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Archives for October 2007

Keeping it real

October 23, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Patrick Tanguay has written a great manifesto about the central role of tone of voice in the blog world: I Am A Media, Not The Media.

It’s in the tone and it’s part of a pattern (or lack thereof). When Sylvain Twitters about his company looking for a job candidate, he’s reaching out to his tribe, to his friends and colleagues. You know he’ll be happy to give a hand in turn when he can, you know he’ll give credit, mention partners and cite sources. He’s using the technology to enhance the social aspect. When Bubba links to his most recent ad-ridden post, without any comment and you see he’s got 666 friends, you have to wonder if the tone is right.

I’ve always been very skeptical about the whole “personal brand” movement – although I hope I come across well in my blog, and I do write here about things that are professionally relevant to me, this space is always about me as an individual, not me as simply a commercial entity. I think that anyone who is involved in this kind of thing professionally would do well to keep a clear distinction between their commercial activity and their personal space on the web.

That’s where the “personal brand” people often lose me. I want to have a beer with a person, not with a company, and all too often that distinction is lost on people. And when the lack of such distinctions starts to invade my “social” space – well, it’s boring and somewhat abusive of my time, trust and goodwill. It’s almost as if a kind of mild autism is at play – autism in the sense that there are people can’t gauge context very well and don’t understand that what is cool in one environment is the opposite in another.

See also Sylvain (cited above by Patrick) and the post to which he linked on the weekend, HOWTO network without becoming a disingenuous weasel by Merlin Mann. As Sylvain put it, it’s about an ethic of reciprocity.

Tags: Blogging

Walt Mossberg on mobile carriers

October 22, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has published a piece on the extremely limiting role that US mobile carriers have forced on consumers in the US: Free My Phone.

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

As bad as things are in the US, they’re that much worse in Canada, where the same conditions apply – except that here, we get to pay a huge premium for the “privilege”.

Tags: Mobile, Public Policy, Wireless

ITU endorses WiMax

October 20, 2007 by Michael Boyle

The news doesn’t seem that interesting: “UN telecom panel endorses Intel’s WiMax technology“. I wonder, though, if this is exactly what Apple foresaw when it chose EDGE over existing 3G for the iPhone. I have always thought that Apple was betting on a non-cellular wireless technology as the long-term data entryway for the iPhone – and the fact that such a tech has been formally embraced seems like a strategic win for Apple.

Tags: Mobile, Wireless Data

Mary Meeker’s Annual Internet Roundup

October 18, 2007 by Michael Boyle

I’m not a guy who hangs on the proceedings of every big confererence and schmooze-fest. But… Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Mary Meeker, a long-time internet investment analyst at Morgan Stanley, presented her annual Technology / Internet Trends report. Check it out if you’re interested in a macro look at the key trends affecting the internet economy. If you can’t wade through the original slides, Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has posted a very nice summary.

Tags: Advertising, Analysis, Trends

New kind of spam

October 18, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Just now I got my first instance of what I think is a new form of spam – an email with an audio file payload. It was only about 175Kb all tolled and it was just as easy to delete as any other spam (i.e., very), but I was surprised to see it at all. Is this a widespread phenomenon? Who else receives these?

Tags: Spam

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