Alpha Mind Blog

So, Alex Iskold is a dude that gets it. Today he writes much the same thesis as formed the core of Unfashionably Late: That late entry into the blogosphere (or any other social media space) decreases one’s chances of getting noticed. In Alex’s case, he focuses on monetization, which I wasn’t concerned with. The fact is, that whatever one’s motivation for blogging (or facebooking or YouTubeing, etc.), the later one gets in the worse are one’s odds of success.

Alex poses a question: Is the long tail of the blogosphere solid? Or is it in danger of falling apart?

And I answer:

In Unfashionably Late, I liken the blogosphere to a multi-level marketing scheme. It always pays more if you get in early. Most MLMs eventually become very unattractive, because it’s easy to see the market is saturated.

But, “falling apart”? I don’t think so. Reasons:

1. Many Markets: The blogosphere isn’t one MLM. It’s a multitude of them; 1 for every topic times 1 for every slant on the topic times 1 for every intended audience times…. (you get it.) Even if 30 MLM companies die this year, the MLM as a business model will stay healthy as long as there’s a single product category whose market isn’t fully saturated.
2. Saturation Doesn’t Kill Markets: Even MLMs that have pretty well saturated their markets are still going concerns. (Amway & Shaklee come to mind.)
3. Many Motivations: Even if it could be shown conclusively that there is no money to be made from a new blog, people will keep blogging because not all their motivations are monetary.
4. All Is Never Lost: It can never be shown conclusively that there is no money to be made from a new blog. There are ways of succeeding even in a mature market (think of how Japan entered machine tools, farm equipment, etc.). Just as there are ways of breaking into Hollywood even though the odds are very long.
5. Always Somebody Showing the Ass the Carrot: As with MLMs, there are those who make their money by selling the long tail, and they will continue to provide incentives (however bogus) to get people to live in the long tail.

What I fear most is that the quality of the blogosphere will continue to deteriorate, because eventually the long odds will deter anybody who’s smart enough to notice them.

So it’s been upgrade weekend here at the Alpha House in North Berkeley.

My new PC arrived on Friday. It’s now Tuesday. Here’s what I’ve done in the interim:

1. Opened my spiffy new (refurbished, actually; yes, I’m cheap) Gateway laptop featuring Centrino Core 2 Duo inside. 2 cores, yay! 64 bits, yum!
2. Decided not to send the lousy thing back because most of its faults are probably Vista’s faults (Home Premium). Such as:
   1. I can’t get a single cardbus device to work.
   2. I can’t get a Mac-formatted external FireWire hard drive to be recognized.
   3. It chokes on a Windows hard drive wired to it through a USB2 hub.
3. Decided not to send the lousy thing back even though some of its faults are definitely its own (i.e. the Gateway laptop’s). Such as:
   1. Your eyes have to be below the center of the screen to get the best view. Which means that when it sits on a table, you have to have the screen leaning way back. It’s so near horizontal I’ve had to dust it 5 times in 4 days.
   2. It has spiffy function key functions of its very own which are somewhat hinted at by little ideograms on the keys, but if you can’t tell what those mean by looking at them, you’re out of luck: the Gateway documentation doesn’t mention the function keys or what they do. ‘nfact, a search in the docs for the word “function” comes up empty. So when you hit a key combo that turns off your wireless, you get to scream and shout and pull your hair out until you happen to hit the same combo again to toggle it back on. You get no help. None.
4. Decided not to install XP to the new machine. I was sorely tempted. Introducing new hardware to Vista… well, after a while you get to feeling about this activity the way you feel about telling a four-year-old his mother’s died. Pure dread. After a while I figured out the drill. Add hardware. Wait a long time. Get told the driver’s been successfully installed. Begin restart of machine. Fold 2 loads of laundry while Vista shuts down. Sit in a rocker and listen to a longish piece of classical music while Vista starts up. (When I plugged the external HD into the USB hub, I’m not sure Wagner’s Ring would have been long enough; I gave up after Dance of the Blessed Spirits and half of The Four Seasons and did a hard-shutdown.)So the main reason I didn’t install XP was that it would be a lot of work and I reckon I’d regret it within 3 months, when the Vista drivers have been debugged and anything new I buy will only work with Vista.
5. Decided I still can’t eliminate Microsoft Office from my life entirely. I massage a lot of data, diverse small datasets, not worth writing programs to do the routines, so I can’t live without ASAP Utilities, which means I can’t live without Excel. Not yet. So I installed Excel 2000 to the new PC.
6. But I did decide to leave MS Word behind. Forever, I hope. My last client made me use Word 2007, and a little bit of Excel 2007. It was like going to prison in Louisiana. To say Office 2007 sucks is like saying the Pacific Ocean is moist. Word 2007 prompted me to write a Twitter update that I’m really not proud of—I was soooooooo mad!!!! Worst! Software!! Ever!!!Ever!!!!

   Really, I can’t imagine how the Word 2007 team’s members sleep at night or look at themselves in a mirror. Vile. Repulsive. Truly abominable. Inexcusable. Disgusting.

7. Deleted all traces of Office 2007 from the machine. Installed OpenOffice.org, the whole suite, and started learning the Writer module.Did I mention I don’t like Word 2007?
8. Made my new laptop a dual-boot Vista-Ubuntu machine.
9. Found a reason to like Vista. Partitioning the hard drive to set up the dual-boot was incredibly easy, and required nothing more than the disk manager built into Vista. Last time I built a dual-boot I had to buy Partition Magic for the one-time use.
10. Installed Cinelerra and started using it. By which action I fulfilled a dream almost 3 years old.
11. Learned that Ubuntu rocks. Oh my goodness how sweet it is! Top 5 ways Ubuntu rocks:
    1. Package Management: They’ve almost got this right, finally. I got Cinelerra installed and running in less than 2 hours. And that’s Cinelerra—nobody told me Cinelerra was a game for kids. My guess is it’ll be the hardest install I’ll ever have to do in Ubuntu. In my previous tries at Linux I’ve given up on installing some packages after 10 infuriating hours.
    2. Did I mention introducing hardware to Vista was a pain? Ubuntu had no trouble with the hard drive routed through the USB hub, the one Vista completely choked on.With Ubuntu, either it can handle the hardware you give it or it can’t, and you know within a few seconds. And mostly, it can.

       Here’s Vista noticing a new thing plugged into a USB port:

       “Oh, I see you’ve plugged in something new…

       “…I’ll get on it right away…

       “… No problemo…

       “…Don’t you worry your little head about it. I can handle this… I seen just this kind of thing once, back in the day, in Bangalore during the war, where I got that Jezail bullet in the leg, I ever tell you about that?…

       “…You just might want to go get lunch. Better make it Chinese carry-out though, nothing too slow, because this really won’t take all that long…

       “…Yes sirree, my daddy used to work on these things, I seen one just like it, yes I did…

       [User returns from Chinese carry-out, eats while listening to William Tell Overture (12:53 if the conductor doesn't drag too much) goes outside to check for mail, returns to computer]

       “…Hey, where you been, I got this done a long time ago. Two three minutes ago, maybe longer. I told you I’d handle it.”

       After all of which, the hardware might work. Might.

       And with Ubuntu? Oh my goodness! I had a PS2 mouse, a PS2 keyboard, and that Windows hard drive all plugged into the USB hub when I introduced the USB hub to Ubuntu. My elbow accidentally bumped the PS2 mouse on the desk, and I saw the cursor move. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. I moved the mouse on purpose. Cursor moved. I fired up Firefox and typed in a URL with the PS2 keyboard. It worked. I went looking for the external hard drive and there it was! This took no time at all.

       I plugged my HP PhotoSmart all-in-one into the hub. Ubuntu was ready to print to it immediately! Installing it to Vista had taken several minutes.

    3. A goodly selection of apps already installed. Like OpenOffice.org, which we should all learn to use now that hardware can help it go quicker than a snail’s pace. And, oh, did I mention I hate Office 2007?
    4. Ubuntu 7.10 for AMD64 on Core 2 Duo is fast! There just isn’t much waiting going on here. I may wind up spending most of my time in Linux instead of Vista. And 7.10 for 64 bits is surprisingly complete. (I.e. nearly every package you’re likely to want is available in a deb.)
    5. It allows you to feel like you could be a nerd if you wanted to, because after all, look at you! you’re successfully running Linux! which we all know is impossible unless your head is topped by a propeller or a turban.
12. Imported my current book project into OpenOffice Writer and got going on it after a few weeks’ hiatus.
13. Visited YouTube and almost cried over all the great 80s music videos that used to be there and are gone. (And several of the users who’d uploaded them suspended.)
14. Learned all the Vista keyboard shortcuts. Being a writer and a non-mouse-type guy, I like keyboard shortcuts. I suggest other writers check them out.
15. Fired up Windows Live Writer and started writing this post.

So, why is this so strange? Oh, it’s using my actual fonts from the blog! How cool is that?

Talk about superb use of a symbol: Scoble was given a gift of a Webvan pen. He says Paul Lindner “handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype.”

Bravo.

I was deep into launching companies when the bubble burst in 2000. There were some voices then calling it a bubble, but not very many, and most of them outside the dotcom mainstream.

This time around it’s different. People who have played key roles in making Web 2.0 happen are sounding notes of caution. Like Scoble and Steve Rubel. It’s a healthy thing.

I’ve been a little acid toward those who first started throwing around the term Kool-Aid as applied to social media. But now, with the coupling of shaky business models and astronomical valuations, what’s being called Kool-Aid isn’t social media or its evangelism, but such truly scary stuff as the last bubble was made on.

But back to communications, which is what this blog is about (even if I sometimes forget). The Webvan pen is such a potent symbol I’m going to ask Scoble to get a really good still shot of it. Then we can all post it over our monitors and on our blogs. To remind us not only to look beyond today’s hype. But also as a reminder of what makes for a powerful message.

People get just plain crazy around the famous. Especially the famous-and-opinionated. Around, say, that guy who writes Scripting News.

Today Winer’s explaining why he deletes some comments from his blog. And my question is: Why should he even have to defend himself?

His blog is his. Period. He can shut it down if he wants. He can erase the whole thing. As I can do with mine, as you can do with yours.

The reason he’s defending himself is that the same trolls who leave the vacuous-nasty comments he deletes will also go elsewhere on the web and say the same vacuous-nasty things about him there, except that elsewhere they have the added ammunition that “Winer deletes comments Mommy, make him stop!”

Damning Scoble by faint praise of Winer

Some vacuous-nasty stuff can be pretty nicely dressed up as thoughtful commentary.

Submitted in evidence, this post, seemingly in sincere praise of Winer, but primarily effective as a knock on Scoble. The post (to which Scoble’s reply in the comments pretty well nails the matter), would be in the running for lamest blog post of November, except that the author realized the lameness of his communication and was big enough to apologize for it.

But still, what was said was said, and it was lame as all get out. The post didn’t just knock Scoble, but did so on truly laughable grounds. The message was that Scoble doesn’t do that which, as far as I can tell, Scoble absolutely lives to do: find new cool things and people, and bring them to the attention of others. And he does it pretty effectively. If anything, he overdoes it—when he’s at his hottest, reading Scobleizer + his link blog is like drinking from two fire hoses.

Both Dave and Robert have done things I’ve questioned. I’ve complained about one of Winer’s behaviors publicly (I know: to say that blogging here is public is something of a stretch. But it wasn’t here, it was on the For Immediate Release podcast.)

But I’ve never seen him really disrespectful of anybody who hadn’t earned it. And I’ve never seem him try to disappear anybody who was offering substance, even in disagreement, and who was truly willing to own his/her words.

BTW, the reason this topic exists at all is that Dave is trying out a new commenting tool on Scripting News, and he wasn’t 24 hours into the trial before he had an obnoxious troll. He may have had more since, and deleted them while I was looking the other way.

PS. I’m trying out a different commenting tool here from what Dave’s trying out there. By all means leave me a comment and check out Intense Debate.

PPS. I’ve never done a post about both Winer and Scoble before, but I’ve wanted to. I was appreciating DaveNet when Radio Userland wasn’t even a gleam in his eye. I sometimes wish he’d go back to doing longer, Davenet-style essays. And one of the reasons Dave is cool is that he gave us Robert, who would be doing heaven-knows-what if he hadn’t done marketing for Userland.

PPPS. I mentioned longer, DaveNet-style essays. But my all-time favorite wasn’t very long at all.

You’re about a day late, Jeremiah. I already succumbed to Twitter, after months of resistance, just yesterday.

Two things drove me to it.

1. Scoble’s post about Twitter and last Tuesday’s earthquake. (I might not have noticed his post except that I’d been one of the people at the table with him when the quake happened.) I realized: he’s right, Twitter isn’t a toy, and I need to check it out.
2. Your micromedia meetup on Thursday.

About the latter:

I thought it was pretty much a bust. But it offered much food for thought.

First off, I noticed in your summary of responses, you didn’t include the two that implicitly critiqued the meetup itself: mine and that of John Bradford.

Both of us pointed out that one of the beauties of communications technologies we already have is that they’re asynchronous (or at least can be.) And by the bye, Godin blogged on the same topic yesterday.

The meetup was the worst of both worlds.

On the one hand: By naming a time, you tossed aside the asynchronous aspect of online communications. (I know my contribution was a little bit whiny, but my point was valid: I’ll have to do a lot of work to get the people who “met up” on Thursday to view my video because it was late for the event.)

On the other hand: There was no real meetup. That is, those of us who showed up didn’t interact with each other at all. I know who contributed, but I had no way of knowing who was viewing/reading/hearing the contributions, or what they were thinking about them.

Which brings me to Twitter. Although there’s a comment facility on the wiki you used for the meetup, I think Twitter would have been a better way to make it a real meetup.

Consider the following somewhat different meetup rules:

• Plan your contributions ahead of time and contribute any kind of micromedia except Twitter. (that way we’ll be able to distinguish between the planned contributions and the on-the-fly reactions. Twitter is reserved for the reactions.)
• Set up a Twitter account for the meetup itself. Publish its URI. People who want to join the meetup will need to have Twitter accounts (& as you say they’re incredibly easy to set up.)
• People will be able to see who’s following the meetup’s Twitter account, and can also follow each other for the duration of the event.
• We can then actually meet, view and appreciate the contributions people had prepared ahead of time, and discuss them in real time.
• The meetup’s Twitter account persists, and the record is kept of the meetup. Whether it actually continues or not depends on the people who showed up and whether they want it to persist.

I hope this didn’t feel like a slam on you or your meetup. I thought the event was a great idea, and the frustrations involved in it were minor compared to the education I got.

So, my thoughts about all of this led me to set up a Twitter account yesterday.

It also led me to check out DISQUS and Intense Debate, which I’ve been blogging about. They’re both partial solutions to the problem that asynchronous communcation tends to lack continuity.

Happy Sunday, Jeremiah!

Okay, so I got up this morning after a glorious extra hour of sleep, and there in my Eudora inbox is a note from Josh Morgan, co-founder of Intense Debate.

Intense Debate is another blog comment thingy, similar to DISQUS. Josh had seen my post about DISQUS last night, and wanted me to know about his product.

So, I checked it out. And I decided to install it. And now it’s installed.

Leave me a comment!

I’ll be discussing DISQUS and Intense Debate in an audio comment on tomorrow’s episode of For Immediate Release (if Shel and Neville decide to include it.)

But first an open message to Josh and his team:

Dear Josh and Team,

Hey, it must have been easy to monitor DISQUS on the blogosphere. Not many false positives among the Google Alerts. But “Intense Debate”? Good luck monitoring that.

Best to you all,

Max

DISQUS adds qontinuity where it was much missing.

Go check out Scripting News where Winer is testing it out.

DISQUS adds nice commenting capabilities to blogs. Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and MovableType. Allows:

• readers to rate comments
• comments to be sorted by rating
• a comment to be specifically designated a reply to another comment
• comments to be threaded (a consequence of the last bullet)
• an RSS feed to be made just for one blog post and its comment stream, so that if it goes long you can easily keep following it (remember the incredibly long series of comments on O’Reily’s Blogger Code proposal? Or Kathy Sierra’s farewell? Each would’ve been better threaded and with its very own feed.)
• the thread to be subscribed to by email instead of RSS, for those who prefer
• a DISQUS user’s comments, no matter on how many blogs, to be aggregated in a single RSS feed. I.E. you can subscribe to my comment feed to read everything I say, all over the blogosphere.
• API access to the DISQUS back end.

I’m sure there are other goodies there I haven’t gotten to yet.

Whatever else I learn about it, I’m having a blast just commenting scripting.com. Winer’s been a hero of mine for years, but commenting his blog has been a pain. Now that it’s easy, and in the expectation it’ll be temporary, I’m cuttin’ loose, commenting every post he puts up.

I’ll try to get DISQUS working here tomorrow. No promises. I have a video to edit, an audio comment to record for FIR, and four blog posts queued up.

The first casualty in the war over water? Was it the guy in Sydney, or the truth?

Truth is the first casualty of war.

My fine Aussie friend Lee Hopkins has a slogan with which he ends the episodes of his podcast. “Communicate with passion!” he chirps.

Okay, Lee, I’m about to do just that.

Lee grabbed me with his short post this week, “There will be more blood shed yet.”

I knew that Lee would be paying attention. For many months he’s been noticing, out loud, Australian politicians’ state of denial over dwindling water supplies.

Is Australia’s drought part of a natural cycle or a symptom of AGW (anthropogenic global warming)? We can’t know for sure, but if warming continues and freak weather gets freakier, history’s verdict will most likely be that we, not unassisted nature, caused it.

Lee didn’t mention AGW, but as to violence, he is surely right. It has only begun.

Under nearly every scenario in which global warming kills people, we would be desperately naïve to think that all of those people will die without a fuss or a fight.

Climate change denial is the first act of the next great war (and I mean really great, war by comparison to which USA-on-Iraq is a mere mugging.) It’s a murdering of truth and a murdering of many, many people, of whom those already born probably make up only a small minority. Real skepticism is a fine thing and I respect it and practice it. But only a few points I’ve ever heard made by AGW deniers are honest skepticism; the greatest bulk by far are outright lies.

Being myself a skeptic, I even doubt whether Sydney’s lawn-watering killing is the first such event caused by climate change, if indeed that is what it is. But my best guess is that future history books will name it just that way. (In both respects: related to AGW, and the first murder thus related.)

Truth is also the last casualty of war.

Besides several hundred blog posts, my reading this week included Praise of Folly, by Desiderius Erasmus. This led me to read some literature about the man. I had known little about him except that he influenced the King James Bible. And that Luther called him “an eel whom only Christ can catch.”

In that literature, what struck me most is how little respect Erasmus gets in the Christian world.

The reason, I think, is that he simply refused to participate, on either side, in the Protestant schism.

Here’s what the online Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about him. I’ve emphasized the sentences I think are crucial.

Opinions concerning Erasmus will vary greatly. No one has defended him without reserve, his defects of character being too striking to make this possible. His vanity and egotism were boundless… he lacked straightforward speech and decision in just those moments when both were necessary. His religious ideal was entirely humanistic[:] reform of the Church on the basis of her traditional constitution, the introduction of humanistic “enlightenment” into ecclesiastical doctrine, without, however, breaking with Rome. … Devoid of any power of practical initiative he was constitutionally unfitted for a more active part in the violent religious movements of his day…

I believe what is actually meant here is that Erasmus’ profound pacifism was A Bad Thing. And make no mistake, Erasmus consistently opposed not only war, but the schism which would necessarily bring war with it.

Luther was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. He took joy in the burning of synagogues and Anabaptists. (Erasmus opposed the killing of heretics.) Johann Eck, who opposed Luther after the publication of the 95 theses, was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. His purpose in “debating” Luther was not to sort truth from falsehood, but to find some way of painting Luther into the heretic’s corner, where the full bludgeon of papal authority could be used against him.

For the occurrence of schism instead of reformation, Eck was as responsible as Luther was.

Meanwhile, Erasmus disagreed with Luther but refused to condemn him.

And while the motivations of Luther and Eck dominated both sides in the schism…

while Catholic and Lutheran vilified and killed each other…

while both sides gleefully murdered anyone who dared to live by true Christian convictions…

Erasmus simply tried to stay out of harm’s way long enough to finish a few scholarly projects, including a trustworthy translation of scripture.

The author of the quoted article believes, perhaps, that this desire demonstrates bad character. That Luther and Eck were true solid men and Erasmus wasn’t.

Even in reconciliation, the lying goes on.

The Catholic Encyclopedia was originally published in the seven years up to 1914. Yes, it’s old, and Catholic-Protestant reconciliation hadn’t gone very far in that day. But even now, when the two sides seek as much common ground as they can, who in this movement of unity is singing the praises of Erasmus?

After a bitter war, when the two sides reconcile, they still assume that what matters is the two sides. Catholic-Protestant reconciliation tends to riff on the theme “of course the other side was right in their way, from their point of view.” The two opposing points of view are now reconciled, but also validated.

Which is a great lie.

A better reconciliation would be of both sides to the truth. To the truth that they should never have been sides at war. The truth which would say “we were both wrong and Erasmus has chosen the better part.”

I’m reminded of an account I read some years ago of an early 20^th-century event. Some still-living veterans from both sides of the civil war got together and shook hands and adulated each other for their equal valor.

And there wasn’t a black face in the crowd. None had been invited.

War, born of lies, leads to a lying form of peace. One which says “My!, weren’t we both brave and principled, even if our principles were different!” Not a truthful peace, which would say, “In our thirst for a paltry mastery, we made pawns, we made non-persons, we made carrion of countless other souls whom God loves. May He forgive us. May we learn a better way and teach it to our children.”

In each such lying peace, the smiles and hugs and mutual congratulations are only dirt overlying the seeds of the next war.

The deniers of AGW count on a lying peace, even if the worst scenarios come about. They count on a forgiveness arising out of humanity’s perversity. Humanity’s way of paying attention to the power-wielders on the “sides” of a war, and ignoring the simply dead who never wanted to take a side but wanted to simply live.

Paying attention to global warming isn’t about saving the planet. The planet is a big wet rock. It will do fine even if we leave fewer than ten species to squirm their way out of the deuterordial soup.

No, it’s not about the planet.

It’s about all those other species.

But more…

it’s about our own species, the one that, rightfully, is dearest to us.

It’s about our great-grandchildren.

But more yet…

it’s about war, which God hates and we should, too…

And it’s about saving our souls.

Don’t. Don’t even think about it. Your life is too valuable. Don’t waste it, I beg you.