Competing Messages: Mind or Preference?

Doc responded to the Cluetrain Ticket post, and his response suggests that there will be more to follow. I look forward to that, but I think his first response, and that of Mike Warot, offer some things to consider.

I challenged Doc to offer an example of how a weblog changed his mind, and he offers several here. At the risk of being accused of moving the goal-posts, I'll say right now that I probably should have been more specific. Nevertheless, Doc's first example is an interesting one.

When I challenged Doc's assertion, made in the context of an instance when Jay Rosen's weblog "changed his mind," I was thinking of something a little more substantial than an immediate response to a particular event. In that context, I will concede that a weblog post, or a private conversation, or a sharp stick in the eye can change anyone's mind.

Think about the circumstances for a moment. An event happens, information regarding that event is conveyed to us by some means, and we form a perception of that event. The initial processing of that perception is chiefly emotional. I won't try to prove that here, if you wish to disbelieve that, by all means do so. But you might want to check your work. In any event, we have an emotional reaction to an event, much as Doc did to the interview of Bill O'Reilly by Terry Gross. We reason backward from our feelings, which allows us to articulate, in some fashion, a presumably rational basis for the emotional response. What we're compelled to express by custom and habit, especially men, is the rationalization, rather than the feeling. (Anyone who's been to marriage counseling will probably recognize this.) The feeling is very likely completely legitimate. If you already don't like Bill O'Reilly (I don't, I don't know how Doc feels.), and if you already like Terry Gross (I do, I don't know how Doc feels.), and you listen to the interview, you're not going to feel very charitable to Bill O'Reilly, and that's all quite okay. We're certainly entitled to our feelings.

Doc was presented with additional information from Jay Rosen, and a perception was formed through what is essentially an emotional process, and Doc was faced with what appeared to be a conundrum. What Doc articulated about his perception of the event between Terry Gross and Bill O'Reilly was a rationalization of a feeling. The feelings are almost always legitimate, the rationalizations are sometimes inadequate in a broader context. In addition, Doc seems to like Jay Rosen, so he was likely disposed to regard the information he received from him in a positive emotional context, and to the extent that the feelings he experienced reading Rosen differed from the feelings he experienced listening to O'Reilly and Gross, he experienced what was, to his mind, a conflict.

But if you read Doc's initial commentary on what happened with Bill O'Reilly on that episode of Fresh Air, and then read his subsequent post wherein he says he has "changed his mind," I can't find where he's articulating something in the second post that is fundamentally opposed to the first. To my reading, he's talking about two essentially different things, and neither one directly contradicts the other. Doc may say he "changed his mind," but I would say that he's merely offering an inadequate rationalization of the feelings he experienced reading Rosen's piece.

Perhaps I'm misreading all of this, I certainly have my own point of view. But I would ask Doc to point out something in his original post on the event that is directly contradicted by something Jay Rosen wrote, and then to point out in his subsequent post where he specifically repudiates a position or assertion from his first post. I can't see where he does. Rosen offers another point of view, one that is more informed by knowledge of political history, one that has greater insight, perhaps, into Bill O'Reilly's mind, but nothing that explicitly contradicts anything Doc posted. Rosen's piece is not unsympathetic to Gross, in any way that I can detect. I would say it's sympathetic, while also critical, in a more informed way than Doc's was; but I don't see a contradiction that leads Doc to say he "changed his mind."

Now, others have mentioned this before and so I don't feel too uncomfortable offering this, but it seems to me that Doc is, in addition to being something of a quasi-pacifist, someone who is genuinely conflict-averse. I can't say if that's a good or a bad thing, but I think it informs much of Doc's perception and thinking. Presented with different information regarding the same event that evoked different feelings, Doc detected a conflict and rather than examine that potential conflict, Doc yielded and said he "changed his mind."

I don't think he changed his mind at all, nor do I detect any reason why he should he have.

I'm not saying this proves weblogs don't change minds, I'm just saying I think this is a bad example because it's orthogonal to the question under consideration. If I'm wrong, I'm sure Doc will set me straight. I could be wrong.

I thought the example of Doc's views on pacifism was revealing. Especially the part where he offers, "But as for being a pacifist of the nonviolence school to which I used to belong... well, I have doubts now. It's not a subject I'm eager to write about, but there it is."

I would say that this too is not a good example. It would be a good example, if Doc didn't have doubts, or could write about it easily. It may be an example of Jay Rosen's interpretation of Doc's assertion that blogs are about "making and changing minds," that one not become "wedded" to one's views; but I think Doc's discomfort sort of argues against even that. In short, I would say that Doc isn't quite sure of his own mind here, and there's nothing wrong with that either. Until the day when there is; but that's another story.

With regard to the Craig Burton issue about dropping packets while live blogging, okay, I'll spot him that one. Pretty trivial though, wouldn't you agree? Hardly worthy of "a phrase that launched a thousand links."

Juan Cole? Are you sure it wasn't Jeff Jarvis who "changed your mind" on that one? I'm sure it was pretty hard for most people to stand fast before the alliterative authority and persuasive percussive power of the "Professor Pondscum" appellation. In any event, even if it was Mike Sanders, for whom I have much higher regard than the one with his own alliterative appellation, I suspect that it's the kind of issue that you might once again change your mind about, were you to actually meet Juan Cole. Again, I'll spot Doc this one as an example, but I'd file a protest that it's trivial and inconclusive.

I'm more interested in how un-wedded Doc is to things like "markets are conversations." Maybe we'll hear more about that later.

Mike Warot offered a couple of posts on this subject today. I'll just deal with the first one.

1. 5 - oh... back to beliefs, and how they change.

I find myself open to more views, and also more careful about how and what I say. I think this will have an overall positive effect on me in the long run.

First, it's flattering to read that you're glad you found Groundhog Day. Just don't get too comfortable, I manage to piss off just about everyone sooner or later. But thanks anyway, sincerely.

I appreciate Mike's sentiment, though I don't see a lot that specifically supports the notion that blogs can "make and change minds." I agree with the positive effect of being open to more views, and being more careful about how and what is said. I can't say I uniformly adhere to that myself.

But here's the thing. Let's say you read something in a book or a weblog and it "opens your eyes," or something to that effect. That's a way of saying that it "changed your mind," is it not? There is an entire industry devoted to self-help books, and from my own informal, subjective observation of the amount of shelf space occupied at Books-a-Million, it shows no signs of putting itself out of business. Think about it for a minute. If all those books were as good as all those cover blurbs say they are, if even one percent of them were, I'd say they'd be putting themselves out of business in no time.

They're not going out of business, and they won't be anytime soon. Consider this, if blogs could make and change minds, wouldn't Bush or Kerry have won the last election with a more commanding margin? That's probably giving weblogs far too much credit, but if you're going to consider weblogs, then you probably have to factor in talk radio, and mainstream news media as well. Not too many minds being changed either way, I'd say.

What often happens is we read or hear something that has an emotional appeal to us, and we reason backward from our feelings to rationalize it, to explain our feelings to ourselves. We don't often examine those good feelings critically. Why should we? Feeling good is - good!

So you read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and you think, "Wow! What a great book!" As I did. You'll believe it really changed your mind about a lot of things. And you'll think it can change your life. And for a little while, maybe it does. But chances are, you'll always regard it as a great book, and you'll always believe the insights in it are valid or true, but it will never change your life. Because a book can't do that.

You have to.

And that is far harder than you can imagine.

Not for everyone, probably. But for most of us, it's really, really hard. It depends, I suppose.

Changing your mind is relatively easy. It's just a new rationalization for a new or an old feeling. It's only meaningful if it changes your life.

You have to pay attention and you have to do the work. And the rest of the world is competing with you for your attention, so chances are, you never start to do the work.

Just think about it.

Social Hygiene: Don't Forget to Wear Your Booties

"'...cause it's cold out there!"

"It's cold out there every day."

Happy Groundhog Day!

BSG: Fanboy Chops

I'll probably never make it as a real Battlestar Galactica fanboy, I just discovered this page of videos at scifi.com with little "behind the scenes" vignettes. I'm enjoying them very much. And I'm ever so pleased that they're offered in QuickTime format, as well as Real.

Competing Messages: Getting Your Cluetrain™ Ticket Punched

Doc Searls pointed to this post at Tinfinger that criticized some webloggers:

One of the most annoying traits of a certain kind of A-list blogger is the habit of saying something that sounds deep and mysterious, or not saying anything at all, but leaving it to the reader to read the "clues" and solve the "puzzle" of what your point is.

And it named Doc as one of the A-list members who engaged in this practice. Doc challenged the post itself as an example of the very thing it was objecting to (minus, of course, the part of being an A-list member).

In the comments to the post, Paul Montgomery, the original author of the post, cited The Cluetrain Manifesto as an example of the trait the post criticizes that can be attributed to Doc Searls.

Tinfinger offers comments, and Doc responded at some length in the comments, and it's worth reading because it's very much what he conveyed to me by e-mail during a brief correspondence we shared when I was criticizing the whole "markets are conversations" slogan, er, I mean, metaphor.

This exchange offers several points that I'd like to observe and comment on.

I don't agree with Mr. Montgomery's specific complaint, but I do agree with it in sentiment, or perhaps I'm sympathetic to it, if those aren't the same things. I'm even sympathetic to it when Doc is named as one of the offending A-listers, even if Doc doesn't specifically exhibit the trait the complaint is about.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating, I like Doc. I've never met him, and sometimes the things he writes makes the ol' throbbing vein in the temple beat a tattoo that can make my head pound. But he's never really written anything in a way that makes me actively dislike him. By way of contrast, there are many other webloggers I do actively dislike, and it's only the vaguest sort of self-awareness that this is more a deficiency on my part than theirs that keeps me from indulging a compelling desire to publicly flog them at great length. And then I sometimes slip. Anyway, what follows is one example of something Doc has said, and seemingly believes, that I think you'd have to look pretty hard to find any evidence supporting that belief in any of Doc's online writing.

Here's a post from Jay Rosen's PressThink weblog dated October 23, 2003. What is that, about a generation ago, "web-time?" How many weblogs was Technorati tracking in October, 2003? Lots of lines have scrolled off the page since then, to be sure. In that post Doc Searls features prominently. Here's a relevant paragraph:

So while a good weblogger is constantly engaged with opinion, Doc says: don’t get married. Wedded to your views, that is. Because the next link can not only change your mind, it can add wiring, add memory. Which then forces you to restate your views to see if they survive the new understanding. This is how good weblogs work. For the writers, for the readers, “blogging is about making and changing minds.”

I'd challenge Doc to point to an example of how blogging has changed his mind. I'd challenge Doc to elaborate on how he is not wedded to his views in The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'd ask Doc to show us where he's restated the views of the Cluetrain Manifesto to see if they survive in the new understanding. I'd ask Doc to tell us what new understanding he has about the Cluetrain Manifesto, if he has any.

Here is an example of the kind of thing I believe Paul Montgomery is objecting to. Doc makes an assertion about what weblogging is about, one that gets repeated in some form or another about 1000 times according to Google, yet there is no evidence to demonstrate its validity.

I agree it is a beautiful sentiment, but I believe it is, like most of the Cluetrain Manifesto, mostly wishful thinking. And yet, because it is a beautiful sentiment, uttered by, whether he wishes it or not, an authority on weblogging, it is embraced and repeated and promoted uncritically by people who genuinely want to believe that it's true. Please go back and read the interview with Stephen Colbert. This is not an uncommon feature of today's world. It was probably not an uncommon feature of yesterday's world either, but now the "marketplace" has a much wider selection of attractive beliefs and "authorities" to promote them and lend them legitimacy, which relieves too many people of the responsibility to think critically for themselves.

I challenge Doc to demonstrate how he is not wedded to his beliefs regarding DRM. I'd ask Doc to tell us how the debate that ensued in Shelley Powers' weblog in response to his post, which he did not participate in, informed or shaped his views on DRM?

The point is, we're human beings, and we're not strictly rational creatures. The faculties we possess for reason and logic are limited, even though they are quite powerful. Mostly, we rely on emotions, and much of our rational faculties are employed in reasoning backward from our feelings. And most of the time, this works exceedingly well, which is why we're mostly not conscious of it. But it can, and often does, lead us astray because of that. Marketers rely on it. They manipulate emotions rather than appeal to logic or reason; or make appeals to logic and reason, only after establishing an emotional "frame" (or metaphor).

In fact, we are often wedded to our beliefs. Changing our minds, usually involves changing ourselves, and that is hard. The day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day, and I'll watch the movie of the same name once again. Often, we don't change our beliefs until we're confronted with an emotional crisis. We are wedded to our beliefs because, in the main, they are how we know ourselves, and when they fail, it's like death. When they fail, it is certainly a loss, a loss of something dear, for which we will grieve. And our first response to loss, the first step in grief, is denial, and sometimes that's as far as we get. Lest you think I'm committing the same "sin" I'm laying at Doc's feet, you haven't been here very long. But stick around, I'll go over it again. We're not called "Groundhog Day" for nothing.

I'm not here to change Doc's mind, because I don't have the power or the authority to do that. Only Doc has that. But I am here to challenge Doc's beliefs and assertions, because, like it or not, he is an authority, and not everything Doc wants to believe is true; and behaving as though it is, or even as though it should be, can lead us astray. And my hope is that there are some minds out there that aren't wedded to these beliefs yet, who might be persuaded to regard them critically and see if their truth value exceeds their emotional appeal.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.

Colbert Interview

It is the AV Club at The Onion, but here's an interesting interview with Stephen Colbert that mentions a lot of interesting ideas about truth and authority and being at the top of the pyramid.

Via Kottke.org

New Boss: Old Boss, or, "Do that to me one more time..."

What is now required is a combination of outreach to traditional elites, including investors, regulators, and academics, plus the new elites, such as involved consumers, empowered employees, and non-governmental organizations.

Same shit, different pyramid.

Old pyramid:

New pyramid:

Four Things

Because Karl is a good guy:

Four jobs I've had:

Beekeeper's assistant.

Hay bailer, shit shoveler, silage pitcher

Commissioned officer (Not really a job, more like an adventure, but I got paid for it.)

Government contractor (Karmic retribution)

Four movies I can watch over and over again:

Grumpy Old Men

Galaxy Quest

Mystery Men

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Four places I've lived:

Warren, MI

Canastota, NY

Newport, RI

Virginia Beach, VA

Four TV shows I love:

Battlestar Galactica

Moonlighting

Ally McBeal

The Bugs Bunny, Road Runner Hour

Four places I've vacationed:

I don't think I've ever had a vacation. Check back with me in about 20 years.

Four of my favorite dishes:

Cocoa Pebbles

White Chocolate Chip - Macadamia Nut cookies

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

Egg Salad

Four sites I visit regularly:

CNN.com

MacSurfer

Washington Post

Science Daily

Four places I'd rather be right now:

My own house.

That's about it.

Four bloggers I'm tagging:

Hal Rager

Elaine Frankonis

Cecil Coupe

Ken Loo

(Editor's note: All of these answers are true to one degree or another.)

A Kid Moment

New pair of bermuda shorts for your daughter: $35.00.

New pair of board shorts for your daughter: $17.00

New designer t-shirt your daughter: $22.00

Lunch with your daughter at Firehouse Subs: $13.40

Watching your daughter walk into the door on her way out: Priceless.

"I'm alright!"

BSG: A Note About Resonance

Last night's episode wasn't the most compelling one ever in the series, but it did have a certain resonance for me. Caitie is with me this weekend, so I haven't had a lot of time to think about why. But apparently it was cooking away in my subconscious because it kind of came to me as we were driving to taekwondo class today.

Much has already been written about the emotional resonance of Battlestar Galactica and its thematic elements in the wake of 9/11. But I think it's more than just 9/11 and terrorism that has us feeling as though we've lost our moorings. I think the rapid changes brought about by digital technology, its celebrated disruptiveness, as well as increasing global competition, that has us feeling anxious, especially at the beginning of a new millennium.

So in a way, we're all like that rag-tag fleet, trying to find our way to a new home. Hopefully asking ourselves along the way how much we deserve our success or our survival, such as it may be. If you're not watching Battlestar Galactica, I think you might do well to consider it. If you've never seen it, I'd say begin with the mini-series, and you'll have a good idea if you want to continue, and the rest will make more sense to you.

In any event, last night's episode included a scene where Captain Adama, callsign "Apollo," was discussing the nature of the black market with its central authority figure. Apollo is often the voice of pragmatic compromise in the series, the "reasonable man," as the villain observed. Indeed, Apollo was reasonable, ultimately; but he pointed out that there are some boundaries that must be observed, in any civilization. The bad guy, and he was unambiguously bad if not unintelligent, had crossed those boundaries in all his entrepreneurial zeal. And Apollo took appropriate action to restore, preserve and enforce those boundaries, to the terminal dismay of the central authority figure. In doing so, Apollo crossed a boundary as well, one the "bad guy" was counting on to save him.

It's a complex universe and a complicated story.

But all civilizations require boundaries. That resonated with me.

Competing Messages: A "Market-based" Democracy

"I'm not a real president, but I play one on Pennsylvania Avenue."

Robert Young used to play Marcus Welby, M.D. on the eponymous TV show. When he started shilling for Sanka coffee on the basis of the "dangers" of caffeine, it was his perception as a medical authority that made the commercial so effective at selling Sanka that it ran for eight years in various versions. It even inspired the "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" commercial, which wasn't tongue-in-cheek, but played straight. Such is the nature of our relationship with authority figures. They don't have to be legitimate authority figures, they just have to have the appearance, to make the assertion of being one, and most of us will go along.

Keep this in mind as the president goes about the country asserting he had all the authority he needed to conduct wiretaps outside the review of the FISA court. Congress will hold hearings, but my guess is that the majority party, which is sympathetic to the president, will accept the assertion and not question the authority.

Much like people don't question the assertions of authority by the leading lights and vendors of the internet.

Authority without responsibility.

Because it's all "just marketing."

iChat AV: Making a Good Thing Less Good

One of the features that made Mac OS 10.4 appealing to me was iChat AV 3.x, which added the feature for multi-party audio and video chats. Up to 10 people in audio, and four in video. Also available for the first time was the option to encrypt you chat session.

At first, everything seemed to work as advertised. It continued to work as it had before with my parents, still on 10.3.9 and iChat AV 2.x. I think I managed to put together a three-person audio chat with Doug Miller and Al Hawkins at one point. I haven't been able to have a multi-party video chat because nobody who I chat with regularly had a G5 Mac that could host the multi-party chat. My brother and I were able to run an encrypted chat, but I honestly don't know if it was encrypted or not. We got the little padlock icon, but how do I know what kind of bits and packets are flying around out there? I guess it worked.

I read some reports of people having problems, and those were initially said to be related to support for some priority packet routing protocol Apple added to iChat AV. It's a relatively mature standard, but apparently not mature enough because not everything on the internet was properly configured to route those packets properly, so they were often dropped, and connections were lost or "not enough bandwidth" errors were reported. That seems to have been mostly resolved, but I never encountered that particular problem.

Then one of the incremental updates seemed to break encrypted chats. I could chat with my parents (who are on Panther, and therefore can't encrypt), but I couldn't chat with my brother anymore. We had to disable encryption to get reliable connections again.

I bought my eldest daughter an iSight for Christmas for their G5 iMac. I was at their house the other day, and I added my dad to their buddy list and he was online at the time, so we gave him a shout and we were able to video chat with no problems. Later, after I had gone home, I tried calling my daughter from my computer, and I kept getting an error message that I hadn't responded to the chat request.

So I had to do a little homework. It turns out, a lot of people are having this problem. iChat AV, that used to "just work," was now giving a lot of people a hard time. I followed some advice to open up some ports in my OS X firewall, and I also opened the relevant ranges in my router firewall. I still wasn't able to chat with my son-in-law, so I walked him through the process of opening those ports on his machine. After that, we were able to connect, and I was able to connect with them the one other time I tried after that.

What seems odd is that I had been able to chat reliably on iChat AV 3.x with my brother in New York without making any changes to the firewall configuration. Something changed in one of the incremental updates to 10.4.x that seems to have mandated manually opening those ports. What that means from a security standpoint, I have no idea. I can't believe it's anything good.

So I suppose it's possible to take a good thing and keep improving it to the point where it's not as good anymore. I'd hate to have to try to walk my parents through opening up ports in their firewall. When I started with iChat AV, the only problem we had to resolve was telling iChat how much bandwidth to expect in the preferences. After that, it was just as reliable as the telephone. Hopefully the software "engineers" at Apple are taking note of the problems people are experiencing and will make the necessary changes to make iChat AV as simple and reliable as it was in the beginning.

BSG: It's Dark in Space

I watched last night's episode of Battlestar Galactica, and I was impressed. The show's not perfect, by any means, and it seems like they have a few too many balls in the air sometimes, but I liked the idea of a black market developing among the ships, and how that might affect the existing authority structure. And there was, I thought, some good character development of Captain Apollo.

I also ordered the first season on DVD, and I've been watching some of those episodes. I agree with Shelley Powers, who mentioned to me in some correspondence that the first season seemed to have more humor in it. Last night's episode was pretty unrelentingly dark. I'm hoping we'll begin to get some lighter moments in the later episodes of this season.

It's almost hard to believe, but they're already finished with filming season two, and they're working on development of season 3.

Flightplan

Caitie and I watched Flightplan yesterday evening. Cait liked it a lot, me not so much. It's worth watching, as nearly any movie with Jodie Foster is worth watching. But I had the feeling there are a few plot hiccoughs that kind of nag at the viewer. I confess, I wasn't paying strict attention, so perhaps my impression is a result of that.

Competing Messages: Engineers

Marketing likes to take a word and use it in a particular context that is meant to evoke a particular emotion, whether or not the context is appropriate for the whole meaning of the word. Eventually, all the real value is sucked out of the word, and all we have is its marketing value. Thus "passion" becomes mere "enthusiasm."

Another word I see used a lot by internet hawkers is "engineer." I have a degree in engineering, but by state law here in Florida I'm not allowed to call myself an engineer, in a professional context, because I'm not a state certified Professional Engineer. Once upon a time, I thought I might become one and even took the Pennsylvania Engineer in Training exam. It's called something else now, but it's the precursor to earning your P.E. Did pretty well on it as I recall. But then, it was open book and I had my copy of Eshbach with me.

The point is, real engineers are expected to take responsibility for their work, and are held accountable for it. When you sign your name to a set of blueprints, you're saying that you've examined that design, studied the calculations, reviewed the site survey, and that particular structure won't fall down or fail in some way, and kill someone. Of course, bridges and buildings still fall down and people still get killed, but fewer perhaps than if we let just anyone call themselves an "engineer."

In the computer world, in the world of the internet, programmers and web developers are called "engineers," but most of their products come with disclaimers that they're not suitable for any particular purpose, and probably don't do what you're buying them to do. The risk is totally on the person using the software.

But still they call themselves "engineers." Perhaps because that sounds more "professional" than "programmer." It's a good marketing word.

Authority without responsibility. The Brave New World™, brought to you by the internet and marketing that respects no boundaries.

Social Hygiene: No Boundaries

For all that certain solons of cyberspace embrace or promote the view of the web as a "place," it lacks certain features of real space that make life more pleasant. Put succinctly, hyperlinks subvert boundaries.

I suspect this is a notion that warms the hearts of all the "true believers," the "technorati," if you will. But before it becomes yet another slogan employed to bludgeon the poor, benighted, bewildered and bored mass of mediocrity at the "center," consider a few thoughts, if you can spare the time. I'm sure it's tough keeping up with all that e-mail and syndicated consumer created content.

In real space, I live or reside in a neighborhood, a residential space, where I have a set of reasonable expectations regarding the nature of the interactions I'm likely to have with my fellow residents. They might be shallow, superficial and insufficient, but they will almost certainly be simply social. While every neighborhood is sometimes accosted by the occasional door to door salesperson, an ice cream man, or kids selling candy or crap to raise money for school or activities, for the most part crass commercialism is left behind at the strip mall.

Imagine, if you will, a new neighbor moves in next door. You make each others' acquaintance, and you're intrigued or interested because they seem like they might be someone you'd like to be friends with. They invite you over for a little get together, they compliment you on your yard or your appearance, you like the same movies, whatever, and it looks like you're going to get along famously.

But then you begin to notice that all they ever seem to talk about is work, when they're not flattering you. It's about their company, their boss, the conferences they attend, the parties. You try to change the subject to something a little more social, perhaps a little more substantive, and they seem to follow along at first, only to bend the topic all out of shape in order to relate it, however obliquely, to how they earn their living. It would get pretty tedious, pretty quickly. Pretty soon, they wouldn't be a neighbor you looked forward to seeing, they'd be someone you'd try to avoid. Or, pretty soon, they realize that there's no advantage for them being associated with you, and they start ignoring you. Which is actually a relief.

In this online "world" we're expected to pay attention to links. Technorati counts them to set us competing, one against the other, to see how we "rate." There's something an expectation of reciprocity that is a carry-over from our social evolution in the real world, an acknowledgment of some kind that the link was offered and noticed. The hyperlink is, apart from e-mail and perhaps an instant message, the most common way to make introductions on the web. But you don't know in advance if the person making your acquaintance is another person looking for a social experience, or someone who is looking for a competitive advantage of some kind. There is no real boundary that can circumscribe the range of expected interactions.

When I go to a used car lot, I expect to encounter pushy, insincere, manipulative people. Because I can expect it, I can prepare myself for it, and as unpleasant as it may be, I know it's a temporary interaction and once my transaction is concluded, I'll never have to interact with them again.

No such luck in the blogosphere. You get a link from someone, you strike up an acquaintance, you begin to think this might be another person you'd like to become friends with, and the next thing you know, all they're talking about is their job. And then they write about something significant that you wouldn't in a million years think is related to their work, but no, they manage to trivialize the idea for the sake of flattering a commercial entity that has the potential of increasing their competitive advantage.

Who has the time for that?

I am fortunate that I do have some friends online. In general, these are people who share aspects of their lives that have no probability of increasing their social rank, or giving them some professional advantage, but do have the virtue of establishing bonds of common experience between us. Sometimes they write about their ideas, beliefs and opinions, but never in a way to promote themselves, or to garner for themselves some particular reward. Sometimes they'll point to something someone else wrote and comment on it favorably, not because they hope for a favorable link in return, or to appear hip by linking to the flavor of the month, but because something genuinely resonated with them. Sometimes they'll put something out there and they won't get the response they expected or hoped for, they might find their considered thoughts and opinions dismissed as "silly." But that's the risk attendant to a social interaction.

Some other people have weblogs that have become little more than a 24/7 infomercial for their employer, or for themselves. For the most part, these are harmless, except perhaps to the people who maintain them and the folks who compete with one another to associate with them.

It kind of goes to the idea of "authenticity," if that notion retains any currency. Some weblogs that deal with ideas, more than "slice of life" portraits, can be genuine in a way that the "informercial" blogs will never be. They happen to believe in the ideas they're exploring or debating. They're more interested in the debate or the discussion and the ideas themselves than they are in their own strictly selfish interests. Of course, if they manage to garner a measure of success, they run the risk of losing that genuine connection, as they may become cautious and concerned with "losing" their audience, or enamored with the attention and eager to earn more. That doesn't happen very often, but when it does, the results usually aren't very flattering.

It's pretty clear that marketers don't respect boundaries, except perhaps for those few that are already thoroughly embedded as social norms, like the geographic boundaries on commerce encoded in our living "spaces." Technology has been subverting those boundaries every step of the way, with junk mail and tele-marketers, junk faxes and e-mail spam. And now the social "space" of the "blogosphere" is corrupted by those seeking a competitive advantage.

You can sort these people out, often without much difficulty; but it's kind of like the days before Caller ID, you don't know when you get a link if it's from someone you'd like to get to know, or from someone who's looking for something other than a purely social interaction. It's always a little disappointing when your new "neighbor" turns out to be someone who can't stop talking about their job. You can tune them out, "unsubscribe," if you will, but it's not a fun thing to do.

This was almost certainly inevitable, and it has only been accelerated by the fallacious, if seductive, notion that "markets are conversations," and lamenting the current state of affairs is little more than powerless whining. But, for now, one advantage of "real space" over the virtual kind is I can still kind of structure my activities and interactions to include, to some extent, only those commercial interactions that I desire. In the blogosphere, you never know if it's a sales pitch until after they've made it.

I'm sure some of my online friends will find this to be one of my "silly" ideas. And while I regret that, I also recognize that they might be right. This may be something that is "silly" to comment on in a negative fashion. I certainly can't claim an inherited gravitas gene, such that everything I write here is freighted with intellectual worth. Mostly it's just an observation:

This used to be a pretty nice neighborhood.

Dad's New Camera

My father sent me his father's old Kodak Autographic Brownie, so I thought it was only fair that I get him a new camera for his birthday.

Despite the experience I had with my Canon Powershot A70, I thought the Powershot A520 was a good choice for my parents. It's pretty much point and shoot, with some nice bells and whistles.

It came in last week, a couple of weeks after Dad's birthday, and I worked with them over iChat AV to help them get familiar with it. Here are some of the first pictures they took with it:

This is Dad seated at the computer desk, and that's yours truly looking on in the screen of the eMac.

Here's Mom, looking thrilled about having her picture taken:

This is their bird, a new addition to the family. Apparently the bird is quite the Johnny Cash fan, getting rather excited whenever iTunes plays a Johnny Cash song.

This is where Mom works on her quilts. She's also got a large quilting frame that's usually set up somewhere.

This what the eMac is mostly used for: (Just kidding, Mom!)

The next two are a couple of examples of Mom's quilting:

Bird Feed

Shelley Powers has an O'Reilly e-book for sale about the various syndication formats called, What Are Syndication Feeds?

I'm happy to say I've bought on the strength of Shelley's writing and her expertise in RDF, RSS and web development, all of which are evident in her weblog.

This information is useful to me because it's about time for me to do some remodeling around here, and I want to try to get things right in terms of "feed validity." I'm not anal about it, and I'm only too pleased to piss off any of the volunteer "format police" vigilantes, but I don't go out of my way to be difficult. Hopefully, Shelley's clear explication will make it easier for me to stay on the right said of the law.

Competing Messages: Technorati and the Post-Cluetrain™ World

In a recent interview by Rebecca Blood, Dave Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto said this:

"That we shouldn't be writing blogs in order to gain a mass market. And we shouldn't be evaluating blogs and bloggers by how many people read them."

In a recent weblog post, commenting on another blogger's writing, Doc Searls, one of the other authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto offered this:

Hear that, marketers?

This is why all efforts to categorize herds of "consumers" insult the individuals within them.

The specific meaning and context of this comment aren't important. What I wish to point out is that Doc seems to believe marketing efforts can insult individuals.

And in another recent weblog post, Tara Hunt calls Technorati the "temple" of some online geek culture, implying some religious connotation to blogging and even that Technorati facilitates the "search for the meaning of life."

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that a little bit insulting, and I'm not surprised that it comes from a marketer, because I believe that there is no idea, no value, no belief, that a marketer will not exploit or corrupt to seek a competitive advantage.

I think Technorati has been one of the most corrosive and corruptive forces in weblogging. I don't believe Technorati is "evil," just that they have been the most successful at exploiting human nature, which is what marketing is mostly about, than any of their competitors. I believe that Technorati is no more aboard the "Cluetrain™" than AT&T or Ford Motor Company. I believe they're clever at manufacturing appearances, but they're no more about the things that Dave and Doc seem to value or believe in than any other "pre-Cluetrain™" entity, and are very much into achieving what Tara Hunt has credited them with, even if it's an utter fiction.

Let's begin with the name, "Technorati." I believe it is intended to be a term that is much like "literati," which means, "well-educated people who are interested in literature." But the term also has a connotation that implies a superiority, or a distinguishing characteristic (well educated - what does that mean? Is one of low intelligence but "well educated" somehow better equipped to appreciate literature than one of high intelligence, but less "well educated?") that makes them superior to others. It has sometimes been used as a term of derision. "Technorati" is meant to flatter its audience. Those who embrace Technorati are intended to be perceived as those who most "get it" about technology. Who wants to be perceived as not "getting it?" Other search companies have neologisms based on technology as well, but none appeals to ego like Technorati.

Then there's the "Top 100." This is probably the most discussed feature of Technorati, if not the Top 100 itself, then the entire mechanism of ranking each of the millions of blogs Technorati supposedly tracks. (They probably do track millions of blogs, but I have no way of knowing. They simply assert that they do. There has been no independent audit to my knowledge.) It's the inspiration for the whole "virtues of the long tail" thing. Indeed, in a couple of recent posts, Ms. Hunt has been lamenting the lack of upward movement in her ranking, even though she knows, roughly, how many blogs link to hers, vaguely reminiscent of Jeff Jarvis' early public complaints about not being in the Top 100.

The existence of this ranking mechanism is to promote the interests of Technorati, not individual bloggers. It is a cynical attention-seeking mechanism that exploits the weakness of the human ego to direct attention to Technorati, and, for some people, it is a source of some suffering. Not serious suffering, not agony, in most cases, but it is a source of some concern. Certainly, the existence of the Top 100 and the entire ranking mechanism seems incompatible with the notion that, "we shouldn't be evaluating blogs and bloggers by how many people read them."

On Technorati's homepage, there's a link above the search field that looks like this:

If one does a search for a particular blog in Technorati, a little blurb appears on the left side of the results page that looks like this:

"Claim your blog.""Claim it now." And why should I "claim" my weblog to Technorati? Did Technorati happen to just "find" it out there in the "blogosphere," and if I want it back, I need to "claim" it from them? No, it's not about me claiming Groundhog Day as my own, I already know that. It's about Technorati claiming me as a user. Just more cynical marketing crap that, if you're not already under the spell of this hip, post-Cluetrain™, popularity contest, you might be a little insulted by it.

In Technorati's weblog, Niall Kennedy introduced one of their "first new features of 2006." This calls for a picture:

Hard to reconcile that with Dave Weinberger's egalitarian notion that, "we shouldn't be evaluating blogs and bloggers by how many people read them."

Then there was the episode where Technorati and AlwaysOn ("The insiders network," ooooh, who doesn't want to be an "insider." Well, me. Because I'm "special.") got together to "honor" certain blogs with an awards list called the AO/Technorati Open Media 100. This is another cynical marketing effort to attract attention. Both Technorati and AlwaysOn are very new entities, and it's hard to conceive how they've managed to achieve any significant stature or authority within a given community to "honor" anyone with "awards" of any kind. But, in America, marketing is also about "fake it till you make it." If you simply assert authority, many people won't question it. We've proven this in psychology over and over again. So they simply say they're offering "awards" to "honor" bloggers, and people just swallow it whole and congratulate all the supposed "winners," when the only real winners are Technorati and AlwaysOn who wanted to win some attention by cynically exploiting human nature. Marketing 101, pre-Cluetrain™.

Of course, "markets are conversations," so when I challenged Dave Sifry about these awards in his weblog, the comment disappeared, due to a "glitch." But Jeneane Sessum blogged them, so they live on, even if the link they point to has no comments, due to said "glitch."

And I won't even go into the whole claiming authority while simultaneously disclaming responsibility thing. Dave Weinberger has already dismissed that as "just marketing."

So there's nothing "post-Cluetrain™" about Technorati and its marketing. It's just as cynically manipulative as anything Madison Avenue ever came up with, because that's what marketing is always about.

Perhaps the most ironically cynical thing Technorati has done in its marketing effort is to have Dave Weinberger and Doc Searls be affiliated with Technorati in some capacity as members of an "advisory board." (Does this board meet? Are there any minutes? What advice was dispensed? Was any taken? For the love of God, where's the "transparency?") As an effort to achieve protective coloration, a little psychological camouflage, it's genius. I have to credit them with that.

But don't be deceived, there's nothing uninsulting, or "post-Cluetrain™" about Technorati and its marketing. It's not evil, but it's not good either.

P.S. Here's a tip: If you're searching for the meaning of life, you won't find it in Technorati.

Flat World: Evolution in Action?

The recent movie King Kong, prompted this mention of a phenomenon of evolution known as "gigantism."

"There is evidence that this happens because of isolation and a lack of competition ... "

Which came to mind when I glanced at a link that Jason Kottke pointed to today regarding obesity and house size.

I know, charts are misleading, and none of these things likely have anything to do with each other, but I thought it was interesting.

In any event, I suspect both house size and waistlines in America will be coming down in the future, as the world grows "flatter" and much more competitive.

An observation

We're fast approaching the day when the "blogosphere" will be nothing but one long infomercial, wall-to-wall, 24/7, everyone trying to be disruptive and "conversant" and competitive.

And if anyone is left who objects or criticizes it, they will be dismissed as someone who just doesn't "get it."

It'll be called the "post-Cluetrain era."

Social Hygiene: (Deleted)

Deleted post, under that rationale that it really doesn't matter anyway.

You didn't miss anything.

Gotta start acting my age...

I have a new instructor in taekwondo and his training style is very different from the one I've been accustomed to the last couple of years. He's more physically demanding, which is a good thing I think. He reminds me a lot of the instructors I had when I first started. This one feels that ground fighting is an important part of martial arts training, so Saturday's black belt class is combined with the Krav Maga class, and the class is focused on ground fighting, mostly grappling.

It's a lot of fun, but it's exhausting and there's a certain amount of discomfort, even pain, involved. We started out with a fairly vigorous warm-up, and then he taught a couple of techniques. We paired off and did drills to practice each technique. So far, no real problems.

Then we did a conditioning drill that involved punching downward on a prone target for about 30 seconds or so, then sprinting to the other end of the dojong, doing a technique drill repeatedly, then sprinting back to do more punching. Lather, rinse, repeat. I was not "sprinting" on the third iteration. After that, we did a drill that combined each of the techniques we had learned in a series. About this time, I'm thinking having a defibrillator nearby would be a good idea.

And then we did free grappling with a number of different partners. My last partner was the assistant instructor and I was just competing with myself to see how long I could go before I had to tap out.

After class, I dragged what was left of me out to the car and dropped Caitie off at a friend's house so they could go mall-shopping. I headed over to Firehouse Subs to get something to eat. Alas, Firehouse seems to be suffering from its own success to some extent. Nearly every time I go in there on a weekend, the place is jammed and they're just very slow getting the sandwiches done. I was in no mood to stand around waiting to order so I could sit around waiting for my sub. Plus, I haven't seen Ursula there in months, and I don't really know any of the current crew.

So I walked across the parking lot to Sierra Grill and ordered a burrito and a Corona. That's one thing Sierra Grill has going for it over Firehouse: they serve beer, the other sports drink. There was no line to speak of, I was able to place my order as soon as I walked in, and I got to sip on a deliciously cold beer while I waited for my burrito and for everything to stop hurting.

As I sat there, nursing a beer and just about every part of me that moves, or used to, I wondered if it wasn't time I started acting my age?

This Is Not a Blog

And the finger is not the moon.

This is me giving you the finger.

BrightBoard

This popped into one of my Feedster saved searches, this one about QuickTime. It's a pretty interesting interface design.

Dental Geekery

My dentist is very cool. He's a geek!

I only started seeing him professionally a couple of years ago, after I retired and became for ineligible naval dentistry. He's been my kids' dentist for years though, I just never paid much attention to what was back there in the treatment rooms.

He's got the digital x-ray camera, which is pretty sweet. He's also got this CAD/CAM, CNC crown-making device. It uses an infrared camera of some kind to image the tooth to be modeled. I don't really get how that works, because it seems to yield a 3D model of the tooth. Maybe it applies some sort of contour map to an "ideal tooth" model, I didn't really ask him. Anyway, the camera vibrates while it's imaging and I asked him what that noise was. He wasn't sure. I'm guessing it was a chiller of some kind, like we use for infrared seekers in missile guidance, increases the sensitivity of the detector.

After he gets the image, he's able to manipulate the model of the tooth and modify and shape the contours of the tooth on screen using a mouse, to manage how much occlusion there should be when it's in place and other factors. When he's finished with that, the file is sent to a computer controlled precision milling machine, though I'm not sure if that's the exactly correct term. Two rotary bits work on opposite sides of a piece of dental porcelain, shaping it into the crown. You get to watch if you want. (I did.) It's pretty amazing, if a little loud.

I asked him how he knows when it's time to change the bits. The machine tells him, if it's taking too long to cut the porcelain, or after x-number of hours of use.

It takes about 20 minutes, but it's better than taking a cast of your mouth, and sending off to have one made and waiting for two weeks with a temporary crown in your mouth.

But that's not what tickled me so much when I got in the chair last Tuesday. The doc walks in and I asked him, "So, any new toys today?"

He says, "Let's see, when was the last time you were in? November? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we do have a new toy. We now have a dental CAT scanner."

Holy crap! So while I'm waiting for my new crown to be milled, I get a look at the CAT scanner. Basically, it looks like a chair with a big panoramic x-ray rig mounted on it. This allows him to get a 3-D model of the entire upper and lower jaw, so he can tell where he has good sites for locating the anchors for dental implants. With that, he doesn't have to cut away soft gum tissue just to get a good look at what the ordinary x-ray suggests might be there. Saves him time and the patient discomfort.

He's a pretty good dentist. I had always had pretty good luck with navy dentists, but they never seemed to have any new technology. Of course, he's expensive as hell, and dental insurance only covers a maximum of $1,000.00 of expenses. I need three crowns this year and they're all over $1,000 a piece. So this year, I took greater advantage of the Flexible Spending Account my employer offers. I set aside the money I expect to spend on dental work, plus a little more for other routine out of pocket medical expenses, and that has the benefit of making those dollars essentially tax-free. In effect, I'm receiving a discount on my medical care equivalent to the income tax I would have paid on that income; something I would have had to be able to itemize in order to do so otherwise, and it wasn't clear to me in advance whether or not I would have been able to do that. I hate doing taxes anyway.

I'd rather go to the dentist.

If I were a superhero I would:

"Not blurt it out in a blog."

Stop The Funny™, a new weblog. Check it out.

(No doubt his servers will strain under the crushing load they are about to receive, such is the power of my links to subvert hierarchy! I am blogger! Here me roar! Or something.)

More Streamage

I think I may have looked at this before, but it's worth another look: OnLife.

Via Monkinetic.

Earl

I like the new TV series, My Name is Earl, and I've enjoyed each of the episodes up until now. I thought last night's hit a wrong note. It was pretty funny in a lot of scenes, but the story's resolution was inconsistent with the spirit of the show.

It occurred to me that it might have been intentional. That Earl is merely another flawed human being and that his view of karma is merely a form of self-delusion that allows him to believe he is doing good while committing harm, like many other forms of self-delusion. I suppose that's possible. If so, I'd be disappointed. I'd prefer to believe it was just a bad script.

Last week's episode had a somewhat similar resolution, when Earl finally punched his boss in the face after enduring a great deal of torment and humiliation. Earl expressed regret and considered whether he might have added another item to check off on his list. But I think they did a good job in concluding how that might not be so, that the punch itself might have been consistent with the notion of karma.

But this week's episode went much further than a spontaneous reaction to a provocation. The resolution involved a fraud regarding finding a little toe in a hot dog. Maybe a "ripped from the headlines" effort? An homage to Law and Order, which kind of describes what karma is about? Perhaps Earl will examine his actions during this episode in a later one.

And yes, I suppose it's possible I think about things too much, and take things too seriously.

Social Hygiene: A Modest Defense of Professionalism

Today, the word "professional" is commonly accepted to mean someone who is paid, or accepts remuneration to perform a particular task. Not so long ago, it had a more particular meaning.

A professional was someone who had achieved a certain standard of qualification in order to be recognized as someone who was able to perform a particular task. Lawyers, doctors and engineers were considered professionals in that, much narrower, sense of the term. They still are, inasmuch as it usually requires state licensure to present oneself as a lawyer, or doctor or engineer. Nurses and teachers, veterinarians and accountants, psychologists and social workers, commissioned officers and other occupations have imposed or accepted a standard of professional practice.

Professionals have a mutual interest in upholding the standards of their profession. In part, this keeps the competition at bay and helps to preserve the high fees they often command. (Not in all cases.) But it also involved a certain amount of self-policing. Doctors, lawyers and engineers all have professional codes of ethics they are expected to observe, a standard of conduct that is supposed to reflect the measure of trust they are afforded on the basis of their expertise and the importance of the issues the advise on to the individual and the larger public interest.

Professionals can be sued on the basis of "malpractice." There are standards in place that spell out what acceptable norms of performance are, and professionals can be held accountable by failing to observe those standards.

Like all human endeavors, these are not perfect efforts and there are many examples of people escaping accountability for their malpractice. But, in the main, I think it is a good thing, and I think it serves a larger public interest that we have standards of practice for professionals.

The other day Tara Hunt wrote a brief post called, Professional? Bah! We want amateurs! which is the stimulus for this particular post.

I think we need fewer amateur marketers. I would welcome the idea of a "professional" marketer. I would like to see marketing made into a profession. I would welcome the development of a code of ethics and standards of practice that marketers could be held to. I believe there is a public interest in doing so. I believe marketing has a negative effect on the public interest, a corrosive effect on public discourse, contributes to mental illness and I'd like to see marketers take responsibility for that or explain why they shouldn't.

I'm in favor of free speech, but I believe one should be responsible for one's actions and speech. I believe marketers are very adept at manipulating and influencing human behavior. Certainly that is their aim, is it not? I believe that often they fail to achieve the specific goals of that effort, but I believe it nevertheless does have some effect, and it is not always a good one.

I've asked this question before, and never received an answer. I don't expect one now, because I think it makes marketers too uncomfortable and not enough people are demanding answers to make not answering even more uncomfortable.

What do marketers respect? Where do they draw the line? They don't respect your time, because they'll call you at home during the dinner hour. They don't respect your bandwidth or computer resources because they'll flood your inbox with spam and your browser with pop-up windows, and they still spam fax machines, if you can believe that. Do they respect the truth? How close to a lie can they go without being outright frauds? Is there any value that we commonly hold that cannot be exploited or corrupted for the sake of achieving a competitive advantage? Any important idea or concept, that can't be bent or squeezed to deliver a little juice or buzz? Do they respect our relationships? Do they pay attention to us because they happen to like us, or because they believe we can help them spread their "message" in some way? Do they invite people to be on advisory boards because they value their advice, or because they value the cachet the name brings, and the attention the "advisors" can bring to a new product or service?

What do marketers respect?

I think professionalism would be good for marketers and good for the larger public interest.

Still Testing...

Woo-hoo!

Tinderbox now does some arithmetic, so the "-" was being interpreted as a minus sign, in an abnormal context, yielding an abnormal result. Placing the value in quotation marks avoids that processing.

Now to figure out where the nav links went, but that is less of an immediate problem.

Testing

"It's not you, it's me."

Well, it's not a .Mac problem after all. Sorry to get all Dave Rogers on the whole .Mac organization.

Nope, it seems Tinderbox is doing something I don't understand.

Each new note has a variable called PermaFile, the value of which is the name of the archive page for each month. This month's is GHD01-06. The id number of each note is later appended to the PermaFile in the Item export template, yielding a relative link or an internal link, I don't know the correct html terminology, to the item on the archive page. What you see in this page, the main page, is the full URL of the archive and this post. This has worked fine for three years now, and I don't recall changing anything.

The monthly outline topic is exported as a page, which becomes the archive of all that month's posts. It is also the Parent of each subordinate note of the monthly outline topic, the "child" of the monthly outline topic. Each child is assigned a value to the variables that make up the post. Once a month, I create a new month's topic, and I edit the OnAdd action that assigns the values to the different variables of each post. So OnAdd sets the PublicationDate to Today (a system variable corresponding to the present date), and it sets the PermaFile value to whatever I have entered into the OnAdd Action statement, in this case it should be GHD01-06.

Starting sometime after Saturday, when I created a new post, a new note in Tinderbox, the OnAdd action assigned a PermaFile value of GHD0106, which does not correspond to the name of the output file, nor to the value that's entered in the OnAdd statement itself. It's deleting the hyphen. Or so it would seem. Tinderbox offers a system of prototypes that employ inheritance, so I suspected that somehow I had a created a prototype note with the GHD0106 PermaFile value, but I can find none in the Tinderbox file that is Groundhog Day itself. Right now, a Find action on "0106" yields only this entry (and I'm going to manually correct that), so I don't think it's inheriting the wrong value from anything.

I suspected it might have had something to do with upgrading to TB 3.0.4, so I've reverted back to TB 3.0.1, but the same behavior persists.

I've gone back and re-entered the value "GHD01-06" into the OnAdd action, thinking perhaps it may have been somehow corrupted. No change, the hyphen still disappears when a new note is added.

I've sent an e-mail to Mark Bernstein, the developer of Tinderbox to see if he has any insight. It's quite likely it's some kind of error on my part, though I don't recall making any changes to the basic nuts and bolts that constitutes the document that creates this web page. Basically, once I got it working several years ago, I figured "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I'm sure we'll figure something out here shortly. Until then, I'll manually enter the correct PermaFile and things should work normally. I should also note, I've already corrected all the previously incorrect permalinks. But looking back at the January archive prior to making the corrections, I noted that all was well on the 14th, and things went south with the first post on the 16th.

One more clue is where the nav links went at the bottom, and I don't know what happened there yet, or when.

Technical Difficulties con't.

It looks like it's a problem with .Mac. I googled for other sites on the homepage.mac.com domain, and all of the ones I checked seemed to work normally. That is, pages that are in the directory below the user_name domain render normally. Some of these pages were created in Apple's Homepage web-app (pre-iWeb), others were roll-your-own pages, much like this one.

I posted a query at the .Mac discussion board, which I'm sure will garner the keen attention of the very astute technical support team. Well, probably not, but at least two other individuals have reported the same problem.

So my guess at this point is that it's a problem unique to one portion of Apple's .Mac servers (one server, perhaps?) and that sooner or later, probably before the next ice age, someone will notice this and take the appropriate corrective action. Oddly enough, the RSS feed is being served normally. Go figure.

Until then, permalinks will resolve to an Orange Alert "can't find it" message. I will try to tickle the one or two Apple employees I know and see if that can't expedite a resolution.

This could be a problem...

I thought I was having a Tinderbox problem, but it may be a .Mac problem. I don't know if Apple changed the way pages are served from .Mac, but I suspect they may have. None of my archives load, for me anyway, though all are there on the iDisk.

I'm afraid this may have something to do with changes Apple may have made to support iWeb, though I don't know. How pages were served from .Mac was never thoroughly documented anywhere that I could find, I mostly figured out what I could do through trial and error.

We may be in for a bit of rough sledding here for a while. It's still possible I broke something on my end, though I don't know why old archive pages that have always worked in the past wouldn't work now.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties...

Apparently, I broke something around here. Permalinks may not be working. Nav links are gone. Warp drive's shot. And I've only got six hours of oxygen left.

I'm going to bed. I'll fix it tomorrow. Maybe.

BSG: More Mainstream Ink

My latest obsession gets a mention in The New Yorker, of all places. Across the Universe, a battlestar reborn.

Also, I'm listening to the Ron Moore commentary on the last episode and he specifically mentions Ensign Gay, though he gives his first name as "Vincent."

It was also interesting to learn that Olmos ad libbed the kiss. Best scene in the whole episode.

Abby Something

Karl Martino pointed to an interview with Ron Moore, the creative force behind Battlestar Galactica, in which one of the questions points out the influences of other movies in many of the episodes of BSG. Moore acknowledges this, as writers do like to watch a lot of movies.

In last week's episode, the destruction of the Blackbird and Apollo's subsequent ejection left him floating in space, watching the battle between the battlestars and the base ships and the destruction of the resurrection ship. I recognized that as an event based partly in history, and also documented in the movie Midway, where the sole surviving pilot of a torpedo bomber squadron watched the battle from the unique perspective of floating in the ocean. I should remember the details of the squadron and the pilot, but I don't.

I was also watching Judgment at Nuremberg yesterday, the Special Edition, that has some commentary from Abby Mann, the screenwriter. In it, in a commentary on the lessons Nuremberg hold for today, Mann says something like, "It's not enough to survive."

Which is pretty close to what Adama said to Kara Thrace when he withheld the order to assassinate ADM Cain.

So I'm wondering if that's another influence? Maybe some audio clips a little later.

Update: Dad sent me this reminder that it was Ensign George Gay, who was the sole surviving member of Torpedo Squadron 8, lost during the Battle of Midway. Here's a link.

Audio clips to follow, I think.

Okay, this first one is from the Special Edition DVD of Judgment at Nuremberg. It's Abby Mann, who wrote the screenplay, in a short piece called The Value of a Single Human Being:

When I heard that yesterday, I thought of something I heard during last week's Battlestar Galactica, Resurrection Ship Pt. 2. Here's that clip:

Adama's comment resulted from this exchange with Sharon, a Cylon captive aboard Galactica:

And the speech she's referring to occurred in the first part of the mini-series:

I hope I'm not spoiling too much for the folks who haven't seen the second half of the second season yet. Sorry.

Stuff I Like

Since I bitch about so many things, I figured it'd be a pleasant change of pace to mention a few things I've enjoyed lately. Then I'll go back to powerlessly complaining.

One thing I really like, which is kind of a new-old thing, is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on homemade bread. But, you know peanut butter is loaded with trans-fatty acids, so it really isn't that good for you. Unless you use "natural" peanut butter, which I do. I've found Smuckers Natural Peanut Butter is pretty damn good peanut butter. You have to stir it up when you first open it, and then you have to refrigerate it after you start using it, otherwise the oil separates out; but actually, cold peanut butter is kind of a treat all its own. For jelly, I'm kind of a traditionalist, I go with grape. Smuckers there too.

Now, homemade bread tends to have large slices, and I cut them a little bit on the thick side. Not a lot thicker than ordinary sliced bread, but enough to give me some margin of error so I don't end up with part of the slice wafer-thin if I'm not slicing perfectly down the vertical plane. I do pretty well. Like anything, it probably takes practice. Then I just cut the slice in half and make the sandwich. Keeps the quantities of everything a little bit on the sane side.

Yum.

Over the weekend, Caitie and I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The anniversary edition just came out on DVD and I picked it up at the exchange. It's very much an "80s" movie, but it does have a timeless sort of quality to it that makes it enjoyable today. I loved it. It's been on TV a lot, but always with the commercials and it has a kind of rhythm that suffers with commercial interruptions.

I also watched Grumpy Old Men, which is another laugh-out-loud favorite of mine. It gives me hope. "One day, you wake up and you realize you're not 84 anymore." I'm only 48.

Well, that's about it. Everything else pretty much sucks.

Just kidding. Have a good night.

Livin' the iLife

Well, UPS was as good as its word, so I guess I'm not so unhappy with them anymore. I put off installing iLife because I wanted to go to taekwondo and I figured there would be "issues" with getting everything up and running.

Well, I started the install at about 9:00 PM, and the installer indicated it would take about an hour to install. Since I already had iLife '05 installed, it didn't require the full 10GB of disk space mentioned in the requirements, instead needing a little more than 7GB. It took significantly less than an hour to install, I'd say 30 minutes or so, I wasn't really paying attention. I started watching a movie while it was doing its thing. I looked in from time to time and I happened to notice that it installed the iTunes phone driver, which I've been not installing every time it's shown up in Software Update. Oh well, I don't need it, but I guess it won't hurt anything.

Once it finished, it required a restart, so I did that. Everything came up with no problems. I immediately launched iPhoto since that's the iLife app I use the most often. It reported that it needed to rebuild the library and I told it to go ahead. It didn't get very far before it reported that it found a problem in that I didn't have permission to modify a picture and it gave the pathname of the relevant photo.

I took the easy route and just had Disk Utility repair disk permissions, since I hadn't done that after the install, which is a normal maintenance action but I was in a hurry. Disk Utility's report didn't happen to mention that particular file, so I wasn't optimistic that the problem had been resolved. I launched iPhoto anyway, and sure enough it still barfed on that picture.

So I switched over to Finder and took a look at the file in question. I did a Get Info and noticed the file was locked and it had read only permissions assigned. The same was true for nearly every other file in that folder. I checked some other folders and none of the other ones seemed similarly affected. If I had some serious Unix chops, I'm sure I could have done some command-line mojo and made the relevant changes to all the affected files in a line or two of text from the Terminal. As it is, I'm Unix-impaired, so I did the GUI thing. I am smart enough to do a CMD-OPTION-I to open a persistent info window, which allowed me to make the changes with the mouse in one hand, while arrowing down the file list with the other. Tedious, but it got the job done. Unlock-change permission to Read-Write, arrow down, repeat.

Once that was completed, iPhoto had no further problems converting the library. It took several minutes, probably more than 10, to do all 6,638 photos. Once that was finished, I could play with it.

Speed is noticeably improved, at least in scrolling. I didn't time the launch. I like the interface, though it's not all that different from '05 I think. I'll have to look at '05 on the iBook to be sure. I want to say that pictures actually look better in this version than in '05, but that could be just my imagination. I used to think pictures looked noticeably better in Kodak's EasyShare software than they did in iPhoto. I don't use EasyShare anymore, but the way iPhoto '06 renders the images seems to give me the same impression EasyShare did. Who knows?

I haven't really had time to do much else with it, so perhaps I'll have more to say about it later. I was concerned that the changes to the library might make it unavailable to other apps, like Comic Life, but it seemed to load in Comic Life just fine. After I finish with iPhoto, I want to dig into Garage Band 3 and play with that a bit. I have some ideas I want to experiment with. Maybe become part of the "remix culture." We shall see.

iLife '06, The Douglas Adams Edition

I received an e-mail from UPS in response to the complaint I lodged online. They were quite courteous and apologetic, and even told me the secret to getting to speak to a human being. (Dial, 1-800-742-5877, then press "zero" and "zero" again to speak to a living, breathing human being.) The e-mail informed me they had changed the delivery address to the condo office.

This morning, I received a phone call from UPS, also confirming they'd changed the address to the condo office. I'm pleased with the effort, and looking forward to the new frustrations and challenges posed by another massive software installation. Or something.

So imagine my reaction when, upon arriving home from work I discovered a UPS sticker on my door with the following words penned above my note, "Your office was 'closed' for holiday."

Urgh. (That's not what I said. I can't really repeat what I said here. I try to keep this a PG-13 rated thing.)

So rather than do the 1-800 thing, I looked at the received calls log in my cell phone and called the helpful person who called me this morning. She said she'd try to message the driver and see if he can't swing by here again.

She just called, and they're going to come by and try again.

I'll try not to be in the bathroom.

Title reference: For those of you who don't recall, Douglas Adams did a game for Infocom many years ago called Bureaucracy.

iLife's Little Mysteries

Back in '83, when I was a young lieutenant on shore duty at Fleet Combat Training Center, Atlantic, Dam Neck, which is essentially part of Virginia Beach, there was a commander stationed there who was a fellow Apple II user. I bought an Apple //c to use at work, since I brought so much work home to do on my //e. The navy was slowly introducing Zenith DOS-based microcomputers to the workplace, but you had to jump through about a million hoops to justify one, and it was just easier to buy something for myself that I already knew how to use, so I did.

Anyway, my commander buddy was a pretty funny guy (I'm sure this was an early example of "microcomputers subvert hierarchy" - because it wasn't often that lieutenants and commanders socialized in this sort of familiar way. Though I still had to call him "sir."), and he gave me this copy of a copy of a copy of a sign someone had made:

"With my personal computer, I can now do, much faster, things I never used to have to do at all."

Which is perhaps even more true today, though I don't think anyone cares to notice.

Anyway, I've been trying to figure out where about 150MB of my iDisk storage space had disappeared to. If I added up all the file sizes of the visible files on my iDisk, and subtracted that number along with my Mail allocation and the space I'd allocated to a .Mac group, I was unable to account for about 150MB of space that should have been available to use, but which Finder could not find. Showing invisible files revealed a 204.1MB file called ".filler.idsff." I haven't googled that filename yet, but it wasn't particularly helpful since 204.1 is not equal to 150.

I was baffled. A fairly constant state of affairs in my life, I'm afraid.

I posted a question in Apple's support discussion boards, which I seldom do since I don't find them to be a veritable font of knowledge, and besides, I know nearly everything anyway. (Just seeing if you're paying attention.) Later on though, I was having an iChat with my brother, and he mentioned that the backups that Backup 3.0 stores on iDisk don't appear anywhere in your iDisk file system. I've been using Backup 3.0 to backup the whole home folder locally and my personal data and settings to iDisk. So I launched Backup 3.0 and in the application menu there is a menu item to Remove iDisk Backups. So I did. I got my 150MB back. Mystery solved. I think.

But mysteries are neither created nor destroyed, they merely change appearances. I was unable to establish a secure connection with my brother last night in iChat. That had been working fine since the feature was introduced, but now it doesn't. We'd both updated Tiger to 10.4.4, so perhaps that introduced a new variable. In any event, disabling secure chat in the Preferences allowed us to make a connection.

Backup just ran and backed up my "personal data and settings" to iDisk on schedule this morning. I've initiated a manual sync to see how much space it has used, but that seems to be taking forever. I'll relaunch Finder and see if that improves the situation. It often does, I've found. It just as often does nothing, but there you go. Ah, it seems to have at least allowed me to find out what my remaining allocation is on iDisk: 597.3MB. So my "personal data and settings" take up a little less than 3MB. So about once a week I need to delete that iDisk backup.

"With my personal computer, I can now do, much faster, things I never used to have to do at all."

BSG: Best Seen

Sorry for the weak pun.

I wanted to mention this in the previous post, but it didn't fit.

I thought the best scene in the episode was at the end when Roslin presented Adama with his flag insignia. Adama is facing another loss, and he holds in his hands something he truly valued at one time. Something which still has meaning, of course, but which is truly insignificant in the face of losing yet another huge part of his life.

That brief, chaste kiss was priceless.

Best show on television.

BSG: Flying Toasters

Something that became clear to me last week, and was made even more explicitly clear in this week's episode is the compatibility or resonance of the central conceit of the story with my thoughts on our relationship with technology.

After last week's episode, I watched the mini-series again. To me, the very best parts are at the beginning where Adama is struggling with loss, the end of his career, the end of his ship, the loss of a son, and the loss of his relationship with his remaining son.

Unfortunately, it's suffering, usually loss, that propels us to undertake these self-critical introspective analyses. They are productive, but the suffering is genuine, so they come at a high price.

Adama raises the central question, but doesn't have the answer. Events conspire to propel him even further along this journey as he's forced to confront loss on a scale that seems incomprehensible. It's been fascinating to watch his character wrestle with these questions, his conditioned and habituated thinking, and the consequences of the choices he's forced to make, as someone with authority and responsibility. I was surprised and pleased last night in the scene were Adama confronted Boomer to ask why the Cylons hate humanity so, and Boomer said that "hate" probably wasn't the right word. Adama indicated his impatience with her by saying he didn't intend to fence with her. Boomer then reflected his own words back to him, from his retirement speech aboard Galactica.

It is, I think, the logical conclusion of believing one can create a technology that can "patch" or "work around" the worst failings in our own nature.

What happens if we succeed?

iLife '05 for a few more days...

iLife '06 was supposed to be delivered today, but I wasn't here so UPS decided they'd try again this coming Monday when I won't be here either. This wasn't a problem over the Christmas holidays, when they routinely left my packages in front of my door for anyone to cart off. Fortunately, no one did. Fedex leaves my packages at the condo office, where they sign for them and I can pick them up when I get home from work.

I tried to call UPS to tell them to just leave it at the office, but I was unable to find a number that actually put me in touch with a human being, having to endure those insufferable computerized voice menu systems on the two toll-free numbers that purported to be customer service lines. So I left them an e-mail where I powerlessly explained how unsatisfactory their service was, and how I would try to take every opportunity to give my business to Fedex in the future. Of course, this may mean a lot less free shipping, but I'm really sick and tired of UPS.

"What brown can do for you," is apparently not deliver your package on the date promised, nor give the recipient an opportunity to speak to an actual person. I have to wonder if they can't recall The Groove Tube with the commercial for "Brown 25, another product of Uranus Corporation."

My Barber Died

When we were kids growing up in Michigan, my father always cut our hair. The popular style being the "buzz cut." I remember sometime during our last year in Michigan, while my dad was stationed aboard a destroyer out of Norfolk (he wanted one last year on sea duty before he retired), the principal of our school made a remark of some kind or another to my mother that he was going to cut my hair and my brothers' as well at one point. I guess we may have gotten a little shaggy.

In any event, when we moved to Canastota, in upstate New York, which was my mother's home town, we started going to the barber. It happened to be a guy named Rich Perretta, who also happened to be the custodian at Peterboro Street Elementary School, where I was a new-kid sixth grader.

Rich was a talker and a story-teller. In a later era, he might have been a blogger, though it probably wouldn't have been the same. He knew everyone, and he always had something to say. He also had a stack of Playboy magazines under the counter, in addition to all the comic books on the magazine table. When I was a little older and was either dropped off or rode my bike to Rich's, he let me look at those Playboy magazines. Quite the thrill for a young guy at the time. Made me feel like an adult. He cut my hair just before I left to go to the Naval Academy. And he'd cut my hair when I came home on leave over the various academic breaks.

Rich cut hair for a long, long time. I found this article in the Google cache that indicated he retired from barbering only a short time ago. I visited with him a few years ago when I went home to see my parents with my kids. I regret now that I didn't make an effort to see him when I was home last October or the preceding March. But on that earlier visit, he took me around his yard and pointed out all his plants and shrubs and trees, and everything had a story.

I was very sad to learn from my folks yesterday, that Rich had passed away a few days ago. He was 80 years old. He was a great guy, one of a kind, and I'll never forget him.

Kitchen Geekery

I am sorely tempted to buy this pantry inventory management system. If I was still managing a household larger than just myself, I think it'd be a slam-dunk. As it is, it's probably overkill for just me.

But I am sorely tempted.

Mini-stream

One of the things I was trying to figure out a few weeks back when I was archiving old Time's Shadow entries was how I could somehow integrate a smart folder of some kind to find the pictures I took on a particular day that might correspond with the date of an archived entry.

I still haven't figured that out, but yesterday's iPhoto announcement gave me an idea that may or may not be interesting. I just looked at both Finder and iPhoto 5, and it isn't immediately apparent how it might be implemented.

What I would like to do would be to have a Smart Album that would include all the photos from "Exactly n years ago," where n is any integer. This album could be shared via RSS, but mainly it would be automatically published to the web site on .Mac. It would be cool if you could have a few thumbnails on a different page that link back to the album page, in an n Years Ago Today section. Well, it'd be cool to me.

Of course, I haven't taken pictures every single day, but I've taken a lot of pictures, so there would likely be something every few days anyway. But right now, there is no "Exactly n years ago" search criteria for Spotlight that I can find in a cursory glance at Finder, which has far more search criteria than Apple exposes in iPhoto '05.

I may try to submit this as some kind of feedback to Apple.

Footnote

I was going through some of the audio clips I've been collecting over the years, and I happened upon the one that appears below. At the time, I thought it was too large to post, this was back before .Mac storage was increased to 1GB. As it is, it's too large to really add to a mix without editing out parts of it, and then it would lose its appeal. But now I can post the whole thing, hopefully it's small enough to be considered a fair use example. It's a little long, it's a little slow, but I think it's worth a listen.

This comes from the movie Cast Away, about which I had a very interesting and productive discussion with David Golding a few years back. As it was, I happened upon the movie at a particularly opportune moment in my life. I hadn't seen it when it came out in theaters, and had no real interest in it to speak of. But it happened to be on HBO one day when I came home from work, and I came in toward the end. I don't know if I watched the rest of the movie at that first viewing, my recollection is that I did not, but I can't be sure. It might be in my old Time's Shadow archives, I should look. But like HBO often does, it ran over and over again and I kept bumping into it, until at some point I watched the whole thing, and it became something of an epiphany to me. Maybe somewhat less than an epiphany, but it did illustrate for me the circumstances of my life at that moment in a way that I had not clearly seen before.

Quite apart from helping me to grasp those particular circumstances in a new and meaningful way, this scene, by itself, is very much a sort of Buddhist insight, and what I believe is a universal truth and experience regardless of your religion or lack thereof. It's something that's worthwhile to recall or think about as we get caught up in other matters of seeming importance or urgency.

Power Over Nothing

He is teh st3v3n355

So, does that look all trendy? Or does it merely make me look foolish? Don't answer that.

I followed the MacWorld keynote live on about six different web sites, some auto-updating, others with me furiously clicking "reload!" Kind of pathetic.

First reaction? It took a real effort of will not to order one of those new MacBook Pros. Technically, I can kinda-sorta afford it. But I need to buy a house. So I've pretty much told myself no new toys until after I'm out of this apartment. Hopefully that will be a matter of months, not years. Anyway, it's usually a good idea to hold off on the first iteration of any new hardware device. I also don't recall seeing any mention of projected battery life on on the new MacBook Pro, did I miss it?

The iMac was very appealing to me as well, but the rig I'm running right now does pretty much everything I need to do, and it weighs a ton. I figured if I got the MacBook (that just doesn't have the same je ne sais quoi that "Powerbook" had), I could give my iBook to someone, or sell it and not get hammered with shipping charges. But I do think a 20" iMac is in my future at some point as well. I also noticed on the Apple product page that it now supports monitor spanning out of the box. Not that I'd want to put a homely little LCD next to that nice big LCD, but it was interesting.

So the really cool news for me was iLife '06. I'm glad I didn't buy those iLife '05 books I've been looking at, and my new O'Reilly iPhoto book is already looking a little dated. But the integration with .Mac and the changes to .Mac look like they might be a lot of fun to play with. Last weekend I was playing with GarageBand, using it to mix some of the various movie audio clips I've posted here from time to time. It works quite well, but I haven't created anything I wish to share just yet.

I've also got Soundtrack and Soundtrack Pro, which are overkill for the kinds of things I want to do, but Soundtrack came with the upgrade from Final Cut Express 2(which I bought at a significant discount with my iBook) to Final Cut Express HD, then Apple introduced Soundtrack 2, with an inexpensive upgrade option for owners of Soundtrack, so I bought that. Both of which strike fear into me when I look at their user interfaces. But they came with lots of loops! Anyway, I digress...

I want to check out iWeb. I kind of feel sorry for Karelia Software and their new product launch, Sandvox. But I was also wondering how Sandvox was going to differentiate itself from Rapid Weaver, to which it bears a startling resemblance. Rapid Weaver is what I bought to get my dad back into weblogging, though he's been slacking off of late. I'm eager to see if iWeb might offer greater ease of use for him, and if it offers any advantages to me over my current set-up.

iPhoto, Garageband and iWeb look to me to be the hot apps, in iLife '06. I may get back into iMovie again here soon, we'll have to see. Anyway, I ordered iLife '06 and look forward to messing around with it. iWeb integration looks like it may involve a URL change, but I'm not sure if all the old archives would have to change as well, which would be problematic for anyone who'd ever linked to anything I've written here, so I'll have to kind of figure that out. Less of a problem for Dad's site, I think.

Looking at what Apple is offering the user in the way of creativity applications, it will remain a mystery to me if Apple doesn't include a QuickTime Pro key with the purchase of iLife, or just .Mac for that matter.

Looked like some really good deals on the refurbs pages too, so if you're looking for a new(er) Mac at a significant discount, probably now would be a good time.

Some Advice for Feedster

Jeremy Zawodny, an employee of Yahoo!, is predicting that 2006 will see the demise of Feedster, one of the many online RSS feed search engines. He's predicting that Technorati will do just fine.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have no financial stake in any of the foregoing entities. I like Feedster, I am unequivocally hostile toward Technorati, and I'm ambivalent about Yahoo!

With that out of the way, I'd like to offer some free advice to Feedster to improve their chances of survival. As always, I'm an authority on nothing and free advice is worth about what you pay for it.

Feedster needs to copy its "more successful" competitor, and focus on social engineering at least as much as it does on software engineering.

The Feedster 500 was a good start, ("Five times better than the competition!") but you failed to lay the proper groundwork. It does appeal to the egos of the high attention-earners in your ranked list (I can't use the word "hierarchy" because apparently that has some technical meaning and some helpful soul will pipe up to explain how the 500 isn't really a hierarchy because of this and that, and the solons of the blogosphere will stroke their beards and nod sagely agreeing with this clear explication of my gross misunderstanding, an experience I'm not eager to repeat. Where was I? Oh yeah...), but it's kind of, you know, "Another list? "*yawn*

There are already a number of ranked lists, and obviously they all compete with one another for the attention of the people who care about where they rank. ("Why aren't I in the Technorati Top 100?" was a familiar refrain from one popular A-lister whose visage frequently makes talking-head appearances on the idiot box.) So you need to make your ranked list more appealing than those who got there ahead of you.

I recommend you locate some high attention-earning webloggers who are not currently already employed as members of an "advisory board" and invite them to be members of your "advisory board." This will invoke reciprocity, as they will clearly wish to reward your keen powers of perception in valuing their insights and advice, and therefore they will make flattering comments about your company and service, adding some cachet to making it on the Feedster 500 list. Be sure to get someone fairly universally well regarded, uncontroversial and non-confrontational. This probably leaves out Dave Winer and me - well, aside from the fact that I'm not, you know, an A-lister. I'm probably more like an L, with some K aspirations, I don't want to sell myself short here.

You need to invoke some "social software" functionality. Get people to sign up in order to know where they rank in your ranked list of feeds. Create a Feedster Profile for each of your users. Get some commitment and investment from them. Nothing succeeds like commitment and consistency. Have someone come up with a little Javascript applet that measures, I don't know, the "sexiness" of someone's feed, based on some data from Feedster, much like the "worth" of blogs gimmick that seems to rely on Technorati profile data. You may have to have some kind of an API that exposes this data to the user in a simple and useful way. I don't know, I'm not a programmer. I'm just a cynic.

Then, partner up with some other Web 2.0 entity, even better - a Web 3.0 entity if you can find one - and offer some "awards" to "honor" some high attention-earning webloggers, who will, in turn, point back to Feedster in humble gratitude for being so "honored."

By all means, sponsor a "conference," or an "un-conference," or a "camp." Or you could just buy everyone dinner at some blogger functions. It might help if you could find a hot chick to help do that kind of thing. Sorry if that sounds sexist, but, that's reality out there. On the other hand, you could try to appeal to underrepresented demographics and perhaps make a targeted appeal to women and get some hot guy to go to say, Blogher, and spring for some food, or, better yet - flowers? (This is sure to get me some mail...) Make sure lots of pictures are taken and posted to Flickr. Whoops! That's owned by Yahoo! and they think you're on life support. Maybe there's another photo service you could partner up with?

Don't worry about not offering comments on your weblog, they don't matter. If you wish to, go ahead and offer them, but then feel free to ignore any that don't validate or praise your efforts. If they make you feel too uncomfortable, just delete them and blame it on a "glitch." Happens all the time in comments from what I hear.

Finally, make some unsubstantiated, baseless claims regarding your "authority" in the matter of RSS feeds. It's all "just marketing" and everyone knows you're not really responsible for anything you put out there anyway, it should all be laid out in your Terms of Service.

If, as seems very likely, any of these efforts are deemed controversial and invoke an outpouring of criticism or disdain - no problem! Any publicity is better than being on a death watch. Go out there and kick some ass! Or kiss some ass, whatever works.

By following a few simple rules of social engineering, you should be able to improve your competitive position significantly for almost no investment in time and engineering effort, apart from making your service data available in some fashion. Remember, "It's not what you know, it's who you blow." I think that was one of the lost fragments from Heraclitus or something.

That and This

I did a Google News search on Battlestar Galactica and I now know a lot more about what to expect this season than I did before. I'm not one who likes surprises, so I'm glad I did it. I'm surprised Ron Moore tipped his hand so much, but I'm glad too. Of course, the success of BSG seems to mean much more work is being thrown Moore's way, and so I wonder if at some point BSG will begin to suffer as its chief architect begins to have his time and attention taxed by other projects and other entities eager to exploit Moore's current success. Did you know Time Magazine said BSG was the best television drama of 2005? I didn't.

And this is for Doc Searls:

A screen shot from last week's Battlestar Galactica, recorded on my DVD recorder and played back in DVD Player on my Mac, snapped with Snapz Pro from Ambrosia Software (Image used without permission under the doctrine of Fair Use. Probably belongs to the SciFi Channel or somebody.)

Happy Birthday, Dad

Sailor Jack is 79 today.

Bullets Subvert Hierarchy

Battlestar Galactica should be required viewing.

I don't know how long they can keep this up.

What an episode.

There's got to be some deus ex machina to preserve Mary McDonell's character. I'll be so very bummed if the show has integrity and lets her die. But wow, what a character. And it's just been so much fun watching the relationship between Adama and her (she? - I wasn't a liberal arts major) over the course of the series.

January Sunrise

I'd write something, but I have no feeling in my fingers.

Wedding Crashers

I watched Wedding Crashers last night. Funny as hell. Vince Vaughn is some kind of genius. He goes right to the edge of being intolerable, but doesn't cross it and you wind up loving the guy. Normally I can't really stand Owen Wilson, but he was pretty good in this one too. And it's got Chistopher Walken! ("Needs more cowbell.") What's not to love?

I should watch it again tonight. God knows, I need a laugh.

But wait! My Name is Earl is on tonight. Cool.

One more thing, before I shut up...

But if you believe that a world of clean, warm, educated, and well-fed people are less well off - and less likely to help their fellow man - than those that are dirty, cold, ignorant, and starving, then you are welcome to that viewpoint. But I think that it is, indeed, silly.

With that, I suppose I am to retire from the field, arguments utterly discredited by the blindingly obvious truth of the virtues of being warm, educated and well fed.

Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not the comfortable are more motivated to help the suffering than those suffering and consider a few other things.

Al points to the improvements in health care that are yielding better outcomes for those afflicted with cancer or heart disease, that patients come to medical professionals armed with knowledge they've gleaned from the many sources made available by the magic of the hyperlink.

These are all unquestionably good things. They are not new things. We've tried to heal the sick since at least the time of Hippocrates. Science has changed how we do that. The good that we do is aided by technology, I'm not disputing that. But the picture isn't as clear as Al would have it.

How many of those suffering from heart disease do so because of a lifestyle that is characterized by over-consumption and a lack of exercise? How many of those suffering from cancer do so for exposure to environmental toxins, cigarette smoking, or too much exposure to the sun in pursuit of the perfect tan?

So before we congratulate ourselves on the state of our very expensive and unevenly distributed healthcare technology, we might ask ourselves if there may be reasons why people get sick that might have something to do with how we live.

Regarding the comfortable, well fed people moved to such generosity and compassion. Again, there are such people, and they are indeed good. But they, like the rest of us, are not saints.

I'm not going to go find the current statistics, I'm confident I'll be in the ballpark. Every year, on the order of about 18,000 people are killed in the United States by other comparatively warm, educated, well-fed people. A more interesting question would be to compare the murder rate in the United States, a nation of unquestionably warm, well-fed people (in the main), with the murder rate of a nation that is unquestionably not as warm, educated and well-fed. I'll leave that as an exercise for the serious student. I'm fairly confident we'll find little to feel comfortable about.

Similarly, every year about 25,000 warm, well-fed people kill themselves in this country. Perhaps there was nothing worth reading in their aggregator that day, who knows? Roughly ten times that number made an attempt to commit suicide. Last time I looked the suicide rate among teenagers was dropping, but it isn't clear if the reason is because of better anti-depressants, or perhaps modern communication technology, cell phones, and the web, help troubled teens find better support networks. I don't know, but that's unquestionably good news. But again, I'd like to see the suicide statistics of the United States compared with those of some state less well off and see if we're remarkably better off. Or even proportionally better off.

About 45,000 warm, well-fed people in this country die every year in automobile accidents. Driving cars, I might add, that consume non-renewable fossil fuels whose combustion products, chiefly CO2, add to the greenhouse gas burden in the atmosphere, which may or may not be a problem, depending mostly on your political point of view. Those 45,000 deaths don't seem to be much of a big deal, despite our supposedly changed relationship with death. Mostly, I think, they're viewed as "the cost of doing business."

And this is sure to touch a raw nerve, but let's consider this for a moment. Nineteen guys took four of our world-changing technological artifacts and tried to change the world with them, by crashing them into buildings. About 3,500 Americans were killed, give or take, and that was a great tragedy, and it was evil, and there was no excuse and no moral equivalence that made it "understandable." I'm not justifying it in the least. Nevertheless, a nation that routinely tolerates the unnatural deaths of nearly 20 times that number as a part of life in America, decided that it was sufficient justification, that it revealed a risk so great, that it was willing to attack and make war on a nation that had not attacked America. We don't know how many Iraqis this nation of warm, well-fed, educated people has killed, because we're not counting. We count birds killed by windmills, but we don't count dead Iraqis. Must be a gap in our technology or something. History will sort out how this effort will be viewed. But you can't persuade me that it's a shining example of how modern technology brings out the better angels in all of us.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong.

Silly me. I should just shut up and let all the brighter lights in the universe lead us on to the technological, hyper-linked, hierarchically flattened Promised Land. I'm just a silly person. A pimple on the ass-end of progress. Obviously I haven't thought long enough or hard enough about this, because it's plainly self-evident that things are unequivocally better! Silly, silly me.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Please do your own thinking. But, by all means, think! Chances are, things aren't always as they appear to be.

Fair warning: You may wind up looking silly.

I should get a beret. If I'm going to be silly, I may as well look the part. I should probably take up smoking unfiltered Camels too.

Some Questions and Comments

Dave Weinberger responded and a discussion is ensuing at his weblog.

In the spirit of proceeding constructively, I'd like to ask a few questions of Mark Bernstein, and briefly reply to a couple of other people who responded.

Mark Bernstein has responded again, and I must say I don't understand much of what he's trying to convey when he writes:

I meant, of course, that in a hierarchy you have exactly one immediate superior. Rogers then goes on to assume that the weblog ecology contains multiple interlinked hierarchies; this admits the point he is arguing against. Hierarchies have no cycles; hypertext links among weblogs demonstrably create cycles; therefore hypertext links among weblogs do break hierarchies.

I don't understand what the significance is of "one immediate superior." I'm not aware of any requirement in the definition of hierarchy for some type of one-for-one subordinate/superior correspondence. Midshipmen at the Naval Academy are accorded privileges based on their class, with freshmen, or 4th Class receiving the fewest privileges and having the least authority, and 1st Class midshipmen receiving the most privileges and having greater authority. Within the 1st Class, there is a Brigade Organization hierarchy with further distributions of authority, responsibility and privilege according to rank within the Brigade Organization. As a singular 4th Class, all upperclassmen are higher than me in the hierarchy, and all receive more privileges than I do. There isn't one individual who is immediately superior to me. I confess I have no idea what Mark is talking about here.

It gets worse, as I have no idea how acknowledging that there are multiple hierarchies admits the point I'm arguing against. Doc enjoys higher rank in many of those hierarchies, perhaps all of them on the web, than I do, depending on how that's measured. How does that matter? If Doc Searls mentions something about Technorati, it probably gets Dave Sifry's attention, and likely a response. When I commented on Dave Sifry's weblog asking about the basis of the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 list, my question was not only not answered, I can't say ignored because I don't know what was in Dave Sifry's mind, but the whole comment thread later went missing after other commenters had prompted Dave to respond to my questions. In this same comment thread, I believe Mr. Sifry responded to criticism from Jeneane Sessum regarding the "Founding Fathers" category. In any event, Jeneane did happen to copy my comment in her own weblog post on the topic, which, I must say, was a subversive act. I'd say that's potentially fair representation of the lack of privilege afforded to those lowest in the hierarchy. I've been a vocal critic of Technorati for some time now, on admittedly a fairly narrow point, but apart from one fairly snide and insincere response from Kevin Marks, to which I responded in kind, nobody from Technorati has deigned to entertain my criticism. Perhaps they will now, but that's not my intent here. My intent here is to show that there is a hierarchy, there are hierarchies, and the degree to which one is afforded attention and consideration is a function of one's perceived rank, and not on the merits of their criticism or argument.

I also have no idea what "hierarchies have no cycles" means. Perhaps it's a hypertext literary term, but it's totally unfamiliar to me in this context, and I'm not sure what the presence or absence of "cycles" means with respect to the effects of rank in a hierarchy.

I want to return to the "change" technology brings another time. I went into it briefly at Dave Weinberger's weblog, but I think I need to address it here, again.

Sig, at Forthcoming, writes:

But a hierarchy is more:

Ranking as in command and control requires a combination of 2. with 3. above, and as far as I can see is not what Dave had in mind in above quote.

Sig quotes my mention that hierarchies are not universally pernicious, and points out, indirectly, that while I was trying to be a little funny, I confused two examples of hierarchy. Let me be clear, I think there is utility in ranking people/organizations on the basis of any combination of 1 or 2 in Sig's list. And I also think there is great utility in organizational hierarchy, and that it is indeed universal and is so much a part of our lives that, like air, we're seldom conscious of it until we bump up against some of the limits in one of the many hierarchies we belong to.

Sig continues,

Thus, I, in all humility of course, do disagree with the postulate that hierarchies are needed.

In fact, I would say that the postulate holds us back from exploring potential alternatives, and that is a tad counterproductive, is it not?

I would say we have a rich history of exploring alternatives, and none has ever succeeded, as each eventually devolves into a hierarchy, or the organization disbands or fails. Even strictly cooperative efforts eventually establish hierarchies. To be flippant, I'd say Animal Farm had some fairly relevant things to say on the topic.

Sig's post prompted jb at Indefinite Articles to write:

And I agree with Sig. Dave's examples could be easily solved with roles, instead of hierarchy (a classic, but limited form of tagging). Situational Responders (Military, Emergency crews) might prefer hierarchy because it makes decisions easier (during war, for example, if the captain gets killed, the sr. lieutenant takes over w/out anyone really quibbling). When you try to model a rapid-turnover/poor communications/high stress environment with roles, it gets messy, and turns into a hierarchy. C'est la vie.

I'm not sure which examples jb is referring to, but I'd be interested in reading about documented success stories of efforts "easily solved with roles, instead of a hierarchy." Again, before anyone points to Wikipedia, I'd recommend reading the comments at Shelley Powers' weblog in the Sock Puppets post.

All that being said, I have to say I'm not terribly interested in trying to "prove" that hierarchies are essential. I will discuss how I think hierarchies can be made to work well, and I don't think this is anything new, though I do believe many people are unfamiliar with it. If anyone cares to show how people can work together in an effort of any significance or difficulty that doesn't involve some hierarchy, of course I'd be very interested to learn about it. While I'll try to have an open mind, please know that I'll be very skeptical.

I want to return to Doc, and I want to partipate at Dave's, and there's much more to say about a lot of things, but this is probably enough for one night.

Subverting Subversion

The responses to the previous post came quickly. That must be an indicator of something, I'm not sure what. I'd like to respond to them in turn.

First, Mike Warot offers this: "The assumption is that there is only one hierarchy of value (like in the High-School social scene).

The thing is, hyperlinks make it possible to have multiple simultaneous heirarchies... which really isn't a hierarchy at all, is it?"

I would disagree that there is an unstated assumption of only one hierarchy of value. We are all members of groups, and each of us has some notional "rank" within each group.

In high school the various cliques are ranked, though the relative rankings would be different depending on the point of view of the clique, each clique seeing itself as being higher in rank than some of the other cliques. The Goths see themselves as superior to the Jocks, though the Jocks likely see it just the reverse. But within the Goths, there is likely a hierarchy, one Goth who is more "gothic" than the rest, who kind of sets the standard.

I was vice president and later president of my homeowners' association. Not because I aspired to high rank in the hierarchy of homeowners, (Which isn't how that's determined anyway, that's more based on what you paid for your house, how many square feet you have and the number and quality of your amenities.) but the office was perceived as being of so little value (and correctly viewed as largely a nuisance) that hardly anyone wanted to hold the office, let alone compete with anyone for it. At the same time, I was a commissioned officer in the navy, which was a rank of some value, the financial measure of which was a matter of public record, though the personal value was somewhat greater, if less easily measured; and even those values often differed between officers of the same rank for various reasons. Competition in those ranks ultimately led to my retirement, as I was no longer "competitive." It didn't matter what value my ability or experience might have held, the best billets went to those junior to me in seniority who were still considered competitive. And I'm not bitter about that, I understood the way the game was played, and I didn't always play that game to win.

As a child in my own family, I was the oldest of seven children, which is a hierarchy, and there is competition in those hierarchies as well.

You may belong to a church, a civic group, a club, a team, a political party, and in each of those you hold some rank, even if it's kind of vague or mushy. If you doubt this, try to assert some authority sometime and see what happens.

Everywhere you look, you can find a hierarchy of some kind. Put 10 strangers in a room and give them a definite task and pretty soon a couple of people will be pretty clearly in charge, or trying to be anyway. It's what we do, it's who we are. And if we understood that a little better, then perhaps the worst effects of competition might be mitigated or avoided.

Mark Bernstein offers this: "Second, let's be precise. Do links subvert hierarchy? If we take "hierarchy" literally, links do subvert hierarchy. In a hierarchy, every member has one superior, any member may have multiple inferiors, and there can be no cycles: my superior is also superior to all my inferiors. That's what hierarchy means."

Well, maybe that's precise, but I don't think it's accurate. Every member may have more than one superior. The higher one goes in the hierarchy, the smaller the number of superiors until one reaches the penultimate rank. All my superiors are also superior to all my inferiors. As an O-5, every O-6 was my superior, not just the one I reported to.

Now links themselves, "hyper" or not, do nothing. The point I think Doc and Dave Weinberger try to make is something along the lines that links can create a communication channel that doesn't strictly rely on the authorities in the hierarchy. So, hypothetically speaking, if Acme Search Engines says it's the best search engine on the web, and because they are Acme Search Engines, they ought to be "the authority" on Acme Search Engines and their message is the one that gets most listened to or relied upon; especially if I'm the only voice that's saying Acme Search Engines is full of hooey. In the recent past only Acme Search Engines had enough authority, in the form of wealth, to have its messages ("marketing") conveyed by various media. But the web lowers the barrier to entry for one-to-many or many-to-many communications, and if I say Acme Search Engines is full of hooey, and link to Bob who says it too, who links to Joe, who links to another search engine that seems to do a pretty good job, well then it gets less clear who the "authority" really is about Acme Search Engines. Hierarchy subverted, existing authority structure overturned! Long live the proletariat!

In theory.

In reality, Acme Search Engines has already curried favor with a bunch of high attention-earning webloggers who are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having greater "authority," (Otherwise, why would they be on the "advisory board?") than relative "long-tailers," and so the linked objections of Joe, Bob and I are sloughed off as being of no merit or consequence. Acme's message of authority continues largely unchallenged, except by other search engine companies who are competing with Acme. So it isn't clear to me at what point links, hyper or otherwise, really begin to subvert hierarchy. Well, I take that back, they don't subvert hierarchy unless or until one of those doing the linking is perceived as an authority of some rank in some other hierarchy. And to achieve that rank you have to compete for attention, assert authority, kiss ass (invoke reciprocity, see Cialdini p.17) , and act in ways that, were we not so mindlessly conditioned to compete for rank in the hierarchy, we would observe how they debase and demean us.

Please, read Chapter Five in the seminal work The Cluetrain Manifesto, and if someone can point out to me where it outlines a clear argument for exactly how hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, I'd appreciate it. The closest thing I found might be in the Blurry Boundaries section, but really, how well is that standing up in the real world? Read that section, then go read the discussion about Wikipedia in the Yo! Sock Puppets! post in Shelley Powers' Burningbird weblog. That whole chapter reads like most marketing literature. It paints a pretty picture, almost poetic, an ode to the unshackling of human potential made possible by TCP/IP and fiber-optics. It certainly flatters its audience (See reciprocity above.) Maybe it's supposed to read "hyperlinks ought to subvert hierarchies," instead of what they do do, which is merely act as another tool for competing groups to overturn or preserve existing hierarchies.

Ethan Johnson at The Vision Thing objects to my reference to Doc being above me in the hierarchy, "I do have a small nitpick with Dave’s post. He refers to Doc Searls as being 'above him' in the 'hierarchy'. Really? He reports up through Doc’s chain of command? I don’t think of any part of the internet experience as being hierarchical, at least not by its raw nature. But thinking makes it so," and he links to a previous post of his here.

First, as stated above, there are many hierarchies. Hierarchies, of themselves, are not evil, in fact, they're essential. When you have to have open-heart surgery, wouldn't you like to have the best surgeon, at the best hospital? Sure you would. Too bad you can't afford it. But let's not digress. There are many hierarchies. When I show my ID and drive through the gate at work, I get a salute and a cheerful, "Good morning, sir." Doc would not get the salute. So I got that going for me!

But seriously, Doc is an authority figure of some kind. He clearly ranks high in the hierarchy of the "blogosphere" or you wouldn't see so many people uttering "markets are conversations," or today's aphorism of dubious merit, "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy." I don't know how many of the people who utter those things have ever actually thought about them in a serious way. I say this because high rank in the hierarchy has this troublesome feature of attracting people who wish to advance themselves by leveraging the favor of those higher in the hierarchy, or affiliating themselves in some way, usually by validating and repeating the views of the currently hip and trendy, and then hoping to be perceived in the same favorable light as those higher than they. These people are called suck-ups, brown-nosers, and ass-kissers. It's a time-honored thing, and we've made a high art of it. I'm an artistic failure myself.

Finally, there's Doc. But it's late and I'm tired and I want to address his comments at greater length. Hey! I heard you groan!

But I want to briefly mention this. Doc writes, "My unenjoyable experience of high school was not about the hells of failure in competition or submission to hierarchy (though I had plenty of those), but rather of being boxed into a system over which I had no control and for which there were no appealing alternatives. And seeing that system stretch out to the horizons of my life."

With regard to being "boxed into a system," I will simply reflect Doc's own words back to him: "Only if others insist on seeing it that way." As to the illusion of control, there's no reason to believe the web gives us "control" of anything, and I'll point to something I pointed to last month:

"I'm not the same person I was last year," Phil replies. The glistening eyes are moist at the tanned edges. "You read about people in earthquakes. Now you know."

"I'm not in control."

None of us is. Even those at the very top.

How's that for subverting hierarchy?

Competing Messages: New Year, Same Old Crap

Doc, for the umpteenth time, hyperlinks to do not subvert hierarchy. In fact, they help establish their own hierarchies. They may help overturn existing hierarchies, they may increase the rate of "churn," but as should be abundantly clear by now, human beings are all about competing for rank in a hierarchy and hyperlinks are merely another tool. Technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do.

That's up to us. Yet we seem to be hoping we're going to invent a tool to do it for us.

And some people say religious people are deluded.

I started to post this on New Year's day, but thought it was too "negative" so it went into the cooler. But this morning I read another brief post from Doc called "Lesson" where Doc asserts again, "this isn't high school here. It's the cure for high school: an open marketplace for ideas and everything else." I just can't let this slide.

So presumably "high school" was something that required a "cure," and "this" (presumably "the web") is it.

Except it seems to me that what most made high school an unenjoyable experience (something that might require a "cure") was its competitive nature, where figuring out who we were and how we mattered seemed to rely on just "where" we "fit" in the grand scheme of things, that chiefly being a hierarchy. There was also the issue of trying to be ourselves within the confines of an established authority structure that had expectations of their own of how we were supposed to "be." Not like that isn't happening right here on the ol' blogosphere. If you don't have RSS, Scoble would fire you! Don't have full feeds? Unsubscribed! Shape up, people!

Instead, Doc calls the web "an open marketplace." Fair enough. But a marketplace is all about competition, it's not about people interacting with one another for the social rewards attendant to that interaction. The web isn't "the cure," it merely spreads "the disease," chiefly through the vector of marketers with visions of non-stop, unlimited, competition through marketing, where the social is to be exploited strictly for its utility in promoting and transmitting marketing messages, not valued for the rewards and challenges of shared human experience. And success is measured, ranked and publicized so the "successful" may be exploited, not the least by those who do the ranking and publicizing, by currying favor and otherwise sucking up, or by being attacked (as this post might reasonably be perceived as doing).

And let's return to this romantic notion of "subverting hierarchy." Where did that come from? It sounds like a good thing, right? Being "subversive" sounds kind of edgy and cool. The hierarchy is the stale, old "establishment." Hyperlinks "stick it to the man," I guess. Except subverting hierarchy is merely a form of competition, and competition determines its success or failure through measuring changes in rank in a hierarchy. How else can you tell if you're being "subversive" unless you're paying attention to rank? I mean it's implicit in the whole idea!

Suggesting it's an "open marketplace" and that it "subverts hierarchy" is merely intended to make it appear more attractive to bring more people to the marketplace where they can then be subjected to more marketing messages, not the least of which are marketing messages "selling" the web to a wider audience.

If you want to truly subvert hierarchy, which I'm not doing right now, I'm competing with those much higher than me in the hierarchy, but if you truly want to subvert hierarchy, ignore it.

What I object to is this mischaracterization of what is simply a technological artifact as possessing some virtue, not just advantage, but virtue, not resident in any previous technology. That somehow these wires and chips and programs make us all magically into better people. That's just warm smoke being blown up our collective asses by marketers who, by profession and by inclination, make a living blowing warm smoke up someone's ass to sell something, to make a net transfer of authority or wealth from one entity to another. To "subscribe" means to "sign up" for something, literally to lend your authority to something by appending your name to it. Well, I don't subscribe to this notion.

Whatever virtues are attendant to the web and the human presence in it are human virtues, which are few enough and would exist whether the web existed or not. And the many human shortcomings that have made life so difficult for us come right along with us into this new technology. Our machinery does not "cure" our humanity.

This is not to say that competition is bad, because it's not. It's essential. But like anything else, there's a limit to how much is essential. And right now, in my opinion, we're approaching the point where there's too much of it.

We can pay attention to Doc Searls, who wants to sell the web, or Robert Scoble who wants to sell Microsoft, or any of the other high ranking "authorities" of the blogosphere, for whatever advantages that may offer in our own effort to increase our rank in the hierarchy; or we can pay attention to people like Elaine Frankonis who, along with her brother, is struggling with her aged and ailing mother through the holidays. For every Elaine who is using the web as one of the few means of social support available to her, there are ten, or a hundred, or a thousand Mike Warots, who are attending to their rank and their progress up the long tail. (Not that they're "bad" people. They're emphatically not.) But we know who Doc and Robert pay attention to. Because they're all about "subverting hierarchy" right?

Right.

Anyway, sorry to be such a grouch. I know Doc's a nice guy, I like him and everybody else does too, but he's bought into something and now he's trying to sell it. That's what marketers do. I'm just not buying, and I don't think anyone else should either.

If we want a better world, a "cure" for high school, we don't require better technology, we need to work on being better people. And to do that, it seems to me, we need to understand who we are and what we do and why we do it. Focusing on our toys and tools, and feeling proud and pleased with ourselves doesn't leave much time for that sort of introspection. But because we're so competitive, we have all of our attention focused externally, looking for advantages, opportunities, risks and threats. Which pretty much ensures the world remains the same, even if the scenery changes.

Happy New Year

Happiness will not be found in the new year. Happiness is only to be found in one place in time: the present.

To add the spatial coordinate to the temporal one, happiness is found in only one place: within you.

So if you want to find happiness, you now know where to look.

My best wishes for success in that endeavor.