David Pogue takes Microsoft and bloggers to task for a program in which bloggers were given free Acer Ferrari laptops as part of a Windows Vista promotion. Pogue quotes a Times article:

“Several bloggers reported last week that they had received Acer Ferrari laptops, which can sell for more than $2,200, from Microsoft. A spokeswoman for Microsoft confirmed on Friday that the company had sent out about 90 computers to bloggers who write about technology and other subjects that could be affected by the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system.”

I agree with Pogue’s conclusion that the bloggers are 

“exploiting the lawless, Brave New World of the blogsophere, where, since they’re Not Quite Journalists, they don’t feel constrained by any of those pesky journalistic ethics guidelines. Like the one that says, ‘You don’t keep $2,200 gifts from the subject of your review. You might think you can still write an impartial review, but it’s highly unlikely-and either way, nobody will believe it.’

But Microsoft gets much of the blame, too. It deliberately exploited a weak spot in today’s court of public opinion: how bloggers influence consumers, but generally don’t have conflict-of-interest policies.”

Acer Ferrari Laptop, shiny and bright red, but does not influence bloggers

Recognizing that these laptops have no inherent value, I am announcing a laptop disposal program to relieve the bloggers of the nuisance of owning a computer that is of no use and does not in any way influence their attitudes toward Microsoft, Acer or Windows Vista. I urge all of the bloggers to contact me as soon as they are done reviewing Windows Vista. I will send, at no charge, a prepaid Fed Ex box so that they can send me these unwanted/unneeded laptops. I will in turn sell them on eBay and donate the full proceeds to Oxfam’s Sudan Crisis Relief and Rehabilitation Fund.

I screwed up! I confused the Everywhere Girl’s blog, http://www.theeverywheregirl.com/ with a skeevy porn site at http://www.everywheregirl.com/ .

SORRY!  

The good news is, the Everywhere Girl (or “eg” as I call her) posted a comment correcting me, and she did a blog post graciously pointing out my stupidity, so I now I can realistically claim we are best friends!

.

I started this post after reading an Inquirer report on the Everywhere Girl’s on again/off again entry on Wikipedia. But the more research I did the stranger this story became.

The Everywhere Girl is a model whose stock photos struck a chord with marketers and graphic designers and consequently showed up in hundreds of places all over the web. I blogged on this phenomenon on my old blog, Hyde Park.

Given the attention the Everywhere Girl has received from bloggers, it is only appropriate that she now has her own blog. But is it really “her blog” and what are its sinister underpinnings?

I am sure I am not the first to notice this, but a whois search reveals that the blog’s domain, everywheregirl.com, is owned by Studio for Publications, Inc. aka TheWetlands.com Inc. of Ocean City, Maryland. It’s unclear to me what line of business these two entities are in.

Here the plot thickens. The Educate Yourself site, attempts to implicate Jon David, listed as the administrative and technical contact for everywheregirl.com, Studio for Publications, and WetLandsInc.com, in the July 2005 London bombings! Educate Yourself appears, to me at least, to be a crackpot conspiracy theorist free-for-all. The site describes itself as:

“A free educational forum dedicated to the dissemination of accurate information in the use of natural, non-pharmaceutical medicines and alternative healing therapies in the treatment of disease conditions. Free Energy, Earth Changes, and the growing reality of Big Brother are also explored since survival itself in the very near future may well depend on self acquired skills to face the growing threats of bioterrorism, emerging diseases, and the continuing abridgement of constitutional liberties.”

A primary tool employed by Educate Yourself is what they refer to as “dowsing.” The site’s dowsing on Jon David alleges that he has ties to CIA operatives, is fluent in Arabic, had advance knowledge of the bombings, and posted on the Internet on behalf of [sic] “El-Queada,” (perhaps a Latin American Al Qaeda splinter group?).

That’s where the trail ended for me. Or at least my interest in spending any more of my time ended here. If nothing else, this post demonstrates the uncanny ability of the web to suck up three hours of research that is quite entertaining but ultimately yields nothing conclusive or credible.

I was sickened and saddened to see that the Discovery Channel chose today, the day we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, to premiere its new series Future Weapons. Discovery’s web site promoted tonight’s episode by urging viewers to “discover weapons that will always find their target, including the AS50 semi-automatic sniper rifle.”

King’s dream lives on with his followers, but it died for him April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry St. in Memphis, Tennessee. King was killed because he advocated non-violence, peace and racial harmony. The irony of this act has been lost.

For those fascinated by weaponry, here is what is believed to be the .30-06 (pronounced “thirty-ought-six”) rifle that killed King.

In the U.S. alone, according to one estimate, a child under the age of 19 is killed every three hours by a firearm. The dreams of nearly 2000 children are snuffed out here every year. That’s very disturbing. I assume that this also bothers the executive management of the Discovery Channel, the producers of Future Weapons, the program’s sponsors, and its viewers. If not, that’s even more disturbing.

In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman says his problem is “he’s liked, but not well liked.” In PR, it seems, it is increasingly important to be well liked, and to be well liked, one needs to be a trusted participant in the conversation.

Consider this post by Shel Israel on the selection of David Parmet as ScrapBlog’s new PR manager largely because they liked him, and because he blogged:

“(David’s) blog, and a previous telephone talk was enough to make Carlos (Garcia) feel enthusiastic about the thought of David having conversations on behalf of Scrapblog. That’s what PR is now about. The PR guy needs to be a trusted participant in conversations. These conversations can help a client only if the person bringing that client into a community is already a trusted resource. David is not alone. There are lots of PR people who get this. They tend to know and respect each other and enjoy each other’s company. They will compete against each other if they have to, but in fact they would much prefer to collaborate.”

John Cook, venture capital reporter for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, published an interesting post titled The end of the Web 2.0* bubble?

Cook tracks Seattle area layoffs, and notes that several Web 2.0 firms, including Jobster, have cut back recently, indicating we might be seeing the “beginning of the end of the current (Web 2.0) bubble.” He also points to TechCrunch and its Web 2.0 “Dead Pool.”

I question whether there can actually be a “Web 2.0″ bubble. A bubble, as defined by investorwords.com, is:

“A description of rapidly rising equity prices, usually in a particular sector, that some investors feel is unfounded. The term is used because, like a bubble, the prices will reach a point at which they pop and collapse violently.”

In other words you need equity for a bubble. According to Cook, TechCrunch estimates about $600 million was invested in Web 2.0 companies in 2006. I don’t think the revenues and market caps of Web 2.0 companies are significant enough (yet) to be termed a bubble and therefore I am not sure there is a bubble to burst.

Cook also makes comparisons to a so-called “Web 1.0 bubble,” an attempt at buzzword backward compatibility. Certainly no one ever called it the Web 1.0 bubble when it was happening and I’m not sure it’s a legitimate term of art today.

The dot-com bubble, on the other hand, ran roughly from 1997 to its 2000 collapse, with the September 11, 2001 attacks driving a stake firmly into the heart of anything that was left. That bubble, despite its dot-com appellation, affected every sector, not just tech and certainly not just the web. And the cost of the end of that bubble was staggering. The collapse of Enron alone destroyed billion of dollars in market cap, left behind $31.8B in (mostly unrecoverable) debt, and put 21,000 people on the street. So while it’s hard to construct a statistically valid financial comparison between the dot-com crash and the current perceived shakeout in Web 2.0 companies, it is clear that there is no reasonable comparison of a Web 2.0 bubble and what happened seven years ago.

And sad as it would be, if every so-called Web 2.0 company disappeared off the face of the planet tonight at midnight, we’d have maybe Y2K-scale repercussions (remember what a tragedy that was going to be?), and nothing on the order of a global market crash.

Perhaps this is a semantical argument, but I do think we need to keep a sense of scale about this thing everyone calls Web 2.0.

* Web 2.0 or anything 2.0 is not a term I use willingly. Anyone who has read my previous blog knows of my disdain for the 2.0-ing of everything in the known world.

Last week I started my new gig at Eastwick Communications. I was recruited into both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems (it’s nice to have friends in the Valley) before that, so 2006 was the first time since 1998 that I actually “looked” for a new job.

My earliest interaction with Eastwick demonstrated to me that the company wasn’t afraid of creativity, and that it had a sense of humor. I found the position on Craig’s List. I sent a cover letter and resume and heard nothing for a week. Normally, I would have blown it off, but I felt like making some trouble, so I decided to contact Eastwick again.

I forwarded the original cover letter and e-mail with the following note:

Hello,

I recently sent you an awesome, dare I say inspiring cover letter and resume for this position and I have received no reply. For your convenience, I have drafted a reply below, and request that you click “reply,” and “send” so that I know how important my communications are to you.

Best regards,

Joel

Dear Joel,

Thank you for your interest in a career with Eastwick. As you can imagine, we have received many responses to this posting. We are reviewing candidates for the position, and should we determine that there is a basis for further discussion, we will contact you.

Best regards,

The fine folks at Eastwick

You may recall I once wrote the SVP for communications at Campbell Soup and complained about the company’s lousy rejection letters (and offered to rewrite them). It’s not that I can’t take rejection (and I can’t), it’s that I think it’s important, even in the impersonal, autoreply, Taleo webtop world of recruiting, to be nice to candidates.

In any case, Linda Clarke of Eastwick did indeed respond to my second e-mail, which led eventually to my new job. Thank you Linda and Eastwick for having a sense of humor.

“‘Plutoed’ was chosen 2006’s Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society at its annual meeting Friday.

To ‘pluto’ is ‘to demote or devalue someone or something,’ much like what happened to the former planet last year when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto didn’t meet its definition of a planet.

‘Our members believe the great emotional reaction of the public to the demotion of Pluto shows the importance of Pluto as a name,’ said society president Cleveland Evans. ‘We may no longer believe in the Roman god Pluto, but we still have a sense of personal connection with the former planet.’

‘Plutoed’ won in a runoff against ‘climate canary,’ defined as ‘an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon.’ reports the Associated Press.

Personally, I’ve never heard anyone use this “word,” so I’m a little skeptical.

U.S. toy retailer Toys “R” Us has reversed its decision regarding the winner of its “First Baby of the Year Sweepstakes” contest.

The company created a controversy, particularly in the Chinese-American community, when it had originally denied the first prize $25,000 savings bond to the first baby born in 2007, Yuki Lin, who was born at the stroke of midnight at New York Downtown Hospital, because the child’s mother was not born in the U.S., and hence was not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible for the prize.

Here, Chinese children are shown shopping at the company’s first store in China, opened December 8, 2006 in Shanghai.

Toys “R” Us graciously permits Chinese children to buy the company’s products
Mark Ralston, Getty Images

Ironically, China makes about three-quarters of the world’s toys and is the global toy industry’s largest exporter.

Toys R Us Mascot Jeffrey: “Wait, come to think of it, we love Chinese babies. Heck, they make most our toys!”

High marks to Toys “R” Us for reversing this decision, but a stern wag of the finger for making such a stupid decision in the first place. To discriminate on the basis of race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, gender or any other similar criteria is mean-spirited, dumb (and generally illegal). But to take on the world’s largest nation and its people in the U.S. and at home, is an extraordinarily lame business decision as well. At least Borat chose to offend the people of Kazakhstan, who have little buying power or political power.

Today was my last day at Hewlett-Packard. I worked with many great executives while I was at HP, including Peter Blackmore, Mike Winkler, Ann Livermore, Tom Hogan, Andy Mattes and others, and I have seen nothing but change in my two-and-a-half years there. Mark Hurd’s the third CEO I’ve served under, after Carly and then CFO Bob Wayman as interim CEO. The Customer Solutions Group, which I joined in May, 2004, no longer exists, having been absorbed by the Technology Solutions Group.

So I’m on to the next big thing. I have been extremely fortunate to have been offered a position with Eastwick Communications as Executive Vice President, Emerging Media, where I’ll be responsible for developing social media strategy for the agency’s clients. I’ll also be working on the editorial side of the house, building on Eastwick’s recognized focus on content excellence and domain knowledge.

I’ve been in Fortune 500 corporate communications for eight years, first at Sun Microsystems and now at HP, and my position with Eastwick will allow me to apply what I’ve learned to the agency side of the business, and to learn from some of the best PR people in the industry. I was attracted to Eastwick by its stellar reputation and high integrity; by Elaine and Barbara, its brilliant principals; and by the wonderfully balanced culture of excellence and sanity I found there.

It is only fitting that I start a new blog, Techneuroti, more suited to my new position and interests. I am putting my original blog, Hyde Park, in storage, perhaps to be brought back to life in another time and place.