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| Thursday, November 10, 2005 |
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Still gives me chills 
| | Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the ruins of her ice water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams,
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered. |
Toward a better distinction
| | Intelliseek: Consumer-Generated Media Exceeds Traditional Advertising for Influencing Consumer Behavior. |
| | Mary Hodder: We are not creating our own media, writing blogs (Intelliseek owns Blogpulse, a blog search product), in some cases creating our own products, as 'consumers.' We are *users* with a proactive capital U. |
| | Kevin Marks: We already have a word for people who create for the love of it, rather than being paid to, and it is 'amateurs'. As with many other pleasures, when we seek out opinions, we prefer those that flow from passion rather than from payment. |
| | Mary Hodder: Fantastic. Because it means we take back from the concept of 'professionals' the notion that 'good = professional." Instead we claim the aspects of our experience through creation that are so humanly, actively ours to own and enjoy, as unpaid creators. 'Amateur' has been derogatorily used to convey 'less than' status. Sometimes one or another works is less than, but it is not due to whether or not someone is paid for their work. A work should be judged lesser or greater because of its intrinsic qualities and value to those who apprehend it. |
| | So, take the label 'amateur creator' as a point of pride. It means you create for love, and not for money. |
| | Dave Winer: Amateur is a good word to describe the work of most bloggers. The root of the word is "love," an amateur is someone who does it for love. The Olympics used to be all-amateur, which implied high-integrity. We've been using the term in the blogosphere for at least five years. |
They do bear a certain frankness to each other.
| | Wouldn't it be possible to use a genetic algorithm to program a neural net such that the NN produced results largely indistinguishable from Google's "Page Rank" algorithm? If it is possible (and I think it is), couldn't Microsoft, or Yahoo! or some other well-funded source smash together a Google replacement (for search, anyway) and compete for AdSense revenue? |
| | Note that such a competition would likely serve to raise, not reduce the AdSense rates. Websites would make more, while people who "buy" AdWords would likely pay less. Google (and its competitors) make a lower margin return, while the rest of us get rich in the process. |
| | Jim is, as Ed Cone once called Dave, a "frank speaker". To (or with) wit, |
| | ... Joy's law still applies, the number of smart people at Google is the log of the number of people at Google. Google may have a different base for the logarithm than Microsoft or the US Army, but they're still deep into diminishing returns with each new hire. |
| | That last line brought up a hmm... where have I heard this before? The Aha! brought me here. |
Same Cone, new pine
| | Ed Cone's blog is now here. Meaning edcone.com now redirect there instead of the old blog, which is still here. |
Linkism
| | Am I upset about the bombings in Amman, Jordan? Heck no, I've progressed from upset several hours ago to permanently pissed having suffered a bit of heart-break somewhere in between. I suspect the good people of Jordan are experiencing the same, only on a scale of magnitute I barely comprehend... |
| | Elsewhere on the same blog is A Brief History of Atheism. This led me to wonder what my favorite atheist might have to say about suicide bombings. Quite a lot, in his latest post (from September — c'mon, Eric, start posting again), Suicidalism. There he proposes that the suicidalist practices of modern Islamist terrorism have the same intellectual antecedents as the political correctnesses (including moral relativism) of the Western intellectual left — and that those practices continue to thrive in the shade of the left's intellectual tree. |
| | I'm not sure (at least some of) blogs4god's authors would disagree. But... I dunno. Not yet, anyway. (I'm too busy with Actual Work to do any digging on the subject today.) |
| | As for me, I'm a believer in God who has always found discomfort with everybody's dogmas (even the ones that give me warm fuzzies), and who believes the chief grace of blogging is the hyperlink, which — more than any convention in the history of writing — has the power to blast open the walls of the echo chambers into which it is our nature as humans to gather. Which is kinda what I'm trying to do here. |
| | An aside that may or may not help... |
| | About ten years ago I took a few days off to chill in silence at the New Camaldoli Monastery in Big Sur. One of the values the White Monks of the monastery share with Quakers in Sunday meeting is confinement of speech to that which "improves on the silence". (Or, in the case of the monks, fails to insult the contemplative virtues of silence.) It was there that I had an amazing conversation with Father John Powell, who told me that any strictly literalist interpretation of Christ's teachings "insulted the mystery" toward which those teachings pointed — and which it was the purpose of contemplative living to explore. "Christ spoke in paradox", he said. Also metaphor, which itself is thick with paradox. Jesus knew, Father Powell said, that we understand one thing best in terms of another which (paradoxically) is literally different yet meaningfully similar. |
| | For example, George Lakoff explains that we understand time in terms of money (we "save", "waste" and "spend" it) and life in terms of travel (we "arrive", "depart", "fall off the wagon" or "get stuck in a rut"). For what it's worth, George is Jewish. Like Jesus. |
| | The greatest mystery of life, Father Powell explained, isn't death. It's life. "Life is exceptional", he said. For all the fecundity of nature, it is surrounded by death. Far as we can tell, everything we see when we look to the heavens is dead as a gravestone. Yet it inspires the living. "Life", he said, sounding like an old rabbi, "is the mystery". |
Here, Kitty
| | If she starts making bread, I'm claiming first dibs on the semi-obvious "bun in the oven" joke. |
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