I know this sounds like I’m coming late to the party, but if you’re not using an RSS Reader you should start. It will completely revolutionize how you read on the internet. Google just bought Feedburner for $100 million, so I can only imagine the sort of improvements we’ll see in RSS in the near future. Now Google is freed up and incentivized to do a whole bunch of great stuff with Reader because they’re making money on the content end now. Blogger was fantastic (and free) because Google wasn’t dependent on it for revenue–they made it off the Adsense ads. Now, Google Reader could lose money everyday and they won’t care because they’re picking up cash off the ads they’re placing inside the feeds themselves instead of ever having to do it on the platform itself.

Anyways, there is nothing in the experience of this site that you lose by reading it through RSS. So if you want to make things easier, just click the button below to subscribe and you’ll get the updates as they happen. Again, I appreciate everyone who reads–especially those who take the time to comment–and hopefully this will make the burden of entry a little lower.

Subscribe

I talked about the Brasidas’ square tactic in my post about the perfect paper. I’m just finishing up Xenophon’s “Anabasis” and it looks like he used the exact same maneuver. He explains it a little bit more in depth and it confirms the efficacy of my method.

“It would be safer for us to march with the hoplites forming a hollow square, so that the baggage and the general crowd would be more secure inside. If, then, we are told now who should be in the front of the square and who organize the leading detachments, and who should be on the two flanks, and who should be responsible for the rear, we should not have to plan all this when the enemy is approaching but could immediately make use of those who have been specially detailed for the job.”

When you lay out the square in advance with clear, orderly lines, you insulate yourself from the chaos of improvisation. You mark the boundaries now so later you don’t have to. Each paragraph is given a singular purpose and its only duty is to fulfill it. No longer is the task to figure out a direction and then go that way, for you’ve done the first part in advance. If it can work for a ten thousand man march through country after country of hostile territory, it can work for a paper or an article.

And then there is a small caveat. Xenophon found that as they traveled mountain passes–difficult subject matter–the square would come apart at the corners, or it would bend and gap. The solution then was to create small groups of auxiliary soldiers who occupied the middle. Their job was to fill these gaps, to fluidly go from one side to the other as needed. This is the role of transition sentences. They fill any holes that might arise where the paragraphs come together. They prevent doubt and danger from seeping in at your most vulnerable place–in between points.

His innovation drastically improves on Brasidas’ tactic because it made him more adaptable and less rigid. This should be what we all strive for. Once you master the form and structure, quickly move away from being dependant on it. It’s why Robert’s last law was “Assume Formlessness” and it’s why the 5th step of the OODA Loop is the loop itself–so it becomes less a methodical process and more of an intuition. The paper format is a foundation and it’s up to you to adjust and build for the task at hand.

Why are reporters so lazy? Why don’t any of them bother to their jobs? I do a lot of reading about PR and for a while I was shocked at how delusional PR people were to think that the press release was an effective way to spread the word. I just realized why they use it: Reporters let them get away with it.

Take Facebook’s recent launch of the Facebook Platform. The trained eye can easily see how the reporters are reading off the same document. What document you ask? The official Facebook Press Release:

Facebook and Amazon.com teamed up to develop an application called “Book Reviews” that lets Facebook users write and display book reviews on their profile pages. Facebook users can then click on the “Buy at Amazon” button to go to Amazon.com and complete their purchase

Now look at a few of the articles (I’ve looked at at least 10, they’re all the same)

MSN :Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook said that, for example, it teamed up with Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) to develop a book review application where users write and display book reviews on their profile pages. Facebook users can then click on the “Buy at Amazon” button to go to Amazon.com and complete their purchase.

SJ Mercury News: Amazon.com’s `Book Review’ application will allow people to write and post book reviews on their Facebook profile pages. Friends whose curiosity is peaked by a book review can then click on the “Buy at Amazon” button, which will take them directly to Amazon.com to complete their purchase.

SF Chronicle: Facebook members, for instance, will be able to write Amazon book reviews and post them on their Facebook pages. If their friends read the review and want to buy the book, they can click on an Amazon button and connect directly to the online store.

Techshout: Facebook and Amazon teamed up to develop “Book Reviews” an application that lets Facebook users write and display book reviews on their profile pages. To visit Amazon.com and complete their purchases users will have to click on the “Buy at Amazon” button.

VentureBeat: Facebook and and Amazon have also worked together to develop an application called “book reviews.” (These applications are going live tonight, around midnight, so no URLs yet.) Facebook users can write and display book reviews on their profile pages, then follow a “buy at Amazon” button

…and more and more and more…

So how do we know they didn’t all just see the application and think the same thing? BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST. It simply is not real. It hasn’t been released, it’s not out. Look on Facebook, search for it on Google. You cannot add it to your profile because you can’t find it. I went ahead and looked at every single application released to date. Check out these searches, it won’t appear. (1, 2, 3) Maybe it will come out soon, but not today (and not a week ago when the Platform launched.)

What we have here is reporters who got swooped up in the buzz and the excitement. They went ahead and reported on something they haven’t seen. Not only that, they acted like they had–like they’d tooled around on it and found it satisfactory and implied the audience could do the same.

Even then, that might be excusable. But instead they plagiarized the press release nearly word for word. That report after report is worded exactly the same is not a coincidence, it’s laziness. And then people wonder why the media isn’t trusted and why companies continue to launch crappy products. How hard is it to gloss over major flaws when the reporters aren’t going to bother to look anyway? Why focus on creating a quality product if a one page document can sell a journalist on just about anything. Why don’t the reporters just go ahead and reprint press releases each morning if they aren’t going to do any original work themselves?

These journalists got caught hook, line and sinker. They took a corporation at its word and asked no questions. Sound familiar? Where has that dereliction of duty led us in the past? Try Enron and the tech bubble. When the press goes around taking press releases on their face, without inspection or corroboration, we are all at risk of manipulation. Companies claims must be checked and rechecked–and in this case, seen to be premature or nonexistent. Blog are one thing, but for MSN or Businesswire, this negligence is unacceptable. They are call the 4th Estate because they are a check to power, not because they bow to it.

Sensationalism is dangerous. They owe the audience an apology and a greater dedication to accuracy.

It’s up on Digg, vote for it here