“Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate goofiness?” asks Nick Carr this week at his blog, Rough Type. In partial answer he points us to Gideon Rachman’s column in the Financial Times. Mr. Rachman says, “Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium’s terseness and immediacy came into its own.”

To my knowledge, nobody has surfaced the very real and likely possibility that twitter, an intelligence service’s wet dream, was used in Iran for something nefarious. A brute force analysis of the data presented in the Web Ecology Project’s report, “The Iranian Election of Twitter” might reveal the existence of agents provocateur agitating and inciting opposition to the Persian leadership. Who benefits? There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil oil in Iran.

“Twitter” rhymes with “fritter” and that’s what I’ve done–frittered too much time away following other people’s interests. The stream of information is compelling, but my continuous-partial-attention time slicer doesn’t slice thin enough for me to follow your tweets while I do my stuff.

Yet online connection and conversation enriches me. It’s my intention to follow Bill Meloney’s lead back to IRC. More than 140 char, real time, meaningful engagement, no pR0n spammers…

Yesterday Bill posted this:

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I’m going back to IRC … See you there.

If you are old(er) like me you will remember the communities in IRC. You will remember the conversations. You will remember the friends…and the feuds. You will remember when groups of people talked with each other in near-real time. You will remember full sentences. But most of all you will be a member.

irc://irc.freenode.net#Pa^Patois

irc://irc.freenode.net#Joiito

irc://irc.freenode.net##Slackware

I cannot promise that I will be on all the time – I do have a real job and some semblance of a life. I can promise that if you catch me there we can share more than 140 character blurts.

Posted by William “Papa” Meloney at 7:04 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The last few years I’ve lost track of a lot of the things I value about personal web publishing and the interpersonal connectedness associated with staking a claim on my own chunk of that notional environment we call cyberspace. My bad.

Here’s a Byrds tune that comes to mind…

Al Franken has finally been declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate race. According to NPR, the State Supreme Court ruling was unanimous. Minnesota’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, has said previously that he would certify Franken if the Court directed him to do so.

Follow-up news coming soon on the Daily Show, I’m sure.

[Wordnik is] “A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic ‘neighborhoods’ of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more. And it’s all compiled via user submissions.”
– Maria Popova

This afternoon Beth told me about Wordnik, a cool tool she learned about from Language Log–a crowd sourced compendium of all the words. Right. All the words. This evening, on an entirely different errand, I ran into a reference to Wordnik by Language Hat. Slipping into my spandex super-geek outfit, I hurried off to Language Log to see what Beth had found. (I could have asked her, but don’t like shouting from one room to another, mostly–I think–because my hearing is starting to go, casualty of my misspent youth).

What Beth had found was a link to the Language Hat post by one “Zwicky Arnold,” a contributor to language log who sounds suspiciously like Arnold Zwicky. One assumes the surname reversal has something to do with the collating sequence of contributors in the Language Log sidebar. Accustomed to a place at the end of the line, Zwicky presumably had to change his name from Arnold Zwicky to Zwicky Arnold because contributors there are ordered alphabetically by first name (and Arnold would move straight to the top of the list). All inferences regarding Zwicky’s motivation aside, it turns out that in his Wordnik post at Language Log he had linked directly to the Language Hat post.

At some point during this veritable fiesta of clickage, I actually went off to the Wordnik site and created an account, and at this point I was indeed on my way down the rabbit hole. There in the sidebar of my Wordnik account page was an advertisement for “The Subversive Copy Editor,” interesting in itself but made more-so by the included citation of Jennifer Balderama’s New York Times Paper Cuts blog.

Jennifer Balderama is one of those people whose name appears in the blog rolls of old blogging friends and acquaintances, someone I have never met, never “friended,” never “followed.” Why then do I feel that I know her a little just because she blogs?

AKMA observes that Dorothea Salo is hanging it up at Caveat Lector. Regarding her decision she says,

What’s next? I don’t know. Some things are right out; I’m not going to go pseudonymous and pop up in another corner, for example, because I just don’t roll that way, never mind that my writing style and subject matter are distinctive enough that I’d be outed in no time flat. I’m not taking all my Internet toys and going home—as childish as I can be, I’m not that childish. I might start another blog, or even more than one, but if I do, it’ll be for a different reason than old CavLec, and have much narrower parameters.

Meanwhile, Dorothea has–available for rummaging–great archives organized by topic and by date linked from the Caveat Lector sidebar.

Shelley Powers declares her site redesign complete! She asks,

What breadcrumb could I use to tease you all into leaving the safety of your syndication feeds, to venture into the raw and wooly lands of actual web pages? With that one sentence I’ve managed to exceed 140 characters, so I’ve already broken the rhythm of the web. Now, I seek to further fracture Web Flow by luring you directly to my lair.

I’ll be there.

At Burningbird, Shelley presents five free-standing blogs isolating several of her interests yet all aggregated and accessible under the wings of http://burningbird.net.

• MissouriGreen: all things Missouri and the South
• Bb’s RealTech: all things web, tech, semantic, and graphical
• Secret of Signals: writings about online video, movie reviews, video technology and so on
• Frugal Algorithm: surviving on little in a culture that demands much
• Just Shelley for everything else

If tech turns you on, but you aren’t interested in photography, then Bb’s RealIech and Secret of Signals are for you. I’m pretty much a fan of all things Shelley, and I think it’s fun to poke around in the archives of all her sites. At Burningbird Shelley has brought together good material going back ten years or more. It’s more than a blog, it’s a fine web publication. It’s a virtual coffee table book, an online magazine. Of course the latest stuff will be available in your feed readers, but to get a good taste of what Shelley’s accomplished and to explore a decade of burningbirditude, you’ll want to click through directly and skip the syndication feeds. Check it out real-time and click around with abandon. It’s worth a read.

bada bing… der Bingle — not just a mellifluous 20th century popular baritone, but now also a Microsoft search engine for the 21st century. Or something. It seems to work, and it gives Microsoft a fingertip grip on the ledge of internetworking, arresting their fall into the chasm of irrelevance. I searched “Cap and Trade” on Bing and two prominent related searches were “Glenn Beck” and “Rush Limbaugh.” Slim evidence but enough to suggest that Bing brings us politicized search. (Is that what Microsoft intended when they built their focus group from the usual suspects?)

A search via Bing for “der Bingle” turns up but one related search: “der Wienerschnitzel.” One fails to see the connection. Bing searches don’t reveal Wikipedia on the first page of results for either “der Bingle” or “Cap and Trade.” Blogger entries also seem low in the results ranking. By way of contrast, The Google places Wikipedia entries and blogger written references high in its search results. Zo, vat ve haff hier ist der Bingle mit der Limbaugher und also der Wienerschnitzel (eine zuchen-zeuge written by dem Katzenjammer Kidz) versus The Google with its Wikipediatrics and amateur sourcing. I’m guessing der Bingle will give das Yahoo! a run for its money, but The Google will leave them in its dust.

***** IEF XQPRSTQXL SYSPRINT OFFSET INTERRUPT *****
APPLIESTO: ALL BOOGIES, BEANERS, BOLOS & BOZOS ……

DOC BENWAY HERE ………. NURSE, SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE
OF LAUDANUM ………. RECOLLECT ONCE ME AND CLEM CLONE WAS CHEWIN
JOHIMBE BARK OUT BACK OF JODY’S ALL-NIGHT PET SHOP …….

NOT A FINER MAN IN THIS WHOLE ZONE
THAN OL’ CLEM ‘N JODY CLONE …..

****WHERE WAS WE, YEAH —- USE AUTHORIZED DATA BASE ACCESS
PROTOCOLS ONLY ….. SENSUOUS KEYSTROKES FORBIDDEN ….. DO NOT
STRUM THAT 33 LIKE A HAWAIIAN STEEL GUITAR ….. GRAND CONCLAVE
OF THE PARTIES OF INTERZONE: CHECK YOUR BOX FOR DETAILS…..
PERSONAL ATTENDANCE REQUIRED; SEND NO REPLICA. BENWAY OUT.
TLALCLATLAN ……

community memory

I’ve upgraded Listics to WordPress 2.8. I’ve dabbled with Opera Unite. I’ve spent plenty of time on twitter, and… yes, Facebook too. Truth be told, I’ve also played too many games of Spider Solitaire.

I’ve bookmarked dozens of links to information on a panoply of web publishing tools–weapons, as some would have it, in the war between pixels and print. From social networking to search engine optimization, from the politics of pillage and plunder (from New York and Detroit to South Kivu) to this week’s twentieth anniversary of the death of I.F. Stone–my attention has dissolved in the kaleidoscopic refraction of all things imaginable to write about.

Last winter I was humbled by a brief stint writing posts for peanuts at a start-up blog that was being packaged for resale to some web media company–this in the days before the big web media companies contracted and began to sizzle like salted banana slugs on hot pavement. During that time I had a couple of reminders of my own mortality including a back injury and a heart attack. The heart attack left me somewhat subdued. I simply couldn’t find the energy to write about health care and aging, right wing militias, extremist violence, disparities in justice administration, war crimes tribunals or any of the other topics that get the adrenalin pumping and the blood of righteous indignation flowing in my somewhat obstructed arteries.

At a certain age we understand that there won’t be time for everything and there aren’t a lot of do-overs left for us. Health fails. Death ensues. The question, “How’s all that social networking working out for you?” deserves an answer. I’d like this blog to be my answer. There’s not enough time to waste it on Facebook.

And, as the woman says:

yawn internet yawn i’m building a shed

…only in my case it’s not really a shed, I have sheds-a-plenty. No, in my case it’s a vegetable garden, of which more later.