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Saturday, February 18, 2006
Affirmative traction 
| | Kent Newsome: I am going to try to find and link to something interesting written by someone I don't know who doesn't have a ton of links. Tag: second opinion. |
Long tales
| | Ethan Zuckerman at the Internet Archive. Velveteen Rabbi on The Longest Night. Imagine that someone fell ill suddenly, and was unresponsive by the time the ambulance arrived. Imagine one family member after another hearing the news and descending into grief. Imagine a burly priest driving in at two in the morning to offer the Sacrament of the Sick. Imagine the difficult decisions of organ donation and life support. Imagine the long crescendo and decrescendo of goodbyes. Imagine that the night went straight through 'til morning. Stuff that matters, as they say. |
Gates to what?
| | Her name is Dana Barrett and she's waiting for the Keymaster to bring about the return of Gozer the Gozerian, who will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, he came as a large and moving Torg. During the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, he came as a giant Slor. (Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!) |
| | So that's a gatekeeper. Fortunately we haven't seen one since 1984, when Ghostbusters came and went. |
| | If you have a website that you post to every day, and you've amassed a sizable readership, good for you. But you are no more a gatekeeper than the New York Times is a homepage. |
| | What you are is a popular nerd, king of your very own soapbox. Congratulations! But being a gatekeeper in the age of the blogosphere is completely meaningless. |
| | After all, how valuable is it to be a gatekeeper in a world of infinite gates? |
| | In late 2004, when Steven Levy was writing his Alpha Bloggers piece for Newsweek, I did my best to play down the whole "alpha" and "A-list" distinction. I remember telling him that "being an alpha blogger was like being an aplpha paramecium", adding "We're all one-celled animals here." (Some exceptions, of course. Four of Technorati's Top five blogs have multiple authors.) |
| | The most remarkable fact about blogs isn't that a relatively few are popular, but that anybody can be heard on any subject they like. And, more importantly, anybody can create or add value to any number of conversations, and help move those subjects forward. |
| | To me that's an amazing and wonderful fact of life in a world that didn't exist for most of my life. It's also why I find the "gatekeeper" characterization so perplexing. Especially when it's aimed at me. As I just I just said here in a response to the latest from Brandon Stafford in pingswept, if keeping gates was all I was doing, I'd hang it up. |
| | I think it's both right and responsible for bloggers to point to their sources, especially to other bloggers. It's also essential to recognize the abundance of excellent sources that aren't in some search engine's "A-list". Finding and crediting those sources is one of the things I've always liked best about blogging. There are posssibly dozens of metaphors for that activity (just starting with searching and browsing). If "gatekeeping" is among them, it's only because the list is streched to include the most negative and cynical candidates. |
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