http://www.phil-butler.com Not Under the Influence Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:49:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Of late I have noticed that there is a lot of negativity in not just my posts, but on the Web in general. This is not something that is pleasing or even interesting to me, but somehow a good number of my interesting people, startups and the Web in general ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/07/22/calacanis/ If you think about it we are all a product of so many variables, not the least of which is environment. Somehow we all intrinsically know this, but are so often distracted and obtuse as to just how much a hometown or place can be a part of us. For ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/07/20/hometowns-charleston/ As the search saga continues, rumor has it Microsoft is just about to announce it did a little shopping and acquired Powerset – one of the leaders in natural language search. On the other hand, Microsoft’s future plans of buying Yahoo’s search functionalities no longer seem dead and buried, ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/07/15/search-game-tactics-should-google-buy-hakia/ Our end of the Internet, the information and networking side, has seen some interesting changes over the last year or so. One of the most predominant ones is in the way we are are driven to promote stories and those from within our networks. Social media sites other outlets were ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/07/05/digg-betrayal/ The discussion over "who owns what?", and particularly content on the Web will become more and more intense in the months to come. Some of the major news outlets have already begun their campaigns to monetize or at least limit who uses their content. The days where a trackback or ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/07/02/open-standards-and-portable-stuff/ What exactly is a "blogger code of conduct ", or any code after all? We all talked about it some time back when things got out of line with the "Kathy Sierra incident". Beyond simple humane activities, any code of conduct has to take into account that proper conduct is ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/06/26/code-of-conduc/ Suffering from a major case of writer's block myself (PR consulting induced), I decided to see what my readers (and as it turned out everyone else's) are missing. Somehow I managed to amble over to Rafe Needleman's fine Webware blog first thing, and what did I find there? The 98th ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/06/24/king-content/ Back in October of 2007 I wrote about a great little innovation called Disqus, a very refined comment/discussion tool for sites. Back then, and even now, I was convinced that Daniel Ha – the founder – struck hard at a point of pain on the Web – interactivity. The Internet ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/05/31/disqus-be-careful-what-is-thrown-at-you/ The first couple of months I spent here in Germany fairly dashed some of my perceptions of both the people and the essence of the place. I expect this is true for most visitors, and certainly my "American" sense of old world charm was slightly skewed by not ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/05/25/a-five-dollar-coffee-learning-from-old-world-values/ Delving into the mysteries of the Web for the 10,000th time, I decided to go all out transparent and also help a friend today. You see, all bloggers and social networking fools use essentially the same strategies to get what they write notices. Whether the subject is super informative news ... http://www.phil-butler.com/2008/05/20/two-brains-are-better-than-one/