Listics

I pulled in my email this morning and got a reminder from MS Office that it’s Jon’s birthday!  This morning Jon is pondering whether "conversation-based online community [e.g., The Well] has died in the era of the blog."

I don’t think so.  I think it’s been enhanced.  Some of the conversations could use a little pruning though.

A problem we face relates to empowerment and entitlement.  Issues of gender and ethnic discrimination in North American community organizing are tangled up in the purpose of some of the work.  Women bloggers (Shelley prominent among them) have justifiably noted gender bias in linkage, conferences, gatherings, dinner parties where the geeks meat to do what’s reet.  Non-white bloggers might feel much the same but I don’t hear their voices raised in blog spaces I most frequent.  Jeneane proxies the conversation around issues of why so few black faces at conferences.  Memer, a black man from Toronto speaks to the matter a bit in Jeneane’s comment threads and occasionally in his own posts.  Who else addresses these matters?

And, entering this issue from the rear:  While I would love to be included in what’s happening across the range of interests that engage me when I blog, do I really deserve a seat at the table with professional journalists?  Senior corporate tech management?  Advanced telecom networking strategists?  Lit-crit heavyweights?  Well, of course I do, but I need to keep using my elbows under the hoop to be sure to get in position and stay there.    

I’ve lost touch with Mike Golby.  I haven’t been the most faithful correspondent over the last year or so, but Mike’s work is seminal.  His blogs use a lot of bandwidth where they’re being hosted, and we are mounting a project to support keeping the body of his work together while we sort out what he intends to do with it.  The blogs belong to the people. I think.  Let me know if you’d like to help out in some way.  The work that Mike did over the last three or four years was amazing.  We need to find a way to preserve it if Mike is willing.

Can anybody help me get in touch with Mike?

Why write if you can rip?  Here then is my post, stolen verbatim from Jeneane, yet every word of it true for me…  (and before we get into the journalistic integrity argument, well - at least I cited my source).      

This is by way of another tribute to RB… he of EGR where Capricorn conquers.  I found this picture in an old cigar box way down in the Jesus Bunker.  (Actually, I found it over by EuroYank, where the kraut hits the dog, or vice versa.  And I found EuroYank by following a link out of a Loose Poodle comment thread.  Anyway, doesn’t this just make you smile?

Lesley Winner is now Leslie Winer.  She’s still a winner of course.

Of necessity this will be one of those internally referential posts, a bow to Kekule and the bezene ring, if not to Kekule and the benzene ring, if not to  Kekule and the benzene ring.

Jeneane started it, others rolled it around, and Halley took a stab at meme-ifying the whole thing  by challenging the lucky few at a Cambridge, Mass. invitation only event to seek out and link to ten new voices, people who blog and who are not white, USian males.  (The event had started in a cloud of bad publicity after the organizers were sued "for violation of The United Nations long-standing trademarks, including
the United Nations name, image, and patented seating configuration.")

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Phoenix New Times has a good story on vlogging and podcasting today…

Boston video producer Steve Garfield, a Seinfeld look-alike whose
inexplicably amusing clips about nothing — one day he’s shoveling
snow, the next he’s shopping for OJ and oatmeal cookies with his
reluctant wife, Carol — has attracted the attention of Time, BusinessWeek and Nightline.
Rocketboom, a popular site offering daily satirical news briefs hosted
by a former reality TV star named Amanda Congdon, seems to have already
filled a niche as the wired world’s three-minute The Daily Show.

Paula Offutt - "You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentothal."

She blogs at "Thought Patterns - Ramblings of an Insane Lesbian Book Writing Crip"

If only she was a native Lapplander she’d meet all of my diversity requirements.  (OTOH, Maybe I better not tease her while I’m sucking up and trying to get CSS hints about how she puts her WordPress site together.)