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How is "great content" found?

3 September 2011 - 12:08pm | Laura Scott

In a provocative assessment of Google’s Google+ strategy of launching a “recommended users” list (a topic of its own), Robert Scoble shared an assumption behind his conclusions:

If you have great content you will get found by one of the folks on this list.

It’s an interesting claim. I've heard this kind of thing for years, and always wondered: Is it true? My intuition always said it's not. So last night I questioned Robert's statement in a tweet, and he replied:

@lauras it's pretty rare that good content doesn't get shared with others.

How do we know that it's "rare" that good content doesn't get shared? We know only about the good content we've already found. We have no idea how much good content has not been found. So how can we lay any odds as to how common or rare it is for good content to be found?

And "found" ... by whom?

I thought I'd lay out some thoughts on this and see what people think.

What does it take?

The content must be "good".

We all know that there's a ton of bad content that gets much more attention than good content. But for good content to get found, the question assumes good content. What makes content "good"? That's a question that is addressed piecemeal in the following points.
The content must be on a viable platform, in a viable format.

The content must exist in a form that can be consumed if it is found. A book in Braille is not going to influence many. Your handwritten novel may be fabulous, but the single copy's being on yellow pads, with all the words scribbled in your poor penmanship ill serves your great novel.
The content must be findable.

If people can't get to it, you can't share it. For online content, it must be in a format to be indexed by search engines. For movie content, it must have distribution. Your painting that's viewable only from your livingroom is not findable by others except your house guests. (If only you had a gallery showing!)

A Confederacy of Dunces was eventually published posthumously and found by a delighted readership and a satisfied Pulitzer committee, but what if John Kennedy Toole's mother didn't champion his manuscript after his suicide and convince a publisher to publish it? How many John Kennedy Tooles have passed through the world, leaving behind great manuscripts that never will be read?
The content must be accessible.

How many provocative news articles languish behind a paywall, never to be accessed by the people who could most infuentially share it? How much great content in China is never found because it's censored? An Internet without Net Neutrality could render much content completely inaccessible due to preferential content mainstreaming deals by access providers.
The content must be understandable.

It must use a common language. It must use existing cultural references. We can love the music of Beethoven because he touches us in musical language still used today, but we are lost hearing Javanese gamelan, and modern avant-garde composers might speak in musical references too modern or obscure for us to grasp. How much ancient Greek poetry can be enjoyed when Greek is no longer taught in university?
The content must have some audience.

Here's the trick. Somebody must start the sharing chain. Likely it takes a lot of somebodies to achieve some sort of sharing critical mass. How many of the most interesting people you know don't have a popular blog, don't have a jillion Twitter followers, aren't in oodles of Google+ circles? I can't count them all on the fingers of both hands. There are simply too many to count.

My own blog has a small audience, but perhaps is on the radar of just enough people where good content fitting all the criteria listed here could break out and be "found". But if I tweet about my post, I can perhaps reach a slightly larger audience (via a fraction of my Twitter followers). On the other hand, if my post is Drupal-related and appears on Planet Drupal, my audience is suddenly and automatically increased by an order of magnitude, meaning so many more people can see and pass along my content if they deem it to be "good".

How many content creators have that kind of audience available, who in turn can share that content with yet other people? Yes, there are some popular thinkers out there really putting out good content. But let's face it, most of the popular stuff is pretty crappy.

Which leads us to:
The content must stand out in the noise.

And there's a lot of noise these days. In the above-referenced Google+ joint, Scoble states: "Most people can only follow 250 people. In fact, the average user follows far less than that." That's because of noise. How much great content passed right before your eyes on Twitter, flitting by before your attention was drawn? I probably see 1% of all the stuff that crosses my Twitter feed, and that's on a good day, and even then I actually read only a fraction of that. Most of what we see is noise. But I love the serendipity that comes from following too many people.

But if everyone is following only 250 people or fewer, how interconnected are we, really? Does your headline grab attention? Does your post have a striking image? Does your so-well-crafted jewelry look too much like discount store junk for anyone to notice its fine qualities? Has your essay topic been played so much that your most-insightful points aren't enough to gain anyone's attention?

This last leads us to:
The content must be timely.

This doesn't apply only to the insightful post on the latest political event can't be posted weeks after everyone has forgotten about the event. It also means that your content must fit the concept of what's "good" in that era. Vincent Van Gogh died a pauper; we can say his paintings were "found", but did he ever know it? Much of our filtering mechanisms are conscribed by popular culture – popular media culture, popular political culture, popular academic culture, you name it. The most-shared good content will fit within those contemporary frames – not "ahead of its time", not out of fashion, not when the event is forgotten, not when the moment has passed. Many a bon mot would have been more bon had they not been "esprit d'escalier".
The implied author must have an appropriate identity.

Your public image of you (as opposed to the "real" you – c.f., Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction) is how many will decide whether you're worth paying attention to. If they've decided yes, your content gets higher consideration. If they've decided no, your content is dismissed out of hand. If they don't know, well, then it depends on your perceived identity and how it "fits" into the context of things – or how it "fits in", period. Scoble points out that "Most content on social networks is developed by only 5% and most of the audience listens to the top 5% of that." The most popular bloggers link to each other, because they perceive each other as credible enough to read.

What about those not already in the echo chamber? They must have an identity that appeals. Despite all the public touting of how we live in an age of "tribes", we tend to vastly underestimate the value of having an identity appropriate and acceptable enough to influence others. And yet what is social networking but a way of forming tribes to filter out the noise? If you don't "fit in" the tribal filter, you're part of the noise as far as others are concerned.

Sometimes that's just by circumstance. Sometimes it's by preconceived stereotypes. For years, women have known that (many) guys don't link. In the tech world, a start-up with venture capital backing is taken much more seriously than a start-up with no backing; not only the venture capital PR muscle, but the very fact of having gotten venture backing at all helps start-ups stand out from the noise and be perceived as worth paying attention to. Joe Coder comes up with a fabulous new app and nobody pays attention, unless the app gets some sales traction; Pete Programmer with Acme Ventures backing gets buzz before the app is even approved by Apple.

I would argue that perhaps the biggest impact Acquia had on the success of Drupal came from nothing more than the fact that Acquia got venture backing, which put it and Drupal on the radar of tech bloggers and journalists, who then put Drupal on the radar of many who've since adopted Drupal for their projects. And yet some of the most profound and influential content about Drupal has happened outside of that paradigm. But those content creators didn't have the right identity to be found. (This is nothing against Acquia as a company. Acquia does much more than raise the visibility of Drupal, don't get me wrong. But seeing the rather sudden "discovery" of Drupal once Acquia announced funding was really hard for the rest of us to miss. [Disclosure: My business does business with Acquia. Many Acquians are my friends.]

In another example, in Google+, you must have the right kind of identity to even participate. If you have the "wrong" identity, how likely is it your "good" content will be found?
The content must last (long enough).

Paintings rot. Books dry up and blow away. Great movies of the 1930s and 1940s disintegrated or burned in vaults. The fire of Alexandria took away how much greatness from even the possibility of our discovering it? This challenge will never leave us, even in the digital age. How ironic that an essay noting the ephemeral nature of digital content can be found only via the Wayback Machine!

In a perfect world, there are fields of dreams

The success of good content (no matter how you define "good") depends upon each of these links. If one breaks, odds are that content will languish in obscurity. If everything lines up perfectly, then all you need to is build it and they will come. For those of us on the Internet, we have it pretty good – better than ever in history, perhaps. Content creators weren't so lucky thousands of years ago. Even a couple of decades ago.

And content creators aren't so lucky in media that doesn't happen entirely online. In Hollywood, for example, one of the old saws preached by the successful is, "If you write a great script, it will get made." They justify this by the fact that good scripts are extremely rare in their world – so rare that bad scripts have to be produced into movies because there are not enough good scripts to feed the production/distribution machine. (This perspective also validates their own sense of self-worth: If they "made it" in Hollywood, it's because they did good work, right?) Yes, the good scripts that actually get their attention have some chance of getting made. But do those good scripts tell stories that studio executives think people will pay to see? Do they have good roles to draw marketable stars? Do the stories tell a political message the executives are comfortable with?

And what about all those scripts that never get read by the Hollywood decisionmakers – the people who not only can say 'no' (of which there are many) but can also say 'yes' (of which there are very few)? One of the most common entry-level positions in Hollywood is that of "reader". The reader reads undiscovered scripts that are submitted (to the agency, to the production company, to the studio) and writes "coverage" that becomes the actual measure for assessment by others. Culling is done by the reader directly, and by others who don't read the script but only read the reader's coverage of the script. There are who-knows-how-many great scripts that never get past this stage.

How much good art that exists in your community do you know about? How many good white papers have been posted by authors you're not predisposed to find credible? How many good novels have a cover you find unappealing and never pick up?

If you're a content creator, so much of your success is out of your hands. You need some degree of luck or providence. Seneca wrote, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Corollary: Luck cannot happen if you are not prepared. But you cannot make luck happen. All you can do is be prepared, and be persistent at that preparation, and not blink if the opportunity comes.

That is how great content is found.

What do you think?

[Photo by "Ken & Nyetta (Creative Commons)]

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On journalists' & pundits' attitudes about new media: It's the privilege, stupid!

3 October 2010 - 11:47am | Laura Scott

For years now we've seen people entrenched in, married to, paid by or validated by old media attack new media, "those bloggers," Twitter, Facebook … the Internet in general. It's been fading lately as publishers especially have started to embrace and integrate new media into their publishing strategies. But there are still holdouts, many of whom seem not just ignorant but willfully ignorant.

Malcolm Gladwell's weak dismissal of "weak ties"

Gladwell's New Yorker article was the buzz on Twitter. One excerpt:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

…proving that old media journalists are as adept as anyone in the straw-man rhetorical technique.

Gladwell's main argument seems to cling to the notion that things like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s could not have happened in new media. The thing is he seems to think that this is a notion that all of us "evangelists of social media" cling to. His is a rant against ghosts and phantoms to make a point, not an investigative exercise.

I love Gladwell's books, especially Blink. But this column is more an expression of his attitude towards social media rather than an insight into social media. It's a tract for dismissal, not a lesson towards understanding.

In a Guardian article on Gladwell's thoughts, journalist Tim Adams, who, by the way, describes us all as "insects":

The twitterers have responded to his provocation by swarming on to blogs and websites to protect their uniting belief: that the future belongs to them.

…does end up revealing a truth behind Gladwell's views:

The New Yorker, for which Gladwell is a stellar correspondent, sees itself as the spiritual home of a kind of reading and writing and engagement that could seem threatened by the attention overload and surface concerns of online skimming. I spoke to Gladwell a while back about his use of computers: he never spent much time on the internet, he said: "I run out of things to look up really quickly."

So Gladwell in fact doesn't even know much about social media, doesn't have a use for them, and doesn't even find the internet of much use. Obviously he's not interested in what other people might have to say. Why would he? He has his saying machines (The New Yorker, his books, his occasional appearances on television). What could anyone possibly offer to a man on top of the literary heap?

So why would Gladwell even bother to take on a subject of which, he admits, he knows little? Because he's a writer for The New Yorker, and that in itself makes his views relevant? I not only like Gladwell, I love The New Yorker (as a subscriber for years). But his taking on social media strikes me as hubris at best, enabled by the blindness of privilege.

Real Time Privilege with Bill Maher

On Real Time with Bill Maher [warning: heavy Flash site] this past Friday, we were treated to the entertainment of Professor Cornell West, journalist and former political flack Joe Klein, and Bill Maher ruminating over why people would want to "share" — i.e., blog or use Twitter or participate on Facebook — as if that were some great mystery.

And mystery it is to these privileged gentlemen.

At one point, Arianna Huffington, who, along with comic actor David Cross rounded out this evening's panel, makes the point that social media can be used for good or ill. She runs through several examples of people using social media for good:

Maher: But most of it is bullshit.
Huffington: Not at all!
Maher: Oh come on! See, this is my problem with Facebook, is this kind of stuff, to me, makes sure no one will ever read a book again, because they just don't have time, because it's so easy to spend all your time, [mimics texting on a handheld] "I took a shit and ate a banana." And that's posting on Facebook and 8 people go "I like that" and "I did, too" and it's — Betty White, I mean I love Betty White said it right when she said, "Now that I know what it is, it sounds like a huge waste of time!"
…
Huffington: But the same people, the same people who are doing that now would probably have spent seven hours sitting on the couch watching bad television and you would not be complaining about it. Self-expression is the new entertainment. Some self-expression is trivial and some self-expression is great. But it's no different than watching bad tv.
…
West: But it's still narcissism on the one hand. You got narcissism on the one hand, all the forms of narcissism, [gestures with other hand] you got the courage to be empathetic, sympathetic, concerned about the plight of others, sensitive to the pain of others.
Maher: Why is it that this generation, though, wants to share everything?...
Cross: Because you can get famous….
Maher: You mean like Tia Tequila?
…
Klein: …The difference now is that, because of these technologies, it's in everybody's face….

—transcribed from second video embedded on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-maher-elections-2010-tea-party-big-tent_b_747795.html

Maher is a pig-headed, but entertaining, boob. Klein is a Washington insider. But I expected West to know better. At one point in the same episode, he observes:

Rahm Emanuel exemplifies contemporary cynicism and old-fashioned arrogance in American politics.

And yet, in his broad-brush dismissal of all of us who don't get to appear on talk shows, he expresses his own brand of cynicsm and old-fashioned arrogance towards people who express themselves online. He, Klein and Maher all seem blind to their own privilege as media celebrities. Their privilege is that old media have granted them camera time and space in print.

What these men did not ask is why they themselves feel the need to share. And why their motivations would be any different than the motivations of the unwashed masses who are not privileged by old media but are newly empowered by publication technologies that bypass the old media scarcity controls.

And yet, when there's blame to go around….

It seemed this past several days that everywhere on the old media we were presented with talking heads wringing their hands over the tragic Rutgers student suicide after being outed and mocked by his roommate and dorm neighbor … and how Facebook is the problem. The best response I've seen on this is from Anil Dash:

It's important to note that blaming technology for horrendous, violent displays of homophobia or racism or simple meanness lets adults like parents and teachers absolve themselves of the responsibility to raise kids free from these evils. By creating language like "cyberbullying", they abdicate their own role in the hateful actions, and blame the (presumably mysterious and unknowable) new technologies that their kids use for these awful situations. Somehow, when I was frequently cross-dressing or wearing makeup or identifying as queer as a high schooler, I was still able to be threatened with violence, even though my tormentors had no mobile phones or laptop computers. (I will point out, for nerd cred, that I was the first person in my school to bring a mobile phone or laptop to class.)

I was thinking of this obliquely when Jose Antonio Vargas asked me a bit about my perspective on Hollywood's take on social media as exemplified by the new Facebook film. Despite my own misgivings about many of Facebook's social impacts, I still think old media as exemplified by the Associated Press and the film industry has a concerted agenda to demonize new media and social media [emphasis added –LS], and Facebook and its creators bear the brunt of that in The Social Network. There's also the ugly reality that coining bullshit words like "cyberbullying" will sell papers or page views. I put it more broadly in the Huffington Post piece:

The movie is written in the abstract, based on what they feel Facebook, and the social Web, represent. It's exoticism. It's the 1940s, when you had a white actor in yellow-face play a Chinese character, you know? Those foreigners talk like this, and it's why they're inscrutable and evil.

And for my own straw-man argument….

These denigrators of new media and defenders of old media would say to tall this, But we are trained professionals! We have the special insights to determine what's important! Who wants to hear about what you had for breakfast?

While there are many people in journalism and media who understand what the new media are about, it does seem that all to often these attitudes are held and expressed and get a ton of exposure … not because their views are particularly insightful, but rather by the simple fact they have the privilege of mass publication via the old media. They are still louder than the rest of us, and need to keep reminding us of this, as if that were validation in and of itself. Why being louder somehow makes them better than the hoi polloi is not clear. Why do they feel the need to keep doing this? Maybe Cornell West had it right: narcissism.

Or maybe it's something more generally shared by all of us: wanting our voices of hope/concern/anger/fear/despair/delight to be heard in an increasingly bustling, insecure, unstable, chaotic world.

--
Photo credit: David Cosand, Creative Commons

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Say hello to the Open Source Decade

27 December 2009 - 7:14pm | Laura Scott

Comic: XKCD #225.

Open Source has been around for quite some time, but odds are most people you ask won't know what "open source" is. This isn't because open source is obscure, but rather it has slipped into the mainstream, and unless you're already in the know, there's no real reason you will have noticed it.

But open source is here, and it's growing.

Linux maximus

Linux was written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linux itself was based on earlier incomplete kernels that themselves were available for reworking and building upon. When Torvalds licensed Linux under the GNU public license, there was mostly scoffing in the media, with a small minority of voices predicting widespread growth in the future. Now a majority of web servers worldwide are running Linux (see Wikipedia, above), and Linux dominates the supercomputer market and adoption in high-end special effects houses in Hollywood. Linux also powers auto electronics, weapons systems, and an increasing number of desktop, laptop and netbook computers.

My prediction: Linux distros will continue to gain desktop and laptop popularity as they develop more usability and visual style improvements. Ultimately, though, it will take hardware driver maker support (or replacement) to create the happy turn-on-and-use experience most non-geeks want out of a computer. Usability is a hard thing to design by committee, but once it starts kicking in, I don't see much of anything holding Linux back. (And no, I don't see computers going away altogether. The cloud is nice, but with all that local processing power there is a great opportunity for cooler, better apps that can leverage that cloud far better than a generic browser. [Not to mention privacy and security concerns that will always hound an open network.] I may be way off on this one, but I don't think so.)

Firefox burns

Last week Firefox 3.5 became the world's #1 browser release, edging out Internet Explorer 7. Of course, when you add in Internet Explorer 8 and the dead-but-not-buried Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft still holds the largest market share. Still, as ZDNet's Paula Rooney notes, open source has been putting the squeeze on IE.

The days of Internet Explorer’s dominance appear to be waning. Of course, Microsoft’s Windows operating system monopoly still owns the market, but we’re not sure how long that will matter, especially as software-as-a-service models take off and Google’s web-focused operating system is prepped for release.

As Microsoft’s grip on the browser market loosens, opportunities for open source rivals are blossoming. It will be interesting to see which of the two top open source browsers benefits most in 2009 [sic].

My prediction: Indeed, 2010 will be interesting for the browser market. Firefox will continue to grow, but Google Chrome, especially with Google's banner ad-driven marketing push, could be #1 by 2011, pushing IE8 and IE9 out of any hope for the #1 release spot. And this will be huge as webapps and software-as-a-service continue to take up more of the usage market from desktop apps. In fact, this latter development will push Microsoft hard to fall in line with web standards and fight to keep up with the far larger open source development communities of its browser competitors.

Android joy

Android is the open source (Linux-based) operating system for handhelds that is powering a small but growing number of smart phones, including the Motorola Droid and the new Google Phone that was given to Google employees as a holiday gift. Forrester predicts Android smartphones will have 10% market share by end of 2010. I would be surprised if it's not more. (Want a Droid? I do!)

Katherine Noyes of LinuxInsider writes:

As for Linux Girl's hopes and predictions? Her eyes are on netbooks, Android and other portable devices as the area where Linux will continue to gain major ground.

The masses are getting used to Linux whether they realize it or not, even as the desktop begins to slowly fade away. Forget the Year of Linux on the Desktop, and get ready for the Year of Linux in Consumers' Hands! Can't ask for much more than that.

My prediction: Android phones will have the buzz at end of 2010. By 2020, Android will be around in some form, morphed to suit whatever devices people are using then, but I have no idea if Apple will be still rocking then. Maybe the iPhone will be seen only in museums?

Open but less known

Drupal drops up

Drupal has been around for almost 10 years, but this past year saw increasing adoption by high profile sites and government agencies including WhiteHouse.gov.

And Drupal is not alone in the open source CMS market. See Dee-Ann Leblanc on what's coming for Open Source CMSs in 2010.

My prediction: With the new Drupal 7 coming just around the corner, expect to see another spike in Drupal buzz and Drupal usage. And with the new features and structures in place, also expect the Drupal market to change in very interesting ways. (N.B.: [BlogHer.com, where I first posted this] has been running Drupal since 2006.)

MySQL is your SQL

This database that powers so many apps you can't even begin to count
CIO's Nancy Weil predicts that Oracle will make the open source MySQL database system a core part of its Unbreakable Linux package.

My prediction: If Oracle tries to clamp down on MySQL, one or two other open source database projects — including a new or existing fork of MySQL — will emerge and come to a rising market share within a year.

Inscape and Blender and GIMP (oh my!)

Open source design programs are just getting better. Inkscape does a lot what Adobe Illustrator does. GIMP is an open source photo manipulation program that will do what most people use Adobe Photoshop for. Blender is a respectable open source 3D animation program. These applications are not new, but I expect their use to only increase as they continue to evolve.

My prediction: Expect the predicted Adobe CS5 release in 2010, and its predictable (high) pricing, to drive more buzz and market to these open source alternatives. But Blender will need a high profile adopter to get similar buzz.

Open Office market not so micro

Open Office is the open source desktop software suite that comes close to replacing Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It's not perfect, but can fit the bill if you're finding Microsoft Office's pricing a bit too dear.

My prediction: Open Office will continue to eek out minor gains in the private user market, but will struggle to convince conservative and under-budgeted IT managers in corporations and government agencies to adopt a new, unfamiliar product. However, 10 years from now....? A lot can happen in 10 years.

Why oh why is open source so popular?

While open source software — or at least the most successful examples of open source software — is free, I don't think that's why this will be the open source decade. Rather, it's that open source is open.

Cost does come into play, but indirectly ... on the supplier side. Open source is disrupting many markets where scarcity enforced by proprietary software licenses drove up costs. With the commons competing in development, that scarcity is challenged, effectively driving down those nice profit margins that made people like Bill Gates rich.

And if there's interest to take it into a new direction, there's nothing to stop them. Forks happen.

So as long as there's community interest (read: demand) for the product, it's not going to die. This software is not going to disappear unless people stop being interested in using it.

For example, just because Android was primarily developed by Google, it doesn't mean Android is dependent upon Google to continue to evolve. On the contrary. Just because Drupal was created by Dries Buytaert doesn't mean that, if Dries decides to quit software and go do pottery in Bali, Drupal will crumble. The Linux industry has grown way beyond the origination by Linus Torvalds or its corporate distribution by Red Hat.

What does this mean to you? Nothing, if you want to ignore it. But if you are paying attention, it could mean opportunities.

As a consumer, it might influence your buying decisions. For example, I would be much more comfortable buying an Android phone than a phone powered by Windows. I had lived for over a year with a Palm 700P, which ran the proprietary Palm OS, which was outmoded and little supported. I have no idea whether Palm will be around much longer, so I don't know if I would consider a Palm anything unless it was at least running an open sourced (and well supported) OS. Buy an Android phone and odds are you will be able to continue to buy phones in the future running Android, with the same familiar interface (albeit always improving). No company is going to EOL Android. No company can.

As an entrepreneur, open source might present a business opportunity. What? Without proprietary software? How is that possible? Well, let's look at other industries. Plumbing is essentially open source. There are no big secrets, just acquired know-how that comes from doing the work. And yet plumbers have businesses in every town with plumbing. Law is open source. The law is there for all to see. But if you learn it sufficiently, you can build a practice into a lucrative career.

In other words, business does not require secrets.

This doesn't mean that all proprietary softwares are going away. Not at all. But I do expect that in 10 years most people will have a pretty good idea what open source means to them, or at least will be pretty big consumers of open source products.

Mark my words.

This was posted on BlogHer.

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100 Hot Tips to Find 100 Hot Tips on 100 Hot Topics = More Info, Less Insight

10 October 2009 - 10:25am | Laura Scott

If you're making a list, don't go on. Less is more. To say the least. Less.

Seems like everyone makes Top X lists these days. 35 this. 50 that. 100 the other thing. Maybe they're link-bait posts. It must be effective, because they're everywhere. But why is it that nobody seems willing or able to parse through the datamass and recommend a useful number?

Do I really want to trawl through the "Top 50 Tutorials" for doing x or the "Top 100 Twitter Applications"? All I need is the one that works. The "top" one. Your best recommendation. The other 99 aren't all that helpful. There's Google for finding oodles.

To all Top 100 list-makers: If you have taken the time to go through all of these sites/resources and write up a paragraph on each, maybe pulled a screenshot or logo, couldn't you, like, give one or three the nod?

What are the best three Twitter apps? [Tweetdeck (Air), Twittelator Pro (iPhone), Tweetie (Mac OSX)]

What are the best two CSS grid systems? [960, Blueprint]

What are the best four coffee shops in Boulder? [Sidneys, The Cup, The Laughing Goat, Unseen Bean]

What is the best professional video online resource? [Creative Cow]

What is the best open source content management system? [Drupal]

Is that too ~~much~~ little to ask?

/whining

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Swine flu: being concerned is not foolish

30 April 2009 - 9:21am | Laura Scott

There's been much a-Twitter about the alarm surrounding the Swine Flu. People griping that SARS, Ebola, bird flu, [fill in the blank] didn't wind up being much, so why get worked up now? Everybody's over-reacting, they say.

I think the cynical response is overly-cynical and perhaps a bit to happy to declare "boy who cried wolf" and laugh or sneer.

Reality check:

Highly contagious? Check!

Fatal to healthy adults? Check!

No vaccine in sight before fall? Check!

Spreading quickly? Check!

This is a little thing that is very bad and could get very big very quickly. I don't see the alarm as overblown (though Egypt's destruction of all the pigs seems a bit ridiculous). We're an interconnected world now.

Shutting down the schools seems to be an obvious step. This is how you try to stop pandemic: By eliminating the mass-infection opportunities that we have.

If nothing comes of the swine flu, I think it could in part point to why such aggressive measures were indicated. It's if it gets really bad when we can say shutting the schools was perhaps too little too late.

So count me as skeptical of the proud, cynical skepticism out there. Just because you've run stop signs without consequences doesn't mean you want to continue doing it blithely.

/soapbox

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Trying out MacJournal

24 June 2008 - 5:55pm | Laura Scott

This is really just a test to see how MacJournal does with Drupal sites. In this case there’s the added challenge that I am not blogging using the “blog” content type -- a detail that stymies some blog apps like ecto.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how this works.

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