Michael Feldman counters Oliver Willis on the point that candidates don't answer bloggers questions or concerns because they are not a large percentage of the electorate.#

During the Presidential Candidates Bloggers session Dave Winer asked if any of the Candibloggers would commit to getting their candidate to answer ONE question from their campaign weblog each day. There was a lot of hemming and hawing and jawboneing about how tightly the candidates are scheduled.

But 10 minutes a day, which is about what it would take to personally answer one question or make one honest, heartfelt blog entry, even if just to say how exhausted he or she was, would represent about ONE PERCENT of a candidate's waking day. If, as reported by several campaignes, over half of the green grease that keeps the campaing train rolling is coming from the internet, why can't the candidate devote 1% of his or her time to directly adressing the concerns of those providing it?

Also note that Matt Gross claimed after my question that Howard Dean did read the blog. If he takes time to read the blog why not take a bit more to answer one comment? (I think they should do more but a start's a start.)

In the comments, reader Lis asks,

What's so special about bloggers that they deserve to have their questions answered daily? Why not answer the questions of inner-city schoolteachers or union members or any other group that's larger and more demographically significant than the miniscule percentage who happens to blog?

I can't speak for Dave or Michael, but I think the point is not that bloggers should have their questions answered but that everyone should and a blog is a good staging area for those questions. And if everyone has a blog or reads the Dean blog, then the bloggers include inner-city schoolteachers, etc.

Susan Mernit classifies bloggers.#

One of the things I have been thinking about after spending 75 hours in Boston at BloggerCon with 250 or so fellow bloggers, are that we need to recognize that there are distinct categories of bloggers emerging who behave differently and want different things.

Based on input and observation at Bloggercon and a read of the Perseus data, here is my first pass at a classification at types of blog authors (as opposed to readers) for discussion by anyone who cares to respond--

Halley Suitt on conferences with laptops.#

At BloggerCon, you might have noticed I was there WITHOUT my laptop. Shocking, eh? I really thought long and hard about it. I wanted to spend as much time listening and not be distracted by IM, IRC and blogging -- all of which I have done and can do at conferences -- but this one was different. I knew I would not be able to really listen and have a machine in front of me. It's just too distracting for me. And I don't make judgements about others who were very wired and running every variety of community app while listening to the speakers. If it works for them, that's great. It's just too much for me most of the time.

Clemens Vasters on why BloggerCon tanked.#

What I see is people that say "blogs save the world" and people that say "people who say that blogs save the world have lost their connection with reality". There was so much hype coming out of that room that it easily beats anything I've ever seen or heard about the potential of the Internet at the height of the bubble. Now we're not only going to get everybody connected to sell them something! No! We're going to revolutionize and revitalize democracy, we'll make the world a world of total information transparency, traditional journalism has ended!

So... if it does? What's the "Blogosphere" benefit of this conference? How did that new space that you all talked about really benefit from all that? I think it didn't, because you didn't give them any context folks, just loose hyperlinked meshes of nothingness. Microsoft TechEd and Microsoft PDC aren't about blogging, but the techedbloggers.net and pdcbloggers.net portals create a hundred times more informative and better organized "blogspace" than this blogger centric event's main "blog", which hasn't seen an update during or since the conference. Where are the presentations? Where is the archive of the web stream, where the IRC logs?

Werner Vogels writes his thoughts on BloggerCon.#

I haven't really composed a solid final opinion about the impact of BloggerCon yet, that will probably take a few more days, but one of my observations is that the meeting had a very self-serving feel to it. Seth Finkelstein compared it to Silicon Valley speak at the height of the dot.com boom. I can find myself in that sentiment, and I agree with Seth that Lis Riba's comments on those first sessions are really, really spot on. Just like Lis, I was rather surprised by unwillingness of the discussion leaders to address criticism directed to the elitism of the particular weblog community in the room, which appeared to represent a very limited social and racial demographic class with a narrow geographic point of view. Basically white middle class Americans discussing how their technology will change the world. As an academic I felt lost for a while in what appeared to be a talk show hosted by Dave.

[...]

In contrast to Clemens I do not feel that the conference 'thanked'. He is right in that an important part was human networking, and meeting the people behind some of your favorite weblogs. But I am sure I will use this networking in the future to more effective spread some of my ideas about reliable information dissemination or scalable distributed technologies into the weblogging world. Bloggercon was just one way of doing a weblog conference, driven in this case by Dave Winer's views. There will be other weblog conferences, organized very differently, maybe even of the style Clemens suggests.

Lis comments on the US-centrism of BloggerCon.#

At another point during this panel, Adam Curry complained that all the discussion remained very US-centric. He pointed out that the issues we were discussing -- Valerie Plame, the presidential election, many of these aspects of the Iraq war -- were entirely Americentric. European bloggers were concerned with the fact that a bunch of unelected officials in Brussels were in the process of forming a "United States of Europe" and how will Americans deal with the fact that there may soon be another superpower with a larger first world population and unified currency...

Two reactions to this: First, mine, which is that I've heard almost nothing on this, which again makes the much-vaunted ability of the blogosphere to enhance dialog feel more like an echo-chamber, only showing us what we want to hear. Second was Christopher Lydon's response, which was something about how to "deprovincialize the American (somethingorother) about blogging." Which made me cringe for reinforcing exactly the kind of ethnocentric response that a few of us audience members during that panel were trying to challenge.

Roland Tanglao has a "random BloggerCon thought":#

Random post BloggerCon thought: Chris Lydon is the éminence grise of the Blogosphere. I am sure somebody else already has given him the title; but there it is!

Ed Cone writes something interesting,#

Weblogs bring Second Amendment logic to the First Amendment.

The Second Amendment means everyone gets to have a gun.

The First Amendment means everyone gets to say what they want to say. But a limiting factor on freedom of speech has been that the tools of mass communication have been unavailable to most individuals. Some people are more equal than others.

As opposed to H.L. Mencken's quote,

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

Seth Finkelstein is very clever.#

The problem [with blogs-as-revolution] is that if the optimist says "This post will reach a million people", and the pessimist says "This post will reach ten people", and it ends up reaching a hundred people, the truth isn't in the middle. The pessimist was basically right, the optimist very wrong.

It's not bad to reach a hundred people. But it's not anywhere near a million people.

The optimist says the equivalent of "Give everyone a bicycle, and cars are dead, no more oil, all Middle-East geopolitics will change ..." And the pessimist points out "No, it doesn't work like that, only a very small part of the population wants to ride bikes or will deal with them". Then the reply is "But isn't our biking club great fun? I love biking. You love biking. Let's all go ride around on our bikes and enjoy ourselves".

Which is fine. But not anything near the original statement.

Razib rails on cry baby job protectionism.#

H1B visas have been slashed. In some personal correspondence godless thought that this was kind of ass-backwards (my words). After all, there are fewer H1B workers than unskilled legal & illegal immigrants. So what gives? On this blog we've talked about outsourcing a lot. But the fact is, service sector outsourcing has been 1) mostly in call center and low level coding 2) dwarfed by the decline in manufactoring employment.

But, most people in positions of power might have a relative or friend who is a IT worker, perhaps a senior programmer that couldn't break into management, etc., so these are the people getting the attention. As for unskilled workers, those in power would benefit from looser immigration laws, cheaper nannies, gardeners, construction workers, etc. And it seems entirely plausible that most lawmakers have no family members that work in menial occupations where they would compete with unskilled immigrants.

Ehud Lamm points to a paper above domain specific languages and spreadsheets.#

One of the things I try to do with my SE students is discuss innovative or influential software systems, and try to analyze their essential features and areas of particular strength. Which is why I mentioned spreadsheets to them today. I want to talk about the flexibility spreadsheets give end users.

Jonathon Delacour responds to Mark Pilgrim and his "addiction koan."#

Joey deVilla posts two pictures of him at BloggerCon. I'm behind Ross above his right shoulder. And above me is the Beautiful, Blonde BloggerCon Bombshell that I didn't talk to. Hah, I'm so lame.#

Dave Winer doesn't think the blogger world plays well together.#

The Bush RSS feeds are a total mess. At the Day 2 community session Joi Ito said the usual, "we work together well in the weblog community." It's not true. We work terribly together. I wish someone would explain to me why a user like the President of the United States has to have such a jumble of formats. Does anyone else care how hard it's going to be to move this mess forward? (Impossible, actually.) I've really tried to get people to play together. Didn't happen. At least we can be truthful about our failures, as it gets too late to fix them. I'm afraid, at the technology level, it's business as usual, and not much win-win. Our shame. Blogger, Movable Type, I'll take my share too. Maybe we can have a grown up conversation about this some time, and try to make the best of a very bad situation.

Sarah Allen quotes Chris Crawford.#

"Thought and language are intimately associated. The expression of a thought is not merely a postscript to the process of thinking the thought in the first place. It's not as if our thoughts exist and grow in some pure, ethereal "thoughtworld", devoid of any manifestation, until such time as we choose to pluck one out of the mist and condense it into base words. No! The act of expressing a thought is part and parcel of the thinking itself. Language is the vehicle of thought." (Chris Crawford)

I have always felt that the ways that we communicate affect how we think. When I was in high school I spoke 3 languages (English, Spanish and German) and had studied a bit of Latin and French. I choose which college I wanted to go to because I was impressed that they taught 13 foreign languages. I was intrigued by the observation that some languages have multiple words for something that another language covers in a single word. It wasn't till much later that I realized that I probably wanted to study cognitive science, rather than spoken language fluency.

Jason Kottke refers to Bush as the "Frozen Caveman President."#

Bush said he insulates himself from the "opinions" that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories. "I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

I think in order to find someone with less perspective on the world, you'd have to look to Papua New Guinea for a member of one of the last remaining Stone Age tribes.

Charles Miller calls the bull.#

It's axiomatic that if you tell a big enough lie often enough, people will eventually believe it. This works especially well in technology reporting, because you're guaranteed that the vast majority of not only the audience, but the journalists won't understand enough of the subject to recognise it's a lie in the first place.

Verisign's big lie, their party line, is that before they instituted the SiteFinder service the web was a mess of incomprehensible error messages: that SiteFinder saved millions of casual users from the terrible fate of not knowing where they were going.

Charles Miller defines "just" as a four letter word in the mouths of programmers and techies.#

'Just' is a vague, almost condescending diminutive. Nine times out of ten, it means this:

I do not know, but it is in my interest to estimate optimistically.

Generally, you'll find that if you have a definite idea of the size of something, or the amount of effort required, the word 'just' quickly vanishes from your vocabulary. Not because the thing is necessarily large, but because even being certain that something is small removes the need to qualify its smallness: it becomes what it is, no more, no less, no 'just' required.

Moxie listened in on an interesting conversation between Gray Davis and the Los Angeles Times.#

Gray: I love Hitler!! Write about me, me ME!

LAT: I'm sorry Governor Davis, we have no interest in writing about your transgressions.

Gray: I just groped this young Angeleno and she slapped me. This is a story ma'am.

LAT: Gray, if we printed this it would be bad for you, we both know we don't want bad things printed. Fair and balanced is for Fox.

Gray: I'm irresponsibly drunk and silly! In the last hour I've humilated at least 2 women. One was FELINE!

LAT: No, you are disciplining an unruly employee and had just ONE drink, sir

Gray: Are you sure?

LAT: Yes Governor Davis, I'm quite sure your take of the events are way off base.

Tony Pierce is a great friend to the Madpony girls.#

theres a dumbass trying to give the madpony girls a hard time, but he's just jealous of their popularity, gorgeousness, and wealth.

sad thing about snipers out there is theyre so sad. this guy is trying to appear cooler-than-thou with his mommy's thesaurus, but people who hide behind three dollar words usually dont have anything to say in the first place.

and after careful examination of his digs at the chicks, basically his only gripe is that theyre being... girls.

Aaron Swartz, on his Google weblog, quotes an in-depth interview with Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News.#

There are no press releases on the browsable pages or news pages. We have a higher editorial responsibility on those because we're telling you where you should look. On the news pages, we do not intend to use press releases. We would never do anything to compromise the objectivity of the product. We don't even show advertising … we do this because we think it's useful. Making a press release available as part of the search results gives the full facts that were available to the reporter when they wrote it.

I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. … There's never been a more controversial time on the planet. I think it's great to be a news source at this point because there's so much hunger for news. You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others. I think the diversity is a mirror to the diversity of opinion there is worldwide. One of the things that makes us objective is we show all points of view. Even if you disagree with one, we give you both -- the majority and the minority point of view. The ones you don't agree with are education. It's nice to know what the other side is thinking. You'll see left-leaning ones as much as much as you see right-leaning ones. Frankly, the software doesn't know the difference between left and right, which is good.

Philip Greenspun calls the race.#

Time to stick my neck out with a prediction: Arnold will lose the California election today, for reasons that have nothing to do with his recent spate of bad press. Arnold will lose simply because there are enough craven risk-averse people in California terrified at the prospect of trading a known (Gray Davis) for an unknown (Arnold as politician). Either (a) the recall will fail and Gray Davis will keep his job, or (b) a lifelong political hack such as Cruz Bustamante will prevail over the replacement candidates without experience in politics.

Matt Jones points to Tom Matrullo...#

21st century: demand for indigenous individuated authority and power threatens to usurp systems of producing authority and representation in both political and media arenas extending and disturbing borders of nations, media, and individuality.

Julius Caesar updates on his quest to preserve the Glory of Rome.#

Caninius managed to intercept and destroy the enemy's grain convoy and then, catching them unawares, attacked the enemy camp outside the town and destroyed it. Drapes himself was taken prisoner. However, the soldiers in control of Uxellodunum were not yet ready to give it up. Fabius arrived with more legions and our men began construction of the siegeworks.

In the meantime I had been on a campaign of reconciliation. I tried to secure peace treaties amongst all the tribes, and convinced them with friendship and encouragement rather than with the sword. Roman rule always brought with it justice, wealth and comfort, and Gaul would be no exception. But when I heard of the siege of Uxellodunum I was somewhat concerned. While the holdout force was laughable, if the siege became drawn out it could give the rest of Gaul a bad example: even a small group of rebels could withstand the Romans through nothing but force of conviction. Others could decide to follow their example, especially since the Gauls knew there would be only one more summer until my governorship was up. So I left two legions behind and made my way to Uxellodunum.

RPGamer posts new Sword of Mana screenshots.
New Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories screenshots.#

Richard Tallent on David Weinberger's recent post.#

Dave Weinberger's post on measurement reminded me of Christ's observation of the religious leaders of the day that they would rather waste effort tithing on the smallest herb growing in their garden in some pursuit of perfection than sensing and responding to the practical needs of people around them. I guess some ideas have universal application. I have no idea what category this post should go under...

John writes about default shoes.#

I don't know about you, but I tend to wear the same shoes most of the time. I don't have to wear a suit to work so when I get up in the morning I'll normally reach for the same shoes day after day after day. If I go out for a drink or two, I'll wear those same shoes. If I go to the cinema, or drive to a friend's house to go biking, or go shopping, I'll wear - you've guessed it - the same shoes. I like to call them my Default Shoes. That's because they are my default choice for almost all occasions. Sure, when I need smart shoes I'll wear something else, or if I go running I'll wear running shoes, but 9 times out of 10 I'll lace up my default shoes when I leave the house.

Gothamist links to the amazing Wisdom of Jessica Simpson.#

"You learn something new every day."

The Situation: After husband Nick tells Jessica about a dead mouse he found that was stiff with rigor mortis, Jessica asks what that means. She also uses the word mouses.

The Profound Lesson: Some might think it funny to hear her stammer as she attempts to pronounce rigor mortis, but really, what is more important--knowing something that only applies after you're dead or developing a philosophy that celebrates learning something every day? We know we learned something from all this--and it wasn't what happens to dead mouses. Just don't ask us what it was.

Jorrit Wiersma explains Dark Matter.#

I'm catching up on old magazines. The Europhysics News of July/August contained an article about Dark Matter (by Gerard Nollez of Paris). Dark matter is an interesting part of astronomy. As a physical phenomenon, but also from a sociological standpoint. It seems to me that it is a subject that is rarely studied outside of astrophysics.

This is not very strange. It is hard to believe something that you cannot see or feel. Actually none of our senses would be able to detect dark matter. The idea is that dark matter consists of particles that do not show any electomagnetic interaction with the rest of matter. All human senses, however, are based on electromagnetic interactions. Sight in the most direct way (light is just electromagnetic radiation). Taste and smell are based on chemical reactions which are basically just electromagnetic interactions of atoms in molecules. Touch and hearing are based on collsions between molecules in our skin and ear on the one hand and molecules of solid objects and air molecules on the other hand. These collisions are also mediated by electromagnetic forces. Dark matter particles that do not have these electromagnetic interactions are thus invisible because they do not emit electromagnetic radiation (light) but they would also be impossible to detect with other human senses.

Wendy on blogger love.#

So one of my readers, or perhaps a stalker, is in love with Biz. Personally, I like the guy. Very lovely person, and certainly attractive. But the whole celebrity crush thing, particularly on another member of the blog community...I guess I've grown out of it (me so old). Not that I couldn't easily have crushes on a few bloggers, but I have to have met them first. It just doesn't work for me. Now, give me Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise, and like they say in Heathers, something about the shower nozzle. But I'm not in love with Brad Pitt.

I hate having crushes.

What is WITH weblogs with out RSS feeds? Didn't they get the memo? They're always good, that's the worse part!#

Jessica says some nice things about me. I think some nice things about her. She thinks that I'm "very intelligent" and I have "nifty ideas" - well, you're a mirror of those around you and it takes someone to prod you and direct you like Jessica to talk about something interesting. And I do have blue eyes, so feel free Jessica. :P#

Ron Davis comments on Christopher Lydon's interviews.#

First I don't think "audio blogging" will work. But that is by my definition. To me blogging is at least partially defined by its format. It is a website where new entries are posted on a regular basis and others can read them and comment on them. So to me an audio-blog would have to have regular audio entries posted and people would have to be able to comment on them.

Christopher is very interested in making a human voiced conversation, but, in my opinion, posting blog entries in audo format isn't going to create a human voiced conversation. To have effective communication I think both sided of the conversation have to be talking at the same speed. So in the case of text blogging both the blogger and their readers communicate via the written word. That means each of them have unlimited time to collect, produce, edit and release their thoughts.

Lisa Chau on gaming...#

Lisa: I was in a gaming store this weekend. Where do kids get the money to buy those books & paraphernalia?? That's an expensive hobby!

Co-Worker, Alex: Well, most of them don't have girlfriends. *Imitates cymbals colliding sound*

Jim Moore points out that a sign of success is a Register flame.#

've never met Andrew, but I've grown to value him and his flames of me. Without Andrew's attacks, I'm pretty much an obscure researcher at Harvard Law School. On a campus with the likes of Alan Dershowitz, Lawrence Tribe and Charlie Nesson plus a host of other notables, I'm not much noticed. I study bridging the digital divide, and the use of the Internet in politics. Most of the time these topics are not the subject of big news (the Dean campaign to the contrary). But every time Andrew posts about me, traffic to my sites goes wild. He has become a major distributor of my memes. So much so that one person wondered if he and I are secretly conspiring to do a "dutch uncle" strategy of mutually-beneficial reciprocal referral.

Gen Kanai links Even a monk is not above checking out a cute girl.#

Oliver Willis on candidate blogging...#

If you expect the candidates to be blogging, you need to get out more. Especially for Bush, quite frankly if the leader of the free world is spending his time blogging in front of the fricking computer I'll introduce the articles of impeachment myself.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children - Screen Shots - Artwork#

Carly posts an amazing quote from de Tocqueville.#

To escape the spirit of systems, the yoke of habit, the precepts of family, the opinions of class, and, to a certain extent, the prejudices of nation; to adopt tradition simply as information and present facts simply as a useful study in order to act differently and better; to search by onself and in oneself alone for the reason of things; to strive for the ends without being enslaved by the means and to aim for the essence via the form: such are the main features which characterize what I shall call the American philosophic method