The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

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Tuesday, October 15, 2002
started 10/15/2002; 12:19:37 AM - last post 10/17/2002; 7:39:07 AM

Doc Searls - Tuesday, October 15, 2002

10/15/2002; 4:19:37 AM (reads: 15347, responses: 20)

What he said

Chis Pirillo, who was also at the Mobius thing last week, has an excellent post on the matter.

Alan Graham has one too.

On the phone with Dave Sifry right now, talking about the role of profanity in blogging, and how it keeps things conversational. Is converation journalism? We don't edit conversation. Almost interesting, no? (Back to the call.)

Rock & Roll

There's a thread that starts here in response to the "Blogo culpa" post below. It brings up the issue of integrity in the blogging world. Who can you trust? For what? Why?

Integrity brings to mind an expression from geology. Solid rock — rock you can trust with your life if you climb it — is said to be "competent." Rock that crumbles easily, that has cracks and faults, that breaks apart or disintegrates under stress, is incompetent. You can't trust it.

We use each other's blogs — as we also use trusted print and broadcast journals — to help scaffold and build our understanding of the world. We need to trust the integrity of our sources, and our sources' sources.

Dave says "It's a matter of what kind of blogging we want -- do we want it to be sloppy or crisp." It's a good question.

Where blogging rock gets cracked and crumbly (yes, incompetent), is — surprise — around the issue of identity. Who exactly is this person? What do they do for a living? What are they doing here? On what grounds (that earthy metaphor again) does their humor stand? Their seriousness? Their know-what and know-how? Their ignorance? Why are they saying what they say, anyhow?

The reason blogs complicate things is that each one adds at least one more identity to the author's roster, which is always complicated to begin with. And most of us know very little about each other to begin with as well.

The write Michael Ventura wrote (somewhere, I can't find it) about "the myth of the monopersonality." What we call sanity, he says, is nothing more than the organization of many identities behind a single name and a singular pronoun.

Often the best we can do, when we know many others trust us to help build their own structures in the world, is reveal those inner cracks and faults, even when they don't compromise our competence.

(More later... I have to break this off and finish up some work.)

Should I renew these domain names?

Cluelog.com, CheckoutLine.com, Marketconversation.com.

The only one I'm inclinded to keep is CheckoutLine, because it has commercial possibilities. The others ... not sure why I should still bother. In less than 15 years I'll be 70. What's the chance I'll ever use any of them if I haven't done shit with them for the last 3 years or whatever?

Frontier du jour

While we're off the subject, here's J.D. on digital storytelling:

Technology, which has already helped spawn a class of amateur journalists through text-based weblogs and niche news sites, is about to blast into oblivion another largely artificial distinction: the gap between professional and amateur visualists.

Talk about clueless

Meesh, a fellow Santa Barbarian blogger, has a long report on the GHB related death of a student in Ventura. What's amazing to me about the story is that I've never heard of GHB.

Resistance is futile

Speaking of clues and Microsoft, Kuro5hin has been visiting the subject of "borg bloggers. Wonder how many there are, and if the company knows how much

Blogo culpa

I just got this email from Dave:

Doc, I just got back from my walk, and one of the things I took with me was your post about Mitch Ratcliffe's story about integrity, money and blogging.

As your friend, I owe it to you to say this. I think you're blowing it. If you step back and think about it, you should support what Mitch says, and the proper way to show that is to apologize to your readers and promise that in the future you will disclose when you're being paid to do something that you write about. You probably need to disclose more than that, but that's a starting point.

Your response, as it stands now, is, as Al Gore would say, snippy. You don't admit any wrongdoing. But you did fuck up. You did. By any measure of integrity, you short-shrifted your readers, your weblog, and blogging in general.

You may publish this if you want, or not. Your choice.

Dave

Dave's right. I fucked up. I didn't think I was being snippy, or dishonest, or concealing (or I certainly didn't feel that way when I wrote it); but getting paid for something one writes about has journalistic significance, and I should have made it clear that this was a paid gig. (Actually, I thought I had said something to that effect a few days ago, but checking back, I didn't.) [Later...] Bryan says I said some stuff out loud, if not in the blog.

So, my apologies. I'll be clear in the future about what I get paid for.

I want to make some other things clear as well.

First, I don't believe the Microsoft folks who paid me to speak at Mobius were trying to get me to shill for them, or to spin me as a journalist. They liked my speech at Gnomedex, and wanted me to give something like that again at Mobius, which I did.

For what it's worth, I wasn't paid to speak at Gnomedex. In fact, I haven't had a paid speaking gig in about a year (I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure that's right). Before 9/11/01, I had quite a few, almost all related to Cluetrain. Like I said yesterday, I make my living as both a speaker and as a writer.

So: who pays for what.

Linux Journal pays me to write for them as Senior Editor, and pays my expenses at events I attend on the magazine's behalf. That's the case with most events I attend, but not all of them. Those include the Linux World Expos, the Geek Cruises, the O'Reilly conferences and other stuff that might be interesting from the magazine's perspective.

Gnomedex in August was on my own dime. So was the last Pop!Tech I attended. I usually pay for PC Forum out of my own pocket — which sets me back thousands of dollars each year I go (an expense I gladly pay, because I think it's worth it). This year, however, I was a guest of PingID, on whose advisory board I serve. PingID was one of the main companies behind DigitalID World, which I just attended; but I bore most of the costs of going to that show. By the way, I was not on the original list of speakers or moderators for DIDW. I pushed hard for getting included because I thought somebody from outside the BigCo sphere needed to speak for individuals at the show. And what I pushed in my talk wasn't PingID the company, but rather PingID.org, which I believe is doing good and necessary work that the world needs and I'm not seeing happening anywhere else.

I'm also on the advisory board for Jabber Inc., which flew me to Munich and put me up when I spoke there at Jabberconf in June. Same for the Jabbercon event in Colorado one year earlier.

Nobody paid me to attend Digital Hollywood a few weeks ago. But I felt I had to go, so I went.

There's a thread here, and maybe it isn't obvious. I work for Linux Journal, and I support PingID and Jabber Inc., because they play parts in movements I support. I want to help the good causes they stand for.

I also take sides in causes for which I get paid nothing, like Internet radio. I've flogged KPIG ceaselessly for years, and they've never paid me a thing. (In fact, I don't think the station has ever pointed back, or said a word of thanks, not that I care.) I also flog for the EFF, Creative Commons and the American Open Technology Consortium, which I currently head even though I have almost no time for it. That's another fuckup, by the way — and all mine as well. I'm a one-man leadership vacuum there: a problem we need to fix.

As for consulting (my third source of income), my last client was Arraycomm, which is trying to get cell phone companies to deploy broadband over their networks — something that would be good to have in the world. When they were paying me to consult them, I disclaimed it.

The fact is, money has very little influence on what I advocate, or what I like and dislike, beyond what it does to put me in a position to talk about something. I seem to be in a seller's market for what I do, and I sell it to people (more than companies) I like — such as Beth Goza at Microsoft. She's the one who hired me, not Bill Gates. If she'd asked me to do it for nothing I still probably would have gone at my own expense, said exactly what I said, and blogged exactly what I blogged. Bringing clues to Microsoft is something I'd love to do in any case.

If you're looking for slant, it's far more likely to be caused by friendship. I tend to say nice things about people I like, and I like a lot of people; so that adds up to a long steep incline. Maybe that's a weakness, but that's me.

One of the things I've liked about blogging is that I've never felt the need to qualify and disclaim the shit out of everything. And maybe I felt that way because I don't get paid for what I do here. It's a free-for-all in a very literal sense.

But it's clear to me now that we need to keep applying the principles and practices of the old Journalistic form while we figure out what the new form is all about. So henceforth I'll disclaim away.

And I thank Mitch and Dave for calling me on my shit. (Mitch wrote and said he wasn't talking about me. I knew that, but it was beside the good points he made.)