Piers Young picks up on a recent thread about Continuous Partial Attention (see here, here, and there), and wonders about the backlash against laptops in some coffee shops who offer free wifi:

[from Monkeymagic: Wifi, Cafes and Solitude]

What is curious about the Seattle Coffee Shop (real world) example above, is not that they don't talk. I think they do, just via laptops, blogs, etc. What's curious to me is that, even though a lot of the roles of the old-fashioned coffee shop get subsumed by their online variants, people still go to coffee shops (rather than staying at home). The coffee can't be that good, can it?

The Seattle Coffee Shop owner noticed increasing numbers of 'customers' who were not buying coffee, but sitting using their computers for hours on end, sucking up free wifi. In principle, she was concerned about the increasing lack of 'interaction' in the shop, not so much the fact that these wifi freeloaders were occupying space without buying a single cup of coffee.

I'd like to separate the two elements of this story, and address them separately:

1. If you offer free wifi to all you are going to get slammed by people looking for free access in a congenial atmosphere. My recommendation: switch over to a solution where network ids (perhaps time limited) are handed out to those buying coffee, and for those not buying coffee charge a minimal fee. That will get rid of the true freeloaders.
   
2. People -- even ferocious connectheads -- like the ambiance of a coffeeshop, even if they desire to share the foreground of their attention: a screenplay they are writing, friends in other locales (via IM), or email. Coffehouses do offer chance opportunites to interact face-to-face, new music, people watching, and a change in setting from staring at the same old wall in your home office.

   The coffeeshop's owner, I guess, devalues the interaction that might be going on via network, in favor of the interaction that she'd like to see face-to-face. But labeling continuous partial attention a public nuisance, like talking too loudly, taking cellphone pictures of the unsuspecting, or urinating in the corner, is too much. Staying linked up via PC while situated in a coffeeshop is much less annoying than loud conversations or people shouting into their cellphones, which seems to go on all the time, and has led me to leave many a coffeeshop for one down the street.

   I think what is happening here is a flip-flop in perception. The coffeeshop owner believes that people leave behind other contexts when they walk through her doors, and subsume themselves in the coffeeshop experience until leaving. Continuous partial attention blends context: I am in the coffeeshop, but I am still in conversation with my buddies, worldwide, who are not there. I am watching the people go by, but reading the online musings of various folks in my inner circle, not just the newspapers strewn about. I am available to business partners for a quick email interchange, even though I am watching a beautiful woman I have never met licking whipped cream from her lips. By remaining connected we enrich our own experience. But the coffeeshop owner views the result as destructive, because the heightened experience of the connected is invisible to the unconnected, and all she registers is a decrease in things she can see.

   So, by all means charge for the access to keep out the freeloaders. But don't turn off the wifi. The connected -- which increasingly means the young, the creative, the digerati -- will just go to the coffeeshop down the street, where we can get the fix we want: good coffee, the circus of life swirling by as we sip, and the foreground of attention shared with connected pursuits, where we remain in conversation with those not present.

I had the chance to speak with James Surowiecki last week, who will be one of several keynote speakers for the CTC 2005 conference. James is a writer at the New Yorker, but perhaps best known for his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, that explores the ways in which groups can -- at times -- be smarter than the individuals that make them up.

We spoke about the ways that collaborative technologies can help -- and possibly hinder -- intelligent decision making within groups, especially organizations like the modern enterprise. James started the conversation by expressing his optimism about the upside potential for collaborative technologies, which are "immense, in the sense that we can learn from each other, and pass critical information to each other." At the same time, there is a downside: "the more we interact, the more we will be influenced by each other, and therefore, the independence of thought that we know is critical to good collective decision-making can begin to fade away. So, finding a balance between the two is important, especially when you consider technologies like the Internet."

Click here to read the rest of the piece at the CTC 2005 blog.

I was following the thread of various folks' responses to a recent piece on Continuous Partial Attention (see here), and came across this piece, which suggests that various institutions -- in this case the Wall Street Journal's D3 conference organizers, including tech pundit Walter Mossberg -- are declaring war on CPA. Apparently, Jason Pontin (Technology Review's editor in chief) was asked to stop blogging by a staffer, although it turns out later that wasn't the real issue. The conference organizers sought to shield the conference from wireless so that attendees would not blog, email, IM, or backchannel -- wanting to keep everyone's attention completely in the forechannel, completely focussed on the presentations, etc. Mossberg's response:

[from comment at Pontin's blog post]

It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else. We merely declined to provide wi-fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences -- near universal checking of email and surfing of the web during the program. The policy wasn't aimed at blogging, and any staffer who said that was just plain wrong. We are fine with blogging. We deliberately invited bloggers. And we provided a bank of PCs right outside the conference room hard-wired to the net.

Yikes. Another culture war, where the institution -- here the WSJ -- deems some new style of communication and social interaction the ruination of the prior Golden Age. But this is just another attack on continuous partial attention, which is, at its core, an allegiance to broadcast, mediated, unsocialized communications. In this case, the WSJ -- although you can replace it with any institution, such as a corporation laying down rules for behavior in meetings, for example -- wants full attention on the official speakers, and no side channel discussions. But in a many-to-many world, where individuals want to participate in unmediated discussions, and who believe that their social connectedness is more important and strategic than the task at hand, as a general rule, The WSJ's iron-fisted approach to stamping out back channel IMing will anger the most connected and ruin the conference for us.

Personally, I suggest a boycott of stupid, singlethread, chowderhead conferences that prohibit wireless on this basis. I am all for asking people to turn off cell phones -- the ringing and talking is annoying. But demanding that we fold our hands and pay full attention to the talking heads on the podium is nonsense.

You want to hold our attention? Get better speakers! Throw out the panel sessions and the powerpoints! Use video, and music! Practice what you are going to say, instead of hemming and hawing up there! Speak more quickly, say less and make it worth more!

Others have chimed in:

Wade Roush

[from Continuous Computing Blog: Disconnected at D3]

From this perspective, preventing Wi-Fi connectivity at a conference means depriving attendees, at least for a few hours, of their situational awareness and their connections to their productive groups. This may be justifiable, especially if audiences go into an event knowing that they'll have to disconnect. But the benefits to the speakers and organizers should be weighed against the fact that audiences will be less productive and will be cut off from the intelligence of their groups (which may even include fellow audience members, in the case of an IRC backchannel, for example).

I'm not going to argue that we deserve to drag our electronic umbilical cords everywhere. Concert halls should probably be off-limits. (And perhaps bedrooms: A startling number of people admit that if their cell phone rings during sex, they answer it.) But I believe that those who want to reach large audiences--whether at a conference or through a broadcast or a publication--will eventually have to recognize that the audience's partial attention is the best they can hope for, and the most they have a right to ask for.

More than ever, we are connected beings. Now we have to figure out, as a society, when it's proper to ask someone to disconnect--and in effect, to cut off a part of themselves.

I got the pointer to Wade here, Crumb Trail, who adds a misleading analogy between CPA and multithreaded programming of computers:

Throughput on compute intensive tasks is degraded and total throughput is degraded except in cases where there were many wait states. Time slicing and task switching allows that otherwise idle time to be used. Not all of it can be used since it takes time to switch tasks, but when the length of the wait state exceeds twice the task switch time there is an increase in throughput.

When such machines were configured wrong they ended up spending too much time in task switching - they thrashed, squandering their power on the overhead costs of task management and getting little real work done. This is more than just wasteful since it has ripple effects. It wastes the time of everyone who depends on the computer, like sitting and waiting for a web page to be served by a thrashing server or flooded network.

This is the real cost of CPA. Not only is the thrashing individual's performance lowered, so is that of everyone who engages with them. Charm school classes and time management seminars will teach methods to avoid CPA and increase fun and profit.

The problem here is -- again -- measuring the efficiency of the individual "machine", ahem, individual, as opposed to the network of connected machines as a whole. If all the nodes in a network ignore interrupts from others until they reach a wait state, individual productivity of the node may go up, breifly. That is until the node requests information from another, and is blocked: the other node is not at a wait state, and won't respond. As a result, the productitivity of the network decreases. And, on the social level -- leaving mechanistic productivity concerns aside -- opportunities to touch base, exchange social context, or build trust and obligation -- these are all lost when we put task work deadlines ahead of social purpose. If we are going to have charm schools helping people out in this regard, let's not have them forcefeed Taylorist dogma while calling it time management.

The war on Continuous Partial Attention is on: they will maintain that it is good for us, we need to be less distracted, more focused, more productive, and ultimately, happier. But those who have shifted to a social work ethic resist. Our time is truly not our own, and in a good way. We are supported by a network of partners who will pause, give advice, offer suggestions, and then return to work. Who will take a productivity hit so that we can make headway. And who fully expect us to give back, the same way.

We know the benefits of participating in a backchannel IRC during a conference panel session with various marketing weenies one-upping each other at our expense, or of replying to an IM from a client during a meeting so that hours can be saved on a critical project turnaround. And, yes, we know that old school types -- bred in the days when people worked on a single task at a time, on a single project at a time, and were responsible only for moving stuff from their inbox to their outbox (and I don't mean email) -- they are going to have a difficult time moving to a time-shifted world. But it's here, and the rest of us are living in it.

[Note: I find it strange that both Crumb Trail and Wade quote my earlier piece on CPA, but don't link to the piece. Odd.]

Neal Stephenson, tha author, minces no words about his unending battle to remain out of touch:

[from his FAQ page]

My ongoing struggle against "continuous partial attention"

Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, has coined the term "continuous partial attention" to describe life in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, cellphones, and other distractions. This curious feature of modern life poses a problem for a someone like me. Every productive thing that I do requires ALL my attention.

I cannot put it any better than Donald Knuth, who writes on his website, "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. "

Knuth also provides the following quote from Umberto Eco: "I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

In a recent review of one of my novels, I was described as "Umberto Eco without the charm" and so it should be pretty clear in what direction I am going.

The purpose of this web page is to help me focus all of my attention on productive activity. Three strategies are used:

• explicit discouragement
  Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested
  not to do so, and warned that I don't answer e-mail.
  
• FAQs
  Persons who wish to ask me questions are encouraged to look for the
  answers here on this page.
  
• redirection
  Persons wishing to make business proposals are aimed in the direction of my agents.

What with all of these different strategies, this web page admittedly gets somewhat long and wordy. Lest its key message get lost in the verbiage,
I will put it here succinctly:

All of my time and attention are spoken for--several times over. Please do not ask for them.

Some years ago, I wrote a document that tried to explain why I am not very diligent about answering my mail, and why I only accept speaking engagements on rare and special occasions. The document is entitled Why I am a bad correspondent and you are welcome to read it.

More recently I found an article in the Atlantic Monthly by
Jonathan Rauch that describes my personality with uncanny accuracy. It explains why, whenever I find myself in a room full of people, or discover a lot of e-mail from strangers in my inbox, my first thought is: "where did all these people come from and how do I make them go away?" This---i.e. the discovery that I am a classic introvert---does not render "Bad Correspondent" invalid, but it does fill out the picture a little. In particular, extroverts ought to read this article!

The bottom line is as follows: I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don't wish to retire at this time.

Please don't, Neal. But I disagree with Knuth's characterization, however catchy. Many extroverts stay close to the bottom of things, not just skimming along superficially on the top. And I also don't believe that CPA is only for extroverts, although its strongest motivation is for social connectedness. However, the truly incorrigible introverted will always think of CPA as a vampire sucking blood.

Joi Ito thinks he's said something dumb but I don't: "No matter what time zone I flip to, I have things scattered throughout the day and night almost every single day. I just realized that I have jet lag even though I'm staying in one place." Traveling without moving.

A growing number of traditional media companies are putting their toes in the water of the Blogosphere, and using the same trick:

Marie Griffin and Ellis Booker

[from As digital dollars grow, b-to-b publishers debate impact of blogs]

Jim Spanfeller, president-CEO of Forbes.com, responding to an audience question about when Forbes.com will surpass the print edition in terms of revenue, said, "probably in about 18 to 20 months." Forbes.com is run as a separate company within Forbes Inc.

"I think blogs are an important environmental change on the Web, but I don't know if it will be as disruptive as some people think for publishers," Spanfeller said. Forbes.com is "trying to endear ourselves to the blogging community with the creation of a blog on blogs," he added.

Hmmm. Imitation is the sincest form of flattery, they say, but journalists writing blogs on blogging is something like letting the lunatics run the asylum. The recent Businessweek front page article on blogging was timed with the launch of the new Blogspotting blog, which definitely has a "reporting from the Blogosphere" tone to it, like this post about Bonita Stewart's incredibly smart comments on DaimlerChrysler's "read blogs first, then write blogs later" strategy, which Stephen Baker of Blogspotting calls "timid."

One of the problems that most traditional media companies make when they try to break into the Blogosphere is that they don't start by reading blogs. I hear it all the time from journalists -- even those blogging -- "I don't have time to read blogs," they say. So off they go, creating 'articles in blog's clothing' instead of engaging in a conversation with others. It's not timidity to start by listening, it's smart, and in a way, it's good manners.

This is similar to the reporters blogging about the blogosphere. There is something suspect about it, and even though I know and respect folks like Stephen Baker, I expect that a lot of nonsense will be written by this rapidly expanding group. It's like the bad advice that's constantly being compiled by instant messaging non-users -- "use IM for short bursty communications", "IM is not a replacement for face to face communications," etc. -- stuff that is just wrong, and would be laughed at by serious IM users.

I have decided that I need to start a Watching The Watchers thread, as an embedded project here at Get Real. I will aggregate the stuff being produced at traditional media outlets "blog blogs" and evaluate how much the writers do and don't get it. Once I figure out how best to do this, I will launch.

I really need to keep an eye on this, because there are still innocents out there who will believe whatever the mass market outlets push to them -- even though they ought to know better -- and who haven't yet figured out how to find us, the insiders, those in the Blogosphere who might do a better job of telling them what it's all about.

[tag: Watching The Watchers]

I can't resist this piece [pointer from Andy Lark] that argues CNN.com - E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot':

[from CNN.com]

Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.

The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard.

Hmmm. This is another Taylorist argument against Continuous Partial Attention, which most think of as a disorder. However, CPA is a reasonable strategy for dealing with a sped-up world, but it requires shifting the measurement of productivity away from the individual -- like 'IQ' tests -- and looking at the productivity of connected groups. Time in today's world is yet another shared space: your time is truly not your own. We constantly monitor communications -- email, IMs, blogs -- to keep ourself situationally aware of what is going on around us.

The shift in focus is profound: you need to accept interrupts from others so that they can make progress on their activities, even though this decreases your personal productivity. But it increases the productivity of your contacts, and those dependent on their activities, and so on. It's a form of social altruism.

But the clowns with the stop watches want us to focus, focus, focus to the exclusion of these basic human motives. "Don't help your buddy with his stupid coding problem! Screw him! Get back to making widgets."

And I love the way they suggest that remaining socially connected is a drug that taps your intelligence. So those of us who advocate living connected lives are just a bunch of hippies, I guess. "Tune in, Turn on, Drop out" - Timothy Leary

Giovanni Rodriguez provides a great analysis of the context surrounding the EFF's recent recommendations regarding blogging anonymously. He doesn't touch on the growing tide of conformist pressures in the blogosphere, but otherwise does a masterful job.

[pointer from Ethan Zuckerman]
[tag: Anonymity]

Tom Zeller interviewed me last week for a piece that ran today in the NY Times, When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?, which provides a good rehash of the Niall Kennedy mess at Technorati. The conclusion: your individual freedom of expression is likely to be squashed by the conformist pressures brought to bear by employers. He mentions that the EFT recently recommended a course of action: "Two weeks ago, the group published a tutorial on "how to blog safely," which included tips on avoiding getting fired. Chief among its recommendations: Blog anonymously." Great. Wonderful.

Chris Anderson at the Long Tail has enumerated the traditional media's meltdown:

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!) [Interesting -- I have been spending a lot of time with major publishing companies recently, who are trying hard to get their minds bent around blogging.]
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising)

The long tail argues that there is still a lot to be made of that content, but the ones that will be making the money -- and the channel that it will be streaming through -- will be the digital moguls, not today's analog media companies.

[Pointer from Andy Lark]

Monetizing the implicit social capital that high Google rank represents seems to be a constant theme in the blogosophere these days. Yesterday, I participated in a debate (via Flashmeeting) moderated by Alex Williams, and involving Marc Canter, Jason Calcanis, Stephen J. King (CEO of Marqui) and me: the topic was Marqui's controversial marketing program to pay bloggers to blog about Marqui and its products.

Jason and I have stated endlessly that this is an immoral and ultimately ineffective way to market. The bloggers involved are strip mining their credibility for the sake of near term cash. Marqui may have gained some press from this, but it is a flash-in-the-pan, a one time finesse: now that its been done, no one else will get all the publicity that Marqui has from this campaign, and even Marquis will find that the program -- if extended into the long term -- simply won't work.

Mark and Stephen argue that they were completely open and transparent: bloggers clearly state they are being paid, and since transparency is a key element of trust, surely bloggers in the program will retain their credibility. Marc in particular makes the point that the Internet is open to all, the blogosphere is not ruled by us, or anyone. He and Marqui are free to create whatever sorts of marketing approaches they want to.

Continue reading "First Marqui, Now Wordpress: Spam Or Just Malfeasance?"

David Hornik riffs on a recent email "alert" from the Howard Rice law firm:

[from VentureBlog: Lawyers Take Hold Of Blogging]

After more than our share of public blood lettings in the blogsphere as a result of employee bloggers running afoul of their corporate parents, it is not surprising that companies are starting to issue blogging guidelines. The issue is a real one but until recently it was a small and isolated problem. But if ever there was an indication of the increasing prevalence of corporate blogging, it can be found in the email alert I just received from the Howard Rice law firm. The email alert was entitled "Corporate Blogging: Seize the Opportunity, but Control the Risks" and it laid out both the legal risks raised by corporate bloggers and some "practical guidance" for dealing with those risks. In fact, when I spoke with the Howard Rice lawyers who issued the alert, they said that they were rapidly developing an "expertise" in the law surrounding blogging and would be issuing additional blogging alerts in the future.

Blogging is indeed mainstream when legal practices emerge around it -- which is not to say that the advice Howard Rice gives isn't well taken. As a former lawyer, I couldn't help but spend a bunch of time thinking about the legal implications of blogging on my professional life before we started VentureBlog. As a result, I ended up drafting one of the first blog Terms of Service out there (who knows, maybe it was the first -- I couldn't manage to find anyone else's to plagiarize [sic] at the time I was drafting VentureBlog's). More importantly, we also spent a chunk of time talking with the whole August Capital partnership about blogging and how it might implicate the partnership either directly or indirectly. While we obviously concluded that the benefits of blogging greatly outweighed the risks, it was extremely helpful to go into it with eyes wide open and clearly set expectations within my "company."

Continue reading "First, We Kill All The Lawyers"

Joi Ito outs himself in a soul-searching piece on his seeming willigness to turn up or down his radicalism on various topics because his words (on in this case, video) might show up on the Internet:

[from What would Gandhi do?]

I felt a sudden pain. I realized that I was compromising and in fact evening softening my words assuming that the video of my presentation might end up on the Internet and that I would have to defend any hardline positions I took. I remember watching the movie about Gandhi (Irony alert. It was a Hollywood movie.) and thinking about the power of sticking to your principles and how this purity can move nations without violence or compromise and questioning myself and my methods.

I have always viewed my role as a sort of ambassador or bridge between groups to help provide a dialog. In talks to telephone operators or other somewhat old-school companies, I talk about their "challenges". To left-wing artists, I talk about the tyranny of the monopolies. The irony is that the recent trend of people posting audio or video files of my speeches online has made it difficult for me to maintain this split-personality / facade. I think it's a good thing that these things go online, but it reminds me a bit of politicians being criticized for what they have said at parties or "among friends"... or the Enron telephone calls. I have always encouraged this and poked fun myself. Being on the receiving end of this chilling effect is interesting. The core message I deliver doesn't change but delivery is slightly dampened.

I haven't been "outed" yet and I'm sure most people would understand what I was saying in the context in which my talks are delivered, but I sometimes say things that I'm sure I would say differently on my blog. In my mind, this is translated to words the audience understands in their frameworks in order to be constructive, but in a sense I'm being a bit dishonest. I also pull back on the "radical" throttle when I think it is going to offend my audience so much they will reject everything I say. Having said that, I've had a number of people get really upset. One publisher in Finland called my presentation about Creative Commons "disgusting".

My blog is probably the most "balanced" version of my position so just imagine that I'm slight more radical when I'm talking to the radicals and slightly more "soft" when I'm talking to conservatives. But my question is, am I compromising by adapting my words for the audience and where is the line beyond which I am not adapting words, but changing my position? What would Gandhi do? I suppose everyone does this to a certain extent but I was suddenly conscious of this gap last night.

Joi is taking an inward view here: what should he personally do about his softening or hardening his take on issues. But I think about it at the social level: the Internet -- like all media -- has a powerful normative pressure. The recent discussion re: Niall Kennedy and Technorati (see here) is just another flare-up. Employers putting pressure on employees to not draw unwanted sorts of attention because of their esoteric or unsavory outside interests is only one form of this not so subtle pressure can take.

In a global village, everyone knows your kinks, knows what you said at a public function last night, and what contrarian or unpopular beliefs you hold. And there is a natural human tendency to get in line. The nail that sticks up will be beaten down.

Last year at Supernova, I was condemned as a kook on the conference blog, because I led a panel session on the future of email and stated that 'email blows': making the case that its not very good for what we most want it to do -- communicating with people we know already -- but really good for the thing we most hate about email, namely people we don't know communicating with us, which is spam. When I suggested that the future of email was less email and more social tools, like blogs and instant messaging, I was almost tarred and feathered. One guy was actually yelling at me to get off the podium, and so angry that the spit was flying from his mouth. It was almost a riot.

Had I the sensitivity of Joi instead of the hide of a rhino I would have toned down my radicalism on this issue, held a more moderate tone, and perhaps have persuaded a few middle-of-the-roaders that these neato social tools might be worth testing out. But I believe that Gandhi was right: "You have to be the change you want in the world."

Joi's self-doubt is well-founded. In a village, if you say one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, everyone will know.

A central issue in having a true voice -- authenticity and authority -- is to draw lines, and to howl when they are crossed. That Supernova audience, of 40 and 50 year olds, who believe that email is the killer app just were unwilling to envision a world (ten years from now) when the teenagers of today are in the workdforce and today's twenty-somethings are in key executive posts, and email will seem as antique as telegrams, fax, and landline phones.

Leaving the specifics of that event behind, or the specifics of Joi's presentation on copyright, it is essential that we take principled stands on the issues of the day, whether or not they are popular. The tyranny of the majority is just as bad as any other monopoly. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't make it true. At one time the majority of people believed in the divine right of kings, slavery, and human sacrifice to propitiate the gods.

[Pointer from Greg Yardley, who maintains that "The conversation of all with all has a moderating effect that dampens extremism in all forms, as individuals are forced to constantly monitor how their behavior will look to others - including individuals they haven’t even met yet." Although he thinks that this is a good thing, which I do not.]

Anil has crafted a nuanced piece, The Blog Cycle, that attempts to puncture various myths and memes in the world of blogging. But I'm not so sure...

[from The Blog Cycle]

1. "First, it's important to note that there is no "blogosphere". There are hundreds of blogospheres. Each sub-community of weblogs has its own social norms, its own traditions and its own thought leaders. And as each community has formed and evolved, you can see it go through a few common steps as it evolves as a medium."

Hmmm. True to an extent; however, since all of these subcultures are being shaped by the same social tools -- blogs -- which are increasingly converging toward a standard suite of features, there are core set of blogosphere norms that have emerged. Think of trackbacks, blogrolls, and so on. More importantly, even though the differences between the various blog subcultures may seem obvious and relevant to insiders, to outsiders they all blur to insignificance. And there is a lot more of the outsiders than the insiders. And they are going to become more and more alike, I believe.

Where are the women/minorities? We've been going through this one again lately in the tech blogging realm, and to a lesser degree I've seen it flare up with political blogs. Interestingly, it's mostly a problem in technology and political blogs, though the most popular members of those communities are loathe to admit it. Other huge and growing communities, like knitters, food bloggers, baby bloggers, and corporate/PR bloggers don't seem to have nearly as much of a problem being blind to identity when linking to or quoting from others.

This is really a discussion about power, not diversity, per se. As bloggers become to become mainstream and not just fringe lunatics muttering in tiny cabals, power will concentrate according to network power laws. Anil is famous for demonstrating the power in his blog's reach by getting a gazillion folks to link to a post of his, and winning a context as a result.

So Halley's recent call to action about new voices (which may be one of the influences for Anil's posting) is about intentionally inviting women and minorities into the emerging spheres of power in the blogosphere. Knitting and babies have traditionally been the province of women, and blogs about traditionally female subjects can be viewed as ghettoes in the blogosphere, no matter how fullfilling they may be for the individuals there.

[By the way, I think I have three of my ten new voices... need to scare up seven more, and at least four of those need to be non-American, to meet the letter of Halley's challenge. Pointers?]

You'll get fired! If you read my site, you probably already know my feelings on the subject, but suffice to say each new community has its own backlash on this, especially as people try to find scaremongering ideas to use as the hook for press coverage.

This is a topic where I really disagree with Anil. There is a growing tide of social conformism that is stifling individual free speech (see the pieces on Niall Kennedy, here), as well as ample evidence that dozens of folks have been sacked for blogging (or through actions manifested on blogs), like Morpheme Tales (Curt Hopkins) roster of fired bloggers.

So, to recap my disagreements: People are being fired because of blogging, there is an inherent power structure built into the nature of scale free networks (like the blogosphere) so that power concentrates, and because the various separate blogospheres that Anil alludes to actually do all exist on one Internet, not as private worlds, there is really just one blogosphere. In the end, I believe that Anil is trying to play down any controversy around blogs, so that prospective users will not be alarmed or concerned, and so they can therefore more quickly gain the benefits that blogs offer. That is all well and good, but we shouldn't suppress the debate around these issues, or dismiss their root causes as simply not existing, just to make blogs less controversial and threatening.

In a thoughtful but deeply worrisome posting, Greg Yardley poses a scenario about the The conservative nature of Internet 2.0, in light of the Niall Kennedy affair:

Let’s take a look at the actions of both Niall and Dave Sifry. Once the controversy developed both behaved perfectly rationally, choosing the path of least resistance and greatest common sense. Sifry acted as he did out of concern for the company he’s painstakingly built; Kennedy acted as he did to preserve his reputation and good relationship with his employer. Since both chose the path of least resistance and greatest common sense, the outcome isn’t an abberation - this is a ‘dog bites man’ story, not the other way around. Yet the lessons Niall learned and eloquently communicated to all were undeniably conservative.

As the popularity of blogging, podcasting, video blogging, blog search, and so on grows, many more people will learn the same conservative lesson that Niall did. Some predictions for the future:

1) Blogging will provide an increasingly clear rewards for individual bloggers. Employers looking to hire will increasingly favor those with well-established blogs - all the better to learn about the proclivities and abilities of their candidates. Because of this, more and more people will publicly blog, using full names and accurate biographical information. Most individuals will happily surrender their privacy for a greater perceived benefit.

2) Since blogging will provide an increasingly clear benefit to the individual, the number of bloggers will mushroom. High school guidance counselors and college-based employment centers will begin giving blogging lessons. Career-minded young people will begin cultivating their blogs with the same diligence they currently give to the accumulation of community service and extracurricular activities.

3) Advice along the lines of Scoble’s will become commonplace. From USA Today to evening newscasts, individuals will be told about what is acceptable to blog and what is not acceptale to blog. The consequences of blogging inappropriately will become common wisdom.

4) Affairs like Niall’s or Mark Jen’s will become commonplace, and therefore boring. Because ‘proper blogging etiquette’ will have appeared from everywhere from USA Today to Oprah, the public’s sympathy will lie less and less with the individual blogger, who ‘should have known better.’

5) A new generation of individuals, starting with the high school students of today, will automatically associate successful employment with blogging, and successful blogging with considered self-censorship and image management. Outwardly professed values will become internalized. Truly controversial stances and opinions will be suppressed for fear of real or imagined economic consequences.

6) The tipping point will be reached when radical groups and individuals stop embracing the Internet as a venue for organizing and start shutting themselves off from it - either hiding in access-controlled enclaves or abandoning online life and technology altogether.

No doubt I’m exaggerating; perhaps I’m missing something fundamental. If Internet 2.0 turns out to be a conservative force, it won’t be because of the intentions of its creators. Yet who can fully predict the consequences of their actions and the uses of their creations? If I leaned left or libertarian, I’d be worried.

As a avowed leftist, however, I find this Orwellian future terrifying. Corporate messages controlling our internal self-image, making us into conformist robots spouting corporate bilge in place of personal convictions, and the apparent inevitablity of all this because of the rational self-interest involved -- it's a dystopian nightmare, not something to be accepted.

Greg is right about the people's tendency to cave when coerced. That is why we have laws to ensure various freedoms, so that those with less power (the employee) cannot be compelled to relinquish personal freedoms in order to work.

Jennifer Rice inspired me to try the Book Meme 123.5 exercise: open a book to the 123rd page, find the fifth sentence, and post it. I grabbed The Support Economy by Zuboff and Maxmin, which yeilded this:

Economists from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, concluded that the average length of the workweek for many groups has changed little since the mid-1970s, but the distribution of work hours among groups has changed considerably

Basically, people are working longer hours, and most critically, women are working longer hours. Although the average worker is working slightly longer hours, much more people are in the workforce than before, with an especially large growth of women entering full-time employment. This has profound social impacts, leading to what the authors call "no time for life."

This is an indicator of the way that work is increasingly intruding into and stealing our private lives (which is another echo of the argument I was leveling in the Niall Kennedy brouhaha, here, here, and here, over the past few days).

I got around to reading some of the comments made at Dave Sifry's posting about the Niall Kennedy mess, and I had to disagree with most of the folks that were at least moderately positive about the apparently transparent and swift resolution to the issue. Here's my comment, which I posted there yesterday:

David -

I agree you have very quickly come to a new consensus with Niall, but I profoundly differ with the thinking that defines it.

Individuals must be permitted a private life outside of work, where what they say as private individuals is interpreted as exactly that. We, in the blogosphere, should collectively assert that truth over and over, and resist the blurring of the line between personal and corporate expression, or else, inexorably, corporations will determine what employees can say, either through direct coercion or more subtle forms of mind control.

The fact that Niall has come to believe that there is no such distinction possible in the modern world is a perspective that should be argued against whenever it crops up, even if he fervently believes it after this flap. He is wrong, and it is wrong if he gets kudos for his new understanding of the dissolution of the private self.

Just as important, employers should support individual free expression of their employees even if the sentiments being expressed are unfashionable or objectionable to others, so long as they are not illegal. And the observation has been made at various places in the blogosphere (like my blog, www.corante.com/getreal) that the use of copyrighted icons is fair use for parody and satire under first ammendment protections, so there is little chance that Technorati would be harmed in that way, even if it had been posted ata Technorati blog, which it wasn't, anyway.

While this has not turned out to be another "doocing" (the firing of an employee for blogging) and you may never have even raised the issues of Niall losing his job over this, I think it sets a bad example. Even in the heart of the blogosphere, employers like Technorati are not standing by the principle of individual free expression and liberty.

I hope next time that some critic complains about objectional content on an employee's blog, you instead tell the critic to reread the first ammendment.

- Stowe

So here is a poll, trying to get at the tenor of the times around this issue. Is it possible to have a private voice if you are an employee of a company, who, like Niall, is veiwed as a spokesperson or public face for the company?

Scoble writes about the "lessons he's learned" from the Niall Kennedy "imbloglio" in this recent piece: The Red Couch: Dave Sifry and Niall Kennedy in lesson on corporate blogging.

But, as much as I like Robert, and generally agree with his theories about corporate blogging, as well as the specific comments he makes in this post ("don't blog angry", etc.), he is off target here.

Kennedy was blogging personally: it was not a corporate blog. Kennedy's convoluted, after-the-fact reasoning that, in essence, there is no such thing as a personal blog if you hold down a paying job anywhere is simply wrong-headed. It may be the case that Kennedy has come to believe that, but it is a perspective that we should work hard to undermine, whenever it appears. Individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, should not be abridged by corporate policies or the disapproval of bosses, no matter what the content or criticism.

As I pointed out yesterday, there are five states (including California, where Kennedy works for Technorati) that specifically protect employees from being fired for legal outside activities. Of course, there is no indication that Kennedy was threatened with termination, but the point is that such laws exists to ensure that workers can enjoy free expression outside of work without fear of retaliation. And there is still an "outside of work": just because you are working 9 to 5, or even 100 hours a week in a startup, you are still a private citizen, and your employer cannot tell you to shut up.

Morpheme Tales (Curt Hopkins) has a roster of fired bloggers [pointer from One Darn Thing After Another]

Following various threads related to the Niall Kennedy mess, I discovered a Committee to Protect Bloggers has been formed, protesting the incarceration of various bloggers worldwide, but particularly in Iran.

The SIRC Guide to flirting is a wonderfully tongue in cheek but learned compendium of info about flirting:

... in some rather Puritanical cultures, such as Britain and North America, flirting has acquired a bad name. Some of us have become so worried about causing offence or sending the wrong signals that we are in danger of losing our natural talent for playful, harmless flirtation.

So, to save the human race from extinction, and preserve the foundations of civilisation, Martini commissioned Kate Fox at the Social Issues Research Centre to review and analyse all the scientific research material on interaction between the sexes, and produce a definitive guide to the art and etiquette of enjoyable flirting.

Psychologists and social scientists have spent many years studying every detail of social intercourse between men and women. Until now, their fascinating findings have been buried in obscure academic journals and heavy tomes full of jargon and footnotes. This Guide is the first to reveal this important information to a popular audience, providing expert advice on where to flirt, who to flirt with and how to do it.

[pointer from Dave Evans at Online Dating Insider]

Doc Searls raises a chilling prospect: "Am I the first to suspect that, if bloggers are recognized as journalists, and therefore deserving of shield law protection, the end result will be the repeal of shield laws?"

A few months ago, I wrote a piece called "Ethics of the Flu Vaccine Shortage: What Would Network Science Do?" where I conjectured that the distribution of flu vaccine was hosed, not just because of scarcity, but because we were doling it out to those at high risk as opposed to those most likely to distribute the disease: the supernodes. Shortly thereafter, I wrote "More on Flu Vaccination: Kids are the Supernodes" a few days later, where some evidence emerged in Japan that suggested that the supernodes in flu epidemics are not barristas, doctors, nurses, or bus drivers, but grade school children.

New evidence has emerged to support this theory in a report being published in today's American Journal of Epidemiology:

[from USA Today]

"By vaccinating at least of 70% of the schoolchildren, you can pretty much reduce transmission to the whole community," says Ira Longini, a biostatistics professor at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health.

So, next year, when the stupidity starts up again, remember that we really need to apply network science to the flu vaccine problem, not a bunch of outmoded ethics. We shouldn't willy-nilly vaccinate the elderly, but only the highest risk cases. While it turns out that we need to vacinate the kids, we aren't motivated by "women and children" stupidity. We need to vaccinate them because that's the only way to end the epidemic spreading. Stop the madness!

And of course, this is a story buried on page 8D of the Life section, lost in the television listings, not above the crease on page one where it could potentially make a difference.

A recent National Endowment for the Arts report blames new media technologies for the decline in interest in literature, and therefore for lessened involvement in civic activities, according to the Washington Post

The NEA, like many other observers of trends, blames technology. In 1990 consumers spent 6 percent of their leisure spending on audio, video, computers and software. Now, according to the report, those items account for 24 percent of recreational spending. Book-buying hasn't done that badly, standing at 5.7 percent in 1990 and 5.6 percent in 2002.

[...]

" 'Reading at Risk' merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted -- our society's massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information," said Dana Gioia, the poet who is NEA chairman, in the preface to the 60-page study.

[...]

Of the adults surveyed, 95.7 percent preferred watching television, 60 percent preferred attending a movie and 55 percent preferred lifting weights or doing other exercise to reading literature. Even 47 percent chose working in the garden.

The NEA report, which was released at the New York Public Library, laments that having fewer readers shrinks the pool of people who are activists in civic and cultural life. Adults who read literature also did volunteer and charity work, visited art museums and attended performing arts programs, as well as sports events.

David is in rare form in Web as world:

[...] some things become clearer if you do not start with the premise that people are fundamentally isolated and battle against noise in order to connect with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shared by others. Connection comes first. Isolation and alienation are withdrawals from the pre-existence of what is shared. I think that helps explain why some sites "work" and others don't. Many of the sites that work for me are ones in which I see that my participation helps create and enrich this shared world; I have that sense at del.icio.us and Flickr, at every place I leave a review or join in a discussion, and every time I blog. I can't explain that by thinking of the Web only as a medium, but I can explain it if it's a shared world that we are building together.

I believe that this is the defining figure/ground issue of our time. Those, on one hand, who see the Internet as plumbing and the junk pouring through the pipes as the real important stuff; the publishers' viewpoint, where information is pushed to a passive audience. And us, on the other, who see the Internet as a shared space, where new forms of social interaction structure shared experience; a communitarian viewpoint, where dialog and conversation within groups can reform the world.

Its all in how you look at it, or what you want to get out of it.