Filtered for Purity
Technorealism, stating the obvious.
Meta technorealism, berating the obvious.
Technorealist, a simplified story in sixteen steps.
Cryptofabulism, because information wants to be freaky.
Speaking of technorealism… Feed blew it this week by publishing the paranoid delusions of Mark Pesce on XML, in a piece titled “The Power of Babel.” Pesce argues that Microsoft will be able to control the way information is consumed by forcing content creators to use their version of the XML spec. “Microsoft can assume the role of the Inner Party,” Pesce writes, “doling out the XML Newspeak to a legion of content creators tooling away in the Ministry of Truth, altering the electronic corpus to reflect a particular reality.” It’s the combination of his utter cluelessness and this kind of hyperbole that led to a thorough dressing down in the article’s “Loop,” including a thoughtful post from XML 1.0 spec co-author Tim Bray.
Halsey Minor is doing his best to live down his infamous comment about CNet’s content merely serving the commerce needs of the company. Salon’s Tom McNichol on the subject: “The viability of most online publications depends on delivering readers to advertisers. But there’s more than a kilobyte’s difference between advertising being attracted by good editorial and advertising steering editorial content. Minor, who had no previous publishing experience before founding CNET, may not fully appreciate the distinction.”
Following the suit of the loom? Prehensile.com’s Halcyon Styn was pursued by Fruit of the Loom for posting a piece on his site that parodies the Fruit of the Loom ad campaign. They threatened legal action. He stood his ground…and won.
The rumor of the week had Disney buying Apple. The stupid joke of the week was that there was synergy between the two mouse pioneers…
Playboy is threatening to take this whole Internet thing seriously. I guess they figure it’s better late than never. Great quote in the news.com story from Kendrick Noble of Noble Consultants: “They have something everybody wants: a name and semi-quality pornographic pictures.” Do you think he meant “everyone” in the “market segment” sense, or everyone in the “everyone” sense?