Listics

I’m grateful to my friend and fellow blogger, Peter (The Other) Kaye of Loose Poodle, for directing my attention to Phil Ford’s blog and to his blog posted essay/address to the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting held this week in Quebec City. Dial “M” for Musicology is an academic group blog, but Ford seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting, water carrying… choose your metaphor for assumption of burdens.

I love Phil Ford’s essay because it refreshes the conversation about the value of the interactivity associated with web publishing. It reminds me that though the meta-conversation around blogging technology may have been diluted by a recent broadening of social software platforms (Facebook, twitter, etc.) and a general disgust with the players in the silly valley blog settings, the creative potential of our medium has only an upside.

Dial “M” has a blogroll that promises to expand access in interesting ways. A recent affectation on the part of a few bloggers who have found their blogrolls to be burdensome in terms of the maintenance they require and the relationships they reflect (Doc!!!) is not imitated here. Indeed, one is hard pressed to imagine any blog with academic intentions that wouldn’t provide sidebar referential information of the type commonly known as “blogroll” (and yes, you can be forgiven for confusing that with some kind of sushi).

The essay emerges from the world of academic musicology, a bubble in the blog foam that has points of tangency with popular culture and the academic treatment of “content creation,” social software, and web publishing. Yochai Benkler gets his links. Here are a couple of passages that may want to make you read the whole thing:

The natural state of the blogosphere is anarchy. The essence of the medium is the reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationship between bloggers and their audiences. In fact, writing about “bloggers and their audiences” is misleading, because it implies that this is a clear distinction of roles, like the distinction between those who read a newspaper and those who write it.

And…

People who complain about blogs, like those who complain about Wikipedia, ask why a medium that puts any random crank on the same footing as an expert should be taken seriously. Defenders of Wikipedia always point out that it’s self-correcting: the damage that malicious and incompetent people cause is quickly undone by dedicated Wikipedians. Now, you can’t quite say this about blogs. A stupid blog post stays stupid. But there is a kind of self-correction at work — call it peer review. The freak who writes ihatealexross.com may get links, but this won’t earn him a place in the minisphere of classical music bloggers. A geek show may get the same pull as a poetry reading, but it’s not as if they have the same clientele: poets don’t have to start biting the heads off chickens. And while one of the charms of blogging is that it allows you to post a long piece of serious writing one day and pictures of your cats the next, a clarinetist who only posts pictures of her cats isn’t going to get any play, except from the crazy cat people. (And that’s a whole different scene.)

…even more…

However, the problem with understanding the musicoloblogosphere as commons-based peer production is that the musicological commons is still very small: for reasons I’ve described, there just aren’t a lot of music-academic blogs yet. But perhaps this is also a secret strength. There aren’t enough music academics to sustain a conversation, but this means that those of us who are in the blogosphere end up spending a lot of time conversing with music people who aren’t academics, or academics who aren’t music people. And the best of them are brilliant: aforementioned critic Alex Ross, pianist Jeremy Denk, composer Matthew Guerrieri, and intellectual critic Scott McLemee, to name only four. And what happens when you spend a lot of time sharing space with these people is that you start to develop a lingua franca, a border language synthesized from the things you have in common. And as I’ve argued elsewhere, that common tongue has its own special characteristics. It is “cool,” in the McLuhanesque sense: readers can profitably interact with it in a wider variety of ways than they can with more traditional forms of academic communication. Blog writing tends to be “porous,” filled with open spaces that readers can fill with their own contributions.

I hope I can be forgiven for pulling so extensively from Ford’s piece. There is plenty more where that came from, juicy prose larded with bons mots and wry observations. If you care about the art of blogging as it applies in any specialized community, take a chance and read the whole thing.

Ever notice how Chris Locke almost always hits home hard with synchronicity?  Today’s effort is for me a mental mash-up of the Berkman Center’s Stop Badware cookie crumbles contest at the FTC “ehavioral” advertising Town Hall, and the populist concern about “ehavioral” cookie driven advertising on the web.  How the Nation Magazine found themselves advertising Newt Gingrich is an interesting question.

Are they perfectly clueless, or what?

[UPDATE 10/31: Yesterday, William (PaPa) Meloney put it this way:

It is as if the world was too big, the universe too vast, the Internet too … too something-or-other… we need to be members of some smaller order, some familiar covenant, some little comfort zone. We want to belong and the only way we can make that distinction for ourselves is with a small lapel pin label: FaceBookMySpaceEtAl. When in fact we are all engaged in the greatest social network known to mankind: The Internet.

I hadn’t read Bill’s post before writing my own, but I think they fit nicely together.]

Forgive me for the forgettable title on this post. I know there is money to be made aggregating eyeballs and herding clickers up the ramp like so many hogs on their way to becoming bacon. And I don’t begrudge Microsoft their interest in bringing home that bacon. But here’s my experience…

There’s something called a “Microsoft Passport,” at least there once was such a thing. It probably still exists. Everybody who bought that snake oil, raise your hands.

Shame on you.

The point is, if you had a “passport” you could take advantage of a hotmail account and play games in the Zone. You probably could also get a pastrami sandwich delivered (dark rye, lots of mustard), but as for me the mail and the Zone pretty much defined my relationship. Backgammon was free, and I could always use a somewhat anonymous email account to flame from. As time went on MSFT became pathetically desperate to monetize this stuff, and I fell away from them. But from ten or twelve years ago, to six or eight years ago, they sponsored a lot of my clickage online, at least for simple game playing.

On Facebook I play Scrabulous. It’s fabulous. I use the meetup-like features too, but I don’t need this stuff. The web is so much bigger, so much more empowering than the white and blue hospital room settings of Facebook. When we’re bored with Scrabulous, I guarantee my friends and I will move along to something else frivolous and likely free. As in beer. Not that I don’t know plenty of people who are stuffing their disposable income down the ratholes of WoW and iCrap, but these so called online communities exist because people are there, and people are fickle. We’ll blow out of there like blackbirds in the fall, no matter where there is. So when a corporation tries to nail this stuff down, they are simply playing fast and loose with their stockholders money, salary-men embarrassing themselves with a delusion of an investment with a payback horizon. Ain’t gonna happen.

Take Yahoo! I’m sure money rolls through there as fast as AT&T can launder it, but what’s the value proposition? Have these yahoos determined that because monstrous amounts were spent on twen-cen television advertising, it makes sense to spend that in the land of clicks and tricks? Why else try to bundle a customer relationship with ephemeral toys that we can as easily throw away and replace with free stuff if their efforts to monetize become too egregiously intrusive.

Bill Kinnon wrote this week,

The Facebook $15 Billion valuation is based on what you Facebookians are worth to marketers desperate to target consumers they can no longer easily access by traditional media exploits. Those of you who self-identify as Christians on Facebook can expect to be receiving targeted email from Zondervan, Christianity Today, EMI Music et al. Using information you may have thought was only viewable by people within your mini-network.

Bill goes on to quote the terms of service that we agree to be bound by when we sign up for a Facebook account… just your usual first-born, left testicle stuff.

Alan Herrell probably said it best last week:

The value of every one of these walled garden spots plummets in a direct proportion to the increase in membership. For those of you that have drunk the Kool Aid and want to argue, save your breath, I have been on the web longer than you have had pubic hair.

Now in the WEB(what’s your monetization(click-thru advertiser) strategy)2.0 world, Microsoft is going to be the exclusive ad server for Facebook. Good business move in the short term (help pay all those fines in the EU, and pump more marketing dollars into the Flatline OS Vista) as they really are the gang who couldn’t shoot straight on their own properties, but the darkside is that they will be tracking every move and click across their new partners network. And yes they will sell your ass down the river.

Amanda Chapel, the lovely face of public relations blog Strumpette, has been booted out of the Facebook walled garden for no better reason than someone thought she didn’t exist. This vile and calumnious action on the part of Facebook management follows closely — so closely as to be coincident with — Ms. Chapel’s decision to resign as editor of the Public Relations Industry focussed blog she started a year and a half ago.

Chapel has a brilliant record of news reporting and industry analysis and she will be missed. Her resignation leaves a huge gap in public information and coherent analysis of the propaganda engines that drive American culture. Back in April, when many of us were afraid to leave our own backyards, Ms. Chapel identified the emerging trend of public apologies and pretty much nailed the genre with this lovely epistle to B. L. Ochman. Earlier she critiqued and updated the O’Reilly rules of conduct for a happy-face Web 2-oh. Amanda has challenged conventional wisdom in her industry and she has been a voice for open and honest communication in web publishing. Her expulsion from the Facebook walled garden says more about the constipated state of corporate management than it does about her as a person or a persona. I will welcome her back, when those fools get their heads on straight. Meanwhile, I’ll just offer up the “last words” she shared in a post last March:

LAST WORDS

“I” dentity, not our-dentity. It belongs to me. I chose anonymity. Unlike [a damaged person] who recoils, I will fight against any culture (let alone lightweight moron) that thinks it can take that away from me.

I hope she meant it and that she will be back to kick some Facebook ass. We need bright and engaged contrarians now more than ever, and if the contrarian is wearing her size four LBD and CFM shoes, so much the better.

Technorati Tags: Amanda Chapel, truth stranger than friction, truth stranger, l’etranger, come back to the raft Amanda honey

This site will henceforth be very drafty.  The empty halls will echo with the remembrance of long lost posts.  Well, not really THAT.  I’ll do my best to prevent link rot.  But do change your blogrolls to point to Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 otherwise known as "listics."  Listics is at http://listics.com

The RSS 2.0 feed is simply http://listics.com/feed

Please.  Toss me a link there…

Maria at Alembic shares some drawings, including a pencil sketch of Mount Tamalpais the way she remembers it before the rains of March closed it off from view.

I’m at the Hilton in Silver Spring, Maryland.  The day dawned bright and humid.  It’s a musuem day… Hokusai at the Sackler, Degas/Sickert/Lautrec at the Phillips Collection.

In technology news…  a marvelous web 2.0 smash-up at The Register that allows you to customize your own interface. USB tanning unit at ThinkGeek.

I’m off to tweak the listics design a little more.  Actually… today I’m downloading the Qumana 3.0 beta to see how it will play into my strategy to workaround the posting limitations of the native WordPress interface.  (No fooling).

Mulling the problems of participation, I found myself on a sign-up screen for Second Life.  World of Warcraft doesn’t do a thing for me, but the Second Life approach provides a dynamic that could suck me in.

It isn’t free.  The Linden Lab people aren’t in it for their health.  Or mine.  And there is a huge health issue associated with online games.  If television is an energy drain that vacuums real life out of a room, then the interactivity of online gaming is a black hole.

Jeneane seems to be thinking about wading into Second Life and I’ve been following her everywhere for years.

Accelerating Change 2024 put the game on my radar, and in 2024 they showed incredible advances in networked interactivity.  Cory Ondrejka was giving the kids free tastes out behind the school…

Jeneane and Euan each speak to the distancing effects of syndication and blog subscriptions and reading each other in aggregators.  I’m with them on this.  Jeneane manages to suck a comment out of old InfoGlutz himself.  Shelley adds another dimension to the discussion.