This blogger's got some scruples, huh?

Gonzo or bonzo? You decide. Tony Pierce is selling links from his blog on ebay.

What is it worth to you to get rock stars, hot chicks, political pundits, brainacs and nerds to go to your site simply because I link to it?

I guess you really can buy anything on ebay.

Tom Shugart Starts Blogging!

Check out our newest addition to the world of blogging. I'm honored that Tom credits me with helping him leap the blogging chasm. I'm glad I could assist, but the truth is, he was blogging in his head and his emails all along. Welcome Tom!

allied goes ad-free

for your reading pleasure.

what i sound like sick

wanna hear how I sound sick? wondering who's this baby blogger I'm always talking about? Gary caught us on tape! For a 40 year old who usually gets an "Are your parents home?" when I answer the phone, I can't believe I'm admitting this hard-smokin' loud-singing voice is mine. :-)

And no, that's NOT me below.

come hither "evil ones."

okay. I'm scared by this.

And Golby Steps Forward for a Solo

It's a behind-the-scenes look you won't want to miss. Oh, and the next time a good book comes out, let's toss a coin and see who sends a copy to Mike, so's he doesn't end up in the slammer. This is what he has to deal with:

“Christopher Locke. L-O-C-K-E," I said, spelling it out for the brain-dead numbskull on the other side.

The phone went down, I heard a clacking keyboard, and the phone was picked up again.

“No, sorry, never heard of him.”

“What?” I asked, incredulous. “The man has published three books, one of which was one of the Harvard Business Review’s books of the year.”

“What business review?” came back the moronic voice.

Bouncing Bombast with Marek

Marek blogs me back about Bombast and takes it further out...

"I make love to the world and the world loves back. It loves back and I am home. This life. This planet. This language. These faces. This house. These shoes. This Century. These stubby fingers. This shaved head. It's all of it and all over again falling in love with the world and I disappear my resignation and I am home. This day. Right now...."

Yes, Marek. Here, all of us one, we make it better, not because we are linked all sloppily together like this, but because we've been connected, and in connecting, have morphed, have transformed one the other.

Who is Golby now? Who is Tom, or Gary, or you, Marek? Who have you become?

Yes, we have become.

We are the ones who used to not think twice taking out the garbage Sunday night, twisting the bags tight, thinking it's a shame all this trash is going to the landfill, oh crap I forgot the fish stinking up the fridge, and will they even take this in the morning, or is it too heavy, and how likely is it I'll be picking all this same shit up off the driveway tomorrow after the bag gives way?

What used to matter, fill time, moments, doesn't anymore. Now there is a world to get to. Now we aren't just talking to ourselves. Now we are falling in love with this world, faults and warts and undeniable insanity, all over again, and because we love, things matter again. Finally. Things matter.

Things matter.

You matter, you mad fucking hatter.

It Came from Canada: A Review of The Bombast Transcripts

if you hear me in the silence
then am I real.
if you see me in the darkness
then am I music
to your music.
if your heart is empty
yet fills with joy
then are your colors
my colors.
-christopher locke


Hold on a second.
[Quick shake of the head.]
Doesn’t this guy write about business? What’s this poetry doing here?

“The solution is poetry.” That and other fundamental truths according to Locke and RageBoy—Locke’s cantankerous alter ego—are just waiting to slap you around the room as you read the team’s latest: The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy.

It’s safe. You can throw away that little postage-paid merchandise-return sticker from Amazon. Put the box in the trash. You may quite confidently expense this book through your place of employment. As a bonus, the book will give you the secret for appeasing the finance jockey who will undoubtedly email you upon receiving your expense report, asking what a Bombast is and who authorized its purchase.

But I digress.

Truth be told, Bombast is more than a business book. And you should know that before you agree to read it.

From “Eden to E-Commerce,” Bombast is the world in RageBoy time, a world designed to destroy everything you thought was so, and then lift you up with the possibilities. It is a journey that crosses every border, deconstructs every widely held notion, teaches as much about what it means to be human as it does about what it means to do business in a connected world.

For RageBoy, nothing is off limits:

Language, voice, media, bandwidth,
touch, madness, the Internet, work, love,
corporations, angst, mores, TCP/IP, music,
artificial intelligence, joy, ROI, dreams, lies,
HTML, 5-GL, change, excrement, rejection,
karma, chaos, fear, creation, paradise, belief,
disbelief, disestablishmentarianism, Elvis,
people, geese, broadband, patterns, walls,
space, fiction, portals, brand, astrology,
guilt, coffee, poverty, philosophy, tear gas,
eclipse, email, addiction, science, passion,
communism, capitalism, aboriginal darkness,
oriental light, power, magic, sin, politics,
pictogram, wanting, sex, P2P,
getting it, and getting lit.

This, my friends, is some serious shit.

I could take you through this browser-free read of Locke’s famed ezine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, step by step. But I won’t, because Bombast is best read without a guide.

So if I’ve intrigued you, good. If not, let me touch on my favorite part of the book and linger here a moment longer. At its core, Bombast has one simple and profound construct, one that RageBoy delivered in a passionate diatribe at a keynote address before 2000 people in Copenhagen:

“What is happening on the net is that people are falling in love with the world all over again.”

Holy cripe.

Did you get that? Worth repeating:

“What is happening on the net is that people are falling in love with the world all over again.”

You see, in the end, it’s not about the net at all. It's about what’s happening because of the net.

As RageBoy tells the good crowd in Copenhagen, we have been here before, with cave paintings, with bone axes, with mythologies and arts. All of these, so distracting in their own right, only tools--tools that help us fall in love with our world—again and again without end.

And that, in a few words, is the beauty of all of this.

Without end.

Tune in, turn on, stay tuned…

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