Had a bizarre blog-land experience this weekend. Matt Asay wrote this post about ‘the open source ethos’, which I thought made a fairly common mistake- assuming that if an open source volunteer is not being generous to you, that he is not generous at all. Usually this is an assumption made by ungrateful users in chat rooms when reporting a bug that ‘you must fix now’. But I can understand that some academics who aren’t experienced with open source might feel similarly when they have heard that open source is all about giving, and then can’t understand why open source is not giving to them. So I tried to gently explain this to Matt, and pointed out that the company I assume he refered to can be approached more effectively using other means of persuasion. I expected Matt to respond when he returned from his weekend trip, and ask for clarification, or tell me I was wrong, or… something. He did respond, by… deleting the post. That is certainly his privilege, but it is weird- I’ve never had someone do that on a blog before. The usual response is to, well, respond :)
Saw a pretty cool post over at passionate users about ‘neo-marketing’. The best part of the post is this chart:
But really you should go read the whole thing if you are at all interested in marketing of any source. We’d do well to keep some of these in mind in our own pimping efforts, as much as makes sense.
hp: EW is pretty good. My roommate had a subscription in college and so I read it very regularly back then. It really is good stuff- as well written and generally low-fluff as you can get when discussing American popular culture.
Spent a lot of the day doing odd jobs- living room cleanup, board emails, release-team bits, email reading, more GMAT stuff, website stuff (the livecd page has an icon now ;). Nothing terribly big or useful, I’m afraid. Maybe later…