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| Wednesday, November 2, 2005 |
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Ways of Rights 
| | There is a lot of debate surrounding the efforts of Google and Microsoft to scan the books of the world and make them available electronically. I say Scan Them All! |
| | I say don't stop with what is sitting on the library shelves of the world, but start a World Wide Effort to get every scrap of information that resides on paper and make it electronic. Books, Magazines, Brochures, Handouts, Catalogues, and the entire output of every local copy shop on the planet. All those announcements about bake sales, rummage sales, and lost pet posters. I don't know if any of this will be significant, but I do know that if it is available, somebody a lot smarter than you or I will be able to see things that we don't. |
| | Index and make it all searchable. Collate and store copies of everything on the Internet as well. Devote a ton of money to create electronic libraries to spider, update and back it all up. Create Root Servers to do nothing but collect and update this effort. |
| | The debate surrounding this effort revolves around the Straightjacket of Copyright. We need to repeal current extensions and bring Copyright back to sanity. I am a proponent of 14 Years. |
| | This just came to mind, and I don't want to lose it: |
| | What makes your creative works immortal is not your ownership of them. |
Mash out
But not holy
| | Perhaps I stretch analogies in comparing Broadway Joe and the upstart AFL to blogging. But I see it as part of the same ladder up in human liberation. Printing presses vs. monks. The 1984 Apple Mac vs. 1980s IBM hegemony. Desktop publishing vs. typesetting shops. CBS/Dan Rather vs. blogs. George Bush/Harriet Miers vs. blogs. |
| | Blogs are democracy. Blogs are free-market capitalism. Blogs are righteous. (And yes, I think Dan Lyons' brave story on those hate-spewers fouling the blogosphere was damn righteous, too.) |
| | A Forbes' piece, called "Attack of the Blogs", addressed the dangers of unaccountable or unreasonable blog attacks. The immediate response was indignant condemnation from big-traffic bloggers including Instapundit, Doc Searls, BoingBoing, and Dan Gilmor. Guess what? They proved Forbes' point. |
| | Forbes' article concerned the piling-on and trashing by blogs who write and publish so quickly and unaccountably that invective often passes for fact. It opens up with a somewhat inflammatory and sensationalist couple of sentences (a typical magazine "teaser"), which opened the piece up to the very sort of attack it recounts.... |
| | Searls is more reasoned, but he wants to be on the 'right' side of this issue, too: |
| | " 'Attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere,' Lyons writes, otherwise ignoring or discrediting the non-sliver blogging constituency throughout his report." |
| | So, although Lyons acknowledges that only "a sliver" of the 'sphere is abusing the system, Searls condemns him for not having made nice noises about (presumably) the majority of bloggers. Of course, Lyons is working for a dead-tree publication (with limited space), and the fact that his article does not include the enormously important contribution of helpful blogging does NOT invalidate the article, despite Searls' protestations to the contrary... |
| | None - that is, not a single one - of the bloggers who attacked the Forbes piece could invalidate the facts cited (the attack on Gregory Halpern and Circle Group Holdings, the lack of accountability for false statements, the prevalence of hyperbole and attacks in place of facts, and the fact that Halpern's attacker, Nick Tracy, was engaging in a pump-and-dump stock scheme). Few even mentioned these facts, which formed the basis for the story. |
| | With nothing preventing them, and every reason (traffic, and acceptance by other blogs) to sling accusations, unfounded charges flew, as they always do. Gothamist accused him of censorship "just like the Catholic schools of NJ who aren't allowing students to blog", which is a major stretch. Searls says: |
| | "Thus sensationalism, which attracts readers and sells magazines, wins a small victory over publisher Steve Forbes' own free-market politics." |
| | Doc, blogs on the whole are often more sensationalistic than newspapers (who can, at least, be held legally accountable) will ever be - and you know it. Don't throw that stone, not in this house. |
| | What may have disturbed some in this blogswarm were the bare-knuckled "fighting back" suggestions Lyons made. These were listed on a scale from benign to nuclear: Monitor the blogosphere, Start your own blog, Build a blog swarm, Bash back, Attack the host, Sue the blogger. As we have actually had to defend a small company that was crippled by libelous attacks, we know the power of destructive language. We also know that, after the initial Instalanche, few blogs go back to correct facts. Fewer still will stand up to the bigger blogs - though a handful are generally up to the task. |
| | Most bloggers just, well, wanna have fun traffic. If they want to preserve Internet freedom of speech, though, they're going to have to also stand up and be counted against the 'sphere's rampant irresponsibility and biased, hidden-agenda attacks. The first step is to acknowledge that these problems exist (which is the reason for this post), because if we don't start holding ourselves to a higher standard, others will come in and do it for us. Libel laws and search warrants have a chilling effect on free speech, and the 'net is building a case, day by day, for their implementation. One day, a case by a seriously aggrieved party will come before the Supreme Court, and everything will change. |
| | That last point is the one that matters. The problems do exist. Kudos to Dan Lyons for reporting them. There are plenty of ways to solve those problems, however, without creating new laws that regulate the marketplace, which is where Dan Lyon's righteousness pointed in that piece. |
| | Anyway, for what it's worth, I don't blog just for traffic, or for acceptance. And if you can't get what I do blog for, you're not reading me closely. Which is fine. It's a free sphere. For now. |
| | And I stand by what I said about sensationalism. It isms what it isms, no matter who isms it. |
| | By the way, I'm not only old enough to remember Broadway Joe and the Jets' sportsworld-changing victory over the stodgy old NFL; I was an adult already. With a kid. Scary thought. |
| | Which means I'm also old enough to observe a tradition behind this righteousness Rich is talking about. (On both "sides". If sides they are.) It's called Gonzo journalism, and it's been around even longer than Broadway Joe. |
discuss
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