I just came across an organizational announcement about Sun in CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog: appropriately enough, it’s called “I Don’t Believe in Walled Gardens“.
Jonathan is a smart communicator. Big-time smart. My guess is that he must have read the noise about the email sent by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker to all Yahoo employees last month, and must have figured that if stuff is going to leak, it’s smarter to pre-empt it.
Maybe I’ll ask my expert friend Shannon what she thinks about it.
Gee, sometimes I’ve got to be happy that my blog hardly ever gets any comments.
Violet Blue has written this thoughtful article commenting on the Kathy Sierra story. I’m scared enough by the whole grotesquely criminal story about the threats to Kathy. Yet, one more thing scares me, and it’s apparently just a detail in the story related by Violet about her friend: that the New York Times would write about a hate site “as though it were written by a rascally-but-humorous cad, and linking directly to the hate site, sending it that fat New York Times traffic“. Have these people no decency or common sense at all? And did they not realize that a link from the New York Times could send the site’s page rank way up?
I can link to whatever I want: it’s not going to make much difference in anybody’s position in search engines results. But anybody who gets to write an article on the NYT site should be required to get a tutorial in how search engines work. As Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. And if such a publication links to a troll’s site, they’re not living up to it. Period.
What a gorgeous purple color.
As much as I dislike contemporary TV culture (and while I had to raise my eyebrows at some of Judge Judy’s more sexist and derogatory comments), I had to laugh at this episode where she lashes out at a white-trash eBay scammer.
It’s all over YouTube; watch it, for example, here.
Very interesting post in Jonathan Schwartz’s blog a few days ago. It is, and I’m willing take Jon’s word for it, faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat than over the Web, at least if you start and/or end with a consumer-grade DSL connection.
If you think about it, that’s why Netflix seems to have a pretty robust business model.
The almost always interesting Dan Savage has another thoughtful Savage Love column this week. Someone who finds the hidden link between apparently unrelated domains (in this case, men’s and women’s different testosterone levels, and yet another confutation of intelligent design), even if in jest, is an interesting writer indeed.
Luckily, not all that ever went on at Goldman Sachs was inane goofing around on the Web (just kidding; I already said I think the Charlie story is a hoax). I just was approved to join (yes, they screen you) a site called 85Broads, the brainchild of a former Goldman Sachs fixed income VP called Janet Hanson. I was referred to the network by a very cool colleague who has a Harvard MBA, Nicola. A few open issues here:
So, you who are out there: any point of view on 85Broads? Please comment.
Comments on Oprah are welcome, too. I believe Oprah is basically good.
TechCrunch has a very funny article today: “Career Advice: Don’t Spend Half Your Work Day On Facebook And Then Brag About It“. It is so hilarious that I think the guy must have been posing as a Goldman Sachs trader (I know Goldman screens people for brainpower and motivation, I assume they have a checkbox for common sense too) and must have made up the email from the IT department.
As for Facebook, it must be about the only social networking site where I’ve never opened an account. Maybe I would have, if the site had been around when I was in high school. But, as I am fond of saying, I am glad that there were no blogs back then. My teenage diaries have been safely destroyed, and I would hate it if the thoughts of my 17-year-old brain were still floating around in cyberspace.
I thought you’d enjoy this picture.
Thanks to Akismet anti-spam filters, I can blog more about Angela Carter’s book. It has great nuggets about politics (“Class dictates our choice of partners [...] it must be obvious that sexual sophistication is a by-product of education”); about psychology (“Sade is a great puritan and will disinfect of sensuality anything he can lay his hands on; therefore he writes about sexual relations in terms of butchery and meat”); about clever historical critique (“Sade, the eighteenth-century lecher, knew that manipulation of the clitoris was the unique key to the female orgasm, but a hundred years later, Sigmund Freud, a Viennese intellectual, did not wish to believe that this grand simplicity was all there was to the business [...] Yet Freud, the psychoanalyst, can conceive of a far richer notion of human nature as a whole than Sade, the illiberal philosopher, is capable of; the social boundaries of knowledge expand in some areas and contract in others due to historical forces”).
The central theme of the book was perhaps an exercise in hope for a growth in the level of common discourse that, as far as I can see, has not occurred in the last thirty years or so: not because Angela Carter hasn’t been read (the book, unlike most feminist critique, is still in print); but perhaps because we haven’t been courageous enough. Her first chapter, aptly named “Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women”, sets out a lucid diagnosis and a vision for change, a change that did not happen in her lifetime, and I doubt I may see in mine:
Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations, as if sex itself were an external fact, as immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never a part of it. [...] It is fair to say that, when pornography serves — as with rare exceptions it always does — to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society, is it tolerated; and when it does not, it is banned. [...]
Out of this dilemma, the moral pornographer might be born.
The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it. [...]
Sade remains a monstrous and daunting cultural edifice; yet I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women.
