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Sunday, June 16, 2002
Newtonian politics 
Get together in London
| | Talking with some others about a spur-of-the-blog get together tomorrow (monday) evening. Ideas? Put it in the Discuss thing over there on the left, unless you want to do email. <doc@ssc.com> |
| | Meanshile, speaking of local (I think it's local), I've been looking over Fred Grott's PhotoFairy, off his ShareMe blog. Cool: fred mixes "open source" and "independent developer" without irony. As it should be. Like Dave says, you need to be able to mix 'em like water valves. |
Blog globally, flog locally
| | It's 17:30, as they say locally, and Petite Delice just closed. But I need the bandwidth more than I need my price, so here I am, reclining in the quiet doorway of a primelocation.com affiliate (I'm reading the URL off a membership decal in the window, at eye level in the front window, about one meter off the ground), grabbing some images I need (pyramid, forest, jungle) for the talk I'm giving tomorrow. And blogging away in the meantime. Just a second... I just remembered I have my camcorder with me. Here's a picture: |
| | So: yes, like a homeless beggar, with a laptop instead of a cup. |
| | Interesting. Some people passing by ignore me completely. Others say a hearty Hello! A few of those are children. Kids always like to greet people shorter than they are. |
| | And now the proprietors of the establishment (The London Mews Company) just stopped by, and we've struck up a conversation... |
| | Okay, the company is better known as Lurot Brand, and the gentleman in this photo here... |
| | ... is Oliver Lurot. If you're looking for some lovely properties hereabouts, he's your man. |
| | (Okay, time to get up. My ass hurts.) |
The pyramid in the forest.
| | On the elevator this morning I thought of a couple metaphors that help describe the differences between institutional and personal journalism — which I think are the true natures of traditional journalism (of the print and broadcast sort) and blogging. |
| | One is built like a pyramid, and the other grows like a forest. (Interesting to swap the verbs in that sentence, no?) |
| | Institutions are not naturally flat. They are natural hierarchies: pyramids. Some pyramids may have greater width and less elevation than others, but all of them are wider at the bottom than at the top. Their stuctures may be organized by merit, longevity, power or all those characteristics and more. Without them we wouldn't have Dilbert; nor would we have The New York Times. However we may fault institutional sloth or cluelessness, there are institutional virtues aplenty to attract and reward talent and effort, and create goods, that would otherwise be denied to the world. |
| | Forests are ecosystems, which means they're pretty much flat. They have their food chains, but there's a limit to the size individuals can grow, and to their ability to dominate the whole system — even when the forest is a jungle (our favorite Darwinian metaporical environment). |
| | Just as a newspaper can never be personal, a personal journal can never be instituiojnal. The biggest and best personal journals are still personal. The most personal newspaper blogs are still instituional. And neither is a Bad Thing. Both deliver goods we wouldn't get any other way. |
| | Institutional and personal journalism compete only in a very limited sense of the verb. Mostly they complement each other. The difference is mostly context. |
| | In the long run they won't be able to get along without each other, any more than cities can get along without surrounding country. Gradually this will become obvious to both "sides." |
Big Ben
| | It's another perfect morning here at Petit Delice on Kynance Place in South Kensington; and the only thing that annoys me now is that I wasn't hip to Ben Hammersley's blog (or blogs, which are here, here and here) any earlier. But if I had read them, it would have ruined the surprise of discovering that the nearest pulbic wi-fi hot spot to my hotel was his. |
| | [Later...] I was going to leave, but I'm still here. The place is too lovely, and the surrounding conversations too interesting to ignore. A large extended family of perfect-looking people all dressed in extremely discreet casual clothes (tweed jackets, fine brown suede shoes) has been sitting next to me here, speaking a mixture of French, English and some Norse tongue (I suspect Swedish, though I'm not sure why... I kept listening for taks sa mecket, but wasn't sure if I heard it or not... doesn't help that my hearing kinda sucks.) |
| | Whoa... they just left and a threesome sat down. I recognize the voice of one gent I can't quite see from this angle. I'm trying not to look, but it seems to be this guy. Nor sure, though. [Later...] It wasn't, but the resemblance was there. |
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