Notes on being away

Not blogging for two months has its pros and cons, but there are two I'll mention briefly.

1) I've started to get comment spam, odd since there's been very little activity here, and I'm planning to clean it out. If you happen to be a spammer who's reading this (as if), don't bother to send it. My readership is not all that big, and it's pretty much non-existent from Japan, so it's really not worth it.

2) Back in July I wrote a post that was kind of a throwaway, about a radio commercial that had really bugged me (does "keeper of cool" resonate with anyone?). Why, I can't imagine, but my post continues to show up first (out of 433,000 hits) in a Google search for that phrase, and, as a result, it has become my most popular post by a wide margin, attracting (so far) 39 comments. I confess that I don't understand that at all.

A blogging loss, at least for now

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there has been a change in a blog I have mentioned often and have highlighted to the right, Decidedly. The main author, Greg Glockner, has left the company from which the blog emerges (he talks about his decision in a post here). and we shall be losing his insight on issues of decision-making. The blog continues with posts by Carol A. Burch, whom I have quoted from time to time, and I'll go on following it, but we'll miss Greg and hope he finds another outlet for his writing soon.

I'm back

It's been four weeks, I'm feeling somewhat refreshed, so I'm going to do some blogging again...not every day, probably, but once in a while. I've enjoyed the time away, I don't expect the blog to ever be as much of my personal mix as it has been, but I'll weigh in when something catches my eye. Thanks to those who missed me.

500!!

Back on Jan. 1, 2008, I started writing daily posts for this blog. Other than my vacation, I've stuck to that, writing at least once each day, amassing a total of somewhere north of 700 posts in those 500 days. I've tried to come up with novel takes on things each day, not always succeeding, but I've never found the time or the interest in doing "pointing posts," those "Sullivan makes a good point here: <quote>" items with no commentary. And for some time, I've been looking forward to this day, this May 14, when I would hit 500...and now I have.

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Let me offer a rough, imprecise taxonomy for blogs. One can posit that blogs fall into four categories:

1) Blogs for money
There are people who blog for a living. Not many, perhaps, and many of these people are affiliated with a larger group or media outlet, but their primary job is blogging.

2) Blogs for some money
2-bloggers blog as part of earning their keep, and a large number of the most famous bloggers fall into this group. I have no idea how important Andrew Sullivan's blog is to his continued employment at The Atlantic; he still writes articles for the print magazine. I'd imagine that the blog has become increasingly important, so let's guess that Sullivan is a 1.2- or 1.3-blogger.

Yglesias, on the other hand, seems to be more of a pure blogger. He works for the Center for American Progress, a kind of think tank, and I'm not really sure what he does for them other than blog. I'd guess he's around a 1.1-blogger.

Folks who do corporate blogs fall into this category. I've spoken before of my admiration for Decidedly, a blog from a company called Dwaffler, that stays largely away from advocacy of their products (OK, they slip it in once in a while) in favor of cogent discussion of issues (primarily decision-making, which is the purpose of their product...but, hey, it's not put right in our faces). I've also seen some simply awful corporate blogs, ones that exist solely as marketing adjuncts with little insight or point of view.

But corporate bloggers generally do not blog to eat. Their primary job is CEO or COO or flack, and the blog is something extra they do, perhaps in an attempt to put a human face on a company, to relate to existing and potential customers. These are 2-bloggers.

3) Blogs for influence
We now fall into the categories of the unpaid. If you blog without remuneration, but hope that you have an effect on people's thinking, you're a 3-blogger. The vast majority of blogs fall into this category; most people aren't selling anything, not even indirectly, they're just offering ideas about subjects they know or care about. The audience can be large or small, devoted or casual, but the blogger still needs to feel that the words are being read and thought about.

4) Blogs for personal satisfaction
4-bloggers are the idealists, the people who put their thoughts out without consideration of an audience. They "have to" write, perhaps to exorcise demons or work through issues, but they do so without regard to whether anyone is listening.

However, 4-bloggers are also the most superfluous, because they have the option of writing their thoughts in a diary (sorry, guys, journal) or into a Microsoft Word file. If they truly don't care what people think, if their offerings are just for themselves, there's no reason to put their ideas out on the most public forum ever invented. For that reason, I don't believe there are many pure 4-bloggers - everyone ultimately wants their words to matter, if only a little, so a goodly number of bloggers are 3.8- or 3.7- or 3.3-bloggers.

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Having created this hierarchy, I must, unsurprisingly, try to see where I fit into it. There's a purity to the idea that I write because I must, because I've just got to, got to, let my feelings OUT!, that I'm a 4.

But I'd be lying to myself. I may have started this blog with low expectations, but humans are built to dream. At the beginning, I might have said "4," that Androcass was going to be a device to let me work out my feelings, to serve as an outlet for frustrations at times (by the way, that hasn't worked for me at all - I haven't found that I naturally feel better after expressing myself, but maybe that's just me). But, not so deep down, I certainly hoped that some small audience would enjoy my writing and be engaged with it, that it would inform or provoke, and that (in the best Web 2.0 way) feedback loops would emerge and I would be enriched by the involvement of others.

Furthermore, I've had a chance to be embedded in the sphere of commentary in a way I never really was before. Previously, I read newspaper and magazine opinion pieces, got into a few blogs, but I never engaged with them in the way that I've had to over the past 16+ months. In part, it was to find fodder for my own efforts, but, whatever the reason, I've spent a lot of time in the 1 to 2-blog world (and the 1-commentators who don't blog, who just bloviate away in publications or on television).

And I haven't ended up being impressed. There are a lot of people making six figures who recite party talking points, or mislead to make a point, or lag reality by years only to present it as something they discovered (offshoring is happening, really, Tom?). I'm not so arrogant as to believe I rank with these "seasoned professionals," but I'd put my thinking track record up with many of them. It's not so much me, anyway; I read quite a few bloggers who write well and passionately, out of real knowledge, who put the windbags to shame, and none of them will ever achieve a fraction of the fame, the money, or the influence.

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So what I was shooting for hasn't really happened. I have a few regular readers, some of whom comment via posting comments or direct e-mails, but (according to my readership stats) many people visit, sample what's here, then move off, never to be seen again. However the marketplace of ideas works, what I'm peddling isn't selling.

I'll grant that I haven't done the things that "drive traffic." I haven't done much of the, wait around for Drum to write something, write a real quick blog post, then puff it up in Drum's comments. There are other tips and tricks to make one's blog a go-to spot, and I haven't found the time to implement those (and I find some of them kind of unseemly).

I might fare better if I homed in on one or two topics of interest. Some specialized blogs become quite successful, rising past the 3 level and on to the more lucrative positions. I have chosen a certain eclecticity, in that I have things to say in more than area; this blog has always been more a reflection of me than of a specific point of view, anyway.

I've had comments about my tone, but I haven't altered anything in response. Here's why: I've been told that I'm overly negative, too cynical, unduly harsh, that this attitude turns people away. That may be true, but I read plenty of blogs that seem far more down that road than mine, so I don't really see it.

What I have tried to do is ask questions, present alternatives. I think it's important to understand the difference between "positive-sum" and "win-win," and I am, possibly, withering in my opinion of people who understand the difference but fail to point it out because it might undercut their (political) point. I think it's important not to align one's self with either Bill Gates or Lou Dobbs on visa issues, but to ask the questions which would allow us to make decisions and formulate policy; if that's deemed by others as being "harsh" toward anyone at the poles, then I guess I'm harsh.

But the clincher is, I've also read other comments that suggest I
should inject more passion, put more of my outrage into what I write.
I can't square that circle; maybe there's some kind of skill that
allows a writer to be passionate and advocating, but not critical - I don't have that skill, I guess.

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The upshot of this is that, as of today, Androcass is sliding into semi-retirement. I've grown tired of working pretty hard at something that actually seems to be moving down the hierarchy, that is of its own weight approaching 4-hood. I have no doubts I've had some good ideas, and some that I've found novel ways of presenting - I'm happy with a higher percentage of my posts than I would ever have anticipated when I began this.

For some time, though, it's been clear to me that the cost-benefit is going the wrong way. I'm not accountable to a little mini-community; heck, my most ardent reader and contributor has disappeared off the face of the earth (something which served to support my already-made decision). There are other things I want and need to do, hours that are better spent in other pursuits. Over the past 500 days, this blog has become far too central to my life, and I need it to stop.

Don't take that to mean that I'm going to pull a vanishing act. I like this Androcass persona, and the very act of thinking and writing has allowed me to polish and refine my thinking on all sorts of topics. If I'm in your feed reader, please leave me there, because I'll be back from time to time, as passion demands (it's possible I'll feel compelled to post something tomorrow, though it would ruin the nice symmetry of "500"). I have a bunch of topics I can't quite get myself to part with (any day now, I expect to finish my classic post titled, "Korea - Should Truman really be getting involved?).

But I may not post tomorrow, or over the weekend, or the rest of the month, I just don't know. Maybe I'll pour my energy into bike riding, or music, or doing things around the house (do I hear the wife cheering?). It makes little sense to do so to a blog that is moving down the hierarchy, that will never bring anything other than a mix of satisfaction and frustration.

To those of you, whether commenters or not, who have been regular readers, I thank you. Whether active or passive contributors, you have enriched my life, and I am most appreciative. Catch y'all down the road somewhere.

Walking the middle

We're having a discussion on yesterday's post about whether paying for labor is a plausible alternative to whining about it and importing people. My conclusion was that we should be rational about it, explore all options, instead of leaping to expedience. North Dakota does have other ways of getting doctors than to eliminate H-1B quotas. Rational examination might still lead us to the importation of doctors, but it might not; the challenge commands us to think more broadly than the first (and possibly cheapest) solution that comes to mind.

But I don't want to rehash that here. What I want to talk about is the tendency we all have to over-contextualize arguments people make, to focus on the back story instead of what's really being said. I've had comments on this blog (and in private e-mails) that deal, not with what I'm writing, but with the motivations of those who provide the evidence. There is enough validity to that view to make it worth considering, but it is not sufficient to allow the arguer to ignore the actual argument.

I have often cited sources that come from people who are clearly more anti-immigration than I am. I do that because the conventional media seems to ignore a lot of the evidence that conflicts with the common wisdom that Americans aren't good enough to fill certain jobs (the PR-fueled, CEO position). And if you read what I write, really read it, you will see that I'm taking a more nuanced view than, simply, we must close our borders. To lump me in with the people who do believe that is, while convenient for you who want to disagree with me, spurious and insulting.

Let's take the H-1B question, at least one aspect of it. There are people who believe that the number should be 0, and their views have become marginalized. There are other people whose self-interest drives them to believe that the number should be essentially infinite. And there is the actual number, based on historical accident more than science, of 65,000.

Where I have tried to walk is the uneasy middle, because I really want to understand what the "right" number is. Unfortunately, that stance means that I have to disagree somewhat with both sides, that I don't have the false comfort of saying, on the one hand, that abuses in the program imply that it should be abolished, or, on the other hand, that there's a (rather bogus) study that "proves" that H-1B applications create jobs. Moving in either direction would, I assure you, be far easier; I could jump in bed with one side or the other and sway along with one mantra ("H-1Bs are bad, bad, bad") or the other ("H-1Bs are good, good, good").

I'm not contending that I am unaffected by my own experience, that's asking a bit much. But I do believe I can remove myself from the midst of whatever biases I have, at least enough to ask the right questions. For example, I've worked with H-1Bs who had no business programming a computer, and certainly should not have been allowed in a position where they could undercut native talent. That's happened enough times to make me think that, more than perhaps, the quota is too high.

But that's a first-cut reaction, and I like to dig a bit deeper. So I ask myself how we actually come up with the people who receive these visas. And I look at the conventional media, which pretty much accepts the idea that H-1Bs go only to the "best and the brightest," but is weak on details. It turns out that there is no great selectivity there, that we're not necessarily skimming the cream from other countries. Additionally, the biggest H-1B users are Indian offshoring companies, who have their own motivations for bringing in their countrymen for a few years, then sending them back to the subcontinent.

If we really take the time to look at this, or any other, issue, we find that there is a complexity that doesn't quite line up with political simplicity, that, if we're trying to find truth, we can't just line up with Bill Gates or Lou Dobbs. Each may have contributions to make to the dialogue, but neither seems to capture the full difficulty of the problems inherent in immigration policy - each is quite selective in their choice of facts.

But each of them may have facts to contribute to the discussion, and it behooves the inquirer to look at both sides and try to determine what truth can be found. Sadly, our news providers seem incapable, most of the time, to appreciate this. It's easier to brand Gates an eminent statesman and assume that his wealth gives him special insight into topics that are well beyond his ken (but within his sphere of self-interest). In this way, extremes are relabeled "conventional wisdom," and any dissent becomes relegated to the fringes; you're either with Bill Gates or you're part of the radical nutjob Dobbs contingent.

That may make the job of commenting on things a lot easier, but it's also colossally lazy. Some of the people who disagree with me are guilty of that (and I am, at times, just as guilty). It's hard to question assumptions, to look skeptically at what both sides are saying, especially when you can sort people into two classes ("agree with me, disagree with me").

I'm pretty sure that the 65,000 number for H-1Bs is "wrong," because it was not determined based on much of anything that I can tell, and because it doesn't change in response to any externalities. Is it too low, or too high? Well, that depends on what our goal for the program is, and that's not something that either side spells out particularly well.

[I thought of trying to hash some of the two sides out here, but this isn't the post for that, because I'm using the H-1B question to illustrate the thought process.]

Hey, facts are tough, but that doesn't make truth something we should ignore. Since I don't have the ability to run an experiment on the H-1B question, my guess is that there are gains and losses whichever path we select. If we dropped visas to 0, some people would be better off, some would be worse. If we expanded them to 200,000, same thing. If I can acknowledge that, try to figure out who falls into each category and determine the magnitude of the life change, then so can everyone else. Of course, that wouldn't be as much fun as the shouting off the top of the head that most people seem content to do, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

A couple of follow-ups

1) Sunday, I wrote about Kevin Drum's struggles with Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, a book that, for no particular reason, has vaulted the author into the pantheon of pundits. His unremarkable observation that "bad things happen," cloaked as it is in self-indulgent tracts of virtually unreadable prose, struck me as a very few good ideas in search of a book.

Kevin found it "odd" and "intensely annoying":

The problem is that Nassim Nicholas Taleb basically sounds like a crank. His prose has all the usual markers: everyone else is an idiot (this includes philosophers, economists, historians, journalists, and pretty much all social scientists, among others); he's the only one who truly understands the world as it is; there's a monocausal explanation for this almost universal lack of understanding in others; and there's a tiny cast of other unappreciated geniuses who do get it (Benoit Mandelbrot, Karl Popper, G.L.S. Shackle, Daniel Kahneman, etc.).

But what of the content (and Taleb certainly pushes against the idea that we can separate style from content)?:

Generally speaking, he wants to persuade us that we know less than we think and that forecasting the future is a mug's game because history is primarily governed by huge, unpredictable events that come out of nowhere (black swans). But this is sort of a banal point: scholars have been arguing about the importance of contingent events vs. broad historical trends forever, and the difficulty of predicting technological breakthroughs is well-trod ground. Worse, Taleb doesn't add much to what's already been said about it. Just the opposite, in fact. In one chapter he cherry picks some inventions here and there to help make his case, but even using his own hand-picked examples he's not very convincing. We all know that penicillin was discovered by accident, but the computer? Taleb seems to think it sprang out of nowhere, but that's sure not how I remember it. It was a big invention and a huge discontinuity, but it was hardly unpredictable and hardly an accident.

Kevin seems to be surprised that there is so little there there, but is willing to concede that he may have missed the point. I would say, Kevin, you didn't miss the point at all; the real challenge is to explain why so many others have been so influenced as to make "black swan" a hot term, and Taleb a media star.

2) As for the disappearance of the great blog Carrie's Nation, in a comment to my follow-up post, 2Truthy unfolds the speculation that she shared with Melvin Toast on her fine blog, to wit:

In a nutshell, the entity known as 'Carrie's Nation' was likely one or more professional researchers working for a firm that pulled the plug at the end of April. That explains the blogger, CC's sudden and mysterious disappearance. Job over, on to the next disparate gig, maybe with tax codes. Detroit housewife? Fine. Sure.

That may be so, and fits the facts as we know them as well as any other explanation (including 2Truthy's offer of CC's suicide as an explanation, and mine of the Obama Indian technology cabal pulling the plug and sending her off to Gitmo).

If that is so, then there is actually a kind of Turing Test insidiousness to the Carrie's Nation experience, no matter how much I might tend to agree to the purpose to which it was put. The creation of a back story, complete with blog posts containing out-the-front-door pictures of a snowy day; the personal e-mails that I exchanged with CC; the idiosyncracies that, at least, seemed grounded in quotidian life: If all of these are fictions, I am left with a peculiar feeling.

Again, accepting 2Truthy's theory requires me to accept that a lie lay at the heart of Carrie's Nation. I have discussed my reasons for cloaking my real identity, but I am still the person I have revealed here. My name wouldn't add anything to the discussion, but every material fact I have written is, indeed, a fact. I can't really say that I like the idea that CC may have been a corporate figment, partially because my own representation of "her" is put in question, but more because it casts doubts on anyone who adopts a nom de plume for whatever reason.

So a part of me resists the theory, even as time and logic dictate acceptance. If that's the case, then perhaps 2Truthy is the passionate alter ego of George Will (he doesn't really believe the stuff he writes, so expresses his true feelings under an alias), mcfnord the online avatar of Bill Gates - heck, maybe I better go check my driver's license to make sure I'm not some consortium of think tank-ers writing my little blog each day.

Thresholds

Everyone's got a blog now. People, from famous to not, are creating Facebook pages, though there are those few stubborn holdouts who cling to their MySpace pages. And now there's Twitter, and even the most hardened reporters are jumping on board; Philip Hersh of the Chicago Tribune is tweeting, even though he admits it will mostly consist of links to other stuff.

Of course, there's the recently reported stat that Twitter loses more than half its devotees each month, though there are theories that the number is inaccurate because of the way the data is collected (it may not be fully accounting for phone usage). But that's a bit off-topic.

I have no idea how the internal workings of our newspapers are grinding these days, but I would guess that Hersh didn't wake up the other day and say to himself, "I feel the need to tweet." I believe that it is much more like my speculation in my March post, The future of journalism, in which I mused that there would be ever greater pressure on news reporters to turn out endless streams of copy for platforms of all types, whether they be print or a blog or Twitter or so forth.

So my question is, what will be the threshold of acceptance for a platform to be added to the list? If someone comes out tomorrow with Twitter+, a site that requires one to write messages of 141-280 characters, how will organizations know when they should jump on that bandwagon? After all, we know that the most popular blogs are overrepresented by the writers who started up around 2003. Facebook probably seemed more useful before everyone had a page. And I have to think that new Twitterers are likely to be lost in the noise. So there's likely to be quicker movement to the next big thing, even if it turns out to be not so big.

I'd expect a lot of time to be wasted as people and organizations chase the future, and I wonder just how evanescent our information is likely to become.

He's back!

As he promised, John McIntyre, erstwhile copy editor at the sad Baltimore Sun, is back on the web. So we were only without him for a couple of days, which is a very good thing. You can enjoy his, well, I can't say it better than he:

Observations on language and the craft of editing, with additional reflections on subjects of no necessary connection with the former topics. Comments are welcome, and commenters are invited to keep a civil tongue in their heads.

at You Don't Say (that's right, unlike Larry "Bud" Melman, a name that NBC kept when Dave Letterman moved to CBS, the Sun has allowed Mr. McIntyre to take the name with him). [And I give the Sun credit for providing the link, without which I might have had trouble following this blog.]

His first non-welcome post is about the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society. I guess they're all in Minneapolis, at least if you read the sports section of the Chicago Tribune today to discover that the Marlins scored their game-winning runs in the 9th inning yesterday - I was watching the game, and could swear that the runs came in the 10th, but who am I to argue with a great metropolitan newspaper?

Dark doings

I'm not fond of conspiracy theories in general.  Even if I am an insider, I am enough of a democrat to believe that unshared information is harmful; if I happen to know there are layoffs coming at my place of business, my pleasure at being "in the know" is more than outweighed by the damage that the information will do (and the knowledge that dissemination will allow people to prepare for that damage).  The burden of secrecy rarely has its compensations for me.

For others, though, there is a kick to the whispering and the sidelong glances, and I am willing to concede that I am outside of the norm here.  Most people derive value from being privy to "the truth," though it's amazing how often that truth turns out to be only somewhat true.  Other people seem to enjoy getting just enough of a clue that they can endlessly speculate on what the insiders aren't saying.

So I will offer to my readers the opportunity to try to ferret out the mystery that is being alluded to concerning the disappearance of the blog Carrie's Nation.  The blog continues to link only to a message, "Blog has been removed," and I certainly have no insight as to its being gone.

But 2Truthy and Melvin Toast are hinting at some kind of secret over at 2Truthy's blog in the comments to her original post, and you can feel free to speculate among yourselves.

Note: my lack of interest in the arcana does not prevent me from a thank-you to 2Truthy for her kind words in the sixth comment.  I am inadequate, as I do not fill the same niche as Citizen Carrie did, and I am unlikely to start poring over the India Times any time soon.

And to my friend mcfnord, who takes another opportunity for some mild sniping, I can only offer the wish that he would engage in discussion on what I actually write, but I have conceded the unlikelihood of that.

Oh, by the way

I mentioned 2Truthy in my last post.  2Truthy is the blogger who, at Losing the War on Humor, weighs in on all manner of corporate and government shenanigans in a style that I cannot begin to describe.  It's one of those blogs that consistently offers posts that I wish, just once, I could write, so wry and funny and impassioned.  You should check it out for yourself, as I'm not doing it any justice, and I don't want to start quoting, because I'll get lost in reading and blow my whole day (as it is, I'm behind on some other stuff like replying to an e-mail from my brother...just go read LtWoH and leave me out of it).

My larger point is about how we all are constrained by our tools, a point that has some connection to my post from yesterday.  I rarely mention 2Truthy, despite my admiration, because, for some reason, LtWoH doesn't work as a feed to my Google Reader.  I have it there, but no new posts ever come through.  I know 2Truthy is posting, I go there, Carrie (please come back) mentions posts there, but the site doesn't regularly bubble into my consciousness because there's never a little (1) next to it in GR.

Two lessons here: 1) for me, I need to go out and check sites I like once in a while even if Google Reader doesn't show anything; and 2) we all need to stay aware of the limitations of our tools and work to overcome them.

[Update: OK, a taste, from a recent post about everyone's favorite Pulitzer winner, Tom "Jowls" Friedman:

Rather than Tom taking his puffed up journalistic backside down to North Carolina to interview the fired locals from Wachovia who have lost their jobs because of the legalized, Indian cheap labor lobby that Friedman triumphs, he instead is content to dispense quotes from officials at companies like Infosys who are complicit in this war on America’s white collar middle class.
Friedman goes on to proclaim that we need new banking regulations that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake. Fair enough. But THEN he displays his salesy, bag-of burning rats in a meth lab, pseudo analysis here:

“And this is ALSO why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don't become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.”

Huh? Coal is bad. Check. Let’s tax all those American hillbillies who rely on coal to heat their dreadful shanties. Check. Let’s tax Utility companies that don’t do business with businessman Al Gore’s portfolio companies. Check. Let’s tax every effing body in this country, while we’re at it – to subsidize all of that other gre$n stuff that Gore’s VC firm is pushing. Check!

Put that on your Friedman shelf next to Matt Taibbi.]

Does the bad news never stop?

I just caught a look at a comment on yesterday's blogging effort, and 2Truthy has informed me that, as the title of her post states, Citizen Carrie Gone Missing.  The blog Carrie's Nation now is filled with the message, "Blog has been removed."

It would be easy to be flip here, as I would assume that this is more likely to be a Blogger technical mishap (my post editing screen has been acting peculiarly the past couple of days - related?  Who knows?) than something dire, so one's first thought turn to whatever humor can be derived from it (perhaps Obama's Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, both men of Indian descent, have tired of Carrie's concerns about the reckless use of H-1B visas and offshoring, and have invoked a super-secret Dick Cheney-style law to shut her down - one only hopes that Carrie is not right now on her way to Gitmo).  2Truthy has, more entertainingly than I, covered up her concern with some light-hearted musings.

So we who care about Carrie will watch, and wait, and hope that it is nothing more than the usual Blogger foolishness, and all will be restored before too long.

An unfortunate loss

I've ruminated before on how a relationship between bloggers can feel like a friendship in that you get to know someone on at least some level as they write day after day.  Given the somewhat tenuous nature of "real" friendships, it's not a surprise to me at all that the virtual world can seem just as vivid; I may not be cracking a beer with Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, but I do have a look into his mind several times a day.

I understand there's an unfortunate asymmetry there.  I read Zorn, but, as far as I know, he doesn't read me; since I'm not a crazy wild stalker guy, I get that we're not really friends in any definition of the word.  But I know more about what he thinks and feels, what things concern him, than I do about the majority of people I would call friends (at some point I should write a post on my "friends," because they are just about the least friend-like people I can imagine, for the folks who never initiate contact to the 20-year-long acquaintance who always makes plans to see me when she's in town and never quite is able to make it happen...but I digress).

When a regular poster leaves for whatever reason, there is a feeling of loss.  I know there are people still saddened at the passing of Tanta at Calculated Risk.  Today, the economics of the newspaper business has caught up with John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun, the copy editor whose ruminations on language and newspapers (and Wikipedia and so on) have offered insight and entertainment and food for thought on the blog You Don't Say.  I will miss him (though he promises to keep blogging).

My first temptation is to take You Don't Say off my blogroll.  After all, why should I want to drive traffic to the site of a newspaper that would lay off my friend?  On the other hand, his work still lives there, so I should probably suggest you go there, partake of his thinking, but not to look at any ads you might find.  However, the click counts will remain, so I remain caught on the horns.  I shall agree to disagree with myself, and allow inertia to leave the link, for now.

There's not much I can offer that's fresh about the implications for the newspaper business, except for this.  Mr. McIntyre has spent 23 years at the Sun, and so, whatever his age, is not in the first blush of youth.  However, he has embraced new technology, the blog, the Twitter feed, the e-mail.  He hasn't been shuffling around metal sorts while his younger colleagues smiled sadly and indulgently as they slipped his work into the computer typesetting system.  And none of that was sufficient to save his position in the cold hard calculus of today's media business.  I'll leave it to the reader to infer what he or she can about anyone's future in this economy.

Isn't the medium the message?

Yglesias, in In Defense of Twitter, contends that:

The idea of a “banal and superficial” medium simply doesn’t make much sense.

Curiously, his quote is from Twitter-using Senator Claire McCaskill, whose defense is "ultimately not that interesting."  (Talk about backhanded....)

His contention is that the medium has little to do with the message, that content should be evaluated irrespective of how it's delivered.  He has a point, I suppose, but I think he overstates it.  There are limitations in the Twitter format which make it inappropriate for certain kinds of information conveyance, and I sense that its current popularity is pushing those boundaries.

The question is not, is the medium bad, but is it being used for the right purposes?  George Stephanopoulos interviewing John McCain using Twitter may enhance both men's credentials as with-it, modern, tech-savvy guys, but it did nothing to improve the knowledge of the body politic.  A Twitter message is 140 characters - think about that, 140 characters.  There may be forms of discourse that are appropriately expressed in that space, but there are many more that cannot.

One of the discussion topics for the future is how we're going to deal with the multiplicity of platforms on which we can express ourselves.  [A related topic is how that expression will fit into a business model, but that's for another day.]  And Yglesias may not be the best person to speak to that subject, as he has far more options than most of us.  If he's writing something for his Twitter feed, and he has a thought that will take him past the 140-character barrier, he can "repurpose" it for his very successful blog.  If he has a big thought that can't be contained within the confines of his blog (or is potentially more lucrative), he has a big enough name that he can find another outlet for it, up to and including a book.

But Twitter is smoking hot right now, much more than a new blog would be, and people are going to try to utilize it regardless of message.  We'll lose some deep arguments that might have some value.  In the end, it probably doesn't matter all that much; just as we can't add infinite blogs to our feed readers and have any hope of keeping up, so too will we tend to limit our Twitter feeds, and a lot of the hype and noise will settle down (when your boss and your parents and your children are all tweeting away, are you really going to care what Ashton Kutcher has to say?).  I expect Twitter to become much like the blogosphere; local clusters will emerge and be much more important than the mass that gets the attention now.

At the same time, we can't assume that the limitations of Twitter don't make it somewhat more likely to be "banal and superficial," and it takes only a few minutes on it to convince the discerning person of that.

Note: Yglesias stumbles at the end of his post, when he writes: "There’s no tool so good as to produce good work when badly used."  That has nothing to do with the rest of this entry, as no serious person contends that Twitter magically transforms garbage into flowers...do they?

At least he won't mention me

Entertaining post by Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings, Who Blogs Too Much? Henley contends that there are just some bloggers who are too busy. He captures well the challenge of keeping up with even those writers who are favorites:

Some of the people are folks whose writing I’ve long enjoyed but whom I’ve practically given up on reading because, when faced with a count of 30 items in Google Reader – since breakfast – the heart sinks and the mind quails. And if you’ve ever seen a sinking quail you know they make awkward, fluttering crashes. It’s much easier to just click the “Mark All Read” button and resolve to catch the next batch.

Wow, can I relate. I try to keep up with a fraction of the "big" bloggers, and Yglesias, Benen, and Sullivan alone are utterly exhausting. Then I fall behind, and Google Reader cuts off the posts after a month, and I feel that I'm missing something (even though it's just old news).

There does come a point where you kind of wish that these folks would put some general principles at the top of the page, then not write any posts that are covered by those principles (Yglesias: "I support congestion pricing and mass transportation" - that would eliminate some goodly percentage of his output).

Henley offers some suggestions of his own ("Most of you should average four to six posts a day"), but I fear nothing will work, at least not so long as blog posts = traffic = revenue.

New places

I am not as diligent in managing my Other Places of Interest (move your eyes to the right) as I should be. There are places I go to that I haven't added, some because they're too ubiquitous to need my help (I'm talking about you, Sullivan and Yglesias), some because my feed reader obviates the need for me to click on my own places.

I'm also wary of doing too much pruning; it's easy to believe that some people are gone when they're only resting. One of my favorites, The Corporate Cynic, hasn't had any activity since last July; should I drop that? I don't, for two reasons: first, the stuff that's posted there is still worthwhile to read if you haven't seen it before; and second, these sites can come popping back into play at any moment. For example, I had pretty much figured that From ship to shore, an entertaining travel blog by a cruise ship hostess, was out of business when there had been no new posts in 14 months. But Jacky's back out on a round-the-world cruise, and she's posting again.

So I've added another couple this week, only fitting as I keep plundering them for posts. The Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre writes a very entertaining and enlightening blog, You Don't Say, and I have added it to the list. Now you can easily go there directly instead of reading my rehashes of his work.

David Seaton is a journalist who now lives in Spain, and he has a pretty cynical (realistic?) take on the world. He expresses this on his News Links blog in which he chronicles the destructive trends he sees, and he spares nobody; he's not much a bigger fan of Obama than he was of Bush.

New economics blog

Robert N. Stavins is a professor of Business and Government at Harvard, and he started a blog in February called "An Economic View of the Environment." Since I don't know too much about this subject, I'm going to follow it for a while and see what I can learn.

Stavins got off to an interesting start with a series of posts about myths concerning the way economists think (Mark Thoma pointed to these, which is where I found out about it). He cites four such myths:

1. Economists believe that the market solves all problems (discussed here)
2. Economists always recommend simple market solutions for market problems (here)
3. When non-market solutions are considered, economists use only market prices to evaluate them
4. Economic analyses are concerned only with efficiency rather than distribution (the last two here)

And as I'm reading these, and thinking that only in a fantasy world are these things myths, Stavins anticipates my feeling:

I want to acknowledge that my profession bears some responsibility for the existence of such misunderstandings about economics. Like our colleagues in the other social and natural sciences, academic economists focus their greatest energies on communicating to their peers within their own discipline. Greater effort can certainly be given by economists to improving communication across disciplinary boundaries. And that is one of my key goals in this blog in the weeks and months ahead.

This is good, but not sufficient. These myths apply to all economists, not just those studying the environment, and the communication needs to get out of the ivory tower. Because, whether non-experts are perpetuating these myths for personal reasons, or economists themselves are misrepresenting their work to fit a political orthodoxy, the reality must be exposed.

Of course, the reality is that economics has few definite answers, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Nevertheless, if the profession is to maintain any credibility, it needs to be a lot more realistic about what we can expect from it.

A new blog

I don't mean this to become the "Commenting on Joe Posnanski" blog (though I might get more readers if I did), but I'm going to mention him yet again. Posnanski is the excellent sportswriter who writes for the Kansas City Star, Sports Illustrated, and has a very entertaining blog that is mostly about sports. (He also has a new book coming out in September, but I'll let him push that on his blog.)

He started a new blog a couple of days ago, and I'll let him describe what it's about:

So, here's the concept of this blog: Newspapers, we all know, are drowning. There are reasons for this, numerous reasons, some complicated, some very simple, some interesting, some boring as sin. The times are changing. The economy is in the tank. Readership is breaking into niche audiences. The business model is broken. Print is dying. Newspapers lost touch with readers. Readers lost touch with newspapers. On and on and on and on and on.

People also feel very differently about what's happening to papers. Some say good riddance. Some worry for the future of Democracy. Some believe newspapers wrote their own death notice with their greed and stubborn reluctance to adjust to a changing world. Some believe this future was inevitable, that the overpowering newspaper business that once existed could not survive, it had to be picked apart piece by piece like the fish in "Old Man and the Sea." Some believe that a technological breakthrough and an economic turn can put newspapers (or whatever they will be called by then) a new life -- there are more readers now than ever before. Some think that if you hooked up a heart monitor to the newspaper business right now, you'd get a straight line.

The blog is called The Future of Newspapers, and, even though Posnanski has not mentioned my post that, coincidentally, came out the same day (The future of journalism), I thought I'd steer any of you who have an interest in this topic to it. What it will become, I don't know, but I always find it intriguing to get in on the ground floor of a blog that discusses topics in which I have an interest.

About comments

Readers may notice that I've been delinquent on responding to comments the past few days. Somehow, I turned off the feature that sends comment notifications to my e-mail, so I thought there wasn't any activity there. I'll turn it back on, take a look at the comments I've received, and try to find time to catch up (though I make no guarantees).

Bitterness

As promised, this is a follow-up to my last post concerning Wikipedia. I won't even begin to rehash everything there. I wrote that a fervid commenter didn't do a very good job of arguing his case, as he failed to realize that his defense (that Wikipedia was known to be inaccurate, but it didn't matter because people used it, people liked it, and people don't care much about accuracy anyway) was a faint effort indeed.

In his third passionate comment on the subject (you can go to the original post by John McIntyre to follow this discussion), after some more of the unconvincing support of Wikipedia, he wrote:

As such, your writing John is mostly (and increasingly so, in my opinion) steered by bitterness.

There's no real follow-up or citations here, though he does go on to write:

Wikipedia will improve and will adapt to the latest situations if so required. Any debate on this (how tumultuous it may be) should be welcomed, instead of being questioned by you.

Of course, McIntyre is allowing these comments to be published on his blog, so it seems obvious to me that he is welcoming this debate, but I'm not the one spluttering on about this.

Here's my main point. The word "bitterness" is rapidly becoming the end of all arguments. We're asked to believe, not just here but on my blog and many other places throughout BlogWorld, that an assignment of bitterness is the ultimate in argumentation. McIntyre is "bitter" about something, and should no longer offer his reasons on the topic. I'm "bitter" about something, as a (former?) commenter expressed, and so my judgment on, say, economics or politics is immediately suspect.

Anyone who's taken Intro to Logic recognizes this for the ad hominem argument it is, but the people who use it seem to find it a devastating critique. It isn't, of course, it's just a way for a weak arguer to claim, "I win. My comments come out of passion and logic, yours merely from bitterness."

It's clear that this particular commenter is out of steam, as he concludes his effort with:

And this is where I will stop feeding the trollz :D
Goodbye folks. Live long and prosper \/.

He dismisses what is actually a fine discussion by claiming that anyone who disagrees with his contention that Wikipedia is great is a troll (and throws in his kewl use of 'z' and his 40-year-old Star Trek reference as proof of his Internet bona fides).

But it does keep him from having to support his questionable logic any further, and maybe we can all be thankful for that.

I can dream

This post is not in the nature of a whine or anything. I have grown comfortable with the idea that Androcass (the blog, not the person) is not taking off in popularity. Whether because of content or style, there remain only a few who come consistently. If there are visitors, they have tended to drift off, leading to a very spiky result set of readership statistics. And that's OK. (I am still pondering some changes as a result of this, perhaps drop my level of posting, maybe coalesce around fewer topics, split into multiple blogs, but those are not decisions I've made for sure yet.)

But that doesn't mean I can't have some regrets about what I miss by not having a larger community. There's obviously a downside to that, given the trolling and spamming that afflicts larger blogs, but there's also a loss of that exciting give and take that occasionally emerges on the higher-traffic sites. All too often, I end up having a conversation with myself.

Moreover, I miss the chance to do what some of the other bloggers do, which is to solicit topics or opinions. Yglesias will ask his readers to suggest ideas, which seems like a cheap way to avoid coming up with stuff (partially kidding), and other folks will ask for input on things like books to read or movies to see or blogs to check out. I certainly wouldn't mind getting to make those kinds of requests, but I am limited by the size of the readership. That's too bad. (That said, anyone who is reading can feel free to make such suggestions, and I'll be thrilled to get them.)

This is yet another reason I find so much of the Web 2.0 commentary to be so overblown. At its very best, maybe there is a real online community that comes together, and synergizes, and creates an emergent consciousness (or whatever other buzz twaddle is propagated by the marketeers). More often, we're just people lighting matches in the darkness.