Davos Newbies

Too busy

In the way of things, I was too busy in Davos to read either Michael Kinsley’s tetchy dispatch from the Forum or his magazine’s series Too busy for Davos. Of course Kinsley could have read Davos Newbies and been far better informed, without the Globolog that the Forum favours.  

Reset

Dan Gillmor, as usual, has an unerring take on the unreliability of today’s computers, based partly on his experience at the Forum. “No other industry has so successfully persuaded its customers to be guinea pigs in one of industry’s great experiments. The technology companies do want to make this stuff work, but we are the product testers as much as the people who have that job title inside the companies that sell it.”

In a follow-up, Dan explains why switching to a Mac isn’t the solution to his problems. And worryingly, he warns that his weblog is migrating to a new platform tomorrow, which will possibly create dead links in my many references to Dan’s work. Update: I’ve altered the two links to Dan here so they won’t go dead.

The feeling is pari-mutuel

Bill Safire received 753 emails telling him he made a mistake in reference to a Sherlock Holmes story. I would have thought the only things that generated that kind of response were techie boo-boos or a map showing Kashmir.

Annoying

I’d like to point to the Financial Times’s hilarious Martin.Lukes@a-bglobal.com (a spoof email exchange, written by Lucy Kellaway, that has been running for a couple of years). Today’s instalment features two executives at the World Economic Forum. But Martin Lukes appears nowhere on the FT site that I can find. I adore the FT, but its site is filled with frustrations.