Month: May 2002

— A few days ago, I described college blog Hoosier Review as “a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper” following some unethical, churlish, and generally juvenile behavior in their quarters, already described in various comment sections here.

This characterzation was unfair, as some of the HR staffers are capable of making the cut at their school’s daily paper, even if others aren’t. I’ve learned that many, many Hoosiers love their Review, and the fact that all of them use the same computer to send e-mail from their various Hotmail accounts shouldn’t bias me against them, or her, as the case may be. So while the HR is nowhere near the caliber of the blogs I’ve listed for some time under my Blog U. section, it’s generally written in gramatically correct English and tends to be free of major spelling or punctuation errors. If they would simply drop the practice of publishing their dumbest rants under feminine pseudonyms, they might get on the road to acceptable. But the Hosers are young, and time is on their side.

— In the course of commenting on a bizarre bit of analysis by one pseudonymous “Hillary Carter” of the Hoosier Review website on something I wrote, I conjectured that the Review was “a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper.” While that portrayal was less than flattering, it turns out the truth is even worse: “Hillary Carter” and “Rush Reagan” are staff members of the Indiana student paper, and star writers for the Review as well.

Since the Review’s stock in trade is grading the work of the student paper, we have the specter of writers pseudonymously reviewing their own work for the Review. Review editor Joshua Claybourn seems to think it’s OK to hide this relationship from his readers, but it raises serious ethical concerns about the Review that would certainly be troubling in any adult newspaper/web site relationship.

The Review also wants a permalink. I’ll let my readers decide on that question: leave a comment if you have an opinion about my permalinking the Hoosier Review.

— Failing to state the obvious is a kind of bias, according to Thurman Faulk, who comments on the outrageous lawsuit brought by the families of illegal immigrants who died in the Arizona desert because the US government didn’t leave milk and cookies out for them:

In self-conscious attempt to be “objective”, news outlets run stories like this one without even a hint of an opinion. They don’t report it as being outrageous, silly, or preposterous, they simply state what transpired, while taking care to pose themselves as being “objective” by not saying anything about it.

I’ve got an idea – if they can sue us for not facilitating their unlawful acts, can’t we charge them with something too? How about “littering.”

Yes, that was mean.

— Sgt. Stryker rebels against his stereotyping as token Army mechanic blogger and throws off his chains:

The Daily Briefing is no more. No more geopolitical crap, no more insights into the “military lifestyle”. If you want that, go someplace else. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who’ll be more than happy to provide you with fodder for supporting whatever ideology you’re trying to peddle and perhaps they’ll be better than I was at properly portraying the caricature of a military person, since that’s all most people seem to want.

Good for you, dude – be yourself and let the hits fall where they may. I’ve already commented on those who hastened the burnout; you know who you are.

— The Olsen family is divided on the Instapundit question. Wife Dawn questions his judgment in resurrecting Adam Curry:

What was Glenn Reynolds thinking when he resurrected this relic from the 80’s, who in his heyday was an uncool – disconnected from anything remotely cool, without one fucking ounce of coolness in him – helplessly rejected,
bad-hair-life-having, sphincter-plug?

And husband Eric kisses-up, calling me a troll for using the Professor as an example of the limits of manual indexing:

Bennett’s statements there pretty much confirm the troll nature of his post: he asserts that the post wasn’t really about Reynolds at all, that Glenn was merely the “hook”

Like Del, Eric relies on Glenn’s summary of my post, and not on the post itself.

Reading comprehension seems in short supply in the Blogosphere, which probably says something about the importance of intepreters and indexers: they don’t just tell us what to read, they tell us what we read.

— Joanne Jacobs, bless her heart, has a very good book review in today’s Mercury News: Rage, not logic, fuels Dworkin’s feminism

Andrea Dworkin would hate me. I’m not perpetually enraged at those child-raping, porn-peddling, woman-beating brutes (men), nor am I one of the childlike victims (women) looking to Dworkin for salvation. That leaves one category: traitor.

Probably the most significant part of the review, in the local context is this: “Rita Simon uses crime statistics to show that men — not women — are the most frequent victims of male violence,” because it undercuts a message the Mercury News has sent relentlessly for the last decade. Good piece of work, and on Mothers’ Day no less.

— Kevin Deenihan at CalStuff is angling to take Rachel Klein’s Sex on Tuesday column now that the kitten has graduated. Toward this end, he pens a sample column:

Engineers don’t take Fluid Mechanics for the credits. (Well, yes they do, but it still applies.) These are men with a greater understanding of forces and weights than anyone else at Berkeley. Tired of being crushed by a too-heavy lover? Just murmur ‘Mass times velocity’ to an Engineer and he’ll understand instantly. Let him experiment; it’s what he does best. After he gets over his shyness and is given freedom to roam, you’ll be surprised by his imagination. But make very clear the parameters and expectations. EECS don’t expect projects to work correctly the [first] time, but they’ll try again if they need to.

Sign the boy up, and give him star treatment on the web.

— Del Eastman, a neighbor and fan of Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, feels that my musings on the future of the web inadvertently trampled on his hero:

REF INSTAPUNDIT.COM. I HAVE GLEN BOOKMARKED. I DON’T HAVE YOU BOOKMARKED. I CHECK GLEN’S SITE TWICE A DAY. I DON’T THINK INSTAPUNDIT IS OBSOLETE. IF HIS SITE IS OBSOLETE WHY DID YOU USE HIM AS A HOOK TO GET PEOPLE TO LINK HERE? AND NO, I DO NOT AGREE WITH GLEN ALL THE TIME. MAYBE ABOUT 60-70% AND I STRONGLY DISAGREE ABOUT SOME THINGS. BUT HE IS MOSTLY FAIR AND VERY INTERESTING. I’M A BLOG SURFER AND I DO NOT KNOW GLEN PERSONALLY BUT I THINK I DETECT SOUR GRAPES HERE. I WON’T BE COMING BACK TO YOUR SITE. THANKS FOR THE CHANCE TO RESPOND. DEL/BARTLETT, TN

Del left some additional comments 8 hours later, having a hard time staying away. Another one of Glenn’s fans offended by my asking the question about his relevance was the pseudonymous “Hillary Carter” of the Hoosier Review, a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper. Hillary’s response was to post a picture of herself, which looks hot according to That Guy. Dawson had the nerve to say that he likes Glenn but doesn’t care for his site; I hope that doesn’t result in a Howell Raines treatment. The man’s brave.

Instapundit’s response to this post was the most disappointing of all, because he misread it. Recall that I asked if Instapundit was over, examined some trends, and concluded “not yet.” Insta spun this conclusion 180° and claimed I was asserting his irrelevance, which brought out the Clone Army in my comments section. That’s sad.

As to the trend I predict, consider this analogy: once upon a time, Yahoo set out to index the web manually, establishing a system of categories and assigning as many web sites as they could find into their respective slots. At one time, people relied on Yahoo to help them find content on the web. As the web grew, Yahoo hired an army of monkeys to index the exploding web, and couldn’t keep up. Then along came Alta Vista, with a high-speed automated approach to web indexing that was much more complete, had less personal bias, and returned a lot of junk. Nonetheless, Alta Vista destroyed Yahoo as a search engine, only to be destroyed itself by Google which took the novel approach of ranking sites by the number of links in instead of a simple content analysis.

The blogosphere is at the stage the web was at when Alta Vista knocked-off Yahoo, and I’m looking forward to the time when we have a Google for the Blogosphere.

These things happen, and just as Yahoo found a way to remain relevant as a shopping, news, and messaging portal, I have no doubt that Reynolds will find a way to remain relevant when his indexing skills are no longer needed.

— Now that Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles blog has moved to Slate, his traffic will go up and he’ll be linked by more sites, increasing his relevance in the Blogosphere from 247,000th (kausfiles.com’s Alexa ranking) to 2,845th (Slate’s Alexa ranking). This puts him ahead of the leading blogs, NRO (11,066), Arts & Letters Daily (18,337), Sullivan (49,465), Dave Winer (57,381), and Instapundit (68,172).

As the sixth-leading blog, Instapundit isn’t exactly the king maker he was when he was the second-leading linker last November, and people are starting to notice that an Instapundit link isn’t the avalanche of hits it used to be (in some cases it’s not even noticeable.) The blogosphere is now so large that nobody can manually index it every day, so visitors to Reynolds’ site read the summaries and rarely click-through, realizing that he’s just got the tip of the top of one of the flotilla of icebergs. More and more, we’re relying on automation to sift and filter and find the cool stories in the Blogosphere, which means more Daypop and Blogdex, and less Professor Reynolds, Dave Winer, and similar manual link-makers.

Steven Johnson speculates on the next evolution of the Blogosphere in a Salon article referencing old-school blogger Jason Kottke and others of the manual search bent, contrasting blogs with journalism:

But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they’re not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan’s wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won’t be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.

More in this vein in Wired and at Nick Denton, who’s building a next-generation blog company. Johnson and Kottke are too hung-up on the details of how the existing web might transition to the Semantic Web, probably because they don’t have the background in textual analysis, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to catch on to methods that are outside the scope of HTML, XML, SOAP, or any of today’s web-building techniques.

Here’s what’s going to happen: in a few months, you’ll be able to build a blog, or more precisely, a dynamic web site, with content largely selected for you by a search robot that understands what you like, who you like, and where the stuff you like is found. You’ll edit a selection of stories found and presented to you by your search robot, and you’ll comment if you please on the stuff you decide to include in your own Daily Dish.

The collective choices of you and others like you will be refined story-by-story, topic-by-topic, and day-by-day until a Best of the Web that reflects your own tastes and values, and those of people you trust, will be your guide to the Blogosphere. And when that happens, Reynolds, Steven Johnson, and the other beacons of the Blogosphere can get to doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, namely analyzing, opining, theorizing, and creating content (or thinking, as we used to say when I was a philosophy student,) instead of vainly trying to direct traffic. And it will be a better web, and a better blogosphere, and a better Noosphere than we have now:

“No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.”

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
(The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)

The techniques and methods of this emerging web were all described in a theoretical way by Vannevar Bush, the first blogger, in his seminal 1945 article, As We May Think:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

That’s where we’re going; how we get there won’t matter to most people.

Update: See Jeff Jarvis, Reed Stott, Henry Copeland and Eric Olsen for reflections on this theme, courtesy of Matt Welch. Glenn unfortunately believes this post was about him, and not about the web, human knowledge and civilization, and technology. Sorry folks, but the Instapundit stuff was just the hook, not the story.