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| Wednesday, March 28, 2007 |
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What it isn't 
| | This morning I recieved an email from Alan Herrell, who has blogged for many years as The Head Lemur: |
| | Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:25:52 -0700
From: alan herrell
To: Doc Searls
Subject: Kathy Sierra |
| | (sorry I haven't written before this as I have been doing damage control for my clients) |
| | I am writing this to you as the guy who can forward it to everybody that matters. |
| | I am writing this from a new computer, using an email address that will be deleted at the end of this. |
| | I am no longer me. My main machine despite my best efforts has been hacked, my accounts compromised including my email. and has been disconnected from the internet. |
| | How did this happen? When did this happen? shit doc, i don't have a fucking clue. I thought i was pretty sharp. I guess not. |
| | just about every online account that i have has been compromised. Most importantly my digital identity and user/password for typepad and wordpress. I have been doing damage control, for my clients. How the fuck i got to be part of this mess is revolting. |
| | The Kathy Sierra mess is horrific. I am not who ever used my identity and my picture!! |
| | I am sick beyond words over this whole episode. Kathy Sierra may not be on my top 10 list , but nobody deserves this filthy character assaination. |
| | But everything I have written about her or anyone else has been in public. |
| | Jesus Doc, In the ten years I have been online, i have never used any sort of screen name or hidden behind psedonyms. |
| | I have always posted and written as me. I have prided myself on the fact that I stand behind everything I wrote. Blogging made it much better in keeping the dialogue public. |
| | That folks think that this mess is the sort they believe I would do is disheartening. |
| | I may not be the the most popular guy, but I like to think i have been honest. And I say again I have *always* done this publicly. |
| | For Kathy and Maryam and anybody else I am deeply sorry. Nobody deserves this. |
| | Whatever credibility I may have had is down the toilet. For this I am profoundly saddened. |
| | I liked being who I was warts and all. |
| | I have over the course of my time online met some of the brightest people that I would never have the abilty to sit across from to break bread or share coffee with from around the world. How wonderful is that. |
| | In 1997 I wrote that I believed that the internet was the most important invention of the human race. I believe it even more today as I write this. |
| | It will probably some time before I attempt to join the great conversation again, but, Please don't let bastards grind you down. |
| | alan herrell the head lemur (retired) |
| | This is the communication I've been waiting for. Alan appeared to have been the source of some (or perhaps most, or all — I'm not in a position to tell) of the offending posts on MeanKids. |
| | I've known Alan for the better part of a decade. He has been a good friend — the kind you call on when something bad happens and you really need help. And he has delivered. Yes, he can be tough on people, especially when defending a principle. But that's one reason I believe him. |
| | From the beginning of this sorry affair, the default assumption by many people has been that Chris Locke or Alan were behind at least some of the viscious postings against Kathy Sierra and Maryam Scoble. Also from the beginning I've believed that these postings were not in the character of anybody I knew — but were in the character of trolls. |
| | Trolls don't just flame. They bait flaming. And they've been doing it since long before most of us were on the Internet. Sometimes very effectively. |
| | If Alan is right, everybody on this giant thread has been taken for one of the oldest rides in the park. |
| | For what it's worth (and it's a lot), we still don't know who did this. |
Frontier and Law
| | As for the facts I want to know, I don't have any more than I did yesterday. (Later... now I do; see the post above.) But we do have a helpful post from Denise Howell, who is both a blogger and a lawyer. Some excerpts: |
| | What has stood out for me is the extent of the potential disconnect between what real people actually do with Live Web tools and what the law might expect them to do based on its experience with what it mainly knows: the primarily professionally administered static Web. Real people don't meet a tool like Blogger or TypePad and, upon learning they can set up a group blog, think "Gee! How cool. Let me get my lawyer (what lawyer?) on the phone to draft up some really nifty terms and conditions so everyone will know just what's expected of them, and spell out exactly who owns, and who is legally, morally, and/or ethically responsible for, what." They just don't. In all likelihood they're writing at night when they should be sleeping, or otherwise in their "spare" time. While sophisticated and well-advised political opinion makers might, real people lack both the resources and the foresight. You might think they should, and maybe they'll start to, but imposing such requirements and expectations will quell socially valuable speech. There's no getting around it. Part of the ability of a blog to serve as "a little first amendment machine" does die at that moment. |
| | Lot of food for re-thought there. |
Pushing past the Paper Problem
| | In Papering Over Problems, Chris Nolan takes a tough stand against premature conclusion-drawing about newspapers' problems. |
| | First she takes on the Net-native side of the debate: |
| | ...tech folks' ideas about the news business are guided by their own prejudices: They think raw, unfiltered data is the best form of information. Since the web allows for unlimited forms of data to be displayed and accessed, filters - newspaper reporters and editors - are deemed unecessary. |
| | But if that were really true, Congressional Quarterly, with its charts and graphs of Congressional voting patterns, would be the nation's most popular political magazine, the Wall Street Journal would just run the stock tables on the front page and fashion magazines would cease to exist. The editorial function - finding what's important, or good or interesting - and showing it to a larger group of people in a way an audience understands and appreciates isn't going to be replaced by the search for raw information. Not-so-geeky readers want someone - someone they like and trust - to inform them. |
| | Next she takes on the traditional newspaper business, and |
| | ... a little bit of gentle self-delusion that news folks like to affect. They like to say that they work primarily for the noble cause of serving the public interest. This attitude has been nurtured by the monopoly status that most papers enjoyed in their communities and it has encouraged many people outside the business - "bloggers," in particular, who already think of filters as a hindrance - to think of editorial as free and therefore without value. But news folks, like everyone else, work for a paycheck, the bigger, the better. And it's high time we stopped pretending otherwise. |
| | There aren't any magic bullets, and accepting that is the first step. A newspaper, at its best, is a guide to the community it serves; the website it puts up should perform the same function and regard online activity - all online activity, not just novelty crap from YouTube, MySpace and Craigslist - as part of its coverage area. Ignoring the online world off your website is as dumb as ignoring the big fire in the next town over. You could see the smoke, your readers could see the smoke, but since it was over there it didn't get covered. How smart is that? The newsroom, its writers and editors should be on the web so readers can find them and they can find stories. |
| | And, let's drop the posing about how this isn't about the dollars and cents. We all need to think about ways to make money for our sites, large and small. Let me throw out this observation: On the Internet, space and time are virtually infinite. Off-line advertising is the business of selling space (and if you're in the TV or radio business, time). So why are we using an out-of-date business model to sell something that's infinite? Can't we, instead, start to think about what readers are doing on our sites and begin to offer them things they want, maybe even need? It's not that hard. In fact, online it's easier than it's ever been (self-serving plug: Have a look at our Amazon stores). |
| | All this makes me think that the people who might be best suited to figuring out how to make money on news websites aren't tech people. Or ad people. |
| | I don't know if she's intentionally going in the direction of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management), but I can't help but think there is a VRM approach to the newspaper problem, just as there is a VRM approach to both the public radio support and Internet radio royalty payment problems — two birds which I addressed with one stone here. |
| | Because it seems to me that Chris is asking for us to base solutions around readers rather than around writers or advertisers. Sounds like a challenge for ProjectVRM. |
| | By the way, I don't think all tech folks think unfiltered data is the best form of information, or that newspaper editors are unnecessary. I think many, including yours truly (who straddles this divide), believe we live in a new information ecosystem in which data can be published in much more abundance and many more people can participate — and that this requires adaptation by newspapers. I think Chris's core idea here — adapting to readers rather than to tech or tradition — is spot-on. |
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