don’t look now, but something’s funny…

thanks to Jeneane for the link.

For years and years, Denise Howell has had — as one of the random tag lines in the banner at Bag and Baggage — this quote from Henry Jenkins regarding bloggers: “We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it.” I knew who Henry Jenkins was, once, but link rot set in and the link Denise provides goes straight to oblivion.

But hooray, another blogger to the rescue: Danah Boyd shares the skinny on Henry and his new blog.

Local angle… Henry was a student of John Fiske.

Robert Ambrogi has compiled a list of posts following up on Denise’s separation from Reed Smith. The compilation follows his searching essay about the matter, which itself follows in bloggy reverse chron order Carolyn Elefant’s post which ends:

What few in our profession realize is that our most talented lawyers’ stars burn too bright for Biglaw. For Reed Smith, however, its options diminish. Because if you’re a talented woman planning on having kids, why in the world would you EVER choose to work there?

Now that Denise has a little more free time, I’m wondering if there’s a puppy in her future?

Denise Howell and Reed Smith have parted ways. But she took her chair with her. When I read Denise’s post yesterday, I thought I would just sit with the information and read it again before mulling it over here, publicly. Ernie the Attorney zeroed in on the news and isolated this bit, where Denise says,

my professional roadmap henceforth will involve only things that are washed through a stringent “how much do I really love that?” filter

Denise always had a stiff upper lip about the time she was spending in the commute from Orange County to downtown LA. I think the iPod was invented for her.  I’m sure that she won’t mind reclaiming those hours to spend with young Tyler.

One outcome of Denise’s retreat to the home office that I’d like to see would be for her to turn her prodigious writing skills to a book, perhaps with an emphasis on “work-life balance!”

The coastal-tech-libertarian-enterpreneurial community will be eager to tie her down with some venture capital. I hope she can steer clear of their pouty, self-aggrandizing, greedball clutches. What the world DOESN’T need now is another cute Web 2.0 product with missing e’s in its name.

Denise has a good post at Corante about a New York Times Style article that stylishly engages in a little blogger bashing, an article that fails to use information from Dennis Kennedy that would have made it even more stylish and more informative.

If somebody put a question to you regarding Rob Stein and long term progressive funding, would you have an effing clue what they were talking about? A lot of last night’s session by Kos and Jerome Armstrong went right over my head. But the context was there for a common understanding between the macro market blogging poli-strategists and the local yokel.

Elizabeth D. was there. Elizabeth writes a weekend feature at the daily Kos called “What’s your fucking problem?” The raw power of Kos’ enormous hit count has hundreds of comments piling up beneath an Elizabeth D. post, most of them fading way off topic, but all generally pointed at that liberal-qua progressive chatter that is the mark of the party politics junky. I’ve had some idea of the weight of the community interactions in that end of the powah curve, but just cruising in to see what’s up on a Saturday night at dKos tells you a lot about the mass media concentration of attention that’s built into the -what? What’s at the other end of the long tail? The short neck? Wherever you put that many people together you get a lot of short-neck, knuckle-dragging mouth breathers. You get some interesting conversations intertwingled in there too, and I’m guessing you get some serious flameage, but maybe not so much. My sense was that Kos keeps it all pretty well moderated.

I asked Jerome Armstrong about whether net neutrality was being addressed by the combined weight of MyDD and dKos. Although he was able to answer truthfully that there is support for the concept, there are people like Matt Stoller wrapping some energy around the issue, the question seemed to make him uncomfortable. Issues orientation is anathema to the big power guys. You can’t easily pull a party unity platform together around issues, and I sense that Kos and Armstrong are about nothing more and nothing less than building a monolithic power bloc of left/progressive voters to win presidential elections. Jerome’s horse in this race is Governor Warner. While the “coalitions” of blogger support for network neutrality are building at MyDD, Warner and the party leadership remain mute, unwilling to risk a misstep in these early days of the 2024 race.

Which brings me to the matter of Zephyr Rain, and her oil and water relationship with Markos. Major projection coming here… First of all, let me say that the description of issues (see page 114 cf. in Crashing the Gate) around Markos’ and Jerome’s reimbursement for work during the Dean campaign were of little interest to more than a thin sliver of politics junkies. “Zephyr Who? Daily What?” This was echo chamber stuff at it’s most trivial. Nobody cared, in a broad sense. Only a few insiders knew there were any feelings hurt, any dispute at all around this matter, Kos was totally a legend in his own mind. He touched a broad base of bloggers, all of whom stuck up for him against any smear from the right. Zephyr was ingenuous at best in her description of the engagement of these young political techno-operatives and what they and the campaign hoped to gain from it.

But as Denise Howell points out, there are emerging economic interests in the blogosphere that will be served. Markos has a business model, as does Jerome. And while Denise is right that on the live web there is no center, that the mass of users is enormously distributed, still there are concentrations of users in the short neck that create conditions remarkably like the mass media markets we have left behind. These masses rally to the right or the left, and they form “a demographic” that the techno-operatives seek to manipulate for the greater good of the party.

I thought the old Reds, Solidarity, the Trots, the Old New Left, the New Old Left, the wobblies here in Madison were remarkably polite and restrained in their exchanges with these young Democrats last night. But as the tension in 2024 between Teachout from the Dean campaign and the techno-operatives demonstrates, the left will have its cannibalistic rituals no matter what.