The XML feed for the new Internet Time Blog is:
I have had enough Comment Spam headaches. I am moving this site to Bloogger for a while.
Come see the new Internet Time Blog!
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.
High on my list of things that really tick me off are:
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.
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.
Here's a baker's dozen of interesting things. I offer them up in hopes that you'll reciprocate.
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!
Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.
This is what OPEN means.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| Amway | Smart Mobs |
| industry economy | information economy |
| top down | bottom-out |
| centralized | decentalized |
| command & control | emergent |
| competitive | cooperative | extractive | restorative |
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.
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."
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:
Other items:
I will miss Sunday's session, for I'm hopping a plane to attend Training Directors Forum in Phoenix.
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.
Life's Been Good (J. Walsh) I have a mansion forget the price They say I'm crazy but I have a good time My Maserati does 185 I'm making records my fans they can't wait Lucky I'm sane after all I've been through I go to parties sometimes until four They say I'm lazy but it takes all my time | I hadn't seen Ev and Jason since the party right after the announcement that Google was acquiring Blogger. Just reading about the Google IPO can make one giddy. I asked Jason if he'd bought his Maserati yet. No, he and Allison assured me that little had changed. They won't have to worry about funding their son's education, but they're still the same people. Ev seems the same as ever, too, still driven by creating cool stuff for his customers.
Google has wisely let the Blogger team make its own way. Most large companies would have screwed things up by now, but Google's too smart to stifle the Bloggers team with a heavy-handed approach. I'm off to see about switching back to Blogger. |
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.
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:
Photos follow.
Hello to my readers in China and thanks to Isaac Mao for translating the signal!
Today I bought a copy of Copernic Summarizer for $60. I expect it to pay for itself in half an hour.learning, jay cross, elearning, businessperson, managers, blogs, designing, community, technology, font, online, customization, div, networks.Summary:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
Want to guess what the results were? Mind you, these are people who are into collaboration.
Blogophiles, we still have work to do. I may assemble another "what's it all about" tutorial this afternoon.
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:
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.
John Patrick on Weblogs
Contagious Media
By Marcia Stepanek, CIO Insight
November 25, 2003 in eWeek
Blogs in business.
Credible guy. Probably more credible than you, dear reader.
So true. KM is like some cat-Lazarus who keeps arising from the dead over and over...
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.
A third of the time I post something, I get an error on the outgoing ping, for example:
I got hit with another 8 Spam comments last night. All came from Romania:
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.
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,
This links to a "service" that offers to Spam 10,000,000 people for you every morning.
Here's another:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
Huh. List truncated by Movable Type. I didn't realize entries have a built-in limit on how much text you can stuff into them. September 28, 2003Personality QuizWhich of these items does not belong?
¤ Netscape ¤ Dave Winer Hint: What would Dave do? September 13, 2003Nothing since July 19?I guess not everybody was born to blog.
August 31, 2003Tragedy of the uncommonsSome cyber-vandal has loosed a bot which posts the addresses of porno sites in the comments of blogs. This character hides behind a Yahoo.com address and an IP allotted to the Tianjin province of China. A little sleuthing led me to the same trash posting on a site in Germany and a travel site. His IP is 61.181.5.155. Openness is a beautiful aspect of the net. I hope we don't have to put up the cyber equivalent of bars on our windows to keep out the thugs.  Anyone have thoughts on how to deal with blog graffiti? 
August 30, 2003Read the feedsWhen I first heard people talking about syndication, my mind turned to criminals. G-Men. The Untouchables. The Syndicate. This is something else. On the web, syndication is a way to scan headlines and news stories selectively, and to see more at the push of a button if you are so inclined. Until recently, setting up syndicatation (RSS, for short) was funky enough to turn off non-geek citizens. These days you download and install a free file from the web, tell it what you want to look at, and it will keep you informed of new items, stories, and blog entries from that point on.
You've probably noticed those little Here's the main BlogExpress screen. It's like a simplified browser.
Here's how to subscribe to free content.
Bill Brandon on eLearningelearningpost Internet Time Blog Learning Circuits Blog Mark Oehlert Stephen DownesSelect one of your subscriptions. You can read what's there as you would in a browser. Click the green button up top to load the most recent items. Click the orange button when you've read them to clear out the "New" tags. You're in business! This ten-minute exercise will cut your browsing time in half, if not more. Not a blog person? Try these: August 17, 2003Blogs > newspapersBlackout!I read a lot of the New York Times' coverage of the largest blackout in our history but it lacks the impact of the photos and personal stories appearing in people's blogs.
John Wehr's photos made me feel like I was there. The Gothamist's photos appear worthy of framing!
August 13, 2003Spin-blogsIn today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd disses politicians who use blogs as PR tools rather than a means to communicate what they feel. John Kerry has given more grist to critics who label him aloof and insincere by assigning staff members to write his cheesy blog. (It's like trying to prove you're a sportsman by making an aide go fishing for you.)
Even former candidates are weighing in. Gary Hart, who began his blog in March, doesn't bother to read other digital diarists. "If you're James Joyce," he said slyly, "you don't read other authors." Now there's a man with a future in blogging. Imagine a W blog! It would be fantastical. ---------------- Via SEB, The day the blogging died. And the three men I admire most,
Phil Wolff, Mark Pilgrim, and Steve Yost Kept editing their final post The day the blogging died And they were singin' Bye bye wiki necho or pie Took my standard to a body But the body had died And the good ol' boys Drinking kool-aid and lies Singing this'll be the way blogging dies. Collaborative learning environments sourcebook is an interesting collection of advice on setting up your own community, including this pearl of wisdom:
August 10, 2003Circadian Blog Rhythms
Carpe diem.   Few things are mastered in a day. Achieving deep understanding of practically anything takes reflection. This requires looking back. Blogs have "archives," but most of them are by date, and that's little help when you're trying to tie together common themes. I found that I needed a personal knowledge management system. Nothing fancy -- just some blog pages that weren't going to scroll off into the ether. Personal Knowledge Management Periodically I harvest daily blog-thoughts that have staying power and incorporate them into the reference pages. (Daily thought: Maybe I should call them reflection pages.) I'm beginning to put this at the top as I do updates: This is an Internet Time Group reference page. The date above is merely a starting point. Periodically, I update this and similar pages with fresh opinions and resources.
This morning's update was the Metrics and ROI page. How do other bloggers deal with this? July 29, 2003Focused PerformanceDoing some research on business blogs this morning, I tripped over this site and intend to do a lot more exploring. This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes).
This great graphic caught my attention: July 26, 2003Blogging for Dummies IIThe first time out, the URL in this posting only worked in selected browsers. I've fixed the link and am now offering a white paper on the topic of business blogging as well. Sorry for the confusion.
CourrielInteroperability? Mais non. Not too many other countries have an equivalent of the Academie Francaise, which hands doen edicts on proper language use, and instead prefer to let language evolve naturally. Not the French. France's Culture Ministry recently announced that the word "e-mail" will henceforth be stricken from proper and official French. The word to use is "courriel", a contraction of "courrier electronique" which is in widespread use among the colonists in Quebec. There's a minor rebellious ripple propagating through the French online community over this. The situation makes you wonder how the French are supposed to order tacos and pizzas. (from Napster) July 25, 2003Blogs for Dummies
July 22, 2003Follow-up: Writing the Next Chapter of eLearningHere are some of the links I promised in today's webinar. Within 24 hours I'll post the presentation (with narration) as well. If you have questions, post them as a comment below and I'll answer them here. There's information on blogs here, although I also recommend you simply poke around on this blog and visit some of the others I showed:
Unlike many bloggers, I think it's okay to go back to add additional material. That's because I view blogs as nifty content management systems more than as diaries. For example, here's an excellent article on blogging from journalist/entrepreneur Jeff Jarvis. Request your copy of the eLearning Implementation & Action Plan Template here. The unexpurgated "director's cut" of Lance's and my book is here Jay's notes on Living on the Faultline (core vs. context) Thoughts on the nature of time Jay's white paper on Informal Learning. Information on Enterprise Application Integration and real-time learning is here and here. My thoughts on the parallels between networking and learning first appeared here. This is a work in progress. If you'd like to be notified of new developments in this and the other topics I track, sign up here. Sign up for:
July 20, 2003July 19, 2003Blog allureLast week Dave Winer asked me what tool I blogged with. "Movable Type, because I like the flexibility and the content management." He said I should use Manilla. I replied that all Manilla blogs looked alike to me. Dave claimed that was not at all true, that Manilla blogs are as varied in appearance at Movable Type's.This afternoon I mounted a minor side-by-side comparison. I took the first nine MT blogs listed on weblogs.com this afternoon. Because I wasn't getting a lot of Manilla hits, I entered "Manilla blog" into Google and took the first nine hits that came up there. I eliminated utility blogs and one-entry blogs. Which set of blogs do you find most varied?
Find out which is which on the next page. The Manilla blogs are on top, the MT blogs on the bottom.
July 13, 2003Emersonian blogging
Multitasking: I'm listening to the Lydon/Winer interview as I write this. I surfed over to Dave's site to grab the photo above. Just now I checked my email. While I was listening to Dave, I was reading an email from Dave. If you want, you can channel Dave through several orifices simultaneously.
Dave and Chris are talking about blogging and campaigning. Read my blog, you're reading me. People come to know Howard Dean without meeting him in person. Or thinking they know him because Madison Avenue has drummed a few gazillion ad-bites into their skulls. This broadens my speculation that learning = making good connections. A lucid blog adds another connection, one that is world-accessible 24/7.
So sayeth ur-blogger Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string." "There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us." "The mind is one. There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent." "Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss."  Lydon concludes, "The modern Emersonian is, in short, an ecstatic melancholic, an unquenchable optimist in a darkening world, aware that the big trick for grown-ups is to look unblinking at the torture and tyranny, the pandemic disease and progressive brutalization of people and the planet and know that is not the whole story and that this is no time to give up." Later that evening in Palo Alto...
June 24, 2003A new home!
June 17, 2003RevampingWhen you’re constantly fiddling with a site, as I do with this one, entropy creeps in. Patches upon patches obscure the underlying design. Things that should be quick fixes consume more and more time because you have to remember the workarounds, the funky naming conventions, and the non-standard elements that seemed right when put in place but look like a dog’s breakfast in the cold light of day. At the same time, I recognize that when you’ve got thousands of readers, design must evolve. Gradually. Designers with empahty and maturity, a group of which I aspire to be a member, don’t switch horses like Wired magazine in the early days. “Let’s see how hard we can make this to read. How about white type on a light violet background with 4-point type that slithers around the page? That should hold us til next month.” No, I vacillate between that gonzo-Jackson Pollock-Mark Rothko-Van Gogh wildness and logical Bauhaus tradeoffs like:
Symmetry……………………………………Asymmetry Regularity…………………………………….Irregularity Simplicity…………………………………….Complexity Unity…………………………………………..Fragmentation Economy…………………………………….Intricacy Understatement…………………………….Exaggeration Predictability…………………………………Spontaneity Activeness……………………………………Stasis Subtlety……………………………………….Boldness Neutrality…………………………………….Accent Transparency………………………………..Opacity Consistency…………………………………Variation Accuracy……………………………………..Distortion Flatness……………………………………….Depth Singularity…………………………………..Juxtaposition Sequentiality………………………………..Randomness Sharpness……………………………………Diffusion Repetition……………………………………Epicodicity I’m changing my role, and hence the role of the Internet Time Blog from encyclopedic knowledgebase to a platform for commentary, from library to pulpit, and from school to store. Let’s see if you notice any difference. If you have suggestions, let’s hear them. June 02, 2003Why edu-bloggingWeblogs as a transformational technology for higher education and academic research This is thought-provoking if you’re contemplating the interplay of blogs and learning.
Table 2. Command & Control vs. Emergent Organisations. ReferencesBarabási, Albert-László 2002, Linked: The New Science Cooperrider, David 1990, ?Positive Crutchfield, James 1994, ?Is Darley, Vince 1994, ?Emergent Goldstein, Jeffrey 1999, ?Emergence Hayes, Brian 2000a, ?Graph Hayes, Brian 2000b, ?Graph Holland, John H. 1995, Hidden Order, Reading, Mass: Holland, John H. 1998, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, Kauffman, Stuart 1996, At Home in the Universe: The Langton, Christopher G. 1986, ?Studying Artificial Life Lewin, Roger 1993, Complexity: Life on the Edge of Mihata, Kevin 1997, ?The Persistence of ?Emergence?? in Miller, George A. 1956, ?The Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle 1984, Order Out Reason, Peter 1994, ?Three Approaches to Participative Reason, Peter 1997, Revisioning Inquiry for Action: a Reynolds Craig W. 1987, ?Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Seel, Richard (2000), ?Complexity Sentell, Gerald 1998, Creating Change-Capable Cultures, Stacey, Ralph 1996, Complexity and Creativity in Waldrop, M. Mitchell 1993, Complexity: The Emerging Watkins, Jane Magruder and Mohr, Bernard J. 2001, White, Mark 1999, ?Adaptive Corporations? in Michael R. June 01, 2003Back on lineAfter being locked out of my own blogs for a week, I’m back again. Lord this has been frustrating. Why the blackout? I sell white papers and reports through Internet Time Press. The shop runs on the Interchange shopping cart, a freebie from Apache. Out of nowhere, the cart started crashing, giving the appearance that I was out of business. Geez. After three or four rounds of this, the ISP suggested that maybe the server my site was on was overloaded. Did I want to switch servers? Well, sure, switch ‘em, so long as it’s totally transparent to users. The tech’s reply: “It should be completely transparent.” Murphy’s Law broke out everywhere. I’m glad to be back on line, so I’ll stop kvetching for a while. April 22, 2003Good-bye, Blogger
What’s New?Friday, April 18, 2003 The Dano Rollout Plan consists of three phases. Starting today, select users will be able to create a Dano blog. Current BloggerPro users will have Pro features enabled in their Dano blogs. The next phase, to start in a week to ten days, will allow users to migrate their existing blogs over to Dano. Finally, in about a month’s time, all blogs will be transitioned to Dano. This includes the blogs, their posts and templates. For more information on everything Dano, please see the FAQ. February 20, 2003Blogger Behind the FirewallDave Winer weighs in on the Blogger deal. His take on the rationale is exactly like mine:
I continue to believe that blogs will be important in knowledge management, learning, higher ed, and schools -- not to mention sort of a "people's journalism" that is taking hold. Even with the backing of Google, blogs aren't going to take off behind the firewall without a good nudge. Most of the populace isn't expressive. It takes motivation to get them to share. Yesterday Sam Shmikler and I were talking about how to make eLearning successful. Sam says you must have incentive. A program he developed for (then) NationsBank awarded frequent flier miles for completing eLearning. In short order, people were bailing out of instructor-led workshops to get those miles. February 04, 2003Standards? You want standards?Read Marc Canter's Intro to Open Standards Architecture. We can use what we've already got to go from here: The how and the what are: and the final result is This ties in with Jon Udell's recent piece Converging on Identity. Take a look at his identity-centric diagram. Jon notes:
This all gets back to Jay's Law of the Net: Everything's connected. January 31, 2003LinksThis is a new meme in blogging: a persistent page. I plan to keep adding links on this page, sort of a catch-all. Also, it will soon be joined by some semi-permanent "living" pages of reference material. Life comes in more than last-in/first-out day-by-day entries.
ERCIM, a quarterly journal in support of the European Community in Information Technology. Pan European. Recent issues have covered Semantic Web, eGovernment, Ambient Intelligence, HCI, and robotics. The current issue is about Imbedded Systems. January 12, 2003Enterprise bloggingINFOWORLD By Cathleen Moore While many freeware vendors also offer fee-based software and services for corporate users, a newer crop of vendors is stepping up to extend Weblogs to specific business processes such as corporate intelligence gathering and market research. These enterprise-specific blogs from companies including Traction Software, Tech Dirt, and Trellix use the same core user-friendly Web publishing approach with added features to regulate access control and security and to bolster functions such as search. Traction Software's TeamPage Enterprise Weblog software includes a permissioning structure that moderates access to content, rich search capabilities, archives, and bidirectional linking to show relationships between ideas. "Moreover, Weblogs can be used as a way to augment traditional enterprise collaboration tools that provide file-level document management, whiteboards, e-mail, and online meeting spaces, Simonson said. Minneapolis, Minn.-based software developer Notiva uses Traction Weblog software for a variety of efforts, such as project management, competitive intelligence, intranet search, and knowledge management, according to Tim Dawson, lead technical architect at Notiva. Meanwhile, Foster City, Calif.-based Techdirt offers outsourced competitive intelligence services delivered via its Weblog software, including searching, aggregation, and artificial intelligence components. A blog is a good delivery format for corporate intelligence data because "it summarizes important points and puts the information into a system that archives it as well," said Mike Masnick, president of Techdirt. January 03, 2003The bloghome pageLast night I combined Internet Time Group's homepage and daily blog into one. You are reading the blog; the homepage content is in the column on the left. For years, I've ranted about the growing importance of time. It no longer makes sense to hide my most timely material down a level in the site.  This set-up will be buggy for a few days. Please note any glitches in the comments to this post. January 01, 2003Ch-ch-changes2003! Amazing, isn't it? One advantage of sitting at the dashboard of one's organization is the ability to steer things however you want, whenever you want. The "Just Jay" category on this blog, former home of tangential blogposts, sick jokes, and whatever catches my eye, has moved to www.jaycross.com. In line with my belief that timliness is ever more important in our accelerating world, you'll see that I've spliced the Just Jay blog into my personal home page.  I may well do the same with the Internet Time Group home page. Any thoughts on that? Shouldn't the freshesh news appear on the front page? 1/1/2003 "[...] If you write everyday, your writing improves, your thinking improves."
The training wheels are about to come off. Make no mistake, Television is only going to get bigger and stronger. It's audience will grown perpendicular to world population. Yes Virginia, a sucker is born every minute. And while weblogging won't change the nature of the forces that propell the tube, it will shift some of the money flow. The first flow has started, its for the infrastructure and tools. Next we figure out our [renewed] values. Placing a value on anything attracts money. I personally don't believe you can place a value on 'content'. No mass medium does, value there is based on access and scarcity. The only asset we all own and value is time. Blogs are closely related to time. They span time, archive over time and take time to write and read. Time is a big deal. Here's another fellow who is doing something similar, merging blog and homepage. Adam Curry has something called RSS BoxViewer that appears to let one put chunks of syndicated material wherever you plop in some HTML. Ben Hammersley.com - Content Syndication with RSS I am warming up to this concept of blog+homepage. Just spiffed up the look & feel of jaycross.com. I will also have reference pages that are blogged. December 14, 2002If everybody had an ocean...If everybody had an ocean  If Google's this important to you as well, keeping up with new directions at Google is part of learning to learn. Google never sleeps, so my advice is to sharpen your Google skills every six months or so. Not that skill-building led me back to Google today; I was there because Google's fun to explore.
And found Google Viewer. This new service converts your search results into slide show format. I put in "eLearning" and watched the first twenty pages go by, discovering three sources I had never visited before. Seeing the pages provides such a powerful snapshot compared to the standard text listing that I plan to visit this one over and over. Hmmm. I wonder if I can feed Google Viewer with a script to make it my site's default entry into Google. Viewer is on the page for Google Labs. I couldn't resist leaving a note for the development team:
GoogleViewer opens new doors of perception for visual thinkers. I'm a visual learning fanatic, disappointed that our text-oriented education and training systems retard the progress of most right-brained people. I predict GoogleViewer will be wildly successful. The main Google interface is so spartan that it's easy to overlook their ever-expanding services & tools page. The same goes for the list of features. As the year comes to a close, check out the Google Timeline. P.S. Google WebQuotes led me to this description of my own site: eLearning at the Speed of Internet Time.  I must do this more often. I entered links:www.internettime.com for a little ego-boo and came across this review:
There's a new blog in town
Learning Circuits? It's ASTD's zine, a stream of online articles on eLearning and related topics. Learning Circuits is on my personal short-list of sources to keep up with. We're recruited a hearty band of thought leaders and contrarians to speak their minds on the blog: George Siemens, Clark Quinn, Bill Horton, Harvi Singh, Jane Knight, Julie Witges Schlack, Lance Dublin, Peter Isackson, Richard Clak, Sam Adkins, and Scott Newman. If you'd like to join the throng, show us your stuff with some incisive comments -- and then drop me a line. November 22, 2002Picture outageDon't tell me. I already know. Lots of images just disappeared from this blog. Other crazy stuff is going on, too. It's related to my changing ISPs. Expect random-fu for the next couple of days. November 18, 2002First entry on Meta-Time.comAs part of my move from www.internettime.com at Interland (which has outgrown its ability to serve its customers) to www.meta-time.com at AssortedInternet, I'm rebuilding my blogs. This is a test entry. November 15, 2002Knowledge blogs are toughev reports that rick klau has written up a great piece detailing his exerience with rolling out a klog pilot at work and it's a mixed bag: "At the end of our first month, it's not a slam dunk. To be successful long-term, we will need to expand the number of people with access to Radio as an authoring tool. We will need to define our objectives - with more specificity than simply identifying how we can improve communications. But this was a helpful start - and a good first step to better understanding how weblogs might make us smarter." Some lessons I learned from this experiment:Just telling people "things will be better" when they don't know that there's a problem is tricky. As mentioned above, weblogs are many things to many people. In our pilot, we started out by simply saying we wanted to see if people found them useful. In other words - we weren't trying to solve a problem.
Reward participation. A number of people stated that they had trouble working blogging into their daily routine - that they had a number of other priorities competing for their time. Not surprisingly, they tended to gravitate to things for which they received recognition. A successful deployment of a k-log will need effective rewards to help reinforce the desirability of participation.
Ensure senior participation. I tend to believe that grass-roots KM is the most difficult to achieve. When a program like this is supported from the top down, people are more likely going to appreciate the importance of the project - and appreciate the connection between the project and the company's overall success. If we are to increase the k-log's success, we will need to involve more of the senior management team. i've had similar experiences in my more limited attempts to evangelize blogging in a work environment. it's a real eye-opener that will level-set any delusions that blogging will revolutionize knowledge sharing in organizations. it takes alot of persistance and i heartily "second" his recommendations. while rick gives his own co-workers the benefit of the doubt, in many ways, the lessons are no different that those learned in more traditional knowledge management arenas. you can lower the barriers to entry to near-zero and find that most people simply don't want to share for all the usual mundane, institutionalized reasons. as rick says, you "must have a problem to solve", "reward participation", "define what you're looking for" and "ensure senior participation". and that's just for starters. otherwise it's blank stares and business-as-usual. October 26, 2002September 28, 2002Last week's trafficWebtrends reports the following traffic at www.internettime.com Sunday through Friday of last week:
3,836 visited once 944 visited more than once More people visited www.internettime.com than attended Online Learning. (Not that they spent as much time here.) A new first: This blog was the most popular page on the site, just barely edging out the eLearning Jump Page. This week's numbers are skewed because things are shifting to a new host. September 19, 2002Panel session at UC Berekely School of JournalismTuesday evening I ambled down the hill to the Berkeley campus to attend Weblogs: Challenging Mass Media and Society, a discussion among a veritable who's who of blogdom -- Rebecca Blood, Meg Hourihan, Scott Rosenberg, Dan Gilmour, and J D Lasica. As you'd figure, this event has been blogged by JD and Radio Free Blogostan, and undoubtedly elsewhere. Altamont? That’s what the GSJ was compared to when it announced a blog course. The rebels complained about being co-opted by the establishment.
Meg: The same reaction came up when we brought out Blogger. People asked why folks shouldn’t do this themselves. J.D.: Fear among bloggers that journalism represents the mass media invading their turf. How does this impact journalism?
J.D.: Readers too often feel out of it; blogs create participatory journalism. * * * Reporters need to do their own weblogs. Increases the reporter’s credibility. * * * Good reporting tool for reporters. Scott: Journalists blogging? Well, they’re very busy people. (Dan: The beast must be fed.) It’s a format, not a movement. Whither editing? One of the attractions of blogging is the individualistic “nobody tells me what to do.” Journalism holds to standards of fairness and accuracy; more than one person’s eyes see the copy. Rebecca: What standards apply to a journal’s blog? Personal blogs are lax on standards. Dan posts directly but if he has the slightest doubt, he runs it by his editor first. “I don’t lose standards just because it’s going online.” His blog is less formal. Instead of three columns, Dan now does two – plus a column of blog entries. The normal publication dumps printed info on the web; the Merc is doing it the other way. Are readers your editors?
Meg: A weblog is almost never done. A newspaper story is more a complete package. Rebecca: You don’t have to do something as a performance piece to express your personality. Is this just a fad?
Rebecca: Part of the reason people have weblogs now is because they can. If Pyra had brought out e-zine software, there would be lots of zines now. Journalism requires standards and primary sources, and 99.9% of the blogs don’t fit my definition of journalism. Dan: I’m not so sure. Blogs are part of the process that adds up to journalism. We think of the model of mass-media, 20th century journalism, but something’s going on. Dave Farber’s interesting people mail list is journalism. Matt Drudge is not my kind of journalist but he is a journalist nonetheless. “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” says the old editor. Journalism is changes from the top down and the bottom up. J.D.: There’s now room for amateur journalists. Notable quotes:
Journalism = verification of what I read in the blogs Blogdex…the pointers are very interesting. The storytellers may have the most interest. The reporters want to know what the people are thinking. Echo chambers. Initially it was for publicity; spreading the meme. Stuff I just happen to like. Are we in danger of group-think? Weblogs' goal is to send people away, expecting that they will come back. The Wall St Journal wants you to stay, not clicking anything but the ads. Bloggers don't track readers.... Rise of the individual expert who does something so well. Rusty foster and kuro5hin. In depth essays. Community rallies to fix what’s broken. Like a public writing workshop. Dan: The web as a read/write medium is only beginning, unlike what Hollywood would like, a read-only world. The New RulesI should be focusing on finishing the presentation I will be delivering four days from now, but some ideas are nagging me to be expressed and I'm not that good at arguing my brain out of such notions. Several recent memes are influencing the way I conceptualize my website and my professional direction. The notion of object orientation has me pondering what size unit is appropriate for my newly designed website. Also, the separation of form and substance, thanks to stylesheets, is liberating. And using a search engine instead of a hierarchy or indexes adds flexibility, too. The title of David Weinberger's book about the web, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, describes the blueprint for the new internettime.com. In tmie, half the site will be Easter eggs one trips over accidentally. Nothing is ever finished. I used to complete a page or a white paper or a chapter and figure that is was "done." No longer. There's always a new perspective. And, since everything seems to be connected to everything else, things are always in flux. This is just as well, since people (including your author) engage with unfinished works but are bored when everything is over. Hell, they may have something to add; hence the need for two-way authoring. I like the way Movable Type encourages me to come back to add on to items I'd posted a while back. Time is accelerating and is more important than it used to be. When I mentioned this to a management consultant friend, he asked, "Do you have any proof of that?" My response was, "Can't you feel it?" For the last dozen years, I've been drawn to the study of time, without explanation, like the moth to the flame. (I can identify with the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who was obsessed with Devil's Tower.) This notion that relentless time is moving ahead is goading me to shift over to the new internettime.com before I normally would have. It is not finished. It's half-baked. But then, it never will be finished. And I have experiments I want to conduct on the web and cannot afford the time to keep two sites up to date. Finally, I'm reconceptualizing the role of the site itself. At first, we positioned ourselves as an authority on eLearning. When we'd figure something out, we'd clean it up and present it on the site. The new role is inquirer. We invite people to look over our shoulder as we explore how the world works and how to make it better. The inquiry leads outside of our familiar domains but we have the courage (or is it chutzpah?) to boldly go out on that thin ice. Psychology? Cog-sci? Design? Socio-biology? The new science? Entropy? Chaos? No problem. September 02, 2002Jerry MichalskiDoc's blog tipped me off that Jerry Michalski is writing a blog, Sociate. As you'd expect, it's though-provoking, to wit: The Law of Convenience is simple.
Apply this to blogs. Better to provide a blend that lets readers choose how they'll take part.
I love Weblogs and am starting one here, but they have two weaknesses that I would like to overcome.
First, Weblogs offer only one distribution model: People have to come read your blog at its Web address. Why can't people read each entry as it is posted, if they would like to, as they can with e-mailed newsletters? It is somehow strange that Dave Winer's Radio Userland Weblogging software doesn't allow its users to do what Dave does every day with Scripting News, which is post to his broadcast list and his Weblog. I'm creating two lists for this one Weblog. The first list, Sociate, is a broadcast list for people who want to see new items quickly, but don't want the e-mail traffic of a discussion list; the second, Sociate-Talk, includes all the outbound posts of the first list, but is meant for people interested in the discussion. I just subscribed to the Sociate list to see what it feels like. Here's the second weakness: Weblogs offer little context. Like articles and stories in more official news sources such as newspapers, radio and TV, blog entries flow past, one after the other, slipping off into archives.
So I will harvest the best items and set them into a more permanent context, using several tools. The obvious method is to collect similar items into various categories and post them on this Website, which I will do. But Web pages aren't that expressive, so I will also use two more interesting tools: a wiki and my Brain. Internet Time will be harvesting but not a brain and certaining not a wiki. Maintaining one personal database is about all I feel I can spare time for. August 31, 2002Usability - HERE!My blogs in the past (for example, Research on Time), followed the casual format characteristic of Internet Time. Large font, lots of white space, colorful. This new blog is a standard template with only minor modifications. The ideal is probably some middle ground. Please comment. What features or formats would make the Internet Time Blog better for you? What should I change and what should I keep? Merci. August 29, 2002DarwinismDarwin magazine says that "blogs are threatening to take over the world! There are a reported 500,000 blogs out there now, and more are on the way! Tell your friends! We will be zapped into the blogosphere—it’s inevitable!" About time. I started blogging in April 2000. Darwin continues that, "Some people saw this coming, of course—the nut-jobs that no one listens to." Fortune magazine? Newsweek? The Wall Street Journal? I've got to write another article on blogging because there's so much material piling up out there. This is part of the future of KM. Jon Udell says, "I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point I became an extreme anti-extremist. Or maybe the way to say it is that I became hyper-empathic: I couldn't avoid seeing issues from every point of view." Me, too, Jon. August 28, 2002Ray OzzieIf you've read my stuff during the past couple of years, you know I'm a big fan of blogs. But Ray Ozzie, smart cookie that he is, has blown past fandom into the realm of mania. Today he blogs:
Uh-huh. What is Ray smoking? Experiencing MovableTypeChanging from Blogger to MovableType is a little like trading up from a Honda to a Lexus. The new gadgets are fun to play with but confusing at first. You need to learn new routines.
Imports into this blogI've just imported most of my half dozen public blogs into this one MovableType blog. Unfortunately, some of the older entries didn't make it. I've retained the Blogger originals and will need to link back to them. Also, apparently some graphics got into my archives folder and were wiped out; these may be in the \images folder, too. I'll be a few days messing with the formats to make this look right. HEY, YOU! August 27, 2002First MovableType entryThis is entry #1 for a new blog. It will consolidate entries from my Blogger blogs on learning, time, visualization, books, and just jay. A reader will be able to read everything within a Category or everything from all Categories. Readers will also be able to enter comments. Less useful immediately, but perhaps the most important items long term, Moveable Type is a content management system. Its content can be syndicated. August 18, 2002This blog is moving here.This blog is moving here. Now you'll be able to make comments. In time, it will be easier to find things. |
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Blogs generally cover what's happening now or what happened in the past few days. Stream of consciousness. They're diaries, although professional as well as personal diaries. Diary, dia, daily.
I've set up a dozen reference pages on my blog. For instance, I've got pages dedicated to Aritlces, Community, Conferences, Focus on core, Glossary, Hot Stuff, How People Learn, Implementing eLearning, Knowledge Management, etc.
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I just left my ISP of the past six months after a series of crashes, outages, and other frustrations. Friday night was the final straw. I spent a few hours scouring the net for an alternative provider. I needed an ISP that offered 500 MB of online storage and sufficient tools to run an ecommerce operation. Saturday I signed up with 
»Students today: Cooperative and self-determined«
Good-bye, Blogger. Say hello to 
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