Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I dropped by Jeneane Sessum's blog (Allied) today. I haven't been there in a while. Top of the page is her decision to quit  Blogher.  Some of her previous posts, shortly after the Kathy Sierra incident, are pretty raw. 

Frankly I'm a little ashamed that I haven't spoken up earlier.  Instead of defending my friend Jeneane two weeks ago, I stayed on the sidelines.  I didn't want to get mixed up in the fight, and I still don't, really.

Some pretty horrible things were said about Kathy Sierra, including things Kathy took as death threats. Misogyny is a terrible thing.  So a lot of people rallied to her support, and condemned the folks named in her posting.  It became the virtual equivalent of a lynch mob. 

Mobs are cruel.  Mobs are irrational. Mobs rarely stop to consider the facts.

What's clear now is that the accusations made may be incorrect.  Accounts appear to have been hacked, and the malice perpetrated by anonymous hackers. 

In the aftermath, Kathy and one of the people accused, Chris Locke, went on television, and published joint statements. Tim O'Reilly proposed a bloggers code of conduct. Kathy posted again, this time about her non-blogging future, and hundreds more people wrote to support her. 

While you can't and shouldn't minimize the hurt Kathy encountered, people forget that she wasn't the only one damaged. At one point Jeneane measured the Google search count of her name associated with the phrase "death threats" at over 11,000.

What disturbs me the most is simply this — amidst the handwringing and navel gazing, people seem to have forgotten that the simplicity and accountability of a mea culpe might be the most effective and human thing to do.  Instead of blogger codes of conduct, how about beginning with the simple civility of an apology to those who were wrongly accused?

I missed this one over the weekend.  Tom Howe has tied together the New Presence and mobility themes we've been pushing at iotum into a neat post that concludes:

The new voice in the network is an old one. The new voice in the network is yours, now fully able to speak not only to your friends, but to speak to the phone itself.

Cool!

Martin Geddes on Skype: They’ve got an intuitive idea that the money’s in linking consumers to businesses, but not the brains or balls to execute on the core problem: the crap telephony experience.

Martin's probably feeling a little grumpy after the time he spent on the telephone chatting with the nice United Airlines rep (read the full post), but his point is well enough made.  Skype's ecosystem programs have been uneven, and appear to have lost their way strategically.  They could do so much to change the telephony experience, but are moving very slowly, and in a different direction.

Ken Camp has a love / hate relationship with Shozu.  I have to say that I concur.  It's unbelievably promising, and purports to solve a problem that I have — that Nokia's LifeBlog software doesn't target Wordpress.  However, it took hours last night to remove it from the phone.  Once installed, it takes over the phone entirely. Hopefully they can solve the problems quickly. 

Some time ago Nokia quietly released a Phone Software Update tool.  If you've got a Nokia N-series phone acquired in the last two years, or one of any of the other phones supported, it's well worth the time to update to the latest versions of the firmware.  For example, after receiving the new N95 last week, and admiring the WiFi scanner tools that shipped with it, I updated my N93, N90, and N80, all of which now can use those same WiFi scanner tool.

Warning:  back up the phone first.  It wipes the phone's internal memory completely.