Saturday, December 3, 2005

Pro-conversation, if not compromise

Is it possible to hold deep and uncompromising beliefs and still have constructive — even persuasive — dialog with others who don't share them? Is it possible to seek practical solutions that embody one's beliefs but don't reduce to them? How do we do that? Those are just three of the many questions behind The Radical Middle, which I posted several days ago over at Linux Journal. There are interesting comments below the piece. And I've received some by email as well. But perhaps the most provocative comes from Sawdust + Incense, the blog of the Saint Joseph Center. The author writes,

You can demand that everyone choose a your side and then pat yourself on the back for something that no one else gives a crap about. Next month, a whole lot of people will be gathering in D.C. and the will accomplish the following:

1. They will be scandalized by the behavior of those that oppose them.
2. They will galvanize the opposition.
3. They will have a lot of photos taken.

If you think I'm wrong, watch every pro life blog you can find for a couple of weeks after the march. Then read every pro choice blog you can find.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Every single year.

The author, I gather, is pro-life. His point, however, applies to pro-anything and anti-anything.

Miscredit where undue

Here's one good (and not necessarily vain) reason for aggregating "vanity feeds" of searches for one's name (such as this one): you can find interesting errors.

This morning, for example, Johnny K and Educational Weblogs both carry a story about RSS DJ, which they learned about from somebody named alan8373 at IT Garage, in a piece titled New web service reads aloud any RSS feed to you as a Podcast. Johnny K begins, Doc Searls has announced a new type of RSS aggregator RSS DJ. Educational Weblogs copies and pastes the top paragraphs of RSS DJ's index page, and runs this credit at the bottom: via Doc Searls Blog. At least the link goes to the right place.

Both are understandable errors. The header of IT Garage carries a tiny picture of yours truly beside the title Doc Searls' IT Garage. The original domain name for IT Garage was docsearls.com, which we later changed to itgarage.com, though I doubt many people noticed, much less remembered. In any case, it was interesting to learn about RSS DJ from people other than myself, crediting myself.

By the way, in the next few weeks we'll have a new look for IT garage, to replace the tired old Drupal template (and my tired old face as well). Meanwhile, anybody is free to follow alan8373's lead and post on IT Garage, the charter of which is explained here.