Buying advertising time during the Super Bowl is the antithesis of guerilla marketing. Even so, bunches of cash strapped dot coms are spending millions to get on TV during the big game. Compared to spending 3.2 million of your 6 million VC dollars to get 90 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, paying a small town in Oregon to change its name looks like a downright brilliant idea.
In amongst some stuff that’s not particularly interesting to me, Dave Winer takes on the people who would leverage patents against the Internet community in his DaveNet essay today. Fortunately, the Internet community does have a weapon that can be used against patent holders … prior art.
Today’s Jon Carroll column is concerned with an issue that’s near and dear to rc3.org–the pathetic state of the health care system in the United States these days.
Salon has an article today about the debasement of Martin Luther King, Jr by the white supremacist group Stormfront at the URL www.martinlutherking.org. That’s the interesting thing about URLs. In some ways, they’re just a location, like a street address or phone number, but unlike those arbitrary identifiers, they do say something about the content found there in a direct way. I wouldn’t dare argue that Stormfront shouldn’t be allowed to own that URL or use it in the way that they do, instead I would caution people to be careful not to read anything into a site’s content based on the URL that they possess. Some people more effectively hide their motives than the leadbrained Nazis from Stormfront.
In case you hadn’t heard, we live in a disturbing world. Reuters is reporting that members of a group of geurillas led by 12 year old twins hijacked a school bus and took over a hospital in Thailand. “God’s Army” is holding the hospital’s staff and patients hostage in exchange for relief in border fighting with Myanmar.