Posts from July 4, 2005

Dell hell: Where’s the flack when you need him?

July 4, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

Steve Broback at the Blog Business Summit looks up Dell’s PR company’s web site on blogs and it says:

One refers to an ancient (feb 2003) Fortune article with blog in the headline, and the other assures clients that OutCast is on top of the whole crazy, kooky blog thing:

Blogger Relations
Here’s what every technology vendor fears about blogs: they don’t know what they don’t know. OutCast navigates the confusing world of the blogosphere on behalf of our clients so they can focus on their business. There are an estimated 9 million blogs today, but which ones matter to you? It’s our job not only to tell you, but to help you negotiate that terrain. How do we do this? Remember when News.com was new? Remember when Usenet mattered? We do. So relax. Breathe. Whether it’s radio in the 1920s, TV in the 1950s or the Web in the 1990s, new media is new media.

Except when it’s not media, when it’s customers talking.

Variety, spice, and all that

July 4, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

I should add to the points below that I’m looking to try out Word Press not out of any problems with Movable Type. In due course, I want to try various of the tools; I started on Blogger and moved to MT (but did not upgrade to the latest version because it was likely beyond my own IQ) and now want to try WP. There are lots of great tools enabling this new medium and I don’t mean to slight any of them. Besides, my son is my webmaster and he says he’ll support WP. Gotta do what the boss says.

Conversation stoppers

July 4, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

Continuing the theme of technological dependence and addiction… Since I have given tough love to Technorati over time for not being able to constantly update its counts, I should in the spirit of equal opportunity lament PubSub these days: I haven’t seen updated links there in days. Wazzup? I depend on these services to find out what people are saying. When they don’t work, it’s like losing my cell phone.

Broken type

July 4, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

This weekend’s burp in Movable Type installations — which came because of a conflict in an update of the Control Panel that controls many web servers — reveals an odd vulnerability of citizens’ media. No medium before could be so handicapped by a single bug or glitch (or virus or spam attack). Of course, in blogs, we’re used to it; Blogger used to go down all the time and with it half the Blogosphere then . But what’s oddly unnerving in this case is that an external change could have such an impact. Then again, because this is a community, people shared symptoms and then solutions with dispatch.

The fake war

July 4, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

Jay Rosen on the fake war media has declared over the Supreme Court nomination. We hear anchors and morning-show gabbers talk about this as if there is breaking news, as if the fighting is going on now. But the truth is, of course, that we’re just waiting. Says Jay:

Meanwhile, I do think “the armies of ideological activists from both sides” now gearing up for the battle royale are embarking not on a rational exercise in political persuasion–a battle for hearts and minds in proper terms–but an absurd and wasteful media campaign that will probably have little effect on the nomination itself, yet serve perfectly the purposes of those for whom culture war is way of life.