Year: 2006

No, I own the new gatekeepers

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 12, 2006

While I work on both the Johnson Shut-Ins post, in addition to trying to wrap my head around ExpressionEngine modules, there have been some writings too good to miss.

Seth Finkelstein writes New Gatekeepers are still Gatekeepers:

This world is exactly the same as *every* *other* *media* *world*, in that there’s a few participants who have enormous reach, while most have little to none (”Power Law”). That’s just a mathematical fact. One obvious corollary is that if an A-lister (very high audience) writes a personal attack on a Z-lister (very low audience), the Z-lister has no *effective* means of responding, to any comparable extent. This is hardly life-threatening, but it’s not pleasant.

Irony is introduced when one realizes that it is Doc Searls’ response to Seth, not Seth’s original writing, that rates top billing in Tech Memeorandum. (Dave Rogers also notes another bit of associated irony–leading to the title on this piece. Sorry Jon.)

Along similar lines, Phil Sims writes The Piss-Ant Blogosphere. In the post, the Squash Man notices that the A-Listers don’t send him the traffic to go with their ranks, and this tends to cast doubt on the power of webloggers in influencing the success of startups.

I can agree to this: other than blitz of traffic for my Parable of the Languages, and the flurry of links to my Men Don’t Link writing, the most traffic I’ve ever had was for a blonde joke; I still get close to 4000 unique visits a day for this. Perhaps I can get Clairol to advertise on my site in the future.

Turning to more serious matters, 3 Quarks Daily has two thoughtful and should-read entries on the explosive situation about the Danish cartoons: one an original writing by Abbas Raza, and one referencing a New Republic article. I was asked in my comments, can’t we have a dialog on this topic? My answer is yes, but only if we all understand none of us has the answer, because we’re still trying to figure out the question.

From the tech side, Kim Cameron has InfoCards working with WordPress and PHP. This was in response to a challenge made to him some time back about implementing InfoCards in a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment. I’m not necessarily sanguine of the concept of InfoCards, but the effort that Kim has done deserves recognition and a well done. More on this when I have a chance to look more closely at the implementation.

Danny Ayers has two posts on mining microformatted and other munchkin metadata formats for richer semantic data: Out of Eden and Out of Eden: possible implementation architecture. More on this topic later, too.

Damn it people — stop writing such good stuff. I want to respond individually and there’s only so many hours in a day.

Media

Shut-Ins

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 9, 2006

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources had a media tour of Johnson Shut-Ins today, and I obtained permission to attend to take photographs. The members from DNR were wonderfully informative, courteous, and helpful. I also spent time chatting with an AmerenUE employee who I found to be very informative on how the company and specifically the company engineers view the event.

I’m in the process of downloading the photos and when finished, I’ll be posting a story with photos from the event. I’ll also include photos from before the flood, for comparison purposes. At times I tried to orient myself to take photos that I knew matched those I’d taken in the past, but the park has changed so much in so many places, all I could do was an approximation.

The media was out in full force–rather impressively so. The small parking lot was so full of satellite trucks, I wondered for a moment if George Bush was visiting. As more arrived, I then began to wonder if Bill Clinton was visiting. From what the other reporters said, people want to know how the Shut-Ins are doing, and not just folks from Missouri.

All in all, it made for a long day and combined with being under the weather this week from what feels like the beginnings of a pretty severe sinus infection, I’m very tired tonight. However, as soon as I have something to show, will post.

Social Media

Chatter

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 7, 2006

Over the weekend, there was chatter about a conversation index, and how the number of comments you have is an indicator of the depth of the conversation. Frankly, I’m not sure we can have a conversation with our posts and comments, no matter how many people become involved.

When you write a comment to one of my posts, you don’t see me. You don’t know what phone call I’ve just had, or how I’m feeling, or even what necessarily triggers my buttons. You can’t look into my eyes and think to yourself, “Maybe now is not a good time to mention what I’m about to mention”. Conversation isn’t just words, or responses. It’s a whole host of things, such as context, familiarity, surroundings, perceptions, and tone. Most importantly, tone. Whether this tone is conveyed via our voices, or our gestures, it forms a third part of our communication when we have a conversation.

As serendipity would have it, Dave Sifry also released some form of state of the blog report this weekend. He wrote:

We track about 1.2 Million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour. At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself – how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.

…how to make sense of this monstrous conversation… You and I and a thousand or so close, intimate friends are having a conversation. Pity that we can only listen to 846 of each other at any one time. Have no fear, though–we’re tagging more.

The thing is, many of these tags are involuntary–derived from categories found in our syndication feeds. They might be helpful if our conversations consist of each of us talking to ourselves, but I don’t know about us having a conversation with each other. As for interesting and authoritative, according to Google, I’m one of the most authoritative and interesting sources on Dave Sifry–not sure he’d agree with that. I know I don’t agree with him, but I’ll let Ethan and Sir Dave the Slayer of Pomps and Lists stick in the pins by their lonesomes this round.

I thought of conversations last night, and realized that I’ve been doing this now for almost five years–or is it six? I can’t remember anymore–and I can count on my two hands the number of times I’ve had a conversation with the people I’ve met through weblogging. I feel affection, respect, a host of feelings for many of you I’ve known for years–yet we haven’t had, in most cases, one conversation.

Dialogs, debates, discussions, exchanges, quips, repartee, jests, jibes, and jokes, oh yes, all of these. Verbal tears, and written fears and softly typed hopes and dreams; bold anger, and italicized satire, and times when the words become jumbled between thee and me and misunderstandings results. I rather think that you, my fine readers, do a terrific job in my comments–better than the posts many times. But do we have conversations? I don’t know. I think if we did, truly did, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you all right now.

However, I am tired tonight so perhaps this is nothing more than blather. Or, to quote my friend, Sir Dave, what do I know? I make all this shit up.

Places

Eden

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 7, 2006

Amidst the turmoil surrounding freedom of expression, a bit of heaven, if you will, has been found on earth.

Scientists for Conservation International have discovered a slice of earth never before visited by humans in New Guinea–full of new or extremely rare species. The animals are so unused to humans, they evidence no fear of the people and the explorers have actually been able to pick them up and take them back to their camps for study.