Day: June 12, 2002

A new look for The Truth Laid Bear

Finally — A logo submission !

To the left, you will behold the new TTLB logo, submitted by a self-described “huge fan of my stuff”. Cower in fear of its aesthetic beauty, foolish mortals ! You are not worthy !

I’m late to acknowledge this, but better late than and all that:

Mr. Patio has replied to my (well, whines, actually) to declassify me from Comedies on his blogroll.

His new category for this humble bear is, I suppose, appropriate, given how “smokin” this site has been lately. Ahem.

Heather Havrilesky a strange lady. She’s also very tired.

Heather on manic episodes: “The Manic Episode is our friend. We need it to function. Without it, how would we alienate our friends and relatives, or do the laundry in a timely fashion?”

Heather on the Good Things In Life: “Well, there’s pizza with extra garlic. There’s great sex and even better sex. There are places in Palm Springs where they bring you cold beers to reward you for tanning so evenly.”

Heather on her plans for children: “I’d prefer to have kids who grow up wretchedly poor in some foul, twisted city.”

Go ahead. Click it. You know you’re curious. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I don’t think Jason Rylander Ralph Nader much.

Shameless plea for validation

Okay, I’ll admit it. I paid $5 to Weblog Review for them to get off their butts and get around to reviewing my site. I’m a narcissist, and I was curious what they’d have to say.

Well, turns out they said nice things, rating TTLB at 4.5 out of 5. Which is great.

But then, some meanies decided to cast their own votes on the site, and they don’t seem to like this bear much at all. My average “user” vote is 2.5, with only two votes cast. And that… well, that just hurts my feelings. Sniff.

So if only to stroke my pathetic ego: go vote! Unless of course you think I suck, in which case: don’t !

I think you have to register, but it’s free and relatively painless, so it’s a small price for you to pay for… well, for me.

Brian Finch has column today over at TechCentralStation which InstaGuy advises us to read, so never to be one to turn down He From Whom All Traffic Flows, I did.

It’s a good piece, and reminds us of the paradigm shift the September 11th attacks forced on our ideas about aircraft hijackings and how they obliterated the “old” approach to dealing with terrorists in flight. Finch calls this “The Delta Force Paradigm”, and describes it as “stay calm, listen to what the hijackers say and wait until the plane gets on the ground so the military or police can come and rescue everyone.”

On September 11th that, of course, didn’t happen, and now we know that there is something worse than the terrorists destroying the plane and killing everyone on board. And we’re adjusting our approaches to countering them accordingly.

But I wanted to take this opportunity to remind everyone — as Finch does — of exactly how long it took American society to analyze this new threat and change our policies to deal with it appropriately.

The change didn’t come from Congress, or from a new Cabinet office. It came through the reactions of civilian passengers on Flight 93, and their loved ones on the ground. And it took one hundred and nine minutes.

This has been commented on before, but it’s worth revisiting, especially in any moments of doubt we may be having about our ability to prevail in this struggle. One hundred and nine minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, our society was able to recognize the new threat, determine how to counter it, and act.

As an occasional Star Trek geek, I find myself compelled to bring up a comparison to the Borg; the race of humanoids who function as a collective mind, completely integrated with their technology. One of their greatest strengths is that no weapon works on them more than a few times — they use their combined abilities to analyze, assess, and adapt to the attack, nearly instantly.

Welcome to the benevolent Borg collective, folks.

Wanted: Soccer Mom Bloggers

The recent York Times piece on bloggers has stirred up yet another round of metacommentary on blogging (“another round” is probably generous — it’s more accurate to say the metacommentary never really stops), and many bright folks have weighed in with their two cents on the future o’ blogging.

Personally, I was unimpressed with the Times piece; despite Glenn’s comments that he was satisfied, it certainly seemed to me to be trying to create a story where there really wasn’t one — i.e., the “rift” between techblogs and warblogs. Am I just dense — is there a war going on and I just didn’t notice it?

But the substance of the piece aside, it has certainly had the salutory effect of driving out some interesting self-reflection in the community, such as Jeff Jarvis’s comments (via Eric Olsen ):

To survive and succeed, weblogs must be embraced by many, many interests and their communities. I’ve seen some good food blogs. We need more entertainment blogs. I can’t believe there aren’t many more sports blogs, from pro all the way down to Little League. I hope to see local blogs and ethnic blogs and, of course, biz blogs.

This is exactly right, but I’ll take Jeff’s points a few steps further.

Once-A-Week Bloggers

In the heart of the warblogger community, a normal rate-of-posting is at least once a day. Many (not just Glenn) are updating many times throughout the day, every day. This is great. But what we really need is not 100 more blogs being updated six times a day — what we need is 100,000 more blogs that are all being updated once a week.

Right now, the political blogs are dominated by — well, political junkies. People who love to think about politics, news, events, and have an opinion on everything. This is, as I said, great. But what would truly be interesting would be to encourage a far, far wider group of people to become involved in blogging — those who don’t want to spend many hours a day on a blog, but who are willing to devote one hour a week.

To keep to what I know best — the political end of the blogosphere — I know what Stephen and Glenn and Mickey and Andrew have to say about homeland security. What I want to know is what the legendary soccer moms have to say about it. We do have a diversity of political opinion in the blogosphere (despite whining complaints of it being conservative-dominated). But what we don’t have enough of is diversity of “time commitment”. The people who are blogging are, by and large, those who are willing to devote a large chunk of time to blogging. And that skews the equation, and limits the spectrum of thought and opinion that we find.

Tools & Talent

What needs to happen for the soccer moms to start blogging? A few things.

First, nobody blogs if they don’t think anybody is reading them. (Or at least, nobody I know). And right now, the tools available to us as blog readers are skewed to favor blogs that are updated very frequently — and readers who are monitoring blogs continuously. Webogs.com’s main list is the worst example. It’s great if you’re monitoring it every few hours and looking to see when Glenn updates. But if you check it once every two days (let’s not even think about only once a week) and are looking for three blogs that update about once a week, then good luck. You’ll never find them; the tool isn’t geared to that kind of usage.

(This is not, by the way, meant as criticism of Weblogs.com — it is a great service and I thank those who run it. But it fills a need — not all needs).

Some add-ons to Weblogs’ main data stream help; BlogTracker lets you select your list of blogs and shows you when they were last updated, and can be used to track blogs over long periods of time. But we need more — more tools, more features on those tools, more flexibility in how to use them, and more independent tools that don’t rely on the Weblogs,com data stream (because after all, the fatal annoyance of Weblogs.com is that it requires the blogger to ping them. We need active monitoring tools to handle sites run by people who’ve never heard of Weblogs.com).

The point being, if there are no tools available to ‘automate’ blog tracking, a normal person is going to reduce down to the five or ten blogs they either remember the URL for, or bother to put in their bookmarks (or, is going to just rely on a major bloggers list like Glenn’s). But with easy-to-use tools, there’s no reason why that list can’t expand to fifty or a hundred weblogs, many of which don’t update frequently. And that sets the stage for the once-a-week bloggers to be able to actually publish with a reasonable belief that just even though they don’t update six times a day, they will still get read.

And the tools need to get better on the authoring side, as well. Surely it is obvious when the blogging revolution will truly have arrived? That’s right: when Microsoft starts bundling Blogger into a version of Windows. Or Internet Explorer (they’re the same thing, right?).

And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. Using Blogger is a bit harder than using Microsoft Word — but only a bit, and it’s not harder for any really good reason that couldn’t be fixed. So why shouldn’t we see Microsoft bundling a blogging tool and free (limited) hosting on MSN with the next version of Windows?

(I use Microsoft as the obvious example here, but I don’t intend to get into the question of whether they, as the Evil Empire, are the best to do this. AOL could do it, as could any ISP. The ideal situation, of course, would be if they all did it…)

Spread the Gospel

Lastly, the obvious point. We need to spread the gospel o’ blogging. This means reaching out to those who are not yet bloggers but should be — and it also means encouraging those newcomers who are just getting started (and there ain’t no lovin’ quite like linkin’ lovin’ — so that’s the best way to encourage!).

The realization I’ve come to recently is that anybody who enjoys writing — even a little bit — should be blogging. It’s not just to share your wisdom with the world. It’s to clarify for yourself just what your wisdom is. The discipline required to sit down and state your case, to declare an opinion and back it up, forces a person to think critically about the issue at hand. By documenting your thoughts, you actually improve the quality of your thinking.

And that is the true promise of blogging. Not only to create a space where — perhaps — the embryo of a virtual democracy can form, but also to drag people out of their spoon-fed adherence on the Conventional Wisdom of the day. If nobody is listening to you, it feels like it doesn’t really matter if you form your own opinion or just parrot back what you heard on Crossfire. But once you’ve got a platform — the feeling that people are actually listening to what you have to say — well, that makes you think.

And that’s the whole idea.

refers us to a Michael Kelly piece in today’s WaPo online, in which Kelly stakes out the pragmatic high ground of the civil liberties vs. increased security debate.

First, Kelly:

The proper response to [complaints about security measures violating civil liberties] is: Yes, it is true, this action will indeed hurt or at least insult some innocent people, and we are sorry about that. And this action does represent an infringement of the rights and liberties enjoyed not just by Americans but by visitors to America, and we are sorry about that, too. But we must do everything we can to curtail the ability of the enemy to attack us. This is necessary.

And VP:

Readers here know that VP is as hawkish as they come. But Kelly frightens me a bit. Read him and report back.

Read and reporting as ordered, sir.

I think I know what the problem is here, and why VP is troubled by Kelly, despite being a rather pragmatic fellow himself. Kelly’s central point is that in wartime, we may not, as citizens (or even simple residents) of the United States retain the exact same rights and privleges as we have in peacetime, and that this is a rational and necessary response to realize the greater good of defending the safety and survival of our country. To which most normal folks would reply: “Well, duh!.”

But that’s not the troubling part of Kelly’s piece. The troubling part is that he takes aim at those who are raising concerns about the impact new security measures will have on civil liberties; in effect, the tone of his piece suggests that he thinks they should sit down and shut up.

And this is exactly, 100% wrong. It is precisely because we have people such as those Kelly bashes to raise objections to new policies — and have a society and legal framework that ensures the right to such debate — that we can safely consider rational tradeoffs between liberty and security.

Reader MarkD on VP’s comment board points out that “Fingerprinting aliens is not the first step on a slippery slope to the American Secret Police knocking on your door just because you said mean things about the government. There’s a million breaking points where lines can and will be drawn. This is a democracy and the people will never stand for intrusions on that level.” And MarkD is correct. But Kelly doesn’t seem to want any review of these policies; in describing the dialogue (he calls it “ritual”) between civil liberties activists and government officials pressing for further security measures, he asks alound, “Would it be too much to ask that we cut this out?”

Yes, Mr. Kelly, it would. For while I’ll support your position that some restrictions on liberty may — may be necessary, I will absolutely not support the idea that such restrictions should be put in place without any public feedback or review. Many of the concerns raised may not be valid — they may be stupid, foolish, and irrational. But some won’t be. And in the dialogue between cop and civil liberties lawyer; between spy and protester; in that heat of discussion and opinion flowing back and forth, we will find the truth. The policies that are truly necessary and just will stand — and those that aren’t will get shouted down.

That is why we call this a democracy, and why it is worth defending, remember?

PS – Stephen has now exceeded his quota of interesting pieces for the next day or so. No more links for you, VP!

If you haven’t figured it out, I’ve backed off from the Hayman coverage. Not because it’s any less important, but because there are folks who are doing a much better job of it that I could. If you are looking for information, please start with the official county sources which I have listed in the top-left of the page. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, then try the media resources. And good luck to all affected.