New Morning
I was gratified to hear from Sun PR that the problem with Sun events invites has been fixed. Apparently I'll now be invited regardless of whether it corresponds to my beat area, which is a good thing because a) I have no beat area and b) I'm not really a journalist. One of several emails asked whether I wanted a pre-briefing under embargo; no, I didn't because I am not a reporter and have no need to write on deadline for a news break the next morning. Valleywag calls me a ZDNet columnist, which is fair since before this blog started I contributed a few blog posts as columns, and I've been a columnist for eWEEK and InfoWorld before that.
But today I'm glad to say that with Dan Farber's relentless rearchitecting of ZDNet as a blog farm, David (MindCamp) Berlind's transformation from columnist to bloggernist, and blogumnists Arrington, Malik, Carr, Calacanis, MacLeod, Winer, and the Doc et al stuffing my inforouter with goodies each day, we are in a Golden Age. All of us, except for the PR folks. They haven't quite gotten up to speed, and honestly, I just ran out of patience this weekend.
I'm not saying these folks are clueless--far from it. Microsoft punished me for some time for transgressions around Allchin, Raikes, Sinofsky, and most recently, the Pinhead spokesman for Office Dead who Dan Farber talked to and I railed against even longer than the commercial "breaks" on the Gillmor Gang. I was invited to Ray and Bill's Live rollout after one particularly aggressive bitchfest on my part, but nothing about Mix06, TechWeb, VSLive, or any of the other Microsoft events that Arrington regularly skips. As Sun's VP for Global Communications correctly understood, it's not that I want to go to most of these events, just have the opportunity to ignore them. Different.... Negative gestures are very valuable in clearing mental and other real estate for more strategic thinking and acting.
Since my prescient call on Bill's latest Excellent Adventure, I've been hearing more from the right people up north. But I issued a direct invitation to CSA Ozzie to attend my talk on the Attention Operating System at Gnomedex and heard nary a word. I trust he was back home on the East Coast for the holiday 4th, but still there is no clear methodology for indicating whether or not he's interested in having a dialogue on this next phase of the post-RSS revolution. So I throw this post out as a nudge to Wagged and internal MS PR to remind them that I am asking a direct question and hope that, unlike the historical pattern during the Gates era, I will be given the chance to have the conversation at a time when it can be arranged. Given Sun PR's reaction, I'm optimistic.