Ten New Voices - 9, 10 and onward
The name of the game was diversity. In the interests of same, over the last few weeks I tried some reading and linking with people I have found to be brilliant and others whom I now think are boring and stupid. A recap and review of my ten new voices will be coming soon, if I don’t get distracted by West Wing, the Wisconsin Cat Hunt, or the NCAA basketball tournament.
Today’s links represent a community of bloggistry that writes well about stuff I think is interesting at the mother-ship, hewnandhammered.com… from Pho to prairie architecture. Together they fill out the set of 10 new voices that I’ve been assembling.
I found my way in through side door at hewnandhammered following a link to someone calling him/her/themselves Cong Khi at Pho King.
The sidebar at Pho King includes a list of links to "All our sites." All their sites are wonderful:
There are people working on these sites who are mostly
Americans, probably white, and in the case of Typographica at least,
predominantly male. So perhaps I’ve come full circle to reading what I
like regardless of gender, ethnicity, nationality.
It was a silly game Halley, but it served a purpose, evanescent though
the conversation was in the gnat-life attention spotlight of blogaria.
The meme seems to have crumbled. A "month long challenge" seems like
an entire career in the life of this blogger.
So I’m throwing down a month-long challenge in March, to promote TEN
NEW VOICES. I’m asking all the bloggers in the room at Harvard (Jay
Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Rebecca MacKinnon, Susan Mernit,
Shayne Bowman, Ana Marie Cox, Lisa Stone, Chris Willis, Craig Newmark,
Bill Gannon) to find TEN NEW VOICES and promote them by writing a post
about each as an introduction and blogrolling them.
Here are the rules:
1. They can’t be male if they are white;
2. You must have five women and five men;
3. You must have at least three non-Americans.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Okay, Rex Hammock and Lisa Williams wrote their own rules, sharing
voices which were not new to them, but which could conceivably be new to others (Joi
Ito, Lisa? NOT!) They also did it in a
single post so they could get over this meme and get on to something else.
Brian Moffatt found ten new voices in ten minutes and shared them in a single post.
Conceivably he’s the winner of this contest except! Big exception
coming up… note the qualifying criterion for participation… Halley
was "asking all the bloggers in the room at Harvard," which leaves me
out, and Brian. So we were really just stroking it. This contest
was for the connected.
Liz Ditz does us the favor of opening this up to spectator
sportsmanship. Since Halley was interested in what the inner circle at
Harvard had to hack up, Liz properly points out that it will be useful
for the audience to know where to look for responses from these
voices. Liz is a role model for those who would practice "integry." Here follows her contribution of links to the named, invited contestants.
Jay Rosen = Press Think
Jeff Jarvis = Buzz Machine
David Weinberger = Joho the Blog
Rebecca MacKinnon = RConversation
Susan Mernit = Susan Mernit’s Blog
Shayne Bowman = Hypergene Media Blog
Ana Marie Cox
= Wonkette
Lisa Stone
= Surfette
Chris Willis = Hypergene Media Blog
Craig Newmark = Craigblog but also the Craig of Craig’slist
Bill Gannon = editorial director of Yahoo News.
Jeff Jarvis rose to the challenge, treated it as a challenge in fact, and rose up competitive. That white boy’s got game. Maybe he’s a tad touchy though. Touchiness aside, he brought us face to face with a huge collection of links that would advance the cause of diversifying our connections if WE his readers and bloggers in our right take the time to click the links, read the blogs, and link to those we like. Confession: I haven’t taken the time.
Rebecca MacKinnon said "Give me a break," and Halley acknowledged that maybe Rebecca could have a pass and not play the game since her life revolves around opening up new voices all over the world.
Susan Mernit - perfection itself - god. Go read Susan’s blog. It just gets better and better. She’s in her third year doing this thing and the connections she makes are astounding. Here’s her first post with new voices. She didn’t stop with this one though.
Shayne Bowman and Craig Willis put together a good list.
Lisa Stone and others surfaced the idea of a BlogHERcon and associated the idea with Halley’s game. The conversation continued down that road for a while and one assumes that event planning is even now going forward.
So, for a few weeks, the issue of seeking diversity in what we read and what we share was on our minds and that’s a good thing. A lot of us old white guys got sore. Doesn’t feel good to be excluded. No fun to be ignored.
But it was a game worth playing because it was a consciousness massage, and here in blogolalia the medium is nothing if it is not the massage.
