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| Tuesday, August 10, 2004 |
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Subtract 
| | People are asking me to be their contact on Multiply. There was an error processing your request. Please try again. it tells me, with advice to "contact customer service." I'm not a customer. I don't have the time. But I do wonder why we need yet another one of these things. |
| | Ah, one friend just told me Multiply promised to import Orkut contacts, somehow. That's a good sell, if it can be done, I guess. If it has other advantages over Orkut, which has become too slow for me. In fact, it's busy not coming up right now. |
Right vs. Lunch
| | For more about how the Right outsells the Left, check out this interview with George Lakoff, who co-formed the Rockridge Institute to help reframe the public debate as effectively for the Left as veteran think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have done for the right. |
| | For his reasons, George says, |
| | I got tired of cursing the newspaper every morning. I got tired of seeing what was going wrong and not being able to do anything about it. |
| | The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta [former chief of staff for the Clinton administration] is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center's framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, "You!" Which meant they haven't thought about it at all. And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing. |
| | Rockridge's job is to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective. It's one thing to analyze language and thought, it's another thing to create it. That's what we're about. It's a matter of asking 'What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?' |
| | I think the other thing Rockridge needs to ask is, "Who and what can we blog about (and with) today?" Blogging, with real voices, by people who are engaged daily in public debate, is essential to think-tanking in the Internet Age. Outfits like Rockridge need a blog of their own, or to have blogging members buttress them from outside. They do have a newsletter right now; but it's in .pdf. That won't do. It needs to be in HTML, so it's easy for search engines to crawl and browsers to read. |
| | As for Michelle Malkin, I think she's a red herring. Coulter too. In the long run, so are the news shows that feature them. (That's not to discount their importance today; just to forecast their fate.) What's weird to me is that the far right, red herrings and all, seems to be relatively unified, bloc-wise, with moderate-leaning mainstream Republicans. Not so on the left. When I look around for equivalents what comes to mind are the battling fractions and factions that have staffed Pacifica Radio ever since it ceased being a social and political force in the Sixties and became what Larry Josephson called "a foghorn for political correctness." Case in point: Ralph Nader. Nobody on the Right has bolted since Pat Buchanan a few years back. |
| | As Stirling Newberry put it in comments below Matt's piece... |
| | What has had a much greater impact is the consistent refusal of the left to channel dissent into political pressure. Backing Nader is an excellent example. If everyone who had backed Nader in 2000 had instead relentlessly attack George Bush - as the far flanks of the right relentlessly attacked Gore - then there would have been a far different political environment. |
| | Ah, but we have that now, with Michael Moore and others in his wake. |
| | Me, I'm looking for more polylogue across the divides. Hard to find. |
| | [Later...] Or perhaps not. Jeff Jarvis joins Joe Klein in blaming in the "blabocrats" for fomenting a nonexistent civil war between political poles that are in far less opposition than the driven story suggests. |
Blueteeth
| | Anybody using Bluetooth to bridge laptop-to-Net over a cell phone (especially a Sony-Ericsson)? I'm interested in how that's going for you. Seems to me that's a handy hole-filler for the wide open spaces between wi-fi hot spots. |
The light party
| | I'm going through my email alphabetically this morning, to find a few grains of wheat in a monstrous bale of chaff, nearly all spam (and this is after aggressive filtration). One whole field of potential wheat is in the grain of Jerry Michalski's post on Light, Memory and Discourse. An open letter to the Democrats accompanies it. |
The new Gettysburg battle
| | Three years and some months ago, our forebloggers... |
| | Now Dion tells me the time has arrived for action, and asks friends and supporters to sign a petition (the text is here). They need at least 500 signatures, and are at 353 so far. Let's help the effort. |
| | By the way, Dion's original Web site design was done by yours truly back in 1996 or something. It may be the only site, other than my own, that I ever designed. A surprising amount of the original HTML is still there, including the navigation tables on the top, borrowed gratefully from Jakob Nielsen. |
A splash in the media pool
| | Also just discovered (looking through an alphabetical sort of my monstrous email inbox) Blogfish, about which is said, |
| | Blogfish is the memepool. |
| | Blogfish is social networking meets evolutionary software meets peer-to-pier networking. Blogfish is best eaten wrapped in newspaper, with salt and vinegar. Blogfish is the fin end of the wedge. |
discuss
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