Thursday, February 7, 2002

Autofloggulation

Blog-slapping John Dvorak

Chris Pirillo says John Dvorak wants a blog debate for his show, presumably to follow up on his (John's) Blog Phenomenon piece. Now here's the (Chris's) idea: Let's all link to John's piece to push it to the top of Daypop. (It's #7 right now.) Chris will take care of the rest.

Heh.

Katz' bag

Jon Katz has another sorta downbeat piece in Slashdot: Heart of the Net. The gist:

Where's the heart of the Net now?

The odd truth is that there probably isn¼t one.

The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network. It has grown beyond almost anybody's earliest imaginings to become a thoroughly mainstream and very American communications medium., thoroughly corporatized and Disnified. Its grown too diffuse to have a center. Half of the nation is now online, says the U.S. Department of Commerce, nearly 90 percent of all kids.

AOL, a peculiar notion of the Net, is dominant -‚ with more than 25 million subscribers, it¼s probably the biggest single entity on the Net, at least in the U.S., and the largest host of utilitarian virtual communities. MSN is fast closing the gap. Who imagined just how prescient Steve Case really was, or how determined Bill Gates was? The middle-class wants to use the Net for pragmatic purposes -- shopping, entertainment, personal communications, and yes, sex. And they don't mind giving up privacy and freedom from corporate and government monitoring to do it.

I know what he means. The other day I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant listening to somebody talk about how terrific AOL is. There was no sense, in what this person said, of the Net as something other than a place one "dials up" to, shops around in, and gets email. A friend the other day told me she has no idea where her old email goes. "I think AOL just makes it go away."

But asking if the Net has a heart is like asking if the world has a heart. Or a head. Or anything other than an abundance of what makes it a world.

The Net is a world. We made it. We're still making it. And an abundance of middle class bustle doesn't change the character of the whole. Nor does it make the other stuff happening here any less significant. This isn't TV with ts finite number of channels. Nothing anybody does displaces anything anybody else does.

But if you've gotta be depressed about something, there's plenty to help do the job. Each to their own.

And if we're going to improve the real world, we've got to keep building out the virtual one so it works for all ofus.

The difference matters. The world, big as it is, has physical finitude. The Net, sizeless, massless, unbound, has virtual infinitude.

The main difference between where Jon's coming from and where the rest of us are going: It's not a medium. It's a place.

Now we can all be like Google

Joe Crawford of ArtLung points us to Open Soucre TextAds.

It's everywhere

At the gym my friend and occasional trainer Constance saw me and said "Hey, blogger! See the piece in Time Magazine?" I hadn't, but now I have. Even though I subscribe, I haven't seen the hard copy yet, but the soft copy is up. It's in Personal Time/Your Technology, and it's titled Pssst. Wanna See My Blog? The author/blogger is Chris Taylor. His blog is DailyBlah. And since he doesn't mention RuPaul's blog's URL, there ya go.

Get SMART

David Isenberg is one of my favorite thinkers. His essay "Rise of the Stupid Network" is a treatise on the true nature of common infrastructure, and why real intelligence about it is rather uncommon in the telco businesses that are largely responsible for maintaining it.

His SMART Letters are packed with wisdom and clues about What's Really Going on, and the current one — The Enronization of Telecom is no exception. Some what he goes into is a bit arcane for the those of us he calls Webheads, but it's required reading if you want a perspective that straddles the BigCo/BigGov morass through which our bits travel and the ad hoccy stuff we're doing to build out the Net so (once again) nobody owns it, everybody can use it and anybody can improve it.

David has joined with David Weinberger (another member of the Dave Conspiracy) to author The Paradox of the Best Network, which contains a heap of quotable lines. Such as::::

The best network is the hardest one to make money running.

David (Isenberg) also treats us to a mini-essay (scroll down), titled "Not Quite Ready to Blog." He has kind words for Dan Gillmor, Dr. Weinberger, Lance Knobel, Metafilter and yours truly, among others.

"Blogs have a way of sucking you in," he writes. Of course in some cases (yes, even here), only most of that statement is true.

Perspective

Marek remembers his friend Chris, the last man shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall.

Bustworthy computing?

Deborah's back (yay!) with remarks about Microsoft's public(ity) Memo From Bill on "Trustworthy Computing" (published courtesy of Paul). All very good.

Meanwhile, there's this from The Register's interveiw with Miguel de Icaza, one of the world's leading free/open software developers (now also working the commercial beat with Ximian):

He also had praise for the new Microsoft security model, dismissed the notion that Redmond was employing embrace and extend to its web services protocols, and put the message that the community should get over its beef with The Beast.

"I'd like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET," he told us. "A lot of people just see .NET as a fantastic upgrade for the development platform from Microsoft.

In my own (still unpublished, disorganized dude that I am) interview with Miguel last year, he also admitted, that yes, Microsoft is actually, um, innovative.

A big Hmm, hmm?

Backbloggig

Here's What She Really Thinks about something I wrote the other day. Good stuff. Has me thinking.

My own oldies station

Given how kinda hot things are getting over at my Skywave doppelblog, I thought I'd point back to something I wrote last ... when was it?... shit, a year and a half ago, back when Napster mattered.

The context (Napster and all) is kinda stale, but the points I make still have some relevance to the infrastructure by which we use and send media streams and files. Is it a container cargo business, where everybody uses their own special freight packaging and containerization system? Or is it something more like writig, publishing and putting stuff on the radio?

I lean toward the latter.

Get a death

Alan Reiter explains mLife, which was advertised to mDeath during the Superbowl. During the game I actually thought mLife was a new logo for Met Life, the insurance company. Made sense since insurance companies have been making pointless advertising for about the last century. But it's an AT&T wireless something. I still don't get it. Do I have to care? Please? I really don't want to.