Dialogue is filled with questions (many of which may go unanswered), where as
discussions are filled with answers (many of them to questions that were never
asked). You might say that questions open, where answers close.
By the way, Parking Lot now has an RSS feed. Hallelujah.
Clay points to Ben Hyde's reflections on ways to change the slope of the power law curve or to shuffle the blogs that live under it.
One way to fight the old-boys-club effect is to avoid linking up - Clay cites as an example the common behavior of blogrolling
"popular weblogs as a shout-out". As a thought experiment, imagine
everyone suddenly decided to only blogroll people who have fewer links
than they have. Things would surely bounce around violently at first,
and we'd end up oscillating around a flat distribution. I wonder what
that would do to the blogsurfing experience... would it feel much more
noisy? (Note that systems like LiveJournal and YASNSes that implement centrally managed networking are in a position to actually make the experiment by enforcing the rule)
When I look at the Technorati profile for an interesting-looking new
blog that I've just discovered, I'll sometimes glance at its list of
outbound links (here's mine).
When most of those are to highly linked blogs, it's an indication that
I probably won't learn a lot from that blog, because the reading I'm
already doing usually makes me aware of what the "A-list" is up to
(even though I don't directly read most A-listers).
So I guess I've revealed one way you can get my continued attention
(and links): dig up good stuff that I can't find elsewhere. Common
sense, really.
I have meditated. I've done Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Kung Fu, DahnHak, Pranic
Healing, Tensegrity and Access. I've been healed, acupuncturized,
massaged, rebirthed, exorcised and hypnotized. [...] I've gone to hundreds of rituals and danced, chanted, drummed and
prayed. I've gone to sacred sites, feng shuied my house. I've gotten my
horoscope analyzed many times, my numerology has been done, my palms
read. The tarot has given me valuable insights, and I know what shape
my chakras are in. And there's probably a lot more I'm forgetting.
[...] my new agey friends, or friends from specific metaphysical traditions,
might well be puzzled that I wrap things up more than they would expect
me to under other circumstances. I.e. I write a lot more conservatively
and tentatively than I might otherwise. Referring sort of distantly to
news items and books with interesting but theoretical subjects. Where I
could just as well provide the straight dope. It is just that I don't
necessarily think the dope is quite so straight as it might have
seemed. And I no longer claim to know exactly what it is.
To me, Flemming (in his current incarnation, perhaps :-) sets an
example for combining open-mindedness and critical thinking. His mind
has gone far but his feet are on the ground - that's pretty rare. But
most
of all I appreciate how he manages to write with simplicity while
pondering the deep and complex.
Spike Hall describesPurpleSlurple, which enables paragraph addressing on almost any page on the web by inserting purple numbers
in it. I've used it a few times already to point to specific places
inside long articles and like it very much. My only worry is that my
PurpleSlurple URLs will break if the service becomes unavailable (or
worse, shut down).
The home page provides a handy bookmarklet (see also Matt's anchor revealer):
Want one-click Purple numbers? Right-click on this link, PurpleSlurple Bookmarklet,
and bookmark it, or drag and drop this bookmark onto your browser's
personal toolbar. Now when you are viewing a page on which you would
like Purple numbers just click the bookmarklet. (Javascript must be
enabled).
Ton and others are trying to figure out a business model for klognets. This followup cracked me up. And Gary's comment is thought-provoking.
The scenario you describe is viable and works, I can attest to this
first hand, although I found it only worked in one specific scenario:
The Client must have nothing to hide.
As soon as they fall for the pompous absurdity of the NDA(Non
Disclosure Agreement), they cut their own throats and seal their own
fates. Sorry for the blunt analogy, but it's been invariant in every
NDA-attended contract I had over 23 years, and after that much
reliability over that much time, you begin to suspect there may be a
pattern.
[...]
With Free Software, there is no threat to the so-called
"Intellectual Property" because no one will get the edge. Open Source
is what the cold war once called detante, it is assurance of a balance
in commercial power among peers. Because the code is open and free, you
can discuss your client's project on the mailing lists, in Usenet, at
LUG meetings, even with other clients, and invariably someone would have at least partial solutions that could be strung together to get the work done.
Maybe it's an America-at-war thing, but sadly, increasingly, on this
side of the pond and in the past two years especially, all my clients
have turned their back on this collaborative advantage. All have become
obsessed with owning the means far above achieving any ends, almost as
if the success of the project doesn't even really matter anymore. Even
where closed ownership is completely irrational (why does a national
broadcaster need competitive advantage in news-story data-entry
software?) in their paranoid delusions of greed, they have erected
inpenetrable IP Curtains, dug deep lawyer-infested moats around their
business plans, veiled everything in a cloak of secrecy, and invariably
every last one has lost their shirt or simply failed to deliver any
product --- they all learn the hard and painful way how creating good software is astonishingly expensive, but creating bad software is even more so.
Lisa Williams: "strange, but it's easier for me to find out what's going on in Indonesia than
what's going on next door. Blogs are a perfect remedy for this problem (see http://www.westportnow.com)."
Throw in an ounce of GeoURL and localfeeds and we can perhaps start making sense of our neighborhoods again.
Update: local information is not just neat, it's necessary, and it's disappearing from old media - I just found this tidbit from Harper's thanks to Chris Corrigan:
