If my warranty scam was not perpetrating fraud and was just a simple auto warranty robocall, exemplitying neither force nor fraud could I as a California business blast the hell out of millions of California homes with a robodial?
I have no idea how the Libertarian party feels about robo calls. But me personally, I hate them. The Libertarian party best represents most of my major politica views though.
I was the one that Kolakowski robodialed. I am not an "established business associate, customer, or other person having an established relationship with" her, therefore this exception would not apply to her.
If you want to try and argue that the same political party would constitute an "established" relationship (which is a total stretch) then in order to be of my same party, Kolakowski would have to be a registered Libertarian like I am. I doubt she is. But here again, if political party affiliation was enough, then couldn't someone who was a Democrat simply robodial all of the Democrats in California with an unsavory auto warranty scam phone call? As I read this law there is no wiggle room at all.
She is breaking the law and she should admit it, apologize and pledge not to use robodialers in the state of California in the future. If she'd like to use them then she needs to work to change the laws in the State to allow them, rather then simply ignore a law that she doesn't like or that is inconvenient for her.
But even if she can find some wiggle room or some minor technicality to skate by the intent of this law, certainly the ethical thing for a candidate for judge to do would be to abide by the spirit of the law which is to stop these annoying and harassing cals in the State of California.
It's just one photo on my blog. If you click through on the video links above you can get a tour from Robert and Bebo. All of my photos of our shoot can be seen here: http://beta.zooomr.com/smartsets/thomashawk/10374
Bebo did mention this and actually showed us an apparatus that they use to realign the the accelerator. It's this big tube that sits beneath the actual accelerator tube and can be moved with Jacks. There is a target that a beam is shot through to make sure it is straight. Here is a photo of an intersection of the tube.
http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/thomashawk/735653
They didn't have to realign it during the Loma Prieta earthquake though although they did lose power to the accelerator during that earthquake.
I can't remember Bebo's real name but he has been going by Bebo all his life. If memory serves correct, he got the name when he was a child. I think it was what his sister called him and it's the name that stuck with him his entire life. He really is a great guy and gave us a great view of SLAC. I'm looking forward to going back there to take photos and film part III with Robert and Shel.
"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer." Jean Jacques Rousseau.
A lot of charged language has been flying around over the past four days or so with regards to Flickr and what rights their users ought or ought not to have with regards to their content. It started off with a thread in Flickr Central when Google launched their new Picasa photo sharing app and has escalated from there to Digg, TechCrunch and now Slashdot.
As I've been involved in the recent debate since it started I wanted to offer up my thoughts on the matter at hand. It's important to note that yesterday I joined Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr. I've kept quiet on the posts over the weekend because I wanted to announce that before offering up anything more on the subject than I already have.
As one of Flickr's heaviest users I feel that I have a decent understanding of the situation and problem at present.
A number of months back Anil Dash wrote a post called "The Interesting Economy." In this post Anil posed the most basic question of all from a Flickr user's perspective, "what's in it for me?"
From Anil: "But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange."
Caterina Fake responded to Anil with the following: "Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it."
At the time, and still today, I agree with Caterina Fake. I have always felt that I've gotten much more out of Flickr than money could ever provide and thus I've felt it more than a fair deal. I don't need to be paid by Flickr. I enjoy the generosity that Caterina speaks of and love the share and share alike spirt of Flickr. And over the past year I've spent hours and hours and hours working away at my flickrstream. Uploading new photos every day, meticulously documenting my images with detailed tags, building friends and making contacts, enjoying and sharing with everyone I meet, and participating actively in many different groups and conversations on the site. But lately I've been having some second thoughts.
The central issue around the recent debate is not whether or not you can get your photographs out of Flickr. Slashdot got this really wrong when they wrote, "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting." There are several tools that have already been developed to allow exporting out of Flickr. Downloadr and Slickr come to mind immediately.
You absolutely can get your photographs out of Flickr your photos are not locked up. Flickr is not the roach motel that others have been making it out to be.
What is at issue is not your photos, but the metadata associated with your photos. At present Flickr does
No conflict of interest here. I have no money or vested interest in the company whatsoever. Just like the technology. As far as I know this is just some guy and not even a company I/you could invest in.
As way of personal disclosure though, my current tech holdings personally include(nothing exciting here, go ahead an mock me)
Microsoft
Intel
Adobe
Oracle
Time Warner
Dell
and that's it. I don't buy small cap tech stocks at all. Lots of other non tech related companies and I don't do an advising in the tech world at all.
Here is some additional info on what went on during the day. I don't think that HP or David knew about the Slashdot post prior to the change of heart but I did start applying pressure earlier in the day.
Thursday evening, May 5th at 9:41 pm. I sent the following message to David Gee at HP "Nice. At least I took a screen shot."
On Friday morning at 7:15 a.m. I still had not heard back from Gee or had the post reinstated so I blogged about my experience.
At 9:07 a.m. on Friday morning I submitted the story to Slashdot. They accepted it later in the day but it took until the end of the day for it to show up.
By Friday morning at 10:54 I still had not heard from David or had my post reinstated so I sent an email about the incident to Steve Rubel (who had originally posted the story about HP blogging), Robert Scoble (an A list blogger and someone who preaches transparency), Mark Cuban, Fred Wilson (a VC who had previously written about censoring comments), and Michael Gartenberg (an influential JupiterResearch) who does not publish comments on his corporate blog but has gone out of his way to try and engage bloggers in Jupiter's publishing. I'd had interaction in the past with all of these bloggers and thought they might be interested and/or sympathetic regarding my story.
Within 15 minutes Cuban emailed me back and suggested that this is pretty much what I should expect from a corporate blog and that they have other constituencies to consider and that it's not as if there weren't other outlets for my criticism. All valid points. I still can't believe that Cuban answers his own emails and have found him amazingly accessible as a blogger for someone who has got so many other things going on in his life. He's offered me some really good advice in the past.
I also sent a separate email to Dan Gillmor telling him about the story and the fact that Slashdot had accepted the story. I did this prior to Gee's reinstating my comment and prior to it being published at Slashdot. Dan subsequently posted a story on the incident today.
At 11:31 a.m. I emailed a response back to Cuban, Rubel, Scoble, Wilson and Gartenberg and this time cc:d David Gee at HP. I thanked Mark Cuban for his response but still expressed that I thought that it was bogus for HP to present this blogging thing as an open and honest way to engage customers and then to censor negative opinions - it particularly rubbed me wrong as the title of the post was "Customer Intimacy."
That's pretty much everything else that happened in addition to the timeline above by way of transparency and background.
For what it's worth, although Gee knew that I had engaged some A list bloggers on this story, I don't think that he knew that it was going to end up on Slashdot.
In either case though if it were of his own volition or by pressure from A list bloggers or even pressure from Slashdot, in the end the result is the same and it's positive and I don't think that HP will be censoring any more negative comments.
I do think that David Gee and HP are sincere in their efforts to blog and I hope that they can do something as positive as Robert Scoble has done for corporate blogging up at Microsoft. This could be a great way for HP to legitimately, honestly and seriously engage their customers.
I agree with David that it was a learning experience and I also strongly believe that everyone deserves a second chance. I've made plenty of mistakes before. The fact is that David owned up to it and did the right thing. And because of that act alone HP picked up a lot of credibility in my book, even if it had to be done in a less than fun way for them.
And people are right, the comment was not particularly well written. I wrote it quickly and off the cuff and quite frankly never expected it to get this kind of attention. I was also kind of mocking his post by using the "Customer D:" angle. I probably could have been much more constructive in my approach an
Slashdot is not a censorship haven. They leave everything up period. It's up to you how you want to view comments. They have good moderator policies in place for the enjoyment of us all, but I still frequently browse with no moderation.
There is a big difference between deleting a comment and assigning relative value based on a community standard. Nothing wrong with this at all.
One of the best things that I've ever seen on the internet was a Powerpoint presentation where a guy broke up with his girlfriend via Powerpoint. It was brilliant. The sarcasm, the humor, it was just over the top. I was thrilled to have found it. Shortly after I found it though it was popularized through some site (Boing Boing, I think) and shortly thereafter it was gone. Poof. Like it had never existed. I kicked myself that day for losing what was one of the most brilliant things I'd ever read. It would have been so easy to have taken the screenshots and rebuilt the Powerpoint. I think in real life the woman who was getting broken up with got pissed and that made the guy take it down.
Since then my policy has always been that it's better to have screen shots than to not. They are frequently helpful when pleading your case after the fact.
So, yes, I thought that there was a chance that HP would delete my comment. Actually I thought that they would leave it up because it would be stupid to take it down, but when they took it down I had the screen shot. I emailed Gee earlier this morning letting him know I had a screen shot.
In terms of other criticism, I absolutely think that it's HP's right to do whatever they want with their website. No doubt whatsoever. And I do not think that I for one second have any rights whatsoever to their property. They have every right to delete my comment.
On the other hand, I have every right to post about the fact that they delete comments on my blog and to share it with as many people as I'd like including Slashdot who is the comment lover's dream as they let everybody, even the crazies (I know, careful who I'm calling crazy), post.
It just didn't sit right with me that in a post entitled "Customer Intimacy" that HP would delete a post from someone critical of there service. So I posted about it and used what tools and blog sense that I had to make a little noise. When corporate blogs don't play fair, well, there's always Slashdot to level the playing field if it's legit -- although I do need to note that HP changed course prior to Slashdot actually publishing the story.
Although the blogosphere is full of the David vs. Goliath type stories, I think that HP changed their policy out of a legitimate desire to change course and try again. Everybody deserves a second chance. Irrespective of my tech support problems with Media Center, HP admitted that they made a mistake and corrected it. This is the right thing to do and I think that rather than lambaste the company's blogging efforts as being insincere and nothing more than hack fake PR blogging, we should give them a chance to do better next time.
I think that they will think twice about the next comment that they delete though and we are all better off because of this. Blogs open up public access that you wouldn't otherwise have to effect change at a company. There are corporate bloggers who do a good job. Robert Scoble is great. Steve Rubel who pointed us to HP in the first place is great. Guys like Mark Cuban who can say whatever the hell they please are great.
My point wasn't that HP shouldn't be allowed to delete my comment. They should. And they should delete comments in the future that are spam or vulgar and truly offensive or the what not. But if they are going to put up the shingle of an objective blogging presence then someone needs to call them on it when they loss objectivity. That's all I did. They in turn admitted their mistake and should be applauded and commended.
Re:What did they eat...?
on
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The debate between what is journalism and what is blogging will go on for a long long time. As a journalist, and I have a journalism background, there are basically two kinds of news, hard news and op/ed. With hard news it is important for the journalist to remove him or her self in every way from the story. It's important to avoid personal bias (although some might suggest that in the end this can never truly be perfected). I've written thousands of words of hard news in the past. It is something that is really important and hard news absolutely should be guarded and protected even among bloggers.
Certainly the types of comments that I blogged about the dinner were not hard news, nor did I hold my article out to be hard news. If you wanted hard news, CNET reported on a similar demo with Allchin the day before. I even linked to it in my article.
In terms of op/ed, my blog post is still nothing that even remotely resembled op/ed.
Hunter Thompson broke the mold of journalism when back in the 60s he began to place himself in his stories. He wrote fantastic tales of drug induced frenzies, the Hells Angels, presidential politics and whatever else was on his mind while simultaneously placing every kind of bias and opinion imaginable in his writing.
When people read Thompson did they realize that his biases were in his stories? Of course. Does that mean that Thompson should not have been allowed to print his work? Of course not. In fact, some could argue that much of what Hunter wrote was oftentimes far more pertinent, relevant and important than either hard news or op/ed.
Shortly before his death, Thompson wrote, "Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed."
Was this hard news? No. Op/ed? Not even that. Was this completely biased personal opinion? Whatever it was, Thompson felt that he had something important to say.
Although many at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal might argue that news ought to be either hard news or op/ed and clearly labeled as such, I would suspect that many of these same individuals just might look at the work that Thompson did and somehow be ok with it - and even admire it - even as it clearly was a bastardization of perhaps everything that they were ever taught in journalism school from day one.
And in many ways blogging today is something similar. While the debate rages over whether bloggers are journalists and professionals fret over the lack of even the most basic standards that many bloggers do not appear to posses, bloggers are coming back with perhaps the same type of response Thompson may have given more than a few editors. Only this time the blogger is the one with the control.
While I do not hold myself out to be anywhere near the caliber of Thompson, one of my great all time heroes, I do feel that there is room in the world of journalism for hard news, op/ed and yes, openly biased writing where the blogger places him or her self as a participant in the news itself.
Was I thrilled to be having dinner with Allchin? Of course. I'm a huge Microsoft enthusiast. I have been an advocate of the digital home for many years and I think that Microsoft may represent our best chance possible of making the digital home of the future a reality.
Was I really enthused about Longhorn? Absolutely. From what I saw it was really was amazing. I spend hundreds of hours every year organizing digital media in front of all five of my Windows PCs. The technology that I saw will save me hundreds of hours of work going forward. This is really exciting to me at a personal level.
Could Apple or Linux provide me a similar e
Re:What did they eat...?
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· Score: 2, Funny
No Kool-Aid but a nice medium bodied chardonnay before dinner accompanied by a nice fruity pinot with the chicken.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like Anonymous has republished the photo and has tweeted that they are a gift to the Egyptian People. You can see the photos here: http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/03/13/egyptofficers-rev-840/egyptofficers-rev-840.pdf and Anonymous' tweet on the subject here: http://twitter.com/#!/Anony_Ops/status/46799870304071680
If my warranty scam was not perpetrating fraud and was just a simple auto warranty robocall, exemplitying neither force nor fraud could I as a California business blast the hell out of millions of California homes with a robodial?
except that she called me on my cell phone. on a Sunday afternoon during my son's baseball game.
I have no idea how the Libertarian party feels about robo calls. But me personally, I hate them. The Libertarian party best represents most of my major politica views though.
could I robodial all California voters with a warranty scam? Would that be legal under the California law?
I was the one that Kolakowski robodialed. I am not an "established business associate, customer, or other person having an established relationship with" her, therefore this exception would not apply to her. If you want to try and argue that the same political party would constitute an "established" relationship (which is a total stretch) then in order to be of my same party, Kolakowski would have to be a registered Libertarian like I am. I doubt she is. But here again, if political party affiliation was enough, then couldn't someone who was a Democrat simply robodial all of the Democrats in California with an unsavory auto warranty scam phone call? As I read this law there is no wiggle room at all. She is breaking the law and she should admit it, apologize and pledge not to use robodialers in the state of California in the future. If she'd like to use them then she needs to work to change the laws in the State to allow them, rather then simply ignore a law that she doesn't like or that is inconvenient for her. But even if she can find some wiggle room or some minor technicality to skate by the intent of this law, certainly the ethical thing for a candidate for judge to do would be to abide by the spirit of the law which is to stop these annoying and harassing cals in the State of California.
It's just one photo on my blog. If you click through on the video links above you can get a tour from Robert and Bebo. All of my photos of our shoot can be seen here: http://beta.zooomr.com/smartsets/thomashawk/10374
Bebo did mention this and actually showed us an apparatus that they use to realign the the accelerator. It's this big tube that sits beneath the actual accelerator tube and can be moved with Jacks. There is a target that a beam is shot through to make sure it is straight. Here is a photo of an intersection of the tube. http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/thomashawk/735653 They didn't have to realign it during the Loma Prieta earthquake though although they did lose power to the accelerator during that earthquake.
I can't remember Bebo's real name but he has been going by Bebo all his life. If memory serves correct, he got the name when he was a child. I think it was what his sister called him and it's the name that stuck with him his entire life. He really is a great guy and gave us a great view of SLAC. I'm looking forward to going back there to take photos and film part III with Robert and Shel.
http://thomashawk.com/2006/08/how-vista-will-final ly-make-living.html
"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer." Jean Jacques Rousseau. A lot of charged language has been flying around over the past four days or so with regards to Flickr and what rights their users ought or ought not to have with regards to their content. It started off with a thread in Flickr Central when Google launched their new Picasa photo sharing app and has escalated from there to Digg, TechCrunch and now Slashdot. As I've been involved in the recent debate since it started I wanted to offer up my thoughts on the matter at hand. It's important to note that yesterday I joined Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr. I've kept quiet on the posts over the weekend because I wanted to announce that before offering up anything more on the subject than I already have. As one of Flickr's heaviest users I feel that I have a decent understanding of the situation and problem at present. A number of months back Anil Dash wrote a post called "The Interesting Economy." In this post Anil posed the most basic question of all from a Flickr user's perspective, "what's in it for me?" From Anil: "But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange." Caterina Fake responded to Anil with the following: "Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it." At the time, and still today, I agree with Caterina Fake. I have always felt that I've gotten much more out of Flickr than money could ever provide and thus I've felt it more than a fair deal. I don't need to be paid by Flickr. I enjoy the generosity that Caterina speaks of and love the share and share alike spirt of Flickr. And over the past year I've spent hours and hours and hours working away at my flickrstream. Uploading new photos every day, meticulously documenting my images with detailed tags, building friends and making contacts, enjoying and sharing with everyone I meet, and participating actively in many different groups and conversations on the site. But lately I've been having some second thoughts. The central issue around the recent debate is not whether or not you can get your photographs out of Flickr. Slashdot got this really wrong when they wrote, "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting." There are several tools that have already been developed to allow exporting out of Flickr. Downloadr and Slickr come to mind immediately. You absolutely can get your photographs out of Flickr your photos are not locked up. Flickr is not the roach motel that others have been making it out to be. What is at issue is not your photos, but the metadata associated with your photos. At present Flickr does
Get your own "Tim O'Reilly, Original Web 2.0 Asshole" graphic here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/153656919/
It's Creative Commons licensed and all, feel free to use it all you like!
Here you go: http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/forums/showthread.php? t=717
Actually never went to Seeking Alpha and didn't get the notes from any transcription. I was on the conference call myself.
No conflict of interest here. I have no money or vested interest in the company whatsoever. Just like the technology. As far as I know this is just some guy and not even a company I/you could invest in. As way of personal disclosure though, my current tech holdings personally include(nothing exciting here, go ahead an mock me) Microsoft Intel Adobe Oracle Time Warner Dell and that's it. I don't buy small cap tech stocks at all. Lots of other non tech related companies and I don't do an advising in the tech world at all.
If you aren't getting search results, remember that you have to add.com at the end. i.e. http://slashdot.org./
hmmmm... somebody's on top of their TiVo news!
Here is some additional info on what went on during the day. I don't think that HP or David knew about the Slashdot post prior to the change of heart but I did start applying pressure earlier in the day.
Thursday evening, May 5th at 9:41 pm. I sent the following message to David Gee at HP "Nice. At least I took a screen shot."
On Friday morning at 7:15 a.m. I still had not heard back from Gee or had the post reinstated so I blogged about my experience.
At 9:07 a.m. on Friday morning I submitted the story to Slashdot. They accepted it later in the day but it took until the end of the day for it to show up.
By Friday morning at 10:54 I still had not heard from David or had my post reinstated so I sent an email about the incident to Steve Rubel (who had originally posted the story about HP blogging), Robert Scoble (an A list blogger and someone who preaches transparency), Mark Cuban, Fred Wilson (a VC who had previously written about censoring comments), and Michael Gartenberg (an influential JupiterResearch) who does not publish comments on his corporate blog but has gone out of his way to try and engage bloggers in Jupiter's publishing. I'd had interaction in the past with all of these bloggers and thought they might be interested and/or sympathetic regarding my story.
Within 15 minutes Cuban emailed me back and suggested that this is pretty much what I should expect from a corporate blog and that they have other constituencies to consider and that it's not as if there weren't other outlets for my criticism. All valid points. I still can't believe that Cuban answers his own emails and have found him amazingly accessible as a blogger for someone who has got so many other things going on in his life. He's offered me some really good advice in the past.
I also sent a separate email to Dan Gillmor telling him about the story and the fact that Slashdot had accepted the story. I did this prior to Gee's reinstating my comment and prior to it being published at Slashdot. Dan subsequently posted a story on the incident today.
At 11:31 a.m. I emailed a response back to Cuban, Rubel, Scoble, Wilson and Gartenberg and this time cc:d David Gee at HP. I thanked Mark Cuban for his response but still expressed that I thought that it was bogus for HP to present this blogging thing as an open and honest way to engage customers and then to censor negative opinions - it particularly rubbed me wrong as the title of the post was "Customer Intimacy."
That's pretty much everything else that happened in addition to the timeline above by way of transparency and background.
For what it's worth, although Gee knew that I had engaged some A list bloggers on this story, I don't think that he knew that it was going to end up on Slashdot.
In either case though if it were of his own volition or by pressure from A list bloggers or even pressure from Slashdot, in the end the result is the same and it's positive and I don't think that HP will be censoring any more negative comments.
I do think that David Gee and HP are sincere in their efforts to blog and I hope that they can do something as positive as Robert Scoble has done for corporate blogging up at Microsoft. This could be a great way for HP to legitimately, honestly and seriously engage their customers.
I agree with David that it was a learning experience and I also strongly believe that everyone deserves a second chance. I've made plenty of mistakes before. The fact is that David owned up to it and did the right thing. And because of that act alone HP picked up a lot of credibility in my book, even if it had to be done in a less than fun way for them.
And people are right, the comment was not particularly well written. I wrote it quickly and off the cuff and quite frankly never expected it to get this kind of attention. I was also kind of mocking his post by using the "Customer D:" angle. I probably could have been much more constructive in my approach an
Good point.
I'll try to do better.
Thanks!
Slashdot is not a censorship haven. They leave everything up period. It's up to you how you want to view comments. They have good moderator policies in place for the enjoyment of us all, but I still frequently browse with no moderation. There is a big difference between deleting a comment and assigning relative value based on a community standard. Nothing wrong with this at all.
One of the best things that I've ever seen on the internet was a Powerpoint presentation where a guy broke up with his girlfriend via Powerpoint. It was brilliant. The sarcasm, the humor, it was just over the top. I was thrilled to have found it. Shortly after I found it though it was popularized through some site (Boing Boing, I think) and shortly thereafter it was gone. Poof. Like it had never existed. I kicked myself that day for losing what was one of the most brilliant things I'd ever read. It would have been so easy to have taken the screenshots and rebuilt the Powerpoint. I think in real life the woman who was getting broken up with got pissed and that made the guy take it down. Since then my policy has always been that it's better to have screen shots than to not. They are frequently helpful when pleading your case after the fact. So, yes, I thought that there was a chance that HP would delete my comment. Actually I thought that they would leave it up because it would be stupid to take it down, but when they took it down I had the screen shot. I emailed Gee earlier this morning letting him know I had a screen shot. In terms of other criticism, I absolutely think that it's HP's right to do whatever they want with their website. No doubt whatsoever. And I do not think that I for one second have any rights whatsoever to their property. They have every right to delete my comment. On the other hand, I have every right to post about the fact that they delete comments on my blog and to share it with as many people as I'd like including Slashdot who is the comment lover's dream as they let everybody, even the crazies (I know, careful who I'm calling crazy), post. It just didn't sit right with me that in a post entitled "Customer Intimacy" that HP would delete a post from someone critical of there service. So I posted about it and used what tools and blog sense that I had to make a little noise. When corporate blogs don't play fair, well, there's always Slashdot to level the playing field if it's legit -- although I do need to note that HP changed course prior to Slashdot actually publishing the story. Although the blogosphere is full of the David vs. Goliath type stories, I think that HP changed their policy out of a legitimate desire to change course and try again. Everybody deserves a second chance. Irrespective of my tech support problems with Media Center, HP admitted that they made a mistake and corrected it. This is the right thing to do and I think that rather than lambaste the company's blogging efforts as being insincere and nothing more than hack fake PR blogging, we should give them a chance to do better next time. I think that they will think twice about the next comment that they delete though and we are all better off because of this. Blogs open up public access that you wouldn't otherwise have to effect change at a company. There are corporate bloggers who do a good job. Robert Scoble is great. Steve Rubel who pointed us to HP in the first place is great. Guys like Mark Cuban who can say whatever the hell they please are great. My point wasn't that HP shouldn't be allowed to delete my comment. They should. And they should delete comments in the future that are spam or vulgar and truly offensive or the what not. But if they are going to put up the shingle of an objective blogging presence then someone needs to call them on it when they loss objectivity. That's all I did. They in turn admitted their mistake and should be applauded and commended.
The debate between what is journalism and what is blogging will go on for a long long time. As a journalist, and I have a journalism background, there are basically two kinds of news, hard news and op/ed. With hard news it is important for the journalist to remove him or her self in every way from the story. It's important to avoid personal bias (although some might suggest that in the end this can never truly be perfected). I've written thousands of words of hard news in the past. It is something that is really important and hard news absolutely should be guarded and protected even among bloggers.
Certainly the types of comments that I blogged about the dinner were not hard news, nor did I hold my article out to be hard news. If you wanted hard news, CNET reported on a similar demo with Allchin the day before. I even linked to it in my article.
In terms of op/ed, my blog post is still nothing that even remotely resembled op/ed.
Hunter Thompson broke the mold of journalism when back in the 60s he began to place himself in his stories. He wrote fantastic tales of drug induced frenzies, the Hells Angels, presidential politics and whatever else was on his mind while simultaneously placing every kind of bias and opinion imaginable in his writing.
When people read Thompson did they realize that his biases were in his stories? Of course. Does that mean that Thompson should not have been allowed to print his work? Of course not. In fact, some could argue that much of what Hunter wrote was oftentimes far more pertinent, relevant and important than either hard news or op/ed.
Shortly before his death, Thompson wrote, "Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed."
Was this hard news? No. Op/ed? Not even that. Was this completely biased personal opinion? Whatever it was, Thompson felt that he had something important to say.
Although many at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal might argue that news ought to be either hard news or op/ed and clearly labeled as such, I would suspect that many of these same individuals just might look at the work that Thompson did and somehow be ok with it - and even admire it - even as it clearly was a bastardization of perhaps everything that they were ever taught in journalism school from day one.
And in many ways blogging today is something similar. While the debate rages over whether bloggers are journalists and professionals fret over the lack of even the most basic standards that many bloggers do not appear to posses, bloggers are coming back with perhaps the same type of response Thompson may have given more than a few editors. Only this time the blogger is the one with the control.
While I do not hold myself out to be anywhere near the caliber of Thompson, one of my great all time heroes, I do feel that there is room in the world of journalism for hard news, op/ed and yes, openly biased writing where the blogger places him or her self as a participant in the news itself.
Was I thrilled to be having dinner with Allchin? Of course. I'm a huge Microsoft enthusiast. I have been an advocate of the digital home for many years and I think that Microsoft may represent our best chance possible of making the digital home of the future a reality.
Was I really enthused about Longhorn? Absolutely. From what I saw it was really was amazing. I spend hundreds of hours every year organizing digital media in front of all five of my Windows PCs. The technology that I saw will save me hundreds of hours of work going forward. This is really exciting to me at a personal level.
Could Apple or Linux provide me a similar e
No Kool-Aid but a nice medium bodied chardonnay before dinner accompanied by a nice fruity pinot with the chicken.
We had chicken. It was tasty.
Interestingly enough AnandTech is also out with a round up today. http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393