Frank Rich’s book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina is reviewed in the NYT Sunday Book review today. The review contains ironic material like,

The Republicans, being more populist than the Democrats, have exploited this new climate with far greater finesse. Accusing the media of bias is an act of remarkable chutzpah for an administration that pitches its messages straight at radio talk show hosts and public relations men. Rich gives many examples. One of the more arresting ones is of Dick Cheney appearing on a TV show with Armstrong Williams, a fake journalist on the government payroll, to complain about bias in the press. Something has gone askew when one of the most trusted critics of the Bush administration is Jon Stewart, host of a superb comedy program. It was on his “Daily Show” that Rob Corddry, an actor playing a reporter, lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the government, which had created “a whole new category of fake news — infoganda.” Rich is right: “The more real journalism fumbled its job, the easier it was for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.”

Unafraid of cannibalizing his brand, Rich has a column in the NYT today titled “The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies.” The column is behind the Times’ bizarre paid subscription firewall, but it can be found here, at truthout.com, for free. From the right to the left, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, an echo chamber effect is reinforced by these dubious pay-for-access revenue models. but that’s a rant for a different day. For today, let’s just relish this (with thanks to truthout for the syndication):

The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that’s why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he’s about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in “the context in which I made that statement last year.” The vice president invoked “context” to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its “last throes.”

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase “I haven’t read the story.” He told Tim Russert he hadn’t read The Washington Post’s front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone “stone cold” or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House’s prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was “no evidence of resumed nuclear activities” in Iraq. “I haven’t looked at it; I’d have to go back and look at it again,” he said, however nonsensically.

On the occasion of the publication of photos from BlogHer France I am feeling all literate and shit. The images of these young bloggy-bloggers blogging has inspired me to poetry. Lacking the verbal facility to whip up a good poem for you today… it’s one of those days when I can’t remember people’s names… have you experienced that? I got up this morning and thought to call a colleague and let her know I was running a little late. You know. The one I meet with on Wednesday mornings. What’s her name. Just look her up in the directory and give her a ring. What’s her name… can’t call, don’t remember her name. Really. There’s an entire gingko tree just outside the bedroom window and I can’t remember this woman’s name. I wonder if after dark, while we’re sleeping, the gingko insinuates tiny tendrils through the window screen, across the floor, beneath the pillow and into my ears, then draws out the naturally occurring flavone glycosides from my gray matter leaving me in some kind of Chekhovian syntactic and phonological knowledge bind… unable to remember the name of the horse much less the name of the woman of which the name of the horse might remind me… a classic anterior cingulate-prefrontal cortical bind as it were.

Diane, her name is Diane…

I read about gingkos in Hiroshima that survived the blast when all around them was blackened wreckage.

But really, if I can’t remember people’s names, how can I write a poyme? I’ll have to pull one from the cellars, a modest vintage from the wet sunny slopes, the crider soil formations of Kentucky, formed in a mantle of loess with an underlying limestone residuum — a screw-top bottling, modestly priced, suitable as accompaniment to the best that vegan cuisine can offer…

Presented then, in honor of all who attended BlogHer France, women who don’t need the advice but may be expected to understand and appreciate the sentiment:

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Doc says today,

One virtue I’ve seen in the programming world is a preference not to re-invent code that’s already doing a fine job.

Doc’s old friend, I mean former long time, not “old” as in decrepit because god knows I have a few years on both those boomer boys, but here’s my point… Doc’s colleague and Cluetrain co-author Chris Locke has been spreading this message himself for quite a while now in his role with Ken Krugler’s and Steve Larsen’s company, the vertical search leader Krugle. SearchInsider says that Krugle claims,

…developers spend 20 to 25 percent of their time looking for code and technical information…. Krugle crawls source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems.

Question:

Since Doc is one of the media heavyweights in open source, and open source is about code (source CODE, geddit?), why has he been so silent on the functionality, the utility, the need for a tool like Krugle? I can only find one reference that Doc made to Krugle last month in IT Garage (after an admittedly quick Google search). The product has launched, and during the beta period over 35,000 people, most of them developers, some of them — like me — simple souls in reckless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, have downloaded and used it and provided feedback. Unlike your perpetual beta web-too-oh! ad hockery, this tool was professionally designed, developed and released. It had a four month beta period and now it’s ready for prime time. So what do you think of it, Doc? What do the Linux folks have to say?

(From Collin Brooke, via Barbara Ganley, via Technorati search for JP Rangaswami’s “Confused of Calcutta.“)

It’s a good post, tight enough that it’s hard to excerpt without turning it into chopped meat, but the following chunklets I found particularly appealing.

It’s easy to come off … as someone who’s already figured it all out — it’s a particularly academic attitude that’s all but hammered into us, that to “not know” is a sign of weakness….

… let’s break out the arrogance checklist for this, I was making the following assumptions:

• An idea is only good the first time, that is, if you’re the one to “discover” it.
• My ideas are so good that people will steal them.
• It’s better to be first than to write well.
• I should hoard my good ideas greedily and then spring them all at once, so that people will think my genius is pure, whole, and polished.
• “My genius” (snort)

It’s so unbelievably hard to get out of the habit of policing the borders of “my” ideas

Collin broke through his concern about creating in public and bravely opened a new site called “Rhetworks: An Introduction to the Study of Discursive Networks (& itself an experiment in networked writing).”

Conclusions

To maintain a blog, I would argue, is to participate in a small-world network, one that involves both clustering and connecting. The combination of these forces (embodied in any number of different kinds of gestures) results in a different kind of writing altogether.

There being few Dickenson’s among us (and perhaps more than few Dickens’) we write to be read. Shelley is on about traffic and audience this morning, noting that her new triple play — Just Shelley, The Bb Gun, and ScriptTeaser: aggregated at Planet Powers — receives less traffic but probably has about the same audience as Burning Bird, her old site. The topic interests me because I moved in April, haven’t posted at the old site since then, have begun to approach but haven’t reached the levels of attention measurement that I had at the old site, and as interestingly perhaps, don’t see the levels falling all that fast at the old site. There are still as many visitors from Google over there as there ever were.

I think I have about the same active readership that I’ve had for the last few years. I think the number of people reading here is slowly growing, and that I retain my core readers because we are part of an active conversational community that shares similar interests. We drop in on each other’s blogs and comment. We point to each other’s work. We behave in other words much like the A-list, a group of people who have developed collegial relationships in the online world since before the web was the medium, people (largely men) who share similar interests and point to each other and have developed reputations due to their good work and who draw traffic because they are lively and consistent writers. In an obscure way they are perhaps gatekeepers, since to be noticed by more than one of them in a given week will certainly spike readership at our less well trafficked (therefore not A-list?) blogs.

deja vu. I feel like I’ve written this post before, and probably I have. If I’m saying anything new or different, it is found in my echo of Shelley’s sense that there are a core group of readers who make up an “audience” for our work, then there are a lot of drop-ins via search engines. Those peope are still dropping in at Sandhill Trek. If anybody cares to add my trickle to the firehose of their aggravator, they can subscribe via Feedlot here. I think it’s Feedlot? Feedburner? Whatever…. mostly people who subscribe probably don’t read, unless they are very selective in the number of subscriptions they manage. The voracious Scoble needs an aggregator of course, like a mainlining junkie needs an IV hook-up. And David Weinberger entered reader rehab over a year ago. My experience with aggregated subscriptions began before people were fooling around with RSS when the Times of London and a couple of other papers offered free online subscriptions by content. The content backed up in my subscription list and for all I know it’s still backing up, like a pile of unread newspapers on the back porch. Or maybe that was some pre-version 1.0/2.0 flavor of RSS. It was a nineties thing, for sure.

I’m grateful for the attention people give my writing, and I play with strategies for broadening that readership. I toy with being mean. I try to steal other people’s good ideas without the theft being too noticeable. In ripping off that last link, I discover that Madame Levy’s dog is sick, which makes my whole post seem even more trivial.

So let me end it on this note… I will probably always read Shelley as long as she is writing. Same goes for other powerful writers I have been fortunate enough to discover here. I will continue to visit with friends who share my interests, tout the poetry of Sweatman, puzzle over the messages from J. Alva, marvel at the working class genius of folks like BMO, struggle to find a way for the avocation to pay for it itself, admire friends like Jeneane who integrate their life and their work… I will continue to link like a mo-fo and hope others link back when they see something worth linking. Sometime soon, I’m going to comb my old blog roll and get it re-displayed here, and I’m going to contact people like Joey deVilla who are on my list and still have me linked at the old blog. Hopefully this will be another expansion of the pebble-in-a-pool ribbling of concentric circles that comprises audience here in the ’sphere. Readership is worth going after, but the way we pursue it is a matter of some delicacy.

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.

Rather than list all the things I wouldn’t know if I didn’t read Shelley, I’ll simply point to the emergence of Gottfried the Intern at Valleywag. This makes the second time I’ve managed to amplify the universal derision associated with Arrington’s Web 2.0 techumentary without stooping to view it. Pray for me… I was tempted after reading Beth Gottfried’s report.

Check out Chris Locke’s amazing MySpace herpetarium construction.

…and here is the promised Snake Preview of Samuel Jackson as the Voice of God in the recent audio remix of the Holy Bible.

The prolific Doctor Weinberger appears today in Strumpette, with a guest posting on transparency. Among much else, he says,

So, all hail transparency… except it’s important that we preserve some shadows. Opaqueness in the form of anonymity protects whistleblowers and dissidents, women being beaten by their husbands, girls looking for abortion advice, people working through feelings of shame about who they are, and more. Anonymity and pseudonymity allow people to participate on the Web who perhaps aren’t as self-confident as the loudest voices we hear there….

Likewise, some meetings should be held behind closed doors. Privacy can be liberating. There are some things we’re not entitled to know and some activities are better with the lights off.