24
April
2009
|
04:18 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Fishwrap: Unicorns, Rainbows and more . . .!

FishWrap-sm.jpg

[Wrapping up the week in three dots . . .]

. . . Not everyone liked my April 1 post but it did fool a bunch of people, and isn't that what it's all about?

Google Quietly Drops Its 'Don't Be Evil' Motto


David Krane, a senior spokesperson for Google, told SVW: "I never liked it. I always felt that it would come back to bite us in some way, that we would end up building concentration camps, or something even worse. The universe seems to love irony, why leave ourselves wide open?"


As my son Matt kindly pointed out, its especially good if you can fool people on April 1 when they are on the look out for that type of thing. The Guardian in the UK wrote an April Fool that it was changing to an all-Twitter format, but that's not an April Fool, that's an Onion story. Matt asked what does The Onion write on April 1st? Write a real news story would be my guess.

. . . I had dinner with executives of Juniper Networks. They had fallen off my radar for a while, I was glad to see that they are still around.

. . . Coming up on May 1 is #LocalDay on Twitter. The idea is to use your zipcode as a hash tag appended to your Tweets to find local Tweeters. I guess you could use that on a daily basis too. There are ten countries taking part, such as Canada. @geoperdis is helping to organize the Canadian #CanTags. I like the choice of day, May 1, it is the traditional International Worker's Day. We have our "Labour Day" on a different day.

. . . Brasscheck.TV says FaceBook makes it easier for gov to collect personal info - true but there also many other ways http://bit.ly/MUeue

. . . It was RSA conference this week. I managed to get interviews with CEOs of two of the top security firms: Gil Schwed from Check Point; and the vivacious Eva Chen from Trend Micro.

. . . The Oracle/Sun deal is interesting, will it try to take on IBM? If it does, IBM is ready, it had 100 lawyers + analysts swarming over Sun's books - knows every detail, useful for any future ORCL battle.

. . . I was the first person to start talking about how all companies are becoming media companies back in 2005. Now it is a much more accepted concept. The twist however, is this: the Internet is disrupting all media companies.

. . . I was very flattered by this Tweet the other day from @giacecco: "@tomforemski I've just realised that I was studying a '99 article of yours for my post-grad Tech Strategy exam!" BTW, my consulting services are available for companies in Silicon Valley and beyond :-)

. . . Here is an absolutely beautiful web journal: Days with my father.

. . . Wow. Take a look at Ultra Super New (Hat tip @evs)

. . . Next week: Largest Gathering Of Social Media And New Communications Experts Of 2009 I'll be speaking Monday along with @kenkaplan and @bryanrhoads. Here's the discount code: SNCRFRIEND

. . . Did you know Amazon is one-third of all US e-commerce?

. . . From Financial Times: Nassim Taleb's 10 principles to guard against Black Swans

. . . How to get past the WSJ.com paywall, a tip shared by JD Lasica from Paul Gillin: cut and paste headline into Google News to read story.

. . . I'm convinced that South Korea is showing us a peak into our future.

. . . I have a joke perfect for Twitter: Pretentious...? Moi?

. . . This the reason media can't make any money on the Internet. The co-writer of the Rick Astley "Never gonna give you up" song used in the Rickrolling craze was expecting a decent royalty check because the video had racked up more than 154 million views on YouTube. Google sent him a royalty check for 11 pounds ($15). Maybe it's true that "Google devalues everything it touches."

. . . Unicorns and rainbows on demand - brighten up your day with Cornify!

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PS: I'm @tomforemski on Twitter. Also, send me a Facebook friend request, it helps me to get know my readers a little better.