeated his wish to unmask the perp, but could only offer some hand-wringing excuse about the difficulty of finding anonymous users, and the complexity of serving internet service providers with subpoenas. However, we now learn that the libeler wasn’t very hard to find, and has now stepped forward to confess to making the edit with an apology.

Brian Chase, a 38 year old employee of Rush Delivery in Seigenthaler’s home town of Nashville, Tennessee, admitted to making the edit and has apologized to Seigenthaler. The reason he gave to the New York Times was most revealing.

Chase thought Wikipedia was a joke site and he made the edit to amuse a colleague. From which we conclude that the spoof site Uncyclopedia, which consists entirely of fictional entries, is doing far better than expected, and that Wikipedia has a long way to go to rid itself of the image that it’s a massive, multiplayer shoot-em-up game, or MMORPG.

Chase has lost his job, and Seigenthaler joined the pleas to reinstate him.

But the unusual aspect of this – and this is an irony on a par with Sony using ‘DVD’ Jon Johansen’s anti-DRM code in its DRM CD software – is what compelled Chase to step forward. The libeller was outed not by Wikipedia guardians, by a prominent critic of the site who has been earned himself a lifetime Wikipedia ban – researcher Daniel Brandt.

Chase left a fingerprint behind, in the form of an IP address, and Brandt discovered that the machine was active, traced it to Nashville, and discovered it was hosting a web server. The web server revealed the name of a company: ‘Rush Delivery’. Brandt fired off a fax to Rush Delivery in Nashville and confirmed the connection.

Then the article offers a quick summary of the entire debate and hits the nail right on the head:

Two great cries have rung around the internet since the Seigenthaler scandal broke.

One is that Seigenthaler should have corrected the entry himself, and the other is that no source of authority can be trusted “definitively”. That’s a deliciously weaselly phrase we’ll examine in a moment.

But both excuses seek, in the classic tradition of bad engineers blaming users for their own shoddy handiwork, to pass the responsibility onto Wikipedia’s users.

The blame goes here, the blame goes there – the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there’s a problem – well, the user must be stupid!

It continues:

If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public “internet” ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world’s greatest “knowledge” was just around the corner. This hasn’t happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile.

Everything you read is suspect! You’d better duck!

Only a paranoiac, or a mad person, can sustain this level of defensiveness for any length of time however, and to hear a putative “encyclopedia” making such a statement is odd, to say the least.

This defense firmly puts the blame on the reader, for being so stupid as to take the words at face value. Silly you, for believing us, they say.

I could not have said it better myself.

Kanye West finally admitted how he dropped out of college. From MTV:

“It is true you can be successful without [college], but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have,” West said backstage. “I would suggest to people to do all that you can. When I dropped out of school I had worked in the music industry and had checks cut in my name from record labels and had a record deal on the table, and when I wasn’t successful and Columbia said, ‘We’ll call you,’ I had to go back and work a telemarketing job, go back to the real world, and that’s how life is. Life is hard. Take advantage of your opportunities.”

... “I think it’s just dope to help kids with money and school,” the rapper said. “That’s the main problem. When I was a college student I was broke, and I really like clothes. When I was in college it would have been better if I could have afforded more clothes!”

On a related note, John Smallwood had an interesting comment:

I get e-mails all the time questioning my blackness because I work for the Daily News, because I sometimes criticize black athletes, because I don’t always say what some black people want or expect me to say.

So is growing up impoverished in the inner city an absolute must to be considered “truly” black?

I grew up in a school district that was only 6 percent black and was called a “nigger.” Would it have been more accurate had they called me “little kind-of-a-black boy lost in suburbia?”

Damn, it sure hurt like I was being called “nigger.”

If I don’t subscribe to the “thug life,” does that mean I don’t subscribe to the black life?

Ever since I first heard “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas, I could not find the right words to describe what I felt about. Slate overcame that obstacle:

As a piece of music, “My Humps” is a stunning assemblage of awful ideas. The song’s playful pogo and coke-thin, ring-tone synth line interpolate Sexual Harassment’s 1982 left-field electro hit, “I Need A Freak”. But where the original trafficked in something icky, sinister, and darkly sexual, the Peas’ call-and-response courtship fails to titillate—in fact, it’s enough to convince one to never, ever ogle again. The “humps” in question belong to Fergie, who brandishes her “lovely lady lumps” for the purpose of procuring various gifts from men who, one would assume, find the prospect of “lumps” very exciting—one lump begetting another lump, if you will.

“What you gon’ do with all that ass/ All that ass inside them jeans? … What you gon’ do wit all that breast?/ All that breast inside that shirt?” rapper Will.I.Am teases in response, rendering literal what had heretofore been pretty much literal. It’s a song that tries to evoke a coquettish nudge and wink, but head-butts and bloodies the target instead. It isolates sectors of the female anatomy that obsessive young men have been inventing language for since their skulls fused, and yet it emerges only with “humps” and “lumps”—at least “Milkshake” sounded delicious.

After the recent media blitz criticizing Wikipedia, the web service responded:

Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.

I am sure the new policy will go a long way, especially considering that almost every imaginable page has already been created. True, the measures will help with the spam, but that is not what all the discussion has been about. Talk about a gimmick.

Additionally, this was in a different article:

“That’s an interesting philosophical issue,” Wales said. “Because on the one hand, particularly with things like podcasting, the people involved are people who know a lot about it, and on the other hand, when people are editing something they’ve been personally involved in, it can be hard for them to be neutral.”

He added that traditionally, Wikipedia has discouraged users from participating in such entries and asks them to be mature and serious when they do.

Luckily, the Internet is a great place to expect maturity and seriousness from complete strangers protected by anonymity.

Breaking news from The New York Times. Turns out the mighty Wikipedia cannot be trusted. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, “The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources.”

I have been dubious of Wikipedia for a long time. After all the praise it has been receiving lately, it is nice to see someone try to open up everyones eyes. I just wonder why it took years for this to end up in a major publication.

And just for the record, as Wikipedia continues to become more mainstream, the number of submissions will eventually completely overwhelm the small group of people willing to actually edit the content. How long this experiment will last is an interesting question though.

In their quest to reach to a broader range of students, colleges are trying a number of techniques. The New York Times reports:

Across the country, colleges are trying to reposition themselves to attract more high-quality students and raise their national profiles. But perhaps nowhere is this more challenging than in the South, where university officials often find themselves struggling to temper Confederate imagery without alienating alumni and donors determined to uphold their heritage.

It continues:

Some alumni were also angered by a report commissioned by the university last year by a marketing firm from Chicago that said that the word “South” often had negative connotations for students around the country; the weaker the connection between the South and the university’s name, the better, the consultants said.

That set off a fierce debate over the unofficial logo that the university has been using for at least a decade on stationery, business cards, campus maps and now its Web site: Sewanee: the University of the South. Often the word “Sewanee” is in large type, with the rest of the name in small type underneath.

What the marketing firm failed to notice is that Sewanee is in Tennessee. If you are uncomfortable with the South, why you would consider applying to a college in Tennessee is beyond me.