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January 25, 2002
Thank you, b!X, for the reply to Jon Katz’s review of my unpublished book. And thank you, too, Steve Giovannetti. And Mike “Question King” Sanders. (And, Doc, for blogging this and for well, being a mensch.)
Thanks also to those who have sent private emails expressing support and puzzlement (and occasional outrage) about Katz’s premature, weird slashdotting.
I blogged about my anxiety about having to give a 3-minute presentation on some new trend, technology or company. I got a few thoughtful replies.
Tony Goodson writes:
Of course this is far from new, but if I look at the Weblogs and the sites I like to read and go to on a daily basis, I realise as I write my own Weblog that to have a paying audience would make a significant difference to time given to my Voice on the Internet. …
I guess you get my drift. Artists of the world get paid for what you do! Surfers of the world pay for what you like! I don’t have a clear way forward on this, but you did ask.
I think Micropayments and the effect they have on the Internet will be the biggest thing, but then again when did a good idea and good technology ever get implemented. I wrote a project on Magnetic Levitation 20 years ago! Good idea. Good Technology. So what?
Yes, micropayments will be huge. Great point.
Halley Suitt counterblogged on the same topic as my original post: weblogs. Here’s a taste: “They are turning a whore back into a virgin, no small task, and preparing the way for a completely new way to work, live, think and prosper.” You go, Halley. (BTW, her blog is most excellent.)
Scott Christensen comes at this rather obliquely:
I hope everything worked out ok with the little talk but what I really wanted to comment on was Cheezits. I’m glad it’s not just me that can consume a vast quantity of Cheezits when under stress. They’re so damn addictive.
You sit and ponder stuff and they seem to fly out of the box into your mouth. It seems that sometimes they have a life of their own and that their only purpose is to be like the moths of the snack food world and leap to their death in your belly.
Of course, the worst thing about the Cheezit eating frenzy is the sudden overwhelming thirst that happens about halfway through the box. A parched desert landscape is better hydrated and I would know because I currently live in Tucson.
So, as I understand it, Scott’s thought is that the most important new phenomenon facing us are animate Cheezits from Hell … just as Bill Joy predicted!
We have a new leader in the Googlewhack Sweepstakes. (A Googlewhack is a pair of words that gets only one hit at Google. To score, you multiple the hits for each word individually.) The leader is RCassidy. The phrase is … well, we’ll save that for the end.
Kevin Marks, who gave us the Marks mark system of scoring, now presents us with a tool for automating the scoring of Googlewhacks. You can download it here. Pocket GoogleWhacker is perfect. Enter your words and it comes back with the score. Well worth the $0.50 Kevin asks in return.
Now, news from Googlewhack’s inventor, Gary Unblinking Stock. His page devoted to the Art and Science of Googlewhacking has become quite lively. And, he is now the proud owner of www.googlewhack.com. Let’s hope that this becomes the new international home of Googlewhackery. Finally, he’s been in a colloquoy with the over-stimulated folks at Mornington Crescent. These are serious gamers who aren’t happy until they’ve complicated matters to the point that the rules themselves become the game. Very amusing discussion.
Now, start up your QuickTime engines and imagine a drum roll. RCassidy gives us:
linux: 48,300,000
checkerspot: 6060
Total Marks mark: 292,698,000,000
Note: We use the Linux Constant since Google has a 5,000,000 point swing in its reported hits on “linux.”
This tops Sam Dionne’s previous high of 151,179,000,000 rather handily. It also beats Steve Ringo’s excellent “hackleback linux” that scores 250,194,000,000. Congratulations Mr. or Ms. RCassidy. Well done!
January 24, 2002
Small Pieces has been slashdotted. Jon Katz has written a goddamn strange review 2.5 months ahead of pub date. It seems to be based on the first 8 pages, although he never acknowledges that he hasn’t read the whole book … in which case: Tsk tsk.
While patting me on the head occasionally (“bright and observant,” “The things he sees are new, interesting and significant”) he puts the book into the Cyber BS category, that is, a book that thinks “that for the Net and the Web to be interesting, they must be portrayed as changing everything about everything”:
… his book also reminds us that this age of Cybertheorizing began to die with the demise of the original Wired. This is bad news for over-heated tech writers and academics feasting on cyber-culture courses. In case Weinberger hasn’t noticed — and he hasn’t, if the book is any indication — the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing. For better or worse, we remain the same people we were.
Ok, that’s not an unreasonable point of view. I disagree with it, but what has me flummoxed is the following:
And he’s quite correct in suggesting that the hyperlinking era the Web begins is astounding, even revolutionary.
If the “hyperlinking era” is astounding and revolutionary, then what’s it changing? Katz seems to say that it’s not changing anything:
In the post dot-com era, we see that the Net and the Web aren’t changing everything about the world, just taking the things people have always liked to do — shop, read, yak, play, masturbate — and making them easier.
Doesn’t sound very astounding to me. My book, on the other hand, argues that the Web is in fact changing the building block concepts of our culture. The ordinary happens to be astonishing on the Web. We get inured to it, but it’s there, even in a simple bidding transaction at eBay.
Jon, Jon, where’s your sense of wonder gone?
[Here’s my reply to Katz at Slashdot.]
Thanks for the supportive blog, Doc.
Dave Rogers, whose blog is full of good stuff, writes in response to our “Free the Broadband” bloggerino:
I agree that great connections for all is a worthy goal that reflects the reasons we fought them Redcoats. “Connect and empower” is my mantra. Yet I’m not sure that the tech industry’s approach is the right one.
Did you see this report from MSNBC? It sure makes me—liberal that I am—queasy. Queasy enough that I blogged on it myself right here and even responded (weakly) to your comments here.
My original bloggerino referenced a draft of a site that David Isenberg and I did, called “The Paradox of the Best Network.” It has a set of suggestions quite similar to what TechNet has come up with.
The difference between Dave and me on this probably comes down to perceived facts. It seems to me that the current regulated environment props up aging telcos that refuse to allow competition in the broadband market. But we may also disagree on the solution: I think opening the market would bring about an era of innovation that would deliver broadband to the vast majority of houses in the nation (and the government ought to step in where the market lacks intrinsic incentives). I’m not sure if this makes me a liberal, a neo-conservative, or just plain wrong, but that’s how it seems to me. There’s also a telco meltdown coming that may require government intervention, primarily to let it happen without melting the economy down with it. And let me conclude this proclamation by noting that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
Davd Rogers also points us to an article by Lawrence Lessig that argues that the legal strictures on copyrighted material are holding up broadband acceptance. Much as I’d like to see changes in the copyright law, I’m not convinced that that’s what’s stopping customer demand for broadband.
Jeneane agrees with what I wrote about weblogs being a way we’re writing ourselves into existence. She adds that the self we’re transforming isn’t simply online:
That is the joy in it for me—not so much the voice, the self I have created through blogging, but how that unleashed voice is transforming me, the person, the flesh and the mind.
100% agreement. In fact, one of the themes of my upcoming book is that the Web is rewriting our real-world concepts. I do find it frustratingly hard, however, to point to real-world examples of effects because they are mainly anecdotal and one never knows what their actual causes are.
Jeneane extends her thinking to gesture toward and ecological view of web self and RW self that she says needs development. Go, Jeneane, go!
January 23, 2002
There’s a discussion on an open discussion board supported by Tivo about whether having such a forum is useful to Tivo even though people air every conceivable (and some inconceivable) gripe. Tivo’s answer: Absolutely.
Full disclosure: I am a deliriously happy Tivo user. Everyone who watches TV should get Tivo the Liberator.
(Thanks to Todd Grinnell for forwarding this.)
Tom Matrullo blogs, beautifully as always, partially in response to my bloggerino about writings as the true avatar. He draws a comparison between blogs and the tradition of the “locus amoenus,” the edenic walled garden into which the hero withdraws for “a brief respite from the shocks and artillery fire of everyday life.” Tom’s tenatively-offered conclusion:
If one attempts to account for the enormous investment of time, energy and other resources that is currently going into blogging, it’s worth considering that more may be at stake here than meets the eye (or, I). The marketplace of messages in which we live is a kind of battleground from which we sometimes need to recuse ourselves in order to find again some notion of who we are. Because as Ariosto knew, this recreative entertainment of the self is not found in the clash of steel or the entropy of market dynamics. It comes alive in the folie of play.
That seems to me to be completely right, at least for some category of blogging. (We shouldn’t forget the teen-age boys who are blogging in order to impress girls.) And the introduction of play into the heart of the self comes with the Web: “The price of admission: Your selves.” But, while I hadn’t heard of the locus amoenus and loved learning about it, it seems too walled and private to be a metaphor for blogs. We blog in public. That’s in fact where the playfulness enters into it: we try on ideas, moods, figures of speech, and personae in public.
Not only is the Web putting play at the heart of the self, it’s also showing us — I hope — that our “real” self is not the self apart from others (taking a pastoral stroll, perhaps, in our walled garden) but is the self engaged with others.
Gary Unblinking Stock points us to a collection of dreams about 9-11. They range from the eerie to the funny to the possiblyphony.
Saltire blogs today about David Dwyer of New Riders, “Publishing Voices that Matter.” Saltire praises Dwyer’s passion and points to a quote from Dwyer that suggests a really useful criterion: “I care about your opinions as long as they’ve been formed by reliable sources outside of our building.” St. Ken Kesey’s idea that you’re either on the bus or off the bus has a certain commit-or-be-damned feel going for it, but too much time on the bus can wear away at your evidentiary base (as Kesey certainly wouldn’t have put it). And, although Saltire is nice enough to point out that the one book that Dwyer recommended in his presentation to Saltire’s students was The Cluetrain Manifesto, the same has to be true of spending too much time on the Cluetrain. Yeah, markets are definitely conversations, and so is the Web and so is much of business. But they’re also not conversations, just on the general principle that nothing is only one thing. Mysticism? Nah, the enabling ambiguity of language.
(By the way, the full text of the book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, is online here.)
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