After a great and cozy Thanksgiving with relatives in Minnesota we are heading home. I’m enjoying the free WIFI at PDX Portland which seems to have a good connection regardless of location in the terminal building – I’m way at the end and downstairs and it’s fine here at the Gate e6 waiting area.
Here we are in sunny St Paul, Minnesota enjoying the hospitality of our many relatives in this area. I’m becoming something of a Flickr, blog, etc evangelist realizing how many great pictures, stories, and pieces of important family information do not get properly distributed.
There is a really interesting human challenge related to proximity – when you are physically close to people you very actively (and I think correctly) think of good ways to keep in touch and build connections. As the physical distance increases those ideas are forgotten or re-prioritized leaving us in the normal state of not knowing enough about the people we care about the most. Silly humans. Evolution did not anticipate living 2000 miles from your close relatives.
Note to Orbitz: If the plane is on the ground and 2 hours away you can be pretty sure it won’t make it on time.
My Orbitz “plane is late” note came in about 8 minutes ago – approximately 15 minutes after scheduled departure but approximately 2 hours *after* somebody could have been certain the plane would be at least 2 hours late since it’s leaving from SFO and has not left yet. I don’t like to complain a lot about this type of thing, feeling it falls under my “Tell it to the Donner Party” category, but I am looking forward to a world where I could get the ‘late flight’ note within minutes of the time when it is certain that the flight will be late.
Sure is nice to have the WIFI going here at Medford Airport since my plane just got delayed by over 2 hours. I’ll need to redo the SFO to LAS connection but hopefully there are many flights and I was getting in pretty early anyway. Connectivity is somewhat flaky – not sure why but it’s been problematic all along, but it’s still good to have it and get a bit of work (or chess!) done while I sit here.
I think the most disconcerting thing as I age is how fast the time seems to go these days. Time is an elusive enough thing as it is, I wish it wouldn’t fly by so fast, leaving me to wonder how I can suddenly find myself hanging out the middle ages wishing for the wisdom of age and the vigor of youth.
In fact I think if I had to make the case that we are not even physical beings, rather some form of data construct programmed to interact in complex ways with a mathematical reality, I’d point to how time seems to slip by so unnoticed, yet so ungracefully.
… can’t we just hurry up and make it so we can download our brains?
As a general rule I’m optimistic about the intentions of those who govern because I think in general good people go into politics with the sincere intention of making things better. That said, I favor the type of small government intended by the founders, who roll over in their graves which each election, staggered by the scale and sweep of modern governments here and in other “democracies” around the world.
Power was supposed to rest in the hearts and minds of an informed populace, yet we the people have chosen to distance ourselves from government to the degree it’s become an abstraction for most of us at the local, state, and national levels.
The outcome of this election clearly “proves” our system really does allow for significant and peaceful change. Yet it also suggests that our choices are confined to only two — and to my mind somewhat equally inadequate — visions of how we should step into our uncertain American future. Why can’t the pendulum swing sideways for a change rather than back and forth between these two inadequate visions of the right path for America?
Is “democracy” the best word to describe the American political experience? I thought I’d coined the term “Advertocracy” but found a nice Canadian article here about the concept back in 2004.
Clearly our elections, the outcomes of which seem increasingly to depend on razor thin margins, are best described as marketing productions rather than the product of a well-informed citizenry acting on democratic principles. I’m not as alarmed by this as many “anti-advertising” people who fail to see that we all practice forms of advertising in one way or another whether we are telling a fish story about a life experience, beefing up a resume, talking up our favorite movie, or buying time on TV to say “Vote for Me!”. If you blog for your favorite candidate is that advertising? Of course it is.
Communication categories are breaking down quickly, I hope in favor of transparency. Transparent, full disclosure is a better way to measure integrity than “commercialization”, which we all practice to varying degrees of success.
Yet the fact remains that our election results are largely the product of last minute activity by those least concerned about the outcome based on their perceptions of last minute “sound bites” and largely negative ads. There has GOT to be a better way but in the meantime …
God Bless America, and God Bless Advertising.
One of the most frustrating things “Verification” sites do is make bogus and ridiculous assumptions about websites and offer pathways to remove them if you pony up cash.
When I read about Compete over at Battelle’s I tried it and noted that one of my 10 year old travel sites with a long history and good contact information had a Compete.com “warning”. Naturally this pissed me off but I assumed a server change last year may have been the problem.
I felt better when Matt Cutts , whose name appears on no less than the Google Patent documents, pointed out that Compete is questioning his blog’s veracity (see snapshot below).
Adding opportunistic insult to injury, the Compete explanations imply (indirectly) that a legitimate site can get rid of the warning by subscribing to a website service called GeoTrust. Prices seem to vary depending on the site, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a relationship here, making compete look somewhat more like an extortion racket than a good new online resource.
SnapShot |
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Use caution in providing any personal information or downloading software on mattcutts.com. |
As anybody who has ever cooked more than a few grilled cheese sandwiches knows very well, it’s VERY easy to burn them. Yet there is a way to make virtually perfect grilled cheeses every time, and it’s a simple “Golden Rule”. Don’t leave the pan unattended. If you simply stand by your pan and keep tabs on the process for the 4-5 total minutes it will take to complete the process it is very hard to burn the thing – just keep checking every 10 seconds or so until you have a golden brown, gently melted, cheddar or american, taste sensation of a grilled cheese sandwich.
Companies too? I’ve noted that restaurants often go downhill at the point where the owner stops keeping tabs on the day to day activities, and I noted the comments of Venture Capitalist Rick Segal at Startup Camp suggesting that one of the worst things that can happen to a new company is when the founders start to view themselves as “employees” which can happen as venture money, and the resulting obligations, start to change the company culture. He also talked about the importance of keeping those founders involved *as founders* so that the intellectual and emotional investment in the success of the venture is not tarnished by the new venture relationship.
Of course if you follow the Golden Rule of Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Companies AND get a bit lucky you might even create a Mother Mary Grilled Cheese and sell it to GoldenPalace Casino via Ebay for $28,000 as happened with the one pictured above.
Mike Arrington suggests that PayPerPost is now officially absurd with a new and silly disclosure policy and I think I agree:
PayPerPost’s disclosure options are already effectively obsolete because checking the first box = “Look at me, I’m a very virtuous blogger” does not disclose the use of that blog as a powerful search optimization tool for *other* websites by the blog author or his associates. Also, if somebody runs ads and gives the money to charity I consider them *more* virtuous than somebody who refuses advertising, yet these standards imply otherwise.
I think the whole notion of commercial vs personal is getting so blurred that we need to either stop worrying about this OR look for an extremely high level of blogger identity transparency (e.g. a clear itemization of vested interests posted and verified by a third party with public consequences if the blogger fails to disclose vested interests).
Non-commercial bloggers become speakers and book writers and link to friends – is that commercial? Of course it is.
Like many frothing at the mouth online analysts and social networking ravers, Pete Cashmore suggests that Zuckerberg is right to act like he’s in no rush to sell Facebook, but this is silly. Zuckerberg is playing high stakes poker and he has a LOT to lose – certainly hundreds of millions if Facebook hits any major snags or if some newer and hipper online community takes root. I suspect he knows this but is loving the game, and I certainly admire this young whippersnapper for that and for creating such a magnificent web community. Magnificent, but only “worth” a fraction of the 1+ billion Cashmore suggests Facebook is now worth as an independent business.
But then what do I know, I traded my Apple for WCOM back in the day.
I do think Google will now scarf them up as part of their “empty the lake of big fish” marketing strategy, and I predict they’ll pay about 1.1 billion, but this is the luck of timing by Zuckerman, not a market based assessment of the value of Facebook as an independent entity, which everybody seems to be wildly overestimating. YouTube’s the same situation, where it’s value is not in streaming 100,000,000 crappy videos per day, rather in the fact that it helps Google, now awash in high valued stock, consolidate their position as the key online advertising leader.
The funny thing is that the *same rationales* used in 1999 are rearing their silly heads again, and only a handful of investors are noticing this. Unlike 1999 there are now many *real companies* out there with moderately long and profitable online histories, but ironically they appear to be very undervalued compared to the more speculative plays.
Joe Duck 