Connecting the dots ...
Apple released the limited, hand-made iPhone Special Edition 007.
The booby-trapped device which can explode in the wrong hands is in high demand by Intelligence Agencies.
Attendees to next week’s Office 2.0 Conference beware: there will be 500 of these devices on premise, so anything can happen…
Other Intelligence Reports: Infinite Loop, Techomical, Gizmodo, TECH.BLORGE.com, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, MacSlash, iPhone Atlas.
This is my shortest post, ever. It’s all in the title. 
The real news is here: NewCo finally gets a name: Hulu. Also read: CenterNetworks, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable , TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Valleywag, Technology Live, TechSpot News, Future Visions, last100.
Brian Solis and Philipp Lenssen report from the annual Google Dance Party – well, they tried to report, but apparently both were handled by polite but helpless escorts (no, not *that* kind, rather from the Google PR Nursery) who all but prevented them from meaningful reporting or even take photos showing real activity:
After being escorted and handed off to no less that five various handlers, I soon realized that their real purpose was to keep us herded and controlled so that the information, pictures, and video that came out of the Google Dance party, adhered to a legitimate standard for security – says Brian.
Now, please tell me what’s wrong with these photos:
You guessed (?) it right: nobody seems to be dancing at this dance party. Which makes me wonder, if we’re simply not seeing “action” pics due to the effectiveness of the escorts, or … could it simply be VGDD? (Valley Geeks Don’t Dance) 
Update: remotely related: Google started zapping faces on Google Maps StreetView.
Read more at bub.blicio.us , Google Blogoscoped and AccMan (Dennis Howlett). Photo credits: Brian Solis.
Update (8/23): Thanks to Matt Cutts, here’s evidence that there was real dancing at the Google dance. As both bloggers above mentioned, only people labeled “Press” and carrying pro cameras had their access controlled, if you were there just to have fun, you could pull out your little cam / phone and shoot away happily.
The Romulans attack the Federation for they can’t read the Peace Treaty sent to them in Word 2307 format… they only have Word 2303. A hilarious cartoon by Geek and Poke. Joke? Perhaps … or not.
Yesterday I attended a (so-called) Enterprise 3.0 event hosted by the MIT Club of Northern California. So-called, as nobody really used the term, other than the moderator, Sramana Mitra. The panelists politely put the title on their slides, and then distanced themselves from the concept, Google’s Jonathan Rochelle being most outspoken: “we did not even get to Enterprise 2.0, why 3.0 now?” (Update: read JR’s follow-up post).
That said, it was an interesting event, clearly focused on Software as a Service (SaaS). 3 of the 4 presenters came with PowerPoint decks – kudos to Microsoft’s Cliff Reeves who only had 1 slide. In the spirit of eating one’s own dogfood JR’s “presentation” was a public Google Spreadsheet.
Next came Captain Picard Sramana: her slides suffered the same faith the Federation’s Peace Treaty did: they were created in a different version, and could not be opened on the presenters’s laptop. Host Nicolas Saint-Arnaud made a heroic effort trying to download a converter, but failed, so Sramana could not show her presentation. This happened in a room discussing SaaS where at least two (well, one and a half) online presentation tools were represented: Google’s future presentation app by Jonathan, and the existing Zoho Show by Sridhar. With a Web 2.0 tool, there s no dependency on having the correct software version on your machine, there are no updates, patches (in fact there are, managed behind-the-scenes by the service provider) – your slides (data) are instantly available anywhere, anytime.
I somewhat wonder if this was an intentional ploy on Sramana’s behalf: after all we can talk all we want about the benefits of working on the Web, nothing delivers a punchline as forcefully as a publicly failed download/patch… or the Romulan nukes, for that matter. (Will they still use nukes in the 24th Century?)
(Side-note to anyone delivering presentations: don’t ever try to download and apply an upgrade publicly, on a projection screen. Murphy’s Law will apply)
Update: See Sramana’s Nuggets from the event, including the slides. She says it was not a ploy… (but I may just have given her an idea 😉 )
A fairly mundane article put into new light by this Reddit title: Incoming Freshman Alert: How Sex Works.
…the goal of sex is to merge two sets of genetic information
Aha … so that’s why Freshmen are all over Facebook. 🙂
(I could not stuff that title with more digg & dugg…). Anyway, Clickalite did some digging into how often the Technorati 100 gets dugg up to the Digg homepage. 92 of the Technorati 100 are English-language blogs, and 76 of them made it to the homepage (you know, dugg up on Digg). The leader of the pack , Ars Technica made it a whopping 1350 times! TechCrunch only got dugg up 533 times, and Mike has said before he only gets about 10% of his traffic from Digg – no wonder, with over half a million subscribers.
Well, I’m just a little rookie blogger compared to Mike, but even I’ve made it into the Top 100, and I did not need the “digg effect” – only made it to the home page about 3 times, if memory serves me well.
In fact, I am #1 on Technorati! But wait… is was Aaron, Brownbaron, Sizlopedia, Matt, Shaun, Eclectic Life, Grokdotcom,*Â and a number other blogs I’ve never heard of before. Hm… quite a few to share my throne with
. Turns out this Saturday was “Everybody No 1 on Technorati Day”. Good for Clickalite not having done his (manual) research on Saturday….
Btw, there was more trouble with T’rati that day. If you look at the pic here, I seem to have 0 (yes, zero) blog reactions to my blog. Now, I know my “authority” has been in a free-fall (lost about 30% so far) since moving to WordPress recently, but how did I make it to even 484 with 0 links?
Oh, well… still waiting for that White Knight.
Related posts: Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim and CenterNetworks
* Groktodcom on the messed up Technorati authority:
If rank meant everything, every blogger who’s had even one link documented by Technorati could rejoice more than they already are after being accidentally ranked #1 today — thanks to a glitch.  f rank meant everything, you wouldn’t have to create fresh, original content. If rank meant everything, blogs wouldn’t be worth reading.  Everyone would be baiting links (like I am). Like money, when rank means everything, it means nothing. Do blog readers really care about rank? 😉
Tags: technorati authority, technorati, technorati 100, digg, digging, dugg, social networking, social bookmarking
I guess I am dumb. Or just getting old, not understanding the new ways of Marketing.
My recent post: Can Tiny Zoho Beat Microsoft and Google in Online Office Apps? The Real Sanity Check attracted a strange comment, that was long, canned, promotional, barely related to the subject, essentially spam. Instead of deleting it, I educated the (fake) commenter, and hopefully others on why it was spam. This sparked a discussion in the Enterprise Irregulars group, and triggered Jerry Bowles to post on the FastForward Blog and his Enterprise 2.0: PR and Social Media: Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
The side effect of the spam affair was that it attracted far more readers to my post than it would have received otherwise – so I guess .. thank you, spammer.. 
I don’t think it did a lot of good to the supposed beneficiary/sponsor company though: I had SAP customers tell me they would not work with this Tryarc, the services firm behind the spam. Side note: I used to run businesses like this, and would never have resorted to marketing us this way. But times change … what do I know? 
This morning I received an email from an Enterprise Software startup CEO – it was a long joke without any comment. A fairly dumb joke for that matter, but that’s beyond the point: why did he send it in the first place, with a link to his product site? Even worse, it looked like a mass email sent out to his contact list. Hm… the timestamp was 3am, poor guy probably got drunk and lost his better judgement….
Then I found out it was actually a quite old joke (yes, I am always the last one to hear them), it’s repeated on hundreds of blogs (is it a coincidence that they all have zero or 1 inbound links, and some only this one post?), and there’s even a cartoon version.
Now, on a site aptly named “Twisted Humor”, this is perfectly OK – but when an Enterprise Software CEO inserts a line to his product site and re-sends it to potentially hundreds of business contacts .. well, that’s an entirely different matter. And it wasn’t a spontaneous drunken act, either. It was a well-prepared campaign: a contact record was set up, as well as an anonymous blog pointing to it several days before the email… so I guess someone in that company thinks this is a good marketing strategy. Again, who am I to criticize, I don’t know Jack Sch**t about Marketing.
Tags: marketing, email campaign, email etiquette, humor, spam, jack schitt
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
More Facebook Code Exposed
The Facebook code-leak (theft?) story is getting ugly. After leaking the source code for the social network’s homepage, and after Facebook’s lawyers started to send cease and desist notes, the Facebook Secrets blog has now published the code for Facebook’s search.
Facebook programmer Mark Slee (wow, his Facebook profile only says: “I’ll find something to put there”) may be getting more famous than he wanted – apparently not for his blank profile, not even his code, but for his comment in the code:
I wonder if Mark expected the entire world to see it.
Additional reading: Inside Facebook, Techomical and Mashable!