OK, let's try this again:
Radio Free Blogistan has moved. The last entries posted to the old address are the ones you see here dated October 25, 2002.
For current entries, please go to the new address: http://radiofreeblogistan.com/.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
11:12:21 PM 
say what []
If my upstreaming changes today work correctly, then this may be the final post to Radio Free Blogistan at the http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ address, in which case, I want to make it very easy for any future readers directed here by old links (sorry, everybody!) to get to the new home page at radiofreeblogistan.com.
If I were really cool, I'd redesign this page so that it contained the moving message and then loaded the new page at http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ automatically, or immediately redirected to that page, or something cool like that. Instead people ending up here will have to follow a link like this one or the one in the title of this entry.
If the move fails, then this message will seem kind of lame and embarassing in retrospect.
For the technically minded, I will continue to use the Salon hosting and address for my salonika category, and possibly for hosting images and other large files within my storage quota.
The blog-related categories (knowhow, metablog, radioactive, syllabus), along with a few knew ones (uh, i don't know... bloggerz, stereomovabletype?) will also be upstreamed to sections of radiofreeblogistan.com.
The others will be squirted off to more appropriate hosts (for completists: fireweaver will show up at Dreamweaver Savvy once I get the templating integrated, memewatch will migrate to memewatch.com, outspoken will fold back into Bite Media, and x-pollen will go to x-pollen.com).
I'm starting another new category today, unrelated to blogs. It's called "Agent7," it's about my clients and colleagues in the worlds of technology and publishing, and especially their instersection, and it will end up at waterside.com once we get the server-side includes inserted into the appropriate page.
Update: The first try failed. I tried to copy the old #upstream.xml file into the subcategories that I didn't want coming over to radiofreeblogistan.com but that somehow resulted in a strange out-of-date rendering of the home page.
To fix that I'm editing this file and reposting after throwing away the bad upstream files and restoring Radio to community upstreaming. If things get back to normal, I'll try the FTP approach, possibly by publishing yet another change to this cross-category entry.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
1:59:17 PM say what []
A week has passed since the J-school panel and I've just now completed my subjective transcript of the panel (in two parts).
[Note: At the moment Radio is unable to upstream my story files for some reason so the above links aren't working. I'll remove this notice when they do work and post another update.]
I do not intend this to be my "article" on the panel, per se, but more like a running summary and commentary on the proceedings, mostly for my own use in writing an actual, final article, but also for anyone else who wants to compare with their own notes, memory, or the streaming video that I've thus far been unable to play.
It's rather long (as was the panel) and dense with information, so I don't think it necessarily represents the best way of learning about the panel. If I did think so I wouldn't bother trying to write anything else about it. As it is, I do think a pithier summary deserves to be written, so I will continue plugging away.
I broke the transcript into two parts because it was straining the size limits of the text box forms I work with to upload these entries and stories. The stories pages still have the old design with the garish non-scrolling backdrop. If this presents enough of an impediment to any reader that they become inspired to write to me and complain about it, I'll probably go tweak the default template that the stories use to remove it.
12:51:26 PM say what []
Scot Hacker posts at the birdhouse that he's "just finished titling and encoding Weblogs — Challenging Mass Media and Society in QuickTime format for our Darwin Streaming Server. Posted both Sorenson3 and MPEG-4 versions (but no modem-friendly version, sorry)."
9:44:08 AM say what []
Dive into Mark today is a great place to start for anyone trying to get up to speed on the weblog-mediated RSS development collaboration.
2:25:52 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 []
Adam Barr takes to task the insider-y side of the blogosphere's hypocracy in this article posted to kuro5hin:
Back then you had to be able to write pure HTML to put up a site like that. With modern blogging has come authoring tools that free you from that restriction. So is this the huge breakthrough that we've been waiting for since 1993? Of course not. The basic facts remain unchanged: information in a blog is non-selected information, non-selected information has always been around, and it is never going to replace selected information. You can put out all the non-selected information you want, by whatever means you want, and most of it will be ignored. And if you care about sustainable business models, you sure as heck aren't going to build one with non-selected information.The whole article is worth reading in full. It has some excellent links and some great follow-up discussion as well (if you don't mind gossip about Philip Greenspun).
I think Adam may be overlooking the context-building projects, from blogdex and daypop to this new metadata initiative that may at least assist in the selecting and filtering. I do think that human channels of attention will always be the most salient.
I surf blogs as I would surf the web in general, following interesting links. People who often send me on to other valuable stuff get bookmarked or blogrolled and I rely on them for part of my info stream.
So, yes. Blogs tend to be self-published (although Kaus and Alterman do it for publications) and thus "unselected" or "self-selected" but the meta-level of interpretation, through human links and machine aggregation amounts to a layer of selection that can be used the way we might rely on agents, editors, and book reviewers to indicate worthwhile books for us to read.
For example, I just noticed pb's bookwatch, which tracks book mentions in the blogosphere.
categories: memewatch metablog syllabus
2:04:09 PM say what []
Rereading Bricklin's Aug 12 article on small business blogging, I realized that his first example is a pretty close fit for the intangibles I get from doing this blog:
One type of small business is the "consultant". This covers a wide range of areas, from engineers, to marketers, to event planners, to freelance writers and designers, and more. Consultants are already very common users of blogs. A normal part of the job of many consultants entails going to meetings and conferences and being active in trade associations where they "network", show off their expertise, appear on panels, etc. A blog is a way of showing your expertise and establishing yourself as a trustworthy authority without doing the travel. The time necessary to maintain the blog comes out of the time that would have been spent at some of the meetings. (A blog is an excellent way to build up your "authority" to move up politically in a trade association, too. Your readers would be others in your field, not customers.)
categories: knowhow metablog syllabus
1:42:29 PM say what []
Believe it or not, I'm still sorting out what I've learned about Traction Software, sifting and trying to digest what I've learned. Traction was heavily influenced by Doug Engelbart and his ideas about
Our Journal system was conceived by this author in about 1966. I wanted an underlying operational process, for use by individuals and groups, that would help bring order into the time stream of the Augmented Knowledge workers. The term "journal" emerged early in the conceptualization process for two reasons:I'm still exploring this vein, but it occurred to me that I also ought to link to one of best recognized seminal works that envisioned the hyperlinked electronic knowledge space we are all building today, Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think":
- I felt it important in many dynamic operations to keep a log (sometimes termed a "journal") that chronicles events by means of a series of unchangeable entries (for instance, to log significant events while evolving a Plan, shaping up a project, trouble-shooting a large operation. or monitoring on-going operations). These entries would be preserved in original form, serving as the grist for later integration into more organized treatments.
- I also wanted something that would serve essentially the same recorded-dialogue purpose as I perceived a professional journal (plus library) to do.
The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
...
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.We are still only documenting our "trails" in ad hoc ways, but it's astonishing how clearly Vannevar Bush was able to see ahead.
I'll post more specifically about Traction Software when I have my thoughts ordered.
categories: knowhow memewatch metablog syllabus
10:32:28 AM say what []
