Paul's Down-Home Page

I threw together a quick page listing some things that a newcomer to our area might want to know. It is in no wise comprehensive, but it’s a good start, and I’ll be adding to it until we move. If you’re not from around here (see? I didn’t use the word “ain’t”– I am ready to move to Ohio after all!), you might not find it very interesting.

The Financial Times has a special report out: “Barons of Bankruptcy.” It reveals that the top management of the 25 biggest recent US corporate collapses walked away with (or, more properly, stole) more than US$3.3 BILLION in compensation! Holy spit! That’s hard to imagine.
Lots of people find it fashionable to crack on CEOs like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs (particularly Gates, who is unfairly dammed even in the midst of huge charitable giving–“oh, $25m is just a drop in the bucket!”, they say)– but they never engaged in this kind of flagrant dishonesty (well, OK, Oracle did). Disgusting.

As long as I’m in the mood for making up new words, I hereby coin the term blogholing for stereotyping blog content based on one of the widely established categories of blogs: warblogs, techblogs, and so on. If you go to Google and plug in the search term of your choice, plus “+blog”, you’re probably going to find a blog on that topic. In trying to prove my point by finding and linking to some ham radio blogs, I found a fascinating essay by Tony Collen, “What is ham journalism?” In it, he says:

There’s something we bloggers have in common, regardless of whether we belong to the upper or lower castes (and cases) of Journalism. Or to both. We are all, each and every one of us, many things; but we are all writers. That’s what we do here. We write.

He goes on to liken blogging to ham radio: both are hobbies involving communication, and both represent opportunities to jump in, start conversations, and share information without having pre-established relationships. Sure, there are journalist bloggers like Dan Gillmor and ‘real’ author bloggers like Cory Doctorow, but most of us are just ordinary people (ranging from librarians to USAF mechanics to schoolteachers to, probably, garbagemen) writing about what interests us. Blogging is a pleasant cross between talking to a stranger at the airport or doctor’s office (since you can get trapped into receiving Too Much Information) and the ease of access and information content of Big Media.
I guess I’m halfway in between; I earn a living by writing, but it’s technical. On the other hand, my brother earns his living doing technical stuff, but he writes too. We can all do it. If you’re not blogging yourself, why not?
Update: Doc Searls has an explanation of what bloghole means.

There’s a lot of bloviating going on here in the blogosphere. (Free translation: there’s an unholy lot of self-referential navel-gazing going on among people who write weblogs). This isn’t new, of course; one of the first things that people used the then-new AltaVista engine for was to ego-surf to see how many times they could find their names listed. This always reminds me of Steve Martin in The Jerk. However, there’s precedent; after all, Google ranks pages in part by counting the number of links to particular pages, and academics have valued scholarly papers based on the number of following papers that cite them. Blogging just makes it easier to see who’s linking to whom (case in point: the truly cool Internet Ecosystem).

This leads to the development of what I call an egosystem, where the value of blogs is perceived to be related to how many links a blog has and where they come from. In the egosystem, if you get linked by a blog geek (and I mean that in a goodway) like Dave Winer or Tim O’Reilly , your blogcred goes up. If you get linked to by one of the uberbloggers– y’know, like Glenn Reynolds or Den Beste, well, you’re a star in the making.

The interesting thing to me about this particular egosystem (as opposed, say, to People Magazine or the Democratic National Commitee) is that it superficially seems to ignore the value of content in favor of link count and weight. Really, though, it does just the opposite– where a site like AmIHotOrNot presents context-free photos for you to rank, with a blog you get all the context you want– possibly more than you want, as in Eric & Dawn Olson’s continual blogged arguing. You can make decisions on whether something’s worthwhile or not by reading it! What a concept. (Of course, having said that, I shall be crushed if my BlogHotOrNot rating stays down near the 1.0 end of the scale.)

NZBear has an interesting discussion about the myopia of some parts of the egosystem. Most bloggers in a particular topic area– surprise– tend to stick together, so that warblogs, or blogs about technology, or blogs by garbage collectors, etc., have lots of back-and-forth, self-referential linking. He says “Bring on the blogs by ordinary people!” Amen to that.