Disqus - Latest Comments for Ben Tremblay

Re: List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Jobs and Professionals

Ben Tremblay — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:17:37 -0000

Earlier this evening, taking a walk through the past fantastic, I spidered Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), as much as anything to get a sense of how such a fine organization withered on the vine. In the last newsletter they commented on how they were having to lay off staff.
The story of my life, watching my peers getting laid off while others made their fortunes.

Some say history is value neutral. *shrug* I say, not alone, that it's written by the victors.
But then I'm the sort who thinks that "winning" isn't everything.

cheers
--bentrem

Re: Social objects and the observer’s paradox

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:28:10 -0000

Alex, I've finally cleared the decks enough to give your piece part of the attention it deserves.
You've done a masterful job of mapping the territory!

I'm trying to grapple with one part of that; when individuals as citizens are mindful of those who are trying to mislead and manipulate they then very naturally act in ways that at once defend their interests and un-mask the deceiver. (I don't think commercials are evil or anything like that, but the constant association of consumption and blissful happiness ... that's brain-washing.) I'm thinking of the sort of exchange that might take place in a forum of blog where one party is being paid to participate with the sole objective of (what? infecting others with a meme?) pushing a simple agenda. That gives me the jitters, imagining how those I try to meet as peers online might a) be false or b) be cynical because of some previous exchange.

I like this bit from your piece: "To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing, is to step outside the circle, to cease being 'all of a piece' with the flow of gifts" ... I think there are alternatives to being naive and unthinkingly innocent, and yet hope that we can get through our days without becoming too self-consciously skeptical. What concerns me most is that those who are intent on amplifying their interests are so methodical and systematic and even lucid compared to the typical individual ... bearing in mind always that there's nothing necessarily wholesome about marketing techniques.

Meh ... I wanted to leave my mark on this today but feel I've just rambled pointlessly. HeyHo, and so it goes, that's front of mind right at the moment.

FWIW I think heh you've got enough material here to unpack into a whole series!

cheers
--bentrem

Re: Social objects and the observer’s paradox

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:27:27 -0000

Indeed ... yes ...

What I'm working on right now is how it seems that solipsism, or a sort of solipsism, seems to be the precursor to sycophancy.

--bentrem

Re: The use of social objects as artefacts for identity management

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:28:52 -0000

I have to say that all this resonates with something I've been working on years. As in "year; plural". So I won't now pretend to respond to your post ... I look forward to giving it a good read.

But as for "social object" I've been sniping (as in with a gun, not as in with scissors ... though I have been snipping, too, see my most recent Tweet: " RadioHead's Yorke has it right: "object" as low-grade artefact, ergo for me "social object" denigrates > http://snipurl.com/1whwy <")

My point is that "social object" is, to be polemical, reductionist and technocratic ... it dehumanizes the phenomenon and thereby the transactions. To be romantic, it demystifies the whole and drains it of the vitality that makes it (at least potentially) vigorous and vivid.

BTW, peripherally, I have been tweeting with @dpn about the possibility of doing some sort of multivariate analysis on #themewords ... where's the "object" in a collection of "themewords for 2008"?

--bentrem

p.s. I use "Gnodal" as a working name for my "participatory deliberation" project; I know all about having the life-blood drained ... ;-)

p.s.2 I don't think your Preview functions works right on FF2.0 ... I'm seeing a very odd page. light gray text on a BG comprised of light gray walkie-talkies and light grey text blobs.

Re: What the heck?

Ben Tremblay — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:20:26 -0000

*kicks Gravatar*
I've got a pic registered. It usually works. You might want to peek under the hood.

Re: What the heck?

Ben Tremblay — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:19:18 -0000

Mebbe I'm just delusional, but applying Occam's razor leaves me with this: the GOP old-boys' network put the boots to the economy when they saw Obama on the horizon.

I'm far from unbiased / impartial: my prime thesis for years / decades has been that any vaguely progressive politician is staring into the face of a capital strike.
War on Iraq? Sure, no problem. Adjustment to reduce income disparity? No f'n way.
It's a zero-sum game, n'est-ce pas?

^5

p.s. in the mid-70s, research a) corporate involvement in South Africa (then under apartheid) and b) mis-direction of aim funds it occurred to me that forensic accounting would be a dandy sword to wield. Still seems that way to me.

Re: Screw up, get rewarded with a CBE

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:26:04 -0000

Some years ago, perhaps after he left the Clinton cabinet where he'd served as Sec.Labour, Robert Reich (OMG I just found him on blogspot.com!) gave a refreshingly candid TV interview. What resonated with me and stayed with me all these years was what he said about the absence of "patient capital" and how that distorted market influences.

I don't need to hit that nail any harder. But what came to mind just now that brought this up is the thought of how that distorting influence ramifies through all sorts of processes.

Since I'm only here to say "Hello!" I won't essay, but rather bring it down to this: "Incompetence is the thin edge of the wedge we call corruption."

We need all the principled practitioners we can find, now more than ever.

cheers
--ben

Re: Blog Search Revisited – Google vs Technorati vs Techmeme

Ben Tremblay — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:01:47 -0000

Soooo happy to see a ray of sunlight dapple technorati's scenario ... I can't think of another site I'm so partial to.

"Keep pedalling guys, keep pedalling!"

Re: Blog Search Revisited – Google vs Technorati vs Techmeme

Ben Tremblay — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:01:47 -0000

Soooo happy to see a ray of sunlight dapple technorati's scenario ... I can't think of another site I'm so partial to.

"Keep pedalling guys, keep pedalling!"

Re: The Wesabe Process

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:50:27 -0000

*sync*
Reading your blog for the first time I found myself thinking that there should be clear attribution ... and then realized that I didn't /know/ there were multiple authors. The next post was this one. So ... buy-line is nice to see.

FWIW I found Wesabe.com refreshingly personable; got here via a tweet by Tim O'Reilly, to which I replied.

cheers
--bentrem

Re: Going to Burning Man?

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:05:40 -0000

W000t!

Contact Leo Sauermann, he of the EverythingYourDeskAlways (my words, actually) ... NEPOMuk or whatevuh, from *ponders* DKFI.
I met him through a post by him after *gasp!* during BurningMan ?which? prolly '06 ... I'd been watching pics from a guy who had his Cesna down there, and mebbe Leo left a comment. I clicked and *klik* yaa, DataPortability ... XML-RPC/Ajax/XHR ... JSON? Sure ... take the data and run; a service ... OhShiet I wanted to add "Flares" to DoS on WikiPedia (I created RateBasedInstrusionProtection last night. Got totally side-tracked. Thanks for the talk-in.)

K ...
... that.

Contact Leo, he's a great egg.
All continental sophistication.
Hey! Get him to give you a tour of CERN next time you're EU-bound!

cheers
--bentrem

Re: Yahoo hoovers the dark web

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:05:25 -0000

I can integrate the shiet outta this.
!j/k

Factiva, Gale, and Lexis-Nexis ... that's too constrained a set.
Ponder: who's big on discoverability?

Is the flip-side of my "participatory deliberation". (Google that ... my prime site was #1 last I peeked.)

How'bout I send you a nice hand-written card ... how long for snail mail to you from central AB?
:-)

--bentrem

p.s. I adjusted my WebSite to my venerable old lashup

Re: MyBlogLog API in the Wild

Ben Tremblay — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:14:16 -0000

*No comments yet? That always makes me edgy ... like I've walked into a Cathedral.*

HiYa -
Somewhere in your posts I commented about the confound between UserName and ID by integer ... and felt pretty self-concious about that ... but I just read something that tells me I'm not a lunatic:
in the Flikr interface example in "Hypermedia in RESTful applications" Mark Baker points to the exchange required to get contact info ... that's what I was mumbling about. ("Mumbling" because I code, but am not a programmer.)

"A hypermedia solution would have used standardized identifiers - URIs, for the Web - instead of proprietary ones, thereby avoiding the need for Flickr-proprietary knowledge for a client to go from a document with a list of people, to a document about one of those people."

I'm not suggesting what's being done is /wrong/ ... just that it isn't using the resources ?what? artfully.

cheers
--bentrem

Re: Panel Discussion on Activity Streams

Ben Tremblay — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:23:28 -0000

Where's the beef? ;-)
The video shows up fine in your 4MAR "Graphing Social Patterns talk on MyBlogLog API" but not here.
Is it just me? (FF2.0.0.12)

Re: Panel Discussion on Activity Streams

Ben Tremblay — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:06:47 -0000

Yaaa, sorry you should be. No excuse for making a mistake now and then. *snort*

cheers

p.s. you must be a "Mother of All Wikis" fan? see http://ringading.ning.com/ *giggle* Cojones, naming it that.
I'll send you an invite ... won't hurt my cred a bit, that.

Re: Variety, the colors of an active market

Ben Tremblay — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:14:34 -0000

As I twittered in reply to your tweet, the ability to filter really does produce the possibility of building a social setting that is entirely consonant / resonant with one's own world view ... homogenous ... so much so "difference" becomes equivalent to "unpleasant" and eventually "in error" ... a form of xenophobia.

But to wrangle "flood" for a sec ... and here's how that tendency comes into play ... I think we can throttle quantity without reducing variety. For e.g. I'm a leftie; if I can find someone who's genuinely conservative but not paradigmatic knuckle dragger, that person is likely to stay in my stream.
I'm trying to recall a quote ... I think from Locke ... "Who knows only his side of an argument knows little of that." Pretty close.

I like to follow what resonates with me and then uhhh check the branches, the outlying aspects to find something that isn't so obviously in tune. Last thing I want to see when I look out into the world is a mirror! That's just too much like #matrix.

--ben

Re: Cloud Publishing

Ben Tremblay — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 10:14:13 -0000

The term "noosphere" comes to mind. (Read Teilhard de Chardin?) And yet, and yet ... clouds are dynamically stable systems and not just individual beads floating around. Which is where I start getting worried ... our track record for resisting manipulation isn't very good. And it's just plain naive to think that SocMed2.0 happens outside of political influences.

Pondering how the A-list's leadership position acts on the whole I can't help thinking that what we lack are the subtle quasi-biological feed-back/feed-forward systems that promote real flourishing. (Case in point: one of the top TwitterVille Stars tweeted your blog post ... but he did not come by and comment on it. And, as we all know, comments are the root system of the blogging biosphere.)

In any case, very glad to read your musings ... a refreshing break from the 24/7 marketing of those who redefine ROI to be Return on Interest.

stay well
--bentrem

Re: Twitter + Google Maps = TwitterVision

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:12:47 -0000

Oh-woops, I meant to comment on your "Reason #287 for leaving MySpace" ... isn't it horrid? Evidently with their sort of money there's no need to even /spehl/ Bayes. meh.

No, I meant to comment on your "problem spaces", but couldn't find it, so since I've been twittering and tweeting my time away ... have you peeked "Atlas"? It's actually a sweet site ... registering at the homepage got me access to mapped blogs. The tweets site I pointed to here is like TVision on steroids.

This to say hello. (Long long ago I was into arch and social dynamics. Now I'm more into trying to encourage civil debate i.e. "evidence-based discourse".)

cheers
--bentrem

Re: #IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:00:41 -0000

And in the background: 2500+ tweeters have found that none of their tweets make it to the search engines [1], FreeNode has blocked [Mibbit] (the web-based IRC client), and the kidz who got opped in #iran #iranelection and #irantech are banning individuals who don't please them.

Some of us believe that democracy is a clumsy step ... rule of law and all that ... the real prize is social justice, and that means freedom from abuse in daily life.

Venceremos!

1) http://help.twitter.com/forums/31935/entries/38518

Re: The “river” versus “folder” RSS approach

Ben Tremblay — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 03:31:57 -0000

*What I was writing originally triggered such profound proprietary instincts in me that those waves caused FF1.5 to lock up hard and I had to abort. Not j/k!*

W=Q/V ... what something is worth depends on how much of it there is and how fast it's moving, did I recall my Economics 12?

Cognitive ergonomics: there's no way I'm going to put up with being pained repeatedly and frequently ... unless there's a payoff. (Cost/benefit, yes?) If each of a long series of teeny actions bothered us a teeny little bit then we'd prolly be really futzy and reactionary. *looks around* Yaa, like this.

Pleasure is Web2.0; elegant, responsive ... and intelligent.

I doubt that "rivers" and "folders" are actually orthogonal, strcitly speaking ... but dang near!

*It's paradigmatic, my dear Watson!*

Re: Bloggers: hot new commenting system from Disqus

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:04:52 -0000

Right ... getting it on WordPress.com ... but maybe that's precipitous.

You've seen IntenseDebate, yes? For whatever reason (Call me perverse; it wouldn't be the first time), even though ID has such high production values, I lean towards DisqUs.

Which doesn't address the real problematic. And that, for me, is the creation of a new set of informations silos.

Shared comments? Great ... I'm on ID, say. I certainly wouldn't be the only one. And you're on DisqUs, say. And likewise, you wouldn't be alone there. Then there's our friends that are using CoComment ...

I don't just talk about my "discourse-based document portal" because I'm a fanatic with regards to "participatory deliberation"; I see the need for something more fundamental, more foundational, more elemental ... is why I veered away from concept mapping so many years ago. (My "Many2Many is only a shell right now; I know what happens to voices from the wilderness: they get swamped by voices that are acknowledged as marketers.)

Glasperlenspiel, anyone?

Re: What I’ve learned in 2007

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:34:22 -0000

I often find myself wondering where you're coming from ... so thanks for "Dealing with continual partial attention is a skill that psychologists and other mental health professionals will be studying for years. I’m learning that it does destroy productivity, which ...", that gives me something like an existential to work with.

BTW: yesterday on twitter I went on for a bit thusly:
"'Polyphasic' is far more than just a peculiar sleep pattern. It's got everything to do with not becoming en-thralled with the 'now', but it is notRPTnot a state of ADHD, far from it. It's more related to the way dynamically balanced systems digest entropy, i.e. it's fractal."

So, in that spirit, have an outrageously glorious / fractal 2008!

--bentrem

Re: Advertising and hiring

Ben Tremblay — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 04:45:46 -0000

"Will it affect the content? I hope it will! I expect that as we hire more people"

Pretty much sums it up. Web as commodity. More = $$$ = better.

Woa up now, it's you who writes in such stark terms. Maybe you're that simplistic (I doubt it), or maybe you realize that's the only way to dance along the fence (worse).
In any case, I can assure you that those of us who spent long hours deliberating the effect of $$$ on the quality of volunteer engagement (circa '75) salute you. I can't assure you it's a salute of respect.

New millenium slogan: from those to whom much is given can be expected the most grave contempt.

"Meh" hardly captures the sentiment.

bdt

Re: Video on the Net – Media Workers and Media Moguls Making the “Digital” Transition

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:15:57 -0000

*sidebar*
I just have to point you to my (former) friend's FaceBook profile ... isn't that a doppleganger picture?!

p.s. early 80s I was all tooled up to do photoJ ... low 5 figures in the bank, NikormatFT w/3 lenses ++, Mamiya C330 w/2 lenses ++ ... got a chance to be spokesperson for national anti-cruise missile action, putting together a "Peace Camp" outside the base. (Remember Greenham Commons?) I wudda headed to Nicaragua.
Life's like that sometimes.

Re: Next Twitter Client

Ben Tremblay — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 10:31:18 -0000

What comes to mind in the moment is something that would act like a bin for interesting items; not the tweets themselves (though "faves" can be a fun thing to do) but the referent.
What I'm doing right now, under the guise of being kind and generous *snort* is repeating the item having SnipUrl'd it into my own collection and passing that on to those I follow ... which, I suspect, in most cases just makes it redundant.

cheers

Re: Next Twitter Client

Ben Tremblay — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 11:49:53 -0000

In TwitBin sidebar there's a teenie [W] beside the teenie [@], so that look. What I can't grasp (yet?) is function.
Perhaps target is config option, delic or technorati or google b'marks or whatevuh ... long list!
What brought it to mind ... no, check that ... what caused me to blurt an as.yet incomplete thought was heh I happened to be reading ontology/taxonomy/documentation for testing ... what a datum "means" depends on context.
If you pass me a URL it means Xsub1 ... if from DWiner, then Xsub2, know what I mean?
So I'm really talking about stashing context-rich ... preserving the cookie crumbs ... the makings of a graphable XFN-like artifact compendium?

(blue-sky mode here ... it's Sunday! *grin*)

Re: Wikipedia – The coloring book of knowledge

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:49:53 -0000

I saw Jimmy Wales on BBC "HardTalk" last night ... the regular stuff about "truth", nothing new or inspiring.

I got onto WikiPedia pretty early ... and likewise with Citizendium ... not the sort of projects I need to lean into; they're doing fine on their own. But it's historic ... and we tend to forget that it's all very very very new, and not intended to be in any way "flash in the pan". Not like hoosgot huh huh

cheers
--bentrem

Re: Trends & Predictions for 2008

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:56:43 -0000

Good on yuh! Nice to know folk are doing that sort of thing. I mean /doing/, not just pimping it as an idea. ("Talking deeply about simple things" is core to my "participatory deliberation" method.

Does the name Tom Atlee ring a bell? Solid stuff ... never really took off in a huge way ... call it "long nose" rather than "long tail". ;-)

cheers