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| Wednesday, May 15, 2002 |
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Embrace the temptation 
Blogburg
| | I'm at the O'Reilly thing now. Rael Dornfest just introduced Steven Johnson, whose talk is called "City of Blogs" (or at lest that's what the slide says... the real title is too long to remember... or maybe it's "Emergence," which is also the title of Steven's latest book). I'm sitting in the back with Ev and Dan, in our own little ghetto. Or, by Steven's terms, "self-organized structure." Or maybe "blogged pieces, loosely joined," to coin a paraphrase of David Weinberger's new book , which Steven just cited. |
| | Now he's talking about "self-organizing principles" and "how cities work." For optimal density you need short blocks. Small pieces again. "Emergent higher level behavior." |
| | New slide: The Blog Predicament: |
| | - Problems forming higher-level groups
- Managing overpopulation
- The tyranny of time
- Little passive organization
- Readers lack input
- Catastrophic success (I wrote "claustrophobic" at first... funny)
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| | "Implicit" organization in links. "Just really starting to wrestle with the problem..." of something or other. He's using the term "wrestlilng" a lot. |
| | New slide of Stephen's face surrounded by Meg's, Jason's and Peter's. |
| | New slide: "The Pedestrian-Centric Model." His larger question is how to harness a bunch of (my term) egocentric blogs to one's own personal needs and purposes. |
| | I missed some stuff while I was trying to GET THE FUCKING CONNECTION TO FUCKING WORK. |
| | The last slide said blogs weren't a threat to the established journalistic order (or something like that), but that it was a threat to Google — but only if we come up with some kind of standards for something or other I wasn't listening to because fucking with technology took up all my precious and declining cycle time. |
| | Now Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Rael and somebody I can't see are all on stage. Clay is asking Steven if he wants Blogger, Radio and Movable Type to agree on stardards. Steven said yes, I think. Between my shitty hearing and the slightly muffled sound system, I can't make out what Rael is saying right now. |
| | The talk is getting reeeaaal academic. Makes me want to channel RageBoy and say something like this. |
| | So I just went up to the audience mike and made a remark about how all the academic stuff didn't square with my expericne with blogging, which to me is mostly about fun. I said I thought it was still early. "We're all hunter-gatherers with cell phones and the ability to beam ourselves here and there." Something like that. Not sure it made sense. |
| | I said I thought trying to impose some kind of standards was maybe not a good idea. Clay asked if I thought standards would make blogs cease to be fun. "TALKING about standards wouldn't be fun," I said. Got a laugh. |
| | Whatever. The tech is off again. Totally sucks. I gotta go hide somewhere so I can work. |
Tales from the frontiers of value subtraction
| | Yesterday Mr. Bad gave copy protection programmers some heavy shit for creating CDs like Celine Dion's latest, which are said to leave iMacs deeply fucked. CNET issued a report to the same effect (also on ZDNet, a link I offer as a hedge on the other, which is at the rot-prone Yahoo archive). |
| | How insane does an industry have to be when it manages to screw its partners, its customers and its sources, all in one move? |
| | No wonder we're seeing more stuff like this and this. |
Credits where due
| | Got almost twelve thousand reads yesterday. Inbound traffic came from MacRumors, Dave, Wes, Slashdot, Stepwise, MacNN Forums (also here), Google (151 searches for doc+searls.... jeez), Ev, Daypop, Rael, MyAppleMenu, Cory... |
| | Not speaking of which, Cory's pal Joey (pun intended) showed up for dinner with the same accordion that helped get him through customs on the way here from Toronto. |
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