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Thursday, October 17, 2002
Stories wanted 
| | In case you guys don't subscribe to my SuitWatch newsletter for Linux Journal, I made a pitch in today's issue for stories I can tell in my keynote talk during next week's Geek Cruise. The title is "The Silent Majority: How Linux Got to be Everywhere While Nobody Was Watching." Great subject. I've got some great material, but I need more. Here's the explanation: |
| | As I pointed out the other day, we seem to be in a new phase of SuitWatching for Linux in Business. In the crosshairs is what Don Marti calls "mysterious subversive projects within large corporations". That puts me in the market for stories about important projects nobody talks about--including accounts of quiet but widespread adoption. |
| | So I want to hear from you about how Linux has been quietly adopted in your organization or by other organizations you know about. If you want, I'll give you credit as a source; if not, you'll still help me tell some interesting stories that need to be told. |
Reduxion
You get what you blog for
| | Bryan Field-Elliot: Googliness is next to Godliness. He has a heap of other quotable lines there too. |
A message from the cosmos
| | It's finally happened: I'm overcome with email. Even without the spam, there's more than I can deal with. And today Eurora decided to it would start to hang whenever I opened the search window. Maybe it's telling me something. |
Presence of malice?
| | In The Ellen Feiss of blogdom, a big-J journalist takes down a little-j journalist with one post. But since the little-j journalist happens to work for the biggest company in the computer business, that makes the attack fair. Or something. I don't know what. I just pisses me off. |
| | Andrew and Beth are both friends, or as close to friends as we get here in the surreal Agora I wrote about in the post below. That's what gives me a huge pain in the heart right now. I know they're both good people, generally trying to do The Right Thing. |
| | However we might fault her efforts, that's what Beth was trying to do with Mobius 2000, and with her blog. |
| | And however we might credit the rest of his work (and I give him plenty), what Andrew did with this post was mean and cruel and destructive. |
| | Andrew joins an anonymous parody in cutting Beth to pieces for talking about her cat on her blog, and for a bunch of other trivia (all of which amounted to simply being herself) that would get attract zero heat if she didn't work for Microsoft. |
| | I'd be amazed if Beth blogs another word after this. Or if she even bothers to invite bloggers back to Microsoft. But I do hope she keeps it up. |
| | I don't know what Microsoft's response to this attack will be, but I hope it's not defensive. My unpaid, unsolicited advice to Bill, Steve and the rest of the company is to encourage everybody in the whole place to blog all they want, with minimal common-sense guidelines (no talk about upcoming products, etc.). It'll be the best PR the company ever had, in addition to embracing a deeply healthful practice — a way of adapting to a new world the company gets insufficient credit for helping to create. |
| | To Andrew and the rest of us, my advice is to measure twice, cut once. And the second time, measure with your heart. |
| | [Later...] Just got off the phone with Dave, who thinks Andrew was not out of line. Dave challenged me to ask myself if I would rise so quickly to Beth's defense if she were a man. |
| | His point: she needs no defense. And maybe he's right. |
| | My point: I care about people's feelings, even if they are "fair game." And especially if they're friends. Like I said before, friends are my weakness. |
| | I've stirred enough shit for today. Let's move on, if we can. |
The Gold Standard
| | In Beware the fairy dust, Sheila Lennon lays out professional journalism's big-J gold standard for ethics on the matter of influence: |
| | I am typing in a the newsroom of a mainstream major metro daily where no payola is allowed. None. I sometimes leave at night with giant bouquets sent to the society writer or the restaurant reviewer, reporters who are not allowed to keep them under our stringent rules. |
| | Reviewers may keep the books, cds and software they review. They may not sell the overflow; these are offered in monthly "book grabs" open to the entire building. We are monkish about preserving not only our objectivity but avoiding the appearance of impropriety. It's why you can't get rich in journalism. |
| | In respect to the cadre of geek toy obsessives with blogs and sites who attended Möbius 2000, she asks the big-J questions: |
| | How can you act on behalf of readers who only get to buy the stuff, without the glamour of all the freebies (and a sighting of Bill and Melinda Gates) |
| | Do you trust these bloggers to be objective in reporting on the whole array of choices open to us, knowing now what you do? |
| | This is why what we do here is journalism in the literal sense rather than the professional sense. We keep public journals, often to express our passions. In many cases this involves advocacy. What we're doing in those cases is, frankly, closer to PR or entertainment than to big-J journalism. |
| | This does not mean bloggers have relatively slack ethics. (Well, maybe they do, but anyway...) They have a different set, or a set that arranges the priorities differently. In whatever case, we've barely begun to decide what the arrangements are. We're still in the discovery phase of this thing. |
| | What we're seeing right now is the influence of a different kind of gold: the professional standards bloggers like Sheila Lennon and Dan Gillmor follow in their day jobs. |
| | The serious pubs set the gold standard a long time ago. And they still do. Even here. It's a good influence to have around. |
| | What we have going for us with blogs is a different kind of familiarity with the people we read. We also have the opportunity to fact-check the crap out out of each other, and watch Google put it all on its public record — something the big pubs deny by locking up their goods after a day or a week on the Web. |
| | Here in blogland here is also a very different sense of the first person plural, of we. This is a social place, a public market, full of gossip and noise and the sounds of vendors selling, customers arguing and the various breeds of Socrates and Pythagoras, teaching. |
| | We get to be real here, whatever that means. And maybe we're still finding that out, too. |
| | And, like the Agora in Athens, nobody owns or dominates the conversation. Not even Microsoft. Maybe not even Google. |
| | We can even say no to the hemlock. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Thursday, October 17, 2002, Fred Grott, 10/20/02; 5:34:33 PM Eudora and blogged and andrew's response, Jonathon, 10/17/02; 4:28:05 PM Re: Eudora hangs, Don W Strickland, 10/17/02; 3:32:59 PM Re: Thursday, October 17, 2002, Mike McBride, 10/17/02; 1:55:09 PM Side Note Beth's site is down, Fred Grott, 10/17/02; 1:37:13 PM SideNote:Java Blogs, Fred Grott, 10/17/02; 11:53:43 AM
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