Friday, October 04, 2002

Cisco CEO draws $1 salary. Chief Executive John Chambers joins Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale to be among tech executives to see a $1 salary. [CNET News.com] The article describes this as a largely symbolic gesture - wish I could afford to make such gestures. 10:10:48 AM

According to Clay Shirky, weblogs make publishing a financially worthless activity. Saying that blogs are facilitating the mass amateurisation of publishing, the writer suggests that there's no point trying to find ways of making money out of blogging. I agree entirely - blogging is about writing for the sake of it, about enjoying the conversation and don't even think you'll make a crust out of it. As one of the fortunate people that gets paid to write, I never regarded blogging as a means to establishing myself as a professional writer - why would anybody want to pay me for the self-indulgence that is my blog. My professional writing is enjoyable and challenging but I can't indulge in the luxury of personal commentary and the creative freedoms I can take with my blog. That's personal and I thank Dave Winer/Radio and all the other blog inventors for this freedom. 9:52:15 AM

Burning Bird says that spam is starting to appear in her weblog comments. Picked this link up on Scripting News. A brief observation that a piece she blogged about hefty phone bills generated spam in her comment box. One of the comments to this new piece points out that it is not spam but "viral marketing" - well here we go inventing the language of technology again. Seems you can buy a custom google thingy which searches for key words on blogs and auto posts comments for you. This is marketing, as insidious and driven by money as all other forms of marketing. Why call it viral? Why discriminate between one form of marketing and another? 9:36:04 AM

started the day with a spoof on Bush at the UN on The Onion. The link was sent by an american colleague which is kinda cool - nice to see some real americans working with real brains in these trying times - I was beginning to fear that resistance was only a blog phenomenon. Yesterday I caught (or rather Norton caught) bugbear worming its way into my mailbox. Despite the fact that I have the PATCH I was still vulnerable and the damn thing replicated itself twice into my temp internet folder even though it was quarantined. Only reason I caught it is that I've got my Norton set for auto live update. So, I'm doing all I can and yet I feel so weak and vulnerable. Coming to the point where I'm almost afraid to give people my email address. Someday I'll get around to writing a story about our emotional involvement with and dependence on our computers. We all know the symptoms of this rapidly spreading disease - that sense of withdrawal when there's a power cut and we can't check email, the sense of fear and impending doom when a bug strikes, the overwhelming depression when the hard disk dies. Dave Winer blogged recently that one possible response to Microsoft's ever-increasing dominance and control of our lives is to switch off and take up pottery. Now if I could only figure some way to work remotely without the wires and CPU I'd be laughing. 9:22:42 AM