Sunday, January 18, 2004

An important post...beware zealots of ANY stripe, particularly those on your side... Green idiots. This is exactly the sort of thing that pisses me off about my more hard-core lefty friends. I am an environmentalist and a feminist, yet I am ridiculed for claiming such because I don't espouse the more stupid opinions of... [Amish Tech Support] 4:45:58 PM  comment []  Trackback []     CandidateMap.com is "an impartial resource where voters can judge political candidates by the statements they make, as opposed to the image they craft." [Scripting News] 8:58:26 AM  comment []  Trackback []     LOL... Journalists wither under scrutiny. As a former newspaper journalist, I'm amazed by some of the hysteria that journalists are exhibiting about a plan for webloggers to follow and critique specific political journalists during the 2004 presidential campaign. A case in point is the reaction by Alan Judd, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The idea of 'tracking' individual campaign reporters -- as on Wilgoren Watch -- is absurd. The people behind such efforts would be satisified with nothing other than stories effusively praising Howard Dean and blasting Bush as the great satan. What they advocate isn't press criticism, it's stalking. It's hilarious to watch professional journalists, a group that makes their living subjecting public figures and private citizens to scrutiny and even ridicule, turn into delicate flowers at the mere thought of being subjected to the same treatment. [Workbench] 8:03:10 AM  comment []  Trackback []     I am currently dealing with a situation at work in which a group that services customers has just figured out that talking to said customers is a good way to figure out what they need and make them happy. I have thus far resisted the urge to meet this phenomenal insight with the expression "No shit, Sherlock!" and I will refrain from doing so here as well... Fortune.  Management gurus have arrived with a business oriented version of the Clue-Train (and they are going to make a mint on this): This new style of business, birthed by the Internet, is ignored at any company's peril. In an excellent new book, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, authors C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy describe the consumer's new role: "from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active." .... In the bottom-up economy, presuming you know what the customer wants is the ultimate error. Prahalad and Ramaswamy instead call for "co-creation of value": The successful products and services from now on will be those developed jointly—company and customer working hand in hand. [John Robb's Weblog] 8:00:26 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Blogging the market needs work. Blogs As Intra-enterprise Technologies of Cooperation. George Dafermos at MIT, in Blogging the Market (93 page PDF) , looks at pervasive blogging as potential organizational dynamite, with case histories that include Slashdot, Amazon, Macromedia, Groove Networks, and Gizmodo. (Thanks, Jim!) [Smart Mobs] I had real problems with this report. It's gotten a fair number of pointers from other blogs and the outline looked intriguing. After about an hour skimming through it though I think there's probably a really good 20-page report lurking in there somewhere, but in its present form it's hard to justify the time to dig it out. If I were reviewing this paper as a referee I send it back for major revisions. Too bad, because I think it's asking the right questions. [McGee's Musings] 7:57:23 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Hee, hee... If George Bush is going to spend tax dollars to promote marriage, he should splash a little cash on the people who prove every day that marriage can work -- members of functional, longterm marriages. I call this critical demograhpic group the Married Establishment, better known by the acronym ME. When Lisa and I celebrate our fifteenth anniversary in June, will any of Bush's $1.5 billion be coming our way? A federally-funded night on the town would be nice way of saying, "Thanks for your role in preserving the cornerstone of civilized societies, which this administration values highly for everyone but homosexuals." Hey, a voucher for a babysitter would be welcome, but I bet we don't even get a card. It's like being an established company, and watching a newcomer get economic incentives to move to town. And what about people who really should not be married? We all know a few. Shouldn't Bush help the institution of marriage by paying some people to stay the hell out of it? And not that Britney needs the money, but maybe he could do something for her, too. Of course, rewarding people who make marriage work would get expensive -- as baby boomers age, more and more couples will require government assistance for any number of marriage-preserving items. Viagra alone could get its own line in the budget. Fortunately, being married to Lisa is its own reward. [EdCone.com] 7:57:01 AM  comment []  Trackback []     This is getting so interesting, I may have to go back to teaching in some capacity... I've added a banner for the Digital Democracy Teach-In in the right-hand column. Click for more information, then book your reservation -- you don't want to lose by 1% in November knowing you could have learned how to get those last few votes by going to San Diego in February....Last I heard, I'm scheduled to moderate a conversation about online campaigning with some senior Dean staffers. [EdCone.com] 7:55:29 AM  comment []  Trackback []     We need more of this... Bridgebuilder. Ziauddin Sardar is a British-Muslim writer and cultural commentator whose work explores and deepens the meeting points between cultures, Islamic as well as that of the Indian Sub-Continent, with that of the West. The best introduction to Sardar's work... [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 7:52:24 AM  comment []  Trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Gail Marsella. Last update: 6/27/2004; 7:20:31 PM.

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