Tag: Social software

Brad DeLong is a Berkeley economist and a member of the blogging elite. He’s a living (blogging) reminder that sometimes brevity sucks. One of these days I’m going to have to read the twenty yards or so of content here and here and figure out just what kind of economist he really is.

In the meantime I’ll be satisfied with some very entertaining writing, titles like chapter heads from a Victorian textbook and about 200 entry categories. I’m inspired by all those categories – he’s practically got one for every entry – and why not? Bowblog just showed up in Brad’s blogroll which is cool.

Dave Green has got my number. He’s written a well-timed (but quite gentle) debunking of our collective blogging obsession and succeeded in making me feel distinctly uncomfortable about my twice-a-day habit, about the usefulness of the things I write and especially about the queasy comradeship of bloggers. We are, after all, cult members. Damn him! (and I can’t even trackback to his article!)

Couple of good articles from sections of The Observer I don’t usually look at. I like the look af Matali Crasset’s playful interior and product design in the colour magazine. Of course, you lose the pictures in the online version but there are some here. Some really good sports writing (like I know good sports writing from bad) from The Sports Monthly. LeBron James is the schoolboy basketball player said to be the greatest ever. Tickets for a recent inter-school game went for $2,000 and Nike and Adidas are now scrapping over the sports shoe contract – the kid is likely to pocket $7M once he makes up his mind.

Bill Thompson comes back stoutly to my sarcastic response to his BBC article about Google and the Bloggers. Read the comments here. The thing is, I usually find it difficult to disagree with Bill on the big issues. It’s just that this time I’m pretty sure he’s wrong, particularly about blogging. Bill damns weblogs with faint praise when what thinkers and provokers like him ought to be doing is driving the medium forward, creating challenges to the established media and testing the limits of the form, not defending journalists and tired media standards (to the barricades!).

Bill Thompson has flipped. According to this article for the BBC (and in no particular order): blogging is not journalism and will not effect mainstream journalists, link frequency and pagerank are ‘just the rule of the mob’, Google is storing your personal search data for sinister reasons and we need an ‘Ofsearch’ to police the search engines.

In fact, he obviously hasn’t flipped but this is a good example of a fairly common response to new stuff in general. First, a natural and appropriate resistance to hyperbole and loss of perspective and, second, a defensive reflex that snaps in when something new threatens a hard won worldview. Bill is a genuine UK Internet old-timer and a true believer and I think the scale and pace of change of the blogosphere probably represents a profound wobble for his stable understanding of the way the net works.

I can say this because that’s how it feels for me too… In fact, I’ll bet every prematurely grey hair on my head (and that’s, like, all of them) that blogging is the ‘paradigm shift‘ we were pretty sure was happening back in 93 or 94 but which disappointingly evaporated.

(incidentally, this entry includes my first embedded link to Google Labs’ very promising Glossary feature).

I’ve just noticed that the sweeties at think tank Demos have given me a heart-warming credit on their new weblog. ‘Inpired by Steve Bowbrick’ it says. This is in lieu of payment you’ll understand…

Bloggers are fixating on ‘power laws’. I’ve read all the stuff (including Clay’s perfectly sane starting point) and it’s obviously useful stuff with plenty of predictive power but it’s dry as dust. Now this dreary economic concept is going to be rattling round the blogosphere for months and we’re going to have to get used to listening to a thousand second-rate interpreters flattening it out and applying it way outside its useful scope. Nothing inherantly reductive about the concept – but something very human and inevitable about its cooption to a simplified mechanical worldview. The reductivists are a bit like the ‘pub Darwinists ‘ I mentioned earlier – expending way too much energy shoe-horning reality into their favourite model. There’s something autistic about this obsessive focus on one of the many factors that produce a web site’s popularity, currency, connectedness, influence, personality…

I wrote about this ? and Richard Sennet’s excellent the Formation of Character in a World of Inequality – in my column for today’s Guardian.

Technorati provides evidence of my first ever French inbound link ? from Mario, a Head Teacher in Quebec (directeur d’?cole = Head Teacher?). Thrilling. Better still is Babelfish’s translation of the entry in question:

“I like much the idea that evokes “the attentive listening” of the tone of the notebook Web. To find its voice, its stamp of voice as a letter at the post office that one deposits, but which only takes one moment to slip surreptitiously with the screen of those which choose of reading. Emotion in a bottle thrown to the sea that one writes for oneself, certainly, but which titillates curiosity to have a presentiment of the heart of that or of that which will give echo. Provocation, insolence, “rise of milk”, sigh, music of bard, idea of genius, lament or denunciation and then also jewel, lucky find, illumination, soft futility, bravado or ode; all that populates the “blogosph?re” for the cause of the conversation, with asynchronous pulsation! How I like this wavelength where the ideas, without inopportune interruption, run with floods and return, often with time, sometimes without, but always at named point! Thank you for the inspiration “Guard without-limit”…”

People arriving at my web site via a search engine are searching for the strangest things. According to my logs the number one search term is “The Gruffalo” which makes sense. Also pretty high up the list are “diy coffee table” (and, of course, “coffee table diy“), “chat rooms for boring gits“, “bamber gascoigne birthday” and “good cowhand photos“. My favourite, though, is “quotes on being ignored“. I’m number 1 result at Google for “bamber gascoigne birthday” and “diy coffee table”. With results like those it seems obvious that what I should really be doing here is not rambling on like this but selling Bamber Gascoigne-themed birthday gifts and DIY coffee tables.

My latest column for Guardian Online is up. It’s headlined Secret of their success and it’s about weblogs and the uniquely conversational tone of really good bloggers.