Month: March 2005

Daimler/Chrysler, in yet another feat of misunderstanding of the US market, is missing out on the chance to sell the single coolest car in the world in the US: The SMART Car.
Peter Davidson points out that D/C is thinking of killing the SMART in the US.
This is a shame, because this means that I will never have the chance to lust after a SMART, the same way I lust after a Powerbook, Moleskine, and a really good professional digital camera.
Daimler/Chrysler: I am in your most desirable demographic. I am looking for a new car. I WANT a SMART Car.
How do you plan to deal with that, Daimler/Chrysler?

Seth Godin pointed this out. [here]

They will probably start legal action against me for posting this.

Travis Smith points out that Google, out of the goodness of it’s heart while trying to raise awareness for World Water Day, accidentally crushed the Web site of the group organizing this event, worldwaterday.org. [here]
Travis poses the excellent question about asking your Web provider how they will handle a huge spike in traffic. Can you throttle bandwidth? Does it make sense to recruit a content-delivery network to help distribute the load?
The other question I have is: Did Google tell/ask the World Water Day group about putting their site on one of the busiest pages of the entire Internet?
Nothing like being ambushed by well-meaning folks.
The UNESCO site for World Water Day is still up, if you would like more information. [here]

While Robert Scoble represents the “Look at all of the cool things we’re doing” side of Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft shows us the dark, Dilbertian side of the NimbleBeast (Should I trademark that?).
In his latest post, Mini-MSFT points out how the HR process has become almost Orwellian in it’s self-referencing duh-ness. I am not sure I could work at a company that is described this way.

So if you’re a Microsoftie, take a moment to go through some of the new, emerging competencies nested in the Career Model site. The old competencies pretty much represent crisp, common-sense focused attributes divided into four increasingly challenging levels. The new competencies seem to be a cut-and-paste job of buzz-worded business jargon arbitrarily divided into four columns of no particular difference. For instance, in one of the competencies there are attributes in Level 4 that I sure know I’d be fired for not doing every day an issue came up at work.

Indeed.

Sometimes, working for a company and being an “enemy” alien in the United States is a pain in the butt. It means that sometimes you have to write a blog post, read it again and say, “Well, that’s just plum crazy to post publicly!”.
I came up with a great small conference/forum idea that I would like to run with. However, getting involved in or organizing such a project would see me get:

• slammed by my company
• thrown out of my job
• thrown out my house
• dragged to the 49th parallel and thrown back into Canada

It is something I believe in, would pursue like a rabid dog, and would love to participate in, as a speaker or as a simple attendee.
I would pay money if there was an event like this that was not driven by the companies in the field.
If anyone, particularly independent conference organizers or small/medium-sized companies/consultancies/analyst firms, would like to take my idea and develop it, I would be grateful. I hate to see my one good idea from this week get wasted.

I like to go on business trips. My current role is one that does not allow me to go to many conferences, or attend workshops, or present to groups. I’ve stopped griping about it; it’s the way it is.
However, I read Joi Ito all of the time, and I know that if I hadn’t wasted 10 years of my life, I might have as much geek cred, respect, knowledge, experience and sage wisdom to offer to groups.
The same goes for Tim Bray. My fave Canadian Sun employee is going to be doing a lot of travelling this Spring/Summer. [here and here and here and here]
What does this have to do with me? I am sitting in my attic, wondering what skills I could leverage to make people want to work with me. How do I make myself remarkable, wow!, cool, hip (or unhip)?
I guess it all boils down to a question of timimg, connections, and other assorted things.

This is the Browser Percentage breakdown for The Newest Industry over past 30 days.

This is a part of an ongoing series inspired by the browser percentage graph at ongoing.
The sudden shift upward on the part of Gecko and Safari browsers comes from the site being Scobelized on Saturday, March 19, 2005.

Comcast came out this morning and found water in the splitter on the outside of the house.
Your regularly scheduled program shall be much more regular now.

John Battelle agrees with me: the Ask/IAC deal is simply just another media deal. [here]

It is interesting working in a post-bubble company, watching the companies on the edge of the newly expanding bubbles of search, Web services, blogging and social networking start to try and find ways to link and grow together.
Ask, after buying Bloglines, gets acquired by IAC. Yahoo acquires Flickr. MSN has Spaces; Microsoft buys a file-sharing company; Microsoft has skunkworks projects at Start.com. Google just announced that they are looking for a UI developer to help revive and restore the flagging Blogger service.
The question that arises in my mind is whether these mergers will allow these large companies to effectively control access to what we can and cannot do online.
Now, I am not trying to be orwellian, I am just pointing out that there is likely to be a large amount of control and centralization in these outlets. In some cases, this will be good, providing us with services and features that were unattainable in the smaller company.
On the Dark Side, the benefits could be subsumed in a flood of meaningless co-linked content for tickets, shopping, and other detritus that has yet to overwhelm the new personalized blogging/peer-to-peer/social-networking universe that has “suddenly” appeared since 2000.
The cry of the Internet in 1995 was that anyone could have a Web page, have access to whatever content they wanted, and be in control of their online experience. Now that has come full-circle, after a detour through the swamp of commercialism and marketeering.
With the acquisition of the “cool” and “innovative” companies by the “old” New Media companies, will these new memes simply get subsumed by commercialism and marketeering?