Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Although many people seem to detest it, I like Dave Winer’s blog. He’s a scrappy, techno-savvy, surly person who speaks from behind the scenes and is uncannily accurate. He’s also been blogging since the early days of Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom, a blog I’ve read for at least a decade. (Update: I don’t agree with his politics that adorn the top of the page, but Jorn is a genius and his idiosyncrasies should be tolerated.)

Dave sounds like someone I would like to meet. He believes in minimal technology, as I do, although in different ways. And his insight cuts through a lot of the loose phlegm of public discourse. Here he is on blogjournalism:

In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn’t have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn’t believed.)

They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. ^{^}

As usual, established interests start relying on one method of doing things so much they forget about other possibilities. I think Dave probably wanted to bring in the greatest parallel ever, which is the personal computer. Back in the 1970s, it was assumed that computers would always need machine rooms and staffs to monitor them, including highly-trained programmers. As operating systems and programming languages both grew up, and got oversimplified, the computer migrated into the home.

Enter the hobbyist programmer. The personal computer software, like the blog versus a system like Vignette, was a shallow competitor because it was simpler and less reliable, lacking the thorough architecture of mainframe software. But it did the job well enough, and people could by having a computer in the office, have a greater amount of control over their data. So they took their dollars and bought IBM PCs, Apple ][s, Tandy TRS-80s, and Commodore 64s.

Blogs are the same way, and I sense the situation is evening out. The medium has changed; the skill of journalism has not. As Winer opines in another post:

Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it.

He's right. If you take some existing thing, strip it down the basics, and make it more accessible to the widest margin of the decision-makers and power users, you're going to see it sell quite well. That's why a 5mhz IBM PC outsold much more powerful mainframes, and even some smaller brands that were arguably better-engineered.

Taking a final look at what Scott Karp wrote,

On the face of it, the question of whether blogs can do journalism is absurd — like asking whether sites published on Vignette can do journalism.

[deletia]

So it would seem the answer to the question is an emphatic YES — IF the blog CMS is used by a journalist. ^{^}

We can quibble over what a “journalist” is, but to my mind a journalist is someone who knows the skill of journalism, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re writing it on a napkin, spraypainting it on a wall, publishing it in a newspaper or blogging it into the ether. Jorn Barger and Dave Winer are arguably as influential as the New York Times or Wired magazine in certain sectors of the tech industry, and that reflects their role and skill more than their medium, which just happens to be a lot more convenient than dead trees newspapers.

Since I’m like a bluejay easily fascinated by shiny objects, the online reading level test offered by Critics Rant had some appeal, and I ran it on this blog. You can see the result to the right.

I didn’t think I’d be dismayed by this. First, I know how unreliable online tests are. They’re four-IQ-point Perl, Visual Basic and Java Scripts crawling the internet hoping to get lucky. They probably do a basic grammatical test, so even if I wrote gibberish with a lot of commas and verbs in odd places, they’d consider it a postgraduate level text. But even more, the thought worried me: what if they were right?

In my life, the one factor that has made the difference between misery and delight has been learning. I didn’t write “education,” because there’s a difference, but finding the truth (loosely defined as how things work consistently in the shared reality we call physical space!) of any discipline, matter, notion or act has always made me feel free from the great weight of negative “what could be” that we call fear. It’s like a darkened room not made light, but I have a map, now.

If those results are in any way true, I’m stubbornly not going to change. I think the rest of the world should. This blog isn’t that complicated. More people need to get acquainted with this style of writing so they can appreciate the beauty of learning, especially from books, which get good when they start at this level (the best books are usually far more articulate, and less bloggish). Learning is fun. Reading is power that requires oppressing no one. Pass it on.

We believed that having a core level of professional content –- from our site editors -– would be enough to attract a loyal following even if the user-submitted content wasn’t enough on its own. But I think we didn’t have nearly enough of that. If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content — and I’d mix that in with the best user content.

I’m not saying that user-submitted content isn’t worthwhile, let me be clear about that. I am saying that I think you can’t rely too much on it. And you need to filter out and highlight the best user content, while downplaying the visibility of the mediocre stuff.^{^}

The publishing worlds are under assault from many fronts. People download MP3s, they trade eBooks, they blog and read the newspaper if they get to it. Does this mean that the conventional model of publishing is dead? Sort of, but not really. The real need out there is still for aggregators, whether sites like Digg or the hard-boiled editors of major papers, to filter through the massive flow of junk and pull out the gems, format them correctly, do background research and present it in a format that doesn’t waste the reader’s time.

I wonder how long it will take for the book publishing industry to see the same thing. Many of the books I’ve read of late have obvious “spellchecker errors” in them, such as homonyms inserted in the wrong places, as if editors are now trying to get more out the door in a shotgun approach. I’m also finding that my discards ratio has risen alarmingly. So many of these new books are promising until you dig into the guts, and then you realize, it’s a slightly novel way of telling a very predictable and not very realistic story. Too often, it’s comparable to reading a fanfic site but with better pretensions.

The peoplemedia revolution is important, but like all revolutions, it seems to me that it goes too far, and that then the cycle returns. Most blogs are garbage, including this one. Too many books means the gems get lost in the shuffle and we’re left with nothing we’ll remember for a generation. User-generated content is a great idea, if there’s an editor to filter it, which means that you’re approaching content from roughly the same model a newspaper does. Nothing ever really changes, but we try so hard to make it look like it’s so.

Very basic things, actually.

But the biggest force driving up milk prices is the same one that has driven up prices for conventional commodities like iron ore and copper: a roaring global economy. Rising incomes, from China and India to Latin America and the Middle East, are lifting millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class.

It turns out that, along with zippy cars and flat-panel TVs, milk is the mark of new money, a significant source of protein that factors into much of any affluent person’s diet. Milk goes into infant formulas, chocolates, ice cream and cheese. Most baked goods contain butter, and coffee chains like Starbucks sell more milk than coffee.^{^}

Globalization is like a giant gold rush for those producing basic necessities with a tinge of luxury, meaning that they go to those with above average earning abilities. It’s interesting how this has come full cycle from high technology being most expensive, and milk being cheap. What happened was the downside of economies of scale. The more technology we made, the broader the production base became, and at the same time, our traditional farm and manufacturing sectors shrank. Now that technology has run its course, it’s back to basics for what the human population produced by this technological wealth needs.

From Joel Aufrecht, who’s doing some kind of masterful research into what I’m calling “wall theory”: how top-down civilizations control their populations and yet, how laws are made to be broken, for an esoteric few.

“For the record, here are the amounts for various drugs possession of which will get you the death penalty in Singapore:

• 15g of heroin
• 30g of cocaine
• 30g of morphine
• 500g of cannabis
• 1.2kg of opium
• 200g of cannabis resin (hashish)”

I have yet to read about a civilization that did not have both taboos, and rules it viewed as necessary for being civilized. Do we call incest a taboo, or a necessary rule? That’s where ethics gets tricky. In the West, we tend to rely on what we view as proof that something is dangerous to the public, but other societies are more sanguine. They know that some people are going to trainwreck no matter what laws they make, so why bother?

It reminds me of a friend of mine and his theories regarding his large tank of tropical fish: it’ll take care of itself if there’s food balance. The aggressive fish are going to eat some of the smaller fish, so have smaller fish that breed like crazy, and get at least one fish that eats the snails because they do breed like crazy, and have lots of snails to eat the green gunk and you’ll be fine. Are societies ecosystems?

Day of the Dead: I got the chucks and ate my little Willy’s sugar skull. – Naked Lunch, p 18

And now, from the wonders of the internet, How to make sugar skulls for Dia de Los Muertos, or really any other occasion, which I recommend as well.

Over the years of trying out junk foods, I have returned to a concept of reality that slides below all the marketing as the most basic abstraction possible: candy is congealed sugar, and soft drinks are sugar water. After that revelation, I found it hard to spend $2 for $0.20 of sugar pressed into shapes, to which potentially harmful weird chemicals are added. (There might be a singular exception if what is added is limited to peppermint oil, as in Wrigley Lifesavers Pep-O-Mint, the only commmercially available candy with four ingredients.)

If you’re thinking runways, you’re very close, but these aren’t the kind with leggy Eurasian models. These are the kind tiny planes land on.

^{^}

Designed for 1/250 scale models of military ships, these tiny planes must be a labor of love, because having done model at a much larger but still small scale, I’ve found it takes a steady hand and a steady eye to get anywhere near this level of realism.

Norms are “social attitudes of approval and disapproval,” the law professor Cass Sunstein writes. Norms specify “what ought to be done and what ought not to be done.” Norms bind societies together; they regulate everyday conduct; they foster civility. They are the oil that reduces the friction of human interaction. We need to maintain norms of courtesy so that we can all get along nicely. Imagine if we didn’t have norms like first-come, first-served. Fisticuffs would quickly follow. In short, norms are a central mechanism through which a society exercises social control. ^{^}

There’s just something about being behind a keyboard and a screen that make people do nutty things, especially if they think that they’re appearing to be anonymous. However, that can also run right into questions concerning libel. Over in the UK, where libel laws are much stricter than here in the US, it should come as little surprise that people who thought they were being anonymous are now being unmasked by those accusing them of libel. ^{^}

I’ve often wondered how humanity is going to resolve this dilemma. We want greater transparency, so we can see what others including our government is doing. However, such transparency makes us vulnerable, especially if it’s not the government that is corrupt but the motives of other people. Privacy is the opposite of transparency. Privacy is the opposite of control. I often fondly look at the anarchy patches on my high school backpack and think it might be worth the chaotic descent into natural selection, if it means I get can get some of these insane “well meaning” people off my back ;)

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don’t spend enough time outdoors and don’t get any real exercise and therefore can’t, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait. ^{^}

Alarmist, and not the news, but he’s right. People have become atomized and isolated into themselves. Learning doesn’t occur, so we can propagandize them with progressive politics and they’ll agree that those things are important, but then go right back to drooling on the couch and not recycling their pizza boxes. The next time you encounter a driver who seems so profoundly out of touch as to be mentally retarded, consider instead that we may have simply dumbed-down, safety proofed, and religiously infused reality to the point where what we see as out of touch seems immensely connected to them.

“When we’re sleep deprived, it’s really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions,” researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.

“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”

In modern life, people often deprive themselves of sleep “almost on a daily basis,” Walker said. “Alarm bells should be ringing about that behavior—no pun intended.” ^{^}

Get a good night’s sleep, you silly people. Running amok is only fun when it’s deliberate!