We arrived at my family’s house in the Berkshires to discover that both phones and many of the lights are fried. Apparently, there was a lightning strike. Or maybe it’s just my bad electrical mojo running ahead of me.

So, I had to drive around with Netstumbler to find a working, open wifi hotspot in town. (Yay for free wifi.) It’s gone this afternoon, though. So, I have 12 minutes remaining on the public Internet in the local library. Must type faster…

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Scott Rosenberg writes about the Miami Herald’s absurd code of ethics. Here’s a snip:

For clarity here, let’s distinguish between the unattainable standard of objectivity — a scientific absolute poised as subjectivity’s opposite — and the entirely attainable, and laudable, standards of fairness and accuracy and honesty and transparency that any journalist of good mind and heart will subscribe to. Fairness: If you’re presenting one side of a story, you owe it to your readers, your subjects and yourself to weigh the other side’s case. Accuracy: Observation should always trump preconception, and you just don’t publish something that you know is untrue, even if it helps make an argument you cherish. Honesty: You do your best to present the truth as you have witnessed it and understand it, knowing that your witness and understanding are shaped by who you are, yet also knowing that honesty will sometimes require you to report things that make you uncomfortable or call your own beliefs into question. Transparency: You do your best to avoid financial conflicts of interest, and where you have an unavoidable interest in a story you’re covering, you reveal it up front.

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I seem to be on the other end of the phone in conversation with Halley over at IT Conversations Memory Lane. It all seems like an out-of-body experience now.

Anyway, Halley and I talked mainly about techno-politics, as well as technology and politics, as I recall.

By the way, allow me to answer one of the burning questions we left hanging in the interview: A balustrade is a railing along the front of a gallery.

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Do we have a word for reacting negatively to someone but not trusting your reaction, and then getting stuck in this oscillation of dislike that doesn’t know whether to attach itself to you or to that someone? That’s pretty much my kneejerk reaction to Gerry McGovern’s column on The Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogging.

I agree with much of the article. I think he gets the advantages of corporate blogging right. He says that the old idea of PR as conveying a message doesn’t work on the Web which is a democracy of voices. Cool. I disagree with him on most of what he points to as disadvantages of blogging. But, my negative reaction went beyond a simple disagreement I found myself annoyed. Not a lot but still unreasonably.

So, I poked around just a little more and found a good and a bad reason for my reaction.

The bad reason is that he’s marketing himself as a consultant a zillion times better than I do. (Since I’m a marketing consultant, this is not just ironic, it’s a sign of my incompetence. But let’s not point that out.) He’s got the quotes from happy customers right up front. He gives you permission to republish his article so long as you include a link that says “Gerry McGovern is a web content management author and consultant.” He’s got the “McGovern Scorecard” that benchmarks your site “against best practice.” I have learned that I react negatively to people who promote theselves overtly, and, knowing that about myself, I try to keep it from poisoning my feelings. I mean, I also have a kneejerk reaction against people who wear too much cologne, but you can’t let that distract you from the rest of the person.

The reasonable reason has something to do with what he actually says. We have an honest disagreement about the following:

Organizations are not democracies. The Web makes many organizations look like disorganizations, with multiple tones and opinions. Contrary to what some might think, the average customer prefers it if the organization they are about to purchase from is at least somewhat coherent.

Sure, organizations aren’t democracies, but the alternative isn’t that they look incoherent. IMO, the multiple voices found in corporate blogs make organizations look human. Ok, so we disagree. Good.

But the disagreement goes deeper. Here’s the opening paragraph of the blurb for his book, Content Critical,:

Content Critical will change the way you think about the World Wide Web. It is built upon a simple but profound insight: The Web is a medium for publishing content.

And later:

Content Critical talks about a website as a publication, because that is the primary function of a website. Yes, it’s a different kind of publication. It’s more interactive and transaction-driven than traditional publications, but it’s still a publication. Like all publications it’s a place where people come to be informed about stuff.

Because Gerry thinks of the Web as a publishing medium — not as a conversation, which I still think is the best way to think of it — his book (based on the first chapter, available on his site) is about how to build good content, edit it, winnow out what is unworthy of seeing daylight, and maintaining your site. All useful stuff.

But, if that’s all your company is doing, you’ve missed the big point. You’re a Web narcissist who thinks that you are the center of your product’s universe, that you are the valued source of the bestest and truest information about your product, that your customers actually want to listen to you prattle on rather than dish the dirt with one another. Dish the dirt about you, by the way.

Ok, so I get to ride my ol’ high horse for a paragraph, acting as if my thinking is more advanced than Gerry’s. How fun. Of course, I’m talking to bloggy readers, not to marketing managers at big, traditional corporations. And, by and large, what I’ve seen of Gerry’s writings pulls his clients in (what I consider to be) the right direction. Much of what I disagree with is like what I might say if I ever let reality influence me.

So, I’m at war with my feelings, an unpleasant brew of resentment and smugness. I feel like I’m back being an academic where the only currency is being right and showing everyone else is wrong and not as advanced in their thinking. The result in academics is that the people whose thinking is closest to yours become your most dangerous enemy.

So, when you come down to it, I can’t find a single reason to hold on to any of my negative reaction. Yet, no matter how much I reason, my knees still jerk.

Sometimes it sucks being a human.

Thanks to Vergil Iliescu for the link.

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After an hour of failing to get my in-law’s wifi up again, I was working up a good lather. I had Adelphia dead to rights: I have two wifi access points, a Linksys and a D-link, neither of which was giving me ping, neither of which was giving me a DNS. I have two computers here, both with the same problem. I tried every conceivable setting on both the access points and the computers. Nope nope nope. Adelphia was going to get an earful, I can promise you that!

I decided to try one last reboot of the Adelphia cable modem. And then, I noticed that the ethernet cable from the D-Link was plugged into the Linksys, not into the Adelphia modem. Um. Er. It turns out it works a lot better if you connect the access point to the Internet.

Heck, I may call Adelphia customer support and unload on them anyway. It may be unfair and undeserved, but it’s cheaper than therapy.

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AKMA suggests that every newspaper syndicate Spinsanity. Can we get an amen?!

Or, even better, maybe newspapers could start reporting on what’s true and not just what candidates claim.

Speaking of AKMA, I’m enjoying watching him think through issues around James. This writing and thinking in public, a Web trend accelerated by blogging, is a big deal.

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For the past few months, I’ve been a contributor to the Worthwhile Magazine blog where a bunch o’ bloggers — including Tom Peters, Halley, David Batstone and the magazine’s editors — talk about what makes working worthwhile. Interesting idea (all hail Halley): Do the blog before the magazine.

Now the magazine itself is getting ready to launch in October, and for US$11 you can have a postal employee slap a copy down on your doorstep (or outside your carton depending on how the Bush economic recovery is working out for you) once a month for a year. There’s a subscription button at the WorthwhileMag blog site.

(FWIW, and by way of disclosure: I have a title with the magazine similar to Senior Editor and will be writing a monthly column. And, Anita Sharpe and Kevin Salwen, the founding editors (ex of the WSJ, with a Pulitzer on one of their shelves), have agreed that in lieu of running a photo of me with the column, they’re instead going to include a scratch ‘n’ sniff strip. Win-win!

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It has arrived. I’ve played 10 minutes of it so far. Incredible graphics and scary use of light and darkness. Mainly darkness. Looong load times. Very amusing to see the old Doom characters re-rendered. (Also, there’s a game within a game that’s no fun except it uses an old Doom texture and the face of the original Doom Space Marine.) Also, with a Radeon 9800XT, I’m getting bothersome white speckles in many of the scenes; they come and go in the darkest areas depending on the slightest variation in viewing angle. I thought I had the latest driver installed…

The dynamic lighting is fantastic, and used to great advantage.

Must stop blogging so I can play more…

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Dan Gillmor lists the ways his book is making its way into our intellectual bloodstream. Go Dan! Go We the Media!

Here‘s an interview of Dan by Xeni Jardin.

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Our 13-yr-old son and I climbed to the top of Monument Mountain in the Berkshires a couple of days ago, despite my sloth and fear of heights, and I have the photographical evidence to prove it!

My son at the summit of Monument Mountain

Me at the summit of Monument Mountain

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