Tucows lays of 15% of their workforce, thanks their stars they’re not wholly dependent on ad revenue.

Did you see the sweet article in the Times about Fake Steve, the blogger who pretended to be Steve Jobs?
Two wonderful posts just in the last week:
1. He fesses up to getting caught, and twits the blogerati for having been unable to ferret him out for 6 months, when the Times did it in [...]

“Customer Intimacy”
This vile jargon arrived yesterday in the daily email splooge from CXO Media.
The term is uncomfortable and a little creepy. Is customer intimacy like airplane intimacy or subway intimacy or prison intimacy? It sounds like a windowdressing term, used by companies to mean the exact opposite of the plain language.
What says CXO [...]

There are only two undelegated top-level country-code domains, aside from those darkened by colonial diktat. One of them, .KP, the TLD of North Korea, is in the tender grip of the Dear Leader — enough said.
Western Sahara (.EH) is another matter. The nearest thing they have to a paranoid strongman who hates the [...]

Names@Work is proud to announce the launch of Marion Nestle’s new blog, What To Eat, on the occasion of the release of the softcover version of her hit book. With some tips about how to use blogs to save time…

As predicted by just about everyone, huge amounts of advertising money are being shifted from TV to online media, such as email and search. Johnson & Johnson is not being slow about it. They’re moving $250M of their ad budget to these new venues.
Of interest to me in the Advertising Age [...]

Word of the day: astroturfing.
Microsoft will provide free wireless access to Portland, Oregon.
Microsoft’s move, and similar initiatives sponsored either by municipalities themselves (Philadelphia) or commercial providers (Google in Mountain View), may be the first step toward making mobile content really rock.
City-wide wifi isn’t just about being able to get a [...]

Word For The Day: Proxenetism
A few days ago, I watched the Republican Party lose the U.S. Senate, in large part because people were disgusted with Montana’s Conrad Burns’ and Ohio’s Mike DeWine’s cosy relationship with influence peddler Jack Abramoff.
Americans got sick of it (finally).
Now, with a cheery ignorance that the lies, deceit, [...]

Why do you waste your time and money on things like music and computer games?
Your money, because you’re persuaded by emotion. Your time, because part of your brain thrives on complexity.
Susan Crawford, my favorite ICANN Board Member, writes in a recent post about how people are drawn to complexity, especially as they get older. [...]

With the unveiling of his new company crayon, Joseph Jaffe has crossed the line from harmless enthusiasm to plain old “wacko”.

Forget his self-description as “industry thought leader”. Forget his unwarranted utterly false claim that crayon is the first business in Second Life. Forget that crayon is just the kind of [...]