Sunday, December 10, 2006
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Just a couple more things
I want to return, if we have time, to Swarm Intelligence, aka the hive mind, aka digital maoism. Read that essay and these responses. A lot to chew on.
And then, if you want to follow the advertising boys better, here's a good site to visit. I use it a lot these days.
And then, if you want to follow the advertising boys better, here's a good site to visit. I use it a lot these days.
Jeez, Is He EVER Gonna Post About the Last Class???
Finally, yes. One question that has been nagging me a bit is this: Are blogs an exciting new medium now the way they were scant years ago? The answer is yes only if people are finding new ways to work with them. Take a look at these, which represent, in most cases, attempts to tweak the way a blog works.
Also coming to the last class will be Steve Wolfberg and Tom Bradley from Cronin to talk about the imact of all this new media on the advertising world and about what works and what doesn't.
Also coming to the last class will be Steve Wolfberg and Tom Bradley from Cronin to talk about the imact of all this new media on the advertising world and about what works and what doesn't.
Monday, December 04, 2006
SNS Live
An aside: with each passing day I realize I am not really qualified to teach this class. Look at the conferences I don't go to. Hey, lots of people had lots to say this week, so check out everybody else's stuff. I''m just going to make sure we have quick cuts to MySpace, LiveJòurnal, Friendster, Facebook, and ... God help me ...it turns out we're old and ugly and marking time until death ...eons. Sara thought LJ had some interesting communities of interest, but I would observe that Wikia may be doing the same subject better. Certainly, this is Sara's idea of heaven. I wonder if the smaller, more lcosed model may ultimately be mre effective. Renee pointed out this.
B to the Lizzogg
My man Scotty-B kept it real this week. Chck out his blog and click on all the lizz-inks. Especially 'Sheed. Wud up, 'Sheed?
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Blogger Still Broken.
Can't believe I have to handcode.
OK, This article from the WSJ gives you some sense of the problem facing something like MySpace. Scale. Scale. Scale. And spam and inauthenticity.
This article may be even more paranoid than Jason Scott. I'm just tossing it in here for the hell of it.
This sort of gives you a sample of how much information you can move on one MySpace page. (I'm just waiting for the "I never meant this to beused in a class!" wail.
But it's not all young people getting personal, huh? WARNING, the scary song does not go away right away. And also, this is just kind of scary in general.
OK, This article from the WSJ gives you some sense of the problem facing something like MySpace. Scale. Scale. Scale. And spam and inauthenticity.
This article may be even more paranoid than Jason Scott. I'm just tossing it in here for the hell of it.
This sort of gives you a sample of how much information you can move on one MySpace page. (I'm just waiting for the "I never meant this to beused in a class!" wail.
But it's not all young people getting personal, huh? WARNING, the scary song does not go away right away. And also, this is just kind of scary in general.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
This Week
I hope it is needless for me to say that this week, as we study MySpace and other social networking sites, you really have to put your toe into at least one, especially if you have never joined one before. I joined Eons, which is proving to be kind of boring. But look at them all. And then REALLY look at at least one.
There's starting to be a fair amount of scholarship about all this.
This guy focuses on Facebook.
I would give you more, but blogger is sort of broken at the moment and I am having to hand code in the links.
There's starting to be a fair amount of scholarship about all this.
This guy focuses on Facebook.
I would give you more, but blogger is sort of broken at the moment and I am having to hand code in the links.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Communities
The brash and brazen -- but nonetheless helpful -- Suzan has found a very good article for us to read.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
We've done it again!
We have upset somebody, although I am, frankly, surprised this time, inasmuch as I spent the last ten minutes of class raving (semi-incoherently) about how great this was.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Lucy in the Sky
This person could easily be a big star in blogging, IMHO. I'm going to keep my eye on her. Thanks, Cosmo. Boy, livejournal never looked so bangin', huh?
Sunday, November 26, 2006
The Kind of Blog That Pisses Scott Off...Pisses Off Scott?
I was looking at a lot of art in New York City this weekend ... at MoMa and in the galleries around Chelsea too. And it made me think about blogs-as-art. And whether bloggers are just kind of opting-out of artistry. From the Steve Himmer essay I linked below:
The latitude allowed a weblogger, over time, to unfold the many aspects of his or her life and personality, and to do so in the same space in which they offer commentary on politics and culture, is a luxury not afforded to journalists or even novelists: discrete, commodifiable work requires a purpose, a point, or at the very least a markable focus. This is not to say, however, that the self presented on a weblog is a “complete” or even an accurate one: just as in journalism, memoir, or fiction, decisions are made about what to include and what to exclude. The weblogger, in that sense, can be read as fictional, as a character, in precisely the same ways that Andy Rooney or James Joyce can be—furthering the collapse between factual and fictional, public and private, and distinct genres in general. The play of time in the weblog allows for the presence of what Walter Benjamin calls an “aura,” the work’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence” (p. 222). The weblog—rather, the weblog as it was in the moment before the most recent addition or change—cannot be reproduced: it is inextricably bound with its moment of production, and that moment is lost when a new moment occurs in its place.
But that got me to thinking about a potentially Scott-off-pissing blog about which last year's class obsessed for a while. We went back to its beginning and thumbed around in it and could not decide how much of it was real. Since then, I see she kept it going, though a title change that happened right here. And here it is today. But she seems to epitomize some of the issues discussed in the essay, which continues:
That the weblog is always in process, never completed, can be read as both its greatest strength and, in another way, its weakness as a form. Burger (1995) argues that the project of the avant-garde is to collapse the distinction between the art object and the process of its creation, that art (and the creation of art) should be integrated into the practice of everyday life. “What is negated,” Burger writes,
is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men. When the avant-gardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean that the contents of works of art should be socially significant. The demand is not raised at the level of the contents of individual works. Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effects that works have as does the particular content. (p. 49)
The latitude allowed a weblogger, over time, to unfold the many aspects of his or her life and personality, and to do so in the same space in which they offer commentary on politics and culture, is a luxury not afforded to journalists or even novelists: discrete, commodifiable work requires a purpose, a point, or at the very least a markable focus. This is not to say, however, that the self presented on a weblog is a “complete” or even an accurate one: just as in journalism, memoir, or fiction, decisions are made about what to include and what to exclude. The weblogger, in that sense, can be read as fictional, as a character, in precisely the same ways that Andy Rooney or James Joyce can be—furthering the collapse between factual and fictional, public and private, and distinct genres in general. The play of time in the weblog allows for the presence of what Walter Benjamin calls an “aura,” the work’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence” (p. 222). The weblog—rather, the weblog as it was in the moment before the most recent addition or change—cannot be reproduced: it is inextricably bound with its moment of production, and that moment is lost when a new moment occurs in its place.
But that got me to thinking about a potentially Scott-off-pissing blog about which last year's class obsessed for a while. We went back to its beginning and thumbed around in it and could not decide how much of it was real. Since then, I see she kept it going, though a title change that happened right here. And here it is today. But she seems to epitomize some of the issues discussed in the essay, which continues:
That the weblog is always in process, never completed, can be read as both its greatest strength and, in another way, its weakness as a form. Burger (1995) argues that the project of the avant-garde is to collapse the distinction between the art object and the process of its creation, that art (and the creation of art) should be integrated into the practice of everyday life. “What is negated,” Burger writes,
is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men. When the avant-gardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean that the contents of works of art should be socially significant. The demand is not raised at the level of the contents of individual works. Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effects that works have as does the particular content. (p. 49)
Alchemy
As I read Caitlin's "friend," I struggle with the question of what he is doing. Creating blogerature or creating relationships? Make sure you check out how he handles comment threads. And then also read this.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Out of the mouths of sloths ...
Ignoring the part about my car, read Caitlin's musing about wordsmithery, and check out the blog she likes.
Blogging style
On the subject of rhetoric and style, read this post by Jill Walker, who appears to be teaching blogs a lot better than I am, in Norway. You might want to poke around her blog, in general. Oh. Happy Hopetaking. A new holiday I am promoting, mainly internally.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Also you must read ...
This study of how people handle their templates seems to have been done in 2003. I wonder if tendencies have changed more recently.
The Visual and Rhetorical Elements of Blogging Style
Jim has been wondering about the visual elements of blogging. Let's start with this lengthy and remarkable essay about that.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Poetry?
I kind of like this: As a literate, civil, rational spokesman for modernity (though in the guise of an ancient sage), Publius cannot move some loyalties. He cannot counter or satisfy some human longings. It would be idle to wonder how a full-blown, spiritually satisfying constitution might have emerged in the 1780s, harmonized by an American Milton. The nature of the American experience was to begin anew, try an experiment, cast off crown and pulpit by calling upon modern newspaper prose to justify a new departure. The poetry of such a changed world would have to emerge, […] through experience, time, and feeling. But the first large step is bare law; devoid of the grace of imagery, softened only by the long deliberation and free discussion, and opening a dangerous discontinuity between old authorities and new. [ix]
It may be that the poetry that we were to wait for was right before our eyes in Publius and that we continue to provide for its emergence as we remain open to the richness of the pseudonym.
It may be that the poetry that we were to wait for was right before our eyes in Publius and that we continue to provide for its emergence as we remain open to the richness of the pseudonym.
Other cool things you blogged
jim Blogging has interested me for two reasons: it allows access to new, broad, unique sources of information; and it creates a space to explore information and to express my thoughts about the information. I now have two blogs and plan on creating another in a few months. This blog is for class, but it’s also to document my thoughts and feelings. My second blog is to document my class, to connect the text to other ideas, and to explore or express my interpretation of the text. The blogs help my feeder instinct.
jim 2 The article in today’s Courant only reinforces my opinion about him. I can relate to his information driven style and the way he weaves it into a story. The interesting stuff is, many times, in the small details of history. I’m a history buff and always am struck but how such huge events turn on some small detail – a captured missive, animosity between two people, illness, egos. I have to wonder, though, would Chris have been able to achieve his current status without blogging. I would so not. I think he is a creature of this media and his knowledge had given him a unique edge, which, by the way, benefits all of us since we need people like him and his colleagues to open new doors to old rooms.
rene: I obviously have more experience being and information seeker. Becoming a person who spreads information is a little disconcerting for me, since I tend to seek information that interest me and what I would share with others would be totally subjective and biased. Reminds me of something…Blogs.Going forward, I think that I will evolve into an online advocate for a cause. I would like to blog and find sites that are concerned with the public good of society. I surmise that I would be more inclined to spread information about a particular cause/interest if I am passionate about the topic.
scott:
First, on the fact that we refer to them as bloggers - we had a hard time adjusting to their "real" names - this is purely speculative and theoretical, but where DO they exist? For us, at least, their existence was purely as information, as an electronic media. They were not people, but they were their blogs. Look at Alden, for example: With a Longfellow Beard like he had just come out of a solitary time in the woods (or the wilderness of the electronic world), and wearing a shirt on which was stitched the word "Blogger" where a nametag would normally go. When he first visited class, I wasn't there, but I read about how he himself was like a blog...what came first, the blog or the brain?Why were we so freaked out when Jason Scott showed up? Because we, foolishly could not reconcile the hyperreal with the real.Alden, I'm sure you and other people who were in our class will read this - and I don't intend to criticize you or your fellow bloggers, marginalize you, or discredit the things you do do, working for the Dean campaign, or in the case of Spazeboy, following politicians around with cameras and being a full-time student. These are just musings, more about our perceptions of existence, not existence itself.
jim 2 The article in today’s Courant only reinforces my opinion about him. I can relate to his information driven style and the way he weaves it into a story. The interesting stuff is, many times, in the small details of history. I’m a history buff and always am struck but how such huge events turn on some small detail – a captured missive, animosity between two people, illness, egos. I have to wonder, though, would Chris have been able to achieve his current status without blogging. I would so not. I think he is a creature of this media and his knowledge had given him a unique edge, which, by the way, benefits all of us since we need people like him and his colleagues to open new doors to old rooms.
rene: I obviously have more experience being and information seeker. Becoming a person who spreads information is a little disconcerting for me, since I tend to seek information that interest me and what I would share with others would be totally subjective and biased. Reminds me of something…Blogs.Going forward, I think that I will evolve into an online advocate for a cause. I would like to blog and find sites that are concerned with the public good of society. I surmise that I would be more inclined to spread information about a particular cause/interest if I am passionate about the topic.
scott:
First, on the fact that we refer to them as bloggers - we had a hard time adjusting to their "real" names - this is purely speculative and theoretical, but where DO they exist? For us, at least, their existence was purely as information, as an electronic media. They were not people, but they were their blogs. Look at Alden, for example: With a Longfellow Beard like he had just come out of a solitary time in the woods (or the wilderness of the electronic world), and wearing a shirt on which was stitched the word "Blogger" where a nametag would normally go. When he first visited class, I wasn't there, but I read about how he himself was like a blog...what came first, the blog or the brain?Why were we so freaked out when Jason Scott showed up? Because we, foolishly could not reconcile the hyperreal with the real.Alden, I'm sure you and other people who were in our class will read this - and I don't intend to criticize you or your fellow bloggers, marginalize you, or discredit the things you do do, working for the Dean campaign, or in the case of Spazeboy, following politicians around with cameras and being a full-time student. These are just musings, more about our perceptions of existence, not existence itself.
Chrs wonders
How many bloggers really get fired.
It does demonstrate some of the fear surrounding a new medium. It feels to me that a few memes were perpetuated about blogs early on. Remember the reports of people getting fired for writing about their jobs online? Probably true. Possibly overreactive by the employers and more than likely a less-than-smart move on the part of the employee. But these couple of cases caused a near panic in the uninitiated. "What's this blog? I don't even know what a blog is." I feel we get panicky about our privacy in this country. So, it naturally follows that in a soul-baring medium like the online journal, this is a hot topic.
It does demonstrate some of the fear surrounding a new medium. It feels to me that a few memes were perpetuated about blogs early on. Remember the reports of people getting fired for writing about their jobs online? Probably true. Possibly overreactive by the employers and more than likely a less-than-smart move on the part of the employee. But these couple of cases caused a near panic in the uninitiated. "What's this blog? I don't even know what a blog is." I feel we get panicky about our privacy in this country. So, it naturally follows that in a soul-baring medium like the online journal, this is a hot topic.
Nurse Knott on Dr. Crazy
Ooooooh. Maybe we will connect it all up in class, but I like the way stuff is sloshing togther here. Scott's musings on the real and hyperreal, and Brenda's exchange with Aldon about being a McMeme and then Jennie -- make sure you read the final paragraph.
Joe SqPnts: Blogging anonymity may provide a buffer to some of that, but as some of us found out with Jason, it's not a License to Kill with words. The persona, I believe, develops as we become more public with our writing, and we are able to judge upon the favorable and objectionable reactions to the things.
Sara on personae -- in a way that reinforces Caitlin's argument about the Romantic self: They all hint at certain qualities of the blogger, either real or desired. So I think that pseudonyms, though commonly used to maintain anonymity, are chosen as a sort of mark or brand. A "hey, this is me" kind of thing. Of course, there are probably many instances where this is not true, but I think that because there's always some desire to personalize what you write and what you create, to mark it in some unique way, to own it or at least attach yourself to it, pseudonyms represent the blogger, if not identify them.
Jill notices the way CGG manages her persona: First of all, I want to remark about how impressed I am with how tight-lipped CGG is about the specifics of her personal life. She certainly speaks about her personal life (congrats on the wedding!) but without any proper names of anyone or anything. Even her fiance is known only as "SO," and it wasn't until I backtracked for a month or two that I noticed that her significant other was given a masculine pronoun. And yet, her entries are very free-flowing and natural. I don't think I could do that- my entries would probably look like a letter revised by the military, with REDACTED awkwardly replacing half of the good stuff. So sorry friends- if you're in my life, you're probably in my LJ.
Hey did we know Brenda was really funny?
I would think your blogger name would get pretty tiring after awhile (it sounded good after three glasses of wine but what does “bitchkitty” actually mean?). Like the Halloween costume with the plastic thread that starts to itch, I’d think you’d be ready to take the thing off and get comfortable in sweats.
Joe SqPnts: Blogging anonymity may provide a buffer to some of that, but as some of us found out with Jason, it's not a License to Kill with words. The persona, I believe, develops as we become more public with our writing, and we are able to judge upon the favorable and objectionable reactions to the things.
Sara on personae -- in a way that reinforces Caitlin's argument about the Romantic self: They all hint at certain qualities of the blogger, either real or desired. So I think that pseudonyms, though commonly used to maintain anonymity, are chosen as a sort of mark or brand. A "hey, this is me" kind of thing. Of course, there are probably many instances where this is not true, but I think that because there's always some desire to personalize what you write and what you create, to mark it in some unique way, to own it or at least attach yourself to it, pseudonyms represent the blogger, if not identify them.
Jill notices the way CGG manages her persona: First of all, I want to remark about how impressed I am with how tight-lipped CGG is about the specifics of her personal life. She certainly speaks about her personal life (congrats on the wedding!) but without any proper names of anyone or anything. Even her fiance is known only as "SO," and it wasn't until I backtracked for a month or two that I noticed that her significant other was given a masculine pronoun. And yet, her entries are very free-flowing and natural. I don't think I could do that- my entries would probably look like a letter revised by the military, with REDACTED awkwardly replacing half of the good stuff. So sorry friends- if you're in my life, you're probably in my LJ.
Hey did we know Brenda was really funny?
I would think your blogger name would get pretty tiring after awhile (it sounded good after three glasses of wine but what does “bitchkitty” actually mean?). Like the Halloween costume with the plastic thread that starts to itch, I’d think you’d be ready to take the thing off and get comfortable in sweats.
The Scarlet Pimpernel Phenomenon
I'm pretty sure 2/3 of the women in this class have crushes on SpazeBoy.
Dr. Crazy Speaks!!
As for my situation, some background: First of all, this isn't the first time I've outed myself! It was the first time I was outed by another blogger (though that was innocent, actually), but I was threatened by someone with potentially being outed last year. The threat of being outed definitely changed my voice as a blogger.
My first version of my blog (at another address) tended to be a bit harsher, and when somebody threatened to out me, I really did a lot of soul-searching about whether that was a persona I was comfortable with revealing to the outside world, especially as I talk about issues related to my profession. That was when I moved over to reassigned time, and I am very comfortable with my persona in that space.
My reasons for keeping the pseudonym are basically that I do feel a greater comfort level with posting spontaneously, and that is important, I think, to the genre. If I wanted to write a series of essays, or if I wanted to write only about my academic field of specialty, I don't think that I'd choose to do so on a blog mainly because I'd want to publish that material in a more traditional form. Blogging works for me precisely because I keep it separate from my professional writing life, even though I touch on issues related to my profession in posts and even though I do feel that blogging is central to keeping me engaged in my profession.
I suppose a good analogy to make would be that the difference between writing for publication and blogging is much like the difference between participating in classroom formal classroom discussion and chatting with friends about something that you're thinking about related to a class that you're taking. In the conversation with friends, you're more free to try out ideas without worrying about what effect they'll have on your grade; in blogging, you're more free to try out ideas without worrying what effect they'll have on your prospects for tenure or your professional reputation.
That's not to say that one is unaware of audience or that one doesn't want to do good posts. It's more to say that one can be a bit more rough around the edges and that it's productive to have a space with an actual audience in which to be rough around the edges. Ultimately, I don't think that all of the drama of this week will affect my blogging much. I think if anything it's had a positive effect - more readers have come out of the woodwork to post comments, and I've gotten a lot of support in the endeavor that my blog has become. I'm under no illusions that I can keep my real life identity "secret" - that's not been what this is about for me. I think it's more that I want to keep this space what I want it to be, and for now, the way to do that is to keep my real life identity a kind of open secret, if that makes any sense. I've never aspired to be a "big blog" and I have no interest in becoming some sort of professional blogger.
The fact that as many people have found my blog and read it as they do is a constant source of amazement to me - I can't honestly believe so many people are interested! - but I do like the community of bloggers of which I am a part, and I like that this is one writing space for me that is not bound up with achievement even though it is writing for an audience.I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll stop. Feel free to share this comment with your students (whether on the blog or in class), and if they have questions for me, you can feel free to email them along to me and I'll try to respond to them if I can.
Thanks for the note, and I'm glad that my drama is being used for a good purpose!Dr. Crazy
My first version of my blog (at another address) tended to be a bit harsher, and when somebody threatened to out me, I really did a lot of soul-searching about whether that was a persona I was comfortable with revealing to the outside world, especially as I talk about issues related to my profession. That was when I moved over to reassigned time, and I am very comfortable with my persona in that space.
My reasons for keeping the pseudonym are basically that I do feel a greater comfort level with posting spontaneously, and that is important, I think, to the genre. If I wanted to write a series of essays, or if I wanted to write only about my academic field of specialty, I don't think that I'd choose to do so on a blog mainly because I'd want to publish that material in a more traditional form. Blogging works for me precisely because I keep it separate from my professional writing life, even though I touch on issues related to my profession in posts and even though I do feel that blogging is central to keeping me engaged in my profession.
I suppose a good analogy to make would be that the difference between writing for publication and blogging is much like the difference between participating in classroom formal classroom discussion and chatting with friends about something that you're thinking about related to a class that you're taking. In the conversation with friends, you're more free to try out ideas without worrying about what effect they'll have on your grade; in blogging, you're more free to try out ideas without worrying what effect they'll have on your prospects for tenure or your professional reputation.
That's not to say that one is unaware of audience or that one doesn't want to do good posts. It's more to say that one can be a bit more rough around the edges and that it's productive to have a space with an actual audience in which to be rough around the edges. Ultimately, I don't think that all of the drama of this week will affect my blogging much. I think if anything it's had a positive effect - more readers have come out of the woodwork to post comments, and I've gotten a lot of support in the endeavor that my blog has become. I'm under no illusions that I can keep my real life identity "secret" - that's not been what this is about for me. I think it's more that I want to keep this space what I want it to be, and for now, the way to do that is to keep my real life identity a kind of open secret, if that makes any sense. I've never aspired to be a "big blog" and I have no interest in becoming some sort of professional blogger.
The fact that as many people have found my blog and read it as they do is a constant source of amazement to me - I can't honestly believe so many people are interested! - but I do like the community of bloggers of which I am a part, and I like that this is one writing space for me that is not bound up with achievement even though it is writing for an audience.I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll stop. Feel free to share this comment with your students (whether on the blog or in class), and if they have questions for me, you can feel free to email them along to me and I'll try to respond to them if I can.
Thanks for the note, and I'm glad that my drama is being used for a good purpose!Dr. Crazy
Empowerment of the Humble
Check out today's New York Times page one story about a blog. Money 'graph:
Perhaps this is what the techno-geeks had in mind when they invented the Internet — a device to squash not only time and space, but also social class and professional hierarchies, putting an unprepossessing Maryland college student with several term papers due in a position to command the attention and grudging respect of some of society’s most famous and powerful personalities.
Perhaps this is what the techno-geeks had in mind when they invented the Internet — a device to squash not only time and space, but also social class and professional hierarchies, putting an unprepossessing Maryland college student with several term papers due in a position to command the attention and grudging respect of some of society’s most famous and powerful personalities.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
ANONYMITY, PERSONAE, PSEUDOYNMS -- PART FOUR
Here's a Daily Kos alum. Nobody knows who he really is. Here's a discussion of who he is. Read the comment thread.
Here's kind of an uberdiscussion of our topic. Read that comment thread. And it links to this.
Key comments:
Anonymity (including pseudonymity) does much good online. It also allows bad things to happen, but so does free speech. Before we tinker with the defaults, we ought to at least recognize what we may be giving up in the realms of (1) the political, (2) the social, and (3) the personal.
1. Anonymity allows people to say and do things that those in power don't like. It enables dissidents to speak and whistleblowers to blow their whistles.
2. Anonymity allows people to say and learn about things from which social conventions otherwise would bar them. It helps a confused teen explore gender issues.
3. Anonymity (and especially pseudonymity) enables a type of playing with our selves (yes, I know what I just said) that may turn out to be transformative of culture and society.
Anonymity also allows some awful things to happen more easily, but we can't fairly decide what we want to do about it unless we also acknowledge its benefits. Just as with free speech
Here's kind of an uberdiscussion of our topic. Read that comment thread. And it links to this.
Key comments:
Anonymity (including pseudonymity) does much good online. It also allows bad things to happen, but so does free speech. Before we tinker with the defaults, we ought to at least recognize what we may be giving up in the realms of (1) the political, (2) the social, and (3) the personal.
1. Anonymity allows people to say and do things that those in power don't like. It enables dissidents to speak and whistleblowers to blow their whistles.
2. Anonymity allows people to say and learn about things from which social conventions otherwise would bar them. It helps a confused teen explore gender issues.
3. Anonymity (and especially pseudonymity) enables a type of playing with our selves (yes, I know what I just said) that may turn out to be transformative of culture and society.
Anonymity also allows some awful things to happen more easily, but we can't fairly decide what we want to do about it unless we also acknowledge its benefits. Just as with free speech
Saturday, November 18, 2006
ANONYMITY, PERSONAE, PSEUDOYNMS -- PART THREE
This is kind of nutsy and boltsy, as opposed to Romantic (pace, Caitlin!); but we're not opposed to nuts and bolts.
And of course, there's a blog that's about, at least nominally, anonymity. This one post in particular was helpful, I thought.
And this has nothing to do with what we're talking about this week, but I just found it and thought you should know about it.
And of course, there's a blog that's about, at least nominally, anonymity. This one post in particular was helpful, I thought.
And this has nothing to do with what we're talking about this week, but I just found it and thought you should know about it.
ANONYMITY, PERSONAE, PSEUDOYNMS -- PART TWO
Dr. Crazy's comment thread led me to this blog with its "bizarre alias." Browse the blog a little -- it's quite engaging -- and ponder the role the alias plays in the the creation of all that is created. From her About Me:
Yes, this really is yet another blog by a disgruntled grad student. I sympathize, but that's just the way it has to be. For hints as to what my bizarre alias means, click here and here and, if needed, here and here. To get a sense of what I'm up to, feel free to check out the sections called "Toward a Wiseass Creed" and "Showings: Some Introductory Wiseassery" in my main blog's left-hand sidebar.
She too has pondered the pseudonym question. In fact, the academic blogs were kind of convulsed by a meme about it last winter.
Yes, this really is yet another blog by a disgruntled grad student. I sympathize, but that's just the way it has to be. For hints as to what my bizarre alias means, click here and here and, if needed, here and here. To get a sense of what I'm up to, feel free to check out the sections called "Toward a Wiseass Creed" and "Showings: Some Introductory Wiseassery" in my main blog's left-hand sidebar.
She too has pondered the pseudonym question. In fact, the academic blogs were kind of convulsed by a meme about it last winter.
ANONYMITY, PERSONAE, PSEUDOYNMS
NEW ASSIGMENT: You know, last week, when all the guest bloggers were here, two things happened that connect me to this week's area of concentration.
1. Trinity's PR department wanted to invite one member of the press to attend. Which meant that I had to ask the bloggers how they felt about that. Some of them didn't want the Hartford Courant in the room. So I told the newspaper to stay home. But before we even reached that point, the PR department was emailing me to ask which bloggers were coming; and I wrote back, "SpazeBoy, Caffeineted Geek Girl, Genghis Conn ..." And she wrote back, "And they would be ...?" And I refused to elaborate, because there's a kind of finality to blog persona. If you're going to look at blogs, you're going to deal with those personae. But it piqued my interest, as did the bloggers preference that the MSM stay away.
2. And then Gabe, who stayed with us only briefly, said something about why he thinks it's important to use his own name. And that made me realize we have never plunged into this whole area.
Consider this academic blogger who, in February, had a few sharp things to say about her persona.
Now read her current postings. You need to scroll down a few days to see she accidentally outed hereself in a posting, which touched off a series of musings yet again on the issue of anonymity.
We will read and think more about that in the next few days.
We welcome and encourage comments and meddling by outside bloggers.
1. Trinity's PR department wanted to invite one member of the press to attend. Which meant that I had to ask the bloggers how they felt about that. Some of them didn't want the Hartford Courant in the room. So I told the newspaper to stay home. But before we even reached that point, the PR department was emailing me to ask which bloggers were coming; and I wrote back, "SpazeBoy, Caffeineted Geek Girl, Genghis Conn ..." And she wrote back, "And they would be ...?" And I refused to elaborate, because there's a kind of finality to blog persona. If you're going to look at blogs, you're going to deal with those personae. But it piqued my interest, as did the bloggers preference that the MSM stay away.
2. And then Gabe, who stayed with us only briefly, said something about why he thinks it's important to use his own name. And that made me realize we have never plunged into this whole area.
Consider this academic blogger who, in February, had a few sharp things to say about her persona.
Now read her current postings. You need to scroll down a few days to see she accidentally outed hereself in a posting, which touched off a series of musings yet again on the issue of anonymity.
We will read and think more about that in the next few days.
We welcome and encourage comments and meddling by outside bloggers.
Saturday!!
Sorry to be playing catch-up on the weekend. Check this site after 1 p.m. today for some new details on stuff we will discuss this week. I did go to see Jimmy Wales, by the way.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Now That You've All Done That First Assignment...
...describing your own relationship to information, try a second. Post a description of one (or all) of the bloggers you met Monday night. What are THEY trying to do? What's their mission? If you focus on one person but feel you don't know enough, you can always ask questions through a comment on their blogs or email them .
Monday, November 13, 2006
In the words of Ron Burgundy...
... You stay classy, Blogging class! This was your finest night so far. I think the "Others" were impressed with your questions and ideas, and so was I. Nights like this one are why I teach. Thanks to the CT bloggers for showing up.
So ... what is your relationship to information?
So ... what is your relationship to information?
Saturday, November 11, 2006
CT Blogger Zombies
They are coming. Many of them are coming. And they read your blogs. So read their stuff. Lamontblog, Connecticut Local Politics, Caffeinated Geek Girl, Spazeboy, Connecticut Bob, et al. Read MyDD and Kos again. And blog some homework about them. And get your questions ready. And interesting thought: did "netroots"happen as a matter of intention or did the activity come first, with an overarching name for it applied later?
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Politix and Apologia
I am so sorry about Monday night. Believe me, if I could have had it otherwise, I would have. I seem rather star-crossed this fall. But my family emerged frim its latest trial basically unscathed. Meanwhile, the next class is not to be missed. Every manner of CT political blogger will be there. Well, that's not quite true, but all kind of folks are showing up in large numbers. So, meanwhile, go back to all the sites that covered Lieberman, Lamont and the rest of the election and refresh your memories.
Monday, November 06, 2006
For class
In this post, we read one vision of what the web can be. But how do you set up rules to make it work? .
Or is it?
This post by Scott seems to go with this post by Steph, at least in the sense that blogging dispenses with the illusion on imprtiality. Disclosure is everything.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
OK, my head is spinning
There's actually quite a lot of discussion out there in the blogopshere about what is right and what is not. Consider this account of digg -- remember digg? -- and whether its founder as honored the principle of conversation. But digg is also a place where there has been a lot of discussion of the site TechCrunch and whether it broke a rule by altering a post (at least, I think that's the problem ....some of this stuff is like walking into the middle of a movie). And then there's the recent scandal in which bloggers turned out to be working for Wal-Mart. I'm floored even by the idea that there's something called WOMMA which apparently tries to create ethics for the viral marketing crowd.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
It seems to me that attempts to create any kind of code all sort of resemble on another and maybe don't address the issues of the sheer wildness of unsupervised blgging. Meanwhile, I think one of the key areas is privacy and use of information. When you look here, make sure to click on the Rosen NYT article. That gives us a lot to go on. But, in a way, we're a living lab right here. What can you post about what goes in in class and out of class? Everything? What kinds of protections do we have. What happens when Jason (or somebody) reads something and wants to meet us?
In this interview, Jay Rosen -- different Rosen -- offers this:
You speak of a “low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author.” But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.
What some people can’t seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems—and professional journalism is one—develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable
In this interview, Jay Rosen -- different Rosen -- offers this:
You speak of a “low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author.” But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.
What some people can’t seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems—and professional journalism is one—develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable
Ethics?
I think Brenda has got some pretty cool ideas, and I especially think we ould spend a little time talking about ethics for bloggers, especially because some of you were a little freaked by Jason. The next step, I would think would be wondering what the rules are. So look at Brenda''s stuff. I think one of my last year's people wrote a paper on this. The question is, do I still have it?
Good Suggestions!
I'll spend the afternoon kind of organizing them. Just to clarify, I had planned to take one last quick snapshot of blogs for thisMonday; but the big class on blogs and the election will be the 13th, a post-mortem attended by as many political bloggers as I can round up. I'll be with a lot of them in Meriden on Tuesday night and will pass out invitations and directions.
But, yes, let's take the quick pre-election snapshot right now, so visit Kos and MyDD and some of the local blogs. If you need a refresher on them I can provide one.
But, yes, let's take the quick pre-election snapshot right now, so visit Kos and MyDD and some of the local blogs. If you need a refresher on them I can provide one.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Input!
I'm not sure I'll get any answers, but what would you like to discuss on Nov. 6? I have big plans for Nov. 13, but I'm kind of open to paths you might like to follow right now. Humor and rhetoric are temporarily on the plate, but I really could adapt if somebody wanted to go somewhere else. Don't be afraid to share. It's very bloggish to do so. Tell me what you think we should read and discuss this week.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
And Bill Gates Said Hah!
I don't really know what to teach this week.
So what is it about blogging and humor? Many of you probably know this site dedicated to mocking the political elite. But do you know this site dedicated to mocking ...everything? Especially, this week, bloggers. (You have to read a lot of Three Bulls to really get it.) Do you go to the internet for humor? If so, what kind of humor do you get there that you couldn't get anywhere else? What doesn't work? Share.
Here is a passage from The Cluetrain Manifesto, referencing laughter on the internet:
So here comes Joe Six-Pack onto AOL. What does he know about netliness? Nothing. Zilch. He has no cultural context whatsoever. But soon, very soon, what he hears is something he never heard in TV Land: people cracking up.
"That ain't no laugh track neither," Joe is thinking and goes looking for the source of this strange, new, rather seductive sound.
So here's a little story problem for ya, class. If the Internet has 50 million people on it, and they're not all as dumb as they look, but the corporations trying to make a fast buck off their asses are as dumb as they look, how long before Joe is laughing as hard as everyone else?
The correct answer of course: not long at all. And as soon as he starts laughing, he's not Joe Six-Pack anymore. He's no longer part of some passive couch-potato target demographic. Because the Net connects people to each other, and impassions and empowers through those connections, the media dream of the Web as another acquiescent mass-consumer market is a figment and a fantasy.
The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the heart of Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to the chairman's latest attempt at insight was no further away than the mimeograph machine. One memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so Mr. Big liked to think).
No more. The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being practiced on the Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet. How many satires are floating around there, one wonders: of the latest hyperinflated restructuring plan, of the over-sincere cultural-sensitivity training sessions Human Resources made mandatory last week, of all the gibberish that passes for "management" — or has passed up until now.
Step back a frame or two. Zoom out. Isn't that weird? Workers and markets are speaking the same language! And they're both speaking it in the same shoot-from-the-hip, unedited, devil-take-the-hindmost style.
This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns. And we have something else as well: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about.
But this whole gamut of conversation, from infinite jest to point-specific expertise: who needs it?
Companies need it. Without it they can't innovate, build consensus, or go to market. Markets need it. Without it they don't know what works and what doesn't; don't know why they should give a damn. Cultures need it. Without play and knowledge in equal measure, they begin to die. People get gloomy, anxious, and depressed. Eventually, the guns come out.
So what is it about blogging and humor? Many of you probably know this site dedicated to mocking the political elite. But do you know this site dedicated to mocking ...everything? Especially, this week, bloggers. (You have to read a lot of Three Bulls to really get it.) Do you go to the internet for humor? If so, what kind of humor do you get there that you couldn't get anywhere else? What doesn't work? Share.
Here is a passage from The Cluetrain Manifesto, referencing laughter on the internet:
So here comes Joe Six-Pack onto AOL. What does he know about netliness? Nothing. Zilch. He has no cultural context whatsoever. But soon, very soon, what he hears is something he never heard in TV Land: people cracking up.
"That ain't no laugh track neither," Joe is thinking and goes looking for the source of this strange, new, rather seductive sound.
So here's a little story problem for ya, class. If the Internet has 50 million people on it, and they're not all as dumb as they look, but the corporations trying to make a fast buck off their asses are as dumb as they look, how long before Joe is laughing as hard as everyone else?
The correct answer of course: not long at all. And as soon as he starts laughing, he's not Joe Six-Pack anymore. He's no longer part of some passive couch-potato target demographic. Because the Net connects people to each other, and impassions and empowers through those connections, the media dream of the Web as another acquiescent mass-consumer market is a figment and a fantasy.
The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the heart of Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to the chairman's latest attempt at insight was no further away than the mimeograph machine. One memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so Mr. Big liked to think).
No more. The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being practiced on the Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet. How many satires are floating around there, one wonders: of the latest hyperinflated restructuring plan, of the over-sincere cultural-sensitivity training sessions Human Resources made mandatory last week, of all the gibberish that passes for "management" — or has passed up until now.
Step back a frame or two. Zoom out. Isn't that weird? Workers and markets are speaking the same language! And they're both speaking it in the same shoot-from-the-hip, unedited, devil-take-the-hindmost style.
This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns. And we have something else as well: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about.
But this whole gamut of conversation, from infinite jest to point-specific expertise: who needs it?
Companies need it. Without it they can't innovate, build consensus, or go to market. Markets need it. Without it they don't know what works and what doesn't; don't know why they should give a damn. Cultures need it. Without play and knowledge in equal measure, they begin to die. People get gloomy, anxious, and depressed. Eventually, the guns come out.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Interesting stuff you said this week
provides the class with tonight's slogan
No matter who put it there, the fact that we can hear the real voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks makes us feel more powerful.
There are two "interesting" things about the Alvin guy. This is one of them: Cousin of author William Saroyan, with whom he collaborated on the song "Come On-a My House," Rosemary Clooney's all-time biggest hit
Scott rocks Eminem I:
hot - mechanical, structured, requires little participation, extends one sense in high definition. ex: radiocold - electrical, requires lots of participation. ex: telephoneThis conception got me thinking about sites like metafilter and slashdot, others, and blogs in general. Are they hot or cold?Unfortunately, McLuhan doesn't do a good job of defining "participation" - whether it is group participation or individual, so I can't really make a judgment. The computer itself is an electrical device, but I don't know, either, whether the web falls into another classification - the digital - perhaps.These sites, do, however, live off the participation of their communities. In reading, responding, and supplying new content. They bring in many pieces of information from many sources, but are also very, very, high definition. Is all this an area that goes beyond McLuhan's ideas about media, or at least my remedial understanding of it? Thoughts?hot - mechanical, structured, requires little participation, extends one sense in high definition. ex: radiocold - electrical, requires lots of participation. ex: telephone
Jim on Cred: The web is different than many other mediums in that newness lends credibility while experience and history almost seems a negative trait.
Caitlin on Cred:
Metafilter is pretty accessible to all and allows anybody to sashay on in and add a link or a comment. I like the site's articulated goal: "This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members." Sounds a little less kumbaya than Wikipedia's "We're going to create a space for THE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE!" (grin). Metafilter makes you rack up a little street cred before you get to post on a main page and be a lofty contributor. You've got a waiting period of at least a week (oh God! A whole WEEK!? A veritable cyber LIFETIME!), plus postings, before becoming eligible for this honor.
christuhfuh:
Read BoingBoing's linking policy. It's terrific.
but then NewsCloud has the thing abnout YouTube stripping out all its copyrighted stuff.
Jim to Steph: I think I've written more in the past few weeks than at any point in my life. I've also had to think a lot more about what others are saying and how to respond in a concise, clear fashion.
Steph and Jason on Hacking!
Kirsten on Steph and Jason and the indelibility of speech!!!
I thought this was an interesting policy regarding the comments:
We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.In short, you should think twice before you click that 'Submit' button because once you click it, we aren't going to let you Undo it.Jason Scott mentioned something along these lines on another blog when the blogger deleted a post, but he had saved it. Blogs and the internet in general, containing the great ability to hit 'delete,' do give the illusion that you can say something without having to accept any serious consequences. Many times you can accomplish this, but on some occasions you honestly cannot have total control. You have to always worry about what you put out online. Many people are learning that the hard way when they get fired/suspended/reprimanded for something they put on a blog, myspace, etc. To some extent, this isn't as true in real life as slashdot claims. You can always lie about saying something, as long as it wasn't recorded and only a few people heard you say it. You can always claim they misquoted or misunderstood. It is much harder to deny what it is in print. You also can't be an 'anonymous coward' in real life, for the most part (by the way, what is with the hostile language?).
JSqP on ... stuff
Maybe I haven't poked around enough, but I think that many of these sites require user accounts to communicate, so that trolls are shot and killed before they cause too much damage. The effect, I think, is that these sites tend to gather together "like minds" that are receptive to the common viewpoint and resistant or combative to rogue views. Reading the Metafilter description about what makes a good post and what makes a bad post kind of struck me that way. I'm not sure what to think about Newscloud and maybe after I poke around a little more I'll understand it better, but it seems to be more of a thread-generation site than any kind of news service. Slashdot's threads are like a tree with a thousand roots, and in regard to reading any one thread through to completion I refer to my earlier "colossal waste of time" comment.
Sara doesn't feel so good:
I've never pushed it one step further into what Teilhard calls a "vast thinking membrane...containing our collective thoughts and experiences." Since infancy, we're taught to work in groups, to share, and to listen. But to me, these things always seemed confined to classrooms and homes and office spaces (in other words, confined to person-to-person contact), but in thinking of the internet as a membrane wherein our collective thoughts and experiences lie brings a new dimension to the concept of "teamwork." And when we join together, when we collaboratively blog and create sites like MetaFilter, are we building something that will soon take its own course, have its own "life" no longer under our control? It certainly seems that way. Let's look at MetaFilter. It was created by "bloggers" but now seems to sort of exist on its own, morphing as the users and their ideas multiply. Though I love The X-Files and have a geeky penchant for the Sci-Fi channel and horror movies, I've always found the idea of life in computers, within the internet or on blogging sites impossible.
Jim: I would like to discuss and learn more about the importance of visual appeal for sites. Some attract me and seem easy to use, while others turn me off and I find them confusing. I liked digg but not clipmarks. I'm sure its a personality, age, culture thing, but one worth exploring.
Steph was wondering where to find the history of metafilter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafilter
Rene: Metafilter's pull
As I reviewed the broad range of topics, I was compelled to read the article on performance enhancing drugs, computerless e-mail printer, etc, I realize that the site titles tend to draw the reader in to review archive articles and to ultimately register and start posting comments as well. There are numerous links even more comments in response to the weblog.
Caitlin to Jim
So the blog gives us distance and yes, by nature is analytical (or, in the words of my father, who now reads this blog as well as most of yours ((*Hi, Dad!*)) "seems like a whole lotta navel gazing to me, Cato.") but does it make us LESS human, or rather frighteningly moreso? Perhaps this'll mean me outing myself as something of a cynic, but I think that deep down inside, past the layers of kindness and rational justice, we're all just a little bit assholic--the blog just happens to lend itself so nicely to showcasing this basic human snarkitude. Also, aren't we always passing judgment on the people we meet, though it may be on some unnoticed, unconscious level? As a culture we've become so preoccupied with political correctness that it's hardly appropriate to breathe too heavily in someone's general direction, much less tell them what we think of them. I think that out of instinct and desire to be a) polite b) liked and c) cover our asses, we're far more apt to smile pretty and call people nitwits in our heads than we are to simply behave indifferently or express actual antipathy. So I don't know, Jim, if the blog makes us crueler by removing a level of humanity or if it makes us more honest by ripping off the bullshit colored mantle of proper social protocol. For the record, I hope it's the former, but I can't help but play devil's advocate and entertain the possibility of the latter.Also, I'd like to think that with carefully chosen words and clearly communicated ideas, blog intent can't be missed by too huge a margin. Text DOES communicate that which the author wishes--it's really a matter of careful diction and thorough cogitation before one gets to the point at which he hits "publish," and the words are up there forever. With that said... I think it's unlikely that bloggers often ARRIVE at that "thoroughly cogitated" point before hitting "publish" (I know I often don't). Therefore, intent is frequently slightly off-center and people, being slightly assholic at the core, love to be offended, so will naturally vault up onto their soapboxes and start a fight at really any given little time.
Slashdot's Commander Taco to Me:
I think Slashdot works quote well. What it does is disseminate the
days major tech/geek news, distilling out the cruft, and providing a
reasonable stab at the most important news of the day. Then it gives
people a place to discuss that news. People can participate as
observers viewing filtered subsets of the data, or use it like
newsgroups getting themselves neck deep in the debate.
Slashdot has changed in subtle ways over the years... I think in the
early days our stories were more inflammatory in tone. Now we tend
to let the users have the inflammatory discussion and let our stories
provide more of a starting point than an opinion. Initially I
selected almost every story, but today a staff of several help.
As far as troubles we've had over the year, I guess some general
axioms worth considering would be to be as open as you can be, as
transparent as possible. But when the line needs to be drawn to
obscure certain things, you must draw that line as opaque as possible.
For example we keep our moderation system fairly private to prevent
certain kinds of abuses. You mention wikipedia, because of the nature
of their system, it makes sense for them to provide in depth historic
logging information about every nitpicky change because a wikipedia
entry might last for months or years. Slashdot stories last only a
few days. They are more impulsive, so we find it advantageous to hide
some information because else people react with a kneejerk and hours
later the jerk may be all that is left ;)
Aldon, so necessary!Colin raises the interesting distinction between moving information and considering information. Various people looking at MeFi end up talking about how overwhelming the amount of information is. Some of this may get to the information overload that Toffler talks about in Future Shock. So, how do we deal with information overload and future shock?We look for tools to help us filter our information. The filters might be very sophisticated and spend time considering the information, yet this produces more information needing to be filtered. Or, the filter might be fairly simple, in terms of people simply flagging other information that they consider important; simply moving information.The latter, it would seem, moves us closer to emergent swam activity, where the swarm is smarter than the individuals in the swarm. The ants moving material back and forth are not considering the material that they are moving.This leads me to the discussion about Civilities. I’ve known Jon for quite a while and it seems as if his biggest hurdle, and the biggest hurdle of many online efforts, is to get critical mass. I’ve been involved with many efforts that never came close.One of the big issues is the role of the leader. DailyKos has achieved critical mass. Markos provides a strong leadership that encourages people to participate. Jane, at Firedoglake, does that herself in her own particular way. The question is, can a community emerge without a strong leader like that? What would it look like? That takes us, I believe to de Chardin. It seems as if the Noosphere is conceived of much more in that manner. Related to this is what Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy, calls Co-Intelligence.To tie this all back together, when you go back to Future Shock, our friends at Wikipedia tie this to the Technological Singularity.
6:18 AM
No matter who put it there, the fact that we can hear the real voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks makes us feel more powerful.
There are two "interesting" things about the Alvin guy. This is one of them: Cousin of author William Saroyan, with whom he collaborated on the song "Come On-a My House," Rosemary Clooney's all-time biggest hit
Scott rocks Eminem I:
hot - mechanical, structured, requires little participation, extends one sense in high definition. ex: radiocold - electrical, requires lots of participation. ex: telephoneThis conception got me thinking about sites like metafilter and slashdot, others, and blogs in general. Are they hot or cold?Unfortunately, McLuhan doesn't do a good job of defining "participation" - whether it is group participation or individual, so I can't really make a judgment. The computer itself is an electrical device, but I don't know, either, whether the web falls into another classification - the digital - perhaps.These sites, do, however, live off the participation of their communities. In reading, responding, and supplying new content. They bring in many pieces of information from many sources, but are also very, very, high definition. Is all this an area that goes beyond McLuhan's ideas about media, or at least my remedial understanding of it? Thoughts?hot - mechanical, structured, requires little participation, extends one sense in high definition. ex: radiocold - electrical, requires lots of participation. ex: telephone
Jim on Cred: The web is different than many other mediums in that newness lends credibility while experience and history almost seems a negative trait.
Caitlin on Cred:
Metafilter is pretty accessible to all and allows anybody to sashay on in and add a link or a comment. I like the site's articulated goal: "This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members." Sounds a little less kumbaya than Wikipedia's "We're going to create a space for THE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE!" (grin). Metafilter makes you rack up a little street cred before you get to post on a main page and be a lofty contributor. You've got a waiting period of at least a week (oh God! A whole WEEK!? A veritable cyber LIFETIME!), plus postings, before becoming eligible for this honor.
christuhfuh:
Read BoingBoing's linking policy. It's terrific.
but then NewsCloud has the thing abnout YouTube stripping out all its copyrighted stuff.
Jim to Steph: I think I've written more in the past few weeks than at any point in my life. I've also had to think a lot more about what others are saying and how to respond in a concise, clear fashion.
Steph and Jason on Hacking!
Kirsten on Steph and Jason and the indelibility of speech!!!
I thought this was an interesting policy regarding the comments:
We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.In short, you should think twice before you click that 'Submit' button because once you click it, we aren't going to let you Undo it.Jason Scott mentioned something along these lines on another blog when the blogger deleted a post, but he had saved it. Blogs and the internet in general, containing the great ability to hit 'delete,' do give the illusion that you can say something without having to accept any serious consequences. Many times you can accomplish this, but on some occasions you honestly cannot have total control. You have to always worry about what you put out online. Many people are learning that the hard way when they get fired/suspended/reprimanded for something they put on a blog, myspace, etc. To some extent, this isn't as true in real life as slashdot claims. You can always lie about saying something, as long as it wasn't recorded and only a few people heard you say it. You can always claim they misquoted or misunderstood. It is much harder to deny what it is in print. You also can't be an 'anonymous coward' in real life, for the most part (by the way, what is with the hostile language?).
JSqP on ... stuff
Maybe I haven't poked around enough, but I think that many of these sites require user accounts to communicate, so that trolls are shot and killed before they cause too much damage. The effect, I think, is that these sites tend to gather together "like minds" that are receptive to the common viewpoint and resistant or combative to rogue views. Reading the Metafilter description about what makes a good post and what makes a bad post kind of struck me that way. I'm not sure what to think about Newscloud and maybe after I poke around a little more I'll understand it better, but it seems to be more of a thread-generation site than any kind of news service. Slashdot's threads are like a tree with a thousand roots, and in regard to reading any one thread through to completion I refer to my earlier "colossal waste of time" comment.
Sara doesn't feel so good:
I've never pushed it one step further into what Teilhard calls a "vast thinking membrane...containing our collective thoughts and experiences." Since infancy, we're taught to work in groups, to share, and to listen. But to me, these things always seemed confined to classrooms and homes and office spaces (in other words, confined to person-to-person contact), but in thinking of the internet as a membrane wherein our collective thoughts and experiences lie brings a new dimension to the concept of "teamwork." And when we join together, when we collaboratively blog and create sites like MetaFilter, are we building something that will soon take its own course, have its own "life" no longer under our control? It certainly seems that way. Let's look at MetaFilter. It was created by "bloggers" but now seems to sort of exist on its own, morphing as the users and their ideas multiply. Though I love The X-Files and have a geeky penchant for the Sci-Fi channel and horror movies, I've always found the idea of life in computers, within the internet or on blogging sites impossible.
Jim: I would like to discuss and learn more about the importance of visual appeal for sites. Some attract me and seem easy to use, while others turn me off and I find them confusing. I liked digg but not clipmarks. I'm sure its a personality, age, culture thing, but one worth exploring.
Steph was wondering where to find the history of metafilter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafilter
Rene: Metafilter's pull
As I reviewed the broad range of topics, I was compelled to read the article on performance enhancing drugs, computerless e-mail printer, etc, I realize that the site titles tend to draw the reader in to review archive articles and to ultimately register and start posting comments as well. There are numerous links even more comments in response to the weblog.
Caitlin to Jim
So the blog gives us distance and yes, by nature is analytical (or, in the words of my father, who now reads this blog as well as most of yours ((*Hi, Dad!*)) "seems like a whole lotta navel gazing to me, Cato.") but does it make us LESS human, or rather frighteningly moreso? Perhaps this'll mean me outing myself as something of a cynic, but I think that deep down inside, past the layers of kindness and rational justice, we're all just a little bit assholic--the blog just happens to lend itself so nicely to showcasing this basic human snarkitude. Also, aren't we always passing judgment on the people we meet, though it may be on some unnoticed, unconscious level? As a culture we've become so preoccupied with political correctness that it's hardly appropriate to breathe too heavily in someone's general direction, much less tell them what we think of them. I think that out of instinct and desire to be a) polite b) liked and c) cover our asses, we're far more apt to smile pretty and call people nitwits in our heads than we are to simply behave indifferently or express actual antipathy. So I don't know, Jim, if the blog makes us crueler by removing a level of humanity or if it makes us more honest by ripping off the bullshit colored mantle of proper social protocol. For the record, I hope it's the former, but I can't help but play devil's advocate and entertain the possibility of the latter.Also, I'd like to think that with carefully chosen words and clearly communicated ideas, blog intent can't be missed by too huge a margin. Text DOES communicate that which the author wishes--it's really a matter of careful diction and thorough cogitation before one gets to the point at which he hits "publish," and the words are up there forever. With that said... I think it's unlikely that bloggers often ARRIVE at that "thoroughly cogitated" point before hitting "publish" (I know I often don't). Therefore, intent is frequently slightly off-center and people, being slightly assholic at the core, love to be offended, so will naturally vault up onto their soapboxes and start a fight at really any given little time.
Slashdot's Commander Taco to Me:
I think Slashdot works quote well. What it does is disseminate the
days major tech/geek news, distilling out the cruft, and providing a
reasonable stab at the most important news of the day. Then it gives
people a place to discuss that news. People can participate as
observers viewing filtered subsets of the data, or use it like
newsgroups getting themselves neck deep in the debate.
Slashdot has changed in subtle ways over the years... I think in the
early days our stories were more inflammatory in tone. Now we tend
to let the users have the inflammatory discussion and let our stories
provide more of a starting point than an opinion. Initially I
selected almost every story, but today a staff of several help.
As far as troubles we've had over the year, I guess some general
axioms worth considering would be to be as open as you can be, as
transparent as possible. But when the line needs to be drawn to
obscure certain things, you must draw that line as opaque as possible.
For example we keep our moderation system fairly private to prevent
certain kinds of abuses. You mention wikipedia, because of the nature
of their system, it makes sense for them to provide in depth historic
logging information about every nitpicky change because a wikipedia
entry might last for months or years. Slashdot stories last only a
few days. They are more impulsive, so we find it advantageous to hide
some information because else people react with a kneejerk and hours
later the jerk may be all that is left ;)
Aldon, so necessary!Colin raises the interesting distinction between moving information and considering information. Various people looking at MeFi end up talking about how overwhelming the amount of information is. Some of this may get to the information overload that Toffler talks about in Future Shock. So, how do we deal with information overload and future shock?We look for tools to help us filter our information. The filters might be very sophisticated and spend time considering the information, yet this produces more information needing to be filtered. Or, the filter might be fairly simple, in terms of people simply flagging other information that they consider important; simply moving information.The latter, it would seem, moves us closer to emergent swam activity, where the swarm is smarter than the individuals in the swarm. The ants moving material back and forth are not considering the material that they are moving.This leads me to the discussion about Civilities. I’ve known Jon for quite a while and it seems as if his biggest hurdle, and the biggest hurdle of many online efforts, is to get critical mass. I’ve been involved with many efforts that never came close.One of the big issues is the role of the leader. DailyKos has achieved critical mass. Markos provides a strong leadership that encourages people to participate. Jane, at Firedoglake, does that herself in her own particular way. The question is, can a community emerge without a strong leader like that? What would it look like? That takes us, I believe to de Chardin. It seems as if the Noosphere is conceived of much more in that manner. Related to this is what Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy, calls Co-Intelligence.To tie this all back together, when you go back to Future Shock, our friends at Wikipedia tie this to the Technological Singularity.
6:18 AM
I, Robot
I agree with Caitlin that this post by Jim deserves wider comment. Maybe Scott, who has been delving into McLuhan, can help.
My response to his visit and his subsequent comments surprised me. The distance and analytical nature of the blog changed my voice, making it more metallic and harsh as I examined someone who I’d met for two hours and then passed judgment on him as if he were another blog. He is human and I forgot and in doing so became a little less human myself. That I think is the great flaw of blogs and technology – we have trouble communicating our humanity. There is no inflection of voice, a smile, a raised eyebrow to redirect, clarify or soften sarcasm, to add humor where it was meant to be. The words simply sit on the screen, not controlled by the writer, but interpreted by the reader. Even if we don’t assume new identities, as in Wikipedia or Second Life, we are new, different because of the flat nature of the medium. Perhaps, that is why there are all these odd fights, flaming on blogs and Wikipedia – the nuance of humanity is not there.
My response to his visit and his subsequent comments surprised me. The distance and analytical nature of the blog changed my voice, making it more metallic and harsh as I examined someone who I’d met for two hours and then passed judgment on him as if he were another blog. He is human and I forgot and in doing so became a little less human myself. That I think is the great flaw of blogs and technology – we have trouble communicating our humanity. There is no inflection of voice, a smile, a raised eyebrow to redirect, clarify or soften sarcasm, to add humor where it was meant to be. The words simply sit on the screen, not controlled by the writer, but interpreted by the reader. Even if we don’t assume new identities, as in Wikipedia or Second Life, we are new, different because of the flat nature of the medium. Perhaps, that is why there are all these odd fights, flaming on blogs and Wikipedia – the nuance of humanity is not there.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
OK. Last thing? I promise.
What's the purpose -- you may ask -- of reading this batch of blogs? Well, that's sort of what I'm asking you. What does blogging do? And why are people trying to do it? One theory is that the internet could become a way of thinking together, as opposed to separately.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
I could be wrong about this ...
...but it seems to me the newer sites Aldon cited are more about moving information than considering it. I could get very addicted to digg, but it's not at all contemplative. An older site like Plastic was all about disucssion, with the rating of the comments being kind of the big thing. Plastic feels like it's shriveling up a little, although I could not find any acknolwedgement of that.
I'm geeking out today.
I'm geeking out today.
Aldon is right. I am behind the times. Although I prefer the slower, more meditative qualities of Metafilter to the fun, snappy collective-ADD vibe of Clipmarks. Maybe also, becuase I am an old, old man, I feel have already absorbed some of the info that might pop up here. Fainting goats are not news to me.
As is ALWAYS the case when you visit one of these blogs, visit the whole thing. Read some of the comments and get to know some of the requent posters/commenters. Who did this? Why? How does it work?
As is ALWAYS the case when you visit one of these blogs, visit the whole thing. Read some of the comments and get to know some of the requent posters/commenters. Who did this? Why? How does it work?
It's Raining, So There's Time to Think
To what degree is this class a swarm? I don't think we're there yet, but by the end of the term, we might be.
There are lot ways to think about this. One is to say that news (and news is just the spread of new information) has become a conversation, instead of a top-down instruction model. Civilities has tried hard to explore this question of whether pooling information deomcratically leads to a different place, but I get the feeling his site is kind of turning into a spore. I mean, I don't think he was able to get a lot of cooperation for a site that was, fundamentally, about the study of cooperation. Also, a lot of his links are busted because the sites went dead. I want to teach an hour or so of one of our classes about dead blogs. What happens when the blogger decides to pack it in? I bet Aldon has some poignant examples of and thoughts about that. Also, a long time ago, somebody brought up pamphleteers, so while I think of it here is somebody making that connection.
There are lot ways to think about this. One is to say that news (and news is just the spread of new information) has become a conversation, instead of a top-down instruction model. Civilities has tried hard to explore this question of whether pooling information deomcratically leads to a different place, but I get the feeling his site is kind of turning into a spore. I mean, I don't think he was able to get a lot of cooperation for a site that was, fundamentally, about the study of cooperation. Also, a lot of his links are busted because the sites went dead. I want to teach an hour or so of one of our classes about dead blogs. What happens when the blogger decides to pack it in? I bet Aldon has some poignant examples of and thoughts about that. Also, a long time ago, somebody brought up pamphleteers, so while I think of it here is somebody making that connection.
McBoingBoing
So we're looking at (more or less) collective efforts to pool and screen information that certain users would find ... what? ... useful? vital? entertaining? Here is BoingBoing, a perennial #1 site by the Technorati rating system. Why? And BB led me to Newscloud which has a different feel and, I guess, a different mission.
Wikipedia wants to be everything to everybody, right? What do these want to be. And do they represent some kind of effort to create a kind of swarm intelligence? I guess another question I have is, do they create sub-communities of knowing. I mean, if you paddled around in a cerain pool of these, would you wind up coated in a different set of memes than users of other pools? Of course you would. What are the implications of that?
I mean, we could begin to think of society as divided into people who want to know certain things and people who want to spread certain things. The job of the spreaders is obviously changing. And the experience of the knowers is changing too. But how? Really DO think of it as a swarm or a hive. I think some of the bees have jobs that never exited before.
Wikipedia wants to be everything to everybody, right? What do these want to be. And do they represent some kind of effort to create a kind of swarm intelligence? I guess another question I have is, do they create sub-communities of knowing. I mean, if you paddled around in a cerain pool of these, would you wind up coated in a different set of memes than users of other pools? Of course you would. What are the implications of that?
I mean, we could begin to think of society as divided into people who want to know certain things and people who want to spread certain things. The job of the spreaders is obviously changing. And the experience of the knowers is changing too. But how? Really DO think of it as a swarm or a hive. I think some of the bees have jobs that never exited before.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
The Whole Wide World
I love you guys for using your blogs to process the visit by Jason Scott. I think it was one of my favorite class sessions ever. The more I teach -- and, I might add, I'm constantly wrestling with whether I should teach at all! -- the more I think the boundaries should be shoved aside as much as possible. I believe that you should all teach each other, in class and blog-to-blog; and I love the fact that the outside world comes bulling its way in. I know it's a little freaky sometimes, but, on balance, I think it's great. I wish more of you had been there for Aldon's visit, because it's a nice bookend with Jason. And Aldon, if you're out there, come back any time you feel like it. I feel the same way about last year's class. I'm happy thhat Eric and Matt and Brett have all come back to share stuff with you. Why should there be boundaries between one year and another? Maybe Elin will be popping in some night too? Bill on the other hand ...well, we might never get any of our work done. Very soon you'll also be meeting a few other bloggers.. Spazeboy, Caffeinated Geek Girl, and who knows who else?
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Coincidence
While we were in class last night, LaRouche supporters were disrupting the debate. I looked up LaRouche on Wikipedia. And the entry had gone into mediation.
Jason Leaves
One of the problems with teaching is that, while orchestrating the class and kind of worrying about the discussion, you don't always get to listen as completely as you would like to everything being said. I wish I had been able to absorb more of the remarkable stuff we heard from Jason Scott last night in his impromptu visit. Maybe some of you who took good notes will -- without revealing that one secret thing -- blog a little about it Scott and Caitlin both have. And Caitlin heard back from Jason. Already. My guess is that Jason, like Aldon, will hang around with us a bit for the rest of the year.
Meanwhile, as I tried, fumblingly, to say at the end, not every collective effort on the internet is as all-encompassing as as Wikipedia. Some things are just mostly fun. Start with a long visit with MetaFilter, one of my favorite sites. As usual, poke around into rules and background and try to figure out what that human network thing is over on the right. Who is here? What is the code? What makes something appropriate content for this site?
Finally, what should we do about this? Class field trip? Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia, will be lecturing at UH Wednesday, November 15 at 7;30 in Lincoln Theater. Free but you need tickets.
Meanwhile, as I tried, fumblingly, to say at the end, not every collective effort on the internet is as all-encompassing as as Wikipedia. Some things are just mostly fun. Start with a long visit with MetaFilter, one of my favorite sites. As usual, poke around into rules and background and try to figure out what that human network thing is over on the right. Who is here? What is the code? What makes something appropriate content for this site?
Finally, what should we do about this? Class field trip? Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia, will be lecturing at UH Wednesday, November 15 at 7;30 in Lincoln Theater. Free but you need tickets.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Halloween, Early
This class has a tremendous ability to upset people!!!!!!
Jason Scott wants to come in.
Also, if you have a moment, look at the profiles of Wikipedia contributors. Very interesting. (You just click on some names in the talk threads.)
Jason Scott wants to come in.
Also, if you have a moment, look at the profiles of Wikipedia contributors. Very interesting. (You just click on some names in the talk threads.)
Animal Farm
Wiki the Revolution, let's dance.
I bow down to this:
However, it was experts who told us of WMDs and that we had enough troops on the ground. It will be the expert who determines if Clinton was impeached on legal ground, if we are experiencing global warning, and if Columbus was an explorer or a pirate. And to what extent is ‘gentle guidance’ and ‘direction’ the deletion of an edit or new topic by someone with a different point of view?
I bow down to this:
However, it was experts who told us of WMDs and that we had enough troops on the ground. It will be the expert who determines if Clinton was impeached on legal ground, if we are experiencing global warning, and if Columbus was an explorer or a pirate. And to what extent is ‘gentle guidance’ and ‘direction’ the deletion of an edit or new topic by someone with a different point of view?
Wiki Chung Tonight
Man, oh, Man. You could teach a whole course of wikipedia. Maybe I will.
I'm struck in particular by the way the structure of Wikipedia and all the machinations are not apparent to the typical user. It's a cathedral looked-at on cornice at a time.
Unless it's a bazaar, not a cathedral.
Eric S. Raymond famously likened the traditional way of creating software and content- Microsoft Windows and the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance- to building a cathedral. There's a top-down central planner, closely guarded blueprints and drafts, workers contracted to implement those blueprints, a laborious quality assurance process, and so forth. The Open Source and Wikipedia model, in contrast, is more analogous to a freewheeling bazaar in that, with no central authority, order sort of emerges bottom-up from the actions and desires of the participants. People see what needs to be done, and due to the project's open design and collective ownership, can do it themselves. This open approach can create wonderful things that the cathedral model can't- like Linux and Wikipedia.[7]
The biggest critique:
skewed toward being "a system committed to the maximum empowerment of amateurs," a place where enthusiasm and conviction count for more than actually being correct.
Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade described Wikipedia as “a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.”
Oooops. But read what this has to say about the nature of information.
One of Sanger's ideas:
Simplification:Sanger feels Wikipedia tends to accrue unneeded complexity in bureaucracy and organization. There will be a significant focus on simplifying and avoiding subject categories, portals, user boxes, and wikiprojects, and minimizing the number of official roles in the community. Presumably this will also involve less focus on current events and facts from pop culture and more on the areas of knowledge which encyclopedias have traditionally been concerned with.
The community as Aaron Swartz states,
Building a community is pretty tough; it requires just the right combination of technology and rules and people. And while it's been clear that [online] communities are at the core of many of the most interesting things on the Internet, we're still at the very early stages of understanding what it is that makes them work.
But Wikipedia isn't even a typical community. Usually Internet communities are groups of people who come together to discuss something, like cryptography or the writing of a technical specification. Perhaps they meet in an IRC channel, a web forum, a newsgroup, or on a mailing list, but the focus is always something "out there", something outside the discussion itself.
But with Wikipedia, the goal is building Wikipedia. It's not a community set up to make some other thing, it's a community set up to make itself. And since Wikipedia was one of the first sites to do it, we know hardly anything about building communities like that.
Actually, Aaron is pretty indispensable on who writes and who runs Wikipedia. On the latter:
But what's less well-known is that it's also the site that anyone can run. The vandals aren't stopped because someone is in charge of stopping them; it was simply something people started doing. And it's not just vandalism: a "welcoming committee" says hi to every new user, a "cleanup taskforce" goes around doing factchecking. The site's rules are made by rough consensus. Even the servers are largely run this way -- a group of volunteer sysadmins hang out on IRC, keeping an eye on things. Until quite recently, the Foundation that supposedly runs Wikipedia had no actual employees.
From The New Yorker Piece
Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of reading groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written an Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude
I'm struck in particular by the way the structure of Wikipedia and all the machinations are not apparent to the typical user. It's a cathedral looked-at on cornice at a time.
Unless it's a bazaar, not a cathedral.
Eric S. Raymond famously likened the traditional way of creating software and content- Microsoft Windows and the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance- to building a cathedral. There's a top-down central planner, closely guarded blueprints and drafts, workers contracted to implement those blueprints, a laborious quality assurance process, and so forth. The Open Source and Wikipedia model, in contrast, is more analogous to a freewheeling bazaar in that, with no central authority, order sort of emerges bottom-up from the actions and desires of the participants. People see what needs to be done, and due to the project's open design and collective ownership, can do it themselves. This open approach can create wonderful things that the cathedral model can't- like Linux and Wikipedia.[7]
The biggest critique:
skewed toward being "a system committed to the maximum empowerment of amateurs," a place where enthusiasm and conviction count for more than actually being correct.
Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade described Wikipedia as “a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.”
Oooops. But read what this has to say about the nature of information.
One of Sanger's ideas:
Simplification:Sanger feels Wikipedia tends to accrue unneeded complexity in bureaucracy and organization. There will be a significant focus on simplifying and avoiding subject categories, portals, user boxes, and wikiprojects, and minimizing the number of official roles in the community. Presumably this will also involve less focus on current events and facts from pop culture and more on the areas of knowledge which encyclopedias have traditionally been concerned with.
The community as Aaron Swartz states,
Building a community is pretty tough; it requires just the right combination of technology and rules and people. And while it's been clear that [online] communities are at the core of many of the most interesting things on the Internet, we're still at the very early stages of understanding what it is that makes them work.
But Wikipedia isn't even a typical community. Usually Internet communities are groups of people who come together to discuss something, like cryptography or the writing of a technical specification. Perhaps they meet in an IRC channel, a web forum, a newsgroup, or on a mailing list, but the focus is always something "out there", something outside the discussion itself.
But with Wikipedia, the goal is building Wikipedia. It's not a community set up to make some other thing, it's a community set up to make itself. And since Wikipedia was one of the first sites to do it, we know hardly anything about building communities like that.
Actually, Aaron is pretty indispensable on who writes and who runs Wikipedia. On the latter:
But what's less well-known is that it's also the site that anyone can run. The vandals aren't stopped because someone is in charge of stopping them; it was simply something people started doing. And it's not just vandalism: a "welcoming committee" says hi to every new user, a "cleanup taskforce" goes around doing factchecking. The site's rules are made by rough consensus. Even the servers are largely run this way -- a group of volunteer sysadmins hang out on IRC, keeping an eye on things. Until quite recently, the Foundation that supposedly runs Wikipedia had no actual employees.
From The New Yorker Piece
Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of reading groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written an Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Dear Class ...
I'm pasting in this whole article which ran Oct. 8 in the NYT because otherwise you'd have to register. Diane Farrell has since been restored.
By NOAM COHEN
SOMEWHERE in the hierarchy of personal celebrity, between the discovery that you are listed in the phone book and, say, being knighted, sits the Wikipedia entry.
The online encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org), which is created by a worldwide community of volunteers, has more than 1.4 million articles in English, with some 120,000 devoted to biographies of living people — from Terje Aa, a Norwegian bridge player, to Todd J. Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor.
Yet each day dozens of new Wikipedia articles about people — and about historical figures, fictional creatures, obscure concepts, run-of-the-mill organizations and even shopping centers — are deleted, having been deemed sufficiently unnotable or otherwise unworthy of being listed.
Wikipedia volunteers have produced detailed suggestions as to what makes a person or organization “notable.” For musical groups, for instance, the criteria include, “Has had a record certified gold or higher in at least one large- or medium-sized country.” Notable people must have achieved “renown or notoriety for their involvement in newsworthy events,” the guidelines suggest, or be “the primary subject of multiple nontrivial published works whose source is independent of the person.”
Roughly 4,000 articles are added each day, and about half that number are deleted that same day, Wikipedia says, by administrators who determine that an article is not up to standards. Tougher cases are debated for five days — at times, a decision is postponed if deep divisions remain. What follows is a sample of recent entries proposed for deletion, and the debate by Wikipedia volunteers whether to delete or keep them. NOAM COHEN
Songs Featuring Cowbells
A Wikipedia user creates an entry that consists simply of a list of hundreds of song recordings that feature cowbells, including “Africa” by Toto, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang and “An Alpine Symphony,” by Richard Strauss.
Debate
I’m sorry, but we cannot have an article in an encyclopedia which is a) unsourced, and b) claims that Bob Dylan, David Bowie, the Beatles, Jay-Z, The Byrds, George Harrison, Black Sabbath, Dizzy Gillespie ... had songs featuring cowbells. There are two references in the entire article that verifies two songs. The rest is taken from “The Cowbell Project” (I’m assuming, since that’s the only external link, which itself is just some crazy fanatics home page, and cites no sources). ...Honestly, can you call yourself a good Wikipedian if you want an article in an encyclopedia that claims that Jimi Hendrix used cowbells. Kill it, kill it fast! Wikipedia user “Oskar”
Delete, or significantly pare down to what is sourced. I could see how this list could possibly be useful if it were properly sourced, as any list of songs featuring any particular instrument could in theory be useful. However, “The cowbell project” doesn’t look like it can be considered a reliable source. VegaDark
Delete. ... Just on a side note however, Jimi Hendrix did in fact use cowbells. The song “Stone Free” has a very noticeable amount of cowbell. It would be very hard to miss it.
Nauticashades
As a percussionist I can tell you the cowbell is a very fine instrument. As a Wikipedian, I can tell you this is a very pointless list. Delete. danntm
Delete as not remotely suitable for an encyclopedia. Commit anyone who thought writing it added to the stock of the world’s knowledge. Legis
Outcome
Deleted.
Pooky
An article about the teddy bear belonging to Garfield, the cartoon cat. According to the Wikipedia entry, Pooky first appeared Oct. 23, 1978; Garfield found the teddy bear when he was searching through a drawer of his owner, Jon Arbuckle.
Debate
Delete. If Pooky ever actually did anything, maybe keep it. But Pooky is a stuffed bear; not a lot of character development possible there. Badbilltucker
Delete. Yes, it can be improved, but washing garbage just gets you clean garbage. This is a cartoon prop that was used for awhile and since discarded — a fictional item of no real importance. Calton
Props can warrant entries. Consider it a prop with character or otherwise important value. For example, if one were to propose the deletion of the “tricorder” entry on the basis that it is simply a prop, an army of Trek fans would start burning houses down.
That’s Just It
Outcome
Merged with Garfield list of characters.
Chuck Greene
The entry for Mr. Greene describes him as a 48-year-old javelin thrower who competed for Western Michigan University, finishing eighth in the 1981 N.C.A.A. Championships. He later won a gold medal at the 12th Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv.
Debate
Delete — 8th place in one N.C.A.A. championship is not exactly the Olympics. Fan-1967
Keep, based on his gold medal in the international competition in Israel. Dekar
I’d like to point out that the Maccabiah Games are basically the “Jewish Olympics” and even the article says that they are on a lower tier than even the Commonwealth Games, which most medal winners do not have articles based on those accomplishments.
Renosecond
Outcome
Deleted.
The Constantian Society
An article about a political group, founded in 1970, that advocates for monarchy in the United States.
Debate
Utterly nonnotable fringe political group. Statement “It cannot be determined whether the society has been active since 1997” gives you an idea of its influence. Fishal
Keep. American Monarchists are probably always going to be a fringe political group, but the movement does exist, and fringe doesn’t automatically equal non-notable. ... They apparently publish a journal, which means both their existence and the substance of their views are verifiable. Monarchism, as a movement, is rather outdated, but hardly non-notable (as many monarchies still exist worldwide.) Dina
Outcome
Kept.
Diane Farrell
The Democratic candidate in the Fourth Congressional District of Connecticut, running against the incumbent, Christopher Shays.
Debate
Delete. Come back if elected. Fan1967
Keep: It would be highly unfair to delete this article unless you were also deleting the article of her opponent, congressman Chris Shays. I say this as a representative of the Farrell campaign. Unsigned
Delete. ... Do you really think people will choose not to vote for someone because they don’t have a Wikipedia page? Samael775
Outcome
Deleted.
By NOAM COHEN
SOMEWHERE in the hierarchy of personal celebrity, between the discovery that you are listed in the phone book and, say, being knighted, sits the Wikipedia entry.
The online encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org), which is created by a worldwide community of volunteers, has more than 1.4 million articles in English, with some 120,000 devoted to biographies of living people — from Terje Aa, a Norwegian bridge player, to Todd J. Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor.
Yet each day dozens of new Wikipedia articles about people — and about historical figures, fictional creatures, obscure concepts, run-of-the-mill organizations and even shopping centers — are deleted, having been deemed sufficiently unnotable or otherwise unworthy of being listed.
Wikipedia volunteers have produced detailed suggestions as to what makes a person or organization “notable.” For musical groups, for instance, the criteria include, “Has had a record certified gold or higher in at least one large- or medium-sized country.” Notable people must have achieved “renown or notoriety for their involvement in newsworthy events,” the guidelines suggest, or be “the primary subject of multiple nontrivial published works whose source is independent of the person.”
Roughly 4,000 articles are added each day, and about half that number are deleted that same day, Wikipedia says, by administrators who determine that an article is not up to standards. Tougher cases are debated for five days — at times, a decision is postponed if deep divisions remain. What follows is a sample of recent entries proposed for deletion, and the debate by Wikipedia volunteers whether to delete or keep them. NOAM COHEN
Songs Featuring Cowbells
A Wikipedia user creates an entry that consists simply of a list of hundreds of song recordings that feature cowbells, including “Africa” by Toto, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang and “An Alpine Symphony,” by Richard Strauss.
Debate
I’m sorry, but we cannot have an article in an encyclopedia which is a) unsourced, and b) claims that Bob Dylan, David Bowie, the Beatles, Jay-Z, The Byrds, George Harrison, Black Sabbath, Dizzy Gillespie ... had songs featuring cowbells. There are two references in the entire article that verifies two songs. The rest is taken from “The Cowbell Project” (I’m assuming, since that’s the only external link, which itself is just some crazy fanatics home page, and cites no sources). ...Honestly, can you call yourself a good Wikipedian if you want an article in an encyclopedia that claims that Jimi Hendrix used cowbells. Kill it, kill it fast! Wikipedia user “Oskar”
Delete, or significantly pare down to what is sourced. I could see how this list could possibly be useful if it were properly sourced, as any list of songs featuring any particular instrument could in theory be useful. However, “The cowbell project” doesn’t look like it can be considered a reliable source. VegaDark
Delete. ... Just on a side note however, Jimi Hendrix did in fact use cowbells. The song “Stone Free” has a very noticeable amount of cowbell. It would be very hard to miss it.
Nauticashades
As a percussionist I can tell you the cowbell is a very fine instrument. As a Wikipedian, I can tell you this is a very pointless list. Delete. danntm
Delete as not remotely suitable for an encyclopedia. Commit anyone who thought writing it added to the stock of the world’s knowledge. Legis
Outcome
Deleted.
Pooky
An article about the teddy bear belonging to Garfield, the cartoon cat. According to the Wikipedia entry, Pooky first appeared Oct. 23, 1978; Garfield found the teddy bear when he was searching through a drawer of his owner, Jon Arbuckle.
Debate
Delete. If Pooky ever actually did anything, maybe keep it. But Pooky is a stuffed bear; not a lot of character development possible there. Badbilltucker
Delete. Yes, it can be improved, but washing garbage just gets you clean garbage. This is a cartoon prop that was used for awhile and since discarded — a fictional item of no real importance. Calton
Props can warrant entries. Consider it a prop with character or otherwise important value. For example, if one were to propose the deletion of the “tricorder” entry on the basis that it is simply a prop, an army of Trek fans would start burning houses down.
That’s Just It
Outcome
Merged with Garfield list of characters.
Chuck Greene
The entry for Mr. Greene describes him as a 48-year-old javelin thrower who competed for Western Michigan University, finishing eighth in the 1981 N.C.A.A. Championships. He later won a gold medal at the 12th Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv.
Debate
Delete — 8th place in one N.C.A.A. championship is not exactly the Olympics. Fan-1967
Keep, based on his gold medal in the international competition in Israel. Dekar
I’d like to point out that the Maccabiah Games are basically the “Jewish Olympics” and even the article says that they are on a lower tier than even the Commonwealth Games, which most medal winners do not have articles based on those accomplishments.
Renosecond
Outcome
Deleted.
The Constantian Society
An article about a political group, founded in 1970, that advocates for monarchy in the United States.
Debate
Utterly nonnotable fringe political group. Statement “It cannot be determined whether the society has been active since 1997” gives you an idea of its influence. Fishal
Keep. American Monarchists are probably always going to be a fringe political group, but the movement does exist, and fringe doesn’t automatically equal non-notable. ... They apparently publish a journal, which means both their existence and the substance of their views are verifiable. Monarchism, as a movement, is rather outdated, but hardly non-notable (as many monarchies still exist worldwide.) Dina
Outcome
Kept.
Diane Farrell
The Democratic candidate in the Fourth Congressional District of Connecticut, running against the incumbent, Christopher Shays.
Debate
Delete. Come back if elected. Fan1967
Keep: It would be highly unfair to delete this article unless you were also deleting the article of her opponent, congressman Chris Shays. I say this as a representative of the Farrell campaign. Unsigned
Delete. ... Do you really think people will choose not to vote for someone because they don’t have a Wikipedia page? Samael775
Outcome
Deleted.
Bad Wiki!
I'm sorry I've been away from you guys for a couple of days This election is stretching me thin, but I'll be around a lot this weekend, comments in your blogs and posting more stuff here. This guy is an important source of criticism. Make sure you click on his links. You don't have to listen to his 45 minute speech, but read his text(s).
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Oh!! Also!
You must read this! And you must chop down the tallest tree in the forest with this! But if I had said with this, would I have violated Wikipedia's fair use rules? Did I just now?
Wonderful World of Wikis
It's not a blog but ... It's time to visit Wikipedia. But this time, for the first time, don't use it. Read it. Pull it apart. What are the rules? What are the ideas behind it? What is its code?
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
See? I am NOT crazy!!!!!!!!
Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, October 16, 2006; A02
You can see it the next time you visit your office cafeteria or a nearby park: Whites sitting together with whites, blacks with blacks, young people with other young people. When individuals from these groups mix, it is usually because they share something else in common, such as a pastime.
Sociologists call this phenomenon homophily, a somewhat grand word to describe the idea that birds of a feather flock together. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle onward have observed that people seem to be drawn to others like themselves.
But while the basic idea is simple, homophily has surprisingly complex causes and consequences. Three weeks ahead of a midterm election, for example, it is playing a powerful, but largely invisible, role in politics.
Studies show that most people interested in politics associate nearly exclusively with others who have similar political beliefs. In fact, research by sociologist David Knoke at the University of Minnesota shows that if you know whether a person's friends are Republicans, Democrats or independents, you can predict with near certainty that person's political views.
Homophily may help explain some of the bitter partisanship of our times -- when your friends are drawn exclusively from one half of the electorate, it is not surprising that you will find the views of the other half inexplicable.
"I often hear people say with absolute certainty that whoever they are in favor of is obviously going to do well because they haven't talked to 'anyone' who supports the other person" in the election, said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who has studied homophily. She rolled her eyes and said, "Oh yeah, sure! That is a good argument."
While the instinct for homophily in politics and other areas seems hard-wired, technology may be fueling our nature. Cable television and the Internet have allowed enormous numbers of people in distant areas to form virtual groups that are very similar to what you see in the office cafeteria.
Smith-Lovin's research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do. No Walter Cronkite figure unites audiences today, the sociologist noted. We can now choose cable stations, magazines and blogs that see the world exactly as we do. If the research on homophily is right, those heavily e-mailed partisan screeds from the op-ed pages are largely talking to those who agree with those points of view to begin with.
But while people may choose blogs or op-ed columnists because they agree with those points of view, do they really choose friends the same way? When was the last time you met someone at a social gathering and quickly asked him his views on abortion, gay marriage and the war in Iraq before deciding to be friends? That does not happen, of course, so one of the most interesting puzzles about homophily is how it turns out that friends often end up having the same views on those subjects.
While beliefs matter, there are two other powerful but subtle factors at work, said sociologist Mario Luis Small of the University of Chicago: One is demography, and the other is shared experiences.
Take, for example, two mothers who become friends after meeting at a day-care center. Beliefs, especially about politics, may never be part of their explicit conversation. But the day-care center exerts a very powerful role in selecting people with similar demographic backgrounds and shared experiences. The mothers are likely to be about the same age, to face common child-rearing challenges and to have similar views on how to balance parenting and work. The fact that they are at this day-care center means they can afford it, which suggests they are in roughly the same socioeconomic class.
"It is not quite the case that I meet you and say, 'Oh my goodness, you also believe in the elimination of Roe v. Wade ,' " said Small. "Two years later, these guys are friends, but it is not because we believe the same things, but our experience and our demographics put us together in the first place."
What this ultimately suggests, Small and Smith-Lovin added, is that while organizations and schools and workplaces and neighborhoods and churches may seem to bring together broad mixes of people, they really do not. Organizations play a very powerful role in bringing together similar people and in creating homogenous views on a variety of topics. University professors, for example, are prone to believe in education, financial aid and research, but those views also lead to other beliefs about the importance of government and activism, Smith-Lovin said.
While there is nothing wrong with being around others who are similar to yourself, both Smith-Lovin and Small said that people and organizations pay a price for homogeneity. In politics, for example, the fact that people rarely have friends with different views makes it difficult to seek common ground or to examine one's positions closely.
"Most of us would be hard-pressed to provide clear explanations for our political beliefs," said Small. "If you ask the average person why they believe what they believe on Roe v. Wade , you are not going to get a coherent answer. We participate in settings where we don't have to explain ourselves because everyone else agrees with us. What this means is, 'I have no reason to challenge or question my own beliefs.'
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, October 16, 2006; A02
You can see it the next time you visit your office cafeteria or a nearby park: Whites sitting together with whites, blacks with blacks, young people with other young people. When individuals from these groups mix, it is usually because they share something else in common, such as a pastime.
Sociologists call this phenomenon homophily, a somewhat grand word to describe the idea that birds of a feather flock together. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle onward have observed that people seem to be drawn to others like themselves.
But while the basic idea is simple, homophily has surprisingly complex causes and consequences. Three weeks ahead of a midterm election, for example, it is playing a powerful, but largely invisible, role in politics.
Studies show that most people interested in politics associate nearly exclusively with others who have similar political beliefs. In fact, research by sociologist David Knoke at the University of Minnesota shows that if you know whether a person's friends are Republicans, Democrats or independents, you can predict with near certainty that person's political views.
Homophily may help explain some of the bitter partisanship of our times -- when your friends are drawn exclusively from one half of the electorate, it is not surprising that you will find the views of the other half inexplicable.
"I often hear people say with absolute certainty that whoever they are in favor of is obviously going to do well because they haven't talked to 'anyone' who supports the other person" in the election, said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who has studied homophily. She rolled her eyes and said, "Oh yeah, sure! That is a good argument."
While the instinct for homophily in politics and other areas seems hard-wired, technology may be fueling our nature. Cable television and the Internet have allowed enormous numbers of people in distant areas to form virtual groups that are very similar to what you see in the office cafeteria.
Smith-Lovin's research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do. No Walter Cronkite figure unites audiences today, the sociologist noted. We can now choose cable stations, magazines and blogs that see the world exactly as we do. If the research on homophily is right, those heavily e-mailed partisan screeds from the op-ed pages are largely talking to those who agree with those points of view to begin with.
But while people may choose blogs or op-ed columnists because they agree with those points of view, do they really choose friends the same way? When was the last time you met someone at a social gathering and quickly asked him his views on abortion, gay marriage and the war in Iraq before deciding to be friends? That does not happen, of course, so one of the most interesting puzzles about homophily is how it turns out that friends often end up having the same views on those subjects.
While beliefs matter, there are two other powerful but subtle factors at work, said sociologist Mario Luis Small of the University of Chicago: One is demography, and the other is shared experiences.
Take, for example, two mothers who become friends after meeting at a day-care center. Beliefs, especially about politics, may never be part of their explicit conversation. But the day-care center exerts a very powerful role in selecting people with similar demographic backgrounds and shared experiences. The mothers are likely to be about the same age, to face common child-rearing challenges and to have similar views on how to balance parenting and work. The fact that they are at this day-care center means they can afford it, which suggests they are in roughly the same socioeconomic class.
"It is not quite the case that I meet you and say, 'Oh my goodness, you also believe in the elimination of Roe v. Wade ,' " said Small. "Two years later, these guys are friends, but it is not because we believe the same things, but our experience and our demographics put us together in the first place."
What this ultimately suggests, Small and Smith-Lovin added, is that while organizations and schools and workplaces and neighborhoods and churches may seem to bring together broad mixes of people, they really do not. Organizations play a very powerful role in bringing together similar people and in creating homogenous views on a variety of topics. University professors, for example, are prone to believe in education, financial aid and research, but those views also lead to other beliefs about the importance of government and activism, Smith-Lovin said.
While there is nothing wrong with being around others who are similar to yourself, both Smith-Lovin and Small said that people and organizations pay a price for homogeneity. In politics, for example, the fact that people rarely have friends with different views makes it difficult to seek common ground or to examine one's positions closely.
"Most of us would be hard-pressed to provide clear explanations for our political beliefs," said Small. "If you ask the average person why they believe what they believe on Roe v. Wade , you are not going to get a coherent answer. We participate in settings where we don't have to explain ourselves because everyone else agrees with us. What this means is, 'I have no reason to challenge or question my own beliefs.'
Monday, October 16, 2006
Real Sonic
You guys poke your snouts in such interesting places. Definitely some interesting tensions between real and ersatz. And even the real is ersatz. Does anybody even SAY ersatz anymore?
notes
YouTube.com, Online Video Audience Soars
August 17, 2006
- Associated Press
The video-sharing site YouTube.com has cracked the Internet's Top 50 for the first time, a Web research company reports.YouTube is one of the most popular video-sharing sites, where amateurs and professionals alike can share and view videos - of a recent trip, of a new dog or even of themselves burping.According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube had 16 million unique U.S. visitors in July, a 20 percent increase from June. The site didn't even have measurable traffic until August 2005, when it had 58,000 unique visitors."Consumers clearly view video as one of the most accessible, interesting and entertaining sources of content on the Web," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. "The trends we're witnessing indicate that online video is emerging from its infancy and entering the mainstream."For July, YouTube debuted in the Top 50 at No. 40, up from 58th in June.ComScore also recorded a doubling of traffic to MySpace.com's video site, with 20 million visitors, trailing only Yahoo!'s video site, which had 21 million.
August 20, 2006
Candidly Speaking
The YouTube Election
By RYAN LIZZA
AUGUST, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube, the vast videosharing Web site.
Last week, Senator George Allen, the Virginia Republican, was caught on tape at a campaign event twice calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca,” an obscure racial slur.
The student, working for the opposing campaign, taped the comments, and the video quickly appeared on YouTube, where it rocketed to the top of the site’s most-viewed list. It then bounced from the Web to the front page of The Washington Post to cable and network television news shows. Despite two public apologies by Senator Allen, and his aides’ quick explanations for how the strange word tumbled out, political analysts rushed to downgrade Mr. Allen’s stock as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
YouTube’s bite also hurt Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who was defeated by the political upstart Ned Lamont in Connecticut’s Democratic primary earlier this month. In that contest, pro-Lamont bloggers frequently posted flattering interviews with their candidate on YouTube and unflattering video of Senator Lieberman. The Lamont campaign even hired a staffer, Tim Tagaris, to coordinate the activities of the bloggers and video bloggers.
In the real world, of course, neither Senator Lieberman nor Senator Allen is finished. Senator Lieberman, running as an independent, leads in recent polls. And Senator Allen, who said that he had meant no insult and that he did not know what macaca meant, is favored to win re-election against his Democratic opponent, James Webb. But the experience serves as a warning to politicians: Beware, the next stupid thing you say may be on YouTube.
When politicians say inappropriate things, many voters will want to know. Now they can see it for themselves on the Web.
But YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways, for good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists in both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?
YouTube didn’t even exist until 2005, but it now attracts some 20 million different visitors a month. In statements to the press, the company has been quick to take credit for radically altering the political ecosystem by opening up elections, allowing lesser known candidates to have a platform.
Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,” said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.”
But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity.
“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”
He sees a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. “What’s happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1,” he said. “It’s taken some richness out of the political discourse.”
Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees.
“It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”
These rules have long applied to White House contenders, but the dynamic is getting stronger and moving down the ballot. “It used to be the kind of thing that was only true for presidents,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Now with the proliferation of technology it is increasingly true for many other politicians.”
But Mr. Wolfson, who recently led an effort by the Clinton camp to reach out to liberal bloggers hostile to his boss, believes that this trend has one advantage. “It does create more accountability and more democratization of information in the process,” he said.
The explosion of instant video may also put pressure on the news media. In the old days, the Allen video would not have been available for all to see. “Imagine this happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We had video and trackers then. But you had to get it to a TV station or newspaper. You had to persuade them to run a story on it. This allows you to avoid the middleman.”
And by doing so, avoid an arbiter, however flawed, of standards. “There’s no, ‘Is this the right thing for political discourse?’ ” Mr. Dowd said. “It’s just there.”
These days journalists are concerned not just about being cut out, but about being part of the show. Reporters often suffer the wrath of bloggers in the same way politicians do. At a recent conference of political bloggers in Las Vegas, reporters more than once reminded one another to be discreet in their conversations because anything overheard was fair game for bloggers to post.
Now, as the campaign trail turns into a 24-hour live set, members of the press corps may find themselves starring on YouTube. “At least one big-time journalist will have their career or life ruined because some element of their behavior that was heretofore private will be exposed publicly,” predicted a senior adviser to a potential 2008 presidential candidate. The adviser requested that his name not be used because he did not want his personal views to be taken for his boss’s.
Then again, YouTube’s impact on politics may be exaggerated. For one, the site’s users are generally young and not highly engaged politically.
“Most social networking sites cater to younger audiences, 18 to 24,” says Michael Bassik, vice president of Internet advertising at MSHC Partners, which advises candidates on media strategies. “For the most part, it’s not political conversations taking place there.”
And maybe the Allen video wasn’t all that shocking after all.
Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and an Internet consultant to The New York Times Company, doesn’t think all that much has changed.
“Is it news that politicians say stupid things?” he asks. “Of course not.”
Ryan Lizza is a senior editor at The New Republic.
August 17, 2006
- Associated Press
The video-sharing site YouTube.com has cracked the Internet's Top 50 for the first time, a Web research company reports.YouTube is one of the most popular video-sharing sites, where amateurs and professionals alike can share and view videos - of a recent trip, of a new dog or even of themselves burping.According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube had 16 million unique U.S. visitors in July, a 20 percent increase from June. The site didn't even have measurable traffic until August 2005, when it had 58,000 unique visitors."Consumers clearly view video as one of the most accessible, interesting and entertaining sources of content on the Web," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. "The trends we're witnessing indicate that online video is emerging from its infancy and entering the mainstream."For July, YouTube debuted in the Top 50 at No. 40, up from 58th in June.ComScore also recorded a doubling of traffic to MySpace.com's video site, with 20 million visitors, trailing only Yahoo!'s video site, which had 21 million.
August 20, 2006
Candidly Speaking
The YouTube Election
By RYAN LIZZA
AUGUST, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube, the vast videosharing Web site.
Last week, Senator George Allen, the Virginia Republican, was caught on tape at a campaign event twice calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca,” an obscure racial slur.
The student, working for the opposing campaign, taped the comments, and the video quickly appeared on YouTube, where it rocketed to the top of the site’s most-viewed list. It then bounced from the Web to the front page of The Washington Post to cable and network television news shows. Despite two public apologies by Senator Allen, and his aides’ quick explanations for how the strange word tumbled out, political analysts rushed to downgrade Mr. Allen’s stock as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
YouTube’s bite also hurt Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who was defeated by the political upstart Ned Lamont in Connecticut’s Democratic primary earlier this month. In that contest, pro-Lamont bloggers frequently posted flattering interviews with their candidate on YouTube and unflattering video of Senator Lieberman. The Lamont campaign even hired a staffer, Tim Tagaris, to coordinate the activities of the bloggers and video bloggers.
In the real world, of course, neither Senator Lieberman nor Senator Allen is finished. Senator Lieberman, running as an independent, leads in recent polls. And Senator Allen, who said that he had meant no insult and that he did not know what macaca meant, is favored to win re-election against his Democratic opponent, James Webb. But the experience serves as a warning to politicians: Beware, the next stupid thing you say may be on YouTube.
When politicians say inappropriate things, many voters will want to know. Now they can see it for themselves on the Web.
But YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways, for good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists in both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?
YouTube didn’t even exist until 2005, but it now attracts some 20 million different visitors a month. In statements to the press, the company has been quick to take credit for radically altering the political ecosystem by opening up elections, allowing lesser known candidates to have a platform.
Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,” said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.”
But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity.
“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”
He sees a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. “What’s happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1,” he said. “It’s taken some richness out of the political discourse.”
Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees.
“It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”
These rules have long applied to White House contenders, but the dynamic is getting stronger and moving down the ballot. “It used to be the kind of thing that was only true for presidents,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Now with the proliferation of technology it is increasingly true for many other politicians.”
But Mr. Wolfson, who recently led an effort by the Clinton camp to reach out to liberal bloggers hostile to his boss, believes that this trend has one advantage. “It does create more accountability and more democratization of information in the process,” he said.
The explosion of instant video may also put pressure on the news media. In the old days, the Allen video would not have been available for all to see. “Imagine this happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We had video and trackers then. But you had to get it to a TV station or newspaper. You had to persuade them to run a story on it. This allows you to avoid the middleman.”
And by doing so, avoid an arbiter, however flawed, of standards. “There’s no, ‘Is this the right thing for political discourse?’ ” Mr. Dowd said. “It’s just there.”
These days journalists are concerned not just about being cut out, but about being part of the show. Reporters often suffer the wrath of bloggers in the same way politicians do. At a recent conference of political bloggers in Las Vegas, reporters more than once reminded one another to be discreet in their conversations because anything overheard was fair game for bloggers to post.
Now, as the campaign trail turns into a 24-hour live set, members of the press corps may find themselves starring on YouTube. “At least one big-time journalist will have their career or life ruined because some element of their behavior that was heretofore private will be exposed publicly,” predicted a senior adviser to a potential 2008 presidential candidate. The adviser requested that his name not be used because he did not want his personal views to be taken for his boss’s.
Then again, YouTube’s impact on politics may be exaggerated. For one, the site’s users are generally young and not highly engaged politically.
“Most social networking sites cater to younger audiences, 18 to 24,” says Michael Bassik, vice president of Internet advertising at MSHC Partners, which advises candidates on media strategies. “For the most part, it’s not political conversations taking place there.”
And maybe the Allen video wasn’t all that shocking after all.
Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and an Internet consultant to The New York Times Company, doesn’t think all that much has changed.
“Is it news that politicians say stupid things?” he asks. “Of course not.”
Ryan Lizza is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Signal/Noise
Dan sent me to this. And it made me wonder about signal to noise. I mean, 8 minutes of ANYTHING seems like al ot in such a competitive environment.
This Class Is Wrong
Chris was kind of riffing on Aldon, and it made me think: he should teach this class, but he never wold, because it's too static. Same time, same place. That's so not-blogger.
Back to School
This is the third YouTube founder. His values are kind of interesting and possibly significant.
Blog like a Pirate day
i'm engaging in the kind of piracy this article talks about, but I wanted it n front of you tonight because it's a big aspect of the youtube thing
The Wall Street JournalOctober 14, 2006; Page A3
In an apparent display of saber-rattling aimed at nudging video Web site YouTube Inc. into cutting favorable licensing deals, a number of major media companies have banded together to explore the legal implications of the video site's unauthorized use of copyright material, people familiar with the matter say.
The move comes just days after YouTube agreed to be acquired by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion. If the deal goes through, deep-pocketed Google could be held responsible for YouTube's legal liabilities.
YouTube, a hugely popular video-sharing site, carries both homemade videos, as well as professionally produced video clips from television networks and movie studios -- some uploaded illegally by users, and some available with the companies' consent. YouTube contends that it hasn't run afoul of copyright laws, because it immediately removes clips when rights holders complain about their inclusion on the site.
But lawyers for the group of media companies, which includes News Corp., General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Viacom Inc., have concluded that YouTube could be liable to copyright penalties of $150,000 per unauthorized video, people familiar the matter say. Viacom believes that pirated versions of video clips from its cable channels -- including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon -- are watched 80,000 times a day via YouTube. At that rate, potential penalties could run into the billions of dollars.
Time Warner Inc. hasn't joined the group, but has also warned YouTube about what it considers to be the site's repeated infringement of its copyrights. In an interview that appeared in Britain's Guardian newspaper Friday, Time Warner Chief Executive Richard Parsons made ominous hints about what course he would pursue if YouTube doesn't agree to a deal.
Whether the media companies eventually will file legal action is unclear, but the legal maneuvering comes as each of them is holding separate negotiations to allow YouTube to carry their programming in return for a slice of advertising revenue. Executives hope the possibility of legal action could prompt YouTube to improve terms it offers the media companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
The media companies have an ambivalent view of Google. On the one hand, they fear its size and clout. On the other hand, the media companies know that Google can be a valuable partner in distributing their content around the Web and also in drawing advertising. Indeed, Google already has separate links through partnerships and ownership stakes to a number of media companies, a fact that could ease the companies' negotiations with YouTube.
YouTube has been negotiating with content owners throughout the year as it tries to reach licensing pacts with them and head off any copyright lawsuits. So far, YouTube has struck deals with TV companies NBC Universal, CBS Corp. and with most of the major music companies, including Warner Music Group Corp., Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group and Sony Corp.'s and Bertelsmann AG's joint venture. YouTube is building a system that would help automate identification of videos containing copyright material on its site, and allow the content owners to get a portion of any related ad revenue.
The negotiations leading up to those pacts have sometimes included public criticism of the video-sharing site. Universal Music CEO Doug Morris told investors last month that YouTube violated copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content. Universal Music had considered taking legal action against YouTube over that issue prior to announcing its pact with the video site Monday, say people familiar with the matter.
The media companies now contemplating legal action have generally turned a blind eye to YouTube's use of their video. One reason for such tolerance is that the site guarantees their programs a degree of exposure hard to find elsewhere on the Web.
In June, NBC inked a deal with YouTube to make available promotional video clips for some of its popular programs, including "The Office" and "The Tonight Show." But NBC has had repeated run-ins with YouTube over its use of videos the company hasn't approved. It has been asking the site to take down as many as 1,000 clips a month, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The person says that Google's involvement with YouTube has added a sense of urgency to the negotiations for a resolution, because the deal is likely to sharply improve the video site's reach.
Google said that pacts it and YouTube announced this week with content owners demonstrate their "commitment to respect the rights of content owners and to work with them to create new revenue streams."
The media industry has been keen to avoid the mistakes music companies made in attacking Napster, an online service that allowed users to download pirated music. Although the original version of Napster was shut down, the move also spawned scores of imitators that continued to undermine the industry's business model. Meanwhile, music-industry litigation relating to Napster has dragged on for years.
Legal experts debate how much liability YouTube faces. Some say that YouTube has the benefit of a set of special "safe harbors" enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Under that process, Web-hosting sites such as YouTube have to comply with "takedown" notices that copyright holders may send when they become aware of content uploaded without their permission. Some entertainment companies have privately expressed frustration with the process, since it requires them to track down infringing works on a multitude of video-sharing sites.
"YouTube looks to be on relatively firm legal ground," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. But, according to John Palfrey, an intellectual-property professor at Harvard Law School, media companies will argue that YouTube shouldn't fall within the safe-harbor protections of the copyright law because, among other reasons, YouTube is deriving direct financial benefit from the infringement.
YouTube already faces a copyright suit filed in July in U.S. District Court by Los Angeles News Service owner Robert Tur over several videos he alleges appeared on the site without his permission
The Wall Street JournalOctober 14, 2006; Page A3
In an apparent display of saber-rattling aimed at nudging video Web site YouTube Inc. into cutting favorable licensing deals, a number of major media companies have banded together to explore the legal implications of the video site's unauthorized use of copyright material, people familiar with the matter say.
The move comes just days after YouTube agreed to be acquired by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion. If the deal goes through, deep-pocketed Google could be held responsible for YouTube's legal liabilities.
YouTube, a hugely popular video-sharing site, carries both homemade videos, as well as professionally produced video clips from television networks and movie studios -- some uploaded illegally by users, and some available with the companies' consent. YouTube contends that it hasn't run afoul of copyright laws, because it immediately removes clips when rights holders complain about their inclusion on the site.
But lawyers for the group of media companies, which includes News Corp., General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Viacom Inc., have concluded that YouTube could be liable to copyright penalties of $150,000 per unauthorized video, people familiar the matter say. Viacom believes that pirated versions of video clips from its cable channels -- including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon -- are watched 80,000 times a day via YouTube. At that rate, potential penalties could run into the billions of dollars.
Time Warner Inc. hasn't joined the group, but has also warned YouTube about what it considers to be the site's repeated infringement of its copyrights. In an interview that appeared in Britain's Guardian newspaper Friday, Time Warner Chief Executive Richard Parsons made ominous hints about what course he would pursue if YouTube doesn't agree to a deal.
Whether the media companies eventually will file legal action is unclear, but the legal maneuvering comes as each of them is holding separate negotiations to allow YouTube to carry their programming in return for a slice of advertising revenue. Executives hope the possibility of legal action could prompt YouTube to improve terms it offers the media companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
The media companies have an ambivalent view of Google. On the one hand, they fear its size and clout. On the other hand, the media companies know that Google can be a valuable partner in distributing their content around the Web and also in drawing advertising. Indeed, Google already has separate links through partnerships and ownership stakes to a number of media companies, a fact that could ease the companies' negotiations with YouTube.
YouTube has been negotiating with content owners throughout the year as it tries to reach licensing pacts with them and head off any copyright lawsuits. So far, YouTube has struck deals with TV companies NBC Universal, CBS Corp. and with most of the major music companies, including Warner Music Group Corp., Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group and Sony Corp.'s and Bertelsmann AG's joint venture. YouTube is building a system that would help automate identification of videos containing copyright material on its site, and allow the content owners to get a portion of any related ad revenue.
The negotiations leading up to those pacts have sometimes included public criticism of the video-sharing site. Universal Music CEO Doug Morris told investors last month that YouTube violated copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content. Universal Music had considered taking legal action against YouTube over that issue prior to announcing its pact with the video site Monday, say people familiar with the matter.
The media companies now contemplating legal action have generally turned a blind eye to YouTube's use of their video. One reason for such tolerance is that the site guarantees their programs a degree of exposure hard to find elsewhere on the Web.
In June, NBC inked a deal with YouTube to make available promotional video clips for some of its popular programs, including "The Office" and "The Tonight Show." But NBC has had repeated run-ins with YouTube over its use of videos the company hasn't approved. It has been asking the site to take down as many as 1,000 clips a month, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The person says that Google's involvement with YouTube has added a sense of urgency to the negotiations for a resolution, because the deal is likely to sharply improve the video site's reach.
Google said that pacts it and YouTube announced this week with content owners demonstrate their "commitment to respect the rights of content owners and to work with them to create new revenue streams."
The media industry has been keen to avoid the mistakes music companies made in attacking Napster, an online service that allowed users to download pirated music. Although the original version of Napster was shut down, the move also spawned scores of imitators that continued to undermine the industry's business model. Meanwhile, music-industry litigation relating to Napster has dragged on for years.
Legal experts debate how much liability YouTube faces. Some say that YouTube has the benefit of a set of special "safe harbors" enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Under that process, Web-hosting sites such as YouTube have to comply with "takedown" notices that copyright holders may send when they become aware of content uploaded without their permission. Some entertainment companies have privately expressed frustration with the process, since it requires them to track down infringing works on a multitude of video-sharing sites.
"YouTube looks to be on relatively firm legal ground," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. But, according to John Palfrey, an intellectual-property professor at Harvard Law School, media companies will argue that YouTube shouldn't fall within the safe-harbor protections of the copyright law because, among other reasons, YouTube is deriving direct financial benefit from the infringement.
YouTube already faces a copyright suit filed in July in U.S. District Court by Los Angeles News Service owner Robert Tur over several videos he alleges appeared on the site without his permission
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