HOME OBSESSIONS - Media/Comm - Writing - Education - Music FAQ HEROES CAREER BLOG - RSS CONTACT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. arch emisou panton
	Phil's Blogservations Sunday, August 03, 2008 Posted by philgomes 2:06 PM 'Bout Damn Time Spent the last half of last week talking to financial communications and investor relations experts about the long-overdue admission from the SEC that, ya know, publication on a company Web site can in fact be "disclosure". Come on in, oh weary, creaky, rusty, seventy-four-year-old regulatory giant, too content for too long with wielding blunt instruments intended to restrain John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan... The water is... Well... The water has been here for almost two decades or nearly a quarter of your lifespan. It always struck me as funny that the SEC seemed to consider the Web (read: one of the world's most open, pervasive forms of communication) as actually less a forum for "fair disclosure" than, say, the wires. The reactions online have ranged from thoughtful to amusing. (The rhetorical arc of the TechCrunch piece is more or less "The press release is dead! Long live the social media press release!" You find yourself humming "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic" about two-thirds of the way through.) I'm paying closer attention to XBRL and related initiatives. In fact, look for standards and practices for how a company might use its Web site for material disclosure. (You can't tell me that the SEC is going to let companies slap together a "social media newsroom" any old way and have it pass muster.) Can't wait for the reaction from Jonathan Schwartz and Mike Dillon, the Sun executives who have been pushing this issue the hardest. Technorati Tags: sec, regulatory, investor relations, ir, public relations, pr | Tuesday, July 29, 2008 Posted by philgomes 8:13 AM Birthday | Friday, July 25, 2008 Posted by philgomes 5:21 PM Scoble On Tech Blogging's "Failure" There's certainly a lot to learn from Robert Scoble's post about the insular, echo-chamber failings of the technology blogging community. That said, I think that Scoble's problem isn't so much that the glass is half-full or half-empty. I just think his glass has been too small. I can't help but think that Scoble's frustrations come from the fact that tech blogging's anointed leaders really missed the point in the first place. Just like the dot-boom of 1999, the loudest voices in tech have allowed the term "technology" has been conflated with "Web stuff". Sell babyclothes? Fine. Sell babyclothes using a social network? Stratospheric valuation estimates abound. Now, as before, real innovation goes largely ignored by the Web 2.0 crowd. As I told one of the heads of the consumer marketing group at a former agency some years ago, "Dot-coms make headlines. Science makes history." He laments the he's "done too much of the 'business talk' and not enough of the 'let’s discover something that’ll improve our lives together' talk." Economics 101 tells you that the latter necessarily inspires the former and vice versa. It's awfully tough to have a meaningful discussion of one without the other in tech. Silicon Valley, at its best, is the most dramatic proof of this. A flying robotic caipirinha-maker would certainly "make my life easier", but I just don't see Sand Hill Road ponying up the dough. Real innovation is what "technology" is all about and what has made Silicon Valley an economic miracle. Not whether one finds Facebook's terms-of-service onerous or thinks another Web 2.0 watering hole doesn't link to him enough. This runs parallel to my ongoing criticism of TechCrunch or, rather, the gushing attention ascribed to it — it operates as if "tech" started in 1999. My summer 2008 reading list (so far) is below. Recapturing the spirit described in these books is, IMHO, where technology blogging needs to go. Broken Genius The Chip Creative Capital (about Georges Doriot) Valley Boy (about Tom Perkins) Technorati Tags: technology, blogging, scoble | Monday, July 14, 2008 Posted by philgomes 11:27 PM Gone Fishin' No Internet. No cellphones. Smoke signals don't even make it to the altitude I'll be at. See you July 21. | Tuesday, July 08, 2008 Posted by philgomes 9:36 AM The Vanishing "Hero Inventor" It's always fascinated me that people know the names Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, but give blank stares at mention of Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby. The two men invented the integrated circuit "separately together" — Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, Kilby at Texas Instruments — and are pretty much responsible for damn near everything you currently enjoy that has an antenna or wire coming out of it. It's a shame that we don't lionize inventors the way we used to decades ago. However, if pressed, I'll admit that interest in Dean Kamen's work comes close. While on vacation, I've been devouring books about the history of microelectronics. I just polished off T.R. Reid's The Chip, about the work of Noyce and Kilby. Just before, I finished Broken Genius about William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor whose ill-considered passion for eugenics eventually overshadowed his fundamentally groundbreaking work. Perhaps we live in different times. To illustrate, I offer this passage from The Chip, about when Diane Sawyer interviewed Jack Kilby after his induction into the Inventors Hall Of Fame: "I mean, if you have to think of one thing that kept the United States at the forefront of technology," Sawyer said, "it was really your invention." Kilby paused, stewing it over. "Well, I hadn't thought of it in those terms," he said quietly. "Have you made money from this invention?" Sawyer asked. "Some, yeah," Kilby replied. Things were just starting to get interesting when Sawyer got a signal from the director: time to move on. She turned quickly to the camera and said, "Coming up in a moment, Dr. Jerry Brodie on how to handle the death of a pet." Jack Kilby's moment in the sun was over. So it goes. Technorati Tags: history, electronics, robert noyce, jack kilby, media | Sunday, June 29, 2008 Posted by philgomes 6:38 PM "Giving Back" I often have a strong negative reaction when a business leader talks about "giving back" to a community. This tacitly assumes that achieving business success means that something must be "taken away" from that community. Further, it downplays the value that a successful business offers in terms of jobs, government revenue, increased prosperity, and so on. This attitude, in turn, plants the seeds for confiscatory, redistributionist tax policies, unnecessary regulation, and so on. Consider this, though: I consistently avail myself of the donated efforts of open-source programmers around the world. At home, I run Kubuntu 7.108.04, compiz-fusion, OpenOffice, GIMP, and a host of other applications developed in the free-as-in-speech-and-beer universe. And I, for one, am not a programmer. Further, my perso-professional priorities pretty much preclude me from taking a lot of time to learn. (Time spent learning, say, C++, could instead be put to learning Portuguese, which I so desperately need as I write this from my wife's grandparents' house in Rio.) So, how does a non-programmer contribute back to open source? Here are some ideas. Marketing/evangelism: This is, quite simply, not an option for me at this point in my life. Not a matter for discussion or debate. Testing: I'm torn on this topic. On one level, it's not only quite exciting to be testing fresh software, but proper testing is an exceedingly important part of a project's success. However, a lot of the time, I'm working on stuff that simply won't tolerate a memory allocation error or buffer overflow as just-one-of-those-things. Documentation: This is a part of the volunteer effort that I think makes the most sense for me. I'm a decent writer, I think, and open-source efforts can always use better documentation. So, I guess I should look for an open-source project to contribute documentation to. Watch this space for more. Oh... And here's some background as to why I use Linux. And a video: Technorati Tags: linux, foss, opensource | Thursday, June 19, 2008 Posted by philgomes 8:48 AM PROpenMic's "Ask Phil" Group Reaches 100 Members Many thanks to the students, faculty, and practitioners who have made this experiment such a rewarding experience for me. Of course, a special thanks to Robert French for taking the initiative to get this all started. Technorati Tags: propenmic, pr, publicrelations, education | HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a PalmOne Treo or a Playstation2. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, VP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.