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May 21, 2005
Today I found out why I make two backups every night. It’s because, sure as snow gets in your boots, when you really really need a backup, one of them is going to turn out to be corrupt.
Fanaticism has its rewards.
The Boston Globe has an editorial today that gets past the usual MSM condescension towards blogs…right up until the last paragraph.
Because The Globe — owned by the NY “Behind The” Times — after a few days locks its content away safe from the prying eyes of the populace, here’s the editorial in its entirety:
Virtual virtues
‘Blog” has A strikingly uninspiring sound, as if it were a cousin of blah-blah-blah — a heavy stream of words without much sparkle. But blogs are lighting up the Internet, and the field is getting crowded.
One definition of blog, short for weblog, is that it is a personal journal published on the web. But bloggers aren’t talking to themselves. They’re starting, joining, and changing public conversations about politics, culture, commerce, and people’s personal lives.
Even more striking are the virtual connections among blogs, a dense forest of links, referrals, and attacks that lead from one blog to the next, forming seemingly endless branching streams. Often, who bloggers are and what they do for a living doesn’t matter as much as the power of their persuasion.
Some blogs are bogged down with news only a mother could care about. Others are written by passionate polemicists who see the world’s trends and flaws in ways that are missed by others. They are unregulated and often undisciplined, letting a thousand unverified opinions bloom in the carefree belief that the participatory nature of blogs will eventually correct any errors.
Now the blogosphere, the vast electronic village square, is being invaded by some big mouths. Columnist Arianna Huffington has just launched her own multi-voiced blog, a place where the famous can sound off: from Walter Cronkite telling the Democratic Party to get its act together to Massachusetts’s own Democratic congressman, Ed Markey, writing, ”I wonder how many North Korean nuclear weapons we will have to discover in order for this administration to conclude we can no longer continue to preach nuclear temperance from a barstool.”
Recently The New York Times reported it is exploring the possibility of creating a Times blog ”that promotes a give-and-take with readers while satisfying the standards of our journalism.”
Other newspapers are already there. For example, the Reading Eagle in Pennsylvania hosts blogs written by the paper’s staff, the mayor of Reading, and area residents.
It must be a little daunting to the bloggers — something like what happens when a funky neighborhood with a sleeper reputation becomes gentrified by a parade of new arrivals. The hope is that fresh voices will survive — that the outraged theory-busters and hole-pokers will keep changing the ways that society talks about itself. Like voting, protesting, and debating, blogging can be a key ingredient of democracy. The trick is for the blogging pioneers to take seriously their responsibilities to the town square and resist trashing it with self-indulgent graffiti. That would improve the neighborhood for everyone.
Damn that last paragraph. The writer doesn’t even have the guts to come out and say who hopes that “fresh voices will survive.” Either way, the rest of that sentence undoes the good work of the third paragraph by conflating blogging with “outraged theory busting” and poking holes. The pendulum swings back and we get an uplifting association of blogging with the pillars of democracy. Finally, back the blade swooshes and we get two sentences that pull the editorial from the brink of concluding on a positive note about blogging. Once again, the mainstream media feels it must lecture us “blogging pioneers” (when there are more than 10,000,000 of us, do we still count as pioneers?) about “taking seriously” our “responsibilities.” We are told that we have to resist our urge to trash the town square, to spray it with graffiti, to be self-indulgent. We “pioneers” should be more like the newbies who are gentrifying our little village: The Huffington blog where famous “big mouths” get to talk, the maybe-someday NY Times blog, and the Reading Eagles blog where respectable people like journalists and the major speak.
Note to Globe: You, Huffington, Walter Cronkite, the NY Times and the Mayor of Reading are all welcome in our blogosphere. But your concern that your high-toned bigness might just drown out our wee voices is misplaced. The blogosphere isn’t a town the professionals can buy up; it’s an infinite landscape that will have towns of every sort. We little, irresponsible bloggers are going to continue to find one another and delight in one another. And now and then we’re also going to drop in on the upscale respectable towns — well, not the gated ones, of course — and, yes, sometimes we’ll be carrying cans of spray paint. But we damn well will not be daunted.
An that’s my condescending lecture to The Globe. See how it feels, Globey? [Technorati tags: msm bostonglobe blogs]
Applehas turned the default download of Quicktime into a full download of iTunes. If you want to get Quicktime and only Quicktime, go here. (And when you install it, carefully check the default MIME types Quicktime takes over.)
May 20, 2005
I just heard (!) that the Times is going to start charging $50/year to read its op-ed columnists. (That will also get you access to their archives.) I feel their pain, even as I think it’s the wrong decision.
The Times is watching its value erode. Electronic distribution is only going to become a bigger part of the picture, its readership is exulting in the exposes of the failures of the MSM to provide full and accurate coverage — the real story about the Newsweek brouhaha is why we are so eager to hear about ways the MSM is failing — and the authority of The Times is being challenged by a new news architecture that denies the necessity of having gatekeepers at all. In this face of all this confusion, the Times has made some smart moves, including giving a backdoor to permalinks to its articles and moving towards dynamically building “topic pages” that aggregate information.
This new move, however, is the salmon trying to swim up a perpendicular waterfall. By making us pay to read Krugman, Friedman, et al., the Times asserts the value of its Big Fish experts against the blogging plankton. But what they’re actually doing is withdrawing the authority that those experts were earning in the blogosphere through the power of their speech. Krugman, for example, is 10 times more important as a voice on the Web than as Rapunzel locked in a tower.
Not everything has to be free, and I’m all in favor of The Times making money. But not at the cost of its value. With this move, the Paper of Record is on its way to becoming the Paper of What-Ever-Happened-To? [Technorati tags: nytimes msm]
Ross Mayfield in the comments makes the excellent point that we’re likely to see columnists become bloggers in order to rejoin the fray. We can only hope.
Meanwhile, Joi is worrying that his blog has changed focus and mood without him being aware of it. Rebecca does some excellent bucking up. Here’s mine: Yo, Joi! Your blog reflects you and you don’t ever have to worry about being boring. You’re just otherly interesting. So, buck up, muh friend!
There’s just a whole bunch o’ goodness over at AKMA’s these days, including comments on why anyone would take the Star Wars twaddle seriously, a way not to take Star Wars seriously, a discussion of the difference between narratives and narrative theology, and a new drawing by Pippa. What a terrific blog. [Technorati tag: akma]
Dan Bricklin has started podcasting a series explaining software licensing issues, especially Open Source. I haven’t heard it yet, but obviously Dan knows this stuff. Sounds like a good way to get your pointy-haired boss up to speed on “All this open sauce malarky.”
May 19, 2005
I’m on a 7am flight to NYC on Friday and will spend the day visiting possible publishers of my book. I will be delivering fully dressed geese and money clips as mementos. That’s how things get done in the big city, my friend!
According to The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in March of this year, supplemented by eMarketer, 93% of instructional rooms in public schools have Internet access, a serious rise from just 64% in 1999 and only 3% in 1994. And, the number of schools with broadband connectivity has risen to 95% in 2003.
…The report also determines that as Net connectivity rises in the public school system, the ratio of students to instructional computers has declined. In 1998, the ratio was 12-to-1, but by 2003 that ratio was 4-to-4.
If you want to catch up with what’s going on, read Kim Cameron’s whitepaper (even thought it’s a screen-hostile PDF) and this article by John Fontana. (Thanks to the DigitalID World newsletter.) [Technorati tag: digitalid]
May 18, 2005
I went to Steve Johnson’s book signing event at the Harvard Bookstore tonight. (I’ve blogged about his book here.) He talked engagingly for 30 minutes and then took questions. So, I asked: While some books clearly count as art, could the same ever happen to some video games? He replied that, yes, he thought so, but it wasn’t going to be via narrative. It will be more like architecture, he said, in which the aesthetic value has to do with building complex and beautiful places. He thinks The Sims and Sim City by Wil Wright approach that degree of aesthetic quality already. He also points out that it took a hundred years for Dickens to be appreciated as more than a writer of entertainments. (I’m still not convinced about Dickens, but bought Little Dorrit while I was there on Steve’s recommendation.)
There’s no doubt that video games (e.g., Myst) can be pretty. But beautiful? The truly remarkable thing is that we don’t even know where to look. As Steve says, the first game we’re willing to call art may be architecturally beautiful, but I think it might instead be narrative. Or some mix that hasn’t been discovered yet. We may well argue as fiercely about whether it’s a game as about whether it’s art.
That’s what makes this such a wonderful time: Our ignorance is so thorough and our capacity to be surprised is so deep.
[Technorati tags: SteveJohnson games ebigfy]
By the way, it turns out that Steve is the next speaker in the series that brought me to Naples and Capri. Lucky students, lucky Steve!
And one of the grad students, Gianluca Baccanico, has just launched his own English-language blog where he is going to explore the ideas in the book he;s writing.
A woman just called, asked for me by name, and began her spiel. John Kerry has introduced the Kids Come First bill to expand health care coverage, and would like me to add my name to the other 600,000 citizens who are “co-sponsoring” it. Before I can say OK, she continues that Sen. Kerry would appreciate it if I would pledge one penny for every thousand (million? hundred?) uninsured kid — 11,000 pennies — to continue the campaign to get one million “co-sponsors.”
I know it’s shameful that a modern, wealthy society has such unequal distribution of health services. I don’t know if Kerry’s bill is the best way to go, but I’m willing to “co-sponsor” it because it’s better than what we currently have. So I agreed to be put down as a supporter. (You expect me to become an expert in health care policy before I back a bill? Not gonna happen.)
But I also know that I am sick to death of bills with emotive names, of marketing-driven twists of language that turn supporters into “co-sponsors,” of ending every political statement by begging for cash, and of John Kerry: When you’re beaten by the worst president in modern history — a man who lied us into a war and was caught at it, a man who is poisoning our kids’ planet — you shouldn’t show your face for a whole lot longer. [Technorati tag: kerry]
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