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Echolalia

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I’m so far behind in so many different areas of my life, including this blog, that I don’t know where to begin.

But I do want to mention the timely, provocative and well-argued piece we posted tonight by David Weinberger, taking arms against the conventional wisdom about the “echo-chamber” nature of online discussion.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s a choice quote:

  While most of us had assumed that the Internet would increase the diversity of opinion, the echo chamber meme says the Net encourages groups to form that increase the homogeneity of belief. This isn’t simply a factual argument about the topography carved by traffic and links. A “tut, tut” has been appended: See, you Web idealists have been shown up — humankind’s social nature sucks, just as we always told you! Furthermore (says the memester), you Deaniacs were self-deluding, weak-minded children: Wake up and smell the depressing coffee!

The facts are not in question. They show that the links-to-blogs curve follows a “power law,” that people tend to buy books that express similar values and views, and that a small number of sites get a disproportionate amount of traffic. But the echo chamber meme, with its “tut, tut,” doesn’t follow from those facts. It rides on a rationalist view of conversation, defining conversations as the exchange of information with the purpose of discovering truth and changing minds.

Talk about your foolish optimists!

Kicking Radio

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Periodically I get email from new Salon bloggers who’ve downloaded Radio Userland and tried to post to their new blog, only to find themselves thoroughly confused by Radio’s innovative but initially hard-to-fathom “desktop webserver” approach.

Recently, rather than try to fumblingly explain what’s really going on myself, I’ve just been pointing people to this chapter of Rogers Cadenhead’s book “Radio UserLand Kick Start,” which explains how to start a Radio blog.

There’s more about the whole book here. By putting that chapter online Rogers has performed a great public service (since the documentation from UserLand is not as extensive as it could be). Thanks!

In an amusing side note, Cadenhead, who also has long maintained the “alterna-Drudge” site Drudge Retort at the “drudge.com” domain name, reports that his server was brought to its knees Monday by crazed Web surfers desperately turning to Drudge for their fix of Janet Jackson’s breast-flesh.

MoveOn up

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My colleague Joan Walsh has done a thorough job of explaining the political dynamics around the Republican National Committee’s disingenuous assault on MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” ad contest. But there’s one aspect of this into which I want to delve a little more deeply.

At BloggerCon last fall, where talk about candidates’ blogs was the rage, it was clear that the doomsday scenario for political campaigns experimenting with “emergent democracy” went something like this: (a) Overenthusiastic supporter of candidate, “un-controlled” by headquarters, posts something impolitic on a candidate’s blog or message board. (b) Candidate’s opponents jump on the posting, spotlighting it in attack ads as if it were the campaign’s official line. (c) Candidate finds him/herself in trouble, and wonders whether all this idealistic stuff about “emergent democracy” was worth it.

Well, the scenario has now happened — albeit in a somewhat different form, since MoveOn is an advocacy group rather than a candidacy. Anyone familiar with the online world is unlikely to be fooled by the RNC attack on MoveOn: It’s painfully obvious that MoveOn was running an open competition, that some of the entries were bound to be outre or inappropriate, and that the open voting process was likely to insure that (as happened) the good entries rose to the top.

What the Republicans are doing is pretending that every single entry in the contest was endorsed by MoveOn. It’s as if I went over to the New York Times’ message boards, found some idiot’s rant about how the Trilateral Commission controls the universe, and held a press conference denouncing Arthur Sulzberger for condoning wacked-out conspiracy theories.

Except for one thing: MoveOn was apparently vetting the entries “for legal issues.” And once you start vetting submitted content, you’re considered (under the law) more like a publisher. So MoveOn does have an iota of responsibility here.

In reaction to the controversy, MoveOn organizers say they will vet more carefully in the future. An alternative they should consider: Vet less. Open the mike even more. Make yourself less of a publisher, and thus less open to spurious attack. In the long run, I’m quite confident that the public will be able to understand the difference between user-generated content and a campaign’s or organization’s official material. In the short term, the Republicans are getting some dubious mileage out of deliberately confusing people.

Yearend fugue

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Blogging from me will be light over the holidays. Any spare time I get over the next week will be devoted, weather allowing, to building my kids a swing set in the backyard. But before the eggnog haze descends upon us, a few choice links.

First, Mother Jones has an interview with Tony Kushner in which the “Angels in America” playwright states, with crystalline precision, the essential fact of the 2004 election. This should be etched into the consciousness of everyone who hopes that things in the U.S. can be put back on course:

  Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote. Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They didn’t have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate, grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is.

MJ: You’re saying progressives are undone by their own idealism?

TK: The system isn’t about ideals. The country doesn’t elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great.

One light of hope this year is that the citizenry has important and still-underestimated tools at its disposal to egg its leaders on to greatness. If you’re keeping up with the blogosphere you may be sick to death by now of reading about the power of many-to-many decentralization, “social software” and the Dean campaign’s remarkable online successes. But what if you’re stuck inside the Beltway? Frank Rich’s Sunday column this week serves as a useful reminder that most of the Washington press corps remains utterly and pathetically clueless about what has already happened during this election cycle. Jay Rosen’s annotation of Rich’s column is well worth reading, too.

So we’re fortunate to live at a moment when the technologies many of us have enthusiastically embraced for two decades are showing signs of achieving social and political ends beyond simply bringing delight to geekdom or fueling the stock market. Cory Doctorow has good words here:

  The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

(And Kevin Werbach points out that technology and policy are always intertwined.)

Finally, as many of us retreat from the daily grind to take year-end stock, I want to offer you this wonderful passage that Kevin Kelly cited earlier this month on his Cool Tools blog. It’s from a book titled “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking,” by David Bayles and Ted Orland, that I will have to add to my 2004 reading list.

  The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Which, I suppose, is an anecdotal version of the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” But I prefer the Samuel Johnson version: “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.”

Thanks to Salon’s subscribers for keeping us going through these thin years — and special thanks to all the Salon bloggers for keeping their “quantity” and “quality” fires stoked. Happy holidays to all.

The RSS Pushmepullyu

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My column on RSS, which noted how poor a name the acronym is, sparked a good discussion over at John Battelle’s blog about how to find a better name.

And I note (thanks to Lockergnome for the link) that Amy Gahran of Contentious has a contest going for a new name.

Jeremy Zawodny makes the same point I was trying to make, in a slightly different way:

  In 2004, RSS is going to go mainstream–and it’s going to happen in a big way. Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers? So do I. It’s going to be like that. One day we’re just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it.

Finally, Dru (no last name provided) wrote in to say, “RSS is not push, it is all pull. And that is extremely important… Any time an RSS reader goes to check on a feed, it pulls down a copy from the given url.”

He’s absolutely right, in terms of the technical meaning. However, from the user’s standpoint RSS provides essentially what “push” promised but delivered only with great, painful effort: dynamic notification of new stuff to read. So, though I stand corrected in my use of the term, I think the analogy still holds.

New column: Ode to RSS

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Since starting this blog my output of regular columns has declined, but I’m back, tonight, with an ode to RSS. This will be old hat to many reading here, but for the wider world of Salon’s readers and beyond, RSS remains a novelty worth introducing with a fanfare.

Fog of war invades game of telephone!

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Jeff Jarvis suggests that I am on the garbled end of a game of telephone or “teleclick” in my post about the battle of Samarra below — and that I’m deriving “Vietnam nostalgia” in the process, to boot. Then Glenn Reynolds nods approvingly. It sounds good, but Jeff is completely misreading my post.

My question — “54 Saddam loyalists dead? Or American soldiers firing on Iraqi civilians?” — wasn’t derived in a tag-team hand-off from Cole to Marshall to me; it’s a question that lies at the very heart of the conflicting accounts of the event itself, as summarized in the New York Times story I linked to at the very start of my post (and that Jarvis links to as well): “Accounts of a three-hour battle fought in the alleys and streets of Samarra on Sunday diverged radically, with Iraqis saying only eight people had been killed, several of them civilians.” It is the question about this still-hard-to-read event, and one does not have to wear Vietnam-colored glasses to ask it. My point remains: Our leadership would have a lot more credibility in these situations if it hadn’t racked up such an awful record in the past.

So Jeff misunderstands or distorts my post, and Glenn applauds. Who’s playing telephone, again?

Harpers’ new design

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The Web site for Harpers has an unusual new design that builds on its extensive back catalog of magazine content in semantic-Web-ish ways. It’s not a blog, exactly. Paul Ford, of Ftrain.com, who designed it, explains the ideas behind it here. He also suggests that the work that went into the site may well make its way into a new “open-sourced content management system based on RDF storage.” This is interesting because, so far, though RDF has generated all sorts of interesting theory, real-world applications remain not very easy to explain, or even find. Anyway, this sort of site-overhaul is always tough, even when it’s not as technically ambitious as what Harpers has done, so congratulations to all.

File under “u” for useful

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[this post had to be deleted in order to fix my RSS feed, so I’m reposting it here.]

Calpundit Kevin Drum walks us through how to make use of the special arrangement between Userland and the New York Times to create permanent links to archived NYTimes content. That deserves a permanent link of its own for my future reference. And yours, if you like…

I also lost this comment from Christian Crumlish, so here it is for posterity:

  See also http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink, Aaron Swartz’s service that will turn a raw NY Times link into a nondecaying one. I just added it to my linklog (Memewatch) under u for useful.

so you got it from me and i got it from cadence90 and cadence90 got it from kottke and kottke probably got it straight from aaron and aaron simply automated the UserLand-permanent URLs the New York Times provide because Dave Winer negotiated this service for webloggers…