Why Blogs Are So Successful from Tom Smith

JOn Husband links via Seb to this from Tom Smith

Its one of those lists, like the Cluetrain, that you read through and the immediate response is "YES!", and then you go back and think, "But why?" and then you move into "I haven't a clue" followed by, "and I disagree with some of it".

Its called being seduced by clever stuff and disengaging the thinker.

There's stuff in Tom's list that I think is spot on, but there are a few that I think should be booted out or worked on, as he says, something for a Wiki.

• Bad Is the New Good ( It Really Is ) [Nope, while expletives, conflicted grammar and illogical structures are fun, they are not "good". Bad can be done in a flash, good takes work, even on a Blog.]
• Some Things Just Don't Work (And Never Did, Let's Get Over It) [Exactly]
• People need to PeripherizeTM, Not Focus ( There is Too Much Information ) [Double exactly. Sometimes, often, to see the picture you have to make it fuzzy.]
• Thinking Out Loud ( The Best Place to Do It ) [Yup, how will I know what I think till I hear what I say?]
• Informality Fucking Rocks ( Everybody Hates the Suits Really ) [Yup, clothes disguiseth the man]
• You Don't Know What You Know ( Really ) [Check]
• You Probably Know Too Much To Even Begin Writing It Down ( Really Really ) [Too optimistic, you don't have enough enough time left in your life even to get down the headings.]
• A Little And Often is Best ( Your Mum Was Right ) [Check, multitasking is the way we do stuff]
• The Link is God ( Which makes Google the Devil ) [Google is the apostle, it tells the story]
• Person Centric not Place Centric (You can only be in one place at a time) [Nope, one of the reasons we feel so much grief when someone close to us dies, is that they take away that part of us that resided in them, parts of us that even we don't know, and that are now lost forever. In a Networked World, raise that to a Googolplex. In that world we are graduated pieces with variable joins, sometimes bits fall off and sometimes we find bits of us we didn't know were there.]
• Personal Taxonomies (Let Dublin Core catch up rather than dictate) [Yes please, and can we make them Implicit Personal Taxonomies?]
• You Own Your Blog ( You Are Your Blog ) [I nearly wrote redundant, but actually I disagree. Tom owns much of this part of my Blog, I own bits that JOn is publishing and so on. You don't own your Blog as long as you enable comments and trackbacks. In fact, ownership is the redundant idea here]
• Information Exists in the Context of People (And Always Has) [Mhmm]
• If It's Not Documented, It Really Doesn't Exist [Bullshit. If its not documented it may be being ignored, concealed or has not yet been detected. But long before we documented cholera and malaria, they were killing us]
• Democracy is the Least Worst of the Alternatives (Let's Get Over It) [Check, at least we assume, be nice to see one somewhere]
• Reflection is the New Black (Who'd have thought?) [???]
• Lets Plan To Start Now, Plan Later (That's The Plan Anyway) [Let the result emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Or. The purpose of a plan is to have something to abandon when you find out what you are really doing.]
• Passwords Blow Goats [On the obverse, the highest security comes from having everything visible. Passwords will be with us for a loooong time, get over it]
• Distributed AND Centralised (not OR) [Distributed and Co-ordinated?]
• Nobody Owns the Blog Concept [But MS will try to copyright it]
• If Blogs are the Songs, RSS is the Home-made Compilation CD (RSS is cool) [Aggregators are the compilation and Zempt is the Karaoke]
• People Can Cope With Simple ( Just about, but not always ) [Nothing is simple, but people cope anyway. Corollary, don't be afraid of complex, just don't make it complicated]
• Don't Try And Make The Computer Do Things It Can't And We Can ( i.e Manage Knowledge, Make Sense, Inspire, See Connections, Make Jokes, Cock Up) [OK, apart from seeing connections. Computers (read Google) can see the connections, but we have to decide whether they have meaning for us]
• Google for "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" [Whatever Turns you on]

Now you

Comments

[Jon Husband]

Lovely second-level analysis/peeling of the onion/pushback. What we all do, actually, when we re-mix and think through the small pieces we join to loosely.

Like art or craft, the deeper thinking takes more work - couldn't agree more.

I'll elaborate on my blog.

[Tom Smith]

Whilst it's kinda true deep thinking takes more work, it takes VERY deep thinking to achieve the catchy and the pithy, for me at least. To understand something to a level where you can describe it is one thing, to be able to make it quirky or humorous enough to be memorable and meaningful is another. I can still remember a whole heap of pattern names such as "Different Chairs" and "Green Fingers" from Christoper Alexander just because the title contains so much deeper meaning.

My aim is understand, and to do that I need to paint enough of picture so that it makes sense for me, but not finish it to the point where it has no room for additions from people like Earl. Bad really is the New Good. By "bad" I don't mean crap, I mean, not obsessively polished to the point it becomes both boring and inaccessible.

By sharing ideas before they've "set" other people can help shape them. Ideas are conversations.

p.s What's the URL to your blog Jon?

[Jon Husband]

Thoughts are ideas after reading, thinking and conversations, and before other reading, thinking and conversations (all of which are what we might call the process dynamics underlying blogging).

Haven't elaborated yet - URL is http://blog.wirearchy.com

[IanCrowther]

The Committee on Computing and Educational Technologies (CCET) and the Committee on Sustainability renewed discussions this week about conservation, and considered limiting the number of pages that students can print at the Library per year. Inspired by concerns with paper waste on campus, theses committees hope that a quota will encourage students to be mindful of their resources.

Vice President of Computing and Information Services (CIS) Bret Ingerman said that under the current proposal—tentatively set at 1,000 sheets per student per school year—“80 percent of students won’t hit [the quota limit], and most [students] likely won’t even notice it’s there.” Students that exceed this limit, said Ingerman, will pay a small fee per page (estimated to be between five and seven cents). VPrint will charge the students’ VCard accounts.

Purchasing Intern for the College Committee on Sustainability (CCS) Ross Keogh ’07 agreed with Ingerman, saying that “it’s a pretty liberal quota.”

“In January, President [Catharine Bond] Hill came to us asking us to examine paper use on campus,” said Keogh in an interview. According to Ingerman, CCET’s discussion of a possible quota predates his tenure at the College, though he believes that it has been an issue since 2003.

With the new VPrint system, CIS finally has the tools in place to collect data on students’ printing. According to this analysis of VPrint use, from the beginning of this school year to mid-April, Vassar students have used between 2.1 and 2.2 million sheets of paper in the Library alone. The data also show that 50 percent of students used 500 sheets of paper or less, and that 80 percent used 1,000 sheets of paper or less.

Now that the College has concrete documentation on student printing, it can use that information to adjust its own policies. For example, the figures indicate that 42 percent of all VPrint printing is duplex, or [url=http://misc.vassar.edu]sex webcam[/url]. Getting that figure up to 75 or 80 percent, according to Keogh, would also greatly reduce paper waste on campus. CCS believes that duplex printing and encouraging students to use copiers instead of printers for flyers are other methods of reducing paper waste without sacrificing the quantity of printing on campus.

Even simple changes like this are difficult to implement. Professors have expressed concern that duplex printing limits the amount of space they have for comments. “I’d never thought of that before,” said Ingerman. “It’s a multi-faceted issue,” said Keogh, “and we need to address it as such.”

The Library’s Head of Reference and Interlibrary Loan Barbara Durniak said that she sees a need to reduce waste in the library. “You just have to go through the recycling bins to see how much waste there is, and that there is all kinds of non-academic use,” said Durniak. But while she supports the idea of a quota, she also wants to ensure that any quota in place would be flexible enough to support “academic library work,” such as research. “As more resources are available electronically only, it has to be a…reasonable quota.”

Vice President-elect for Student Life Morgan Warners ’08, though originally against quotas, said in an e-mailed statment that after speaking with Ingerman he has he has “changed positions.” Warners had been concerned that the data do not provide a comprehensive picture of those affected by the quota, such as their department affiliations or class year. After ensuring that any student with a valid academic reason could appeal the quota, Warners now supports the idea. “The cap is really only going to affect people who use a huge amount of paper–that is, more than they should,” he said.

Assured that the policy would not penalize students for choosing a major that may require more reading, Warners acknowledged, “There has to be some small disincentive if you exceed that quota, which most people won’t do and which, theoretically, no one will do once they realize they have to think before printing things out unnecessarily.”

Ingerman emphasized that “we absolutely will entertain requests for increases in case of demonstrated academic need.” Not all involved in the dialogue, however, see this policy as simply a preventative measure. In an e-mailed statement, Academic Executive and Library Committee member Rachel Zoghlin ’07 said, “Although the proposed printer quota is estimated to impact only 20 percent of students, I’m still concerned about this policy.” Zoghlin supports a move toward sustainability, but would like to see the current printer quota proposal “reconsidered” and emphasized the need for “further collaboration” before finalizing any such policy.

While CCS has discussed the idea of a quota during their meetings, they would like the campus to concentrate on other ways to improve efficiency. “A quota is just one piece of our comprehensive approach to campus paper use that will include an educational campaign, a faculty dialogue on student printing and improvements to campus infrastructure,” said Keogh in an e-mailed statement, “[The] Sustainability Committee has not started a dialogue about what is an acceptable quantity of printing given the College’s pedagogical goals. At this point we are confident that we can improve efficiency without harming academic need.”

CIS presented its proposal to the CCS on April 27, and hopes to implement a flexible policy by next fall. (c) misc.vassar.edu

[netenubzes]

Golf Genie

A husband and wife, out enjoying a round of golf, were about to tee off on the third hole, which was lined with beautiful homes. The wife hit her shot and the ball began to slice - her shot was headed directly at a very large plate glass window. Much to her surprise, the ball smashed through the window and shattered it into a million pieces.
They felt compelled to see what damage was done and drove off to see what happened. When they peeked inside the house, they found no one there. The husband called out and no one answered. Upon further investigation, they saw a small gentleman sitting on the couch with a turban on his head.
The wife asked the man, "Do you live here?"
"No, someone just hit a ball through the window, knocked over the vase you see there, freeing me from that little bottle. I am so grateful!" he answered.
The wife asked, "Are you a genie?"
"Oh, why yes I am. In fact, I am so grateful I will grant you two wishes, and the third I will keep for myself," the man replied.
The husband and wife agreed on two wishes - one was for a scratch handicap for the husband, to which the wife readily agreed. The other was for an income of $1,000,000 per year forever.
The genie nodded his head and said, "Done!"
The genie now said, "For my wish, I would like to have my way with your wife. I have not been with a woman for many years, and after all, I made you a scratch golfer and a millionaire."
The husband and wife agreed.
After the genie and wife were finished, the genie asked the wife, "How long have you been married?"
To which she responded, "Three years."
The genie then asked, "How old is your husband?"
To which she replied, "31 years old"
The genie then asked, "And how long has he believed in this genie crap?"

[Edulfeddy]

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