Seth Godin talks about marketing, and the paradox of it being a bargain hunt, where it really should be an attempt to overbid each other.

Likewise, I have never seen the reason for having contributors to charity enter competitions or what not — if you personally gain something, where is the charity part in it? You should be donating to charity for every other reason than your own personal well-being; except perhaps your conscience.

Wonderful piece by Mark Pilgrim on the danger of letting someone else control your music through encryption. As he so nicely puts it:

[T]he left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

And yes, this does include iTunes. Plus or not, they still con you, although they are admittedly a bit more fair in their approach.

I am a fan. I have been wanting this for a long time. Great initiative by Shaun.

Quite thorough and interesting run-down of what could happen with the Microsoft–Yahoo! deal. It learned me some new things about the system.

I would probably do the same. After all, I am a terrific hacker, and a super ninja.

En fantastisk samling af ord der er gået tabt.

(Via Bromer)

Heh, seems I am not up to speed. Here I am moving my links back to my personal sites, posting photos on this blog, and what not.

Seriously, though, I see what Zeldman is getting at. I just go the other way myself. I want to collect this stuff here, just as he seems to advice¹. And also, I think he is putting more into it than it deserves. Yes, people might be storing information elsewhere than at their own sites, but, and this is something Jeffrey points out himself, it could as well be due to convenience. He says:

Like nearly everyone, I outsource discoverable, commentable photography to Flickr.com instead of designing my own photo gallery like my gifted colleagues Douglas Bowman and Todd Dominey.

Using Flickr might be a matter of taking the easy way out, more than anything else. Likewise with using ma.gnolia or del.icio.us — they can seem easier to approach, than to set up your own personal publishing engine to handle it.

Twitter is the only thing that does not fit into this. And in this, Jeffrey might have a point; it is easier to write something that should just be 140 characters, than something that should be substantially longer. But hey, that is why I have notes. Furthermore, people seem to have fundamentally misunderstood Twitter. Very few answer the question Twitter asks; I have a Twitter account, which I have updated a grand total of 9 times — one of which did not answer the question. I personally find Twitter useless, and I cannot see why you would go and use Twitter instead of implementing some sort of custom category to you own blog.

Anyway, I do not think a centralised brand is crucial to maintaining the value of said brand — I think it could well be a consequence of laziness. I personally store links the way I do, because I find it gives me more flexibility — people storing theirs at ma.gnolia might find it is easier. We all have different needs and priorities, but I think centralisation is and should be of lesser importance. As long as you make all your decentralised entities available, you should be home free.

I must look into this. Although I probably will not be doing it AJAX-style, but it could easily make for some nifty Python action.

Might come in handy… This is one of the things I need to master in order to near fluency in English.

I never thought it this well through, but I have always been more keen on Spiderman — he is more human, and he has personal problems, which makes him more approachable.

(Via Kottke)