February 05, 2003
The Last Frontier in Marketing
Chris Pirillo has launched Rent My Chest!. Not only does this prove once and for all that Pud is a phlash in the pan, it proves, once again, that there's a sucker born every minute.
...and I love each and every nipply pixel of it. This site makes me laugh on so many levels.
I wonder if we'll see someone release some adtracking software for this new medium...or better yet, a nipple-network for those that don't have a lot of individual traffic to their chests, but banded together can actually present some decent numbers to discerning chest marketers...
Practice in Private
Yesterday, Doc blogged that Scott's blog is "This is not your practice blog". Today I found that Docs practice blog is not a blog anymore.
The last time I was there, there were many practice posts on his practice blog. Unfortunately, someone noticed that Docs practice blog had become a public because of a blogroll link that I found on Docs public blog blogroll. Now Doc's practice blog simple redirects to a tool used by a ton of bloggers, but it isn't a blog (although it is public). I guess that this would mean that Doc's practice blog is no longer his practice blog.
Does that mean that it belongs to Scott?
HP Pulling All NASA Promotional Materials, Fails FFAT.
Please let me never work for a company that would do something as stupifyingly obvious and dumb as this.
"HP Pulling All NASA Promotional Materials It's becoming more and more common for companies and organizations to use the easily changeable nature of the web to rewrite history as it suits them. This explains how, when the anger rose over the Total Information Awareness group, suddenly key member bios (and the scary logo) quietly disappeared from their website. So, it's not a huge surprise when Vik writes "In the light of the Columbia crash, HP immediately went through their web site and removed any references to one of their ad capaigns that included NASA. Of particular interest is the online transcript of Carly Fiorina's Comdex speech The current version omits any reference to NASA, while Google brings up the cached page with the following missing paragraph: 'The challenge that NASA faces today is that they send some of the most brilliant minds in our country into space, and then they bring them back home. Obviously, there is very little room for error in that scenario. HP has the honor of being one of NASA's technology partners and we see it as our job to help the astronauts get home safely, so NASA can focus on its real mission: to explore, to discover and to inspire.'" [via Techdirt]
Companies should have to write an exam before they are let into the Fortune 500. Definitely multiple choice and only one or two questions something straightforward like the following:
Fortune 500 Aptitude Test
Using a number 5 lead pencil, select one, and only one answer that correctly completes the following sentence;
Customers are:
- not stupid.
- smarter than you think they are.
- tired of being insulted.
- not an asset to be managed, but rather, part of a relationship that needs to be fostered.
- All of the above.
Applicants that correctly answer the above question will be contacted by the market.
Cook on ICANN - Again.
I agree with most of what Gord Cook has to say - except when he's talking about ICANN/IANA. His observations are usually rooted in some sort of reality, but to lay the blame for the dotCOM bubble at the feet of those that created ICANN is ludicrous. To tie it to a misguided perception that the "play is closed", equally silly.
"Had the cooperative agreement concluded in spring of 1997, as the NSF intended, the problem of institutionalizing the IANA function would have been forced out on an open table (or, possibly made moot) by the demand for (and creation of) additional TLDs. It might also have been forced into the courts. It certainly would have become more clear to many more people that one of the most critical underpinnings of the Internet, the IANA function, had no basis in law. Neither domestic nor international. If the play had been open, the high stakes mania that festered into the Internet bubble might well have not reached such a fever pitch. The industry might not have ridden so high and fallen so hard."
[March 2003, "The Cook Report On the Internet" (Executive Summary Version)]
The Rise and Fall of the Venture Capitalists and Valley Dreamers had virtually nothing to do with ICANN and almost everything to do with their own hubris. The rise and fall of ICANN, as with most, will stem from its own hubris, but these are chapters that have yet to be written.