DISQUS

Again, if you do not wish to speak in public on the Internet, and have people read you, even if they don't follow you regularly, but find you in search or through someone else's tweet, *don't go on Twitter*. Stay on AIM, stay in your country club.

The @reply is among the features that made Twitter grow exponentially precisely so that people could say something, be found in search or other's tweets, and thus acquire new followers.

The pressure to turn that off from the "oldbies" is counter to the open spirit and public nature of this platform, and is merely a desire to shut off critics. If you don't want spam, don't follow, block follow. Most spammers are not going to persist with @reply. The actual "trolls", i.e. not critics, but people who harass you cynically and deliberately, who are that persistent as to be stalking are likely going to be abuse-reported, and not only by you and dealt with. So all you've done by shutting of @ replies is to stop the interesting flow of new and interesting people who will find you by key words or through others. You kill a vital living part of Twitter by wishing to control and block that @ function.

It is not madness at all. It is what makes Twitter effective at what it does. Again, if you don't want to be chatting with strangers, then don't go on Twitter and say inside AIM.

There's nothing worse than a collection of arrogant male tekkies getting together and deciding everything for everyone else.

Your love of block is all wrong, it's contrary to the Internet, and in the end, it merely defeats you, because people just walk around you in the end with your "block".

People put others on "block" for all kinds of arbitrary, stupid, arrogant reasons. Sometimes, block is warranted. Sometimes it is not. But block goes too far. It's one thing merely not to see someone you don't want to see -- you mute them. But to then prevent them from seeing your content creates a closed society, an insular group of self-satisfied prigs who eventually even get bored with themselves without fresh content, and without being challenged.

The ideas of "behaving" you have, while, say, more expansive than Shel Israel's, are still restrictive. You, as a public figure, can't behave like you're in a Silicon Valley country club. You have to have some accountability to the public. That means not blocking people from seeing what you say, so that you have accountability for what you say, even from critics. If you want a private chat group with friends, stay in your country club, go on AIM, don't go on Twitter or FF.

Have you notice what just happened on Twitter? I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but suddenly, a few weeks ago, the devs did something that made it impossible to see people's tweets in search if they had put you on follow-block. That is, not only did they not show up in your feed, but you couldn't even see them on Twitter search. If you tried to search them, you would see "so-and-so's tweets are locked and you must IM to get permission" -- even though in fact their tweets *weren't* locked to the public, and others could confirm to you that they could still see them in the public search and without any locks.

I protested this on Get Satisfaction, I blogged about this, and I screamed bloody murder on Twitter itself because this idea of depriving the public from content, on a public service like this, just because of some thin-skinned geeks on the A-list who couldn't bare criticism (or assorted other neuralgic net nannies), runs counter to the whole way the Internet is conceived and operated. And of course, you could get around this sillyness by simply putting the search of that account name whose tweets you were blocked from seeing in an RSS feed, then going over to your Google Reader to read their tweets there. Of course, that mean all the RTs and the mentions of them, but that was ok, you could see their tweets.

Perhaps the realization that RSS and Google Reader defeated this sillyness eventually, a few weeks later, made the devs turn off this block in search. So now, even if someone follow-blocks you, you can still read the page of their tweets. Of course, there are some who want track-block and want to have you completely unable to read or respond to them. Too bad. Don't be a public figure if you don't want critics.

Your moderation isn't "decentralized" -- that's silly. If you own all the items under your initial post, that isn't decentralization, that's Politburo-like centralization! How on earth you could call that "decentralized" is beyond me. If you mean the ability of people to follow leaders and flash-mob follow-block as "decentralized," that is also not really 'decentralized' so much as it is "outsourced hate". You hate someone on a whim, you block them and get others to block them. Outsourcing from influential tribal leaders isn't decentralization.

Decentralization is when people just move on from your blocks and your manipulations and go to some other account/comments/room. Which they will do if you keep blocking critics.

What you're describing about groups of likeminded people having fun, then not having fun when others come in, then retreating to form more private country clubs where they can have fun again -- this was all described some years ago by Clay Shirky in his famous essay "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which you can read about. But while at first I thought he was correct in his analysis, over time, I came to realize he was wrong, and wrote a counter essay something like, "The Group is Our Own Worst Enemy".

Groups have curators that arise to protect the soul of the group and repel those against its spirit. But then that becomes annoying at times and people split or they suffer from newbies. But if a group is really part of an open society, and civil society, it should have a means of dealing with newbies and also dissenters. If you don't want to take on that civic burden, then don't be a public group.

Any system that lets anyone moderate a message leads to tyranny of a few caretakers who become monsters. I've seen this time and again on forums and on the JIRA bug trackers. That's why I lobbied hard -- and finally won -- to have the JIRA turn back on the function that let only the author of a bug report or feature proposal be allowed to close his own proposal. Because what happens is that overzealous "caretakers" who believe only they understand "the soul of the group" (even mistakenly called "good citizens" by the devs, just like you're speaking piously of "the behaved") can start to then reject any kind of dissent, or even common sense that works against their irrationality, which only proliferates as they become more arrogant and isolated.

The tekkie overreach comes not from merely the arrogance that "computer science is hard, so if I mastered that, I can do anything". It comes from the idea that "everything today is digitalized, therefore if I am master of code, I am master of any field."

Re: "for some reason, Linden Lab was in a hurry to give out awards, for some strange reason."

Yes, Catherine seemed to hint at this today by saying that the Lindens plan to roll out their official "Linden Award" soon, they know there will be howling about that being unfair, so it was as if they were drawing all the fire to this exercise, where they could also give people a chance to do the picking, so there'd be this sense that there was not only "Linden choice" but "resident choice."

The rush to put content in the infohubs was unseemly -- in fact, I'm annoyed at the Lindens for not revealing that they were going to come out with these hubs. It's good that they have them and put content in them, but there are problems with the whole system which they still refuse to pay attention to, load balancing, etc. They have enough Lindens now on staff where they really should have given consideration to taking nominations for picks and changed them once a month, just calling them "recommendations we have received" without making a "contest" or a "best" or a "winners' circle" which is ridiculous. I myself just take recommendations people give me, and if they are within a broad norm, i.e. not just somebody's self-advertised store, I put it in my infohub list. I ask people to contribute and they keep sending it and I try to refresh it. I don't pretend a contest was held or a vote, it's just a recommendation.

You've added another good idea for a requirement: that to be nominated, a person has to have a slurl too to their build, their store, their SOMETHING.

I wonder if Twitter added another column like "favourites" or "@" called "high value" that people got in the habit of using to tag anything HV -- and then there was some kind of master running list of this.

This was a useful video because I could get some insight into why you are so hepped on FF, I never get it. And basically, it seems it's because you can fan out and see the likes surrounding any item that gives you useful meta data.

And here's the problem -- to get that useful meta data, you'd have to have 60,000 or 70,000 followers/followees to generate enough around each item you might post or topic you might watch for. Obviously not everyone could do this.

If you didn't read Chomsky, etc. you still somewhere/somehow basically absorbed this Marxist meme about "the bourgeois media" being somehow some sort of "evil".

You also along the way absorbed this arrogant and superior posture that purports to "analyze and penetrate" to what "the news business actually is" as if applying the typical Marxist "critical" analysis.

You try to attack a person for pointing out the obvious -- that the news is a mainstream, valued product that helps civil society and commerce -- and make it seem like they are "insecure" and "clinging to the security" of this "illusion". In fact, however, you're on Planet Whatever with this perspective, as most people simply appreciate what a newspaper is, hard copy or online, and use it every day, even taking for granted that it will "keep coming".

There's also an illusion that there is some sort of "glue coming unstuck" because this or that newspaper failed (interesting that they tend to be the liberal and left newspapers, eh?) Maybe all of them will fail but...they didn't yet. And meanwhile, they move on, they adapt, they try different things, and your notions about them are merely your notions, hardened in the past in some sort of wacky sectarianism.

Unions and jobs began being dislocated 40 years ago during the move from "hot type" to "cold type" as they called computers back then. You were likely not around to remember this, as my father's friend went from having a successful job selling "hot type" to having to drive the news delivery truck, and then lost even that job. I have been around to see many foreign news bureaus shut down and the news hole for foreign news simply shrink to almost nothing, with many papers taking only AP wire stories. This sector has been "in transition" and dislocating for ages.

This idea that we can't trust Bill Keller, managing editor of the Times, to tell the story, is one of those silly notions of the sectarian left -- or wherever you are hanging your hat, it's not clear. Of course he and the rest of the people in the operation can be trusted to tell the story. A room full of editors is in fact a great institution. They are skilled, practiced, experienced and they think about these things all day. Do you? No. There is nothing "broken" about this except your own perception of it. Your favourite media snacking devices in your readers or Twitters or whatever all have paths that lead back to this room full of editors -- and give me THIS room full of editors ANY DAY OF THE WEEK over that unskilled, inexperienced, sectarian, unaccountable bunch who run the Wikipedia operation.

Rupert may very well block Google, or think up something else. Like AP. It's war, it needs to be fought, and that's a good thing. Maybe we will come out with something better than the communistic destruction that the Internet engineers brought us with their utopian visions which have ultimately only destroyed value, not created it.

This thread is just getting too hard to long and search so I will wait for the next blog entry that is relevant or post on my own blog.

Wikipedia has some HORRID built-in problems that you seem impervious to seeing that are far, far worse than the standard default bias of any source. For one, it is near ubiquitous with its mediocrity and biased by turning up first in Google. One hand washes the other there.

Newspapers are right and good to aggregate information and sell ads and live from ads, subscriptions, and kiosk sales, providing a product that everyone values. It is key to the success of many other businesses.

What does Google do? It a) mainly makes money for itself, and all the other people hanging off the ad agency biz are at best a tiny handful of wealthy sites at the type, say, a TechCrunch, and enormously long tail of little guys. b) it destroys other businesses -- that's not something that can be said of newspapers, unless you count newspaper reporting about corrupt businesses; c) it grabs content for free (remember the subject of this blog?!) and resells it, without paying the cost to access it.

Ugh, trying to compare human beings who go out and search for news and interview people and make cold calls and use their skills to investigate with some robotic crawling spider -- ugh.

There isn't a "demand" for the product of Google. There is a "default" to the product of Google. It's "there". We're call compelled to use it. The same tekkie-wikis that bitch all the time about Microsoft's monopoly and the PC and rant about Linux and opensource never, ever complain that Google has a monopoly on search. Ever. Now...why is that?

And I'm here to tell you that this tired, facile, Clay Shirky meme of the Catholic Church=evil empire that refuses to "evolve"=mainstream media versus Protestants=good guys=new media is a) anti-Catholic b) wildly incomplete c) horribly forced d) not true.

Again:

1. The Catholic Church persists, and took advantage of the printing press just like anyone.
2. Shirky and others using this analogy have a strange obsessive need to bang on organized religion, particularly *this* organized religion, when they could be banging on, oh, the Ottoman Empire or Islam with even more of a valid analogy. But that would be politically incorrect, eh?
3. These "good guys" aren't so good. They're destructive. What they created in opposition/inplace of Catholicism, you might say, is just a lot of splinter groups that don't add up.

I don't need any virtual group hugs. And it's war, in case you haven't noticed, and it will be fought.

This isn't an artifact that is "only" of human nature because the echo-chamber effect has unquestionably worsened due to the amplification of the Internet.

Read the comments on the New York Times articles, often absolutely appalling. But they are only a tiny percentage of readers who post, most lurk.

Your loss. Seems like an ignorant practice.

It's always great to make judgements on when *other people* and not yourselves can "adapt or die".

Did YOU do anything to "adapt or die" today? Maybe you aren't exempt?

And you may well be wrong. There's quite the backlash against the entire Freetard Republic mentality these days, and the music business is actually doing just fine selling music instead of just letting it be stolen. Not over yet. Not by a long shot.

AND you don't get to determine what evolution is or does. It's beyond you. Stop pretending you can see long swathes of history or the future. You can't.

No, rather old news:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPBots

More and more, you see their "handiwork" and the arcane wikinistas arguing about them.

Yes, just a few. Any more might be terribly threatening!

Google and craigslist made a big heist, yes.

Online newspapers made a bad judgement call back even in the 1980s when they let the idea that computing costs dictated the need to provide news for free. It shouldn't have.

Er, there has always been an easy way to track advertising in newspapers: sales in that area lol.

The fascination with the average user-generated content dims quickly.

Thanks for your post. And don't be so apologetic. Oh, and BTW, welcome to being the only other female on this thread -- it's so typically filled with swaggering male tekkies who enjoy the idea of something strong that they can identify with utterly trashing and destroying something that is in a weakened position. Despicable.

The Catholic Church is still going strong. Now...how many Protestant splinters were there? How are they doing? This is one of those Clay Shirky anti-Catholic memes, that this "printing press revolution" somehow "destroyed" the Catholic Church. Huh? The Church used the printing press to print the very indulgences that in fact critics like Luther rebelled against lol. It continues to have influence to this day. How's Lutheranism doing? Er, why is a news company that is a business like a spiritual non-profit organization anyway ?

Er, I'm not "pseudo-intellectual" or "semi-veiled" if I *push back* against the sort of pseudo-intellectualism that you find in the slams on me here.

My arguments have considerably more than a grain of truth.

My arguments aren't "hysterical" or "impolite". They're just arguments. Your gang is so used to living in the tekkies' magic circle that it comes as a rude shock when somebody refuses to believe what you say, doesn't find your arguments persuasives, and simply says "no, it's not that way at all".

Deal with it.

Maybe you need to just look at...the bylines? The mastheads? Which is something you can't do on Wikipedia.

What you're failing to realize is that we are already WELL on our way to 1984. Wikipedia is constantly being rewritten, just like Winston did at his job:

There are a tiny handful of people making most of the pages and even tinier number making the editorial decisions at Wikipedia.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_though...

Google has an unconscionably huge hammerlock on search and ad revenue from search in all kinds of ways with all kinds of tentacles.

Did you forget the royal "we" you used in your original post?

"It's not that he can't compete with Google. It's that he can't compete with us."

I'm not "wrong". I'm reporting on what you yourself wrote.

BTW, you'll have to buy me coffee!

No it's not. It's the most powerful and richest search engine, and access to content depends on it -- but it doesn't pay for the content it uses for free to sell its ads. That's wrong.

Um, do I need to go over this again?

You have to pay for kiosks. A lot. Do you live in Podunk?
http://wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php...

And...You have to pay for the papers that you will resell? You left that part out.

Paying for servers and bandwidth isn't paying for content, it's just paying for servers, like an office building or a printing press.

DMCA is not a solution. Robots.txt isn't used by newspapers, although...they might start, soon!

You pay for your pipe to Google. You pay for *part* of what the bandwidth is. The bandwidth that is required for the search isn't something you pay for.

No, I'm not backed into a corner whatsoever. But it's customary for people like you living in the tech magic circle to think that. Projection much?

Um, sure, go ahead and quote it, but don't forget to read the history of what comes next -- and how ultimately, your friend Lenin failed, and the USSR collapsed, but not without causing the mass murders of millions.

You need to stop calling this "democracy". It's only a sort of "democratic centralism" like the Politburo. Facebook's management set the propositions and the framework, allowed only 30 days for comments, hand-picked a committee of users like a Politburo, and then said they wouldn't feel bound by certain things if they didn't feel like it. Hardly a "democracy".

This fake democracy, if anything, far from sopping user rebellions, could spark new ones if people begin to see how fake it is and also aspire to have a say over other things like the changes to the news feed.

Scoble is wrong. This business is a public service that doesn't even have a business model and a profit yet. If it wants one, it has to provide an authentic democratic space. If they charged for the business and got people to pay to have their news feeds wrenched around, then they could see accurately if they lost customers. Right now, they just have a lot of free collectivized labour hostage to networks they control. People don't leave because it's free.

Most people aren't ideological and copyleftist like you, Fred. They find it actually easier to buy i-tunes than sit and rip and fiddle with files. They don't have the hatred of DRM that you have because they probably *only* have an i-pod and nothing else, so there's no need to transfer files across all kinds of devices. You have to realize you are in a tiny, affluent, ideological minority with this thinking. Apple couldn't succeed as it does if everyone in fact behaved as you do, and as you think others do. And that's a good thing, because Apple needs to get paid, and so do artists, and putting up free stuff on Myspace doesn't get them paid, as Andrew Keen very methodically reports in "The Cult of the Amateur".

So you're confirming my point about opensource -- it's not so open or free.

When people like Kirsten or whoever go off on their own thing, this is, oh, "drama". Or violating some "license". Licenses that are arcane and disputed and not so open.

And...er...the entire thing needs a "strong leader" then to come and "whip everybody into shape" with "daily reports" and "commitment".

OK, like I always said: opensource=closed society.

Evil programmers are evil, yes. There is little good that has come out of the viewer hitherto but griefing and exploits and drama and bullshit. Philip working on it means it merely has an insider company leadership that apparently all soi-disant "opensource" requires or it becomes unravelled. So, meh, not so open.

All these projects, uh, work? But...how? They work by exploiting volunteer labour for big companies that then suck up all that exploited labour. Modern-day Marxism.

So, interesting -- does Jacek then use this new interest of Phili's as a channel to bully and push and impose his Impudence viewer that he constantly bragged was deliberately not listening to "the people" (so much for that, uh, concept of open source being, er, open) becaues he was "progressive" in his views of how to monkey with the viewer? Or does Jacek now get well and truly screwed.

Yes, hearts may be broken in opensource land tonight, whoever didn't get on Philip's friendship card list.

Uh, no. I don't "tremble in fear" of open source. But I criticize it as the self-parody that it is. Oh, wait. I don't even have to anymore. It self-parodies, like it is doing now. Stay tuned, kids. Don't try this at home!

What's great about your post here is your willingness to escape from the confines of conformity that so often is dicated by the tekkie tribe -- you have to be for ripping every device and freeing content or else die. I hate that sort of technocommunism, which is constantly trying to destroy value and property.

When vruz writes this, it's a kind of hysteria: "It's because of what it means to have a single point of failure concentrated in a single vendor that becomes the de-facto watcher for our cultural wealth. Of course it's great for Amazon and for Amazon stockholders, but it's a really fucked up thing for mankind as a whole. Really fucked up."

Breathtakingly sectarian and just plain *weird*. You would think that all the books had been confiscated yesterday and were being doled out now by amazon. In fact, there are plenty of ordinary old tree books everywhere. And Google has scanned into the Internet gadzillions of books if you want to sit and read a book online for free. And the same newspapers or services that Kindle has are online, too.

So there isn't any chokepoint of horror whatsoever. There won't even be in 5 years. Not with all the opensource fanboyz ripping at something like this like they rip at everything, for one, but more to the point, other readers will emerge -- in fact they already exist, didn't I just see a Microsoft reader in the book store?

I fail to see why each time some company adds value by making something that is proprietary and is useful to people, they have to subtract value by providing free fodder for legions of loafers who want stuff for free, and legions of widgeteers who think it is a God-given right to rip every service and hook their APIs into it they can sell then for a free or sell their consulting to marketers or companies. Seriously, this is whack, not Kindle making a buck.

I think it's a bit alarming that someone can get Fred Wilson to move off the usual opensource copyleftist dime just by giving him a free thing. But If that's what it takes to get you to see reason, fine! Amazon should be giving more of these things to all the Twittering copyleftist A-listers who are screeching about this horrid closed system.

It's extraordinary to me, again, that vruz could scream "fascism" about a company's simple wish to get paid and pay their workers by charing for their software-run device.

Where is vruz's grave concern about our cultural wealth tied up in Wikipedia and run by sectarian loons especially on the more controversial pages? Wher eis vruz's profound unrest about our cultural wealth tied up in Google search which most of the time turns up Wikipedia? No concerns about bottlenecks and chokeholds, there, hmm? Is it that some companies are more politically correct than others, so they can do no wrong?

Sure, the chokers of any cultural wealth are suspect, but I fail to see why Kindle is even close to doing such an evil thing, and I fail to see how vruz can be morally blind to Google and Wikipedia *already* being close to this, and not prompting a peep out of him.

It's as if private property itself is the crime, rather than the power that is in fact gaining power by destroying private property (which is what is happening with Google and newspapers).

Now, finish the job, Fred, and let them post your blog on Kindle, don't be ideological for no reason.