Month: August 2005

Categories
History

Subtle impact

Twenty years ago, most people would probably say that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was the single-most significant event of the last century. Five years into a new century and history is already writing a different story.

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The event has received a great deal of coverage in weblogs, as well as other publications.

Among webloggers there were those who come out with a hearty ‘Well Done!’ in regards to the bombing; and those who deplore the event as barbaric and unnecessary. Most acknowledge that they don’t have any ready answer, as to whether we should have dropped the bomb or not. As to whether the act was a war crime or not, well, they say history is written by the victors. As Curtis LeMay said of his own part in the firebombing of Japan before the atomic bomb was dropped, if the US had lost the war, he would have been tried as a war criminal.

The depth of knowledge about the atomic bombing varied widely among the webloggers. Some adhered to the rote view that “millions were saved” because of the bombs, a number and notion that has been largely discredited over time. I found one weblogger who talked about Hiroshima being in China. (I won’t embarrass him by linking–note: it isn’t.). On the other hand, Susan Kitchens has been writing a set of posts that details the events, day by day, leading up to the bombings, and the aftermath.

Some webloggers wrote empathetically of the bombing and the inhumanity of war. I found, though, that many people have a detached view of the event: they know it was a Bad thing for people to do to other people, regardless of whether it was necessary or not. But it was something that happened a long time ago.

One weblogger wrote the following, which says more than just the few words imply:

Yesterday was the 60th aniversary of the Atomic Bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, and on Tuesday is the 60th aniversary of the Atmoic Bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. This resulted betwen 50000 and 150000 deaths i dont know how many and i cant be bothered to check anyway remember the dead

Another weblogger who lives in Hiroshima wrote:

I did not know anything about sufferings that people who lived in Hiroshima back in 1945.

I watched a TV program on atomic bombing last night. I learned a lot, and realized that I really have not known about how much and how many people suffered from the bombing until now. I am not trying to victimize myself for just being born and raised in Hiroshima. My parents are not originally from Hiroshima, so I do not really have relatives who can tell me how it was back then.

Joi Ito was asked to provide his perspective on the event in an op-ed for the New York Times. I found his writing to be a frank, dispassionate, and unflinching look at the viewpoint of today’s younger, affluent, less traditional, and more future thinking Japanese:

WHEN people ask my thoughts on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I always feel uncomfortable. As a Japanese, I know how I’m supposed to respond: with sadness, regret and perhaps anger. But invariably I try to dodge the issue, or to reply as neutrally as possible.

That’s because, at bottom, the bombings don’t really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.

Joi has received some heat for his writing from those who think he didn’t display the ‘proper’ perspective on the event; I, personally, valued his honesty and insight.

Joi’s writing and his mention of the future leads, indirectly, to another August 6th anniversary: it is the Web’s birthday, as it was on this day in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee released a set of documents detailing his vision for a “World Wide Web”. I could ask Joi and others which they consider the more significant event–the bombing of Hiroshima or the invention of the Web–but I think I know the answer: in Japan, and elsewhere, the lessons of the past must compete with the hope for the future, and hope can be a powerful force.

Categories
Diversity Technology Weblogging

Technology is neither good nor evil

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Technorati has been coming under fire a great deal lately, including this latest by Om Malik, who writes:

So this is where I lose the plot – I tag my post, Technorati benefits, and despite all that, my tags help spammers who clog my RSS readers gain more readers. That’s absolutely rotten! So essentially the spammers can write a script, generate tags, stay high on the Technorati listings and fool people into visiting their sites. By tagging I am helping this scumbags, the RSS-link blog spammers. This is clearly not going to help Technorati (or infact anyone’s reputation) as a good search tool.

This is a conversation we’ve been having for months, as I noted in Malik’s comments. He wrote an email asking for references, saying he’d searched on Google for the terms and I responded back with several links to several posts, including some of my own — most found by going to Technorati rather than Google. And therein lies the rub: a year ago, Technorati could do no evil. Now, Technorati can do no good. Neither is the absolute truth, because we’re applying terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to what is nothing more than technology, and technology just is. I don’t care for Technorati’s Top 100, because I see absolutely no value in it from a technological perspective, but much harm based on how the list is used to attach ‘authority’ to certain webloggers. However, I do like the ability to look at one of my posts in Technorati and see who has linked to it and, more importantly, what they’ve said. There is no inherent implication of authority in this, nor any indication of moral righteousness: it is just a reading of what is, and can’t be, shouldn’t be misused in implying value in the post. Now that many of the scaling and implementation issues are being taken care of, this service is very helpful. As for tags, I disagree with Technorati automatically converting categories into tags, as there is no overall value in this. I have categories that make no sense outside of the context of the weblog, and all they’re doing is polluting the environment. However, I found explicit tags to be helpful when I was trying to keep up with all of the recent BlogHer writings; not to mention those on Hiroshima. As for spamming, I’ve noticed that tags that are both very active and very time specific overwhelm the spam. BlogHer in a month may be filled with spam, but right after the conference, the links were relevant. Again, challenges in implementation aside, there is no implication of good and evil in tags; they are a service, nothing more. Not, I hasten to add, a way of ‘defining’ social groupings or any of the other glorious sounding purpose associated all too often with ‘authority’ (read that link) based technologies. Speaking of BlogHer, among those posts found in Technology, I was happy to read about the pushback against lists such as Technorati 100 that happened at BlogHer, but less than thrilled when this was, in my opinion, misconstrued as an ‘opportunity’ to replace ranking indexes such as Technorati 100 with something better. In particular Mary Hodder suggested …a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. She had this idea going into the BlogHer conference, based on a dinner she attended one night with several people, including Ross Mayfield, who wrote at Many to Many:

Following Liz’s read of BlogHer, one of the more interesting points to come out of the conference is the need for constituent algorithms — ways of revealing hidden groups. For the BlogHer community, the Technorati 100 was more than a whipping boy, but an index where a group was under-represented. Mary Hodder’s approach, spot on, is to develop alternative indexes.

Ross then goes on to discuss the limitations on indexes, such as the authority implicit with each, which left me puzzled as to why he would approve of the development of alternative indexes. Yesterday, Mary released her new effort to identity alternate algorithms based on a dinner she had with Ross, Doc Searls, Halley Suitt, and others in Paris a couple of months ago. It’s a very detailed and thoughtful post, and I respect the amount of work she put in it, but it seems to me that no matter how much the community is involved in this effort, it’s just propagating the same problems, because the issue isn’t about technology, it’s about people and how we behave. If women are not as visible in weblogging (or technology or politics and so on) because of some esoteric to do with technology, then our problems could be easily solved. I would personally devote my life to finding the Woman Algorithm — the algorithm to give equality to women. But, as we’ve seen with the recent linking to BlogHer reports, the issue isn’t that simple. Even considering the fact that BlogHer was about women in weblogging, the single most linked individual post on the conference, was Jay Rosen’s–one of the few men to attend the conference. Why was Jay’s the most linked? Well, some of it was because he provided a viewpoint that led to debate. He used a ‘confrontational’ term that was guaranteed to trigger furious discussion. I linked to him for that specific reason, as did other people. However, Halley Suitt also wrote a post that generated much debate, and though it was also well linked, not as much as Jay’s. Does this, then, mean that Jay’s was a better post? No, not necessarily. If you look at those who linked to Jay, you’ll see two patterns: people who linked to Jay because of what he said, and others who linked to Jay because of who he is. What is the common characteristic of those who linked to Jay without specifically referencing the ongoing discussion? They were all men. Is this relevant? Well, considering the purpose behind Blogher, I would say the results aren’t irrelevant. I suppose we could compensate by having all the women at BlogHer link to Halley just because–but that doesn’t solve the problem, it just ‘hides’ it in this particular instance. Links based on the work are something that can be measured accurately with technology, and used to derive some overall value–interest if nothing else. But the latter, this linking because of who a person is, can’t be normalized with technology; no matter how clever the algorithms or how open the process. Not unless we start adding demographic metadata to our weblogs such as sex, age, economic classification, race, married status, political party, and so on. Though there are those who wouldn’t hesitate to put this information online, most would, rightfully, look askance at the process. Even if we tried to analyze a person’s links to another, we can’t derive from this anything other than person A has linked to person B several times. If we use these to ‘define’ a community to which we belong, and then seek to rank ourselves within these communities, all we’ve done is create a bunch of little Technorati 100’s — and communities that are going to form barriers to entry. We see this ‘communal’ behavior all too often: a small group of people who know each other link to each other frequently and to outsiders infrequently; basically shutting down the discussion outside of the community. Continuing, Mary writes:

So the tension is, do we in the blogosphere figure out a more sophisticated, open standard based metric that reflects the way we see blogs, within and across communities, in order to score blogs? And do we do this within topic areas? Or does using a more sophisticated algorithm across all blogs make more sense? Or do we allow this all to be done for us, possibly in an opaque way by some of the blog search engines or by people who are trying to figure out blogger influence and communities for their clients, or do we write off those efforts because we know they cannot possibly understand us anyway? I have to say, I’ve resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others. What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I’m seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I’m at the point where I’d like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us.

I think Mary should stop with …I hate rankism. I understand the motivations behind this work, but ultimately, whatever algorithm is derived will eventually end up replicating the existing patterns of ‘authority’ rather than replacing them. This pattern repeated itself within the links to Jay Rosen’s post; it repeated itself within the speaker list that Mary started for women (“where are the women speakers”), but had its first man within a few hours, and whose purpose was redefined within a day to include both men and women. Rankings are based on competition. Those who seek to compete will always dominate within a ranking, no matter how carefully we try to ‘route’ around their own particular form of ‘damage’. What we need to challenge is the pattern, not the tools, or the tool results. Of course, I realize that mine is just one opinion among many and this work will continue regardless of what I write. As a tech, I’ll be interested to see the algorithm develop and even provide whatever insight I can. That is, if my rank gives me the necessary authority.

Categories
Stuff

I still wish I could breath under water

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I watched the movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on DVD tonight. It starred Bill Murray and a host of other well known actors. Critics hated it, or loved it — in about equal measure. I also loved it and hated it, in about the same measure.

It’s a odd movie with odd sets and an odd story. I would watch one scene and decide I disliked the movie; in the next, though, I would be laughing over some dry piece of visual or verbal humor, and the confusion would start all over again.

Ultimately, though, I liked this movie. I liked it a lot. I liked the odd sets, including the cut away ship, exposed to the camera like an ant farm. I liked the music, which enters at odd moments. I liked the characters, but not all of the time. And I loved the end. I loved the end so much, I watched the last set of chapters on the DVD three times, and may watch it once more before going to bed. All I will say is that I came close to crying, and still may. And I have a burning desire to hear the Beatles “Yellow Submarine” again. For the first time.

A. O. Scott at the NY Times wrote:

As someone who was more annoyed than charmed by “Tenenbaums,” I should have been completely exasperated with “The Life Aquatic,” with its wispy story and wonder-cabinet production design, but to my surprise I found it mostly delightful.

Save the money you might spend watching that piece of crap Dukes of Hazard and rent The Life Aquatic. If for no other reason than a good David Bowie song, and for the visual delight

Categories
RDF

Creative genius with data

Jeff Jarvis writes today about looking for technologists for a new start up:

As you may know, I’m working on a still-stealth start-up for news and we’re looking for talent, starting with a top-notch engineer who’s both an algorithms/analytics expert and a creative genius when it comes to playing with data. Of course, we’re always on the lookout for all-star, world-class developers of any flavor. If you’re game, e-mail john.donovan@gmail.com with something about yourself.

This type of job suits me quite nicely, and is inline with both my experience and interest. I’ve worked for 20 years in technology, most of it with data being the lead information repository manager for Boeing Commercial at one time, an Oracle DBA for other companies, as well as working with data integration between disparate tools for even more. This isn’t to mention my experience with XML and RDF, in addition to microformats.

And I’m sure the fact that I’ve had a weblog for years would only appeal to Jeff and the others involved with the start up. I feel I am a strong fit for this position and sent along my resumé. However, it couldn’t hurt to have others put in a good word for me. Hint. Hint.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Life isn’t an oven, you can’t control the temperature

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It would be the ultimate irony if of the individual posts related to BlogHer, the one or ones linked the most were either by guys who attended the conference, or those who didn’t. Having said that, I am linking to one, Jay Rosen’s.

Of his overall impression of the conference, Rosen wrote:

It seemed to me (and I told the conference this part) that these were reflections on a kind of terror that is by now deeply associated with the Internet, especially the strangers who are on it. At a conference of bloggers that was 80 percent men and 20 percent women (the usual ratio) this would barely be heard. I don’t recall many expressions of dread from bloggers at the three BloggersCons I attended.

Here it was routine, which is not to say bloghercon was dominated by expressions of terror (because it wasn’t, at all…) but rather in a conference that is 80 percent women—and where 100 percent of the tone was set by women—there were no disincentives to speaking about raw fears connected intimately to the act of blogging.

From what I’ve read in other posts and heard in the chat room, I agree with Elisa in that I don’t think the conference focused unduly on ‘terror’ or fears of this or that exposure. There was the one session on Naked Blogging, but that discussed the ramifications of being too personal in one’s blogging and having to be careful. I don’t necessarily equate this with terror. Same as I don’t equate flaming or criticism with terror.

How to explain the differing interpretations? I think that Jay’s journalism background played a major part in how he framed the discussion and he naturally did as a journalist would: he opted for the catchy phrase. Let’s face it, “terror” is a grabber. This isn’t, necessarily, to imply a criticism of what Jay wrote, or the terminology he used. In fact, there is something to be learned from Jay’s post-BlogHer wrapup, as his writing has generated discussion in other weblogs, as well as references ( i.e. links) back to his post. This writing is, in a way, a ‘take away’ for the participants, as much or more than the cool Google bag.

(Speaking of which: can I have one of those?)

Does this mean, then, that you have to use catchy phrases or other journalistic mechanisms when you write in your weblog? Of course not! But if you want the flash and sizzle, you got to be able to start the fire, and the terminology you use is part of the stick (ahem) rubbing process.

But I don’t want to just write about Jay — even if I do adore irony. So on to the ladies, and something else that caught my eye.

There were two global sessions at BlogHer in addition to the start up and wrap up: the A-listing and links session (led by Halley Suitt, Lisa Stone, and Charlene Li); and, during lunch, a discussion on Flame, Shame, and Blame (Ellen Spertus, Liza Sabatar, Alisa Valdes (who responded to the conference by quitting her weblog and telling other webloggers “To get a life. I am”), and Mobile Jones) .

Reading the liveblogging and other notes from the sessions, supposedly, one gathers, some want more of the one–more visibility, more links– without the other–shaming, blaming, and flaming. This seemed to me to be both confusing and a contradiction; it’s the same as saying you want to take a strong stand on an issue, but you don’t want to defend it.

Halley wrote an interesting note today on the conference, addressed, I assume, to some of those who have been critical of the conference and the sessions:

Feel free to disagree, as long as you attended BlogHer and can attest to the facts I state. If you haven’t attended a conference recently with an 80% female audience and 100% female speaker roster, save your comments until you attend one — like the next BlogHer, okay? Seems only fair. It’s like writing a movie review of a movie you haven’t seen — go see the movie first.

(Oddly enough, of those who have been particularly critical of BlogHer, most are men, and most have only linked to other men, even as they reference what other women wrote or said–a refreshingly honest and direct and rather fascinating attempt to reassert the dominate paradigm of male centered communication. Social scientists take note. Please feel free to use my Linkers tool to investigate this yourself.)

Halley writes that we should withold our (seemingly ‘critical’) opinions, but then also focuses on asking for links, and herein lies the confusion. By all means eschew popularity and the attendant difficulties, but note that the two–popularity and hassles–go hand in hand, as any of the popular sites demonstrate: most highly linked webloggers write controversial text, and take strong stands, or have strong opinions; as a consequence, they get their share of strong, and even vitriolic debate. Even those who write primarily on their personal lives can attest that their writing does not float along on a stream of kind good will.

Life doesn’t assess that you are a gentle being and then respond accordingly. Weblogging doesn’t see that you shrink from confrontation, and route damaging opinions around you. With the links you ask for, you will receive the following:

People will react. Sometimes people will react personally. Sometimes people will be mean. Sometimes they will seek to hurt.

The anonymous troller. The anonymous troller is a fact of life. Ignore them, delete their comments, laugh at them, whatever. Feed them if it’s fun, or don’t if it isn’t. But you control how much energy you give them by your actions. If you take what anonymous trollers say to heart, you are giving them power. Ultimately if you can’t handle this environment because they have too much power, then consider changing the environment: eliminate comments and password protect your space. Or as Alisa did: quit.

The passive-aggressives. I don’t know about anyone else, but I dislike passive-aggressive behavior with a passion. Either say what you mean, directly, honestly, and without games and take the lumps; or shut the fuck up and sulk. One or the other. Still, the passive-aggressive live and breath and exist in our society. And the P-As suck onto links, like a slug to flesh. All we can do is watch out for their sincere insincerity and keep our backs to the wall.

Anger. But anger can be useful.

Disagreement.

Feel free to disagree, as long as you attended BlogHer…. The weblogger’s motto is Feel free to disagree and that’s followed by a period. We don’t take kindly to caveats; we eat provisos for breakfast.

If you ask for links, you will most likely get contention. Even if you don’t go specifically for links, if you make a strong or controversial statement in your weblog, you are going to get a response and it isn’t always going to be pleasant. There will be those who make take what you write personally and respond in kind. There will be those who disagree strongly, and respond in kind. You have to take responsibility for your actions, and that includes writing. If you make a strong statement and people respond, you can’t suddenly change the protocol in mid-debate and demand people play ‘nice’.

A long time ago, I was feeling hurt about the comments I was receiving in a post and went to a friend, a good friend, for commiseration. Rather than commiserate with me, he basically said I was responsible for how the people were reacting to me. I would make strong statements and then when people responded in kind, I would act all hurt, which was frustrating to the other people, leading them to become even more personal in their responses.

His words were like a cold splash of water in the face. They hurt, made me cringe, really pissed me off, and then hurt, cringe, and piss off all over again. It’s only been over time that I’ve come to realize that he was right. Oh, not completely–there were other factors involved, not the least of which is the tendency of men to add an emotional context to women’s writing, which can be equally frustrating. But for the most part, he was right.

I was not accepting the responsibility for my actions and responding in kind. I would be critical of others and then get all hurt when they were critical in kind. I was, literally, setting the other participants up, and pulling a “po’me” on them just when they started to build up steam. Ouch! Bam! Right in the bullseye, too. Suddenly I’m ten again, riding in the back seat of the family car with my brother and yelling out, “Mo-o-o-m! He’s picking on me!”

Since then, I’ve tried to be aware of this in myself and curb the tendency, though not always successfully. It’s natural to want to point out the errors of others, and to deny others the same courtesy in regards ourselves. However, it’s also natural for us to just squat anywhere when we need to pee. Sometimes for the good of the society in which we inhabit we have to rise about what’s natural.

But what if isn’t ourselves that are responding to the negative commentary. What if our friends do so , to protect us? Well, your friends are not helping you.

In my post To Google, Pregnancy is Evil a couple of people disagreed with some of my statements. John thought one of my statements was over the top, and that Google shouldn’t necessarily be held responsible for this one person’s actions; another, Quantum Jim from Slashdot wrote that some of my posts seemed to have a bitter tone in them, lately.

Dave Rogers and Yule Heibel responded to both John and Jim, passionately and eloquently and in disagreement, but they didn’t do so to ‘protect me’. If their only interest in responding is to protect me, Yule and Dave would be responding in all of my threads where I’ve made strong statements and had disagreement. My sidebar would be litered with “Yule” and “Dave”. People would be saying to themselves: geez, don’t piss on Shelley or that Yule or Dave will whack you but good.

Now, Jim may be feeling that way a bit right now, but that’s just because he walked into it. Uhm, repeatedly. And here’s a smiley to go with that 😉

(Speaking of this discussion, and this is a digression from the main topic: do guys apologize to other guys for ‘hurting’ them in these debates? Just curious.)

Now if I said something either Dave or Yule disagreed with, and if it triggered the same interest to respond, they would write as eloquently in disagreement as in agreement. That’s the way this all works. Or, that’s the way this all should work.

Yet how many threads have we been in where disagreement with the writing is equated with disagreement with the person, and have had people respond accordingly? More, how many times has a weblogger’s friend gone into the comments of a post where another weblogger has been critical and again, moved to ‘protect and defend’?

If you as a weblogger encourage this, after a while no one is going to want to link to you, debate you, or even acknowledge you because they don’t want to have to deal with your friends. Can you see, then, how this can adversely impact on your being linked? Or even treated with respect?

For those of you who discuss ‘safe’ places, is this, then, what you want? That we don’t even talk about you? That we don’t link to you? That we don’t make comments in your posts? You can’t pick and choose — only the ‘positive’ or ‘constructive’ criticism is welcome; only ‘helpful’ comments are welcome. Or in Halley’s case, only those who attended the conference can speak on it.

As for those unkind, the world is an unkind place at times. People cut in front of you in traffic, your kids get in fights at school, you work with someone you can’t stand — it is life. If you want your weblog to be ‘safe’ from this, then you have to make it safe from life. Is that what you want?

If you don’t want the links, and you don’t want the world to know about you, then by all means, build a safe place. Make sure that people understand that only friends are welcome, and that any form of criticism is not. Don’t read the posts of those who link to you. Stop Google and other webbots from indexing your page, to keep Others out. And don’t leave your weblog URL when you leave a comment elsewhere. Better yet: don’t comment elsewhere. Well, unless it’s in a friend’s weblog, where nary a harsh word is exchanged.

Over time, you will have a safe place. It will be a very quiet place, but a safe one.

Asking for links without the possibility of heat. Might as well try to roast marshmallows over your computer.