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?