Solipsism Gradient

Clay Shirky has a great article out, illustrating how FedEx failed with its Fax-based ZapMail service.

ZapMail was done in by several mistaken assumptions about Fax services; IMHO, most notably by not noticing that their customers would also be their competitors.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Just fixed a pesky bug that made links to a specific post go to the wrong page. Apologies to whoever ran into that…

Dori Smith and Tom Negrino’s Backup Brain pointed me at Kari Coleman’s article “My Psychic Adventure”. This is in the James Randi Educational Foundation Newsletter.

Worth reading; of course, people who really want to believe in this sort of thing won’t be dissuaded by logic.

From near the end:

I think I have finally found my answer to those people who tell me that skepticism takes the joy out of life, that you need God to experience morality, and that without him it’s just a heartless existence. People were happy to talk. They really just wanted someone to listen to their problems, or share their hopes and dreams. They wanted to go over funny stories about a loved one they’d lost or just sit and remember them out loud with someone. When I took away the voodoo, the fact that we had “shared” didn’t go away. There is all the joy you need in human interaction.

The MacIntosh Hotel in Manaus (Amazonas) was photographed by “Tereré com Tapioca”.

Bill Amend’s Foxtrot looks at rumors about the upcoming MacW… I mean, FruitWorld Expo.

Charles Eicher (Disinfotainment) has just posted a great reminiscence about the 1984 Christmas sales battle between the Apple //c and the IBM PCJr. (Linked by MacSurfer.)

Oops, forgot to post a link to Dave Sifry’s Alerts. Great reading. Dave, of course, is the man behind the up-and-coming TechnoRati blog indexing engine.

Dave pointed me at The 10 Cardinal Columnist Sins. Required reading for any columnist or blogger.

One of my favorite SF writers and techno-authors, Bruce Sterling, is posting great stuff at the schism matrix. His fellow columnists there – John Clute, David Langford, and Terry Bisson – are also worth reading.

Doc Searls pointed me at RageBoy. Warning: not easy reading, but worth it.

Boing Boing just posted a link to my disclaimer. Thanks, Cory!

Update: Manual::Override soon picked up the link – thanks Seek!

I was a little skeptical about TechnoRati, until I figured out that they don’t necessarily conflate different URLs on the same site. So I was typing in the wrong search string and getting nothing back.

Anyway, I’m now using them to check who’s linking to me. Let’s see how many other blogs pick this up, and what the effect on my site traffic will be. It’s been very stable for over a month.