After reading Weinberger's Law:
whatever people most emphasize about themselves is the biggest lie they tell. If your boss tells you that he's all about teamwork, then he's all about himself. If Nixon says that he is not a crook, then he is.
I'm somewhere between an academic geek and a normal person.
Also, for what it's worth, I've never believed that George Bush is "compassionate." There was no compassion in the glint in his eye during the debates when he supported the death penalty and asserted that marriage is between a man and a woman. And I agree with David that John Kerry's claim to be just a regular guy probably is another instance of Weinberger's cynical law.
Brother Clay has a worth-reading take on Dean, politics, and blogs. Here's an excerpt:
We know well from past attempts to use social software to organize groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the real world. When you’re communing with like-minded souls, you feel like you’re accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom.
On a topic that is contentious for different reasons, welcome Brother Nick on the topic of sports and technology. My views on the topic can be summarized quite easily:
1. Baseball should prevent all new technology (and even roll back some existing technology), using whatever draconian authoritarian means necessary.
2. Other sports don't matter.
Nick probably will offer a more nuanced view.
I have invested enough of my ego and my career on the Internet that I do not want to see "Internet campaign" become a term of political derision, like "Al Gore's endorsement." So, even though I thought that Howard Dean was the second coming of the Internet Bubble and was bound to burst sooner or later, I was sad to see him do so poorly in Iowa.
My guess is that Iowans tend to cast their votes based on personality. It's sort of like the article I read recently about job interviews, which said that studies show that a good rating at a job interview tends to correlate with being liked by the interviewer rather than with job performance. I think Iowans decided that Kerry and Edwards were nice and folksy, while Dean failed to connect. I don't think that the caucuses really sort out issues or message.
But the Internet smart mob proved to be far less potent than even I would have expected.
Steve Johnson thinks that government by mob is a good thing.
Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that’s appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it’s much more likely to stir up passions.
I openly declare myself as anti-populist. If the people ever had their way, we would lose our freedom, our market system, and our Constitutional rights.
I am anti-elitist as well. What I believe in are checks and balances. Democracy is a good thing to the extent that it provides a check against elitist arrogance. It is not a good thing if it means populist government.
The best thing about the American system is that it has so many checks against the abuse by government. But the mob is willing to take away those checks. Relative to how things work today, mobocracy is a problem, not a solution.
If populism appeals to you, then you have not met many people.
David Weinberger delivers some well-placed low blows against social networking software.
real social networks are always implicit...Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.
Moreover, relationships are not transitive, as David points out. I know that I interact with Alpha and with Beta on a regular basis. This creates trust in a number of ways. However, when Alpha meets Beta, they do not know how many interactions that they will have in the future. So they cannot possibly relate to one another the way that I relate to them.
I suspect that social networking software would be more valuable in working backwards than in working forwards. That is, what is interesting is not working from someone I know to someone I do not know, but rather working from someone I just met to someone I know.
How often do you meet someone, find out something about their background (say, that they went to a certain college from 1983-1986), and ask, "Oh, do you know so-and-so?" I could see using social software to do that sort of thing.
Kevin Werbach gives a mixed review to business networking software.
Yesterday I got a request through Spoke to forward an invitation to Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist. I knew both the sender and the next person in the chain, and the request was reasonable, so I forwarded it on. The recipient wrote back to say that his only link to Krugman was sending him one email last year commenting on a column. Krugman never responded. Not exactly a "trusted connection."
Take Kevin's example: Suppose he had simply said on his weblog "I have a friend that would like to get in touch with Paul Krugman. Can any bloggers help?" Had I seen it, I could have put something on my blog, which Brad DeLong occasionally reads. He could have posted something on his blog, which Krugman occasionally reads. And if Krugman were interested, he could have worked his way back to the original request.
Brother Shirky must have been in a lazy mood this month. He smacks down the semantic web, the engineer's dream of bringing order to the world through data modeling.
Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now.
I don't mean to be All Weinberger, All the Time, but he has written an important post on the future of the blogosphere.
blogs aren't even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It'll happen. And here are some guesses (note: guesses) about what they'll look like when they do:
I am not quite sure that blogging will become mainstream in the way he suggests. There are a lot of people who "go online" but who do not have lives and personnas on line. They still see email and the Web as tools. Maybe that will change, but maybe it won't.
Also, a lot of people do not write fluently. Just as with newsgroups, we may see a lot of "lurkers" who do not wish to participate actively in the conversation.
I do not think that any of my daughters would enjoy blogging. And the time they spend on chat seems to *drop* when they get to college, for the same reason they spend less time giggling on the phone.
So one scenario is that blogging increases, but approaches an asymptote.
I think that David's points hold regardless, but my opinion would be that the probability of blogging becoming as mainstream as email is much less than 50 percent.
Clay Shirky thanks the recording industry for stimulating innovation in social software.
Such a system would add a firewall of sorts to the client, server, and router functions of existing systems, and that firewall would serve two separate but related needs. It would make the shared space inaccessible to new users without some sort of invitation from existing users, and it would likewise make all activity inside the space unobservable to the outside world.Though the press is calling such systems "darknets" and intimating that they are the work of some sort of internet underground, those two requirements -- controlled membership and encrypted file transfer -- actually describe business needs better than consumer needs.
My guess is that McKinsey or some other big consulting firm would have been proud to have issued this report on information-age management for the Department of Defense. It's book length, so not easy to excerpt. But here's a sample:
With the widespread adoption of IP (Internet Protocols), browser technology, and the creation of Web pages and portals, we can finally move away from a push approach to information dissemination to a post and smart pull approach. Moving from a push to a post and smart pull approach shifts the problem from the owner of information having to identify a large number of potentially interested parties to the problem of having the individual who needs information identifying potential sources of that information. The second problem is a far more tractable one. This is because it is much easier for the individual who has a need for information to determine its utility than for the producer to make this judgment.
