In today’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen argues that the Enron mess–the fact that top executives were allowed to sell their Enron stock before it tanked, while the rest of the company’s employees were not–is an ethical outrage, not a political one.
An interesting article in the NY Times details plans for adopting guidelines to measure the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns.
P.J. O’Rourke on the anthrax scare.
A group of Tibetan Buddhist monks is here in DC creating a gift for the United States: A mandala, which is an elaborate sand painting. More on mandalas is available here.
Kevin Kelly’s “The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed” explains why the downfall of the dot coms does not mean the downfall of the Web. He says, “So much money flew around dot-coms, that it hid the main event on the web, which is the exchange of gifts. While the most popular 50 websites are crassly commercial, most of the 3 billion web pages in the world are not.”
Kelly’s article reminds me of a great piece that ran on The Motley Fool in December of 2000. At its crux, the Internet is about communicating–not making money.
“Reading anxiety”–the sense that no matter what, there’ll never be enough time to read all the good stuff out there. Gotta love the J. Alfred Prufrock reference.
Here’s an exceptional article outlining the reasons that nonprofits need strategic communications. It’s called “Why Take Media Seriously.”
I’m reading a couple different books these days. John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” is hilarious and richly imagined, and “Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East,” by Pico Iyer, is a revealing portrait of contemporary Asia.
The Economist’s Christmas edition is brilliant. Don’t miss their fascinating articles about Filipinas living in Hong Kong, “The Bridget Jones Economy”, and the strange story of the Pacific island of Nauru.