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| Saturday, March 16, 2002 |
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Something in commons 
| | I am about to power down this laptop so it can go into the shop for a few days. Meanwhile I'm still on the road. This is not consistent with persistent blogging. |
| | Meanwhile I'd like to offer David Weinberger's last paragraph below in partial answer to what Kevin Jones says here in response to what I said yesterday about the difference between sharing and intermediating: |
| | With all due respect, as long time docblog lurker, i think you are an intermediary. You have influence, people are thrilled when you move their names up your blog list. beyond that, when you mentioned the john marks piece, as did a couple of others, it moved up high in goggle, because people are linked to your blog and the network that links to them, etc. having influence, guiding attention, is being an intermediary, it's being a trusted content switch.its just your voice, your journal, but its public and its immersed in an interactive social network. |
| | We can characterize what we do on the Web in many ways. Some of those ways serve the puroses of the Web's enemies better than others. I would rather be a guy sharing ideas people trust than a "trusted content switch," for the simple reason that the Constitution protects the first while Fritz Hollings (and other sock puppets for Hollywood) want to regulate the second. |
| | If we define what we do on their terms, we lose. |
| | Their terms come from conceiving the Net as a plumbing system for "content." Ours come from conceiving the Net as a place. |
| | And yes, of course it's both. But as long as the first characterization suggests regulation that trashes the second, I'd rather not give the first any help. |
Links vs. Chains, cont'd
| | The venal, frightened a-holes we call U.S. congresspeople are getting close to enacting legislation that will effectively kill the sharing of creative works, and will hamstring the US computer industry for that matter. The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act is Fritz Hollings' extremist response to the entertainment industry's demand to have their stranglehold on creativity backed by law and hardware. |
| | Two paragraphs later he endorses my suggestion that we — by which I mean: the whole fucking world — march on Washington. |
| | Then he points to more good reasons we should be shamed to stay home, and adds You want some good news? Sorry, how about another bowl of CrapFlakes instead? |
| | Top to bottom, this is the best JOHO yet. If you care about what we're doing here, it's required reading. One more sample: |
| | ...a utopia is a place and so is the Web. In fact it's a world. It is not a medium. A medium is something we send messages through, and while we can do that with the Web, I believe ‹ and the fact that I believe it should definitely be enough to establish it as a fact ;) ‹ that the excitement about the Web hasn't happened because it's a messaging medium. Rather, our language says that we move through the Web. We, not our messages. This is very weird. While the Web consists of pages, we go to them, enter them and leave them. We don't do that with real world pages or documents. We experience the Web as a navigable space. |
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