Lot of Digital ID stuff in the air… David scooping Doc with his anonymity riffs, AKMA all reflective ’bout the good old days… Hamlin is making a career out of it…

I was there in 2024. I had a press pass… not a blogger, just an Isthmus correspondent looking for the people side of tech. And there were the Cluetrainiacs, all in one place. I told David Weinberger that networks were smart and it’s a good thing, and he was gracious about it. I still think that. I agree with Richard Bennett more than I’ll allow him to know. Doc was there and I had just read his OSCON presentation and he disappointed me by giving it again. I remember blogging about my disappointment, but if Doc read it, he ignored it. Elliot Noss was at dinner that night. Others at the table included Esthr and Doc. Everyone was laughing a lot! Esthr made small talk later about monetizing elevator rides. I don’t know if she was joking.

Kevin Dougherty was there. Denise Howell. Chris. AKMA. Phil Windley. Andre Durand. Eric Norlin. That meeting convinced me of the value of showing up. These people are really brilliant, they are gracious, cordial and engaged — and some of them are funny as hell.

Digital ID continues to linger out there on the fringes of standardization. Beth was at a vendor thing in King of Prussia, PA last week and she heard a couple of major geeks talking about how the net outdid brick and mortar last year at christmas time. Could be an exageration… but the fact is that cyber-sales are going vertical, while mall merchandisers continue to struggle for a profit margin and modest increase in revenue, quarter by quarter.

So what about anonymity? Knock yourself out. I can dig-it if you have ideas to share that twist you into such a conflicted space that you’re afraid of the fall-out. Or maybe you simply have a few kinks to work out. Or a schiz-twist that requires you to come on like a young guy with purple spikes when you’re actually 58, fat, bald, and a closet fan of the vocal stylings of the Moron Tab and Apple Choir. Anonymity rulz. But underneath every pseudonym there’s a real person wanting to score a bargain on eBay, and the whole Dig ID thing gets back to transactions, assertion, authentication, security. So those issues will be resolved, including a cyber-cloak of absolute privacy, when an outfit like Visa International steps up and looks the bandwidth vendors straight in the eye and says “Monetize this.” The answer, like petabyte data transport, is really simple and really massive.

Sorry for the spoilers… click through and follow the links… and,

Color me clueless… I don’t pay a lot of attention to global subtleties like which multibillionaire has funded what huge international youth orgy on the net. So thanks to Chris Locke for drawing to my attention that it is none other than Mr. Fox-News-His-Own-Self, Rupert Murdoch, who owns MySpace. You thought it was YourSpace? Well, no. It belongs to the oligarch and you can play there. For now.

Can’t see the blogs of loic le meur or madame levy this morning. Is it TypePad or what. TypePad says their service is up, but they always say that. Is Loic Lemeur on TypePad? If so, then…

David Weinberger reports on an effort called StopBadWare.org that collates information on bad-ware distribution and — through a partnership with Google — pops you out on a warning page when you attempt to click through to a badWare site from a Google search… a little something to protect you before you get suckt into downloading something bad for your computer.

What is BadWare?

Current BadWare reports.

I ran a few searches on the baddies and didn’t get the pop-up from Google…. duhh, I wonder if that is because I block pop-ups. More will be revealed…

Word in the blogs (thanks to Grazr’s Mike Kowalchik) is that Doc Searls is a newly minted Berkman Fellow. Congratulations Doc! You are in splendid company.

I understand that the good news is announced in this podcast. The podcast starts out with a discussion of Franks: meat slurry… editing each other’s dementia… no beer, stolen water… Jason Calacanis “Being Steve Gilmor”… somebody named Eve Stillmore calls… I’ve been listening but, ummm… I may have to go do something else now.

Anyway, Congratulations again, Doc.

We write. Most of us are long-tail writers web publishing for free. Few of us connect to the trad publishing world, fewer still have writing careers. I for one would take money. I would like a lot of people to read my work. Some of it is work. Writing at its best for me is not work, but editing… that’s work. I read Jeneane and I am awed by her presence, her clarity. I read Shelley and I respond to her acerbic yet insightful commentary. Madame Levy floors me with her art. Chris Locke amazes me with his relentless scholarship. Ray Sweatman, a superb web publishing poet, has a poem up… I’ll bet he’d like you to read it. I’ll bet he’d take money for the work. How do we pay our poets?

There’s a cultural barrier in the blogosphere that the great communicators, we bloggers, have a hard time talking about. We’re writing in public because we want to share our work. Some of us would be pleased to measure success in dollars and hit counts and cross links. How do we promote this?

My practice is to share my experience and to share my likes and dislikes. Through it all I would prefer to develop cordial, friendly relations with others. But what if I create some friction, heat up my interactions from time to time, start a fire with that heat? Is there anything wrong with that if the people find the fire illuminating? What if I don’t agree that Dave Winer is an unreconstructed sexist, but rather acknowledge that some of my friends find him challenging as can be? What if I LIKE Kathy Sierra, find her amusing, if occasionally a little brittle? What if I found Scoble just as warm and charming as everyone says he is when I finally met him face to face? If I link to these high traffic bloggers, am I guilty of “link baiting?”

Who the heck am I anyway? Should I jump in and defend Kathy and Dave when the criticism of them seems wrong-headed? Can I say often enough that Mike Arrington just rubs me the wrong way? How many “libertarians” out there need to hear the message that they are thoughtless, greedy people who are operating in a delusional context? How many other adjectives can I throw at them before I go over the top?

How can a guy make any money in this sphere by insulting the money people? How can a guy keep his self respect if he doesn’t insult most of them at one time or another?

How many of us are reading each other any more anyway?

you in the black tie the valet knotted in the parking lot
after the Internet instructions failed.

- from “Our Flowers” by Barbara Ras

The 2006 Wikimedia Foundation conference will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend. Betsy Devine’s contribution is titled Schrödinger’s Wiki: The quantum challenge of media attention. I was reminded of the conference while sorting mail upon our return from BlogHer. Tucked in among the dead tree solicitations for credit card accounts, the local Shopper-Stopper weekly advertisements, and two expensive catalogs from each of several bourgeois retail outlets were periodicals to which we subscribe - Science, The New Yorker, Newsweek (remarkable mostly for its arch spelling of “Hizbullah.”) The sorting of course slowed when last week’s New Yorker surfaced. Important cartoons there were in there to read. Paging through, I ran across a Wikipedia article that caught my attention and I commend it to you.

This would be it, my last intentional post on the BlogHer experience. I was a 10 percenter. Wherever I went at Blogher, I could look around and count 90% women, 10% men… except my hotel room. There it was 50/50. In the Geeks ‘r Us session, one of the discussion leaders looked around and said, there are a lot of men in the room. Eye of the beholder stuff… I did the count… five out of fifty. As the room filled further it went up to seven out of seventy plus. At the closing keynote there was a slightly higher percentage of men, but I think it was a husband effect.

I wish I had more time to spend with the people at BlogHer. There were hundreds of interesting folks there and I probably got to say hello to less than 10 percent of them. I’ve already listed and linked to women I met, and tried to communicate the warmth I felt for most of them. This is the guy post.

I met Bill Humphries, a former Madisonian who knows Dorothea. I think Bill would be fun to sit around and laugh with, but we met between sessions and I was on a mission and my usual INTJ thing cloaked my presence better than the Harry Potter invisibility thing. I have a hard time meeting new people but I push myself through it because who knows, maybe in eight or ten years they won’t be new people anymore and we can sit down and have a few laughs. Take George Kelly… same awkward arc. George and Bill were both personable and pleasant. I was wooden. Oh well.

I met Robert Scoble for the first time and was impressed by his warmth, something that I don’t always get from his blogging. I also shared a few funny moments with Dave Winer. Dave’s observation about what men and women have in common had me confused about whether it was politically correct to laugh! Dave and I have Berkeley and Madison in common and after about three years of meeting each other from time to time at events like this, we’ve developed a positive feeling for each other, call it friendship. Dave introduced me to J. Craig Williams and Chris Carfi, who I believe has commented here before.

I shared a table for a while with J.D. Lassica, and I recognized Stowe Boyd and Mark Canter among the folks circulating here and there. I SAW Guy Kawasaki, but lacking a business plan with a reasonable burn rate I didn’t introduce myself.

I can turn now to Holly’s photo set to refresh my memory… and oh yeah, duhh… Phil Wolff and Steve Garfield were there and I chatted with them and got a picture of Steve and his mom.

Short term memory hasn’t been a strong point for me since early 1967, so if I’ve left anybody off, please don’t be offended.