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| Monday, March 4, 2002 |
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Search mines 
| | But I think it only matters if it interferes with otherwise unrelated searches. Near as I can tell, it hardly does. |
| | Okay, so maybe Doc Holliday, Doc the Dwarf and Doc the dictator all matter more than I do in the Grand Scheme of Fame. But we all suck wind next to the Department of Commerce. |
And that's not all...
| | About a thousand years ago, somewhere in the late '60s, WBAI in New York ran a very funny radio play that contained this memorable dialog: |
| | "I am an eagle in flight, and you are a shrub on a dry stone." |
| | (Sound of a door opening) "Yes?" |
| | "We're just little people, but we're here to take over. We've come to get your things. Cut his vocal cords, Sis." |
| | For some reason this comes to mind when I imagine a fanciful dialog between the vainest of bloggers and stick-in-the-mud Journalists of the Olde School. |
| | All of which has nothing to do with Bob von Sternberg's piece about blogging in the Sunday Minneapolis Star Tribune, even though the dialog popped into my mind while I was reading it. The piece is lengthy and well-researched. It even quotes a little bit of what I said to Bob in an email exchange. Here's most of the rest of it, beginning with a response to a question from Bob about why blogs have "become so wildly popular": |
| | Dave Winer and Evan Williams (Userland and Pyra, respectively) have lowered the threshold of publication almost to zero. We've been able to write Web pages for years; but it has never been especially easy. Yes, you could save Word documents in HTML and try to put up a Web page using FrontPage or Adobe GoLive. But it was still a project (and if you were busy you got a designer to do one for you). |
| | Radio Userland and Blogger make it easy to write directly on the Web. Not "for" it, but *on* it. Big difference. Now everybody can publish their own Poor Richard's Almanac. Benjamin Franklin's dream, not to mention the full import of the First Amendment, are finally realized after two hundred years. It's a big deal. |
| | Blogs are not a "medium." Nor is the Web. The term "media" is a recent one, and it has an industrial context. It's about "moving content" from producers to consumers. What we have on the Web is more like correspondence. It's conversation. And it happens in a place. It's not pumped through a tube or moved through a distribution system. Yesterday I remarked on my blog about a survey sent to me by a graduate student who wanted to know what "media outlet" I worked for, and how it "disseminated information." That's a Traditional Media mindset at work. |
| | (As for blogs' longevity) (They're) here for the duration. Yes, quite a few of the new blogs out there will wither away from lack of interest by their authors. But what's now a phenomenon will become a common choice among the many ways a society informs itself. |
| | Something I didn't say, and should have, is that blogs and formal news organizations are basically symbiotic, not competitive. The real story here requires AND logic, not OR. |
| | Of course, there's less box office to the AND story. Which is why we need to keep that false choice meme alive. |
| | Thanks to Griff Wigley at Real Joe for the link, by the way. Griff is a Good Guy and an old hand at bloggy kinds of stuff. I met him when he was running the Utne Reader's discussion boards, way back in the mid-90's. |
| | By the way, RJ features the Affirmation Bullshit Generator, which resembles Dack's Web economy Bullshit Generator, which I can never mention without also pointing at BuzzPhraser. Along the Affirmation line, check out what you can producer with the CollaboLatin lexicon in BuzzPhraser, which defaults to TechnoLatin. Just click on the TechnoLatin button to expose the CollaboLatin choice in the pulldown menu. The entire CollaboLatin lexicon was taken from one speech about Knowledge Management, by the way. |
I want my WTV
| | By the way, it's amazing to see ABC shoot itself in both news feet in a terribly-managed effort to woo Letterman from CBS. ABC had emerged from 9/11 as the prestige network news organization, thanks to superior work almost across the board. But without another disaster to turn the country's eyes to Peter and Ted in Our Time of Crisis, the entertainment juggernaunt that is Disney will proceed apace with plans to replace what we still call news with "content" aimed at appeals to younger demographics. |
| | From the pointless irony department: if Letterman were just a viewer, he'd be too old to interest ABC. |
Uptime, 1 day
| | After not missing a blogging day in many moons, I was gone a whole weekend. The Saturday blog was actually committed on Friday night, local time (my blog keeps East Coast time, so it was Saturday in New York — my cultural home — when I wrote it). |
| | I haven't even been close to on-line since then, and now it's after five on Monday. |
| | I'm afraid we were in L.A. having a good time. |
| | We drove down to Irvine on Saturday to hang with relatives and see the musical Promenade performed at UCI. The director is Colette Searls, our oldest. She took our youngest (her 5-year old brother) to the matinee, and then the big people got to see the evening performance. |
| | Colette always puts on a terrific program, and we weren't disappointed. I think it's sold out, but if it isn't and you're in Orange County looking for a fine evening's entertainment, I highly recommend it. |
| | On Sunday we went out on a yacht out of Huntington Harbor. Toured Long Beach on a perfect day. We could see the snow on top of Mt. Baldy and Mt. San Gorgonio over on the far side of the L.A. basin — a rare sight indeed. |
| | Then today we visited our accountant and a dentist and stuff like that. Didn't get back until a few minutes ago. I haven't checked my email yet. I'm afraid to, but here goes... Not bad: only 239 messages, including let's see.. 86 spams. |
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