Big Questions Online: The Online State of Nature.

”I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.” I think we hoped in the early days of blogging that open discussions would inoculate against ignorance. Instead, like-minded individuals seem to congregate in flocks, pushing their beliefs to extreme levels. This can be seen in a beneficial niching of interests and hobbies, but also in the dangerous isolation of belief systems or political philosophies. We humans desire to be right, right without the effort of questioning our basic belief systems, right as if rightness were one of our appendages. It’s easier to seek those who agree, than to look at difficult issues and analyze them.  Esp. when introspection runs up against how you were raised, and how you were educated. I see so many teens and 20-somethings on Facebook who profess the philosophy of Captain Morgan over anything substantive or worthwhile. Ignorance is celebrated, education is reviled.

Extending further — we watch television, read books, view movies in which characters come up against crisis, and then undergo a change of character.  It’s a basic writer’s technique for any work of fiction — required, even — yet it’s not an accurate representation of what happens in real life.  People in reality can change, but they’re slow to do so — if they do so at all. Yet we expect others — friends, business associates, celebrities, our political leaders, our religious leaders — to go through crises and change for the better. How often we’re let down on this point!  We need “Seinfeld” back again ... a group of people who *never* progress, who show clearly that we need to change ourselves in order to not be miserable self-centered individuals.

I find it all a funny combo of ignorance and naivete, and the need to shout it all from the rooftops [I’m looking in a mirror as I type this phrase]. We all fall into the abyss from time to time, but the sheer number doing it these days is astonishing. 

I recommend writing drafts of posts or comments, and then stepping away from them for a period of time.

As I should have done before writing and posting this.

Spiegel Online: Will Russia’s Bloggers Survive Censorship Push?

”With so many of their media sources controlled by the state or government-friendly oligarchs, Russians have turned to their bloggers to keep informed and give voice to their grievances and concerns. But many of those in power are now seeking to impose rigid limits on online freedom.” The internet’s like water ... it finds the nooks and crannies, and escapes most political control structures.

Well now …

I forgot to schedule some posts while I was away this morning. Have to remedy that, right fast.

PapaScott: It Was Twenty Years Ago Today.

Great story, Scott.  Food for thought; thanks for sharing it!

Beneath the Underground: Top 5: Older Artists and Social Networking.

”Our job as artists is to astonish. To create a gravity so undeniable it attracts everything around it. THIS IS NOT EASY ...” Great post, Jeremiah.

Run along elsewhere.

I’ve got deadlines this morning, so I won’t have any links up until after 12 noon MST. 

Dig WP: Pimp your wp-config.php.

Good article for WordPress users.

Discove Magaziner: SPEECH Act now a law: big win for libel reform!

”American authors, journalists, and bloggers can breathe a sigh of relief: with broad bipartisan support, a short time ago President Obama signed a bill into law that makes sure that the awful and regressive libel laws in the UK cannot be enforced here in the United States.”

BruceClay: The Danger of Dismissing Social Media’s Value.

”First of all, I think that Fry has forgotten that blogging is part of social media.” Many do nowadays, sadly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah …

I’m getting to links.  Patience.

Mashable: Philadelphia Tax Code Sparks Big Controversy with Small Bloggers.

Ye gods, don’t let NM know they can collect gross receipts on internet ad revenue. Next thing you know, we’ll have to register our blogs as businesses.

Discover: The oldest science blog of all?

Who was blogging exclusively about science in 2000? I can’t recall. Let Discover know.  I know there were a couple ...

Meme generation, and thoughts about the old blog.

I’ve been noticing an effect here on the blog. You all know I work hard to be ‘first’ to a particular kind of eclectic story ... and you all notice I don’t seem to get any cred for it. My dominance as a meme generator ended in 2004, but most significantly in the months after Twitter opened the floodgates. My thousands of unique visitors a day dropped to below 500 within six months. In the last few months, a pattern has been becoming all too clear to me, a pattern that has been gradually becoming more clear since that time:

There’s now a social aspect to news.

I’ve seen this effect over and over again now.  Being first to a story does not matter as much as posting a story when the social conversation is peaking. The story’s only important now when everyone else is talking about it. Even folks who I know read this blog regularly, will pick up and post a story I’ve reported days before from another source than mine - when it’s peaking in popularity. I felt it was a stab in the back, until I realized the importance of the social buzz. Folks seem to feel safer forming opinions and expressing opinions within a group environment, where the consensus can be built from multiple sources.  Most importantly, however, building consensus opinion is now entertainment.

I was discussing this with Brian Tercero (Santa Fe’s Twitter powerhouse and Wordpress MU master) at a party the other night, and he suggested watching Twitter trends and perhaps delaying posts until trends peak to maximize reach. Traffic has never really been my goal, reputation and authority are ... but Brian laid out convincing argument that popularity, social trending and authority are now inextricably linked.

My ‘00’s romanticism of how weblogs should influence people is no longer accurate, nor is this ‘old school’ romanticism effective. This has been niggling at the back of my brain for a while, but this romanticism got laid out on the road and run over a couple of times Saturday night.

It was also mentioned by party host and occasional commenter ‘Eric of Santa Fe’, that one of the main reasons he frequents my blog is for Santa Fe news ... Santa Fe ‘flavor.’ I’ve gotten away from that a bit, and it needs to be restored.

So I’m going to be doing some experimenting here, watching my stats a little closer to see what trends within the blog. This blog is really an extension of my own wide-ranging curiousity, shaded a bit by what I know certain readers enjoy reading.

I picked up “The Four Hour Workweek” the other day, and though I have doubts about the ethics behind some of it (my brain screams ‘con’ at some of the chapters), I cannot deny the author’s contention that maximizing effectiveness is the way to go. This blog is not at all effective. In fact, it’s almost a living fossil, a coelacanth. Time to change things up a bit, narrow the focus, play to my strengths. I need to take into account how you all are absorbing your information.

Should I echo posts in Twitter? Use Twitter as a sideblog of sorts?  Focus more on longer narratives? Local color? Emphasize art more than tech? More/less photography? Show you how I’m remodeling my house? Deemphasize politics? Add video? Do a podcast?  Do all these things?  None?

Let me know, if you have time in your busy days, what you come here for ... what you’d like to see here. I know what I’m planning to do (it’s a surprise), but I’d like input. I’m interested. 

Downtime last night.

Someone tried an SQL injection here late last night, screwed up a MySQL table. A quick rebuild of the table put all back right again. Sorry for the outage.

NY Times: Night of the Living Tech.

”Last week, Wired magazine proclaimed, ‘The Web Is Dead.’ Yet evolution — not extinction — has always been the primary rule of media ecology.” As I was telling folks at a party over the weekend, Twitter and Facebook are starting to mature. The new technologies that will replace them either already exist, or are in development right now.

I’ll add that doesn’t mean one should wait for the ‘next big thing’. I waited on Twitter, and lost the early adopter ‘mojo’. I think a better model with new tech today is jump in with both feet and dog paddle until you understand the service.

I’m fascinated with how different vertical markets are adapting these services to work for their sectors.  Everyone’s busy categorizing themselves, and then building power bases within those categories. Niche marketing, personal branding (don’t yell, E) ... and yet, to be an individual social media powerhouse, you need to have a strong foundation, rooted in a vital social community. Can’t be an influential personality without a strong base of follower support.  Here’s a quote for you - “No personal brand is an island.”

I’ll be thinking more out loud about this over the next week or so.

NewMexiKen: Driving Across America.

Take a drive with Ken across the USA.

vowe dot net: Mixed Tape 34 “Red Rhythm” is out

Volker always keeps me in tune, for very affordable prices (free).

1,205 unreads in NetNewsWire.

And it’s gonna be worse tomorrow morning. That’s what I get for missing a day. Then again, the incremental-news-posting thing is kinda nice to escape from.  Whatever happened today - I don’t give a damn!

Very busy today.

Not sure I’ll get around to blogging. Tootle along elsewhere. My 365 will be online as per usual later today.

Officials Say the Darndest Things.

A tumblog from ProPublica.

Google Small Business Blog.

It’s about time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Links soon.

The New York Review of Books: Words.

”Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (’It’s only my opinion ...’). Rather than suffering from the onset of ‘newspeak,’ we risk the rise of ‘nospeak.’” Yet in these litigious times, we webloggers have to be guarded in our utterances. Also, some find articulate verbosity offensive in others, as if an expression of haughty superiority. Add that we’re often warned not to write prose ‘too high’ on the Flesch–Kincaid grade level test.

There’s significant ‘dumb-down’ pressure these days, and it’s a terrible shame. It’s not like Dictionary.com isn’t a click away.

Bloggasm: Daily Show co-creator erupts at feminist blogger during Netroots Nation panel.

”I wrote this really snarky post and I got like 20 comments about what an irresponsible dick I was and 80 more comments about how I was funny and great. And then I wrote a more serious post, and the comments were like ‘I agree with you, thanks for spelling out your ideas so clearly.’ But there were way fewer comments.”

This is something I brought up in an unpublished interview years ago.  We older bloggers see snark as a stage of weblogging.  It’s that fragile time after you get your first attention, the first set of responses to a post on your weblog. “Wow!” you think. “Validation!” Or, “I have some importance!” You become addicted to commenters, and you desire more — at almost any cost. You begin working harder on posts. More often than not, there are no comments to this greater amount of work. In frustration, you post your first snark. Wow again! Everyone loves a good snark, and it invites commentary. Snark is the easiest, fastest way to get attention. It’s a cheap overused technique, that the reading public seems to have a boundless tolerance for.

Snark’s not sustainable long-term by an individual blogger, unless one becomes the snark. For many, this requires an uncomfortable duality ... the blogger has to assume the faux snark personality everytime they get online.  Some have done this successfully, but most sail through the snark phase and go on to discover their better voices. Traffic numbers and commenters fade in importance, replaced by the love of being able to express freely, without self-imposed constraint.

I will forever think of snarkers as webloggers who can’t abandon their training wheels.

Upstart Blogger: Not Your Typical Mommy Blogger - A Stay At Home Babe.

”Oh, and If you’re interested in making money blogging, follow her moves and see how she does it. Rumor has it, she’s already been picked up as a guest blogger on a soon to launch blog.” Niche marketing, still working.