Select Page

Hey, FOIB has just added its 100th member.

This is no great feat, in our fast-paced world of affinity marketing. On the bright side, there may be “A Little McDonald’s in Everyone” but at least FOIB isn’t obstructing the colons of 20,000,000 fat teenage boys in America.

What this does mean is that FOIB is now obstructing the InBoxes of more than 100 people worldwide, none of whom are teenage boys (except Tottle).

As such I have modified the List’s Manifesto (and thus what it’s about) somewhat. Peep the following, my brothas and sistas:

—– Hi,

Welcome to FOIB. FOIB stands for ³Friends of Ian Bell². Contrary to popular belief, such beings do actually exist. FOIB is a diverse community of individuals sharing ideas on life, politics, art and technology. One thing that they all have in common, of course, is that they are actually friends of Ian.

You’ve been added to the list, or you have been invited to join the list, because we think you might benefit from participating as much as we’ll benefit from having you around.

The idea is to share information. FOIB is not a broadcast list — ie. It’s not a tool to maintain Ian’s huge ego and fragile self-esteem. We have other tools for that, such as beating Gersham at XBOX. 🙂

At the same time this list is not specifically intended for long, drawn-out newsgroup-style discussions on current events. Those never result in anyone changing their opinion, and debates usually devolve to name-calling when somebody mentions Hitler, Camille Paglia, or Henry Kissinger.

Nope.

FOIB is instead an Intelligence Gathering Device (IGD). We will all use the FOIB to collect, share and store those ideas which we think are important to us now — ideas from a diverse set of publications including but not limited to magazines, web sites, and papers.

Your contribution to FOIB is your own set of experiences in filtering the information and ideas that float across your screen and your desk daily. You take the ones that really really matter, that are bellwethers of the times, or that represent disruptive or otherwise thought-provoking ideas.

Your obligation as a FOIBer is to post these to the list, adding your own commentary as you see fit (this is HIGHLY encouraged). Once in a while, guys like Ian, Pablo, Steve, and others take the time to write their own pieces, and these are valuable too.

These rules apply when posting to FOIB:

– We like TLAs, but only when you explain what the hell they mean. – We hate HTML email. It should die, die, die. Emacs rulz! – We hate message attachments. They take too long to download on DSL. – We like opinions, but not long, bitter discussions. – We don’t care about the latest virus alerts. Outlook sux! – Sometimes we like to swear. Your mother is a freakin’ astronaut! – Always include the URL and the body text for any article you are forwarding.

That’s it.. The Law of Toyland.

Enjoy. Live Well and Prosper. Stuff like that. Seeya on the List.

-Ian.

—–