Category: Business

— 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.

— Go to lgf: don’t panic right away to read LGF for the next few days, until DNS propagation catches up with reality.

— Last night it was my pleasure to meet the distinguished French journalist Emmanuelle Richard (no relation), the wife of Matt Welch. I discovered, much to my surprise, that Matt and Emmanuelle have only one pair of glasses between them, which they apparently share. So please go to Matt’s Tip Jar and make a contribution to help them buy a second pair of glasses. Thank you.

— InstaPundit.Com had one of his better days Wednesday.

— PatrickRuffini wrote a nice letter to NBC News’ Brian Williams about their biased coverage of Fortuyn, to whit:

Once again, webloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher of National Review Online savored the hard political “facts of the case” … within an hour of hearing of Fortuyn’s murder, and hours before NBC News reported otherwise. And those facts all indicated that Fortuyn was no Le Pen. Whereas Le Pen had spent years directing his anger to all manner of social and political groupings — immigrants, Jews, the political class, the European Union, and the United States — Fortuyn’s only real “right-wing” plank was to cut foreign immigration by 75%.

By the NBC standard, the Sierra Club is a right-wing extremist organization, because they too are opposed to immigration.

— Edward Boyd at zonitics.com has done a follow-up on the Nunberg study alleging that Bernard Goldberg was wrong about media labeling of politicians, and finds Goldberg was right and Nunberg wrong. Boyd corrected Nunberg’s denominator and looked for labeling on a story-by-story basis, concluding:

Overall – and subject to some interpretation – conservatives were 30% more likely to be labeled than liberals.

It’s unlikely that liberal media outlets who’ve touted Nunberg’s claim will issue retractions, since they’re busy labeling slain Dutch politician a right-wing extremist and covering-up the similarity between Al Gore’s views on the environment with those of confessed pipe-bomber Luke Helder:

Helder, an art student from Minnesota…sent a rambling letter to the University of Wisconsin student newspaper expressing his radical environmental views and wish to legalize marijuana. Sounding like Al Gore or John Kerry, he whines that “the icebergs are melting, and precious earth is heating up.”

The Big Lie – it’s everywhere you want to be.