mowabb: meta-blogging

Will Blogs Improve the World?

Hello. If you're visiting here through Dave Winer's link to David Watson's response to one of my questions: Hi, and welcome. Please check out Illusions of Freedom, part 1, the first half of an investigative paper I recently completed on the political efficacy of blogs. The paper generally argues that blogs will not make much difference to the real world, but I have to say that I'm still highly ambivalent about that, and I hope I'm wrong. At any rate, this first half is just the introduction and a section talking about what blogs are and what they do -- that's what might be interesting. If anyone is interested, I'll clean up the second (and I'm sure more controversial) half and post it soon, as well.

Not A Whore

I'm not being a very good blogwhore, but I'm linking to Photojunkie, as requested, so maybe someday I can be a whore, too.

Moving from Radio to MT

David Watson has posted a helpful reply to my question of how he moved his posts from Radio to Movable Type. Thanks David! Now I just have to find the time to try out those scripts. I wonder if the recent MT upgrade to using SQL databases will change anything?

Google Search Macro For Radio

I just tried out this macro that automatically puts the top 10 Google search results at the end of every post, based on a search for the post's title. It's neat, but perhaps a little excessive. Plus, to be really useful you'd have to concentrate on making your titles informative and on-topic, and what fun is that? However, posts should now say what category they were posted to, for what it's worth.

Blogs to Teach Writing

Scripting News pointed to this academic who blogs. She gives several good pedagogical reasons for using blogs to teach writing. Some of these I've considered, others are fresh ideas for me. I'll be teaching a summer class beginning next week; between now and then I'll give more thought to how I might use blogs to teach "business and technical writing," but at this point I'm still thinking it might be more trouble than it's worth. (Battery dying, must run...)

Elementary, Thanks to Watson!

David Watson pointed me to this page with instructions for adding a comment count to your comment links in Radio. I've been trying to figure this out for some time -- thanks David! If you use Radio and you see people with cool features on their pages that you'd like to implement in your own blog, check this list, which appears to be a central location for all of Dave Winer's new Radio features announcements. I'm still contemplating a move to Moveable Type, but I dunno... If Radio would send me email every time someone made a comment about a post, I might be even less likely to switch. Does anyone know how to make Radio do that?

Morning Links

Good morning. For those of you who might be finding this site via Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian (thanks for the link) or from various Weblog Neighborhood lists (thanks to Adam Wendt for the subscription) -- welcome! And speaking of the neighborhood, the most recent harvest for there is no spoon makes me wonder what it all means. I look forward to hearing more about what we might do with these lists. Meanwhile, a few quick links/comments from the aggregator: I haven't had a chance to fully read The Rise of the Creative Class, but it looks like a good way to help decide where you'd like to move in the next few years. Boston beckons. Chris Nelson offers some interesting comments about the inherent bias of weblogs. But doesn't this assume it's possible for some medium to communicate without bias? If such a medium exists, I've never heard of it. As far as I'm concerned, one of the major problems with traditional media is that it pretends to be "objective" and unbiased when it is inherently anything but. In this sense, blogs seem a step in the right direction bececause they don't pretend to be what they're obviously not (at least in this regard). Mac Net Journal thinks this is a good way to make the RIAA mad: Turn Your LPs or Cassettes into CDs. I've been wanting to do this for some time, which is why I bought Toast Titanium. (Now carbonized for OS X.) Toast's CD Spin Doctor is supposed to digitize tapes and LPs, plus Toast comes with the required Y-audio cable to hook your Mac to your analog audio equipment. However, the MacWorld article mentions several other software options that might be worth a look.

Home Improvement?

Testing Radio's Weblog Neighborhood feature -- virtual home improvement.

Wallace Wallace Everywhere

Check out Eschaton, a lefty blog named after one of the minor subplots in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Great book, good blog. [via Altercation]

Secrets, Lies, and Speculation
This weblog gets a few hits once in a while, and a few weeks ago it got quite a lot of traffic, mostly focused on the subject of backlinks. However, none of the traffic lasts, and it has never translated into what appear to be "regular" readers (unless people are subscribing to the RSS feed, in which case I wouldn't know they were reading, right?). At any rate, I've long suspected that I won't get a lot of readers so long as I continue to express sentiments like "McKinney's Prescience". These are not popular positions these days, and I'm guessing that people who drift across these pages and see such ideas are likely to dismiss "there is no spoon" as the rantings of a mad conspiracy theorist. Why would anyone want to read that? Why, indeed. For the past few months one of my goals as a "blogger" has been to provide another outlet for different ways of thinking, perspectives that challenge the prevailing discourse and the mainstream media. In addition, I've assumed that if this goal makes me sound like a crackpot, so be it. However, today, after reading David Corn's The September 11 X-Files, I've realized I'm probably just shooting myself in my own foot if people dismiss me as a crack-headed conspiracy theorist. Corn's article details -- and, to a degree, debunks -- a few of the more popular conspiracy theories surrounding 9-11, including:
George W. Bush did it. The Mossad did it. The CIA did it. Or they purposely did not thwart the assault--either to have an excuse for war, to increase the military budget or to replace the Taliban with a government sympathetic to the West and the oil industry. The theories claim that secret agendas either caused the attacks or drove the post-9/11 response, and these dark accounts have found an audience of passionate devotees.
While I haven't really followed any of these conspiracy theories closely enough to assess their validity (I'm not even sure what "the Mossad" is), I see them as united by an underlying "theory" for which there really is a lot of evidence, namely: Bush and Co. (and corporate America, generally) cares very little about anything other than business, money, and reducing all barriers that stand in the way of the wealthiest Americans to continue amassing huge quantities of wealth. Bush and Co's policies comprise a massive body of evidence that this is true. From the administration's refusal to support environmental protections like the Kyoto Treaty, to the extreme haste with which it moves to eliminate worker-friendly measures like the ergonomics laws that would have held employers responsible for repetitive stress and other on-the-job injuries, to its attempts to "reform" welfare to eliminate assistance for the most needy in our country -- I could go on, but the point is: Bush and Co. wears its priorities on its sleeve, yet it constantly says things like "we care about the environment" and "we really want to help the poor people in this country." In other words, Bush and Co. lies as a matter of policy, so why should anyone believe what it's saying about 9-11? Nevertheless, Corn's conclusions have caused me to rethink my strategies for getting my readers to think about what I see as the contradictions between what Bush and Co. says and what it does. Corn concludes that conspiracy theories often distract from the truth, which is often bad enough:
One problem with conspiracy theorizing is that it can distract from the true and (sometimes mundane) misdeeds and mistakes of government. But when the government is reluctant to probe its own errors, it opens the door wider for those who would turn anomalies into theories or spin curious fact--or speculation--into outlandish explanation. Not that all who do so need much encouragement. September 11 was so traumatic, so large, that there will always be people who look to color it--or exploit it--by adding more drama and intrigue, who seek to discern hidden meanings, who desire to make more sense of the awful act. And there will be people who want to believe them.
Corn is right: the truth -- whatever it turns out to be -- is bad enough, and getting all worked up over conspiracy theories does less good than serious and meaningful consideration of ways to improve the world we find ourselves in today. So my own conclusion is that I'll continue to follow and comment upon the issues that seem important, and to thank people like McKinney for having the courage to voice unpopular opinions. However, I'll try to clearly separate my conspiracy theorizing (which really can be quite fun -- as an imaginative exercise) from the things that can be proven and which therefore matter more.

Rocking Politics
Although he's never been hugely popular here in the U.S., I really do think Billy Bragg is one of the greatest songwriters of the last 20 years. Most people know him from his collaboration with Wilco on the Woody Guthrie archive material that comprised the "Mermaid Avenue" volumes, but Bragg put out about a dozen discs on his own before that. The Nation is currently running a terrific interview with Bragg in which he comments on global justice and why the AFL-CIO should sponsor free rock concerts (kind of a no-brainer, really; unfortunately, labor leaders sometimes act as if they had no brains -- only sometimes, ok?). Another great bit:
We do have a strong tradition on the left, and one of the things we have to gain from the demise of the Stalinism of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall is that we have an opportunity to create a leftist idea outside the shadow of totalitarianism.
What a great way to see the world. Speaking of which, it was nice to see this argument for peace make DayPop recently (thanks to Scripting News -- Dave Winer has power in the blog community!) along with the Amnesty International 2002 Annual Report. Is blogdom taking a left turn here, or are these just being used as giant targets for the warbloggers to shoot down?

Random Referral
Radio's minimalist referral log says I got a hit from keanuvision, which is a cool site about Keanu Reeves, "The Matrix," and related subjects, but I can't for the life of me find anywhere they mention my site. Oh well. For my money, the lack of information available to bloggers about who is looking at their pages is one of the main things currently limiting the growth, influence, and value of blogs. All the talk about including links to your RSS feed in the HTML of your blog is a good start. See Scripting News over the past week for links to several other ideas of increasing communication and building blog communities, including Beyond Backlinking by Sam Ruby, John Udel's Byte article on RSS aggregators, and ThinkBlank on meta-linking.

Sci-Fi Resources
Sam Gentile's Science Fiction page is a great sci-fi blog with a bit of an update on the "Matrix" sequels. Gentile's list of Must Have Science Fiction Classics is also worth a look. I haven't read most of them, so someday when I'm not neck-deep in "literary modernism" and the so-called "Southern renaissance" (my current project) I'll have a lot of good reading to do.

Can't Resist

NEW YORK - May 21 - A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.
See CommonDreams.org.

Bush and the Dark Side
Will Leshner picks up on the connections between Bush's foreign policy and "Attack of the Clones," similar to what I mentioned yesterday. Speaking of which, check out the of The Nation. It also links to the Nichols' piece about Aaron McGruder, which I also mentioned yesterday. (Leshner is the creator of Radio Poster and he says a new version should be out shortly. I can't wait!)

A Better Aggregator
How many times do you see stories in your Radio News Aggregator that you'd like to be able to save for later? For me, these are usually things that I'd really like to read and/or think about a bit before I post something about them. Yet often when I'm running through the pile-up in the aggregator I'm in a hurry, just trying to thin things out. So wouldn't it be great if there was a second check box that would allow you to "save for later"? Those stories would go to a "saved" page completely separate from your aggregator page so you wouldn't have to keep checking them off time and time again. Wouldn't that be great?

Great Strip
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The Boondocks is the best comic strip around these days. Those of you who think the media is not doing a very good job these days (that would be lots of people with blogs, I imagine) should check out Sunday's strip -- good stuff. For more: John Nichols did a great piece about "The Boondocks" and Aaron McGruder (the strip's author). McGruder has been doing a lot of strips about "Attack of the Clones" recently -- too many, I was thinking. But that buildup began to pay off yesterday and today. Huey finally saw the movie and... well... It never ceases to amaze me how truth so regularly is stranger than fiction... ;-)

Imagineering Example II
Global Justice supporters have created a sort of example of Imagineering (see previous post) with this site, which makes you think that the WTO is admitting it's responsible for a lot of human and ecological suffering. Of course, the page is a spoof, and I'm not sure whether the fact that it's so hard to tell it's a spoof makes it a more successful example of Imagineering, or less. To be fully successful, it seems it would need to clearly tell readers that this is the truth that the WTO refuses to admit, followed by pointers to what readers can do if they would like to see the WTO actually admit these things. In other words, I wonder if good imagineering requires that you:
reveal the illusion as illusion -- a dream we wish were true, yet still a dream -- and,

tell people how to make the dream a reality.
Either way, it certainly seems to me that many bloggers are already Imagineers, in various ways. Whenever you find a "news" article and tell your readers what that article is leaving out or reveal the motives behind its spin, you're helping your readers see the world a different way. You're also giving an example of how "news" could be "reported" differently in order to, possibly, become more useful.

Imagineering the Web
If you're still not sure what all this copyright, intellectual property, Napster-related hubbub is all about, just ask Doc. He seems to be a BigMedia ventriloquist. Here's what BigMedia is saying to Congress (according to Doc ):
The Web is a content distribution system that needs to be protected by digital rights management hardware and software, through every cog in every conveyor belt that runs from producer to consumer. The only beings that matter are companies. The Web was a nice experiment, but now it's time to get down to business and extend the world's supply-controlled malls and theaters into every consumer's home, car, PC and Walkman.
That's so true. Remember, the above quote is not literally what BigMedia has said to Congress, but it more accurately reflects what BigMedia means when it says other things. In a way, Doc's little exercise in ventriloquism is sort of the inverse of what something called the "Co-Intelligence Institute" (CII) refers to as "Imagineering" (scroll down to Item 6). CII explains:
Imagineering to me embraces any use of the imagination to actually create (or try to create) the imagined reality. A supreme example is The Monkeywrench Gang, a novel which provided the story out of which Earth First! arose, born of those who decided to live out the story of sabotaging billboards and earth moving equipment. Walden Two and The Turner Diaries are other imagineering stories which generated real activities. In 1988 I did a participatory imagineering experiment at a Green Gathering: I created a small journal called The Ecotopian Grapevine Gazette, which contained news articles about neat things that hadn't happened yet, but which we wanted to have happen, written AS IF they had happened. Then, at the end of each article, I put a contact name around whom people could gather who wanted to make that story a reality.
Thus, as an "Imagineer" you write things that aren't actually true, but which you want to be true. What Doc has done is write what is true but which no one is really saying. Either way, you expose people to a new way to see the world. The Imagineer exposes people to the possible but not yet realized, while Doc exposes people to the realized which is carefully hidden by BigMedia. So Doc's ventriloquist exercise needs an Imagineering counterpoint. How would we rewrite Doc's ventriloquism to reflect the vision of the Web we want to become reality? (In a way, a lot of Doc's blog posts are about what the Web should be, but I'd like to see a concise paragraph that rewrites the above as if Doc were testifying before Congress....)

BlogRolling
Have you tried the great service offered by BlogRolling.com? Just create an account (you can lie about who you are if you'd like), grab the nifty little bookmarklet and install it on your browser's toolbar, then every time you find a site you'd like to read regularly and/or recommend to your readers, just click the bookmarklet and add the new site's URL to your blogroll. What could be simpler? Later you can go back and edit your blogroll when you decide you didn't really want to link to Junk Food News after all. The only problem: I can't get it to work with Radio. It seems to work fine with Moveable Type. Is anyone else having this problem? Any suggestions?

Jonah Goldberg Wants You to Be Lazy
In the process of predicting that blogs will have little effect on Big Media, Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, also summarizes what being a "conservative" means for him.
Now, I'm a small-c, big-C and even a bouncy-c conservative. And one requirement for being any kind of conservative is that you have faith in the adage "there's nothing new under the sun." It is this faith that has always made me a bit of a skeptic about the Internet, even though I make my living from it. Believing there's nothing new under the sun doesn't mean I can't recognize the great technological marvels of history [^] the wheel, the printing press, the rising-crust frozen pizza. These were all new and wonderful things. Indeed, it was a conservative, St. Augustine, who essentially invented the idea that history is the story of technological innovation. But, Augustine noted that while the doohickeys keep changing, human nature and the laws that govern it remain constant. And this gets to the heart of why I don't think there will be a blogger revolution. As a full-time conservative and part-time media critic, I am in total sympathy with the idea that Big Media is bloated, smug and less responsive than it should be. But, because human nature remains constant, we can also count on the fact that most people are lazy [~] in a good way. Surfing among thousands of bloggers is harder than reading one or two newspapers.
This explains a lot, doesn't it? I mean, I know Goldberg doesn't speak for Bush and Co., exactly (although arguably he is part of the "Co."), I'm sure there are many "conservatives" who wouldn't disagree with what he's saying here (and who, in fact, rely on Goldberg and TNR to tell them what it means to be a "conservative"). At any rate, it's hard to look at the last 20 months or so (since the 2000 presidential selection) and say Goldberg's wrong. The American People have been letting Bush and Co. do pretty much anything they want. Why? Is it because the American People are lazy, as Goldberg argues? And if the people are "lazy," is that their "nature"? Or do people act lazy when they're told that's how they naturally are? Let's see, who benefits the most from the idea that the American People are "naturally" lazy? Hmmm.... I'm more than a little wary of the conservative claim to know or understand "human nature" and "natural laws." I can't forget, for example, that not so long ago it was considered "natural" to enslave people whose skin, language, and cultural history differed from yours. Those people were "naturally" inferior, weren't they? According to Goldberg, "human nature and the laws that govern it remain constant." So why is race slavery now illegal in the U.S. and condemned around the world? If people were wrong about "human nature" 150 years ago, how can Goldberg be so sure he's right now?

A Little Break
I've got to cut down on the couple of hours a day I've been spending surfing and posting. I'm also reconsidering my approach to political news -- I suspect many potential readers leave my pages when my politics are screaming at them rather than attempting to have a conversation with them. I'm a teacher, so one of my instincts is to spell things out the way I think they are, which often ends up sounding didactic and offensive. I've seen students completely turn off to this before, and I've learned in a classroom that it's better to lead a horse to water than to try to force it to drink (sure, there are horses and water in the classroom -- when's the last time you were at school?). It's about tone and often about restraint and humility; most important of all, it's about not sounding like you think you know the truth. Remember: there is no spoon. So on a slightly lighter note, I saw "About A Boy" last week and absolutely loved it. (Check the review from The NYT.) I haven't laughed so hard during a movie in forever. My impression is that this was Hugh Grant's best-ever performance, and Nicholas Hoult is a great pesky, brutally honest and incredibly resilient 12-year-old. Toni Collette (from "Muriel's Wedding" fame) also does a terrific job. Reviews of the book more or less agree with my impressions. Tonight we're planning to see "Insomnia," which I don't really expect to be as good, but Al Pacino and Robin Williams directed by Christopher Nolan (the man behind "Memento") is at least very promising. We'll see. (In the movie category: Did you know there was a recent film adaptation of Herman Melville's classic, "Bartleby the Scrivener"?)

Backlinking Back Again
David Watson has been keeping tabs on the backlinking thread and has collected some great links on the topic. rjsjr offers several different ways to access the backlinks of sites you visit, as well as giving readers easy access to the backlinks for your own pages. His bookmarklets poll Blogdex, Daypop, and Google, so they cover the bases pretty well. rjsjr also offers some good links to coverage of backlinking in its sidebars. Meanwhile, drop.org fills in some history of backlinks, with interesting mentions of the Amaya browser from the W3C -- probably the ultimate example of unfulfilled promise on the Web. So I still don't understand why the "blogosphere" or whatever isn't all gaga over backlinks. I mean, if the point is to create conversations, what better way is there? (Unrelated, but also covered by Watson, is Bloglet a service that allows your readers to subscribe to email notifications of updates to your site. This is something that Moveable Type automates, but Radio seems as if it's not important (asfaik). Kind of surprising, since Radio bills itself as a content management tool rather than a simple blogging tool, while MT seems primarily interested in blog creation and maintenance.)

Radio Poster Coming Along
Will Leshner says his blogging app, Radio Poster, is getting better. I can't wait to see the improvements he's making.

Altercation Launches
Hard to believe, but Eric Alterman is now blogging for MSNBC.com. Interesting comments on the role of editors for writers. I agree -- we all could benefit from an editor, but is a blog with an editor actually a blog? Aren't bloggers their own editors? Isn't that part of the point? Whatever. Alterman says his page should be at altercation.msnbc.com, but so far, that URL is not really live.