DISQUS

*cringe* Very glad you liked it, Leona. Thank you. Fantastic presentation at Talk is Cheap the other night, btw. You guys rocked.

And here's the thing I really like about that scenario. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that something like this transpires, and La Palin really does earn the nomination - somehow - as a partially credible Republican presidential candidate for 2012.

How is that a bad thing? Wouldn't pretty much guarantee Obama a second term? :-)

Brilliant in its almost child-like simplicity. Nothing quite says "fat canary" like a picture of a...um...fat canary.

Trust me, Jason, if it was down to me you would certainly have been going home with a super-thin AQUOS TV from our booth :-)

Heck - if it was down to me, I would have been taking one of the prototypes home myself!

Great to meet you at CES and thanks for stopping by.

Happy Blogiversary to you, Zoe.

Conblogulations on making it this far and

How very mature. Evidently some Turkish script kiddie has been misusing his parent's dialup connection. If you Google his soubriquet, you'll find his personal home page (not very stealthy there, silly boy), as well as a bunch of other sites (mostly Wordpress) he has managed to "hack".

Even though this invasion is almost pathetically inconsequential, as you point out, it's probably still worth reporting to both your web host and the Wordpress chaps. The hacker may be just polishing his basic skills as he works his way up to some bigger stunt.

It's grim, isn't it? You see this kind of thing popping up all over the place. Even - get this - in news releases. Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/35ylp5

Ack.

http://tinyurl.com/2doaya

:-D

I think the SMS Shakespeare thing has been tried a couple of times (with mixed results, as you might well imagine).

In similar vein, though, there are a couple of absolutely terrific webby renditions of the Bard out there, in particular:

- Brian Millar's hilarious PowerPoint Hamlet, complete with SWOT analysis (that link opens the .PPS file directly)

- Tales for the L33t's outstanding stick-figure Romeo & Juliet rendered in hacker speak. Had me positively snorting with laughter the first time I watched it (I'm such a geek).

I'm just glad I sent my stunt double along for the night, he's evidently a lot smarter than me.

That's just dumb, isn't it? I'm sure Nintendo must have account managers - like your cola company guy - whose job it is to drive around and police stuff like this. What the heck was the store merchandiser thinking?

Your headline also reminded me of the terrible story of that lady in Sacramento who died during the week as a result of taking part in a "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest. She basically drowned her internal organs (story here). Awful stuff.

Good to meet you at 3rdTuesday, btw.

I agree with Rob's last comment there - the new hotness of this, if hotness there is, probably exists in "trying to amp up the involvement that people have with the content by applying social media tools to it".

But I also think that KZSW's decision could be seen as a good example of what Doc Searls calls the "because effect" - that is, while other people look to make money with something, KZSW in this case may be exploring ways of making money because of something.

Sure, KZSW may be missing out on potential TV ad revenue, and sure they're most likely going to end up screwing with their CPM - but the experiment is still worthwhile. And CPM is such a crock anyway. It's a crock upon which an enormous industry has been built, I know, but 'tis no less a crock for a' that.

Who knows what kind of extra viewership this could generate for them, and what goodness might spring forth from that...?

Good stuff - that's a pretty close summation of the way I've been thinking about this thing too.

And yes - Jimmy's points at PaidContent are well put. His "apparently unbought voice" is a nice coinage.

I also like the fact that he's one of the few bloggers to choose to focus on what is (to me) the root issue here. Leaving aside the sequence of events after they were rumbled, I'm much more interested in how the hell these guys (who I really do genuinely like and respect) managed to wind up screwing such an obvious pooch in the first place.

It's startling that such a smart company was engaged in such a horribly ill-conceived campaign. There's no schadenfreude in it for me, though - it's more troubling than anything.

"Inimitable" - gosh. Thanks. At least you didn't say "inimical", as one friend once did :-) I've never been entirely sure quite whether he really knew what he meant.

Well we could always have just sat down, you know (although, at the prices in the Spoke Club, perhaps not).

And yes, the bill was indeed settled - by none other than Chris Clarke, bless 'im. But I did buy him a cup of cocoa at *bux to compensate :-)

Good to see you tonight Mathew. Thanks again for doing this.