I took a big screenshot that you can find here, and here’s a sneak preview:

Kemp Obit with FB banner

This content-ad juxtaposition struck me from a surreal angle. Kemp himself probably had a BlackBerry later in his career — or an assistant who had one — and probably had heard of FaceBook, but what would his response have been to seeing such a twenty-first century ad placed next to a story about such a twentieth centure figure?

Note also the AT&T U-Verse ad at the top of the page.

Note#2: Kemp was 73, which USED to seem old.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks

Certainly, that’s the worry: after the Reverend Al Sharpton — smelling blood and never able to stop swimming — organized an opportunistic protest rally, the Post and Post-owner Rupert Murdoch himself each apologized, with the News Corp chairman having to descend from whichever castle he was hanging his hat to apply a torniquet to the hemorrhaging mess of public outcry.

But I’ll bet that Murdoch would have stood his ground if the newspaper business wasn’t at the front of the poisoned Kool-Aid line. So it was a good, if somewhat hysterical, move.

But if Michael Woolf’s Newser blog’s guess is true that News Corp is about to depose longtime loyalist editor Col Allan over this, then Murdoch is making a mistake. Allan should remain in place, lesson learned and properly chastened, as should the Post’s advertisers who are getting what they paid for in this mess. (I know that it prompted ME to click over to NYPost.com for the first time in years.)

Don’t get me wrong, here: I’m no fan of the Post unless I’m lining the bottom of the bird cage. And I am a fan of our newly elected President.

But he’s the PRESIDENT, folks. President Obama is a big boy. The gloves come off when somebody gets elected to this office, and this was an editorial CARTOON.

The president himself, gracefully, has been silent on this issue because he knows he has bigger fish to fry.

Yes, the cartoon was stupid, tone-deaf and tasteless, and yes making any racist allusion when we’ve just elected a biracial president is idiotic, but demanding Allan’s head on a platter isn’t good for journalism, for the country, for a departure from the overly-partisan last eight years, and suggests that Reverend Sharpton has too much time on his hands and didn’t get a post in the administration for a good reason.

Final Note: there weren’t any rallies when www.bushorchimp.com launched in 2000, shortly after the last president was elected and going on to get more than five million hits between then and March, 2003. Yeah, George W. Bush is a white guy, but don’t absurd and highly personal comparisons come with the White House? Do a search on “clinton chimp” and you’ll get results (although, unsurprisingly as racism and sexism go hand in hand, mostly results for the Secretary of State).

The late President Ronald Reagan only WORKED with a chimp.

It’s worth a look: make sure your speakers are turned on and mouse over everything in sight.

This has been around for a couple weeks, apparently, but I just learned of it today.

Two questions for the more enlightened: 1) Does anybody know who is behind this? 2) Does the humor of the site sufficiently outweigh the terror caused by the sight of Sarah Palin in the Oval Office?

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

That second sentence contains the clinker… impressive debate performance?  Sure, if “not crying” makes one impressive.

I was horrified by Brooks’ positive endorsement of Palin’s content-free performance at the Veep debates (he was a post-game comment provider on PBS), and agreed with one speculation that he must be besotted by her.

Palin may be effective on the stump, sharing pre-written zinger after zinger, but she was an embarrassment to the country in the debate.

And the times, they keep a-changing…

It’s right here:

Governor Palin wore her hair up and didn’t crash and burn like she did in the Couric interviews. Other observations:

• Yes, she didn’t embarrass herself or the campaign, but she hardly made the case that she was fit to sit a shaky 72-year-old, cancer-surviving heartbeat from the presidency
• While she spoke without a puppeteer, most of what she said were bromides repeated endlessly– full of perky sound and cheerleader spunk and signifying nothing
• The media — of which I am a member — in my mind blew the coverage of the debate by focusing so much on how Governor Palin didn’t suck, on how charming and poised and energetic she was, on how Senator Biden didn’t beat up on her… it was frustrating to see the sound-bite-ification of immediate post-debate coverage. The focus on the different styles of Palin and Biden concealed the obvious and radical disparity in what some scientists call information density. Palin, at this for “five weeks” in her own description, had the information density of merengue. Biden, at it for 35 years, was far more detailed, dense, explicit and interesting. David Brooks, commenting on PBS, is clearly besotted by Palin and should be embarrassed by his remarks. Can we finally take the myth of the liberal media elite out behind the barn and shoot it? The media has no politics other than what will get ratings. Sheesh.
• Palin’s down-home-yokel routine is getting old fast– and why is nobody mentioning that we fell for that nonsense with W. for the past two elections and where has that gotten us?
• Although Mencken famously quipped that you can never go wrong under-estimating the intelligence of the American people, the people seem to be catching on to the McCain/Palin brand of horse-pucky. E. J. Dionne’s blog post at the Post this morning helpfully links to a number of polls that say Biden won the debate.

VOTE OBAMA!

• If it’s down, does that mean that she’s concealing a microphone?
• Will some enterprising journalist have an audio scanner in the building to see if either candidate is being spoon-fed lines (or lies) from offstage?
• Is that even legal?  There’s no expectation of privacy in a debate and it’s not a private phone line… so I’m guessing it is, but are there any lawyers out there who can weigh in?
• Is there any way that Senator Biden can win this debate? I’m worried that if he wipes the floor with her then he has beaten up a hockey mom, and if he doesn’t then he has been beaten up BY a hockey mom.
• If Palin’s hair is up, will she make any sense at all?

By the way, if you think that an exposed microphone in Palin’s ear would be anything less than damning, check out this video created by psychic debunker James Randi, where Randi proves that faith healer Peter Popoff is a fraud. (Skip to nine minutes into this video in order to see what I mean.)