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All blogging is political

Michael Moore's documentary on the Bush administration may be the first movie in history to turn the tide of the election. I encourage you to see it. In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman explains why with eloquence I envy.

There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

And for all its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn't promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren't the reason why millions of people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven't been doing their job.

For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr. Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction.

[snip]

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.

Damn, damn, double damn

High on my list of things that really tick me off are:

1. People who waste my time
2. Malicious vandals

There's no simple way to put things back to normal. I'm not about to go through the multi-step process of removing each instance of this garbage manually; life's too short. I will clean at the crap at the SQL level.

Then there's the issue of stopping this from happening in the future. I may switch over to MT 3.0 and force people to register in order to comment, but I fear that this will reduce the already pitiful level of response here. I may set up sufficient disguises and spoofs to mislead a Spam-posting bot.

Has anyone found a really effective way to stop this nuisance?

Google should take away the incentive for this by overlooking links that appear in Comments fields. I think I'll jot them a note.

Gmail!

Yesterday evening my friend Jason at Google/Blogger asked me, "Got your Gmail account yet?" I said I thought I'd wait until the privacy and intrusion issues died down. My said I should give it a whirl. I just signed up.

In the press coverage of email-with-Google-ads, I'd missed a valuable benefit of Gmail. With a gig of storage, you only need to delete old mail once a decade. In fact, when you push the "Trash" button, this message apprears: "No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!" Furthermore, you don't need folders. You can tag an email with multiple labels for retrieval purposes. When you want something, just search for it. I'll take Google's word for it that their search is faster than that of Outlook or Eudora.

It would certainly be handy if I could upload my past emails into Gmail, so I'd have everything in one place.

For the present, I'm going to forward mail from other email accounts to Gmail. If I decide it's not my cup of tea, I can always cut off the forwarding and go back to my original set-up.

I'll add comments as I gain experience with Gmail.

There's no way to import a contacts file. Agh. My Outlook file has 1,000 names.

The contact list contains a place for free form entry. I may use this for my frequently called directory. (I don't have a PDA and don't really want another gadget in my life right now.)

Pro: I like being able to label emails for easy recall. It's less klutzy than folders and one mail can have multiple tags. Also handy to be able to attach a star to an email that requires follow-up (which you can easily remove when you've done it.)

Con: When I send an email with an attrachment, I am locked out while the attachment uploads from my machine to the mail server. This interrupts the pace of my work.

Ur-blogging

Here's a baker's dozen of interesting things. I offer them up in hopes that you'll reciprocate.

1. eCornell Reference Blog

2. IBM Research

   

3. Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

4. Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp

5. Chris Allen's Life with Alacrity, home of the awesome EditThisPagePHP

6. AllLearn

7. Positive Psychology Center

8. Time for the Blind
   This is soooooo retro. This link went dead a few hours after I posted it.

9. OnFocus

10. Zoom into San Francisco (NASA)

    

11. Eric Weisstein's World of Science

12. Werblog

13. Ray Ozzie's Blog

In the early days of the Web, proto-bloggers shared links with one another. "Look what I found"! Karma ruled the day. Let's share what we've got, man. Someone on the Well pointed to Yahoo! and we were enthralled. You could go through every link on Yahoo! in few hours but it was the largest link list we'd ever seen.

If you enjoy any of these links, post a link to one of your special places in the Comments section. Share the wealth. Maybe we can start a movement! Make the gift economy a reality!

Push vs pull

A Rare One-Liner

Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

This is what OPEN means.

PlaNetwork LIVE 2

Brian Narelle, "CEO/Janitor" of Narelle Creative captured and replayed thoughts from the "assembly" sessions in his delightful cartoons.

Drat! Wi-Fi access is getting spotty.

MoveOn

Joan Blades of MoveOn is the first speaker after lunch. MoveOn is the poster child for political activism on the net. "Democracy is changing. MoveOn Primary: Ending the Money Primary." Over 300,000 MoveOn members participated in the online primary. (More than Iowa and New Hampshire combined.) Substantive communication to and from candidates is possible through online.

MoveOn Ad Conetst: Political ads by and for Real People. 100,000 MoveOn members rated the ads. (1,000 were submitted.) www.bushin30seconds.org Members are contributing funds to run the ad.

Bake Sale for Democracy. Raised $750,000. People are getting together. It starts online but results in face-to-face.

"Driving Votes" encourages people to move to swing states where their votes will count. MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country explains "how to find your political voice and become a catalyst for change."

Where does the connection take us? Beyond the broadcast culture that creates cynicism. Fox News. Events reported like professional wrestling. Conversation in politics is being reborn.

People have a hunger for connection to core values. Compassion, fairness, justice, opportunity, diversity, community, family, country, freedom, responsibility, democrcacy = WE

Two Americas? But progressive values are American values.

Commercials.... Child's Play, Polygraph, What Are We Teaching Our Clildren? If the Bush admoinistration was your roommate, Al Keyda. These are great.

MoveOn has 2.2 million members, the AFL-CIO 1.7 million.

Lead from the Heart. Don't split the difference. Make the difference.

I asked if other nations have an equivilent of MoveOn. Joan's not certain. The next question asks if we can do it. We're going to need international rules; this administration has been very poor in international cooperation.

Right now, the Iraq War is George Bush's war. If we re-elect Bush, it becomes our war. That's the sort of rallying cry that sets MoveOn apart.

Club of Rome. I'm tired. Raoul is speaking in monotone and I'm drifing off to sleep. I hate to walk out since I'm sitting in the front row and the speaker has been making frequent eye contact. The Club of Rome, Raoul assures us, is more optimistic that the (infamous) Limits of Growth report by Jay Forrester in the 60s. The new concept, pretty loose at the present time, is to educate the world via satellite. Someone asked me, "Why should we believe them this time?"

At this point, my battery died.

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up

Brad de Graf talked of complexity, drawing parallels to human systems. The patterns of cellular autometa demonstrate how order can come from simply acting according to what your neighbors are doing.

Brad contends we no longer need the old model. This is precisely the feeling I've been getting.

Zephyr Teachout, who was part of the Dean Campaign, began by saying "Nobody understands what they're talking about." Look inside any campaign and you find a mess. Organizing, if you can call it that, centers around the message.

A key to getting active participation is having the transparency to see that others are taking part; it gives you the feeling of being part of something larger.

Chapters were a dying organizational form (cf Bowling Alone) but technology may revive them.

Marty Kearns began with a poster of a bear catching a leaping salmon with the caption, "A journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly."

Marty likened a nonprofit to a business value chain. An advocacy network exists only so long as it provides value. (Is there workflow?) A shared story propells the activities.

This doesn't do justice to Marty's message, so check out his Green Media Toolshed.

Moderator Bill Pease of GetActive made dozens of summary points such as:

• link online and offline activities
• support critical roles (e.g. clusterers, connectors, leaders)
• hierarchy is not inherently bad; it's what makes us human
• MoveOn's viral networking infects existing social clusters

Other items:

• del.icio.us is a shared link list worth checking out
• upcoming.org enables nonprofits to manage and track events
• check out favors.com and Live Directory for help
• Progressive Pipes takes mail list entries, aggregates them, and provides an index by type of issue or type of message. Think of it as email converted to RSS format.

I will miss Sunday's session, for I'm hopping a plane to attend Training Directors Forum in Phoenix.

Isn't the Presidio gorgeous?

Back to Blogger

Yesterday Moveable Type released MT 3.0. It's a developer's edition, e.g. it's for us tinkerers. If you just want to go online and write, Moveable Type will steer you to TypePad, their hosted service.

The free version of MT is limited to 3 weblogs and 1 author. This is not enough for my needs. The Learning Circuits blog has many authors. I've also been using MT to run InternetTime.com, Workflow Instititute. www.jaycross, Meta-Learning Lab, a blog for the Berekley Path Wanderers, and five internal blogs. It may be time to go shopping. I have quite a bit of time invested in these blogs. On the other hand, I don't intend to write the Trotts a check for more than $1000 to convert to version 3.0. One wonders what version 4.0 will cost.

I'm seriously considering a return to the Blogger fold, which is where I used to maintain eight blogs (and where I fell in love with the blog-form.)

Last night I attended the Blogger Party in San Francisco (photos). The upbeat spirit of Ev, Jason, the other Blogger folks, and we Blogger groupies is ineffectious.

Driving over the Bay Bridge on my way to the event, I listened to Teri Gross interviewing Bill Moyers on Fresh Air. Bill went over the enormous list of magazines he reads to keep up with things. Then he said he reads a lot of blogs. "Blogging is the closest we have come to, in a long time, to the history of the American media in the beginning."' In the old days, if you wanted to run a newspaper, you plunked down $250 and bought a press. Editors were always covered with ink. Blogging is bringing back the independent voice.

Blogger founder Ev Williams

China Bloggers

The Department of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley hosted China's Digital Future, Advancing the Understanding of China's Digital Future, a two-day conference on the impact of information and communications technologies on Chinese society, yesterday and the day before.

Over 78 million Chinese now utilize the communication power of the Internet, and over 257 million have wireless phones. How will China’s rapidly expanding high tech industry and market affect global technological development and the world market? How does the Chinese government maintain a balance between control and growth of the Internet? How does the flexibility and pervasiveness of the new media alter the traditional information landscape? And what are the expansion, control and transformative effects of these technologies on China and its future?

78 million net-connected Chinese? That's a big number. For the sake of comparison,
Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates there are 128 million Internet users in America.

Speakers and panelists included Lawrence Lessig, Fons Tuinstra, John Gage, Orville Schell, Fang Xingdong, Jonathan Zittrain, Bill Xia, Hal Varian, Isaac Mao, Liang Lu, Fang Xingdong, Mao Xianghui, and many other notables.

There's a cateogry in the Berkeley Conference on The Well titled "Berkeley and Cambridge: Separated at Birth?" Many of us have lived in both towns, which hold the #1 and #2 spots for the most Nobel Laureates and probably for smoking ganja, too.

In the blogging realm, Birkman and Berkeley are taking different tacks. As you'd expect, the West Coasters feel "We don't need no stinking echo chamber." In that spirit, Patrick Delaney organized a dinner for China bloggers last night in a French restaurant in Berkeley. He made a reservation for a dozen but twice that many showed up, which meant an hour of blog-geek-speak on the sidewalk outside before we were seated. In Cambridge, "international" means listing overseas blogs; in Berkeley, it means Chinese bloggers outnumbering Americans four-to-one.

A few feelings derived from dozens of conversation snippets throughout the evening:

• Just as free-flowing media raised awareness behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe to the point that the entire Soviet system came crashing down, so now is the Internet raising consciousness in mainland China.


• While admittedly it will be a wrenching struggle, these Chinese are optmistic that China will change, incrementally and not through revolution.


• The infectious entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. At the dinner, the leaders of Blogdriver.com performed the ritual distribution of logo t-shirts.


• If you thought the Howard Dean bubble was spectacular, you ain't seen nothing yet.


• Bejing's decision last week to disenfranchise Hong Kong was no surprise to those who know China. Disappointing, yes, but unexpected, no.


• As in America, some people are blogging true believers while others can't understand what the fuss is about. I'm convinced that the only way to appreciate blogging is to read blogs. Instead of trying to explain what's going on, I now just hand over my business card and encourage people to come here and read.

Photos follow.

Hello to my readers in China and thanks to Isaac Mao for translating the signal!

Blog Essence

This easy-to-use summarizing software dramatically increases your productivity and efficiency by creating concise summaries of any document or Web page so you spend considerably less time reading without missing any important information.

Using sophisticated statistical and linguistic algorithms, it pinpoints the key concepts and extracts the most relevant sentences, resulting in a summary that is a shorter, condensed version of the original text.

learning, jay cross, elearning, businessperson, managers, blogs, designing, community, technology, font, online, customization, div, networks.

A Shared RealityThe Internet is a network of many metaphors.

You found a page that's part of a listing of visual learning resources.

A CMS supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of content from cradle to grave.

SOAP makes it possible to use Web services for transactionssay, credit card authorization or checking inventory in real-time and placing an order.

The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics.

Imagine telling your sales manager that the sales force was well prepared ("Levels 1 & 2") but simply hadn't sold anything ("Levels 3 & 4").

A customer blog enables a company to make announcements to its Web customers immediately.

Make it easy for the learner to buy (learn).

has a great and growing selection of links on communities of practice, who's doing what, and who the players are.

This myth has been virtually unchallenged for years, he says, and in a provocative and interesting essay called Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual Community, Lockard claims that it's nothing more than a bunch of hooey.

The development of friendship in this manner is I believe a very good alternative to traditional community, which, for all the "meaning" it bestows on life, is more often than not coercive, intolerant and closed-off.

Related pages: Community Implementation Knowledge management Virtual classroom Culture Motivation LCMS Metrics Organizations Visual Learning eLearning These are the absolute best sources of the bunch: elearningpost, f...

" These days they hear about a new opportunity over lunch and go to work for a competitor that afternoon.

What keeps people on board these days is the opportunity to develop, to build valued skills, to achieve certifications, and to add to their store of intellectual capital.

i´m a student and i want to make a paper about eLearning because i find very difficult for someone who do not have very good computer skills to follow a elearning course.

<p>I never allowed schooling to interfere with my education. --Mark Twain</p>

No such thing as a classroom, because learning happens in a variety of settings.

'What is eLearning?

A good online instructor wears many hats.

Distant students need to become more selective and focused in their learning in order to master new information.

Related pages: Community Implementation Knowledge management Virtual classroom Culture Motivation LCMS Metrics Organizations Visual Learning eLearning These are the absolute best sources of the bunch: elearningpost, f...

Tom Stewart has a wonderful line, The customer today can call the tune because he knows the score.

But the result will be a new kind of conversation.

If you disagree with a blogger you can tell him or her via comments and links and initiate a dialogue with the author and other readers.

There's a lot to be said for blogging, and three interesting, expressive bloggers do it well here, providing thoughtful, intriguing and diverse points of view about the phenomenon.

We should shamelessly but briefly blow our own horn a little here and point out that in some ways Netsurfer is a blog, and perhaps the oldest of them all.

Web designers</font> should know better.

Many of the people who design websites had a problem with this.

The skill of an expert is that of experiential cognition.

The operator having arranged and classified his books, papers, etc., seats himself for business at the writing table and realizes at once that he is master of the situation.

Thought history, groups of people often without conscious design, have successfully blended individual and collective effort to create something new and wonderful.

An important insight gained from some of the more recent projects in member companies of the Society for Organizational Learning has led to the distinction between two different sources or processes of organizational learning: one that is based on reflecting the experiences of the past (Type I) and a second source, one that is grounded in sensing and enacting emerging futures (Type II).

As marketers, we break the market into pieces ("segments") in order to identify and focus our attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.

Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing.

Great example of how visuals show relationships and get the mind's wheels to turning.

In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher.

This was a mediocre commercial band that, in the mid-80's, decided to sue the incredibly awesome, fun and mellow rap group De La Soul for pirating a sample of the Turtles' music and using it on a De La Soul track.

On one wall in the departure area of the Guatemala City Aeropuerto hang clocks displaying the time in California, New York, Paris, etc.

Recordings of blood flow in the brain indicate that when a person visualizes something such as walking through his neighborhood, blood flow increases dramatically in the visual cortex, in parts of the brain that are working hard.

The more artificial an object is, the more arbitrary the restrictions are on its movements, the simpler the rules governing the play, the more powerful a game seems to become.

Literacy depends on linear, sequential, abstract and reductionist ways of thinking - the same as hunting and killing.

Images of any kind proscribed in first culture to worship written words.

With that behind me, I'm reading David Sibbet's classic <i>I See What You Mean!</i> It's a workbook for learning to do group graphics.

I intend to incorporate visuals in my consulting engagements from now on.

1. Learning by Teaching: If you have to explain something to someone else, then you have already learned to explain it to yourself.

The Schizophrenia of Blogging

Timing. It's all about timing. I'm rattled that some time-cop ripped off an hour of my time early this morning by declaring that clocks be set ahead. What is this nonsense about? I don't work by the clock anyway. Geez.

Timing pervades the way we blog. In fact, blogging suffers from multiple personality disorder induced by timeframe. Some of us think short-term, others think long-term, and most of us do a crappy job of trying to keep a foot in both camps. Is your blog near-sighted or far-sighted?

Some bloggers record current events. Others collect information for reference. The first is like publishing a daily newspaper or keeping a journal. The second is akin to maintaining an online reference book or content management system. The two personalities are at odds with one another.

The Blog as Journal. If my purpose is maintaining snapshots in time of current events as they seemed when I wrote them, I'd never change an item after the date it was written. I agree this is the way the New York Times, the "newspaper of record," should behave.

The Blog as Reference Book. If my objective is to provide my current view on a variety of topics, including those I wrote about last year, I'll be going back in to change items that have become dated, to supplement old entries with new insight, and to correct errors when I find them. Otherwise, readers might confuse obsolete opinions that what my current take on things.

The Blog as Journal

Putting new items at the top is a great concept. You start with "What's new." This is especially good when blog-reading is episodic. The reverse-chron order makes it easy to catch up. This is the good news.

A downside is that most blogs scroll off into nowhere. At the end of the front page of the blog, there's a jarring change of format. Instead of continuing to scroll through entries, just tapping the ol' spacebar to see what's next, most blogs leave the reader with no place to go. There's not even an up-arrow labeled "Back to the top." This is analogous to reading a book and, at the end of the first chapter, instead of leading to the second chapter, you are confronted with the Index and have to figure out what comes next.

The last line on the first page of Internet Time Blog reads "More! Click for Page Two." Page 1 displays the dozen most recent entires, page 2 the next twenty entries, and page 3 the following thirty entries.

The Blog as Reference

Unlike the news of the day up top, fundamentals don't change often. You refine these concepts, restate them, and supplement them with examples. They're worthy of revisiting. In fact, they're my personal encyclopedia and I refer back to them frequently when developing new concepts.

I pigeon-hole this more lasting stuff into twenty topics. Examples are "Time", "How People Learn", and "First Principles." That last one has been evolving for decades. When something new grabs me, I may post it as a comment to the topic. Recently I added a quotation to the First Principles topic:

"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion." -- W.R. Inge

Every now and again, depending on the volatility of the topic, I harvest the best individual posts and insert them into the topic pages.

In addition to the topics, I categorize posts along similar lines, e.g. "Blogging", "Books", "Customer Care", "Collaboration", etc.

So?

Blogging is an immature form that has yet to evolve very far from its geeky roots. The structure of most blogs accommodates their writers more than their readers. It's time for bloggers to share their goals with their readers. Those golas should inform the way bloggers structure and maintain their blogs.

I'll show some examples in the continuation below.

P.S. These are some of my thoughts about public blogs. I'll take up confidential blogs in a subsequent post.

Here's the home page of Internet Time Group. I moved the Blog into prime position when timeliness started to become more important on the web than permanence. Readership has grown from 300 visitors a day to several thousand. Fresh content attracts interest.

My home page has three basic sections. Most of the time, the Blog is the only thing I touch; the other parts generate themselves. I often create new entries in wBloggar or EditPad because they're easier to use -- and less likely to crash and vaporize my input.

The last line on the first few pages invites the read to continue reading.

Topic pages summarize a score of more lasting reference subjects.

Some topics rarely change.

Others, like Articles, change at least once a month.

As with any Blog, this is a perpetual work in progress.

Posted by Jay Cross at 12:32 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

You asked for it...

Chernobyl

Here's a moving account of a woman's motorcycle tour of the abandoned area around Chernobyl. The Clue Train honesty of this story shines through. Only a few years ago, I would never have heard stories like these. Not only were government censors suppressing the news, but also a Russian motorcycle mama had no way to publish her observations.

I'm not a religious person, so my prayers don't mean a lot. Nonetheless, I pray that sharing our thoughts and images with one another leads to understanding, empathy, and friendship throughout the world.

This morning, when separating the e-wheat from the e-chaff in my mailbox, something compelled me to click open a mass mailing from ASTD. The first article, A Positive Approach to Performance Improvement, caught my eye.

Richard Gerson, the author, had been drawing on the same sources as I: Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology, Csikszentmihaly's Flow, and sports psychology. I lump Daivd Cooperrider's Appreciatve Inquiry, the positive reinforcement described in Don't Beat the Dog, and even Richard Eyre's Spiritual Serendipity into the same category. Build from the positive. Don't always seek "a balanced perspective." Accentuate the positive.

Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm, Living on the Fault Line, The Gorilla Game, etc.) exorts companies to focus on core strengths and hand off everything else (usually to someone who considers your leavings to be their core strength.) "Do what you're good at" and "Leverage your opportunities" are nearly synonymous.

Years ago an author I was listening to at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, had described dozens of ways we've screwed up the world. Someone in the audience asked him, given that his book was filled with doom and gloom, how could he be so sunny? How could he be optimistic?

He replied, "I'm an optimist because it works better."

That works for me.

Без перевода.

Blogs? RSS? Huh?

Yesterday I gave the opening presentation to fifty or sixty people online for Collaborative Learning 04. When I came to trends in social software, I conducted a poll:

Do you have your own blog?

1. Yes, I have a blog
2. No blog, but I read RSS
3. No blog, no RSS
4. Don't know what a blog is

Want to guess what the results were? Mind you, these are people who are into collaboration.

1. Yes, I have a blog -- 40%
2. No blog, no RSS -- 20%
3. Don't know what a blog is -- 40%

Blogophiles, we still have work to do. I may assemble another "what's it all about" tutorial this afternoon.

Why semantic mark-up

I'm slowly converting my blogs to XHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Content and format will exist independently of one another. This makes for rapid "reskinning" of the sites, readability on PDAs and phones, and leaner code. That's not enough to get me to unlearn old HTML habits. (I may need aversion therapy to program new code snippets into my fingertips.)

My real motivations for complying with web standards are:

1. Clean code. Some of the entries on this site still have mark-up from Netscape 1.1; there's probably some pre-Netscape Mosaic in there somewhere. I have tables nested in tables nested in tables. Lots of pages have the superfluous XML garbage that Word spews out. If you play web archeologist and dig down a few layers, you'll come upon "single-pixel gifs" for alignment and other anachronisms. This stuff takes too long to download. More importantly, it offends my sense of order.
2. Consistent presentation. Until reading Zeldman, I'd forgotten how much time we designers used to waste creating workarounds for oddball browser behavior. XHTML and CSS are a path out of this mess. In the continuation section, I'll show how different browsers render this page.
3. Spring cleaning. Yesterday's great ah-ha is today's commonplace. Some of my older writings appear prescient; many now seem naive. As long as I'm going to churn through old content, I plan to harvest the stuff of lasting value and dump the rest. Note the Research section to the right; that's where most of the good stuff will reside.

Internet Explorer renders the same code like this, squeezing the heading into an odd layout:

Mozilla screws up the text alignment in the right column:

Life's too short to use programming tricks to accommodate browser variations. Here's my Workflow Learning Institute page, which is coded in XHTML, as rendered by three different browsers. They are identical.

Opera:

Mozilla:

Internet Explorer:

Rant alert. It really, really, really gets my goat that Microsoft, having illegally crushed Netscape, has abandoned Internet Explorer. Opera and Mozilla are easier to use, faster, and are laden with cool features. By contrast, IE is truly lame: no resizing of text, no tabbed windows, and klutzy controls. Having cut off its competitor's air supply, Microsoft has no motivation to improve its product, save that of satisfying its customers. Customer satisfaction doesn't seem to matter to Redmond. Message to Bill & Steve: We have long memories for crap like this. /rant.

CSS, Semantic Mark-Up, and codes

CSS Smorgasbord II

CSS Smorgasbord I

A List Apart on CSS

webmonkey on CSS

Better Living Through XHTML

John Patrick on Blogs

John Patrick on Weblogs
Contagious Media
By Marcia Stepanek, CIO Insight
November 25, 2003 in eWeek

Blogs in business.

"John Patrick is president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM, where he worked for 34 years. During his IBM career, Patrick helped start IBM's leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and was senior marketing executive during the launch of the IBM ThinkPad. Starting in the early 1990s, Patrick dedicated his time to fostering Internet technologies. One of the leading Internet visionaries, Patrick is quoted frequently in the global media and speaks at dozens of conferences around the world."

Credible guy. Probably more credible than you, dear reader.

"Knowledge management wasn't overhyped," says Patrick, in an interview with CIO Insight Executive Editor Marcia Stepanek. "It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could."

So true. KM is like some cat-Lazarus who keeps arising from the dead over and over...

John Patrick: I think this blog phenomenon is one of those things that comes along every decade or so and gets completely underestimated by just about everybody. It's very much like what's going on with Wi-Fi now, and very much what happened with the Web ten years ago. Blogs are a whole new Internet channel, yet another example of how the Internet has made it possible for new ideas to come along and change the status quo. I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

Why is this a big deal for business?

There is no question in my mind that blogging is already beginning to reshape how information is created, published and shared. Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will enrich the quality of information available. Voices not necessarily heard before, thanks to limitations of money, access or hierarchy—you're not the CEO, you're just a guy with a big idea—now you can bridge those gaps.

I've been pushing the concept of blogging for almost as long as blogging has been around. My track-record at identifying the next big thing but failing to make a dime off of it goes back twenty years. I've been a raving champion of personal computing, online community, the net, the web, AOL before it was AOL, Cisco when you could count the staff on your toes, eCommerce, instant messaging in corporations, web cams, and more recently informal learning, workflow learning, contextual collaboration, and blogging.

It will morph into different formats and smart syndication will become prevalent, but trust me on this: blogs are going to be a driving force in business.

MT Errors

A third of the time I post something, I get an error on the outgoing ping, for example:

Ping 'http://ping.blo.gs/' failed: HTTP error: 500 read timeout

EdBloggers D-2

Ed Blogger

Saturday & Sunday, November 22 - 23, in San Francisco

Tragedy, Part 2

I got hit with another 8 Spam comments last night. All came from Romania:

Registered through: GoDaddy.com Domain Name: SUCCESS-BIZ-REPLICA.COM Created on: 04-Sep-03 Expires on: 04-Sep-04 Last Updated on: 16-Sep-03

Administrative Contact:
Dinca, Valerian radu_dinca@oltenia.ro
none
cartier rovine bloc A45 ap 4
Craiova, dj 1100
Romania
40251562493 Fax --

I may cut off comments until this crap stops. For the present, I've cut off HTML in postings.

Tragedy of the Web Commons

Damn

Last month a few bots posted Spam in the comments field of entries here at internettime.com. The content was childish graffiti, a string of porno URLs and a comment like "Nice blog". This minor vandalism offered no payback aside for ego-boo for some wacko street artist, so it did not proliferate.

Today my blogs were hit by more sophisticated Spam bots. The new bots parse text from an original post that might trick the unsuspecting reader to folllowing the link in the comment. For example,

World are evolving into the patterns of living systems. The meta-level learning that we are all engaged in is learning to work with network principles. Decision making and knowledge creation are not rational processes, but social processes.

This links to a "service" that offers to Spam 10,000,000 people for you every morning.

Here's another:

A new comment has been posted on your blog Internet Time Blog, on entry #614 (The Future of Knowledge).
http://www.internettime.com/blog/archives/000614.html

IP Address: 194.176.173.33
Name: Frieda Zonnenfeld
Email Address: swiss_rolex_replica@yahoo.com
URL: http://www.success-biz-replica.com

Comments:
Success people know the things they need to know to be successful. And when they need information, knowledge, or skills and talents that they don't possess, they find someone who does possess them.

This links to an ad for fake Rolex watches.

Now the vandals have an economic incentive to spew their garbage onto individual blogs. It matters not that it may take millions of messages to sell one fake Rolex if the sender pays nothing for the mayhem that ensues.

A call to arms

These sneaky automated comments have the power to stifle the blogging community. In a matter of days, every outpost in the blogosphere could be facing hundreds of spurious comments. Were this to happen, the give-and-take commentary that enables interaction among blogs would resemble my email: more noise than signal.

Blocking the Spamsters' URLs won't solve this. The garbage appearing on my blog appears to originate from some village in China. Surely the criminal who wrote the blog text-parser can find a way to spoof URLs.

I don't have an answer. If you do, leave a comment. Help sound the alarm.

Margaet Mead wrote, "Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever does."

I hope it's we who do the changing, not them.

Blogger.Com fallout

Dave Winer's BloggerCon event last weekend at Harvard Law School will make it into the blog-history books as a mnor Woodstock, a gathering of the tribes in self celebration. Webcasts. Essays.

Oliver Willis writes:

Blogs are great. They're wonderful, and they will Change Things. But we need to step back outside of the blog-to-blog echo chamber and look at how important this movement really is.

What seems to have happened is that the fundraising success of the Howard Dean campaign has become the blog equivalent of the Netscape IPO. That public offering opened the floodgates to thousands of unprofitable companies and created the stock market bubble that was great for some, but probably set the web industry back a few years after people realized it was not The Answer to all their problems. That cycle appears to be happening with blogs now. During the BloggerCon conference it would be easy to go home thinking that any problem of note in the world could be remedied by a simple addition of "blog" to it.
I'm not ready to drink the Kool-Aid just yet.

During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I'm not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I'm a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world - it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.

Again, it is quite similar to the web bubble. For a while when you were inside the industry (as I was) it would be easy to think: everybody is doing this. When the truth of the matter is that they weren't and they aren't. The vast majority of Americans are not online, and even those that are online only a small portion of them are reading blogs, and an even smaller amount are reading politically oriented blogs. That small percentage does tend to be quite influential (particularly if they're a part of the media) but it is our duty as bloggers to understand that we aren't exactly changing the world yet.

That came out in the campaign bloggers panel where people like Dave Winer hammered the candidates for not plugging the money they raised online back into the web. What we are forgetting is that the web has yet to elect anyone. The reason we have campaigns are that candidates meet and greet the people they want to vote for them, and those they can't meet they "see" in tv ads. The overwhelming majority of Americans will pick their next president between two men they see on television and not someone they saw on the web much less a blog. We have to keep perspective.

Blogs are transformative tools, they're doing amazing things and they are enabling wonderful advances. On a personal level, if it weren't for blogs I wouldn't have improved as a writer (debatable, I guess) and there is certainly no way little old me would have made it on the front page of the Boston Globe. That's great for me on a personal level, but it ain't changing the world.

Dave Winer writes of the Rule of Win-Win:

I started formulating a new rule, I call it The Rule of Win-Win, after listening to Chris Lydon's interview with David Weinberger. I realized that he and I share something important, we both believe in the power of links. And it's not just a philosophy of writing for the Web, it's also a philosophy of business and human relations. And it's elusive and hard to describe. And there are lots of people who don't subscribe to the rule. People who take but don't reciprocate. Somehow, intuitively, this is unweblike. Somehow David and myself have agreed to something, unknowingly, that not everyone else has agreed to. What we have agreed to, I think, is what I'm going to try to explain in this essay.

The Rule of Win-Win says that by choosing to participate in the Web, I can promote my own interests, but I must acknowledge the existence of others and their interests. I don't sacrifice the truth in furthering my cause. In fact, if you accept the Rule of Win-Win, the truth is your first cause, it comes before all others.

In a sense, if you belong to the Win-Win club, you're a sales rep for my stock. When I meet with someone whose feed I want, you get it too. So when I win, you win. When my stock goes up, so does yours. Our interests are aligned.

The purpose of the rule is to create trust and then build on it. I first wrote about this in Que Sera Sera, in 1996: "Nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity.

On The Rule of Links, Dave writes:

The New York Times, always controversial, says it's their policy is not to link, that their pub is self-contained and complete. This is total bullshit. While I love the Times, and have been reading it my whole life, I know that they're crazy over there. Can't fool me.

I wonder if this will become a trend for community building: attendees were invited to post their name, website, institution, and RSS feed, and most of them did. Talk about networking possibilities! Wow!

Blogroll for BloggerCon Last update: 10/9/2003; 12:14:15 PM Eastern.  A K M Adam Seabury-Western Theological Seminary  Aaron Fuegi  Aaron Schutzengel  Adam Curry United Recources of Jamby      Amanda  Amy Campbell Infoworks!      Amy Harmon New York Times  Amy Wohl Wohl Associates  Andrew Bayer  Andrew Grumet MIT  Aslam Karachiwala      Barbara Ganley Middlebury College  Ben Adida MIT      Ben Edelman Berkman Center for Internet & Society  Ben Williams None  Betsy Devine Disorganized Blogworld  Bhavesh Patel      Bill Koslosky, M.D.      Bill Wendel Real Estate Cafe / Voice Real Estate, Inc.  Biz Stone Wellesley College  bmo better radio  Bob Doyle CMS Review  Bob Stepno Other Journalism  Brendyn Alexander  Brian Weatherson Brown University  Britt Blaser Blaser and Company      Bruce Weinberg Bentley College  Bryan Bell KCSOS  Bryan Strawser Target Corporation      C.C. Chapman  Cameron Barrett Clark for President  Camilo Ramirez  Carl Robert Blesius Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg  Carol Dodson Ohio Resource for Mathematics, Science, and Reading      Catalina Laserna Harvard University      chlora      Chris Locke freelance author      Christophe Courchesne Harvard Law School  Christopher Lydon Berkman Center      Christy Gaitten  Craig Cline Seybold  Critt Jarvis