Chris Boese's Weblog

All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us

Oh man, I'm just, like, SOOOOO easy! But I saw this on Clancy's CultureCat site, and all I can think of is to echo what she already said.

"I can't begin to explain how brilliant this movie is."

Except unlike Clancy, I have no intention of seeing the "real" movie. This one will do me just fine.

Link: YouTube - All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us.

My favorite quotation today...

Link: Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier.

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

Gee, and here I thought Jaron Lanier was a film director... [grin]

This is a fun link. Here's another teaser.

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

DIGITAL MAOISM:

The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

By Jaron Lanier

An Edge Original Essay

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

[...]

                                                           

Josh Kucera is back blogging again

And this is one terrific post on his blog at www.joshuakucera.net:

Link: Joshua Kucera: "A real tragedy and a waste".

I should say more by way of introduction, because I did help Josh get a new blog back up and running again, but when it comes to Josh, he figures everything out pretty quickly, so there wasn't much for me to do.

I'd been waiting until he hit his stride to put up a "Grand Opening" announcement link to it, but you need to read this post. The site's already deep and rich with a full stock of his research and article archives on international affairs.

It also is a terrific story research resource for generalist journalists who don't have this kind of specialist background, for when they're working on international stories.

I hosted Josh's first (and ground-breaking) Iraq warblog, The Other Side, here on serendipit-e.com in March 2003. It was a short run, but his observations from on the ground in Kurdistan easily rose to national attention in the Blogosphere and Mainstream Media, largely on the specific and reflective nature of Josh's observations.

And I'd missed his voice. Not that he wasn't still working in traditional journalism, chugging away on military and international news at Jane's Defense Weekly (and other pubs in the information group, I guess).

I know he's still working out what he wants this blog to do, and maybe figuring out how its voice fits in with all his other voices, but when I saw the post above, I knew Josh the blogger was back. It just hits me like a fist to the gut.

It's the fact that he wrestles with the stuff in this post that makes his perspective so valuable. Kevin Sites can run all over hell in Yahoo's "Hot Zone," playing "Joe International Journalism Guy" with a  marketing campaign, slick design and all, but give me someone who reflects on what their position in the world means, what it intentionally and unintentionally inscribes, even while still dedicated to doing the work.

(I'm not saying Kevin doesn't do that, but you just gotta get past all the flashy stuff to dig for it. Kevin's embedded work with that one Marine unit in Iraq was nothing short of tremendous, and courageous. The photography on the Yahoo site reminds me of that early Rick Smolan CD-ROM I loved in the 1990s, Passage to Vietnam. I can't complain too much about a site that showcases photo essays as a genre).

It takes brains, heart, and reflexivity. It's a hard row to hoe, but the insights that come out of the wrestling are all the more valuable because of it, even if the ideas feel unfinished, unresolved, and maybe even resist closure altogether.

I'm far more suspicious of journalists who tie everything up in a neat little bow. In the part of the field I work in the pressure to do that with stories is intense.

Better to resist closure than to fall into stock journalism tropes, story arcs, templates of heros, anti-heros, underdogs who prevail in the end, etc. It's a lot less tidy, and you feel a lot more exposed doing it. And it isn't as easy to stick a pat marketing elevator pitch on it.

Who's questioning what's lost when bloggers start squishing themselves into look-alike slick professionally-designed sites that are really "ventures" and get all polished up with advice from "effective blogging" sites?

What my roundabout rambling means is that I'm proud to be working with Josh again, even if I did have a flashback to the old anxiety I had from worrying about him when he was in Kurdistan in 2003 and the war had just begun. Just the other day he'd sent an email that he was off to Somalia, and that same day, I went into work and the story flashed over the wires of the journalist killed in Somalia, and I was just like, "oh shit."

Go read his account of that incident, and the article in the Guardian that he cites. They need to be read together. He tells it better than I do.

What do you say when someone gets all up in a lather over a story in The Onion?

My favorite from the comments (helpfully archived below because the author had taken them down, the widespread ridicule of Internetties being too much for him):

"I’m pro-life, but sweet Jesus you’re an idiot. For your next post, how about a passionate speech on the need to immediately free Prince Albert from the can?"

Link: HaloScan.com - Comments.

In case that precious bit of righteous ignorance of satire disappears, I just had to grab myself a copy of the original (after I got up off the floor from laughing so hard).

Download march_together_for_life__onionsatire.pdf

Oh, and here's the original "article" from The Onion.

Link: I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion! | The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

I had to grab a copy of that for posterity too, in case it disappears online.

Download OniononAbortion.pdf

Chris Anderson's book on "The Long Tail" is out

Link: Amazon.com: The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More: Books: Chris Anderson.

I've been digging around in Chris's blog for more than a year now, pitching the concept to friends, rolling it around in my head. Some of the early reviews say there isn't much in the book that wasn't in the original Wired article, and that is perhaps a trend these days with the short-attention-span nature of book publishing business, which is putting out more titles than ever, yet people are actually reading less (or so I hear, could use a solid statistic on that).

That in and of itself has ramifications for the Long Tail, I suppose, or it acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows? The mysteries of book publishing often do not make sense to me, and not because I am unfamiliar with the industry. Like much of the media business, I see companies making decisions that appear to hurt their own long-term viability/profitablity.

Six Apart and Typepad are featuring Chris Anderson's Typepad blog on the Long Tail, and include this blurb in the notice about the book:

TypePad News: What is the Long Tail?

It was originally an idea...

Back in October 2004, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson penned one of the most influential magazine articles of recent times, "The Long Tail." The Wired cover story explored the impact that improved searching and better filters have had on selling products and services, making it possible to profit from items that aren't "hits" in the Top 100 sense. Increasingly, Anderson suggests, niche products that alone sell relatively few units will together make up the majority of sales for many businesses.

The idea has become one of the most popular memes for bloggers who write about business and culture, and over the past 20 months has taken hold in the mainstream as thinkers and consumers alike realize the implications of the shift.

Then it was a TypePad blog...

Inspired to continue the work he began with his article, Anderson turned to the natural habitat of the Long Tail — the Internet. He launched his TypePad blog, The Long Tail, the very month the article appeared, and ever since, he's been revising and extending his thesis, under the watchful and helpful eyes of "thousands of smart readers," as Anderson describes them. The blog not only served as a workshop for the author's continuing research, but also as a clearinghouse for any and all information related to the concept. To this very day, you'll find Anderson posting about the developments and data that surround the economics of unlimited choice.

Now it's a book...

 

So there you have it, the Long Tail in a nutshell. I've also written about it a bunch on this blog.

To counter my previous enthusiasm, I want to mull over some contrarian thoughts. I'd still sign on to the idea of the Long Tail as an element of radical democracy theory online, just as much as I was an early signatory on "The Cluetrain Manifesto," long before it ever was a book. Philosophically, I am in alignment with these ideas.

So now, let's play the skeptic. The 80/20 rule, for instance. Chris says the Long Tail turns the primary assumption of the 80/20 rule on its ear. And the numbers appear to bear this out.

And that fits with what we have learned about the distributed (democratized distribution) model of technological power, such as how the proliferation of weaker desktop PCs trumped the more powerful world of mainframe computers. The principle reveals itself in the construction of the Internet, a distributed and deliberately decentralized collection of nodes that route around disruption in the same way Christmas lights (and Al Qaeda cells) operate, where if one light goes out, the rest stay lit. Solar power and other off-the-grid energy generation projects work on this model as well.

Even the relatively weak SGML-knockoff code HTML, replicated itself widely because of its ease of use (despite people who don't realize this now 12 years later... you can teach yourself HTML in two days, seriously. Don't waste your money on a class. Take a class in CSS instead).

And to illustrate this point even further, the blog social movement and the Blogosphere exist BECAUSE the distributed model of ease of use/limited template choices create a lower barrier to entry for well-distributed web pages and personal content management systems.

Google even made more power freely available to just anyone than Lexis Nexis ever charged a boodle for (I'll bet folks who banked on the scarcity model of value at Lexis Nexis and other "elitist" databases are still cursing at Google over this).

Forces of centralization and exclusivity (and elitism) have a real hard time wrapping their heads around how a non-scarcity, distributed model creates power where there was not power before, out of seemingly thin air. Asymetrical, perhaps. To their minds, you don't give away dollars to increase wealth, you hoard them (and these days, there are many people sitting on big pots O dollars, practicing their hoarding to the tune of seven thousand square foot homes and upward).

But distribute power among the many INSTEAD of hoarding it, and the total set of goods grows, devaluing hoarded wealth in the process. Bummer, that. Or is the point "wealth" generation just to have more relative to those around you? Is the point central control of the borders and the gates, choke points of power, regardless of the wampum of the day? Or is it just to be Uncle Scrooge McDuck, swimming around in your vault of coins?

See, I get the distributed model. But is the Long Tail as it is currently envisioned a true distributed model? Ah, there's the rub!

This just occurred to me, so excuse me if I sound a little half-baked. I'm thinking out loud.

The Long Tail looks at the AGGREGATE value of the tail end of the selling curve (or collecting curve, if bits of information are what's exchanged, instead of wampum).

Aggregate. That means the 80/20 rule only reverses as the long tail is mined for MASSIVE CENTRAL DISTRIBUTORS. Like Amazon. Like Netflix. (yes, I am still in love with the Long Tail at Netflix, so shoot me).

INDIVIDUAL authors, like, say, Chris Anderson, do not realize the power of the 80/20 reversal, because they are not large scale aggregators. I'd imagine Chris is sitting there watching his Amazon rank, as some of my friends have done when their books came out. And what part of that curvey graph does he hope he's on?

My friends still had to deal with being remaindered and going out of print when they got dumped off the steeper end of the curve. Maybe that's residual horseless carriage old media stuff, but for one author with one book, the Long Tail can be a lonely ride.

What about bloggers who ride the Long Tail care of RSS feeds and Google? They have no barriers to keeping their permalinks up, so long as Google's Big Daddy doesn't unceremoniously decide to dump them out of the Index of Everything.

Many bloggers say their Google AdSense revenue comes from their archives, and I know my archives are my greatest value as well, and of course I don't have stockholder pressure for quarterly results and projections like those odious and highly profitable blockbuster-focused old media companies do. As if the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel "Dead Man's Chest" ISN'T a dog movie, even if Johnny Depp remains a god?

Push-button enforced audience-passivity marketing is still producing results, and these are issues to be reckoned with.

So Chris (Anderson), if the Long Tail pattern only pays off in the aggregate (I suppose you could make the same claim about how PCs trumped mainframes, yet PC power quickly centralized into massive aggregators, didja notice?), where is the payoff/power for the granular producers? The collectors of the dollar/wampum/link votes?

That's the part I'm still trying to work out in my head. Is the Long Tail a tool of greater centralized control, and therefore in OPPOSITION to the distributed/democratized model?

Or is it truly empowering for many of us little littles, just as HTML was, just as a content-neutral DARPA-created packet Internet was, just as blogs + Google/RSS pings are?

RSS is not Push. RSS/Atom/Feed Readers are in the hands of Everyone. Push was in the hands of pushy aggregators who sought to cage up all the benefits for themselves and their REAL audiences, not users, advertisers.

That's where I think we wander into the fog of this gray area. Do we get to wander around freely in this fog? Or are large aggregators sending out border collies to herd us around, secretly nudging us back into a passive media universe where push-button marketing still rules?

Whoa! Amanda! I hardly knew ya!

Link: Rocketboom Goes Boom. Distress Signals Sent. - AdPulp.

Steve Rubel seems to say Amanda Congdon is at fault, claiming (quoted below on AdPulp) she "pulled a Star Jones." That sounds too much like somebody's spin to me. Turns out Rubel is a PR guy. Go figure.

I obviously don't know the whole story, but I do know I loved Amanda on Rocketboom, and she just came off the screen as THE first video-blogging breakout artist. That's history-making right there. Did old media lure her away, or was it simply stupid-ass business practices and a dumb contract offer?

It still shows us where the real power resides, right? Does Amanda hold all the chips? Does the platform hold it? OR, was she lured away by more lucrative offers in old media that the Rocketboom platform keeper couldn't or was unwilling to meet? Amanda says no, and she seems to be implying that the keeper of the Rocketboom platform got drunk on some of his own power (my interpretation).

Thing is, in new media, the barrier is very low to simply moving to one's own platform. Despite what "portals" think (that they have power), Yahoo! syndicating a Huffington Post columnist who has his own blog platform as well (say, Jay Rosen) means that Jay doesn't really NEED Yahoo! or technically, Huffington Post. Jay can still reach all the same audiences with his own feed. (I'm not implying that Jay or anyone else is having problems with their platforms; I'm just using him as a hypothetical example.)

Link: Rocketboom Goes Boom. Distress Signals Sent. - AdPulp.

Rocketboom Goes Boom. Distress Signals Sent.

Note the upsidedown map

Rocketboom, a new media company with a ton of fuel on board, lost a co-pilot and host, Amanda Congdon to Hollywood. Andrew Baron, the show's producer, is now piloting the craft and looking for a soft landing.

Washington Post tracks Rocketboom's flight path:

When Rocketboom started in 2004, young video producer Andrew Baron sent out a casting call in New York and hired Congdon to produce a daily Internet show without a fancy studio -- just $25 a day, a desk and a map of the world as a backdrop. Eventually, viewers were drawn to Congdon's offbeat humor, the show's funny camera angles, and its unpredictable format and content. As hundreds of thousands of viewers began to tune in, Rocketboom asked for advertising bids on eBay and brought in $40,000 to $85,000 a week at times.

Steve Rubel, senior vice president of Edelman Worldwide's Me2Revolution practice, told the Post that Congdon "pulled a Star Jones."

On her blog, Amanda Unboomed, Congdon says:

I am disheartened by Andrew Baron's decision to spread misinformation. He knows I cannot move to LA without a job...but insists on spinning things this way to shore up his assertion that I am "walking away" from Rocketboom. I did not walk away. I did not accept Andrew's idea of "partnership".

You can check out Congdon's confessional resignation here.

Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money"

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

While I am certainly NOT one to think that Nick Denton is the online equivalent of Warren Buffett (heavens, no!), nor do I necessarily think he "gets" interactivity and grassroots media in a real sense (I'd still put him firmly in the "horseless carriage" category), I do have a great deal of interest in the article below.

First, holding my finger up into the wind, I am interested to hear that the "party" is back on. I wasn't too fond of the dot.com bubble "party" of the late 1990s, and my biggest complaint about it was how "stupid money" went around chasing after other "stupid money" in the form of venture capital and angels who didn't read business plans, dispensed with P/E ratios, and worst of all, had NO understanding of the larger concepts governing Internet communities and online interactive spaces.

They were carpet-baggers, in other words, and dumb carpet-baggers at that. And they were so full of themselves, they threw a big party of excess and actually believed it would never end, oblivious that the world of real people online went happily on without them.

So Nick Denton is suspicious that the "party" is starting up all over again with Web 2.0. Well and good, and I would be too. I'll give him credit for a certain degree of wisdom here. But is it?

Would Web 2.0, strictly defined, support the kind of "party" Denton is talking about? Or is it some kind of fluff popularization of Web 2.0 that is starting to consume speculators?

Think about what Web 2.0 means.

What does it mean for me? Maybe I'm half a bubble off here, but Web 2.0 for me means one major step closer to the Semantic Web (the Semantic Web, in my mind's eye, will be driven by AI), with XML- and tag-driven meta-information creating spaces for higher-level "smart content," or content that knows its own name, knows things about itself, can parse itself, and knows how to fit itself into larger contexts. Oh, and all these relationships are formed by many-to-many communication links or conversations, forming and reforming dynamically, on the fly. It's been called an "ecosystem."

In other words, the XML, MySQL/PHP, database-driven universe of tags and social network meta-data starts to web itself with levels of complexity that we have previously only seen with simple links as the coin of the realm, through regular old Vannevar Bush Memex machine hypertext theory.

Did I lose you there? That's OK. You're already one-up on VC with stupid money, so don't feel bad.

Just think about ways to visualize cyberspace, and think about how relationships can be represented so that items don't exist in space, all by their lonesome, but rather, are defined by their relationships to each other in a vast web of ongoing dialogues and conversations.

Or better yet, visualize a busy parlor with people clustered around, talking here and there in groups. Some of the people there are related, even second cousins twice removed. Some are married. Some are friends. Some are having secret affairs no one knows about. And most importantly, SOME drove in on horseless carriages from this big auditorium a few blocks away, where the only folks allowed to talk had to wait for a turn to get up on stage and hold forth with a microphone and a PA system.

You can tell the ones who drove in their horseless carriages over to our parlor here, because they walk into the room and ignore everyone else, and they just START TALKING IN VERY LOUD VOICES.

Some of the small conversations are disrupted by these obnoxious people, but others are not. This does not daunt the loud-talkers. They raise their voices more. They want everyone to pay attention to them exclusively, even if they kill off the party in the parlor in the meantime. That really doesn't bother them, because enough of the disrupted conversations will be lured into the loud-talkers' orbits, and those people (sheep) can be persuaded that what the parlor really NEEDS is a stage, and maybe, oh, you know, a PA system...

Got that image in your head? OK, now go read about Nick Denton below, and remember, he's no Warren Buffett, and not even a Tarot card reader.

Web 2.0 lives in the parlor, and turning the parlor into an auditorium is NOT Web 2.0. IMHO. The people who have this compelling need to turn it into an auditorium will just take a powder when their audience goes away, jump in their horseless carriages, and ride off in search of another busy parlor to disrupt.

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

July 3, 2006

David Carr

A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs

THE blogging bubble has been taking on serious air of late. Last week, PaidContent.org, a blog that covers digital media, held its first mixer. It was, by all reports, filled to the brim with money and content guys speed dating on the way to marriage.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, was there, but he wasn't looking for love or money.

"It made me want to move to Budapest, batten down the hatches and wait for the zombies to run out of food," Mr. Denton said cheerily.

[I love this line! And so apt, too. VC=Zombies? Who'd of thunk it?]

One of the overlords of the blogosphere with 15 sites and enough buzz to arm every doorbell in the nation, Mr. Denton has watched page views at his sites double in the last year; Gawker Media and Nielsen/NetRatings put monthly unique visitors at 4.2 million. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Mr. Denton celebrated a very upbeat stretch in the blogging industry by putting two of his sites on the block, reorganizing others and laying off several people.

Laying off journalists? How very old media.

"Better to sober up now, before the end of the party," he said in announcing the realignment. As of last Friday, Sploid, a tabloid-infested site built on screen shots, and Screenhead, an aggregator of video clips, were put up for sale. Editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper were moved or replaced. At a time when mainstream media companies are madly baking their own piece of blog pie, Mr. Denton was summarily executing underperformers.

"We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company," Mr. Denton said last week. "You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognize what isn't working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are."

[...]

Gawker, Deadspin, a sports site, and Valleywag, a Silicon Valley blog, in particular, have gone beyond cult status with rapacious, real-time annotations. But while newer sites like Jalopnik, an auto-obsessed blog, and Kotaku, a gaming destination, took off, Sploid and Screenhead tanked.

[...]

BRACING candor is not the only relevant application at Gawker Media. Blogs, as they became a medium unto themselves, have generally been characterized not just by idiosyncrasy, but also by a publishing schedule known only to them. Not so at Gawker Media, where the writers publish early and often, delivering on the critical expectation that readers will always find new content.

And every site, regardless of subject, is built on speaking what mainstream reporters will only say sotto voce. It isn't journalism — as Mr. Denton and his pack of merry provocateurs happily remind — but it is the kind of media that attracts steady audiences that advertisers covet.

"I always thought that you needed to know the code for finding out what was actually going on when you read mainstream publications," he said. "We just say it. It is supposed to be the conversation that occurs between reporters at the bar after they have finished their stories."

[...]

But the whole digital veneer masks a bit of a media traditionalist. His sites are arrayed over very common contemporary interests — celebrity, pornography, sports, Hollywood — that would not be out of place in mass magazines (a dead-tree medium, by the way, that he believes is far from dead). He thinks all of the bluster around blogs, fueled in part by AOL's purchase of Weblogs, has brought stupid money off the sidelines. He has felt the touch of clammy hands from venture capitalists more times than he would care to count.

"There is no doubt that there is a bubble right now," he said.

So why not cash out?

"Because it would be too hard to start over," he said. "Sites need to be well-managed and well-designed and even then it is harder and harder to launch a site. The world does not need more blogs," adding that if you count all the pages on MySpace, "there is approximately one reader for every blog out there."

For his part, Mr. Denton spends a lot more time reading computer code than blogs. He believes that the common software behind blogs isn't up to the task and now has 11 people, including 4 in Hungary, working on developing proprietary solutions.

[...]

Mr. Denton thinks a few other opportunities are worth investigating, but is not making any bold predictions.

"The barrier to entry in Internet media is low," he said. "The barrier to success is high."

 

Neat project: "Ethnomedica" or herbalist lore

Sorry, this is behind the firewall, but there's some neat stuff in the article in the Independent. I just wanted to share the really good parts, and the link to the Ethnomedica project site. I wish there were a way to memorize all this wonderful stuff!

Link: Ethnomedica: Researching the Herbal Traditions of Britain.

Link: Independent Online Edition > Plant remedies: Back to our roots.

Plant remedies: Back to our roots

Plant remedies have been passed down for generations. But it's only now that scientists are putting them to the test.

By Sanjida O'Connell

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1099050.ece

Right now the roads near us are lined with elder in bloom, the flowers balanced precariously like plates of whipped cream and the air thick with their heady scent. I've made a sorbet with the flowers and have been liberally dosing my husband with last autumn's elderberry liqueur to help relieve a cold. Apparently, as well as being good for coughs, the berries are packed full of vitamins A and C and anthocyanin, an antioxidant.

This is about the limit of my hedgerow knowledge, for, like most of us, I have little idea about what to do with British plants. "We've spent so long popping down to the chemist that we're in danger of losing traditional herbal recipes," says Rosie Atkins, the curator at Chelsea Physic Garden.

To counteract this loss of knowledge, Kew Gardens is working with the Natural History Museum, Chelsea Physic Garden, the Eden Project and British herbalists on an Ethnomedica Project to collect people's herbal remedies; so far they've found 3,000.

[...]

Rhiannon Evans, a medical herbalist who chairs the Ethnomedica Remembered Remedies Group, says that the way plants were used historically may not reflect how a qualified herbalist would use them today. "I would recommend my children rub dock leaves on a nettle sting because you can use dock found growing by the wayside but, in professional practice, you need to use specific species. For instance, the root of yellow dock can, in some cases, be used as a laxative."

[...]

Simmonds has run into a problem she hadn't anticipated, though. One of the plants she has been examining is the figwort, a shade- and damp-loving plant with innocuous, unpleasant-smelling flowers. In Ireland it was regarded as the "queen of herbs" and was used to heal wounds. Simmonds thought it could be useful for diabetics, who can often suffer from leg ulcers. "We identified some of the main ingredients but when we extracted these compounds, we discovered they were totally inactive," says Simmonds.

Simmonds went back to the herbalist who had given her the information, and asked for a sample of the material she was using. She discovered that the compounds she was interested in, the iridoids and flavonoids, had been destroyed when the extracts were made. "We don't always look very carefully at how people prepare their herbal medicines. In the 17th century, doctors wouldn't have written this down - it was their way of earning money."

By looking at how figwort is used today - fresh, as a poultice - the team were able to isolate the active ingredients. Simmonds is now hoping to begin clinical trials.

[...]

Traditional remedies are collected at the Eden Project, Cornwall, the Chelsea Physic Garden, London, and at the Kew Heritage Festival, which runs until 24 September, or can be sent to Monique Simmonds at [email protected]

Cures from Mother Nature

The 10 most popular plants and their remedies, collated by Kew's Ethnomedica Project:

Link: Ethnomedica: Researching the Herbal Traditions of Britain.

Dock Rubbed on nettle stings.

Onion Cut into slices, covered with brown sugar and left until the juices run out. This syrup was used to alleviate coughs.

Garlic The leaves and bulbs were eaten as a general tonic.

Nettle The tips of the leaves were infused in boiling water. The resulting tea was drunk as a tonic and to purify the blood.

Feverfew A garland of these daisy-like flowers was worn around the head as a migraine remedy.

Elder The flowers can be made into a tea as a cold or flu remedy.

Comprey Traditionally the fresh leaves or a poultice were used to heal broken bones or sprains, but its use is restricted today.

Lavender The dried flowers were put into a sachet and placed under the pillow for insomnia.

Cabbage Fresh leaves placed against the breast were thought to help alleviate mild cases of mastitis.

Dandelion A tea made from the leaves was used as a diuretic and for arthritis.