Friday, August 23, 2002

Viewer discretion. CNN's al-Qaida tapes were grisly and important, and offered a promising look at what a news channel could actually be. [Salon.com] The gist of this article is about Aaron Brown, the 10 o'clock anchor on CNN, talking about how Brown behaves very differently from how we're used to a news anchor should behave. I, for one, much prefer him to any other anchor working today - he seems human.

9:25:58 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

I am the very model of a modern teenage Cyberpunk. AaronSw linked the funny I am the very model of a modern teenage Cyberpunk. [Hack the Planet] Funny stuff - anything name-checking PDPs is alright by me.
9:11:23 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Grubb for Congress. By Weblog. [Slashdot] The Slashdot guy's quote: "The weblog community is all excited over her because she drank the Kool-aid." Ok, even I wouldn't go that far...
9:08:19 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

...heard on the radio this evening: "That was U2, with 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'... you know, that's a good song to play, with football season coming up..." And this was on the intelligent/good station...
8:51:18 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Happy Fun Ball Dropped on Angola [FARK] Actually, Happy Fun Ball seems as good an explanation for the event in question as any.
5:46:17 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Let me just correct myself a bit in regards to Dave Winer and my post on his view of the blogfuture...I said "I know Dave has a vested interest in portraying weblogs as The Next Big Thing, since he makes money off that," which could easily be interpreted as me saying that Dave is saying what he's saying in an attempt to drive up blog interest, thereby driving up blog usage, thereby driving up Radio sales, thereby making Dave money. That is *NOT* what I intended to say. The piece was beginning to meander out of my control and I was just trying to get all the points I was meaning to say in as quickly as possible. =) What I meant to say was more along the lines of this: Dave is very, very involved in blogging, as a community, as a business, and as a philosophy. He is so excited about blogs that I don't know if he can really look at blogging from an outside, objective perspective. This is not a criticism of Dave as a person, a businessman, or a thinker, but I feel that it does slightly diminish his credibility on bloggish issues. There - still not quite right, but a lot better than before. If I offended, I sincerely apologize.

4:31:10 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Managing Planet Earth [New York Times: International News] Interesting article - with this really great picture. I need to find a use for it.
3:32:45 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Michael Moore.com : Mike's Office of Homeland Security. Michael Moore on the State of the World and What to do About It Michael Moore.com : Mike's Office of Homeland Security [BlogLeft: Critical Interventions] Good stuff - Michael Moore gets angry like almost no one in America can any more.
3:12:53 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Three recent items from Dave Winer's Scripting News: Ed Cone: "Comebody could end a political career pretty damn fast by letting out some 2 AM brainfart onto the Web." I don't agree with this prediction. My guess is that when politics and governance move to this medium, it will be a lot more resilient than TV. Remember, in this medium, each voter can have his or her own TV station. [Scripting News] It's gratifying to read about the role weblogs are going to play in Middle East peace, through Lance Knobel's weblog. In 2000 and 2001, Lance and I wanted to offer weblogs to people attending the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. The management of Davos didn't think it was worthwhile. That was one of those times when we absolutely knew we were right, and that one day we'd get a big I Told You So. Eventually the world will be run with weblogs, much the way it's run with telephones today. My belief is that when you find a technology of this stature, you deploy as quickly as possible, without worrying. It could be that weblog technology could avert the next international crisis, or deal with its aftermath, more effectively. (Actually there's no could to it, to me it's a certainty.) [Scripting News] Here we go. Wired News lifts Tara Sue, and gets Coble's staff to hedge on the Hollywood hacking bill. She's the first candidate with a weblog. Yeah. Soon all races will be run on weblogs. All of them. By the way the Plotkin quotes really sting. How did Tara Sue's weblog get going. Wasn't that the technology industry? [Scripting News] As much as I like blogging, as much as I think blogging has given me a feeling of having created something, as much as I feel like blogging is a new way to disperse information...I don't buy Dave's "Weblogs will cure cancer! Weblogs will make you lose 20 pounds!" idealism. It just feels a little naive to me. Here's the thing - he's assuming, first of all, that everyone will have a computer. Maybe at some point in the distant future, this could be the case, but for the foreseeable future, a computer and Internet access are still primarily the domain of the lower-middle class and upwards. The poor don't have nifty new laptops - if all communication is done online, aren't we ruling out the most needy section of our populace? Dave says that "in this medium, each voter can have his or her own TV station," but that's not true. Blogs may look egalitarian, but I'm willing to bet that the overwhelming percentage of bloggers are white and middle-to-upper class. Maybe I'm just too left-wing to see how a medium that further concentrates power in those hands is revolutionary. The Tara Sue thing - good for her. It's nice to see someone go after the legislators that have been bought and paid for by the entertainment industry. Dave's trying his best to make her into a big deal - and doing a pretty good job of it. But revolutionary? Again, no. She's going to lose. She's going to lose by a LOT. Getting press in Wired News means nothing when it comes to voters. Sure, she's got a weblog - but, Dave, she has one because you gave it to her. That's good of you, but it's not like she's representing some groundswell of public demand that our legislators must blog! Dave says "Soon all races will be run on weblogs. All of them." No, Dave, they won't - because most candidates actually are trying to get elected. They're going to invest their time and money in the ways that will get them the most votes...and weblogs aren't going to be high on that list. What percentage of any given congressional district reads blogs now? Let's even allow Silicon Valley/San Francisco area, though it surely doesn't represent the rest of the country. How many of them will end up stumbling across a campaign blog? How many will care? Even at the greatest possible numbers, we're talking about a very small portion of the electorate. Compare that to TV ads, radio ads, campaign appearances... It's not that I think it'd be a bad thing if legislators, CEOs, diplomats, etc... blogged. I just don't see it either happening on the scale Dave talks about, or changing the way the world operates in the sense that Dave talks about Weblogs aren't going to play a significant role in the Middle East peace process. They aren't. Sure, some people will start blogging about it. There will be some new minor information sources. Perhaps some major players might start blogs. But do you really think they'll be honest? Do you really think Arafat or Sharon would use a blog as anything other than another medium through which to spin, to propagandize, to posture? Weblogs are a great thing, with some really interesting potential as an artform, a news source, and a knowledge management tool. Weblogs aren't the movable type printing press. Weblogs aren't the telegraph. Weblogs aren't the telephone. Weblogs aren't TV, or even email. I know Dave has a vested interest in portraying weblogs as The Next Big Thing, since he makes money off that, and I know the media has bitten on that hook, but it's getting exaggerated, a la the Web in the mid-90s. It changed the world, sure, but the same guys are still on top, and business is still done the same way - just with new tweaks and looks.

12:59:06 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Procrastinators get poorer grades in college class. The worst procrastinators received significantly lower grades in a college course with many deadlines than did low or moderate-level procrastinators according to a presentation at the American Psychological Association annual meeting today. [David Harris' Science News] I could have told you *that*. My own experience as a master procrastinator proved this to me a looooong time ago. Not that I ever considered doing my work earlier - I was too busy doing the other work I'd already delayed doing. This, my friends, is why I'm not cut out for academia.

10:40:33 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Pakistan accuses India of major attack [BBC World] It's so weird for me to think of a major democratic country being involved in so nasty a border dispute that an Indian army spokesman can say: "He said that while there had been routine firing in the area, no particular incident had taken place and no Indian soldiers had been killed." Routine firing on a border...even knowing all that I know about the Kashmir dispute, every time I hear news about violence between the Pakistani and Indian armies at the border, I'm thrown for a loop.

10:36:40 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Under False Pretenses A thought just struck me - I've been participating in one kind of online community or another for around 12 years. I don't think I've ever actually been myself before - I've always hid behind an alias or a character. With this blog, I'm finally expressing myself honestly and under my own name. This may not sound like a big deal, but when you've been pretending you're someone else in a good portion of your total social interaction for about half your life, being yourself is something significant. This isn't to say I think that my alternate lives online have been unhealthy. Much to the contrary, actually. My dad got us a membership in Prodigy back in October of...'88? '89? Something like that - a long time ago, before many people had really noticed these funky 'online services'. For the first few years, I just played games - there was a truly engrossing game called something like Mad Maze...you had to find your way through a maze with a lot of weird things in it. The graphics consisted of, well, just static pictures - you got a new one when you went to a new location in the maze. I mapped it all out and still never finished it. Absorbed a LOT of my life, though. (btw, just discovered that there's an emulation of the original Mad Maze up here. There goes MY productivity for the day...) In 1990 or so, I discovered Prodigy's bulletin boards. I wanted to talk about David Eddings books, I think - young adult fantasy. I took an alias - Belgarion, I think - and started posting. Miracle of miracles - no one knew I was a 7th grader. This surprised me. I hadn't honestly thought that people wouldn't know I was a kid, but that's what happened. I joined a community of Eddings fans, writing messages to each other, telling fan stories, you name it. I realize that there's a good chance everyone there was the same age as I was, but I couldn't tell - I was in heaven. About a year later, a new Star Wars book came out and I rediscovered my early childhood obsession. I began posting in a Star Wars fan club, and shortly afterwards transitioned to a Star Wars role playing game. We didn't roll dice or keep statistics - we just wrote stories about our characters. I had to name mine and was stuck for a while trying to think of something decent. I ended up going with "Remy Lebeau" - the "real name" of the character Gambit from the X-Men comic, another obsession of mine at the time. Little did I know that I'd still be using Lebeau in email addresses and IM names 11 years later. At about that time, I started becoming active on local BBSes (Bulletin board systems, for those who are unfamiliar, where I dialed directly into a computer running message boards, some games, hosting some files, and in some cases, chat through multiple dial-in lines). I knew most of the people I interacted with on the BBSes in real life, so I wasn't able to lead the completely alternate life I could on Prodigy, but I still did my damnedest. I took the alias Lebeau here, too, but over time, the Star Wars rpg on Prodigy stole most of my time. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that my involvement in this RPG taught me social skills. Here, I could sit back and think about what I said before I actually said it - hell, I could even write it out and read it over before releasing it to the world. I was admired for my writing skills, and developed strong friendships. I talked to a couple of them on the phone on a semi-regular basis about real life as well as the game, but I was still in character. When I eventually met a number of my online friends in real life, it felt...awkward. I wasn't who they expected - I was shorter, for one. One guy just had to point this out. =) Anyway - I wasn't as well-spoken, since there wasn't time to review my thoughts before they came out of my mouth, my life wasn't as interesting as the one I created for public consumption...I was playing someone else. I've fallen out of the game over the years - every year or two, somebody tries to get the gang back together and start again and we all show up for a few weeks...until something distracts us in real life. As I think about it, I realize that I didn't need to play Lebeau any more, and there was no point in playing the game if I wasn't going to be Lebeau. Now, here in this blog, I'm actually me. My name is on the title of the place - I can't avoid the fact that this is Andrew Bayer's blog, not Lebeau's blog. It's actually a great feeling - sure, there's a little more thought going into what I'm saying now than if you were to meet me in real life, but the gist of it, the basic content, is the same. This is new for me. I like it.

8:26:04 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Brazil's rainforest slaves [BBC World] This is disturbing, to say the least. Not only are they still burning and clear-cutting the Amazon, but they're using slave labor to do it. No, it's not slave labor in the sense of workers who are bought and sold, but the workers are more or less kidnapped, told they owe their employer enormous sums of money, and forced to work it off... a similar situation to many illegal Chinese immigrants in the US, actually.

7:11:53 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Washington Post: "The most downloaded album in Internet history -- the recently released 'The Eminem Show' -- is also the best-selling album of the year, which suggests that at least some fans were spurred to buy the disc even though they already had it stashed on their hard drives." [Scripting News] If you'll pardon my French - no shit, sherlock. The astonishing thing is that the media is taking this long to pick up on this. I buy significantly more albums as a result of MP3s, because I'm able to preview more songs off an album than just whatever singles might make the radio. This is especially significant with albums that don't get radio play at all. I don't want to just have downloaded music - it's rarely as high quality as on disc, I'd have to get a burner and burn it to disc if I want to listen to it on my home theater system, etc... I just like to know what I'm getting before I buy it.

7:04:04 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []