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started 7/5/2001; 9:22:40 AM - last post 7/6/2001; 7:46:06 AM
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Doc Searls - 
7/5/2001; 1:22:40 PM (reads: 5100, responses: 2)
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The Sorcerer's X10 ads 
| | Seems you can't keep a bad ad down, Paul says.. |
| | While were on the subject of ads you can't keep down, here's Tom, translating AOL boilerblather into jive. |
Oddballs in the blog may be larger than they appear
| | Phil Jones calls me and Dave "giants of blogging." What's more, we alpha bloggers seem to be at the top of some link-blog cascading social apparatus that works (as Phil's mom puts it), "like the French court," complete with a patronage system: |
| | The aim of the game is to attach yourself to, give contributions (presents) to, and try to win favour from, local dignitaries; who themselves are almost entirely uninterested in you except as far as they can use you to curry favour with the layer above them! Far from being egalitarian, the blogrolling community is revealed as a self-organized feudal system. |
| | Holy fucking shit. Is that what's going on here? I had no idea. (And I thought all you guys were my friends.) |
| | I certainly do not put Dave's blog and mine in the same class. Dave is clearly at the headwaters of this thing, as my referer page amply shows. I also don't go out of my way to curry favor with Dave (or Dan, or Cam, or anybody). I just like to put up whatever fancies my suit at the moment. A lot of ya'll feed me shit, and I'm aware sometimes that what one editor once called "instrumentality" is often involved. But blogrolling, to me at least, isn't about currying favor. It's not about class at all. It's about giving credit and granting authority while we're in the midst of sharing stuff. |
| | Doesn't seem a lot more complicated than that. |
Ignorance is blast
| | Wanna know where "markets are conversations" came from originally? Back when I worked in PR, around the turn of the 90s, I got sick of editors who insisted on turning everything into a war or sports story. I looked around for a metaphor that expressed the positive-sum nature of markets as they actually are — rather than as editors like to dramatize them. Conversations seemed to fill the bill. |
| | But the warmongers are still at it. The latest one to piss me off is this piece of false fireworks on MSNBC. The title — Slashdot in the balance? — isn't too bad; but the teaser paragraph is tendentious in the extreme: |
| | For the militant advocates of "open source" programming — the movement that holds that software should be shared and collectively improved and that Microsoft must be destroyed — it was as if the world stopped for a while. |
| | It reads as the lead paragraph, but it isn't. It's a sales blurb. The words "militant" and "destroyed" don't appear in the body copy of the piece. Nor do the words "movement" or "collective." The word " "improve" does appear, just once in approximately the context suggested by the blurb. |
| | Anyway, I hate the story on so many other (but related) grounds that I don't know where to begin. |
| | I also don't have the time or the energy to get into it. |
| | I do want to point out, for what it's worth (which I hope is a lot) that, among all the folks who wrote to let me know about various open source blog efforts, there was not a hint of militancy in any of them. Instead there was a careful effort to diminish differences and extend olive branches. This email excerpt is typical: |
| | The point I really want to make is not one about taking a moral or partisan approach to propriatory software, but to note that Open Source and blogging work because of deep similarities. |
Extend an embrace
| | I'm on the phone with a friend talking about all kinds of shit, but especially three subjects that won't go away: open source, blogs and (always) Microsoft. I just wrote down some of what this guy just said about The Evil Empire: - MSN Messenger is a work of art. It has video, audio, chat, file transport, app sharing capabilities (like Timbuktu and PC Anywhere). It's lightweight, uncluttered, easy to use, intuitive and has a beautiful interface around great core functionality. AOL's AIM not only can't compete, but the company is clueless about what it means to compete in this space, where the real game is making more possible for users, not just holding them still while their eyeballs get pounded with targetted advertising messges.
- XP beautiful, solid and extremely easy to like.
- Microsoft is doing an incredibly good job of caring about users — which they consider customers, and giving them maximum functionality with minimum hassle.
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| | And this guy is no friend of Microsoft. He's an inveterate critic of the company and regarded (at least by some) as one of its enemies. Yet he adds (and not grudgingly, either) that there are features in Microsoft products that he personally asked for. He also adds that there are many virtues for which Microsoft gets scant credit, the most important of which is what Charles Fitzgerald of Microsoft once told me was "Marketing 101": finding what customers want and giving it to them. In the same conversation, Fitzgerald also expressed amazement that almost nobody else in the computer industry practiced it, to Microsoft's default advantage. I had that conversation with Fitzgerald in 1996. |
| | Back to my friend on the phone (we just hung up — I blogged the above while we were still talking). We also talked about Linux and open source. "Why is Microsoft still attacking Linux when they've already won?" he wondered. "They've effectively walled Linux off at the server. The chance that my mother will ever use Gnome or KDE on a desktop is zero." |
| | One reason, he observed, is that most open source developers are "scratching their own itch," rather than doing Marketing 101. Another way of putting it: they don't have customers. Or at least they don't have nothing but customers. Their prevailing context isn't business. Putting their fingers on the pulse of the market and creating stuff to speed that pulse is not what they're about. This is not a bad thing (in fact it's a good thing, a very good thing); but it's not a competitive thing. At least not in the business sense of competition. |
| | We also talked about blogs. Here I find myself in the middle of something I'd rather not be in the middle of, but here I am. I wrote an editorial on blogging for Linux Journal. Now I'm getting questions from readers about open source blog software. I'm put the first of those questions out on the blog, and I'm publishing the answers. This blog, we might observe (though nobody who has written to me made the observation) is served to you by the graces of a commercial software company that is not generally perceived as a member of the open source community, even though you can construct plenty of Venn diagrams that show lots of overlap, and far more in the way of shared sympathies and backgrounds. I don't tend to see the sides here, but as long as others do, it bothers me. Because if we start by painting ourselves or others as fundamentally opposed, we can get nowhere together. And that's the way I want us to go. |
| | There's another context here. I've been struggling for a week to come up with the introduction to a panel I'm putting together for the next LinuxWorld Expo. It's titled INFRASTRUCTURE: How Linux companies make it in the enterprise, and enterprise companies make it with Linux. Now, this is a Linux show. But the issue is much larger than that. The issue is about working together. What I'm hearing from all "sides" here is that, when it comes to getting stuff done, they'd rather not be taking sides. They'd rather work together. Not everybody is saying that, and they're not using exactly those words, but that's what I'm hearing, when you get past the perceived boundaries and presumed oppositions. |
| | Some would rather not hear "closed" and "proprietary" used as epithets, especially when the other "side" has plenty of closed and proprietary stuff going on. Others would rather not be considered commie pinko anti-business dweebs just because they like hacking around with stuff that doesn't have commercial intentions. But again, that's conversational stuff. What's desired here is something beyond cooperation and live-and-let-live behavior. It's conversation. It's working together. |
| | What I'm getting is that there is a lot of perceived otherness in others who are not nearly so separate and opposed as it appears. And if we can get past it a lot more will start getting done. For everybody. (I know, I know, I'm an old Sixties pacifist. I can't help it. But shit, that's one reason I'm here — and, presumably, why your're reading my shit.) |
| | There is also the matter of need. I can think of many open source .org folks, for example, who need to be working with, and talking to, commercial folks who have real customers in real markets where people buy stuff. And I can think of many commercial software folks who need to recognize and adopt some of the altruism that makes open source folks work for the good of everybody (along with their own itchy selves), and not just for business owners and stockholders. |
| | Over in the Cluetrain List, which is amazingly active and vital recently, we seem to be working our way toward what I would call the economics of altruism: economics that respects what we do for all of us — whomever "we" may be — and not just for the people by whose immediate graces our paychecks get written. There are lots of folks on all "sides" of this conversation, including Microsoft, that have an intimate understanding of altruistic economics, even if they habitually go off and start talking about "competitiveness," "the bottom line" and all that pro forma biznoise. |
| | As I've heard said before, we here in the industrialized world tend to understand markets in terms of exchange. But in the less industrialized world, where real markets — the literal kind — thrive, exchange has a much larger context, and that's relationship. "Life is a market," they say in the Yoruba language. In The Cluetrain Manifesto we say "markets are conversations." But that only gets us part way toward where we all need to go. Useful conversations have a context, and it's not just exchanging money for goods and services. It's the relationships that make those goods and services worthwhile in some way for all of us. It's the passions that make us work for love more than money. |
| | Blogs are still new. Let's look at their creative sources, and the good work those sources are doing. Then let's talk about that, and how we can work together on it. |
| | If we stay on from one side or another, we'll just end up talking to ourselves. |
No sooner Q'd than A'd
| | Mark Kraft comes back with an answer to the the open source blog software question I asked yesterday (actually, about 1am this morning). If you're looking for open source blogware, check out LiveJournal. Looks pretty interesting. Especially LoserJabber, which appears to be a way to get live updates on what friends are up to with their blogs. I imagine this could be made to work in a cross-bloggy way, no? Meanwhile, check out the LoserJabber social network. |
| | Finally (not!) there's this one from Mother of Perl. |
discuss
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Ken Kennedy - Re: blog software
7/5/2001; 7:08:42 PM (reads: 1453, responses: 1)
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Another package that can be used for blogging is OpenACS; which is really a higher-level toolkit for building community-oriented web apps. Based on ArsDigita's ACS; OpenACS is completely open source (uses the GPL'd ACS code, AOLServer as a webserver, and PosgreSQL as the db backend.
As for blogging with it; it's certainly doable...I use it for my blog! (I'm using the news module for blogging...) OpenACS is currently moving from v.3 to v.4, which will have a robust facility for extension via "modules"...it's a pretty nice system. More for someone who really wants to build their own system; I use it for blogging, for storing my
bookmarks, for file-storage, FAQ lists, etc., etc. I'm one of the porting developers for the OpenACS v.4 project, so I can also answer (or try, anyway) any questions...
discuss
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Dan Lyke - Re: blog software
7/6/2001; 11:46:06 AM (reads: 883, responses: 0)
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Yeah, my new system does a lot of the modularity that some of the underlying structure of OpenACS is for, except it does it in Perl.
I wonder if the reason that there's no really visible Open Source weblogging software (ie: Doc asked the question) is that it's the sort of thing that the tinkerers all want to write themselves, and there's not really enough code there to warrant sharing a code base, and the non-tinkerers don't want to deal with integrating someone else's code into a bizarre hosting environment? The problem with adoption of Newwwsboy was that you pretty much had to understand how to hook it into Sendmail (or another similar mailer), and most people pass that stuff off to sysadmins who don't want the users mucking with that sort of config.
discuss
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