Callwave

I use a service called “Callwave” to handle my voicemail. Basically, it turns incoming voicemail into txt messages so I don’t have to listen to every message.

Or that’s what it’s supposed to do. Looks like the service has been down all morning and I can’t login to my account via the website to even check on things or cancel my account. I’ve spoken to a couple of other Callwave users who are seeing the same thing on their accounts.

They’ve got a blog but haven’t updated it with any issues today. Ugh.

Looks like I’m declaring voicemail bankruptcy! The joys of being an early adopter…

Callwave

Narcissus Called… He Wants His Blogosphere Back

Everyone loves fame (except for the wise ones), so it’s no surprise that there’s been an over abundance of “popular” lists and rankings emerging from all areas of the blogosphere lately.

The sad fact is that no one really cares.

Hot on the heels of the Techmeme Leaderboard, the newest offenders are Scoble and TechCrunch:

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments – with his permission we’ve published it below.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has the right idea:

Here’s some honesty. I love seeing Marketing Pilgrim on any list–like many bloggers–and I suggested MP be added to this new list. Guilty, as charged. But then I stopped and asked, “when will this blog-list insanity stop?” Do we really need to keep compiling lists of top blogs?

The blogosphere is all about the “long tail.” If we continue to highlight only the top 0.0001% blogs we do nothing but encourage the echo-chamber when instead we should be trying to delve deeper/wider into the blogosphere.

I’ve recently discovered a great trick to get past my disgust at such navel gazing… unsubscribing. Seriously, it works wonders to vote with your feet eyeballs attention and let the free market figure out when bloggers have spent too much time staring into the puddle of Narcissus.

There’s a wide world of incredible things happening online in terms of new platforms, new programs and new marketing paradigms… I’d rather focus on those and read bloggers who are doing the same instead of admiring the size of their feed numbers.

Doctorow and Le Guin in Spat Over Fair Use

Two of my favorite writers, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K Le Guin, are in a bit of a spat over the perception of fair use and creative commons in relation to a short Le Guin piece that Doctorow published on the uber popular boingboing.net blog:

In a nutshell: I quoted, in its entirety, a one-paragraph story that Ms Le Guin sent to the fanzine Ansible, in which she made fun of a book review in Slate that said that Michael Chabon “has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Le Guin’s paragraph was a long one, about 500 words, and I pasted the whole thing in, because I thought it was delightful.

In my own non-important view, I have to side with Doctorow here… he seemed to have nothing but the best of intentions and wanted to introduce a new crowd of readers from boingboing to Le Guin’s excellent work. Additionally, his explanation of Fair Use seems to be right on… but I’m not a copyright lawyer (thank the gods), so what do I know?

Yet again, here’s an instance of the offline and online publishing worlds having a difficult time grok-ing the intricacies of each others’ systems, customs and practices.

You say tomato, I say tomato… let’s call the whole thing off.

An apology to Ursula K Le Guin – Boing Boing

Colbert Opinion Piece in the NY Times

Stephen Colbert assumes the role of Maureen Dowd in today’s NY Times. Very very funny:

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Great stuff… go read the whole thing.

Pictures and Videos

I’ve had a couple of people email me to find out where the videos and pics of Mary Hudson, etc are located on the web.

Pictures: http://photos.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my Flickr site which is the same thing).

Videos: http://tv.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my YouTube site which is the same thing).

There’s a constant stream of pics and videos flowing these days since Mary Hudson is having a lot of “firsts!” so be sure to check in or subscribe to those places if you’re into feed reading.

BTW, I’m also a heavy Twitter user. If you’re a user add me (http://www.twitter.com/samharrelson) or sign up and give it a go. It’s good for your constitution.

Affiliate Marketers Can’t Decide Who or What Affiliate Marketers Actually Are

What does this say about the affiliate marketing industry when leading “affiliates” …er… publishers can’t decide on a proper definition for themselves.  Let’s debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin next:

28 Comments

Affiliates Grow Up and Exit

Blogged with Flock

Mediocre Marketing

Seth Godin lays down a beautiful analogy for those who watch the innovators and then attempt to follow their success in light of the Radiohead album release of In Rainbows.

This is exceptionally true in the case of online marketers who are frequently beyond watchful in their appraisal of new marketing approaches and hence beyond mediocre (video, social media, etc):

So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they’re persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.

Seth’s Blog: Radiohead and the mediocre middle