Atlanta Media Bloggers

Sherry tagged me

So I'm supposed to write five things about myself?

This 'blog slam' is a tagging game where you write 5 things about yourself and then tag 5 bloggers to do the same.

1. Soon I am moving to NYC to start a new job.

2. I think I hate packing and moving more than any human being on Earth, because I have a Grand Fixed Cross in my astrological chart, which means I'm incredibly stubborn, and am always pulled in four stubborn directions. So instead of sitting still, it means I've moved all over the country all my life. And every time I do it, it's so wrenching, it's a bit like being drawn and quartered as a torturous punishment in a medieval town. And I wouldn't NOT do it for anything.

3. I just watched "Good Night and Good Luck" about Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, and Senator McCarthy, again, and I'm so intensely moved every time I watch it, it leaves me gasping and speechless. Maybe that will pass after I get some distance from similar circumstances.

4. In my past life, I was a Christmas Elf! Santa Claus was berry berry good to me this year, and for that I am deeply grateful. Merry Christmas, all!

Oh, and Tag, You're It!

Chip
Joshua Kucera
Wally
Crowpoet
Tim A Gem

Chris

p.s. Sherry I'm very sorry to hear about your dad.

 

We are Bloggers, hear us roar?

Link: Blogs becoming force in advertising | Reuters.com.

Whoo hoo! How about this new research in the Reuters article below?

What does this mean, tho? My immediate thought is that there is a great warning embedded here. Take a study like this and mindlessly apply the results to your thinking, and shift the massive advertising persuasion push to blogs, and you risk killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

You see this happen all the time in television. They get a piece of research that says audiences like "X," and without thinking about WHY audiences like "X," they just turn around and run "X" into the ground, until audiences absolutely HATE "X."

So here's my logic. Advertising is wholeheartedly NOT persuasive. With emotional branding (pathos), it does OK, but audiences are far too savvy to expect advertising to be logical (logos), and most importantly, audiences have been conditioned over time to distrust the source (ethos).

Audiences DO trust close family and friends, word of mouth, MORE THAN ANYTHING.

Insofar as blogs appear to be as trustworthy as close family and friends, audiences will treat them on par with word of mouth recommendations.

However, if bloggers by and large sell out, or if the trust/credibility link-love system fails, if scam-blogs and splogs proliferate and drown out all the signal for their noise, the truths of this study will evaporate as surely as people stopped believing the boy who cried wolf.

It always amazes me how business these days takes a scorched earth approach in pursuit of profit, instead of looking at how longevity and trust matter more than quarterly returns. I mean, what self-respecting capitalist would actually hype a lie or corrupt a source that reaches an actual audience (what should we call blogging payola? blogola?) if it means destroying his or her own future customer base or ability to reach that customer base?

What this research tells me is that when given a choice, people choose authenticity. Sales pitches don't feel authentic, so they are disregarded. Blogs feel authentic, so they are tentatively trusted. Those who promote rampant pitching without regard for authenticity will probably rush in and exploit this source.

Will authenticity be strong enough to win, or will the pitches drive the real audience out of the blogosphere?

Link: Blogs becoming force in advertising�| Reuters.com.

Blogs becoming force in advertising

Fri Nov 10, 2006 7:27pm ET

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Blogs are becoming a force to be reckoned with as a means of advertising products, according to a survey.

An Ipsos MORI poll found that the Internet journals are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or e-mail marketing.

[...]

Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people's intentions to buy goods or services.

Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service.

[...]

Blogs, or weblogs, are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent), the survey commissioned by Hotwire, a technology public relations consultancy, said.

But they still lag behind newspapers (30 percent).

[...]

"Word of mouth is no longer restricted to close friends and family, it can have the same level of influence upon millions of people across the world."

Let's have a virtual meeting this month!

Hey y'all!

Yeah, it's been cooooollld out, and rainy enough to curl your hair. And yeah, a whole bunch of us have conflicts up the wazoo, preventing us from making a goodly quorum for our monthly mind meld.

And yeeeaaah, SOME of us got to go on a cool road trip, and they need to be telling the rest of us who didn't go some wacky stories, amazing anecdotes, and tortured theories about Web 2.0 and unConferences (what the hell is an unConference, anyway? I'm asking this on behalf of the peanut gallery. There are no stupid questions around here).

The topic for our meeting, if we had been able to hold it, was going to be Online Communities, and the intangible something that makes them hold together, that gives them power, that structures cyberspace perhaps more strongly than in some of our real lives.

What is it? One friend once told me that online communities were fake, no more real than the people who gather at around the piano in the lounge at an airport bar. He said there's nothing that really ties the people together, no strong ties, no obligations. People come, and they go.

And some of us actually like communities that have that kind of freedom, the freedom from guilt and obligation, the knowledge that the people who are present are there because they want to be, not because anyone is making them. That was one of the beautiful things I discovered in my online ethnography of the very strong communities of the Xenaverse, the fandom groups centered around the TV show "Xena: Warrior Princess."

I think of it like gravity, the so-called "strength of weak ties." Of all the forces in physics (electromagnetic, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force), gravity appears to be the weakest, the easiest to overcome (don't believe me? Jump!). But gravity is like a prevailing wind. You can stand against it, but it ends up shaping everything (even the shape of the cellulite in our legs!). Gravity holds entire solar systems in orbit, and more. I think the weakest force field can actually be the strongest.

Businesses look at the blogosphere and social media as an opportunity, but often they see it as a top-down opportunity for them, rather than a chance to harness real bottom-up grassroots force.

But is that a real force? Or is it like herding cats?

Or maybe the mindset is all wrong. Maybe its wrong to even think that cats should be herded in the first place.

Soooo, what are we doing here? Do you want to be here? Are you obligated to be here? Do you get something of value out of being here? Is this a cool community to be a part of?

If so, I hope some more of you will chime in in this space. It's been a while since I sent out invitations on how to use this site, but I am happy to resend any invitations that got lost or misplaced. Just zap me a note.

If you have a blog or blogs, a good blog promotion strategy is to get hooked in with an existing community, so that people start reading your blog, and folks comment back and forth on each others' blogs, and we can spread some link love around.

I SURE WOULD LIKE TO BE SPREADING SOME MORE LINK LOVE AROUND!

So if you've got a blog, post up a little introduction to it here on this site, with your link. Tell us why we should peek in, check your blog out. Maybe you're feeling shy, just getting your blog legs. We'll hold your hand. That's what link love is all about.

We're Atlanta Media Bloggers. We're into blogs. We have blogs. OK, all together now:

Send us your links, your huddled URLs longing to breathe free...

Ahhh. Isn't that better?

Let the virtual meeting commence.

All in flavor? Up hosed?

respectfully submitted,

Chris Boese

A good reason to be careful what you say

Link: Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers *

Maybe Libel Law would be a good topic for one of our future monthly meetings. I'm not trying to scare anyone, because you really don't need to fear threats of libel if you don't say bad things about people that you can't prove to be true.

The beauty of libel law is that Truth is the primary defense against libel. That's how you CYA. Just don't make things up.

And Fair Comment and Criticism (which allows you to review a film and say nasty things about how badly it sucks) is PROTECTED SPEECH. That allows you to have nasty opinions about things.

Good ethics would require you back up hasty generalizations with support, reasons for why you think the film sucks, for instance.

PARODY is generally considered Fair Comment and Criticism. I do believe that usually includes filksongs (bastardized song lyrics) and Fark.com-style "photoshopping" joke sites.

But with the heated nature of online discourse, where folks get sloppy is when they're busy flaming someone who maybe isn't wearing asbestos underwear, and instead of criticism, they start playing the "dozens," or an online variant, essentially saying bad things about someone's mother or parentage, or other exaggerations that are made up completely of whole cloth.

I dunno. Don Rickles gets away with that style of insult, but if it is something that can be fact-checked, it had better be true. If Don Rickles says out loud that someone's mother wears army boots, it is aural and generally considered slander. Libel is a bigger deal, because it has more permanence, and if etched forever on the ethers, Google-searchable, that could add up to a sizable settlement.

So an exaggerated insult COULD be construed as taking from a person her or his good name or reputation, and if it ain't true, that's libel.

For those of you for whom this is pretty basic stuff, or old news, please forgive me for going over old ground. I just figure it's better safe than sorry.

Chris

Link: Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers *

Link: USATODAY.com - Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites.

Link: AsiaMedia :: US: Blogs hit by libel suits.

US: Blogs hit by libel suits

People criticised in online journals fight back, experts fear the impact on free speech

Singapore Straits Times
Thursday, October 5, 2006

New York --- Mr Rafe Banks, a lawyer in Georgia, took his ex-client David Milum to court when the latter wrote on his blog that Mr Banks had bribed judges on behalf of drug dealers.

Last January, Mr Milum became the first blogger to lose a libel case in the United States and was ordered to pay US$50,000 (S$79,000) in damages to Mr Banks.

The case is just an example of how blogs are increasingly being targeted by those who feel harmed by attacks on the online journals.

In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from postings on blogs and website message boards have been filed in the US, reported USA Today.

The suits have sparked a debate over how the "blogosphere" and its impact on speech and publishing might change libel law.

Legal experts say the lawsuits are challenging a mindset that has long surrounded blogging -- that most bloggers are "judgment-proof" because they are often ordinary citizens who do not have money.

This is unlike traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television stations.

But the lawsuits by Mr Banks and others were undertaken not with the sole purpose of claiming damages, but also to silence their critics.

"Bloggers did not think they could be subject to libel," said Mr Eric Robinson, a Media Law Resource Centre attorney. "You take what is on your mind, type it and post it."

Mr Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, told USA Today the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should learn libel law.

"It has not happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home," he said.

[...]

"10 Commandments of Web 2.0" cracks me up...

Found it on the AU Blog, and wanted to point up my favorite bits.

Link: The 10 Commandments of Web 2.0.

The 10 Commandments of Web 2.0

1. I am the Lord thy Google, which have brought thee out of the land of Web 1.0, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other search engines before me.

[...]

2. Thou shalt not take the name of Apple in vain.

The music of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the RIAA and the tyranny of MSN. Blessed is he, who in the name of iTunes and 99 cents, shepherds the weak through the valley of “The Darkness,” for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of “Lost” children. And I will Digg down thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my Macbook. And you will know my name is Steve Jobs when I lay my DRM vengeance upon thee.

3. Thou shalt not make copies of any Flickr image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth without first checking the creative commons license. Thou shalt not download it thyself and serve them from your server.

[...]

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Get the hell out of the house Sunday. Seriously. The world will not end if you don’t blog for 1 day out of the week. Go take a walk in the park or streak a football game. It will give you something to blog about on Monday.

5. Honor thy fathr and thy mothr: thy website names may not be long.

[...]

6. Thou shalt not kill your comments.

Only Seth Godin and Satan have blogs without comments. If you’re going to have a blog, let people interact with it.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery (if you have an AOL account.)

The AOL data leak showed us all the dangers of search histories and large companies releasing large amount of semi-personally identifiable information. If you’re going to get some cookie, delete your cookies. And if you can, cancel your AOL account.

[...]

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against Wikipedia.

I’m looking at you Steven Colbert. We can’t have just anyone modifying the sum of all human knowledge at will. Not unless we live in Washington and/or our last names start with O’Reilly.

10. Thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

It’s called tagging now and you should covet it like crazy. And you must put it in a cloud – it’s most angelic.

[...]

Should interactive media be doing a better job of managing expectations?

First, this article just struck me as counter-intuitive, because all the numbers have been running high precisely in the opposite direction.

Then, I wondered if it is linked to the expectations game, the land-rush mentality that turned the Internet into Oklahoma in the late 1990s, with ripe money poised at the border, wanting to be a Sooner.

The money rushes in, the money rushes out, all because interactive media won't immediately transform itself into a push-button marketing free cash bonanza? Like with old media companies, will a slower than 28% growth spawn a shareholder exodus?

That sounds too easy, tho, given the massive Ford cutbacks announced recently.

And why is there a decline in financial advert money? Mortgage market slump? Too soon, or is it? Why would one of the most profitable industries in U.S history (credit industry) back off? I know there's a mortgage adjustment going on, but could there be a trimming back on consumer credit too? Larger economic trends that capital gains and investment machinations of the super-rich can't disguise?

Hey, don't ask me. I'm not a broker. I just know Yahoo! has had an aggressive and intensely creative year, and it surprised me more often than once in the past year, with interesting content and interactivity plays. Generally, I'd consider that a good thing. I dunno. Maybe Yahoo! was sucking in some more traditional old media investors, and they got cold feet quick.

Link: Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives - New York Times.

Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: September 19, 2006

Shares of  Yahoo fell more than 11 percent today after the company disclosed that it had sold less advertising in the last few weeks than it expected, largely because of a slowdown in automobile and financial advertising.

Speaking to a conference held in New York by  Goldman Sachs, Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive, said that while advertising continued to grow from these industries, “they’re not growing as quickly as we might have hoped at this point in time.”

Yahoo said that it would still meet its financial targets for the third quarter, but that its profit and revenue will be toward the bottom of the range it had estimated.

[...]

The bottom of that range represents a 20 percent growth in revenue and a 16 percent growth on operating cash flow.

That would represent a further slowing of Yahoo’s growth. In the second quarter its revenue grew by 28 percent. And that result was lower than analysts expected, causing the company’s shares to slide. Over the summer, Yahoo’s stock had regained all of that loss until today’s disclosure.

[...]

Still, Wall Street analysts said it appeared that Yahoo’s problems were  not widespread in the industry.

“Not everything is hunky-dory in Yahoo land,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “Yahoo’s audience is not growing as fast as it once did.” Mr. Rohan added that Yahoo appeared to have unusual turnover among its executives and that this might have hurt its ability to sell advertising.

Susan Decker, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, told the investors that the advertising slowdown affected both text-based search advertising and graphical display advertising, an area in which Yahoo is the leader.

[...]

How NOT to get lots of comments on your blog...

Yeow! When some friends first told me about this today, I really wasn't sure what a "sock puppet" was, and to tell you the truth, the guess I had in my imagination was a tad more off-color. I was glad to be proven wrong on that assumption!

So another professional journalist gets his poor ethics exposed, care of blogs and the blogosphere. I just have to point that out, because usually it is professional journalists ranting about the lack of ethical reporting standards in the blogosphere.

Link: New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog - New York Times.

September 4, 2006

New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog

By MARIA ASPAN

A senior editor at The New Republic was suspended and his blog was shut down on Friday after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts.

Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog. An editor’s apology replaced the blog on the Web site, announcing that the blog would no longer be published and noting that The New Republic deeply regretted “misleading” its readers.

Franklin Foer, the New Republic’s editor, said in an interview that he first became aware of the accusations against Mr. Siegel on Thursday afternoon, after a colleague noticed a comment in the Talkback section of Mr. Siegel’s blog that accused him of using the alias “sprezzatura” to defend his articles and assail his critics.

["sprezzatura" is a literary term, for art that seems effortless or comes easily]

[...]

In a statement by e-mail, Mr. Siegel said, “I’m sorry about my prank, which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my happy intellectual home for many years.”

[...]

Mr. Siegel became a polarizing figure, coining the term “blogofascism” in the midst of a debate over The New Republic’s support of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Connecticut primary.

The user named sprezzatura, an Italian term for studied carelessness, posted comments that were hyperbolic even in the blogging environment. After readers criticized Mr. Siegel for his post about the host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, sprezzatura wrote: “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” (A later comment deplored other readers’ “inability to withstand a difference in taste without resorting to personal insult.”)

Mr. Siegel is not the first mainstream blogger to use an Internet alias or the first to be unmasked. In April, The Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of a reporter, Michael A. Hiltzik, after he admitted using aliases on his own blog and other Web sites. Mr. Foer said that as print publications engage the Internet, it can be difficult to clearly define and apply journalistic principles. “Obviously, this all happened in a newer medium where the rules are more ambiguous,” he said. “But we simply don’t tolerate the misleading of our readers.”

Arianna Huffington is keynote speaker at the Decatur Book Festival tonight!

Link: The AJC Decatur Book Festival | Event Schedule.

Sorry for the last minute notice. I'm not too organized these days.

It's at Agnes Scott College, Presser Hall, 8-9 pm.

I've always wanted an excuse to poke around the Agnes Scott campus. It's so beautiful.

Anybody feel like going? I plan to be there. While she isn't directly scheduled to talk about Huffington Post (slated to talk about her book on work/life balance), I expect she'll get some questions about the Post during the Q&A session, if there is one.

I'm a fan of what she's done with the Post, both in its navigation and architecture, and its sense of being a "stable" of a wide range of well-known people. She's given them a forum to blog and unleashed a powerful and now influential collective voice on the blogosphere and beyond.

In particular, I hope to ask her for more information about how she set up her deal with Yahoo! News, both to repurpose content from her site, but also getting primo structural representation in the opinion section of the Yahoo! News page. Did she make the deal the way it has usually been done with newspaper syndicated columnists? Or was there more of a trade or exchange aspect involved? Did she approach Yahoo! News, or did Yahoo! News approach her? I'm just really curious about the business model of the arrangement. Inquiring minds want to know!

Keynote Address

The AJC DBF is proud to announce political columnist Arianna Huffington as its keynote speaker! Join Ms. Huffington as she opens the festival Friday night at Presser Hall at Agnes Scott College with a discussion of her new  book, On Becoming Fearless… In Love, Work, and Life.  

View Arianna  Huffington’s bio.

There's a ton of other events at the conference, plus a festival atmosphere with a book market on the Decatur Square, a barbecue and fireworks among the many things scheduled.

Activities In-Depth:

• Antiquarian Book Fair
• Barbeque and Fireworks
• Children's Activities
• Cooking Authors and Demonstrations
• Food, Beer, and Wine
• Keynote Address    
• Live Music and Poetry
• Panel Discussions and Book Signings
• Writer's Conference
• DBF Stages
• Event Schedule

That grid schedule is just a BEAR to read tho. Wish they'd redesign it. Here's some other events that pertain to blogging:

PANELS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

E-Storytelling: In which we discuss the new form of writing commonly referred to as online fiction, from short stories to comedy pieces to email-text-and-Instant-Message-as-storytelling device. 10 a.m.

• John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
• Jack Pendarvis, author of The Mysterious Secret of Valuable Treasure, Pushcart Prize winner
• Jamie Allen, editor of The Duck & Herring Co.

Real Writers Blog: In which we discuss whether today's writers need a web site, a blog, a podcast, and/or a MySpace account.  1 p.m.

• Laurel Snyder, poet and NPR contributor
• Tayari Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling
• Touré, contributing editor with Rolling Stone
• Amy Guth, author of Three Fallen Women

I'm also interested in this session by The Atlantic Monthly fiction editor. Gotten a few rejection letters from him over the years! But I think I need special (free) registration, and I haven't heard back yet.

Magazine Fiction: In which Atlantic fiction editor C. Michael Curtis discusses the realities of rejection, cover letters, and other literary matters. 5 p.m.

• C. Michael Curtis, Atlantic Monthly, author of Faith: Stories and God: Stories.

I think you need special registration for this one too, but I know there are comedy writers in this group, so I thought I'd pass it on:

WORKSHOPS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

That's Not Funny: A Definitive Guide to Written Hilarity, Wit, and Mirth, By Prof. Rev.  John Warner, Humorologist. 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.

Political bloggers would probably love to be a fly on the wall in the $13 admission brunch with a former editor of The Nation. I dunno if any spaces are still available tho.

And one of the Indigo Girls, Emily Saliers, will also be speaking on a topic with her father.

A delightful parable by Nick Carr

This whole topic has generated much kerfuffle in the blogosphere, but it's the kind of kerfuffle I like, because it forces introspection, forces one to examine unquestioned assumptions about whether online interfaces are as democratizing as the spin often claims, whether there could be political/social biases embedded in deep structure interfaces.

The folks who have roundly spanked Carr for claiming things that they say the open "Home on the Range" of the Internet makes impossible have a point, but still, Carr's humorous parable rings true more often than not, particularly in the opening bit, and the epilogue.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Great Unread.

The Great Unread

Prelude

Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw.

Part one:
On the nature of innocent fraud

I've been reading a short book - an essay, really - by John Kenneth Galbraith called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. It's his last work, written while he was in his nineties, not long before he died. In it, he explains how we, as a society, have come to use the term "market economy" in place of the term "capitalism." The new term is a kinder and gentler one, with its implication that economic power lies with consumers rather than with the owners of capital or with the managers who have taken over the work of the owners. It's a fine example, says Galbraith, of innocent fraud.

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it's a lie that's more white than black. It's a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere - that it's open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud.

Part two:
The loneliness of the long-tail blogger

The thing about an innocent fraud, though, is that it's not that hard to see through. Often, in fact, you have to make an effort not to see through it, and at some point, for some people, the effort no longer seems worth it. A few days back, the blogger Kent Newsome asked, "Who are the readers of our blogs?" His answer had a melancholy tone:

The number of bloggers competing for attention makes it seem like the blogosphere is a huge, chaotic place. But it only seems that way because we have all ended up in a small room at the end of the hall. When people refuse to converse with me or go out of their way to link around me, it hurts a little. Until I remember that while they aren't listening to me, no one in the real world is listening to them either ...

[...]

The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant's little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal's hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

[...]

Epilogue

One day, a blog-peasant boy found buried in the dust beside his shack a sphere of flawless crystal. When he looked into the ball he was astounded see a moving picture. It was an image of a fleet of merchant ships sailing into the harbor of the island of Blogosphere. The ships bore names that had long been hated throughout the island, names like Time-Warner and News Corp and Pearson and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast and McGraw-Hill. The blog-peasants gathered along the shore, jeering at the ships and telling the invaders that they would soon be vanquished by the brave royals in the great castle. But when the captains of the merchant ships made their way to the gates of the castle, bearing crates of gold, they were not repelled by the royals with cannons but rather welcomed with fanfares. And all through the night the blog-peasants could hear the sounds of a great feast inside the castle walls.

   

What's been going on with me...

Hey y'all,

I been kinda quiet this week, because something both awful and tremendous has been happening to me, and it has to do with blogging, so I decided I should share it with you folks here.

I just launched a new blog Tuesday night, into Wednesday 3 A.M., and within its first 24 hours of existence, it got more than 1,800 hits, from all over the world, starting in Australia and New Zealand, within hours of the site going live. (2,500+ hits in 48 hours)

I'm still pretty new to this group, so you probably haven't gotten a good bead on my hobby horses yet, but a REAL big one for me is studying online cybercultures and communities, and working out ways to understand how online communities work.

This makes me somewhat of a hardass when it comes to certain marketing assumptions about passive audiences, because I insist on user-centered design, and also user-co-constructed design, or ideally, entire cultures or communities collaboratively authoring their own virtual landscapes, grassroots, bottom up.

You can see why the recent attempts to commodify and commercialize the blogosphere tend to give me the heebie jeebies. These appear to me to be overt attempts to co-opt true bottom-up communities with subtle market forces, to sell soap instead of making communities the true center of interactions.

I didn't study the force and empowerment of real online communities just to be able to better think up ways to co-opt them. Working in new media causes me all kinds of moral dilemmas when the prevailing winds favor commercial forces over community, content, and communications.

Sometimes I feel like these things are another variation of an experiment Ragu did during the 1990s with "Mama's Kitchen," trying to coalesce an online community around talking about all things Ragu, all the time. I mean, there's only so many spaghetti recipes you can share, you know? And the commercial agenda was just so overt.

That's why, when I went to do my dissertation research into cybercultures and communities, and how interfaces shape and are shaped by communities, it was important to me to find something REAL, vital, something amazing. And I did. It was pure luck. That's all it was, pure luck. I stumbled upon the most amazing dissertation topic in the world.

So like Margaret Mead, I did a cyber-ethnography as a participant-observer over a two-year period in that particular online community. I captured texts, charted online personas, analyzed chat room interactions, studied flame wars on bulletin boards, listservs, diagrammed web sites, and collected the creative and communicative output of a community that was tightly-knit, more and more empowered to greater social action and activism, AND a community that both competed with and interacted with the mass media providers which gave the community its center and reason for authoring its own virtual landscape.

I entered the community, became immersed in it, and along the way, it also changed me. I made life-long friends. That was important, because the point of ethnography is to become an insider, and to establish reciprocity with the groups you interact with, so that you are not only TAKING from them, but that you also give something back, so the relationship is balanced, and not colonizing.

Many of you know by now, the community I studied was the Xenaverse, the online fans of the show "Xena: Warrior Princess." This was actually a precursor of the academic "Buffy" studies that came later (heh, I did it first, but I also owe my work to the face-to-face Star Trek community researchers who went before me). I started my formal data-gathering in early 1996, and completed the dissertation in 1998.

The terrible, terrible thing that happened was over last weekend, but I didn't find out until late Monday night, after getting home from the Steely Dan/Michael McDonald concert at Chastain.

A dear friend of mine from the Xenaverse, an active, important, dynamic member of this community and a person I've known both online and in person for more than ten years took her own life in a small trailer in Haines, Alaska, a little town where she was the doctor and director of the small medical clinic, living the dream she'd had for as long as I'd known her.

I'd known her in New York; I'd known her in California when she was going to medical school, and I'd watched her take Xena as her model for living and insist on taking her medical training to the Alaska Bush, a place she'd dreamt of for years, to try to make a difference.

What happened to lead to this tragic event is a long story that I won't go into here. The truth is, an online discussion group I manage had just gotten one of her normal emails on July 31, and there was no sign anything was remiss, although we did know she was going through a tough time, health-wise.

By the time I got off work Tuesday, I knew I had to do a memorial blog site for my friend, and I finished at 3 A.M. (I don't know if you're familiar with the genre, but I've done two others in 2003, one for my uncle, because I couldn't make it to his funeral, and one for a dear professor who passed away a month later--you can see that one here).

In some ways, I built the site as much for me as for the community that had given me so much. It was a way to deal with my grief, to honor and give expression to all the different aspects of her life, and to give the virtual communities which were so much a part of her life a place, a focal point to express their feelings as well.

My heart is still so full at the incredible response to this site, and people are still subscribing, still leaving guestbook entries. Someone contacted me about the memorial service in Haines on Sunday, wondering if I could in some way host an open chat space for a virtual memorial service at the same time, maybe in Second Life, something we had done in the Xena Palace back in the day, when "Xena" was still on the air. It was an amazing thing I documented in my dissertation, online funerals and weddings, other parties.

But this is 10 years later. Theorists write about the "strength of weak ties," but what I'm finding right now is that these ties are not weak at all, were never weak. I saw it in the way the news swept around the globe, swept across cyberspace, within hours, within days.

This is something corporate interests can never duplicate, bottle, or harness. That is the sheer beauty of it. It is something true, real, and moving. It is dynamic, empowering, and bottom-up.

I made this blog because my friend will never have a gravestone, and because she has no other family but us, so this site is her gravestone in cyberspace, a place where her people, her tribe, can find her, can remember her and tell tales of her great deeds like they were stories told around the campfire, to be passed on.

I did not create the site. I just gave it a platform, and like any memorial service, the people who come to speak about the person we've lost are authoring the space into existence with the shape of their words, their feelings, their memories.

I know I'm getting sentimental here, but I'm just in awe of what is happening, and I have no one else outside of that group to tell about it, to share the story with.

Chris