rare pattern thoughts in a blog

The notion that PowerPoint has helped forge modern business thought is an old one. (The idea is that since business management makes decisions using PowerPoint presentations, the decision-making process gets boiled down to a few bullet points -- what would fit on a PowerPoint screen -- and this can preclude more in-depth discussion and analysis.)

So what about in the blogging realm? Are blogs being streamed into a certain format? I'm not talking about efforts to make all online content conform to common content structures. This is about how we're seeing blogging change.

Much attention is paid to the economics of it.

But what about the technology of it. On BlogHer, mir ponders this:

First of all I read the really intense discussion about "growing a pair" the other day on Blogher.

Then I read the post about Dropping the A-list mentality and the discussion of maybe, women converse and communicate in a different way online.

Then I read Danielles post in which she self-identifies as a negro, and then wonders aloud what audience-impact her choice of descriptor will have.

Finally I read What is technorati anyways? and picked up some ideas about tagging, and popularity.

So what's my point? My point is that i guess I am framing my role here, not just as the editor of book and literary blogs, but as someone who combs through the data and sometimes pulls out important factlets about the words we use. What they are good for, the damage they can do, and the fact that a vocabulary used in a techno-social setting is a very powerful thing indeed.

Then she asks:

I am fascinated by the way colloquial language creates order or disorder on the web, and also how only words that have weight survive. What does that mean for the unpopular tags?

Unlike a library, where books stay in view long after they are relevent, how are tags creating a heirarchies of taxonomic/linguistic power in web content?

How (if we want to), can we subvert a power structure that is based on algorithms and on usage, rather than the real strength behind language, which requires that the reader understand the words (if not the authors) intention, and the context the word is being used in?

Some interesting things to ponder here.

First you pull in multiple RSS feeds. Then you mix thoroughly until you have a mishmash of keyword phrases. Bake at 350 degrees and post to spam site.

This one I discovered during a vanity search on Technorati: conferencing [dash] solution [dot ] biz [slash]conferencingonlinephone/?p=2 (no linky goodness for spammers). The "post" appeared with my name, so of course I had to go look.

What kills me is that these nefarious types must get results from these and other underhanded tactics, or else they wouldn't do it ... right? So who's following the spam parade? Who's clicking through? Who's buying???

Obviously, "just say no" doesn't work.

On the current nefarious Sony anti-piracy outrage, a column in The Inquirer (UK) by Marc Ninthly highlights what I think is the biggest issue here:

My big problem is that we are not being told about these things. Decisions about the software we run on our systems – the ones we saved hard for, or stole from some drunk yuppie last night – are being made, and implemented without our consent. Now, some legal smart arse will undoubtedly point out that it was all outlined quite clearly in Section 3, paragraph 17, addendum III b of the user contract but let’s be realistic, who the hell reads that all of that mumbo jumbo in the first place? Most real people don’t and when it comes to products from big brands, I often don’t. It’s not just that it’s mind-numbingly boring, but that it’s written in a way to make it impenetrable to normal folk.

One could say that it’s been embedded with an Anti-Interest rootkit that prevents you from reading more than a few paragraphs before you start questioning your own existence. The only way to stop it is to press the ‘Accept’ button. Consumers allocate a certain amount of trust to household name companies when they buy one of their products. We figure, maybe naively, that forking out that extra bit of cash for a real CD instead of some cheapo knock-off at a car boot sale, entitles us to a certain level of quality and protection. Not so. We have now gone from being valued customers to potential criminals. That’s it in a nutshell.

And, he points out, the ultimate consequence of Sony's treatment of its customers is that the customers will be more likely to go the illegal route and download pirated music -- Sony's customers will indeed become the "criminals" that Sony despises.

I'm reminded of a tenet of Eastern thought:

You tend to receive from life that upon which you focus. If you focus on bad things, then you tend to cultivate bad things in your life.

In other words, you reap what you sow. And the "why" is that your creativity is a powerful thing, and works in ways that you don't even realize. Put all your energy into positive endeavors and positive energy comes back to you.

Successful entrepreneurs know this -- they will be the first to tell you how once you commit to a venture, it's almost like doors are opened up before you and the universe conspires for your success. On the other hand, gloomy Murphys will tend to see the downside of any decision; they prove adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

In this sort of Zen-like way, we're seeing multinational megacorporations focusing on the negative, and therefore cultivating negative outcomes. Sony's corporate policies are being dominated by gloomy Murphys who see criminal intent in every customer. Meanwhile, whatever creative visionaries there might be in Sony's executive suites -- those who might see the new media developments as opportunities rather than threats -- seem to be having little or no impact on corporate decision-making.

The clichéd metaphor of corporate "dinosaur" seems especially apt in this context, for we see a large beast that is so angry that its feeding grounds are changing that its stomping out the food it has -- and seems to be too limited in intelligence to see the self-destructiveness of its actions.

That's not to say I'm predicting the fall of Sony over this. As entrenched as these corporations are in our global economy, it's pretty clear that they aren't going away any time soon.

But this does offer yet another clear indication that the market is changing in ways of which the megacorporations are not mentally, creatively or even lawyerly equipped to take advantage. Our economy is changing, and the old-time top-down hierarchical business models, where the consumer has little or no say in the vendor's business practices, are proving to be outmoded and, ultimately, counter-productive.

Sony is facing an expensive lesson in the new economics of the world. How many more lessons will it take, and how many other dinosaurs will have to suffer the same, before they join us rather than fight us?

Several years ago I had an online diary. I'm not quite sure why I wrote it, or posted it online. I didn't know at the time. But the pragmatics were difficult enough -- I was essentially hand-coding the stuff -- that when Xanga came along, I had to try it. (I really wanted to join LiveJournal, but you needed an invitation or had to cough up something like 20 bucks to join, so I ditched that idea. To this day, I don't quite get LiveJournal and how it works. I visit LJ sites, but they leave me rather baffled. There, have I established my naïveté well enough?)

At first, Xanga was kind of fun -- posting things, getting props from others, building friends' lists.... But after about a month, I got bored with it all. I just couldn't see the appeal of all this first-person storytelling. Its interactive features were limited ... and far too in-grown for my taste. It started to feel like an echo chamber, and boring at that. So I let the little blog die.

That was 2001. Yet now -- today -- I cannot imagine not blogging, or not being surrounded online by bloggers writing about themselves. I suppose I've changed a little. But I think the culture has changed ... profoundly.

About 20 months ago I started up blogging again. I was in -- let's just say a pause in my overworked working life -- and thought I'd start up a Blogger blog. I chose Blogger because it was free, and ubiquitous. Why I started it up was mainly just to rant a bit -- anonymously -- about whatever struck my mind. Soon it ended up getting rather political, which made me grateful of the anonymous choice; I would not want to meet some of the folks I encountered online. (No, I won't give over the blog's particulars. That would spoil it, now, wouldn't it?)

How far we've come since 2001. Some people like to call what we have now "Web 2.0" -- as if the internet evolved in stable releases, like Photoshop or Word. I suppose it's only natural to try to define something that eludes definition. And since there's no telling where exactly we're headed in the evolution of internet-based interactivity, the tendency is to assume that we can make like Heisenberg and know, at least, where we are.

The thing is, can we really know where we are? Do we in fact have the right perspective on the present? What's more, are we truly served by seeing history as leading up to where we stand "at the end of time," so to speak?

The patterns we see are informed by our own perspectives. It may turn out that we haven't even begun to see change in our society. How can we know, when we don't know what will be? How can we judge what has happened, when we see it all as leading up to where we are now? Aren't we flotsam trying to define oceans? Galileo was persecuted for blasphemy. The Edsel was supposed to revolutionize motoring. The idea of graphics as used in Xerox's GUI interface was a non-starter in the face of IBM's PC, but became the heart of Apple's success and the primary component of interactivity today. The internet's IP went largely unusued for years, and now we're running out of IP addresses.

At the time, nobody had any idea what the result would be for any of those moments in history. Now we view those legacies through the lens of today. We view all these things as parts of patterns through which we (think we) understand the world.

But these patterns are ever-changing. Our perspective evolves, and consequently so do our demands on the world (and ourselves) change. And as we learn more, and experience more, our understanding of what we experience now will have changed.

Galileo is immortalized. Apple is a business success. The Edsel has its picture in the dictionary entry for "flop." And we move on ... to look back and see our triumphs and follies -- and then our folly of believing those prior interpretations.

What will come of this blog, I have no idea. I'm not writing for the echo chamber. I'm not writing to share "the truth." I'm just trying to figure some things out, and part of that process means posting some of my questions and tentative conclusions here, thankful that there's not a Spanish Inquisition ready to lock me up, but not really sure where all this is going, just the same.

We make sense of things by recognizing patterns -- in what we see, what we hear, what we experience through time, what we know. We may not yet understand how we do this, but we learn more and more through creating tools to help us manage information, knowledge, experiences into patterns we can grasp, and refer to, and build upon.

Amy Lowell wrote a wonderful poem that gave me inspiration for the name of this site. Thank you, Amy.

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