Ideas & Ethics

  • Law of ongoing trends

    Law of Ongoing Trends: Whenever you think a trend is about to expire, it’s safe to assume it will continue on for up to half of its total life to date. Expressed mathmatically: Total life of trend = assumed life + half

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  • Lance won…this round

    Congratulations to Lance Dutson, who is free from the legal black cloud imposed on him by Warren Kremer Paino Advertising. The agency dropped their lawsuit Friday, though they made no public comment on the matter. Cowards, to the end. In his latest post on the now seven-month-long Pay-Per-Gate saga, Lance thanked his own legal council,…

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  • Maine Rep calls for Office of Tourism investigation

    In his ongoing ethical and now legal battle with inept state government officials and contractors, Lance Dutson has finally received meaningful public help from a State of Maine government official, some five months after his original reporting. Today, Maine Representative Stephen Bowen (R – Rockport) announced he has asked Maine’s economic commissioner to suspend the…

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  • ‘Pay-per-Gate’ picking up steam

    The ‘Pay-per-Gate‘ saga, which I’ve written about twice before, has now crossed over into the local media here in Maine. Today, both the Knox County VillageSoup Times and the Portland Press Herald ran variations on the story.

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  • Trend watching: homemade how-to videos

    Prediction: homemade how-to videos, such as the ones featured on Turtlesoup.tv and at Ctrl+Alt+Chicken, will rise up in a big way in the second half of 2006.

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  • Maine blogger threatened with lawsuit for ‘Pay-per-Gate’ story

    Every blogger out there should understand that when one of us is threatened with a lawsuit, we’re all threatened. That’s not a cutesy cliche- it’s a serious point to keep in mind whenever we begin to forget that there are many members of the old guard- institutions such as government agencies and media outlets- with…

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  • Don’t visit Adholes unless you like to be spammed

    Just got another email from Adholes, the worthless advertising news site. You may remember my post from three weeks ago, where I complained that Adholes continued to send me email messages after I had attempted to unsubscribe twice. Well I’ve now tried to unsubscribe three times and they are continuing to send me messages. Again,…

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  • Andy Baio sticks up for freedom of expression online

    If you care about freedom of speech and the future of the Internet as a distribution platform for original content, you should care about Andy Baio’s willingness to stand up to the powers that be. Baio, a popular blogger at waxy.org, has been hosting the files of a popular homegrown series, House of Cosbys, since…

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  • Woomu: Another video sharing site, with some twists

    Woomu is a new video sharing site with a couple of interesting twists. The biggest difference between woomu and other video sharing sites such as YouTube is that woomu is simply an aggregator, rather than a video hosting service. While this approach provides relative freedom from pesky copyright troubles like the ones YouTube has faced…

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  • Adholes will spam you

    Adholes, an ad-industry specific social site, has been sending me marketing emails for quite a while. I have now unsubscribed via their unsubscribe process twice, both to no avail. By my definition, that means they are spamming me, and as a result their reputation is now officially crap in my view. If you’re going to…

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