Context & Continuity

I Want You to Want Me

This is very, very interesting and gives me hope about what we can do with this internet.

What elephant? I didn't see an elephant.

Don't get me wrong. I love the career I've chosen. It's just sometimes I find that my colleagues are doing our profession a disservice. Take for example this week's issue of PR Week (yes, I'm a subscriber). The April 11 issue features a roundtable in San Francisco / Silicon Valley and around the table sit some of the leading lights hereabouts.

One question posed to this august group was, "So, what about the recession?" Everyone at the table, save one voice, replied, "What recession? There's a recession? I don't see a recession." The lone dissenter was Mr. Paul Bergevin, formerly of IBM and Cunningham and currently enriching the public image @ Intel. Mr. Bergevin noticed that the last time the economy went through a mild recession, there were heavy casualties in technology media.

Okay. If I were the president or MD at an agency, or the VP of Corp Comm at a company with a market cap larger than most countries in South America, I might not want to let on that the heavy rains of the economy were puddling in my front yard. Nevertheless, ... please. How credible is it for these folks who do more revolutions per minute than a carousel at Coney Island to turn away from what is blindingly obvious to most of us, even President Bush, for crying out loud.

I don't usually get worked up about what my peers say or think, but it just so happens that I know more than a couple of the people around that table and I know they are smarter, better still, wiser than this. It hurts all of our credibility when a group of very bright people don't admit there's an elephant in the room.

Auntie Pays a Vist. Amused by what she sees.

It's been Some Time, since I arrived on the Left Coast, having relented (or succumbed) to irresistible gravinomic forces, that maelstrom known as Silicon Valley.  Nevertheless, I think I'll forever see the world through the grey glasses given to my by the New York Times. 

Being here, is rather like becoming the eccentric uncle who is kind of fun every now and then but we never quite figure out what he really does for a living.  Here, in the eye of the storm, we charming company but whey do they insist on being so different.  Yes.  So, our aunt visited and was shocked by what she saw.   Another cup? Shhhhhh.  It's the fog.

Quoth the Times:  Beneath the huge modified hammer and sickle painted on the wall behind the counter, body piercings are outnumbered only by the laptops open throughout the room. As latte sippers pore over the latest draft of a business plan, bang out a little code or post to a blog, it is not hard to overhear snippets of dialogue with a decidedly capitalist bent: “We could make money off that,” and “Have you talked to them about a deal?”

For the Web 2.0 crowd creating businesses, as well as the post-Web 2.0 crowd looking for businesses to build, Ritual is the place to be. While it has not yet risen to the mythic proportions of Buck’s, the hangout in Woodside, Calif., for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, it is becoming the place to generate ideas, find staff members and troll for companies to finance.

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