Alpha Mind Blog

Trafcom News: How teens communicate in 2007. A fine post by Donna. Laughed out loud.

The whole post is funny, but am I alone in thinking it takes a very serious, perhaps grave tone at the end?

And let’s all think about these teens coming to work in our organizations in a few years.

Part of the post’s thrust is that teenagers are failing to learn, or are unlearning, key communications competencies:

Teens have lost the skill needed to ring a bell or knock on a door. No more: “Hello, Mrs. Cleaver, can the Beave come out to play?” Instead, today’s teens stand on the front porch, or in their cars if they are 16+, and call the person inside the house, using the mobile phone conveniently glued to the palm of the hand.

If Donna reads her own post the way I read it, then, there is a real foreboding in that ending. If kids don’t know how to knock at a door, how many other skills will they be missing when they enter the workforce?

Of course, Donna may not see things as grimly as I. Perhaps I’m seeing (more than others do? more than is real?) that our new technologies for instant communication lead to superficial communication. If I can use my cell phone to avoid meeting the Beave’s mom at the door, then, while I still know the Beave, I’m missing an important piece of deep information about him, to wit: what’s his mother like and how does she behave at the boundary of her domain? I hope I don’t need to explain how this is information about Beaver. Without it, my understanding of him is just slightly diminished, my relationship with him slightly less rich than it might have been.

(photo by permission Jana Werner)

After some time away from it, I can now go back to Unfashionably Late and see just what is in there.

The summary:

Is blogging a waste of time? This can only be answered if you know what return on time you want to get. Simplifying greatly, I suggest that in the blogosphere, the coin of the realm is the link. But since not all links are equally valuable, I introduce a unit of link quality, the “scoble”, defined as the average value of a link to your blog from Scobelizer. (A link from a newbie might be worth 0.001 scobles, and a link from Huffinton perhaps 4.2 scobles.)

I suggest some reasons why the economics of blogging may be deteriorating. Put in my economics-of-blogging terms, it may be that, as the blogosphere grows, it takes more hours to earn a scoble than in the past. Possible reasons:

1. It costs more time to get a top blogger’s attention. Why? Top bloggers are very busy being top bloggers.
2. It costs more to enter the game at all. Just to be perceived as a good blogger, one needs to shore up one’s position in sixteen skills.
3. It costs more because there’s a lot being written, but of decreasing quality, so that one spends more time finding the conversations that are worth entering.
4. It gets more stressful as the sphere gets crasser, cruder, and uglier as it matures.
5. The cost of entering the game is not just skills, but learning. And learning blogging gets more complex as time goes on. I cite online lists (which aren’t even complete) of 16 blogging software offerings, 63 aggregators, and 19 podcatchers the newbie can try out. Then one has to learn about tagging, blog searching, and other tools. Then one has to learn a mess of concepts, manners and mores, gossip and argot. Blogging has come to cost a lot of overhead in addition to just reading blogs and writing posts.
6. If one seeks links from non-top bloggers, there are too many bloggers out there who have no clue, and you can waste a lot of time on these.

Next, I suggest that in some respects, the new and small blogosphere of 2002 (when I first blogged) was a healthier environment and can be partially reproduced. I begin with the blogging education that Robert French is giving his communications students at Auburn U., and suggest several ways of turning that semi-closed environment into a “blog academy” which can train new bloggers without overwhelming them, and can get them some readership at the same time.

Finally, I suggest that a tool is needed, a telescope by which we can identify good bloggers (since there are so many dreadful ones out there.) I suggest the following metrics:

• Reciprocity of linking (does the blogger reciprocate a reasonable percentage of links?)
• Reciprocity of linking to newcomers (Is this blog helping newer bloggers?)
• Serendipity (does this blogger turn up new stuff?)

Technorati or Google could implement these in a weekend. (My money’s on Google to do it.)

There are a few other traits that tend to belong to good bloggers: they use real names, accept comments in which links are permitted, and deploy only enough snarkiness to have a nice edge, not so much that their posts just amount to name-calling.

Finally, I challenge somebody, anybody, to make some of these things happen, and restore some of the beauty of 2002, when I met Radio Userland and fell in love.

That’s Unfashionably Late in a nutshell, sans pretty pictures, amusing anecdotes, and the all-important reminder to breathe. These SparkNotes should help you pass next week’s quiz, but I do hope some of you will sit down and read the book itself.

When I found my post about Dee Rambeau’s “farewell to blogging” growing past 10,000 words, I decided to make a little e-book instead of posting it. I also decided not to put links in the pdf file, because readers would have driven themselves crazy following links; they’d never get my own essay finished.

The links that would have gone in the essay if I’d let them, are here:

Creative Commons licensing.

Dee Rambeau’s farewell post on his own blog.

Amanda Chapel’s post about the burst bubble of business blogging.

Wikipedia article on “irrational exuberance.”

The folks Amanda calls “rabid” in her “bubble” post:

• Jeff Jarvis
• Steve Rubel
• BL Ochman
• Shel Holtz
• Debbie Weil

MLMs: Multi-Level Marketing.

Wordpress, fine blog tool. I’ve stuck with it through two blogging careers.

Build a Better Podcast, my short-lived podcast about podcasting.

The quintessential A-listers I use as examples:

• The Huffington Post
• Seth Godin
• Om Malik
• Guy Kawasaki
• Dilbert

Darren Rouse’s post on 15 requisites for the professional blogger. The post, by Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, which Darren takes off on.

My own post on editors, which won me my 2005 scoble.

Scoble’s post linking to mine.
Financial Times. It shows up on my driveway daily. I read it most days. It’s excellent.

Wikipedia entry on Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London.

Wonkette. Not, oh please, to be confused with Strumpette, whom I also mention in my essay, and whose link is above.

MIT Sloan School of Management.

The allegedly sleazy ADM.
The HP Way.
George Orwell Resources.

Lists of tools:

• asymptomatic.net, blogging tools.
• aggcompare.com, rss aggregators.
• podcatchermatrix.org, podcast aggregators.

Social Bookmarking:

• del.icio.us.
• digg.

Wikipedia’s list of social software.

More social sites: squidoo and AmIHot.

Grant McCracken’s first post on “Cloudiness.” He’s done more since then.

Paul Graham’s essay “Is It Worth Being Wise?”

Hobson and Holtz, their fine podcast, “For Immediate Release“.

Kathy Sierra passes on a video of a newborn horse. I also used a photo from her post. Glorious!

Dee’s Post at Marcom Blog explaining his no longer blogging.

Radio Userland, the first blogging tool I ever loved.

Robert French at Auburn University. His students’ blog there: Marcom Blog.

Scripting News. I started reading Davenet in 1998, and I still enjoy reading Dave when he takes the time to write anything longer than 20 words.

Scobleizer. Robert Scoble’s blog, the basis of my new economic unit, the scoble. A scoble is the average value of one link to your blog from Scobleizer.

Skype. Rocks and isn’t a time sink, like the next two.

MySpace. Sorry, but I always navigate very briskly away from sites that play sounds at me unbidden.

Second Life. You have got to be kidding. God has given me maybe 85 years, if I take after my mom’s side. I have already stuffed 4 or 5 careers into that, and I want to get in about 3 more. So I have time to go build a house of bits in a world of pixels, and hang out with people who have that little to do? Nononononononononono! No!

Lee Hopkins. A good man fallen among Second Life, but still okay.

Google Alerts. They rock. Google is probably the company that will be smart enough to implement what I suggest in this essay.

Photo Credits: (partial here, complete in the book)

StockXchng Stock Photography web site, from which I took many pictures for the essay. Below I list the web sites of individual photographers whose work I used and who have their own sites. In the e-book, I list the StockXchng pages of the others who upload their photos there.

Teacup photo: Matthew Bowden. Gillingham, Kent, UK.

Dead Parrot Photo, from Wikipedia’s entry on “Dead Parrot Sketch.”

“Price Tag” photo: Hilary Quinn. Cork, Munster, Eire.

“Arborial Marsupial Road Sign”: Laurent Cottier. Lausanne, Switzerland.

World Socialist Movement web site.

“Diva and Filly” photo: Kathy Sierra, link given above.

Telescope photo: Martti Vire, Rauma, Finland

Yikes! It’s been a whole week since I found Kami’s post about Dee Rambeau’s posts about why he was quitting blogging. I read Kami, read some comments, followed some links, and started posting.

7,000 words later, I saw I was writing something I could never permit to be a post on my blog. It has become an e-book, the link to which is at the bottom of this post.

Here’s what happened. Dee Rambeau posted to his blog that he was done blogging. Says it’s a waste of time. Says the blogosphere is getting noisier, the quality of content going down.

There’s been a bit of reaction and some overreaction to Dee’s posts, both the one I just cited and the one he left on Marcom Blog, the blog of those communications students at Auburn.

What I didn’t hear is anybody really talking about the time economics of blogging. I hear this and that about the ROI, or lack of same, for corporations that blog. But the simple, personal economics of time spent blogging, I’ve heard nobody discussing that.

So I thought about it myself. I realized that entering the blogosphere is a little like entering Second Life. You trade in some real world currency for the coin of the realm you’re entering. In the blogosphere, that coin is the link, but links aren’t identical in value.

So I’ve invented a unit of link value, which I call the scoble, and I set out to work with it.

I adduce some theoretical reasons why the economics of blogging might well be deteriorating. Dee Rambeau might be the canary in the coal mine (although in the essay, I didn’t mention a canary. I did use M. Python’s dead parrot.)

The mini-book I wrote is rather light-hearted—I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’ve got blogging all scienced out. I made some feeble efforts at humor because the picture I painted was in some ways kinda dismal. (I was, after all, dabbling at the Dismal Science.)

All is not gloom, however. In the end I make some concrete suggestions for improving blogging’s future. Now that I’ve written it, I realize what I thought was a major software product design is in fact just a tweak to what Technorati and Google already have. Google could implement what I suggest in a weekend. I hope they do!

Final note. The e-book is link-free. The links that would have been in it if it had remained a blog post will all be in my next post.

Here’s the book: Unfashionably Late: Why Every Book About Blogging Written Before 2009 Is Already Obsolete (Except for this one, I give this one three weeks.) Enjoy.

Here follow the last five points I made in my email to the RSD:

6. Own books. Libraries are great, but… It’s important to have a collection of good books right at your fingertips. That way when you find yourself having a teachable moment, that moment when you remember what so-and-so did especially well that’s like what you need to do in your own writing, you can reach for so-and-so’s book on your shelf and see how it was done, just when you’re fully motivated to learn and use it.

7. Read old books. By knowing how English has worked over a period of more than three centuries, you gain an understanding of how language changes and adapts. This will help you you understand how *you* can adapt language, making it your servant and not your master. Even books too old to have been written in English can be great helps. Sometimes story and image matter more than the precise language in which they are conveyed, so check out Herodotus and the Old Testament (esp Genesis, I&II Sam., I & II Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah) and Attic tragedy. Also the less old greats of other languages, like Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe.

8. Because language does and must adapt, learn when to throw the rules out the window. A major turning point in my writing was when I realized that the second line of the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” is such a communications masterpiece as to utterly nullify its being a grammatical abomination. (In case you forget or don’t know: Line 1: “Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now.” Line 2: “Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.” Brilliant.)

9. Read for wisdom. The best writers have been those driven to try to make sense of the world. They do so with varying success, but it is their thirst for wisdom, not just knowledge, that also makes many of them dig deep for an understanding of how to communicate what they learn. So: Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Penn, Gibbon, Drucker. (Note that Penn’s writing is as bad as it is good, so you need some discernment if you’re to learn from it. Good and bad often live in shocking cohabitation; as Randall Jarrell admiringly wrote, “… only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language—or none whatsoever—could have cooked up Whitman’s worst messes.” In a less dramatic way, this is true of Penn.)

10. Take risks. One of the great advantages of writing for editors is that they’ll tell you when your experiments fail, and as long as you don’t waste too much of their time, they don’t mind your taking risks. Thus you can try the less straightforward way of saying something. What most editors won’t do is tell you, if you give them plodding, no-risk writing, how it can be made more interesting. If they were that creative, they’d be writing not editing. Pruning excesses is their business, supplying the excesses is yours.

The RSD wrote me an email a few weeks back, stating how much she enjoys my writing (aw shucks) and asking for writing tips. I gave her some. I now offer them to you, somewhat altered from the personal manner in which I addressed her. There are ten of them, and I’ll post them in two parts.

1. Read a lot. Composition classes don’t teach us nearly as much about writing as writers do by example.

2. Read good literature. Read the best. Try MFK Fisher, a superior writer. Read Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Dickens, Conrad, and especially C.S. Lewis. Find ones *you* think are good; your judgment is likely to be right.

3. Write for publication, in actual magazines and newspapers, where they employ actual editors. These people will teach you lots of lessons.

4. Write for the best publications you can get your work into. The better the pub, the better its editors, and the better the feedback and lessons they’ll give you. Make a targets list and work patiently to get your writing into every publication on your list. Unfortunately, some of the best-written and best-edited publications are all-staff-written (like The Economist) or peer-reviewed journals by folks with very special qualifications (like the New England Journal of Medicine), so you can’t work on them without being on staff. (BTW I know two people who have edited at NEJM, and both found it a great experience.)

5. Read books about writing. Yes, there are too many of them out there, but the good ones are truly helpful. I especially like A Writer’s Time, by Kenneth Atchity; Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (gets my very highest recommendation); On Writing Well, by Wm. Zinsser; and Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brand.
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That’s the first half of what I told the RSD. I have one more note to add. I did not mean to suggest that composition classes are of low value. I merely meant that they cannot capture all the lessons that are contained in the work of fine writers. Coursework and the vast literature on how to write are very valuable, because none of us learns everything we might learn from example. Sometimes the example needs to be made explicit to us, in a teacherly way, before we can appreciate and use it. One reason I recommend Williams’s Style is how he makes explicit the brilliant choices Lincoln made in the Gettysburg Address.

[coming in part 2: On Reading and Rules. Tune in tomorrow.]

A fascinating article by Paul Graham: Is It Worth Being Wise?

Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

I agree there’s a trade-off, but I also believe it’s necessary to seek for as much intelligence and wisdom as we can.

The key is in Graham’s choice of the word “curing,” which implies something very like eliminating, and I believe is the wrong word. In fact, all domestic animals, including humans, tend towards neoteny, the carrying of childish qualities into adulthood. For humans, there’s then the matter of overcoming, but not curing, the childish qualities.

The difference between curing and overcoming is that, when we’ve done the latter, the quality overcome remains within our repertoire–we can turn it on or off. We can choose, based on context, whether to allow the quality in question to express itself.

The person whose sexuality is “turned on” either all the time or randomly is a ghastly thing to contemplate. Equally ghastly, though, it the idea of someone who has “cured” their sexuality.

Wisdom is, I believe, precisely the capacity to wield one’s capacities by choice and not by inward compulsion.