So you want to start blogging, but you're shy...

That's "Baby Buns" to you

So what's YOUR Mob Nickname?

Find out here.

Link: Mafia Name Generator.

Personality Quiz - What Poetry Form Am I?

Link: Personality Quiz - What Poetry Form Am I?.

I'm the limerick, mired in muck. I refuse to be bored or get stuck.    I like to offend,    But not, in the end, As much as to thwart expectations. What Poetry Form Are You?

Are You a Talent, a Lifer, or a Mandarin?

Link: Are You a Talent, a Lifer, or a Mandarin?.

I'm a Mandarin!

You're an intellectual, and you've worked hard to get where you are now.  You're a strong believer in education, and you think many of the world's problems could be solved if people were more informed and more rational.  You have no tolerance for sloppy or lazy thinking.  It frustrates you when people who are ignorant or dishonest rise to positions of power.  You believe that people can make a difference in the world, and you're determined to try.

Talent: 44%
Lifer: 28%
Mandarin: 56%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.

News that came late to me: one of my most influential teachers has died

Drury "Dean" Long died November 21, 2006 in Thousand Palms, California

He was a high school teacher for me, and one on whom I modeled many of my own teaching techniques. The one high school teacher I had who was so powerful and communicated so much to me, I didn't meet another on his level until I got into my MFA program at Arkansas and met Jim Whitehead.

I took every literature class Mr. Long taught, and my senior year I was a T.A. for those same classes, just so I'd have an excuse to sit through them again. I'll never forget Mr. Long saying there was no point in reading all the footnotes on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," since most of them referenced Sir James Frasier's "The Golden Bough" anyway. He said just go to "The Golden Bough" instead, and he did, introducing us to archetypal and mythological literary criticism at the high school level.

Oh, and going on 30 years later, I still have those classical lit notes, and found them the other day, while packing for my next move. So bite me, Edith Hamilton. I never needed you. [grin]

I didn't realize until I got to college lit classes and discovered none of my classmates had ever heard about any of that stuff that it was anything out of the ordinary. We finally did get to it in college, but not until my SENIOR year, in the upper division literary criticism course for English majors (and I wasn't even technically an English major, so don't ask me what I was doing in there. I ended up three credits short of a double major with Journalism/English, just because I was obsessed with Emily Dickinson and decided to do an independent study on her instead of that last required course for the major).

I took Mr Long's drama classes too, although I didn't do so well at those. I was too much of a "speech student" to lose myself in the parts the way he wanted me to. He gave me a shot at "Mammy Yokum" in "Lil' Abner," tho, even though our musical never made it to the stage that year.

I never got the part I really wanted in "The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-on-the-Moon-Marigolds," so I became the stage manager instead. It was a crazy schedule, because I was also on the basketball team, so I'd get to school really early, write my newspaper stories, go to classes, then basketball practice, and then late play practice.

The only way I could do it was because Mr. Long actually lived out my way, almost to Wasilla, and he'd give me a ride home, often not until 11 pm when we got done. Then I'd get up the next day and do it again. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything, though, because I got a rare treat. On the way home, Mr. Long would go over that night's rehearsal with me and ask my opinion about what was working and what wasn't. He really listened to my ideas and even ended up incorporating some of them into the play. I'm sure he never knew how much that meant to me, to be treated with such respect and have my ideas valued that way, by someone I thought so highly of.

We didn't always get along so agreeably, and I think he even gave me a C in drama one semester. But "Gamma Rays" was a really neat time, and an amazing play. I've seen many productions over the years, and it always amazes me to see higher level and even professional productions that fall short of performances I saw Mr. Long get out of high school students.

And I still have my copy of "The Golden Bough," even if archetypal literary criticism is now out of fashion. I use it in other ways now, with Tarot cards. And I do still read Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," when I need to bone up a bit.

Link: adn.com | obituaries : Obituaries.

PALMER

Dean Long, 78

Drury "Dean" Long, 78, of Palmer died Nov. 21, 2006, at his winter residence in Thousand Palms, Calif.

A celebration of life for friends in the community who would like to share memories will be held in spring, when he normally would have returned. An announcement will be published beforehand.

Mr. Long was born May 8, 1928, to Lucinda and Floyd Long in Hindsboro, Ill., and was reared in Illinois.

An educator who taught in Missouri, California and Alaska, Mr. Long was respected by his students and fellow teachers. He retired after teaching English and drama for several years at Palmer High School. He also led the production of numerous plays and musicals at the high school and in community theater.

Family wrote: "Dean touched the lives of many, many students and community members who participated as actors or in other capacities in one or more of the myriad dramatic productions that he directed and produced.

"Subsequent to his retirement, he traveled extensively with his wife Jean, and became an avid writer, joining writing groups and publishing several works. He continued to write until his final illness and leaves a novel ready for editing and submission.

"Dean was also an avid golfer who traveled to play the finest courses in America and abroad and as a lover of flying, he flew his own plane in Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48.

"Dean will be forever missed by his family, friends and former students who valued his company and counsel."

He is survived by his wife, Jean Long; son, Gary; grandson, Christopher; granddaughter, Donna Jean Kramer; great-grandson, Ethan Kramer; and sisters and brothers, Dorothy Koelsch, Garnet Kincaid, Paul Long and John Long.

Have You Reached CSS Zen Yet?

I was dipping my toe into CSS in a small way by the late 1990s, but the CSS movement has really caught fire lately, making it more of a religion. And I'm all for that.

But for beginning bloggers who may not know it, Typepad RULES in its aids to help you learn CSS a little bit at a time, just enough to be dangerous. I highly recommend its Custom CSS feature, where you can do as much or as little CSS as you like.

A good place to start is just to change the font of a pre-set template banner. Go on, you can do it! The Typepad custom templates are butt-ugly compared to the pre-sets. But quite often, the pre-set templates look slick, but have one or two features that are just jarringly awful. But all you have to do is look at that template's CSS, grab the teeny bit of offending typeface CSS code, and paste it into the Custom CSS field corrected with something better. Less than an inch of code. Nothing wonky about it at all.

While I haven't done a thing with the design of this site in quite some time (maybe I will mess with it again soon), the main thing I do with Typepad Custom CSS on other sites I build is put in custom banner images and make them 900 pixels wide, or more, if I'm in the mood. 900 is better than the overly-narrow Typepad templates, but it can be a little tricky to do. Let it be a challenge to you!

I figure in the land of CSS Zen below (and the CSS Garden of Zen site is pretty cool too, to see examples of what can be done), I'm at Steps 6,7, & 8. I never really got on the whole validating kick, although I can do it. But I am doing lots of basking and scoffing these days.

Link: AUblog: Have You Reached CSS Zen Yet?.

Have You Reached CSS Zen Yet?

The evolution of a modern web designer. The 12 steps:

1. Realize that CSS/XHTML design - separating content from presentation - is the wave of the future.
   (BTW, this should have happened to you years ago)
2. Start learning CSS.
3. Start despising Internet Explorer and by proxy, Microsoft (even more than you already do).
4. Spend countless hours learning CSS hacks and obscure bugs to make all the browsers play nice.
5. Waste many hours of your life yelling at your screen.
6. Build your very first validating CSS/XHTML website without a table in sight.
7. Bask in your own glory and sense of accomplishment.
8. Scoff at the work of others, develop an odd sense of grandeur and superiority over others.
9. [Insert a montage here of you progressing in your work]
10. Come to a very important realization that no one cares.
    (No one except other coders/purists/CSS-nazis)
11. (Optional) Realize there are people better than you at coding CSS and start outsourcing it.
12. Zen.

 

Favorite quotation of the day

"Blog is a terrible word. How else do you describe the activity of someone who has become a synapse in the emerging global brain?"

Thanks to John Robb for this nugget of pithy wisdom!

Link: John Robb's Weblog: Blog.

How to take better care when writing about science

Journalism professor Michael Bugeja hits the nail on the head with this one.

Link: Inside Higher Ed :: Sound Science or Sound Bite?

It is my biggest complaint about science coverage in the mainstream media, which forces very nearly every science story into one of three narrative templates:

1. Dreadful disease-of-the-week
2. Gee whiz science innovation and/or technology entreprenuer (usually male) saves the world, discovery-of-the-week
3. How the next apocalypse will be caused by this instance of science run amuck

I suppose we can thank Wired magazine for adding "technology entreprenuer-heros" to Number Two above. I love Wired magazine, and I'd really love to write for Wired, but I gotta tell you, the feeling that I'd have to include some variant of Number Two in every story I'd query makes me hold my nose and write for my blogs instead. I wonder if Wired deliberately chose this narrative path, a variant of the cyberpunk anti-hero cowboy, jacked-in to the system, or if it fell into it with the tech boom. It's been copied by other entreprenuer-hero magazines ad nauseum (Fast Company, Business 2.0).

So if mainstream media is screwing up its coverage of science and producing pathetic science writing, I'd hope bloggers, many working in technology fields, would do something to correct the larger error in their mainstream narratives.

This is for those bloggers who enter these spaces not to write endlessly about themselves, but rather, to use their blogs as a way to SHARE what they find interesting in the world, to say "Hey, lookee here!" and let their blogs be a way to interact with the wonder and silliness and oddness and create or enter watercooler conversations about these things (Boing Boing has too much oddness and not enough conversation, if you ask me).

Translating science into something relevant and understandable to a wider audience could bring real joy to bloggers who love and are fascinated with science, even if they've had to face the fact that most jobs in science don't allow them to indulge very much of the wonder that first drew them to the field. Yeah, I'm talking Popular Mechanics readers, Wired readers, sure, but ANY workshop tinkerer, ANYONE who loves to read and engage with how things work. Science is NOT impossible arcana. It can be accessible to those who don't have precise disciplinary specializations.

Just as I preach the need for public intellectuals in the Blogosphere, I also hope this space can help popular interdisciplinary science to thrive, so that it becomes an avocation that doesn't stop when you discard your childhood chemistry set, or rock tumblers, or that fun build-it-yourself radio kit.

Yeah, that was me as a kid. Somewhere along the line, someone in school (maybe me) decided my aptitudes ran toward the humanities (they surely do), but I never fell out of love with science and curiosity and a desire to invent. I know there's others out there like me.

Michael Bugeja has some advice below for would-be science writers, and by extension, bloggers. Bloggers have an opportunity to do mainstream media one better, because they don't have the commercial imperatives of advertisers to force every science story into one of those three godawful narratives. Bloggers are expanding this world of discourse, so I'm hoping they can expand on these narrow-minded science story templates.

But if bloggers excerpt and condense these stories, they run the same risks as journalists. They can reduce things to sound bites, decontextualize, and oversimplify just as badly.

Here's some tips on how to avoid doing that:

Link: Inside Higher Ed :: Sound Science or Sound Bite?

Sound Science or Sound Bite?

By Michael Bugeja

I direct a journalism program at a science-oriented university where my colleagues are modern-day alchemists, turning corn into fuel, conjuring twisters in wind tunnels, or morphing visitors at our virtual reality lab into plant cells during photosynthesis.

These professors rank among the most ingenious, passionate people I have ever met.

Put some of them in front of a reporter, however, and all bets are off.

Being misquoted in the media is commonplace, especially when the topic concerns science. Depending on the error, a quotation out of context can catapult a scientist into the national spotlight where the person gets to clarify the remarks and do it again, only this time for a mass audience.

[...]

Journalists, of course, are partly to blame for overselling science. True, big national newspapers and broadcast outlets have seasoned correspondents. Science happens everywhere, including college towns like mine, Ames, Iowa, where agricultural biotechnology is on display in fields and on shelves of supermarkets. Many reporters who cover science do not fully grasp it, interviewing sources with polar viewpoints on genetically modified products or exotic animal diseases.

My colleagues diagnose mad cows. Reporters love mad cows because the beasts in question have or do not have the disease. Better yet, we eat on average 67 pounds of beef annually per person, ensuring the story will be read. But the science of immunohistochemistry to test for bovine spongiform encephalopathy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory is, on occasion, an arcane topic for the reporter who also does restaurant reviews.

[...]

To put this into perspective, consider this: The scientist who visited my university and who reportedly made that comment happens to be the same person who wrote the essay, titled, “Creation Myths: What scientists don’t — and can’t — know about the world” in the journal In Character. His name is Robert Hazen, author of the extraordinary book, Gen-e-sis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins, and a professor of earth science at George Mason University.

Read Hazen’s book, if you haven’t already. When you do, you realize that his comment as reported in the Ames Tribune actually is based on the molecular fossil record. Most reviews of his work note how fair and balanced his theories actually are.

You can’t deduce that, however, by reading the 387 words in the story about his talk at Iowa State University on February 3, 2006. You need to glean the 339 pages in Hazen’s hard cover book.

And in this numerical comparison is also the problem at hand.

Bites from Books

Below are some of the most influential books that helped shape a century of science, according to The American Scientist, the magazine of the Scientific Research Society. To illustrate my point, I have reduced each work’s premise or conclusion into a sound bite — an excerpt taken out of context — [...]

What would be the outcome, I wondered, if reporters attended lectures by authors of these great books, quoting them out of context in the year of publication, given the social mores of those times?

1. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell (1954): “Although obviously superior to cocaine, opium, alcohol and tobacco, mescaline is not yet the ideal drug. Along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory” (p. 66).
2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959): “[M]an is seen not as a static centre of the world—as he for long believed himself to be — but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer” (p. 36).
3. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962): “Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” (p. 8.)
4. Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Fractals (1977): “Why is geometry often described as ‘cold’ and ‘dry’? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain a coastline, or a tree.… Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel” (p. 2).
5. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (1988): “Who knows what the chimpanzee will be like forty million years hence? It should be of concern to us all that we permit him to live, that we at least give him the chance to evolve” (p. 252).
6. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1992): “If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers” (p. 251).
7. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (1996): “[W]riting emerged from a counting device.… Each change of reckoning device — tallies, plain tokens, complex tokens — corresponded to a new form of economy: hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry” (p. 122).

If you have read these books, you would realize that the above citations require substantiation. Those excerpts make great pull quotes in print or sound bites on air. However, taken out of context, they also provoke as much as inform. That is why I caution scientists to at least qualify similar remarks with humbler disclaimers, especially if they believe passionately in their assertions.

[...]

[Robert Hazen says]

“So what’s a scientist to do? My approach is to explain three things:

• “First, describe what we think we know about the topic (and, if possible, provide a little background about the measurements and theory that support that knowledge). How do we arrive at our conclusions?

• “Second, explain what we DON’T know about the topic, including the uncertainties, the controversies, and a sense of how much weight to place on different ideas. It’s always best to be honest about our imperfect state of understanding.

• “Third, and equally important, explain what we’re doing to find out more.”

According to Dr. Hazen, science is a never-ending adventure.

I feel the same way about journalism.

[...]

Michael Bugeja, who directs the journalism school at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2005).

My favorite quotation of the day

I really do thing this applies to the Blogosphere as well, so we should give it pause.

Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade.

Now here's the context, a New York Times article about learning to read more slowly (or as Thoreau might say, deliberately).

Link: Learning How to Read Slowly Again - New York Times.

I like the idea of thinking about this, although I don't know if I like the writer's prescription of how to go about it. I don't want to necessarily become a neo-Victorian (thanks Neal Stephenson!) keeping my tidy Commonplace Book (what the devil is a blog, anyway?).

But I do think too many of us read like students and multi-taskers, skimmers, in other words. The beauty of a beach novel is that you can pause after a paragraph and stare into space, ponder an idea the passage raises, reflect, question, argue in the margins. But how many so-called "beach novels" are worthy of such a ponderous approach? But are you ready to take Middlemarch to the beach?!

More appropriate, I think, for blog authors and would-be blog authors, would be to reflect on what makes a piece of writing valuable outside of the moment that spawned it, that might even make it stand up longer, make it stand the test of time.

I had a non-fiction workshop teacher who urged us to think about our long essay-like pieces as an attempt to be THE definitive take on that particular topic. Now how's that for something to shoot for?

Bloggers tend to respond so much to the moment, and there's nothing wrong with that. But Thomas Paine was also responding very much to his moment, and his little pamphlet surely has stood the test of time. We could say the same about Ben Franklin's little aphorisms, or even what he wrote under the throwaway name "Silence Dogood." (Of course Ben Franklin also believed in his own aphorism, "Fart Proudly," which I think conveys both the right degree of irreverence and timeliness about those things we might wish could stand the test of time.)

Link: Learning How to Read Slowly Again - New York Times.

September 22, 2006

Learning How to Read Slowly Again

By WILLIAM GRIMES

The demise of print looks as if it will be a long, drawn-out affair. John Sutherland, the chairman of last year’s Man Booker Prize Committee, offers an arresting statistic: Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade. As he calculates it in “How to Read a Novel,” it would take approximately 163 lifetimes to read the fiction currently available, at the click of a mouse, from Amazon.com.

So what to read? That’s the question. But as Mr. Sutherland’s title suggests, there’s a second question entangled with the first, addressed in several new books devoted to the lost art of reading. It’s a Malthusian problem. The amount of printed material increases exponentially, but the time available for reading remains static or, in many cases, decreases arithmetically. So once we have decided what to read, the question then becomes, How to read? And the paradoxical answer is, Much more slowly.

In “Reading Like a Writer” the novelist Francine Prose shows how to do it. She forces the act of slow reading by singling out excerpts from her favorite writers and zeroing in on single words, then sentences, then paragraphs, teasing out the specifics that transmute raw language into style and an artistically meaningful form. She has a notion, quite correct in my experience, that all readers start out slow, savoring individual syllables and words. Gradually, under pressure, they speed up, consuming more but enjoying and absorbing less.

Reading becomes information processing. The sheer bliss of the childhood reading experience comes to seem like a lost Eden, recaptured only in thrilling fits and starts or when time, mercifully, stands still. Prison and vacation make good readers.

Ms. Prose sets out to rewire the reader’s circuitry and get the electricity flowing the right way again. She has excellent taste, and she picks fights, which is fun. She heaps scorn, for example, on the standard advice that a writer should show rather than tell. She also admits to a prejudice against using brand names in fiction. It’s the lazy writer’s way of placing a character or establishing a social setting. Nothing can date a work more quickly, she writes, “than a reference to a brand of bed linen that no longer exists.”

This argument raises an intriguing question. Balzac and Dickens did not rely on brand names, but they did minutely describe clothing to indicate social status and character. Like obsolete brand names, these styles and, in many cases, the articles of clothing themselves have become extinct. Only period experts understand the meaning of clothes, carriages and interior decoration in the world of Turgenev or Flaubert. What’s a literary realist to do?

[...]

These impediments do not figure at all for Edward Mendelson, who holds seven classic novels up to close moral scrutiny in “The Things That Matter.” Each book is chosen because it sheds light on a significant stage in human life, beginning, naturally, with birth (Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”) and ending with death, or at least the uneasy prospect of a future minus us (Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts”). In between, Mr. Mendelson, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, tackles “Wuthering Heights,” “Jane Eyre,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Middlemarch” and ‘To the Lighthouse.”

All seven novels are by women. Three, perversely, are by one author, Woolf. Mr. Mendelson defends his choices in a rather sophistical introduction, but then gets right down to the heavy work of close reading. He can be oppressively earnest. “The Things That Matter” can seem like an endless sermon or a higher form of Cliffs Notes (“ ‘Jane Eyre’ records a journey out of a childish world into an adult one and a journey out of inequality and into equality”), but the author’s shovel work generally turns up riches. He takes the reader deep into the moral universe of his authors and pulls together thematic threads with extraordinary skill. He is a good reader. Not my kind of reader, perhaps, but he thinks books are important and reads them as if his life depended on it.

So do the 55 contributors to “You’ve Got to Read This Book!” That’s how excited they are about “the book that changed their life.” They need an exclamation point to express it.

There’s something profoundly depressing about seeing “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” listed as someone’s No. 1 life-changing reading experience. But so it was for Lisa Nichols, described as “a motivational speaker, personal coach and the founder and C.E.O. of Motivating the Teen Spirit.” Uplift and go-to-it entrepreneurship trump Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, although a few fiction titles, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” make the grade. Otherwise it’s “The Science of Getting Rich” and “How to Make Millions With Your Ideas.” Maybe the Europeans are right about us, after all.

[...]

 

Rank Revolts, or Are blog-natives getting restless?

Link: Naked Conversations: Revolting Rankings.

I just started reading Naked Conversations (the book) on the recommendation of a friend, and on its companion blog (?), found this interesting thread about bloggers who become obsessed with ratings and rankings, stats and traffic, to the exclusion of all else.

It strikes me as odd, putting the cart before the horse, in a community, an ecosystem, that professes to be more interested in what one has to say than who one is.

Has there been a shift? Has the blogosphere lost its sense of direction and gone the way of endless "tail-wagging-dog" pursuit of traffic and links, what used to be called (it's politically incorrect, of course) being a "blog slut" or a "blog whore?"

I sometimes see it as an obnoxious extension of high school, where far too many sheep are willing to ape and cluster around the "cool kids" and forget who they are in the process. In the blogosphere, it's the so-called "A-listers" (of course, each major community has its own A-listers, and crossing from business blogs to political blogs to tech blogs, you'll find the different A-listers don't even know other A-lists exist).

I'm like, dude, that is SO 2002! OK, so it's not, but 2002 was when I sort of fell into my own blog ratings obsession loop, back on Radio Userland. I was bored with it by 2003 and ready to write for myself instead of endlessly prostrating myself before a clique of A-listers.

I mean, I'm somebody who likes poetry, and literary non-fiction, and reading Harpers. Why wouldn't I be more interested in creating or linking to content that has a more timeless value, rather than content that only exists to ping Technorati at frequent intervals?

The whole frequent posting in a desperate quest to be able to say, along with Sally Field at the Oscars, "You link to me! You really link to me!" reminds me more of a famous psychological experiment with rats.

The rats have three control groups (if I remember correctly), one where pressing a bar delivers a bit of food, another where pressing a bar doesn't deliver food, and one where pressing the bar sometimes delivers food and sometimes doesn't. It's sort of like a Skinner box "reward and punishment" thing. What it found was that the rats who got or didn't get food behaved in fairly predictable ways, either using or ignoring the bar as suited them.

The rats who got what was called "inconsistent reinforcement" to the bar-pressing behavior drove themselves bonkers, however, pressing the bar madly, frantically, over and over, trying to get food out of it, way more food than the rat really needed to satisfy hunger.

Kinda makes you realize what sort of energy gambling casinos, and especially one-armed bandits, are harnessing.

So go on, y'all, pinging away, pressing your food bar. You can let it drive you crazy if you want. Me, I'm more interested in thinking and writing and linking about things that have more than a momentary value.

Link: Naked Conversations: Revolting Rankings.

Revolting Rankings

In his recent post, Revolting Peasant Metaphor, Sterling Camden at Chip's Quips hits a significant nail on the head of an issue I've written about a few times--over-ranking blog rankings.  Beside that, I like his ambiguous use of the word "revolting."

Is he making it a verb or an adjective?

If 50 million bloggers all want to be top-rated, then the blogosphere becomes nothing more than a humongous shouting match.  That seems to me, would be a pretty revolting development because it takes attention to the kind of rankings that are used by TV networks, and loses the power of the backyard fence conversation. In the former case, a bunch of slick people in nice suits uses every trick they can cook up to capture your eyeballs.  In the latter, two folks build trust, credibility and an enduring relationship through simple, candid conversations.

If you want to be an A-Lister, there's lots you can do.  First, enrich me by buying the book.  It's filled with rank-boosting tactics: Post often.  Be controversial.  Link to Scoble, Arrington and someone at BoingBoing.  Join every conversation at the top of the Technorati daily list. and at TechMeme.

[...]

This sounds pretty phenomenal until you realize all the people, all the people, all over the world who DON'T read either blog.  In fact, every day [Scoble] and Arrington probably reach increasingly smaller percentages of the total blogosphere.

[...]

Case in point: why should political bloggers involved with Netroots organizing and citizen journalism give a crap about linking to two tech guys that have NOTHING to do with other A-lists?

I know there's some cross-over between these two spheres of the blogosphere, but I'm somewhat of the belief that the true grassroots of the blogosphere is in local (say, Bluestem Prairie, on Minnesota's First Congressional District) to global (like Riverbend, with compelling blogging from Baghdad) blogs about WAY more than the tech/biz/marketing community, and WAY WAY more than cat blogs or teenagers on MySpace.

But here Shel Israel says, "Why isn't EVERYONE reading Scoble? like the very idea begs the question. (I suspect he's saying it tongue-in-cheek, however)

The comments thread attached to Israel's post raises a number of good issues as well, so if you're really thinking about these ideas, go check it out.

In his recent post, Revolting Peasant Metaphor, Sterling Camden at Chip's Quips hits a significant nail on the head of an issue I've written about a few times--over-ranking blog rankings.  Beside that, I like his ambiguous use of the word "revolting."

Is he making it a verb or an adjective?

If 50 million bloggers all want to be top-rated, then the blogosphere becomes nothing more than a humongous shouting match.  That seems to me, would be a pretty revolting development because it takes attention to the kind of rankings that are used by TV networks, and loses the power of the backyard fence conversation. In the former case, a bunch of slick people in nice suits uses every trick they can cook up to capture your eyeballs.  In the latter, two folks build trust, credibility and an enduring relationship through simple, candid conversations.

If you want to be an A-Lister, there's lots you can do.  First, enrich me by buying the book.  It's filled with rank-boosting tactics: Post often.  Be controversial.  Link to Scoble, Arrington and someone at BoingBoing.  Join every conversation at the top of the Technorati daily list. and at TechMeme.

[...]

This sounds pretty phenomenal until you realize all the people, all the people, all over the world who DON'T read either blog.  In fact, every day [Scoble] and Arrington probably reach increasingly smaller percentages of the total blogosphere.

[...]

Case in point: why should political bloggers involved with Netroots organizing and citizen journalism give a crap about linking to two tech guys that have NOTHING to do with other A-lists?

I know there's some cross-over between these two spheres of the blogosphere, but I'm somewhat of the belief that the true grassroots of the blogosphere is in local (say, Bluestem Prairie, on Minnesota's First Congressional District) to global (like Riverbend, with compelling blogging from Baghdad) blogs about WAY more than the tech/biz/marketing community, and WAY WAY more than cat blogs or teenagers on MySpace.

But here Shel Israel says, "Why isn't EVERYONE reading Scoble? like the very idea begs the question. (I suspect he's saying it tongue-in-cheek, however)

The comments thread attached to Israel's post raises a number of good issues as well, so if you're really thinking about these ideas, go check it out.

Another fascinating science fiction writer

After I posted about the death of Octavia Butler a while back, I went totally off on an Octavia Butler kick, and I must say, I now count Parable of the Sower as one of my all-time personal favorite books. Parable of the Talents a bit less so, but the Sower is something I carry around with me, in my head, like Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossesed, or Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake. I'm haunted by Butler's envisioning of those homeless refugees making their way up California.

I'm not a natural science fiction fan, or I didn't come to it naturally, being biased by spending all my reading on the literary side, from getting my M.F.A. I came in through cyberpunk, during another grad program.

But the story of James Tiptree Jr. being a psuedonym Alice Sheldon held a mild interest when I first heard it, some years ago. This Salon article by Laura Miller opens up a whole new side of things and I'm totally fascinated. Maybe it's how Miller constructs it, but like Tiptree's correspondents, I may even be seduced.

Here's my favorite bits...

Link: Salon.com Books | Stranger than science fiction.

Stranger than science fiction

Before JT Leroy there was James Tiptree Jr. -- the writer and alter ego of Alice Sheldon, a beautiful woman who struggled under the weight of her talent, depression and sexuality.

By Laura Miller

Aug. 10, 2006 | People are understandably fascinated by the lives of great artists. We scrutinize them for the formative experience or the light-bulb flare of inspiration -- whatever it is that pushes a human being beyond the rim of the merely good and results in a work for the ages. But in a way, the lives of the near great are just as illuminating. They're more like us in both their fears and their limitations, and they're often better at showing us where the threshold is by not quite managing to cross it. With them, you can see the precise point when nerve failed, perseverance ran out, vision faltered.

Take the case of James Tiptree Jr., who for a few years during the heyday of science fiction's "New Wave," in the 1960s, ...  The reclusive Tiptree carried on involved, intimate correspondences with at least a dozen other writers and editors. They knew that their friend had gone on safari in Africa at the age of 6, learned to fly a plane and shoot a gun, worked for military intelligence during World War II and for the CIA afterward, published a short story in the New Yorker and obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. What they didn't know was that he didn't exist, or not exactly. The person writing under the name James Tiptree Jr. was actually Alice Sheldon, a woman in her 50s, living with her husband in suburban McLean, Va.

[...]  Yet "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon" offers a rich exploration of the attractions and perils of writerly personas, ... Alice Sheldon, as Phillips portrays her, was a woman who struggled all her days to do justice to her own knotted and painful experience of life; she came closest in Tiptree's fiction. But this biography conveys the pervasive sense of a gift thwarted on the verge of consummation, and Phillips' meditations on why that happened make this book exceptional.

What's particularly provocative about James Tiptree is that almost everything "he" told his epistolary friends about himself -- down to several passionate but doomed infatuations with unavailable women -- was essentially true. Sheldon lived an extraordinary life, and was a woman of immense charm, intelligence and talent. Yet somehow, she needed the mask, or rather the alter ego, of Tiptree to write her best fiction. When Tiptree's real identity was discovered ... nothing she wrote afterward "was ever as direct, honest and exciting as her work before she was exposed."

The most difficult and preoccupying relationship in Sheldon's life was with her mother, and it's not hard to see why. Mary Bradley was a popular author (she supported the family with her writing when her husband's business interests faltered during the Depression), a glamorous Chicago socialite and a fearless adventurer.

[...]

In a letter, Sheldon described her mother as "a kind of explorer-heroine, highly literate (Oxford & Heidelberg), yet very feminine whatever that is. You help her through doors -- and then find out she can hike 45 miles up a mountain carrying her rifle and yours. And repeat the next day. And joke. And dazzling looks ... I am still approached by doddering old wrecks, extinguished Scandinavian savants and what have you who want to tell me about Mother as a young woman."

[Hell, I want to BE Sheldon's mother. Mary Bradley sounds simply wonderful.]

... Sheldon would spend most of her 72 years trying to figure out how to be a woman. A chief obstacle was her own mother's manifest success at doing whatever she wanted while remaining "feminine whatever that is." Sheldon, who accomplished enough in her time to make the child of a more ordinary mom feel exceptional, wrote that her mother "didn't provide a model for me, she provided an impossibility."

[...]

Sheldon and her mother were very much alike -- but not exactly ... As a stylish debutante, she was photographed by admiring society journalists. Then she eloped with a bad-boy poet to live the boho life of a painter in 1930s California. Six stormy years of marriage ended in divorce, whereupon Sheldon joined the Army as one of the first WACs. She got into the burgeoning intelligence field known as photointerpretation (studying aerial reconnaissance photographs for enemy installations and activity). Stationed in Paris, she challenged an Army colonel to a game of chess, played blindfolded, beat him and shortly thereafter married him.

... Alice returned to the U.S. and the couple spent a few quiet years running (of all things) a chicken hatchery in New Jersey. In the 1950s, they moved to Washington to work for the CIA. Ting ranked high enough to sit in on National Security Council meetings with the president, but Alice soon got tired of photointerpretation and went back to school to study clinical psychology. She eventually earned her Ph.D., studying the effect of novelty on lab rats, and struck up a lifelong correspondence with the great psychologist Rudolf Arnheim.

Sheldon had loved pulp science fiction... but didn't make a concerted attempt to write it until she was past 50, when research psychology was turning out to be as hard to stick to as anything else she'd tried. She picked the name James Tiptree as a lark, inspired by a jar of Tiptree jam in a supermarket...

[...]

This new s.f., Phillips writes, aimed for "real characters, atmosphere, social criticism, style" at a time -- the 1960s -- when speculation about social change was in the air. Tiptree's first important story, "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," coolly recounts a multistop international journey by a doctor who is in love with a mystical female vision of Earth. It gradually becomes clear that he's intentionally spreading a lethal influenza virus as he goes, wiping out the human race to save the planet.

[...]

Tiptree's stories fused themes of sex, death and alienation in ways that many of his readers hadn't encountered before. "I read the first two sentences and felt like I'd fallen off a high tower," one critic wrote. Tiptree's fiction gained a following, and the persona blossomed as Sheldon began regularly exchanging letters with such innovative s.f. writers as Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and firebrand feminist Joanna Russ. Sheldon was a charismatic correspondent. (Under her own name she wrote fan letters to mainstream writers like Tom Wolfe and Italo Calvino; Calvino was so impressed he wrote back asking to see her stories, but she never responded.) Those who exchanged letters with Tiptree felt they really knew him, and both Russ and Le Guin have confessed to being more than a little in love with him. "Tiptree was a man designed by a woman," Phillips writes, "and that made him as appealing as any Darcy or Heathcliff."

[...]

Yet when the truth about Tiptree was finally revealed, Sheldon didn't feel liberated. Her writer and editor friends were overwhelmingly supportive and many were intrigued by Tiptree's true gender. But despite freeing herself from a deception that had become unwieldy, creatively, Sheldon felt enervated and wary; she'd interpret the slightest friction in any interaction with editors and publishers as a sign of her demotion in status from male to female.

Sheldon wrote in her journal of Tiptree, "I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity, I was -- though an aging intellectual -- of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman ... Tiptree's 'death' has made me face ... my self-hate as a woman."

[...]

Sheldon's distaste for her gender wasn't consistent. She was an enthusiastic supporter of second-wave feminism who joined NOW and subscribed to Ms. Magazine from the outset. She started and abandoned several sympathetic treatises on the dilemma of women, especially those women with "atypical" ambitions and desires.

[...]

Still, Phillips believes that Sheldon never shook off the ill effects of a youth spent trying to live up to her parents' expectations and her mother's example. In school, Phillips writes, "Alice had the bad luck to be extremely pretty. If she hadn't been, she might have given up the popularity contest. She might have studied harder, prepared for a career, and not cared what people thought ... Instead, she cared about appearances, practiced femininity and flirtation, and got addicted to the rewards for being a pretty girl." The result was a woman of tremendous charm who felt exhausted by the company of other people, even those she liked. Every interaction was a life-sapping performance.

Phillips suggests that if Sheldon had been able to accept those parts of herself that defied her parents' image of a good girl -- homosexual desires, anger and grief -- she might have been able to integrate Tiptree into Alice and sustain a brilliant career as an author without resorting to disguises.

[...]

Sheldon also suffered from some more commonplace creative problems. Throughout her life, she rushed into a profession -- painting, the military, clinical psychology, writing -- with idealistic, grandiose notions of how things ought to be done. Inevitably, she was stymied by the inglorious practicalities. She worshiped Mexican muralist José Orozco, only to be disappointed, upon meeting him in Mexico City, when she learned that he was painting a rich woman's portrait for the money. Her hopes for finding a utopia of female empowerment in the WAC were dashed when the women insisted on behaving like the imperfect human beings they were. She refused to accommodate the realities of academic life -- department budgets, grantsmanship -- and thereby quashed her chances at a real career in science.

Sheldon's struggles remind me of a famous conversation between the minor British writer Stephen Spender and the great poet T.S. Eliot. The young Spender told Eliot that he had always wanted to be a poet. Eliot's reply was that he'd never understood this thing of wanting "to be a poet"; all he understood was having some poems you wanted to write.

When what you really want is to write some poems, you don't let the ultimately ancillary issues of how a poet should live or whether you're an exceptional talent get in the way. Often, the difference between a minor writer and a great poet is a matter of insufficient -- or, rather, misplaced -- commitment.

With Sheldon, the nagging problem of her identity, who she wanted to be -- a genius, an artist, a scientist, a writer -- kept interfering with the things she wanted to do. By creating the persona of James Tiptree Jr., she was temporarily able to finesse the block. In time, though, the puzzle of identity intruded again, as this new imaginary self sucked up more and more of her time and energy. (Ellison, complaining that Tiptree wasn't producing a promised novel, insisted that all that letter writing was the cause.) If she'd managed to solve her identity dilemma, she might have, as Phillips suggests, figured out how to write about a girl growing up into a "whole woman." On the other hand, if she had cared more deeply, obsessively and passionately about any one of the half-dozen types of work she tried in her life, she might have looked up from it one day to find that the whole woman had arrived unbidden.

[...]

How to Avoid Blogging Snake Oil

I got to writing a comment over at Dan Greenfield's blog late last night, and something up and bit me while writing it, so I've decided to repost the lengthy comment here, with a bit from Dan's original post as a set up from the dialogue I was entering.

BTW, Dan is a PR professional who is also Vice President for Corporate Communications at Earthlink. I met him for the first time about a month ago at a meeting of the Atlanta Media Bloggers.

Link: Bernaisesource :: How to Avoid Blogging Snake Oil.

How to Avoid Blogging Snake Oil

Does your corporateblog keep you up at night?  Are you anxious about starting one?  Do you feel “inadequate” because you don’t know what RSS and tagging are?

Well look no further because I have the cure for you.  Accept no substitutes. Guaranteed to work or your money back.

I think many who blog or want to blog have, at times, felt much of the former and wished even more for the latter – a miraculous remedy with secret ingredients to cure our social media needs.

Well I am here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as if you didn’t already know; there is no such thing as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, and any blogging cure-all is bound to be just a case of blogging snake oil.

Blogging is hard work – from trying to figure out whether to write, then what to write and then how often to write -- despite what so-called experts may say.  Embracing transparency, candor and personal expression on a regular basis is stress producing even in a corporate culture that supports it.  And hiring someone to write your blog for you will never generate the passion you need to succeed.

So what do you really need to know to be a successful blogger? How much technical expertise do you need to have?  How technical should your blog be? What does it take to be an expert?  How can you tell a pretender from the real thing?

For some answers, I sought out some seasoned bloggers to get their perspective on what it takes to be an expert.

[...]

Here is what I wrote for a reply (among others who also replied).  Note: I am not one of the experts Dan was soliciting. [grin]   

Hi Dan!

I'm seeing some kind of movements and counter-movements in cybercultures and communities, sort of like pendulum swings online, and the sort of distinctive signature styles when different cultures seem to dominate the spaces (I've been studying cybercultures since 1993, dunno if that makes me an expert, but that's what I've been working at).

It reminds me most of what I used to see growing up in Alaska, a state with a boom-bust-boom-bust economy, driven by oil. (I've written about this a bit in my dissertation, here: http://www.nutball.com/dissertation/mains/Narra1.html)

So online, even without oil, some of the boom-bust character swings affect people's personalities online, how they act in different contexts.

From early 1994 to about 1996, the Web was a place for true believers, Kool-Aid drinkers, folks migrating over from Usenet and listservs, MOOs, IRC, wonky folks, techie folks, but folks accustomed to communities and dialogues, often combative dialogues. These were people who were likely to have been veterans of some famous flame wars in this community or that community. They looked upon people with AOL.com email addresses with suspicion [grin].

Many in those days were working very hard to try to make web-based communications less one-way, less monologic. They wanted interactive "sites," places to anchor real communities.

While I was focusing an ethnography on one such community, there was a shift online, as the boom picked up speed with an influx of cash. New stereotypical online characters entered the mix, some as out of place as the AOL.com email addresses were when they first ventured into real and intense online forums.

Sort of like when a rich Texan shows up in some small town and walks around in a big hat and tries to buy up everything without really knowing what he's buying. Or like when the Pipeline folks showed up in Alaska and started shipping their own labor into the state (huh, many of them Texans).

Things get nutty in Alaska in boomtime. Not many zoning laws, so strip malls go up every which way, in a frenzy (I know one town was about a mile wide and 10 miles long). People put septic tanks too close to lakes. The locals shake their heads and wonder why no one seems to have any sense. Friends get rich overnight and start doing lots of cocaine. I think people's characters get revealed as much in times of plenty as in times of hardship. It's like a little test the universe gives us.

Things got a bit nutty online too. Folks who'd never been in real online communities showed up. Many came from the world of old media, where a lot of money lived in big piles. They thought about the media landscape in terms of one-way communication instead of interactive community dialogues.

Oh, and sort of like when the white Europeans showed up in North America and claimed to have "discovered" this big empty continent and neglected to notice that the Native Americans were already there? These late 1990s arrivals just sort of showed up in cyberspace, started bulldozing and putting up their strip malls every which way, with no regard at all for what was there before them (that would require something like dialogue to be taking place, a rather alien concept for many, still).

But that big old party went bust, and about the only good thing about it was that those fair-weather folks took a powder pretty quick. Who was left? People who had a REASON to be there, because it was where their friends were, the communities that shaped and gave identity to important aspects of their lives. Long before there were dating sites, people were meeting partners, making friends, having parties, all through communities online.

Some of us may have felt that we got our old Internet back once those carpet-baggers bugged out.

And in real vital online communities, there were even folks in the late 1990s building home-grown content management systems, precursors to blogs, to serve up fan fiction, fan artwork, all manner of things to support forums and other groups.

Blogs were born from communities and bulletin boards, just as much as they were from web pages. Real communities and bulletin boards, chat rooms, graphical VR spaces, where the communities existed first, and the sites that were part of them came second (even Slashdot and Kuro5hin).

And then blogs began to multiply, and new communities formed up around many of them. LiveJournal was as hot for teens as MySpace is now. Dialogue and interaction were the rule, not "blogging success."

You can guess where I'm going here. I'm starting to feel a shift in the Force (go tell Obi Wan Kenobi!). I feel another boom coming on, mostly by the shift in the personalities of the spaces, and what their goals and intentions are. I hear an awful lot more talk about how to bottle and sell "blogging success" as well as products and company PR, than I do about real communities, interaction, and dialogue.

I'm hearing more talk about blog metrics and measures than ANY compelling topics of conversation on this blog or that blog.

I'm seeing all kinds of blogs springing up, presuming to play English teacher of sorts for bloggers (hey, that was my job! I taught English for 15 years), speaking not in a dialogue as part of a community, but rather, offering 10 reasons for this, five tips for that, making pronouncements, prescriptions, all with a one-way voice-of-authority tone, like "HERE IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO FOR SUCCESS," like someone died and made that person god, when old-timers around here know they're just making this stuff up as they go along.

I've taught both regular English and technical and businesss writing, and it appears to me that bloggers need a whole lot more than formulaic prescriptions from the land of tech/business writing and SEO nonsense to "game" the system. (I think I'm inadvertently echoing Plato, who often whined about the very famous and rich speech and writing teachers of his time, the Sophists)

For every new blog that's launched, there doesn't have to be a reason or a community first, any more than Thoreau knew what he was starting when he just up and went out to Walden and started writing. Sometimes you know the reason, and sometimes the reason finds you.

What I worry about are gamer blogs, playing word combinations and titles like they were shaking the dice in Boggle, always with one eye on their Technorati rank and the blessing of an A-lister.

It seems like there is going to be an avalanche of "fake" bloggers unleashed onto the Nets, all writing some variant of bland, characterless imitations of these "how-to-blog" preachers, whilst earnestly striving to boost their ranks, sell widgets, perhaps become ethically compromised.

What is it I'm thinking of, Amway? A pyramid scheme? Everybody must get blog, but really only the ones who got in early get any real benefit? Why does it feel like the carpet-baggers have returned?

And why does it feel like they've just "discovered" North America again, and whoops, there's still no prior inhabitants to dispossess?

I think bloggers need more of what they learned in freshman comp, instead of business and technical writing, to have a successful blog. They need to write in a real voice for real audiences. Calculated rhetoric sounds calculated, just like most of the stuff in Old Media.

I do hope many many people find their voices and soar online in communities and dialogue, where the real energy is.

Wouldn't it be great if it turns out that English teachers are important after all, even if most of them are paid less annually than the cars most of their students drive at college?

My fear is that people who maybe would really connect with some wonderful communities online will get so lost in the surfaces of these endless sales pitches and proscriptive, prescriptive voices of authority in this little boomlet that they'll just look at the new strip malls and shake their heads, do their best Holden Caulfield, and say, "This is phony. It is not for me."

just my long-winded two cents,

Chris

How to sell your soul and sell out your blog for 10 pieces... of paper?

Link: BloggerJobs :: Blogsvertise is looking for bloggers to post their ads.

Egad! Should we start watching for these sell-out bloggers to appear on a spammer-scale? Will machines generate these blogs, these three-links-per fake-promo-link-farm posts, and then massively spam the comments field too?

I mean, direct mail folks (and by extension, spammers) operate under a low low LOW percentage response rate, five percent or something, but they look at that five percent (or whatever the number is) as rock solid, an entitlement that justifies a calculus of MILLIONS, gazillions perhaps, of no-friction messages sent out, just to get that rock solid single digit return on an investment of next-to-nothing.

I believe they think it is a valid method of creating value out of thin air. And by their calculations, it may be, but actually, it destroys far greater values to create that single digit value, in the same way fouling your own well does. They say dogs at least know enough not to defecate where they live, but it is a lesson many humans apparently never learned.

Suppose vast numbers of bloggers accept that blog version of an envelope-stuffing "job" below. Would that be enough of a disruption of the noise-to-signal ratio to disrupt the ecosystem of the blogsophere itself?

Comment spam and trackback spam are disruptive, but marginal (at least now they are, because of CAPCHA, but they were once out-of-control enough to radically turn an interactive space into one-way monologues). Google and Technorati already have a hard time parsing link-farms out of their records. What if it became impossible because humans were conned into becoming willing link-farm agents?

The Turing Test generally holds when it comes to distinguishing humans from machines... but what happens when humans are hired as willingly volunteers to become the machines, because machine-generated spam blogs can technically still be detected (AI not really being good enough yet to simulate uniquely human-style randomness)?

Link: BloggerJobs :: Blogsvertise is looking for bloggers to post their ads.

Blogsvertise is looking for bloggers to post their ads:

Blogsvertise.com is looking for bloggers who are interested in getting paid to post a variety of assigned topic entries in their already-existing blogs.

Bloggers will be asked to post short entries on a variety of topics, including three links to an advertiser's website in each entry. You decide what to write; it is not necessary to endorse the advertiser's product or service.

Each completed task will pay $10 via Paypal after the entry has been online for 30 days.

This is a great way for bloggers to earn a small income in addition to or instead of featuring pay-per-click advertisements.

URL: http://www.blogsvertise.com
Email for more information: jess@blogsvertise.com

I include the addresses above, hoping someone with the capability to spam this person will have at it, as karma for the blogosphere pollution this ridiculous link-whoring will generate.

The blogosphere exists because some bloggers chose to make a stand on integrity, to be REAL in a world increasingly of media marketing-created surfaces, the NON-reality-based universe.

Now those media-marketing types want to remake the blogosphere in their image, to make the world safe for NOTHING BUT mindless promotions of every sort.

I have nothing against honestly using advertising on a blog, nothing at all. I do, however, have a problem with the influx of the direct mail/spamming forces who want to apply math on an absurd scale, in order to create highly questionable returns, and in the end, to ultimately destroy the system by overwhelming the search engines necessary to creating the blogosphere's value.

I remember a time before there were search engines on the web. In 1993 and 1994. Spiders, we called them then, when they first started appearing, Web Crawler and Lycos.

BEFORE search engines. Can you wrap your mind around that concept? It's sort of like imagining the world without nearly-universal electrical service (during this massive heat wave, it brings the point home) . I overheard a news report the other referring to the very IDEA of living without electricity as "primitive."

You know, I about gagged at such utter stupidity. Had this news anchor ever read Victorian literature? Would people in the modern age call Victorians, with their drawing rooms and excruciatingly correct manners and social customs "primitive"?!

Ah, nobody reads much anymore, and they wear their ignorance out in the open without even the good sense to be embarrassed by it. I was on a Jane Austen kick again last night, so I'm filled with outrage.

There can be civilized worlds without electricity, and yes, Virginia, the Web once did exist in its present form without search engines (I'm really not counting Gopher, Archie, and Veronica, because those were tools for the Internet proper, the blinking cursor Internet, which is not to put down their rimportant ole in the development of the Net).

My caution here is that if the "Well" of the Internet becomes so fouled by these entities or agents as to render search engines inoperative, if their scale overwhelms even Google's massive server farms (server farms, good, link farms, bad), we may find ourselves in the same sort of anarchy online as the world would go into without electricity.

But the Blogosphere COULD survive.

What we'd have to do (and maybe this is obvious to old-timers from the 1990s, but I want to make it explicit to newer arrivals) is simply recreate the original purpose of the Blogroll, as a TRUE ROADMAP to what would become an utterly roadless world, a chaotic sea of information and expression.

That, btw, is what made one of the first million-of-hits web sites a success, in 1994. John December's Internet Web Text was a guide for a world without search engines. Because of the carefully-selected value of his travel-agent's guide to the Web, the space became intelligible to people as a landscape, in a way that the blinking cursor and Gopher never could create for most of us.

If glorified link-farm spam comes close to killing the blogosphere, this is something we will have to do as well, to rebuild all the roadmaps for a world without search.

The "old" Wonkette on where blogs are going

David Pogue is apparently still on vacation and recycling the transcript of an old interview on his NYTimes blog, but I found some bits in there that were worth looking at, not as Thus Sprake Zarathustra, but just as something to mull over.

I never was as big of a Wonkette fan as so many people were, and that's an interesting subject for discussion all by itself. First, I sort of thought she laid an egg at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, as one of the first group of bloggers given press credentials there. I thought a bit too much raw ambition showed through, and I wasn't impressed.

But mainly, I never jumped on the Wonkette bandwagon because I just didn't think she was that funny. I dunno. Maybe some folks are starved for humor in the Beltway or something. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor, tending toward the body-function/bathroom variety, perhaps, but too much of Wonkette back in the day seemed like ad hominem cheap shots that weren't all that clever. I always figured whoever hired her away probably could have done better.

Now how's that for a cheap shot? I am (remain) a big fan of David Pogue, and there are still some interesting observations below.

Link: Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog.

Wonkette’s Ingredients for a Successful Blog

July 27

A couple of weeks ago, CBS News Sunday Morning broadcast my introduction to blogging. As so often happens, my reporting for this segment involved some really interesting interviews, of which we could use only a few minutes’ worth in the final episode.

I thought I’d treat you, therefore, to a heartier excerpt from one of the most interesting interviews. Ana Marie Cox wrote the gossipy, funny, blog Wonkette.com for its first two years before taking on a column in Time magazine and a couple of book deals. Time announced today that she would be the Washington editor of Time.com. On the Web, she can be polarizing and controversial. In person, she’s funny and media-savvy; it was clear that she’s no stranger to TV interviews. In any case, what she wasn’t was boring. Here’s the transcript.

[...]

DP: And then, after two years of this, Time Magazine called with a contract.

AMC: Yes! I still can’t quite believe any of that actually happened. I’m still waiting for someone to come out from behind the curtain and be like, “Ha-ha!”

DP: But isn’t that the definition of a successful blogger, though, to get plucked from the blogosphere and given a column?

AMC: I think that’s what most bloggers would consider successful. I don’t think that. I think that blogging as a medium is just that. It’s a medium. And it has a very low bar to entry. But the reason why anyone does it, I think, has to do with, like, having an opinion you believe is worth other people hearing, and having something to say beyond to the three or four people you talk to every day. And I think that’s why people get into journalism.

And so it sort of would be a little odd if, given a chance to talk to a couple million people, rather than a couple hundred thousand people, you said no.

[...]

DP: So what are the ingredients then for a successful  blog, apart from being entertaining or snarky?

AMC: I think it’s changing. Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.

What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it’s almost physically impossible for one person to do that.

And so I think that we’re probably going to see that the individual, strong-personality blog is not going to be at the forefront, because group blogs are going to be able to do what people expect of blogs better.

[Not only would I STRONGLY disagree with this assessment (I think it reflects her going over to the dark side, overly influenced by mass media assumptions), but there are some folks talking about POSTING LESS rather than more as a more effective blogging tactic (see Eric Kintz on MarketingProfs, for his post on Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore). I think "feeding the beast" is not only a recipe for jumping on George Jetson's treadmill, it removes reflection and thoughtfulness from the equation.

I mean, in a world of information glut, endlessly pinging Google and Technorati may be one way to get noticed (as tabloids have also discovered near supermarket lines), but what about VALUE? What about contributing to the greater wisdom of the world? What about creating something that might one day stand the test of time, as some of George Orwell's essays did, written from here and there as a correspondent, for this reason or that reason? Many of the reasons Orwell wrote are long past, yet we still value and read his words.

Why not aspire to something more thoughtful, rather than trying to desperately OUT-PING a gazillion bloggers? It stands to reason that actually standing out for something OTHER than your pings might actually be an effective way to break out in the filters and feed readers. You know, just as Glenn Greenwald did or someone like that. There are quite a few people who aren't pinging themselves to death with little one-liners that will be as forgotten as quickly as most of the stuff Wonkette wrote.

The fact that Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis are leaning toward a hyperactive flurry of postings, as if the only way a blog can succeed in winning the lottery is by buying (pinging) dozens of tickets (posts) belies the fact that WHAT is said actually matters very little.

And to tell you the truth, I did not get into blogging as a rejection of mass media assumptions because I thought WHAT was said is immaterial. WORDS MATTER. Choose them with thought, imho.]

DP: Who are the readers of the blogs? Is it just the BlackBerry crowd? The white-collar coasts?

AMC: I think it’s people with time on their hands. People who work at white-collar jobs, have high-bandwidth Internet connections, and aren’t expected to produce, you know, widgets on an hourly basis. I think those are the blogveyers.

[...]

DP: I doubt it. So, blogs are read by this upper–

AMC: Well, they’re read by the opinion-elites, if you want to put it that way. Which means that they get written about disproportionately to how much they affect the world.

But because they get written about, they do wind up affecting the world. So–

DP: It’s self-fulfilling.

AMC: Yeah.

DP: And so what about this thing that blogs are killing newspapers?

AMC: You know, I suspect that The New York Times will never cease to exist. That dinosaur can’t be killed. That really would take a meteor, and I don’t think blogs are a meteor. They’re kind of like a tiny asteroid shower.

But The New York Times is going to have to change. I mean, all major media outlets are going to have to change to meet the demands of people who might, you know, have grown used to some of the things they get from blogs.

DP: So: 75,000 new blogs being created a day?

AMC: Yeah, I think that that may be true, but I can personally attest that I probably started, like, five blogs as a joke, as a whim. You know, like, a blog about purses. Or a blog about lipstick. ‘Cause it’s so easy. Like, why not go in and start a blog, and then it’ll die and never be heard from again? So I think that might be a large percentage of the 75,000 blogs being created.

DP: And how many of these people are just blogging for an audience of nobody?

AMC: I mean, they’ve replaced the family newsletter. You know, desktop publishing did a similar thing for print publications. But are we going to count every person that used Adobe PageMaker to print out their family newsletter as a new publication? No.

[...]

As far as I'm concerned, let a GAZILLION family newsletters bloom! It's still active media, and in doing so, it flies in the face of passive media and the push-button marketing brain-wash.

Active media says "Wake up, Neo!" Time to take the red pill.

Toilet seats of the rich and famous...

Betcha never would have guessed this. Question: is it real or made up? I got it off Salon, but it's original source is actually the NY Daily News "Daily Dish." Strange bedfellows, all in a day's work so that YOU can find out about Madonna's strange toilet fetish...

Link: The Fix | Salon Arts & Entertainment.

Money Quote:
Madonna spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg, after confirming that the singer requires a brand-new toilet seat -- to be sealed in plastic beforehand and thrown away afterward -- at every venue she plays: "I don't know if anyone helps her wipe, but there are probably people who would volunteer." (Rush & Molloy)

Link: New York Daily News - Daily Dish & Gossip - Rush & Molloy.

Run, don't walk over to copyblogger to read "Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Blog?"

Brian Clark at copyblogger has one of the most practically-focused blog how-to pieces I've seen, and the reason it excels is that it tells you explicitly what NOT to do! I'll pull out my favorite bits here, but you really owe it to yourself to head on over there and not only read each item, but take every resource link included with each item. Way Cool!

Link: Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Blog? | Copyblogger.

Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Blog?

[...]

Some people are turning the whole “blogging advice” arena on its head, and instead of focusing on what you should do to be an effective blogger, they point out what you shouldn’t do. Perhaps this is a better way to get certain points across?

OK, I’m game. Here’s my “top five” list of big mistakes people make, and a handy prescription for how to cure what ails your sickly blog.

5.    Do you write for search engines instead of people?

Your blog is suffering from “robotitis,” an affliction characterized by boring, keyword stuffed content that serves only to fill the blank spots between AdSense ads. If you actually hope to sell something, you need emergency attention, fast.

[...]

3. Do you agonize over writing a great post, only to slap on some hastily-concocted post title that all but guarantees hardly anyone will read?

Less-than-compelling headlines kill more solid blog posts than any other blogosphere affliction. There is a cure, but you’ll need to take action fast. If not for yourself… won’t you do it for the children?

Prescription:

• How to Write Headlines That Work
• Writing Headlines That Get Results
• How to Get 53% More Readers For Every Blog Post Your Write

[This was THE biggest problem my students had at the University of Montana last fall. Their second biggest problem? Clearly introducing and citing links in their posts instead of saying something vaguely cryptic and then saying "click here." As a surfer, if you don't tell me where I'm going, that is an invitation to me NOT to take the link.]

[...]

1. Do you use user-unfriendly RSS options that you bury at the bottom of the page, and leave out an email subscription option altogether?

I can only label this as a disease of the blogging mind. You do all that hard work to get everything else just right, and yet you rely on people to remember to come back on their own? That’s just self-destructive. Paging Dr. Freud!

Prescription:

• Where’s the Money in Blogging?
• Four Simple Steps to More Blog Subscribers

For more tips on what not to do with your blog, check out Why My Blog Stinks, a blog that actually doesn’t stink at all, even though it’s one of the most egregious examples of Mistake Number 1 above.

[...]