We are the alien overlords. I am reading in the New York Times our detailed plans for laying seige of cities in Iraq. We will attempt to control the minds of the inhabitants (demoralizing the fighters, calming the civilians), and systematically in our now infinitely superior ways conquer each city.
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categories: outspoken x-pollen
1:18:54 PM 
say what []
Right fringe notices that Republicans are not conservative. Kevin Tuma hates FDR and Lincoln, favoring Goldwater and Reagan.
What's interesting about this article is that he voices the "dirty little secret" of the Republican party. It is not now and has never been a conservative party, especially not in the sense of small-government conservatism.
categories: outspoken x-pollen
2:17:48 PM say what []
Don Park responds to Ray Ozzie's obituary for publishing, saying "Publishing is not dead." I would tend to agree. Publishing is definitely sick, buffeted by unfamiliar pressures, in disarray, due for some changes, racing to keep up with technology changes, slow to adopt technology. Publishing is many things.
(I feel mildly qualified to comment myself having spent most of my adult life in the publishing industry, wearing a number of different hats—editor, author, agent, book packager, e-book experimenter—and the last eight years publishing online in one format or another.)
But the Web has been promising disintermediation for a long time and Tim O'Reilly has written some good stuff about reintermediation, where aggregation services fit into the supply chain, and Amazon.com as a successful web application using the Internet as an OS.
Publishing is in trouble if it doesn't change, but I thought we'd all learned by now that these changes take time. Just because you can envision a future doesn't mean that future has arrived. Often, the devil is in the details, and whoever solves the problems of the at-first insignificant-seeming bits of grit in the workings gains the benefits of friction.
Richard Tam, a visionary and entrepreneur, started iUniverse he once told me after seeing how major publishing companies deal in false scarcity and voodoo decision-making processes. "They don't know where—or who—their customers are. They have to find them all over again every time they need to market something new."
Tam's idea was to publish freely and let the market decide. Stop doing things that don't sell and keep doing things that do. This may oversimplify things the other way. At this point iUniverse is considered a print-on-demand vanity press and its success stories are not well known.
As for predictions, while they're taking their own sweet time coming true, existing processes mutate to coopt or respond to changing pressures. Book publishing (just one form of publishing, after all) may take on aspects of electronic publishing (some publishers already produce their books in an XML format for easy expression in multiple form factors). Electronic publishing formats may integrate aspects of the book experience that are still superior to the modes of ingesting writing online.
There is always a dialectic. There are always—eventually—hybrids. I'd like to see a hybrid interface: some kind of smart paper, something tactile, something you can skim easily with your hands the way you can riffle the pages of a book, but with the augmentations of hyperlinking, deep structure, updates, interactive content, and so on.
In the meantime, we are publishing, and selling, more books today than ever before. This despite the fact of a computer-book recession, an IT recession, a tech recession, a games recession, an optimism recession.
Don Park mentions the aspect of time:
Technology will take at least 40 more years to reach the level of availability and convenience necessary to kill off publishing: 10 years to emerge and mature, another 10 years to be cheap and convenient enough, and 20 years of deathwatch (old habits die hard). Rising cost of paper will obviously become a major fudge factor.
Surprisingly revelant to this discussion is a book last revised 1960, The Truth About Publishing by Stanley Unwin.
categories: memewatch outspoken syllabus
8:58:02 PM say what []
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
12:20:43 PM say what []
- My last few posts won't publish
- My site design won't update when applied to the home page or to categories
- Attempts to reach http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/2002/08/20.html lead to an error message
One issue may be that my "Cloud Status" shows 1% of 10.0MB free. Could it be that my new entries aren't posting because they are too big? But how could I possibly have filled 10 meg with most plain text in just a month? Also, my Radio pplication says "20 meg free," or more literally:
Radio UserLand 8.0.8: 20.0MB free, 8:51:29 AM; 5 threads; 9 hits.
So, really, I'm just confused, and frustrated.
Posting this to all categories in hopes of breaking the logjam.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
8:54:10 AM say what []
I'm still rolling this over in my mind, not fully convinced of that absolute definition, but it has prompted a chain of thoughts about what these differences are. To some extent I think some of it has to do with ownership of your own words. Not just in the Well sense that Ray Ozzie mentioned (referenced in an earlier post in this log), but in a literal sense.
An example. I was just reading Tom Friedman's editorial about the fog of war and the lack of clear war aims on the part of Palestinians (and perhaps on the part of Bush's hawks). At the bottom of the column is an invitation to join a moderated discussion of Tom's views. I had no interest in signing in and joining that conversation. If I have an opinion about what Tom wrote, I'll quote him and link to his editorial in my Mediajunkie blog. On some level it's selfish: Why should I donate content to the New York Times? Especially when they reserve the right to moderate it?
If I wanted the audience, the tradeoff might be worth it. I made a similar decision when I decided to stop blogging in relative obscurity and sign up for this Salon blogs experiment (six days left on my free trial!). I calculated that there might be an audience of (a) Salon readers, (b) Radio webloggers, and (c) curiosity seekers whom I might reasonably have a chance of adding to my own readership. So far, so good.
So, I like discussion boards, but I decide whether to participate based on the audience. I do comment on blogs that permit it, when the mood strikes me. Usually it's to add something reactive that does not inspire me to write up a full view of my own. To my mind hosting an opinion on my own site is a more permanent method, with a stronger aspect of ownership. I can't track down all the various comments I may have posted all over the Net. In effect I've donated that content to whomever curates the specific sites.
Back to the problem of unwelcome or unkind commenters. There is an element of badmouthing someone in their own front parlor. My attitude is "there are streetcorners for that kind of trash talk." Asking me (or Dave, or whoever) to host and pay for content that detracts from my work or my mission is a bit of a stretch.
Someone said that we have a free press in the U.S. for anyone who owns a press. In 1994 I realized that owning a press no longer required a huge industrial capital investment but rather an investment in a small server and an Internet line. We're reaching a point where just about anyone can host their own words, regardless of content.
Just as anonymity (which I believe can be justified in many circumstances) has a tendency to discredit an author's views in the eyes of some readers, so does taking the responsibility to manage and archive one one's words and keep them in the full view of the public tend to reinforce one's credibility.
Some semi-baked thoughts for a Sunday morning.
(A postscript. My browsing this morning led me—unsurprisingly—to Doc Searls' weblog. In it, among other things, he distinguishes between diaries and journals. Both have roots in words meaning "day" (in the sense of daily), but the connotations are different, at least in English. Journal has the advantage of relating to both journalism and the computer-sense of journaling. I wanted to discuss this and add a pithy comment along the lines of "We lepers" vs. "You lepers" in light of the ongoing discussion of Lessig's warning tone but got confused trying to work his Discuss link. How ironic, I thought as, I gave up on the interface. I'll just write about it in my blog.)
categories: memewatch metablog outspoken
11:41:20 AM say what []
While the mission of this blog is to talk about blogging, the nature of blogging is such that I want to be able to do other things in this space. I could keep them off the home page when not about blogging, but I'd rather use my discretion about when something belongs on the home page (most of the time) and when to just send it to a category or two.
Rather, I'd say that if you're reading this blog just for the news, tips, and comparisons of blog products, then consider going to the 'metablog' category as a matter of course (or subscribing to its RSS feed). This will filter your Radio Free Blogistan flow to just posts about blogs and blogging.
I will try to implement a dynamic filter so you can view or hide different categories all on the home page, but I'm not there yet. In the meantime, a brief explanation of my categories as they currently stand:
metablog
Blogging about blogging, and blogging about blogging about blogging, but never blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging, I promise!
knowhow
What does blogging tell us about content and knowledge management in the enterprise space?
syllabus
Required reading about weblogs and the state of writing online.
memewatch
Counting memes by candlelight. All are dim but one is bright.
fireweaver
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, web design and web practices.
radioactive
Radio questions channel aggregated by dws.
outspoken
Occasional intemperate outbursts.
salonika
Salon, Salon blogs, blogs.salon.com
x-pollen
X-references to and from my other blogs. RSS Monkey help me.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
12:24:15 PM say what []
