If I had a scanner
I’d scan it in the morning
I’d scan it in the evening
All over that land…

(I do have a picture of Anne Galloway’s ear somewhere around here, a picture taken at the University of Chicago, the tutor was there, he’ll vouch for the provenance… a picture which I will be happy to share if I can only find it.)

John Palfrey will lead the “making money” discussion at BloggerCon. Looking at the cursed power law, there would seem to be three subsets to examine: the asymptotic risers - those few who aggregate attention in a mass media modality; the inflectioneers - people with blogs to be found around the inflection point of that cursed power curve; and the waggers - numerically huge, enormously influential for a variety of reasons, residents of what has been labelled the long tail and then largely ignored or misinterpreted. The power law presents a two dimensional view that obscures much of what is important about the last decade’s revolution in publishing.

Among the attributes obscured: community, medium, intention, and influence. To which community or communities does a particular web presence contribute? List a few communities… the legal, the journo, the technoid, the telecom, the literati, the eeleomosynary, the political left, the polictical right, educators, librarians, age peers. The list goes on and there are certainly sub groups among each of these. The web empowers each of us, it offers emerging communications tools that we integrate into our daily lives. No longer are we confined to the alpenhorn and yodeling to be heard across great distances. No longer does our yodeling impose on the ears of the disinterested, because choice dominates clickage.

This may be one of those “posts in progress,” because I have a meeting. Maybe it just ends here because I have ADD.  For further reading pleasure, just go here…

she: cousin… la….. bla bla detail… met him at a barmitzva in boulder…. detail detail he had his colleague call me… detail detail detail… and he said i’m handicapped too i’m in a chair i’ve lost 2 legs… detail detail detail…
me (perking up): what? what? wait, Stop. the guy has no legs? HOW did he bring this up? what was the lead up?
she: well, i was telling him about my friend, I Forget who, who started a pbs show about cooking with the blind…
me: oh my god. no. what’s it called this show?
she: cooking without looking.
me: no, no… ( here i laugh, really laugh, for a good full two minutes. i realize i haven’t laughed like that in a while. driving all laughs into one. we are at my level. it has come to this struck me funny.)

(The above excerpt is not entirely without intention. It perhaps illustrates two things: one, that personal creative choices will lead us to vocational opportunities that are unique and personal, viz “Cooking Without Looking;” and, two, that this thing called blogging is its own reward, comprising readers and writers, linkage and thinkage… and sometimes - yes - stinkage, but not today, neither in this post’s origins nor in the novel in progress that I’ve linked here… we have an opportunity to help each other carry the canoe on that long portage, and sometimes there will be blueberries and sometimes there will be biting insects, but all in all, when the loon calls and the sun sets on the lake beyond, there are no simple answers, rather there are all these complicated relationships and quel domage that we find so many of them parsed into fifty minute segments with an IRC back channel).

Ray’s book is available.

Madame Levy, all mountain dewey and shit.  Ain’t jumped the roomba yet.  Capsule review:  getting a grip.