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| Tuesday, June 10, 2003 |
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Christopher Lydon knows the world 
| | The subject is the encroachment of online media on the Fort Journalism that is The New York Times. For now. The subject is also talk radio. |
| | This country is so much smarter, more interesting, hip, generous and responsive than the media believe. The media love to look down. |
| | The speaker is Christopher Lydon, who has been at the top of the biggest heap you can make from sums of sucess in radio, TV, journalism and academia. And he's talking about What's Happening Now. What happened then: The British knew the world. So much quotable stuff. Good gawd. Challenging us to create a radio broadcast that draws from blog smarts. Blog City. How do we define ourselves? What is the subject of the conversation. What time of day? How do we bait the hook? Will the poets listen when the techies are talking? Should it have stars? Complaints: |
| | It's too techie for me. Too much quoting, not enough talking. Too much hip shooting. Lot of received opinion. Lot of ideological response (from the right wingers). Lots of unpleasantness. Lots of thrown elbows. Hockey stick stuff. Too bad I knocked your teeth out stuff. |
| | Fabulous democratic dimensions. Consider the difference between an ant and an ant colony. |
| | He wrote ten years for the New York Times, and sees Jayson Blair as symptomatic, almost predictable. Part of the Fall of the Times. We are watching a great tragedy here. A Great Paper coming down. |
| | One cheerful voice among the mourners and polemics. Talking about Emerson's publication 150 years ago. |
| | How do we address the isolation of interests and thinking in the world? |
Moblogging with Dan
| | Says here it's the DSC-717. |
My brother blogger Hebig and my other brother blogger Hebig
| | I swear, the blogo isn't a sphere. It's a fucking Möbius cube. |
Blogalog
| | Google is not removing blogs. |
| | He's emphatic about that, while graciously resisting audience urgings to dump on Andrew Orlowski (who raised the question Jason just answered). |
| | Push-button publishing. Good line. |
| | Lots of advice for businesses. Fairly obvious stuff for free range bloggers. Permalinks good. Flash bad. Links good. |
| | B.I.G. is Blogger In Google, which happens behind the firewall at Google. Their own bizblog. "Not a product, yet." |
| | There is no us and them. It's all us. |
| | Weblogs are the highest form of audience content. |
| | there is something really creepy about a boatload of bloggers blogging ablogging conference. |
| | I think two classes of bloggers will emerge: those who show themselves and those who replicate old media traditions, including conferences about disciplines that don't really have any discipline. |
| | Vin Crosbie is making complete sense. Maybe one of the others will explain. |
| | Arik Hesseldahl just called blogs the director's cut of journalism. |
| | The blogging community (the cool people who are already blogging) aren't so sure they want "business" to pierce the blogosphere. Heck, companies may start launching Web logs that have a business objective. And that don't really have authentic voices. |
Dis content
| | Really thoughtful morning keynote about "content" by Jupiter analyst Matthew Berk. (Here's his blog.) He's sourcing Foucault and "digital self fashioning," without intellectualizing it. An achievement. |
| | When we look at content managment systems, we forget that what we call content is meaningful to users. And we abstract it away. |
| | Yesterday, at the end of a panel at which it was said "it's all about content," and "the bottom line is content" and other crap like that, I lost it and said I hated the word. My message: "Content" is crap, basically. I said I never thought I was writing "content." Producing "content" is something I do on the john. Also quoted JP Barlow, who said I didn't start hearing about "content" until the container business felt threatened. Matthew isn't crazy about the term, either; although it's his job to work with it. So he speaks about everything as a form of it. |
| | Sites have metaphor legacies. Navigation. Sites, directions, anchors. |
| | Blogs don't have the same legacy. |
| | Web sites are genres. They are conventions. Blogs are a new genre. |
| | Actually, blogs do have a metaphor. It's writing. Journalism. |
| | Halley brings up a good question, based on the reaction of a potential publisher to the idea of a book that compiles blogs. The publisher said "It looks like email," and had trouble imagining what to do with it. Are blogs trapped in their genre, she wondered? |
| | On the whole, I'd say: yes. |
Room service 1800000ms
| | Ping times to Google (somewhere on the East Coast, presumably) run around 19ms. To Searls.com in Texas, 69ms. To Linuxjournal.com in Texas (or is it Seattle? I dunno), 104ms. To Oracle.com in California, 89ms. To Sex.ru in Russia, presumably (I guessed that URL existed, and it did), 850ms. To Sex.au (same kind of guess), 2.3ms. To the router, .14ms. Negligible packet loss in all cases. |
| | None of which matters, because every site times out when I try to go there with a browser. I get a server timeout error message, or a page that says this: |
| | HTTP proxy reports:
(No buffer space is supported. The WinSock implementation was unable to allocate additional memory to accommodate the function request. For more information about this event, see ISA Server Help.). |
| | This is my third morning in this hotel, and every day it's the same thing. |
| | New twist: the browser now brings back a message from The World of Sheraton: |
| | We apologize for the delay. A network error has occurred while attempting to connect to the Internet. |
| | Actually, we're connected just fine to the Net. I can exchange email and post to this blog. HTTP just doesn't work. |
| | You are not authorized to view this page |
| | You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials you supplied. |
| | Then I'm urged to "contact Microsoft Support." The link refreshes the same page. |
| | [Later...] Now I'm at the conference, which thankfully has working Net access provided by a solid wi-fi connection. |
World con
| | Yesterday news came linking Bernie Ebbers to fraudulent financial practices at WorldCom, the phone company he both built and crashed. I had been in the midst of reading Om's chapter on Ebbers when I left on this trip. |
| | Nice to see some of that chapter is up at the book's Amazon site. |
| | The thrust of Broadbandits is that the telecom bubble, inflated perhaps more by Ebbers than by any other human being, was gassed up and burst at the expense of the hard-working folks who invested their sweat and savings in faith that these businesses would be run responsibly. |
| | If these folks were truly swindled — and that's the case Om makes — some kind of justice needs to be done. |
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