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Tuesday, February 14, 2006
From an actual dialog about Valleywag 
| | Other person: Oh yeah, they've been around for awhile. |
Another measure
The dance of attention and authority
| | And here's the killer quote, from Eric Hoffer, from The Ordeal of Change: |
| | Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status. |
| | Ironic to perceive myself as a member of the latter while finding myself in the company of the former. |
| | Today in my Mass media class. We were discussing newspapers and the extreme power the editors or "gatekeepers" have in your perception of what is going on. New york times, La times, and The wall street journal, have roughly 10 gatekeepers each. These people get to decide what goes in the paper, and what stays out of it. Imagine having that much power? You decide what gets put into the media, and you decide how you want it to be presented. In my personal opinion, i believe that these people have more power then the u.s. government on views you have in the world. |
| | Just think how you can change the world by being able to control what is being fed to the masses. |
| | Hoffer, by the way, was a longshoreman and philosopher whom I suspect would have found the blogosphere an agreeable place. I remember listening to an interview with Hoffer, many years ago, in which he talked about how he would work on perfecting his sentences. His method was less a matter of good mechanics than of good meaning, often by using the right metaphor. |
| | He was an influence on me, and that influence was strongest at a time when Hoffer was still alive, and setting a perfect example for a philosophy major with a useless degree and a default position on the z-list of every career path he could imagine. So I thank Glenn for bringing the old guy back to our attention. |
Any portal in a storm
Later, hopefully
| | I was going to be at OSBC, but for a variety of reasons couldn't make it. My apologies to folks I was going to see there. |
Gives me 1.5 years to wrap stuff up
| | Ronni Bennett: It's official. There is no one in the U.S. older than 60 who matters anymore. |
A shout to Yahoo
| | A friend of mine managed to get himself locked out of his Yahoo account, and after hours on the phone with Yahoo support, he seems unable to convince the Yahoo bureaucracy he is who he says he is so they will let him back in. He even offered to fly to Sunnyvale to present his driver license. Apparently, the zip code Yahoo has on file is different than the zip code he¹s had his entire life, and the support staff say they can't unlock his account until he gives them the right answer, which he¹s already doing. (Apparently, the best one particularly dim bulb in Yahoo customer service could come up with is that he call back each day with a different guess till he gets it right.) |
| | In short, there seems to be some sort of an immovable object/irresistible force thing going on, and he's not sure how to break the deadlock so he can get back to his data. The most pressing problem is that he¹s got some tax related information in his email account, and on the current path, there seems to be no way for him to get to it by April 15. |
| | So, I pose two questions here: First, if you work at Yahoo, how in the hell can my friend get his access back? As already stated, he¹s spent hours on the phone to no avail. I¹ve tried inquiries on the backchannel but have received no responses. Second, for the larger SaaS [software-as-a-service] community, if our data lives on the network, what happens if Google, Yahoo and the like become the phone company? |
| | So, Jeremy, or anybody, can you help? |
| | Meanwhile, good questions. |
Class distinctions vs. Everything else
| | The gatekeeper issue is about class. It's about privilege and its absence. It's about haves and have-nots, outsiders and insiders. I've been trying from the beginning of this discussion to direct attention to the qualities of the Net and the Web that are class-neutral — to the countless glasses that are half-full, rather than half-empty. |
| | But I keep hearing privately, mostly from friends, about the pain of exclusion that is genuinely felt out in (what I believe we insultingly call) the long tail. |
| | Clearly it is bad form for those of us in the short head to tell others in the long tail that the blogosphere's caste system doesn't exist or isn't a big deal. Clearly, it is. |
| | The next thing I write about this will be a longer piece, over in Linux Journal. There are Linux and open source angles to this, not the least of which is the wide-open future of development in the Live Web, where blogging is just one species of expression. Plus the fact that it's my job to write there. I'll point here to the piece once it goes up. [Update: shooting for tomorrow now.] |
| | How about a second slider that doesn't progressively filter out the long tail from left to right, but rather works in the opposite direction, progressively filtering out those with higher "authority"? Why? I'd like the option to look only at those with few or no inbound links. |
Trucking
| | Dean Landsman: A corner was turned. The worst was over. Health, although in no apparent hurry, seemed to be making a slow comeback. And so did it it seem. One day, finally, one just finds oneself traveling on the heralded Road To Recovery. |
| | I talk to Dean a lot on the phone, and he's sounded like hell this last month. Glad to see he's mobile again. |
| | So, a happy valentine to him, too. |
Happy Val
| | I just love the fact that my old pal Val Landi is blogging. And I thought saying so on San Valentino's Day was good, if not appropriate. |
| | I've known Val since the turn of the 80s, when he was a salesguy for Computerworld magazine and I was a partner in a tech advertising agency in North Carolina. Before that Val worked as a honcho for Metromedia, when that company was still a force in broadcasting. By then he'd already written his first book, and was on his way to becoming a high ranking excutive with IDG and then a successful CXO with a bunch of different tech companies. |
| | More importantly, Val and I both grew up in New Jersey, only an exit or two away from each other. His brother-in-law and I were buddies when we both put ourselves through college as ice cream men, selling Pied Piper Ice Cream from beat-up trucks we drove out of Paterson. So Val and I have an almost brotherly sense of coming from The Same Place. |
| | [Digression...] Between the last sentence and this one, I wrote on impulse to Adam Chernichaw, whom I guessed might be related to Nate Chernichaw and his family, who ran Pied Piper for many years. Nate was one of the great teachers in my life, and I remember his whole family fondly. Well, Adam wrote back immediately, and it turns out he's Nate's grandson. Now we're catching up by email. |
| | Anyway, Val's busy changing the book business, as you'll see from his last two posts about Sundance. If he succeeds, we should be seeing A Woman From Cairo, his latest, in bookstores. |
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