Doc Searls's blog

There are a range of ways that marketing can relate to engineering. At one end are companies where engineering is the core competency and marketing "leadership" is an absurdity. At the other end are companies where marketing tells engineers what to do.

The most extreme example of the former comes from fiction. It's the nameless fictional company that employs the cartoon character Dilbert. In three daily Dilbert strips starting July 27, the character Alice -- a competent, under-appreciated and violence-prone engineer -- relates to marketing people by banging their heads on furniture. In one strip she tells a prospective employee, "I'm going to bonk your head on the table. If it sounds empty, you'll work in marketing."

The most extreme example of the latter comes from reality, and stars in "The Phone Companies Still Don't Get it", by Mark Gimein, in the July 31, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek. more>>

Next Tuesday at OSCON in Portland, I'll be giving a 3.5 hour tutorial titled Open Source Clue Training: How to Market to People Who Hate Marketing.

As I prepare for that, I thought I'd share some of the curriculum I've come up with. I'm looking for constructive feedback, suggestions and Stories From the Real World that might be useful to the tutorial. Here we go... more>>

Net Neutrality is a snowball.

That is, it's an idea that started small but grew steadily as it rolled forward, gaining mass and speed as it accreted the passions and opinions of many -- on all sides of the issue. Today the topic is so large and complex that it's hard to find where it began. It has also become so highly politicized that it may sink the telecom reform legislation that carriers have been working on since the last round of reform, in 1996. more>>

Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? Or at least not a complete one? more>>

In the last several days a flurry of postings about a new company called M2Z piled up in my email box. Technorati finds 163 new posts on the subject. Google's Blogsearch finds 329. (As of 4:30am Friday morning, which is when I'm writing this.) The pile will get a lot higher before M2Z gets off the ground. Or buried under it. more>>

Last week in New York, I shared a cab with a friend who works for Google. He was the guy who, with permission from his company, gave me a scoop that had to stay embargoed until 8pm Pacific time tonight (Thursday, as I write this), while I was out having an anniversary dinner with my wife.

What the hell, scoops are over-rated anyway. News is news. In this case, news that Google has released Picasa, its photo editing and organizing software, on Linux. That's before they release it on Apple (if they ever do). I believe this is a first. more>>

If "all politics is local", as Tip O'Niell famously said, can't we say the same about all business? If so, maybe we should start walking our Net Neutrality talk on our own main streets. more>>

What would happen if anybody could produce radio or TV programming as easily as they consume it?What would happen if the natural limits to broadcasting went away?

Those questions only had sci-fi answers when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, not far from the swamps later re-labeled "meadowlands", after a sports complex by that name appeared alongside Paterson Plank Road. In those days, back in the '50s and early '60s, I was like any other geeky kid who had better luck with science than with girls: I sublimated unrequited desire for the latter into preoccupation with the former. Since computers were still captive to big business, big defense and big science, I focused my science obsessions on big radio. more>>

Monday at 1:00, at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego, I'm going to give a talk titled Plug 'n' Pray to Plug 'n' Play: What's it Going to Take? If you follow that last link, you'll find no details. I'm looking for your help with that, fellow Linux Journalistas. more>>

I love this quote from Douglas Crockford: What a Flash intro says to me is "I hate my job. What I really want to do is make films. But they won't let me do that because I don't have talent. So watch this Flash intro." Soon as I read it, I immediately thought of Dack Ragus, whose more>>