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Monday, March 28, 2005
Bad encore 
So we can all relax
Oy, oy, Captain!
| | The captain will perform a community service as some kid will get on the site, join the club, get the rum and get his silly ass killed. |
| | The parents will sue for millions and despite all the disclaimers, privacy statements, and lawyerly impedimentia, They will win and make the captain do a 9000 city tour for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. |
| | Besides who want's to use a product that makes you look like a spaz when you are trying to score? |
Ironies of life in a persistent animated state
| | Did any of them care about Terri Schiavo for the first 14.5 years of her vegetative state? They did not. Did they offer to pay for the extraordinary expense of keeping her alive? They did not. Did they sit by her bedside, read her books, play her music, bathe her bedsores? They did not. There's nothing to be gained from unpublicized compassion. |
Bet on the snowball
| | A couple weeks ago I was hanging out with George Lakoff and friends while they waited for a late plane here in Santa Barbara, where George had given a speech the night before. One of those friends was not yet hip to blogs, so it became a fun conversational project to describe blogs metaphorically, especially since metaphors are George's forté, to say the least. |
| | Once he understood that blogs were powerful tools for change, the friend began to run down a list of Big Challenges that I, as a well-known blogger, should tackle. |
| | I'm sure this isn't exactly verbatim, but it's pretty close to the reply I gave: |
| | Tell ya what. I'm fifty-seven years old, and I've been pushing large rocks for short distances up a lot of hills, for a long time. Now, with blogging, I get to roll snowballs down hills. Some don't go very far. But some get pretty big once they start rolling. |
| | See, each snowball grows as others link to the original idea, and add their own thoughts and ideas. By the time the snowball gets big enough to have some impact, it really isn't my idea any more. |
| | Anyway, at this point in my life I'd rather roll snowballs than push rocks. |
| | I also operate on the assumption that if it's a good idea, the chances are also good that somebody else had it too. Case in point, the RSS/BitTorrent idea, which I "invented" back in December in my eWEEK column. In the blogosphere, it produced a dressing down from several techies who assumed I misunderstood how the technology worked ( "The point that Gillmor missesŠ" and "Gillmor's vision is upside downŠ") and a slashdotting of the syndicated Yahoo News version. |
| | The net Blogging for Food result: I am permanently immortalized as an idiot on Google, received no page rank whuffie since the original post preceded the rollout of my eWEEK blog, and didn't even get the benefit of a Slashdot traffic spike on the originating eWEEK.com site. But thanks to Andrew Grumet, who actually picked up the idea and implemented it, and Dave Winer, who saw the familiar makings of a low barrier publishing framework for audio and video, and TiVo, who's fighting Rupert Murdoch's Direct TV and the DRM lobby by moving to Web content delivery, the RSS BitTorrent idea is still growing. |
| | Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new stuff. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man, but just remember: it doesn't want to conclude. |
| | I think Big Challenges start with conclusion, with finished opinions. That's what makes them sysiphean. They are bodies at rest that are hard to put into motion, especially in an uphill direction. |
| | But if you start with an idea, whether partly formed or whole, whether yours or somebody else's, and push it in the downhill direction that all blogging (thanks to links and RSS) essentially goes, it's bound to have some impact once it grows large enough. And as long as it keeps going. |
Guess I'd better make 'em smaller
| | Kevin Briody calls me "probably the utlimate BTDT guy in the business" and says my posts "are rather cryptic more often then not likely not where you'll find the huge epiphanies in life or business, if that¹s what you¹re looking for." |
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