Whenever I get one of these communiques through eBay I’m always astonished at the amount of extra verbiage. This one takes the cake, though. Only about 1% of the message body is the actual message – the words “it’s taken care of.” Presented below in full, slightly reformatted and munged.

From: 	  member@ebay.com
Subject: 	Re: Question for item #__ - __ __ __
Date: 	September 17, 2005 4:03:09 PM EDT (CA)
To: 	  __@e-scribe.com
Reply-To: 	  __@comcast.net

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Response to Question about Item -- Respond Now
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Response from __
Item: __ __  (__)
This message was sent while the listing was active.
__ is the seller.
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it's taken care of

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Item Details
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Item name:                             __ __ 
Item number:                           __
End date:                              Sep-19-05 15:34:28 PDT

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=ADME:L:RTQ:US:1

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Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.

The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.” I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi – who don’t seem to make flash memory devices.

Tim Bray recently posted an update on the Massachusetts OpenDocument decision, dissecting some leaked talking points from Microsoft. These expand on the one-liner I quoted in my previous post on the subject. This passage gets right to the heart of it:

The notion that using standardized formats and protocols gets in the way of innovation is twenty-year-old thinking, it was wrong then and its wrong now. I remember perfectly well, back in the Eighties, IBM and Wang and Pr1me and DEC explaining why their proprietary networking stacks were much more innovative and better than this new-fangled least-common-denominator Internetworking thing, and why their proprietary operating systems were more innovative than Unix. (Hey, most of those companies are out of business, aren’t they?)

Journalist and author David Kline, who I know from the Well, has launched a new blog, Blogrevolt, hot on the heels of his new book, blog! (which I’m betting has something to do with blogging). He’s wondering about companies using blogs to solicit ideas for products:

Which companies are already experimenting with “product definition” blogging? What are the results so far, and how are these firms dealing with the potential confidentiality and competitiveness issues that R&D blogging entails?

Google has launched a blog search tool. Given how long it took them to get around to it, it’s rather underwhelming. Also, I’m seeing a lot of spam blogs in the results – despite my recent attempts to mock such sites into oblivion they seem to be flourishing. Some Craigslist-style flagging options (also now offered by some blog hosting services) are sorely needed.