B12 Solipsism

(Apology to Brian Eno for the title snatch)

Fascinating overview of the 21st phenomena of Digital Intimacy¹ by Clive Thompson in Sunday’s NYT Magazine. I’m old and crusty enough to still be an old-fashioned introvert, but I’ve certainly exposed and expressed my thoughts to a much wider audience in the last couple of years than all my college years combined².

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.

…

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

[Click to read more of I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com]

As far as following people I don’t know: I learned from Flickr to be careful who I follow, otherwise the data stream becomes overwhelming. I’m usually not interested in baby photos of strangers, nor of parties I’m not invited to filled with people I’ve never met. Still, I know a lot more about acquaintances and friends from the past than I ever thought feasible, or enjoyable, and I’m quite delighted with the interconnectiveness of it all.

Oh, and for me, twitter became interesting after I:

1. connected it to my cellphone, but not getting updates every time somebody posted, just so that I could post while bored in waiting rooms and in airports, yadda yadda.

2. started using a third party application instead of the twitter webpage (I use the free version of twitterific, there are other clients)

1. Like this blog, for instance, or twitter, Facebook, Flickr, tumblr, FriendFeed, LibraryThing, you get the idea [↩]
2. which lasted from 1986-1993, if you are curious [↩]

RIP, Tina

Sad news indeed. Friend of this blog, and friend of me, Tina Oiticica Harris has passed away after a long bout of anarchic illness. We’ll miss you Tina!

Around 3am this morning, I woke up with a weird sense of anachronism about Tina’s 56th birthday.
Unfortunately, Tina-la-vecina as she was known in the Santa Monica Unified School District checked in Hotel California on Monday and isn’t available to solve this riddle.

[Click to read more An anarchic birthday]

[The Rookery - 35mm, Illford film, Nikon 8008, scanned in Photoshop 3.5, or maybe 4.0]

Received my copy of this collection of essays, put together by Friend of B12 (FOB, as it were), Ginger Mayerson. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks good. Damn good. The front and back cover are photos of mine, so if you are creating a library of my published works, go ahead and order a copy (the Lulu Press version is larger, and is only $7, or you can order a slightly smaller version at Amazon for $9).

The Journal of Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1, is a collection of the following blog essays: On Essays by Paul M. Rodriguez, Liberal Fascism: An Interesting Moral Question by Steve Gimbel, Paint Splatters & Pixie Dust by Dan Kelly, Ten Dates of Christmas? Ten Lords A Leaping: The Gallant Mariner by Deborah Teasdale, Vanity by Susan O’Doherty, The Pillory of Hillary by Becki Jayne Harrelson, Reparation… by TJ Bryan, Richer Than The Sum Of My Skirt by Birdie C. Jaworski, The Music’s Between Us by Kathy Moseley, How to Scare People With Statistics by Tom Good, Red Lipstick by Eva Lake, Barbarella: A Woman of her Time? by Patti Martinson, An Invert’s Manifesto by Chad Denton, Roadtripping by Molly Kiely. Enjoy!

[From The Wapshott Press » J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon]

The Journal of Bloglandia is soliciting essays for a second volume, with more details here

(repost*)

Simon Dumenco is not impressed by the Huffington Post’s business model.

Last week, the Huffington Post, the liberal news/political blog co-founded by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, successfully lured [Betsy ]Morgan away from CBSNews.com. The inevitable headlines and analysis — about how the scrappy blog was edging ever closer to mainstreamness by luring a respected news veteran to be its CEO — was helpful not only in underscoring Huffington’s status as a national media power broker.

It also helped everyone forget Lerer’s astonishing statement in USA Today, just days earlier, that HuffPo has no plans to ever pay its bloggers. “That’s not our financial model,” he told the paper. “We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.”

Coming right out and saying that — and saying it that way, with those particular words — takes cojones. Not our financial model. Geez, wow. Not since the Pets.com sock puppet scored a deal to write his memoir (published in 2000 as “Me by Me: The Pets.com Sock Puppet Book”) has there been a more tellingly, creepily poetic new-media moment. In fact, if it weren’t for Betsy Morgan’s vote of confidence in the Huffington Post — if Morgan weren’t willing to put her career on the line to endorse the blog’s place in the media firmament — Lerer’s pronouncement could have been HuffPo’s jump-the-shark moment.
[From Advertising Age]

Gawker’s media empire doesn’t pay its writers much either, but both Gawker and HuffPost bloggers get paid more than B12’s stable of bloggers (who make about a dime a day, after expenses are paid. Those Google ads on our sidebar bring in less and less.) Dumenco continues:

First of all, arguably, it’s the other way around: Despite Arianna’s cable-news omnipresence, it’s the excellent work of such regular bloggers as Harry Shearer, Nora Ephron and Bill Maher that gave HuffPo visibility, promotion and distribution. They lent their credibility and influence — and their built-in audiences (Shearer with his radio show, Maher with his “Real Time” on HBO, Ephron with the fans of her books and movies) — to Arianna and Ken. And for what? Bupkis now — and bupkis forever! (Suckas!)

Second, the vast majority of the Huffington Post’s bloggers get virtually no significant visibility, promotion or distribution simply because there are so damn many of them — 1,800 at last count, which means that unless you’re one of Arianna’s favorites (and/or a scoop-slinging insider), you’re probably rarely going to get on the home page — and if you do, only fleetingly.

Third, the Huffington Post actually does pay some of its bloggers — the ones it has on staff, such as “Eat the Press” media editor/blogger Rachel Sklar — so the financial model is, well, what then? Pay some of the bloggers some of the time? Don’t pay the bloggers who are wealthy enough from their real gigs not to care? That, to me, is not only not a real “financial model,” it’s a wacky, ad hoc, college-newspaper-esque compensation scheme unworthy of a self-proclaimed “great company.”

Mind you, Lerer has also claimed that the Huffington Post will be profitable in 2008 — after burning through at least $10 million in venture capital. If HuffPo ever gets a lofty valuation — through an IPO or through the sale of a publicly valued stake — the serfs will surely revolt as they watch Lady Arianna and Lord Ken and their backers get rich(er).

I’ll admit I was skeptical when the Huffington Post launched, but I do glance over there from time to time, and do find stories of interest to me occasionally. There are so many bloggers though, that I’d guess 80-100 entries are posted a day, and who has time to read them all?

* From time to time, I’m reposting articles from my old blog to my new. No reason, really, other than the best way to test something new is to use it, use it, use, you gotta work it, work it. I’ll try to remember to try [sic ]to append *reposted. Please don’t be irritated if I forget.