Author: Shelley Powers

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Due to problems at provider, my DSL connection was choked down to sub-modem speeds. Painful. And basically unworkable with Movable Type — all those buttons…

Thankfully, back to working speed today.

Yesterday, I was sitting in my favorite chair, listening to music and typing into my laptop when the door to my apartment opens. A man enters, sees me and stops, half in, half out. He stares at me, I stare at him, waiting for him to say something along the lines of “Oh, excuse me! Wrong door!”

When he continues to stare and look around the apartment in confusion, I ask, “Can I help you?”, being sure to put a little ‘you’ve walked into my home, bud, and what if I had been nude’ tone into my voice.

He starts laughing and says, “I’ve come to the wrong floor! I live on the second floor and must have got off on the wrong floor. I live in 222!”

Sounds reasonable. Easy mistake. Just shut the door on your way out.

“I was so surprised. I couldn’t figure out who you were.”

Well, cool. Please leave now.

“How funny! You must have really been surprised, too.”

WHAT THE HELL DO I NEED TO DO TO GET YOU TO GO!

I got up and walked towards the door and the guy still isn’t leaving. Friendly, not harmful at all — just chattering away. Being a polite soul, I respond to his chatter. Yes, funny coincidence. Yes, I do sometimes forget to lock my door when I bring groceries in. And, yes, weather has been nice…now move your butt outside my door!

After I herded him out, and just as I’m closing the door he calls back, “Well, nice meeting you!”

I locked the door and started to walk away. Stopped. Turned back and threw the dead bolt.

We are a society that is, above all, polite. We have raised courtesy to an art form, honing it into fine-edged usefulnes. Our words become knives as we fight a duel called “conversation” — victor and victim equally bloodied. We circle and stab, and then commiserate with the pain, apologize for the sting.

We pommel each other with argument and viewpoint, all the while debating the finer points of etiquette. We hammer at each other with opinion; we blast most eloquently, and always with the highest regard, the deepest sincerity.

We hold mirrors up to show others their flaws, only to find that the silver has flaked off, the glass is transparent.

You know what I like about weblogging? If you read something you don’t like, or something that irritates you, or a piece of self-righteous garbage, you can close the browser and it’s gone. You don’t have to be polite. You don’t have to read, react, respond.

Just close the browser.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

At first I thought the Weblog Foundation was a joke, but additional reading showed me that, no, this guy’s serious. And so are the people who’ve been responding to the suggestion.

A Foundation that will do, among other things:

Provide honorariums for deserving webloggers
Provide hardware and software to support webloggers
Provide weblogging PR
Arrange corporate and other sponsors of weblogging

And so on…

And the response to the idea has been favorable — primarily from people who want to see themselves acknowledged as “professional” journalists because of their weblogging effort.

Professional weblogging. Doesn’t it just make you want to cry?

Not all the response on the idea has been supportive as can be seen at MetaFilter, not surprising that. Though I hesitate to provide buzz to a weblogging book competitor (she says with a smile) Rebecca Blood’s MeFi response is one of the best:

at this moment there are too many *excellent* weblogs for me to have time to read them all, and all of them are paying a little bit for the privilege of maintaining their sites.

so many professional writers seem to have the idea that good writers must be paid in order for writing to be worth their while–the web belies all that. *professional* writers need to be paid in order to be professional, but there are even some of them who are willing to do it on their weblogs for free.

Over at AKMA’s, Dorothea has been conducting an extensive makeover of the PreacherMan’s weblog. She’s not being paid for this effort. Instead, she’s doing this as an act of kindness, for fun, and with a sense of adventure.

Ultimately, Dorothea is acting as a member of a community, the same community that David Weinberger writes about:

Relativism need not be what we learn from our encounters with others. Respect and open-mindedness are more likely given the fact that the Internet as a technology teaches us one value more deeply than any other: the joy of being connected … which in some parlances is more accurately termed love.

Now if you’ll excuse me a moment, I have to go dust off my tin cup.

The more I read the CNN article, the more I think that every last bit of it was deliberately contrived to generate noise among weblogging users. And a quick peek at Daypop and Blogdex only supports this.

If you deconstruct it, the interview is perfectly created to push at least one buzz button within each weblogger, regardless of your interest and type of weblog.

For instance, the following words:

There’s another one that actually is way cooler, far more sophisticated and allows you to add all sorts of graphical components and do all sorts of indexing and interesting diagnostic stuff. It’s called Radio Userland.

That will guarantee a link on Scripting News.

The fact that the interview only references Pitas and Userland’s Radio is going to capture the attention, and ire, of Blogger and Movable Type users. And not referencing Blogger just doesn’t make sense — of the weblogging tools most featured in the mainstream journalism publication articles the last few weeks, Blogger tops the lists.

Also consider the reference to what weblogs are:

What a blog typically is, is a collection of links out to interesting things out on the worldwide Web. The typical format is: link, tiny bit of commentary, and then a pointer to everyone else’s commentary. Sounds very simple — in fact, sounds so simple as to be not even very interesting, but in fact it’s incredibly interesting.

The “short blog” vs. “long blog” camps are legion. Is weblogging nothing more than links to stories? Or is weblogging original writing? Or both? Whatever your camp, the above paragraph is incendiary.

Then there’s the emphasis about weblogging’s relationship with journalism:

It’s totally democratic. It’s democratic journalism … it’s journalism by the masses.

That line should grab the “weblogging is a new form of journalism” crowd. The Slashdot.com reference is also a grabber; something to hold on to as you shake the article apart.

The only thing missing to make the interview “complete”, is a reference to Google.

Add in the overuse of “cool”, the pubescent writing and speaking style — I just can’t believe that CNN would allow such inane drivel through the editorial process and on to the web.

I am left with the question: Was this a deliberate hack to generate buzz, as fodder for a more in-depth look at weblogging at a later time?

Regardless, our “one link one vote” approach to discussing the article has effectively pushed it up Daypop’s and Blogdex’s buzz sheets as one of the top weblogging stories of the day.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In the comments attached to my previous posting on the weblogging’s influence on Google, I found the most telling line from Elaine:

So, with Googlewhacking, like lobbying, our sense of what’s ethical should prevail.

Our sense of what’s ethical? Our sense of “ethics” is ruled by bias, prejudice, bigotry, elitism, self-interest, and group membership. Our sense of ethics is flexible and to be abandoned on an event by event basis.

The inherent instability of our ethics from moment to moment is why we have laws — a method to crystallize the best of our ethical beliefs, to apply at times when our “ethical” practices morph into self-serving platitudes and behavior.

To some — not all — of the Palestinians, suicide bombings are “ethical”. To some — not all — of the Israelis, invasion of the Gaza strip because of the actions of an extremist organization that’s currently housed in Lebanon is “ethical”.

To some — not all — webloggers, bashing every Muslim country because of the actions of extremists is ethical. To some — not all — webloggers, bashing Jews because of the behavior of some extremists in Israel is ethical.

And among the so-called ethical webloggers, some have negatively categorized or labeled other webloggers based on expediency, bigotry, and other self serving needs.

I have said, and will continue to say:

Webloggers aren’t influencing decisions — they’re influencing the information that influences the decision, and that’s dangerous.

The dangers inherent with a mob mind are no less because the mind is connected via the Internet rather than gathered together in a field, rope in hand.

When weblogging fought back in defense of Operation Clambake, that was a noble act. That was a an attempt to redress a wrong by balancing the actions of one organization, the Church of Scientology, with the actions of another organization, the webloggers. And the status quo of Clambake’s appearance within the Google search results was upheld.

However, when the efforts of webloggers pushed Clambake’s rank to number one, the status quo was also changed — and not based on naturally occurring interests, but based on deliberate manipulation of the weblogger effect.

Was this ethical? Perhaps.

Perhaps in the long run, the actions of webloggers will be necessary in order to counter-act the actions of the church. The church seeks to directly influence Google results so that anti-Scientology web sites don’t show in the first few pages. The webloggers counter to ensure that at least one anti-Scientology web site shows within the first page of the results.

Both organizations are using the weaknesses of Google’s ranking algorithm to influence the flow of information.

How is this not dangerous?

Any manipulation of the flow of information — whether occurring through the censorship or manipulation of the mainstream media, through weblogging, through Google search results — is dangerous. Just because you see the manipulation as being on the side of angels, doesn’t lessen the danger.