Blogs, Business, Boston And Bombay

Read (heard) this in Fast Company yesterday ("Is Your Company up to Speed?," June 2003):

Most companies have lost their zeal for tech-driven transformation. But fast companies keep the faith. They believe that the Internet remains the most powerful laboratory for business experimentation ever. It transforms how people work together, how companies interact with customers, and the economics of entire industries. There is nothing more disruptive today than an original strategic insight fueled by a savvy application of computers and communication.

Seemed an appropriate backdrop against which again to mention that the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference & Expo will take place next Monday and Tuesday in Boston. If you're in the neighborhood, please join us for dinner Tuesday night, 7:00 p.m., The Bombay Club, Cambridge. Attire? It's tough to go wrong with a classic t-shirt and red boots.

"The Mother of all Babble"

Oh, this is good. [via Donna] And although you probably don't need me to tell you that this also is good, in a much less dripping with irony sort of way, I'm telling you anyway.

D: 'flexive

Wired News is covering David Hornik's and my coverage of D: All Things Digital. ("Gag Rules? Bloggers Report Anyway," via Dave.) And now I'm covering Wired News. I fear we're going to need some astrophysical intervention here sometime soon...

Some thoughts and observations. To begin with, I appreciate Walt Mossberg's comments. Richard Saul Wurman also said something I've been thinking about all of the interviews I heard: speakers of this order are too intelligent, sophisticated and cognizant of their corporate responsibilities (where applicable) to disclose confidential information to an assembled conference crowd. As Wurman put it, "These aren't the kind of people who spill the beans. It's an artificial restriction." There's something else I haven't seen mentioned yet: non-journalists were charged (a bunch) to attend. Now, I have no idea what the conference's press pass policy was, but I'm assuming those who attended on one—and agreed to the associated terms—were exempted from registration fees. In other words, as we lawyers might say, there was consideration given for the reporting ground rules imposed on the professional journalists attending as such. And perhaps not just financial consideration. As Wurman also pointed out, some conferences are off limits to the press altogether. As a final note, it pains me to have been one of those seemingly testy people who couldn't be reached by a reporter for comment. Turns out this is the price one can pay for an agressively-set spam filter.

I have been pretty busy this week (and the baby seems to want me to sleep a lot), but my next installment of notes from the conference is forthcoming and will cover the interviews with Terry Semel, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Eye On Redmond

Michael Gartenberg, in the new Microsoft Monitor Weblog: "As part of the launch of our Microsoft research service, we have also created this companion weblog to focus on Microsoft news, insight and analysis on a daily basis." Here's the related press release. Note too that all the Jupiter Research weblogs now have easy to find permalinks. (Not true yet of the new Microsoft Monitor blog, where it looks like you still need to access the archives to get a post's permanent URI. Update: no longer an issue, thanks Michael!)

Roadmapping

Harvey Kirkpatrick presents itopik.com: "a blog/rss feed directory organized by topic that is a companion to itown.com..."