The New York Times : Yellow or Blue? In Hong Kong, Businesses Choose Political Sides on the 19th January contains this quote ...

Families and businesses have cleaved, sometimes forcefully, between those who believe Beijing must be compelled to carry out promised reforms and those who worry that the democracy crusade is destroying Hong Kong’s reputation as a stable financial capital.

I thought of the UK and the US ... and made two modifications

For The USA

Families and businesses have cleaved, sometimes forcefully, between those who believe Washington must be compelled to carry out promised reforms and those who worry that the democracy crusade is destroying The USA's reputation as a stable financial capital.

For The UK

Families and businesses have cleaved, sometimes forcefully, between those who believe London must be compelled to carry out promised reforms and those who worry that the democracy crusade is destroying The UK's reputation as a stable financial capital.

Are we winning? Well a whole lot more than we might have been pre-internet. 

Ad blockers are used by some 25% of internet users in 2019. In real terms, this means that 25% of internet advertising that uses trackers will not reach their intended audience. (It’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but the point is that somehow the word got out that people were being tracked and it was those pesky Ads doing all the tracking - enter Adblocking and so an industry was born and an ‘arms race’ ensued.)

The peak of the internet searching for the term ‘Ad blocker’ was September 2015. 

Me - I call it ‘tracker blocking’. There are sites that allow advertising and do not track. Ad blockers don’t work there - because there is no tracking to be blocked.

But there is no escape that at one point people were increasingly aware of ad blocking - what it was doing and most importantly - what it was doing to them. They got interested. And then it all fell away.

That's the mistake - we need to keep piling on. Keep reminding people what is going on.

Doc Searls, Godfather of The VRM/Me2B Movement observed recently that he writes on 4 (what amount to) personal blogs ... which made me feel a lot better about myself. In that same post he wrote;

Bigger than all four of those blogs is Linux Journal, where I wrote a great deal, including what amounted to blog posts on its website, for 25 years. That ended when Linux Journal ceased business in August. Also, as of today the entire site, with all its archives, is offline, erasing a third to a half of what I've written online so far.

Doc Searls

Think about that .... a third to a half of what you have written online is suddenly not available. And you wonder why I write articles like this.

It's a cautionary tale because Doc (who's final position at Linux Journal was Editor in Chief) might reasonably have expected that whoever owned Linux Journal wouldn't suddenly remove it from public view.

Rule Number One : When it comes to your IP trust no one. Keep your articles and writing in a place that you have access to and control.

Rule Number Two : There is no Rule Number Two.

On a side note, but keeping the theme of Doc ... he recently published the links to the last three posts on the VRM Blog. They are good reads.

People are the real edge

We’re not data. We’re digital. Let’s research that.

What law might clear the way for VRM development?

Thinking Allowed

• More about People First
• Other People First Posts
  (not just from the ‘other domain’ … all of them.)

Counting both noun and verb forms, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists and defines thirteen separate ‘gigs’.

‘A flighty, giddy girl’ was where it all started and then ‘spin’, ‘whirl’, ‘whirligig’, ‘fool’, giggle and ‘joke’ are all in one way or associated with the word. Even when you get up to the 18th century where it meant ‘light one-horse carriage’, its origin might be ..

perhaps based on the ‘bouncing, whirling’ sense of the earlier ‘gig’.

Until recently, most of us would primarily have associated ‘gig’ with the music industry and even today young struggling bands are delighted (initially) to get their ‘first gig’. In this sense, we have two possible origins;

• ‘a gambling bet’ (possibly from the use of a spinning wheel in some original ‘gig’ game), which then was generalized to mean ‘a business undertaking’ and then applied to a musical performance.
• the musical engagement sense to the original ‘spinning’ meaning of the word, perhaps influenced by the Old French ‘gigue’, meaning ‘dance’. which also gave us ‘jig’.

The word in this context dates back to 1926 ... and this makes for a good little read if you want a more thorough and entertaining overview of the myriad meanings and learn where some of this research came from.

But when did the gig we know today come from?

That dates just back to 2009. And to me it continues to honor the light, flighty, gaming/gambling origins of the word. So let\'s stop using it and call it what it is. Exploitation? Slavery? After all they shoot horses, don't they?