I might Go Quiet for a week or two following this post. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by blog reading and writing and maintenance. Time to set my focus back on family, work, contemplative writing (read: not seat-of-the-pants writing as blogging can get for me when Info Overload hits). Besides, I need to get stuck into my potential Digital Web article this coming week.
This is a late-Saturday night post and I'm feeling tired and run-down as I write this. So forgive me if it sounds jumbled. But actually it'd be in keeping with the theme of this post: Remixing. I've been following with interest the controversy about The Grey Album, which is a mix of 'The Black Album' by rapper Jay-Z and the classic 'The White Album' by The Beatles. The mix was done by DJ Danger Mouse and the controversy is that he did it without the permission of the copyright holders of the White Album, EMI.
The Grey Album is doing the rounds of the Web as a free download. I gave it a listen and thought it was a pretty good album in parts, but really it's much more interesting as a concept. It was a brilliant idea to mix two such diverse albums, one made by a black rapper in the 21st century (I presume) and the other made 30-odd years ago by a bunch of english pasties. And it's a marketing coup to call it The Grey Album, as a pun on the Black/White mix. Pop music has an interesting history of remixes. One of the best examples is the Run-DMC/Aerosmith song 'Walk this Way', which blended rap and rock and resurrected two careers at the same time.
I wonder if we could apply Remixing more to the weblog world. For example, I'd subscribe to a remixed Winer-Pilgrim weblog (RSS-Atom), perhaps DJ'ed by someone who crosses both worlds - e.g. Joi Ito. Or maybe a Scoble-Scrivens remix (developer world vs designer world), with Anil Dash pushing the buttons.
But seriously, what I'm leading up to is a plug for Greg Gershman's new Blogdigger Groups. It's a service that lets you create a new group RSS feed out of a selection of individual feeds. For example take a look at this feed - it combines a bunch of weblogs about comics into one single RSS feed to subscribe to. I haven't yet worked out the best way to use Blogdigger Groups, but there are a couple of paths I see it taking.
One is to utilise Dave Winer's idea about categorising. If you have an RSS feed for a certain category - say posts about John Kerry - and other people have RSS feeds about John Kerry, then a Blogdigger Group could be created which combines all those John Kerry feeds into a single RSS feed. You could also add search feeds - eg Bloglines has a feature that allows users to subscribe to search queries. So you could do a Bloglines search for "John Kerry" and add that to your Bloglines group.
Another idea is one that Lilia Efimova wrote about a few weeks ago - combining feeds of your collegues or a real-world group you belong to. Lilia's examples:
"15 latest posts from KnowledgeBoard bloggers" or "10 latest posts by my colleagues"...
In summary, Blogdigger Groups enables a kind of Remix Culture in the blogging world. We can mix and match RSS feeds as we (the "consumers") see fit. Perhaps future generations of tools like Blogdigger Groups will allow us to mix and match microcontent, much like a DJ scratching a rap song on top of a Beatles melody. So we not only mix feeds, we remix individual posts. My mythical Winer-Pilgrim remix may not be that silly an idea in a few years.
About a month ago Rogers Cadenhead called me an "information-remix junkie", which I quite liked. We are a generation of Web and blog addicts and information is indeed our 'fix'. As the great Velvet Underground song goes, I'm waiting for The Man!
I've now swapped my comments system from Radio Userland's comments server to the Python Community Server, developed and hosted by Phil Pearson. The reason I did this was because I've experienced frequent problems with Radio Userland's comments server, causing slow downloads of my webpages and sometimes no service. This is probably caused by the large number of people Radio Userland host on their servers. The PyCS comments system is also a step up in functionality - it features things like RSS feeds for comments, ability to delete comments, and other admin options. It also looks better!
But I should warn you: the set-up process wasn't as straight-forward for Radio Userland users as the instructions led me to believe. Below I've documented the process I went through. Other Radio users who want to swap to PyCS may want to follow this process, but be aware that it's not necessarily the correct or recommended one - it's just what worked for me.
1. Fill out the online form for a PyCS Comment hosting account.
2. Next, politely ask Phil to import all your old comments from Radio Userland's server to the PyCS one. Phil's automated this now, nevertheless it still takes up some of his time so ask nicely. I recommend the phrase "Pretty please with cherries on top" (not sure if it's an exclusively kiwi phrase, but I was taught to say this as a child!).
3. Now open up your Radio Userland client and browse to Preferences > Comments. In the "Specify a server" section, swap the Radio Userland URL with this one:
http://www.pycs.net/system/comments.py
4. Here's where I had problems with the instructions. It's not quite as simple as just adding in some code to the Homepage and Item templates. I ended up having to modify some things in the Radio root file. So if you're brave enough, click File > Open > Radio.root. Open each of the following 3 files and make the change below:
system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.getCommentLink
system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.render
system.verbs.builtins.radio.macros.CommentOnThisPage
For each of the above 3 files, look for the Comments URL's. For each of those swap "user.radio.prefs.usernum" with your PyCS user id - e.g. mine is "000280". NB: be careful not to change the Trackback URL's, as you'll still need Radio Userland's server for that (Phil is working on adding this to PyCS in the future).
5. Still in Radio.root, open this file:
system.verbs.builtins.radio.data.cloudUrls
...and swap the "CommentsPageUrl" value to this: http://www.pycs.net/system/comments.py
OK, this is how I got my Radio Userland weblog to swap to PyCS comments. Once again, I don't claim this is the easiest or even a 100% correct method. It probably needs a real Radio Userland expert like Rogers Cadenhead to cast his eyes over it.
But for now I'm really happy with the result and I hope my readers enjoy the better Comments service, provided by Phil with his 'kiwi ingenuity'. Thanks Phil!
Update: OK, Phil has discovered the Easy Way (or is it the Wasy Way?) and it doesn't involve rooting around in the Radio Userland root file. So ignore my instructions above; make life easier for yourself by following Phil's instructions instead.
Just testing my swapover to PYCS comments server. Please ignore (unless you're Phil Pearson helping me get it set up!).
I've begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I'm aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these tools. For example, one concern is of the unstructured nature of Wikis when compared to the highly-structured nature of Content Management Systems. Wikis and Weblogs are often seen by people as being replacements for Content Management and Document Management Systems. And in a sense it is a choice between two types of Knowledge Management: Bottom-Up (wikis/weblogs) vs Top-Down (CMS's, Doc Mgmt). But right now I see wikis/weblogs as being complimentary to CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems - not replacements. There is still a need for structured information in a corporate setting and probably there always will be, but what wikis and weblogs potentially bring to the table is collaboration and a publish-subscribe culture.
Having said that, there's no doubt that wikis/weblogs would be much stronger technologies if we could discover how to add layers of structure to the information that we produce using these tools. But that's when the Semantic Web looms into view like a giant blimp and techies start throwing 3-letter acronyms at each other like paper airplanes. Long story short: when the day arrives that we able to structure Web information from the bottom-up in a practical and user-friendly manner, that's when wikis and weblogs may begin to replace CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems.
All this doesn't stop us from implementing wikis and weblogs now as tools to foster collaboration and easy information publishing. That's basically what I'm aiming to achieve at my company. Today I had a look at Twiki and I came across this excellent presentation by Twiki creator Peter Thoeny, which he made to LinuxWorld on 21 Jan 2004. There's a lot of great advice in this presentation, but the things I want to highlight are his views on Knowledge Management. He makes the point that Knowledge Management is typically viewed as "control over content" and this is what conventional CMS's aim to achieve. He argues that knowledge cannot be managed, it can only be enabled. This is a point that resonates with me, because I think that "knowledge" is subjective and therefore cannot be 'captured' as an objective entity. Information can be captured though - and that's where wikis and weblogs come in. They enable anyone and everyone to capture (write down) information. Knowledge needs context - the reader's.
This is all fine and dandy in theory, but the practical reality is I have to convince my company that wikis and/or weblogs are a viable KM solution. A lot of people still subscribe to the "top-down" approach of KM. With regard to Intranets, the top-down approach says that Intranet content needs to be controlled. That there needs to be a gatekeeper or webmaster who decides what is appropriate for publishing and what is not. Of course, I don't agree with this approach - this weblog isn't called Read/Write Web for nothing! To my way of thinking everyone has the right and ability to not just consume information, but produce it too. And this is the fundamental benefit that wikis and weblogs provide. The question is: are corporates ready for the read/write culture, or is the need to control information going to remain for a while yet? I'm asking this question in the context of a corporate Intranet, but it's the exact same question being asked of journalism, politics, marketing weblogs, book publishing, music, etc etc.
All in all, my colleagues were open to using wikis and weblogs - as long as they're targeted at the right problem and to the right audience. That is, ordinary people must be motivated to use the tools ("passionate" is a word that was used) and it must be a suitable context. For example, a Wiki could be used to enable communication between teams, as an alternative to team members using email to send and store work-related information. My colleagues are enthusiastic (albeit slightly skeptical) about me testing out these technologies and seeing what evolves. I'll let you know how it goes!
Dina Mehta wrote today about implementing Weblog, Wiki, IM, and other collaboration technologies into an Intranet environment, to replace an "archaic" Knowledge Management system and improve inter-office communication. I'm embarking on similar activities with the company I work for, so I'm eagar to read about others experiences. In my work, I've made a couple of proposals to IT mgmt about using weblog and wiki technologies. They seem interested, so I'm now going to set up some test runs using open source technology. I've got my eye on Twiki as an Intranet-focused wiki and Movable Type as an extensible weblog system. I'll be writing about my experiments with these two products in the future, because I'm as curious as everybody else how "normal people" will react to this technology in a corporate setting. Especially as I not only have to convince business people, but IT people too.
Dina also adds, about KM in general:
I'm not sure this fits into traditional definitions of Knowledge Management (i really dislike the term) - i wish someone would coin a really neat term for it.
I feel the same about the phrase "Knowledge Management". To me, KM is full of fluffy words and phrases that have little practical value in the real world. It's too easy for so-called "Knowledge Management Consultants" to swan into organisations and pontificate about leveraging 'this' and setting up processes for 'that'. It's all so top-down, all talk and no action. The thing I like about wikis and weblogs is that it's bottom-up, there are no rules or processes or KM systems trying to pen workers in like sheep. KM is like a sheepdog and KM Consultants are the Shepherds. Except the 'sheep' are actually people, not sheep, so they resist herding.
With wikis and weblogs, people can just click a button and type (notice I said 'can' - it remains to be seen whether they actually do). People can produce information, subscribe to information they value, edit each others information. It's like a flow of information and Knowledge gets created in the mix and mingle of it all.
Information Flow is the term I suggested to Dina to replace Knowledge Management. It's not an original term, I've heard people like Dave Winer use it. Information Flow is what wikis and weblogs enable. To "manage" knowledge suggests a top-down approach where we get to tell Knowledge what to do. Well guess what, knowledge can't be ordered around. Information routes itself around of its own free will. What's more, Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder - i.e. it's a Subjective thing, not Objective. Am I mixing my metaphors? Sorry, it is late on a Friday...
Hey, maybe I can style myself as an "Information Flow Consultant" :-) I'll get the business card made up on Monday morning!
The RSS Aggregator Bloglines is starting to build a lot of whuffie on the Web and it's justly deserved. I signed up to Bloglines at the beginning of August 2003 and at the time I raved about the benefits of having a browser-based RSS Aggregator - as opposed to the so-called "smart clients" (non-browser based apps) that Robert Scoble and others were touting. The main benefits of a web-based application like Bloglines is that you can synch your subscriptions between different computers and you don't have to install anything on your computer(s). And since last August, Mark Fletcher has been doing an amazing job adding lots of cool functionality to Bloglines.
One such feature I discovered yesterday while browsing Sam Ruby's weblog, in which Mark Pilgrim says in a comment:
"Bloglines puts the number of subscribers in the User-Agent when it fetches your feed, so you can see exactly how well it's scaling. 839 Bloglines users subscribe to my Atom feed, but of course it only fetches it once."
Well apart from being bowled over by the number of Bloglines subscribers Mark Pilgrim has (839!!), I also immediately saw simularities with Dave Winer's "Share your OPML" service at feeds.scripting.com. Now I'm not interested in the Top 100 on feeds.scripting, I'm only interested in viewing my subscriber list and checking to see who my subscribers have on their subscription lists, so I can discover new feeds. I have 18 subscribers at the feeds.scripting site. Not exactly A-List material, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
So anyway, back to Sam's weblog and Mark's comment...I got to wondering how many Bloglines subscribers I have and how it would compare to feeds.scripting. I downloaded my latest log file from my web server, opened it up and did a "find" for the word "bloglines". Here's what I saw:
"Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 32 subscribers)"
Cool! So 32 Bloglines users subscribe to my Read/Write Web RSS feed. While it's a puny figure compared to Mark Pilgrim's 839, it is still more than I thought it would be. I'm very much a Niche Blogger (a nicer term for "C-Lister"), so I'm grateful for having any readers at all.
The difference between the count of my subscribers at feeds.scripting (18) and Bloglines (32) led me to the conclusion that Mark Fletcher could be sitting on another killer app. Because Bloglines is now so popular among bloggers (and Sam's post just confirmed this upward trend), Bloglines could provide some very compelling weblog statistics to its users.
Think about it - while it's easy to track our Referers and people who link to us, using Technorati, Feedster, Blogdigger and others, the one thing people want but don't have is an easy way to track how many people subscribe to their RSS feeds. Dave Winer was the first person to provide such a service and it was another great user-friendly innovation from Dave. But it does have one flaw - it requires people to manually upload their OPML subscription files. So only those people who have done this get counted.
Bloglines however already has subscriptions data, because it's a centralized service and all subscriptions are stored on the Bloglines server. Therefore Bloglines is able to count the number of its users who subscribe to Read/Write Web and present this data back to me.
Bloglines does currently have an option to view a list of "subscribers with public profiles" for any feed. Those who keep their subs private (the default) are not displayed. I'd like to have this service extended slightly, to tell us the number of both private and public subscribers. This protects the anonymity of the private subscribers, but gives us the figures we're all interested in.
I'd actually like Bloglines to go further and set up a similar service to feeds.scripting, with a separate web frontend and opened up to non-Bloglines users - so they can see how many Bloglines subscribers they have. I realise they can already do this by looking at their logs, but really who bothers looking at logs apart from geeks (...oh yeh, heh, guilty as charged!). So why not slap a nice user-friendly web frontend on it?
Also I'd wager that if Bloglines had a similar service to feeds.scripting, more Bloglines users would make their subs public. I certainly would. Because it opens up possibilities for people to share their subs, find out what else their subscribers have on their lists, group their subs, etc. In other words, all the same things feeds.scripting is doing so well. And why not have an API while you're at it, so other developers can create their own cool little apps - e.g. like Andrew Grumet has been doing with feeds.scripting.
I've sent Mark Fletcher a couple of emails with some ideas along these lines. I'm not sure of the technical challenges, or whether he feels it's a path Bloglines should go down. But it seems like a logical move to provide RSS subscriber stats if you can, especially since these stats are so difficult to obtain any other way. Bloglines already seems to have more data than feeds.scripting, as evidenced by my 32 Bloglines subscribers compared to 18 feeds.scripting ones. It's a measure of Bloglines' popularity, but also it's because feeds.scripting is at a disadvantage because it relies on users manually uploading subscriptions data. Bloglines already has subscriptions data, so it would be cool if it was made 'automatic for the people'.
One of my goals this year is to get my writing published professionally. I called it "Paper-publishing" when I wrote down the goal at the beginning of 2004, but I include online publications in this definition as well. I've taken my first steps to publish a non-fiction article, by submitting a proposal to Digital Web Magazine. I received an email today from the editor, telling me they're interested. So I intend to work on that over the next few weeks. The topic will probably be of interest to my weblog readers - it will be an analysis of web design trends in corporate websites over the last 10 years. I have some interesting theories on this which I think you'll enjoy.
In regards to fiction, I found out today that it would be relatively inexpensive to self-publish my Nanowrimo 2003 novel - Dirtside to Spaceside. Erik Benson is thinking about publishing his second Nanowrimo novel, called 'Disaster'. He said it only cost him US$450 to self-publish his first novel, which is a much lower price than I thought it would be. I purchased Erik's novel Man vs Himself from Amazon at Christmas and I really enjoyed reading it. The physical book itself is excellent quality - hardy paper, professional layout, arty cover, crisp and clear font.
It would be nice to see my own name on the cover of a Real Live Book. However I'm not sure the world is ready for a book about telepathic aliens and humans trapped in a virtual world of avatars. I mean, I had trouble explaining to my brother what my novel was about! Is it a fear of my novel being thought of as silly or frivolous? Well I think the themes I explored were very interesting and 'serious', but on the surface the subject matter does seem rather silly. And remember a lot of people still judge a book by its cover. So ironically, for all my talk about the value of Subjectivity, I do need reassurance from other people before I'm willing to take the plunge and publish my novel.
Also on the fiction front, I've started a short story called Sylvian and the System. It's set in the near future and the main character is a young woman called Sylvian. She is a star in an avatar-based next-generation blogosphere. The main theme is Subjectivity vs System, but I've also been trying to squeeze in a Greta Garbo complex and some David Sylvian allusions (I thought of the name "Sylvian" before I remembered there is a musician with the same name). I'll be focusing on my Digital Web article over the next couple of weeks, but I'll keep thinking about this short story too.
Over the past week I've been devouring a bunch of Etech 2004 session notes, including one I read today from Cory Doctorow on the subject of e-books. Cory wrote the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and released it as a free download on his website in early 2003, under a Creative Commons licence. His book won much acclaim from the blogosphere, particularly for coining the term whuffie - a way of describing reputation as a currency. I read it at the start of this year in its paper edition, ironically loaned from the library (I did pay $1 to reserve it). I've downloaded his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, and I intend to read that on my Palm PDA.
Which brings me to Cory's Etech presentation. It raised a number of important and I believe very innovative points about book-publishing. Firstly, Cory thinks that reading books is becoming much more interactive - dare I say, two-way. He writes:
...the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
In an earlier piece, Cory refered to modern readers as "slicers, dicers and copiers". Much as Napster and Kazaa harnessed the power of the Internet to enable free downloads and mixing of music, Cory is advocating a similar digital revolution in book-publishing. But with one difference - it won't be a technological innovation like Peer-to-Peer that is the main driver for this. It'll be innovation in copyright, in the form of Creative Commons. We already have the technology to easily publish our writing - weblogs and websites.
Next we come to the sticky topic of Gettin' Paid. The fact is, the majority of writers don't earn lots of money. Most of the public don't buy fiction. And even I, an English Literature major, tend to borrow books from the library as much as possible rather than shelling out money for them. But I'll come back to that point. First, here's what Cory has to say:
I take the view that the book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an "object."
Wow, that's a big call. Traditionally an artist (be it musician, painter, writer, etc) is viewed by society as a person who creates a piece of art - an object - and we, the clamouring public, pay to consume that art. My copy of the Oxford dictionary defines art as "production of something beautiful". Art is supposed to be a thing that is produced and then consumed by an audience. I think Cory is saying that a book should be an evolving thing, still produced by a single "artistic" figure - but the production doesn't stop there. The audience keeps on producing, based on the original production but adding their own bit to the mix.
I have to say, this is a big philosophical step to take. When I did the Nanowrimo novel-writing contest in November 2003, I followed Erik Benson's suggestion to publish it as I went. I did so using a Creative Commons licence, but one that did not allow other people to take my work and alter it:
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Cory's now taken the brave step of allowing people to make derivative works of his Magic Kindom novel. This is interesting - for example I could take one of the characters in Cory's novel and write a brand new novel of my own based on that character. So long as I attributed Cory and released my work under the same Creative Commons derivatives-allowing licence. Imagine if they had this back in Shakespeare's day - there could be a thousand versions of Hamlet sitting in libraries today.
Come to think of it, they already do it in films. How many movie versions of Hamlet are there? Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke (I didn't actually know about the Hawke one till tonight!) all played the Danish Prince. All of those actors brought different interpretations to the role. So why not do a different written interpretation of Hamlet, or Down and Out in the Magic Kindgom? Actually there are other interpretations of Hamlet around - e.g. the Klingon Hamlet(!). But that's because Shakespeare's works aren't subject to modern-day copyright. So in a sense Cory is challenging us to turn back the clock of copyright, to when people were free to interpret and build on existing works of art.
Back to the question of how a Writer gets paid when publishing ebooks. Cory says that there is more chance his books will be bought if people can discover them (and discover him) online first. I agree with him there. Even though I've only shelled out $1 so far towards Cory's books, I'm much more likely now to buy his books than I would be if he'd not published them as ebooks. For example, if I read and really enjoy a book I borrowed from the library - or downloaded from the Web - I may go out and buy a copy for my own personal library. And as Liam O'Donnell pointed out recently, it's all about "data access over (paper) ownership". Eventually ebooks will be the central form of publishing, because of the data-manipulation opportunities it confers to the reader. So while a writer may not necessarily get paid for ebooks today, they're investing in the future by publishing their writing as ebooks.
One final thing, I also agree with this summary from Cory about why he writes ebooks:
"The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that."
NB: egoboo = ego boost for seeing your name in print.
Amen to that brother!
I've noticed that a few of my favourite webloggers are being hit by comment spam. Bill Seitz's WikiLog has been hammered this week and Andrew Chen noticed this morning a new trick. A spammer had exactly mirrored a comment made by me a few days ago on Andrew's weblog, using my name but replacing my URL with its own nefarious link.
Webloggers that get hit by comment spam have one thing in common - they include their comments on the same page as their actual content. Movable Type blogs do this by default and most people who brewed their own weblog systems (like Bill and Andrew) do this too. And I have to say, it's the ideal way to present comments. I'd do it too, if it weren't for the comment spammers.
The way Radio Userland does it is to have a pop-up window just for comments. Because the comments window is highly unlikely to generate any Google juice (because it's separate from the actual weblog post), comment spammers haven't bothered to target Radio Userland with their filth. I've heard of one or two isolated cases, but that's all. So I have to say, I won't be moving any time soon to integrate comments with my weblog posts - even though scripts like this make it relatively easy.
And yes I know there are the Web equivalent of swatters and flysprays that can be used to attack comment spam - but I don't want to spend my precious time stamping out insects.
Besides, I'm kind of a puritan regarding my weblog posts. I like the idea of my writing being apart from the comments. Perhaps it's my pretentious artistic tendencies. Each weblog post deserves to stand alone on it's own merit (ok, that did sound pretentious!). What I mean is: I see each weblog post as an entity unto itself and the comments likewise.
Speaking of comments systems, I've also noticed that my website is slow to download sometimes due to Radio Userland's comments server. Specifically the comments-counting macro. This is discussed here over at Radio Userland. It's been happening too much to me lately and frankly annoying me as much as spammers do. So I decided to strip the commentCount macro out - at least for a little while to see how much difference it makes (nb: I think the Referrers counting macro also causes slow download). So for now you won't be able to see how many comments a post has on my site. This is a pain, but it'll have to do until I think of a long-term solution (or just cave in and put the macro back).
One solution I thought about was swapping my comments over to Phil Pearson's Python Community Server. I still may do this, as I've heard good things about it. Only I'm a bit nervous about the swapover process and potentially losing my old comments. Also the instructions weren't all that clear to me. Maybe someone out there can post a comment and steer me right ;-)
Today I came across a very interesting article in the New Zealand Herald newspaper entitled "US power and influence warrent careful scrutiny" by columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn. She starts off by explaining why she writes about America so much (and gets flack from her readers because of her perceived anti-American stance):
"So why do it? The answer is simple: America matters. Politically, economically and culturally, the United States is the paramount world influence.
Every day we, out here in the colonies, are affected by America. From the television we watch, to the runaway films our creative community must make to stay alive, to the rules that influence our food, medical and education systems and standards, to the shoes we choose to wear and the coffee many of us drink."
I often wonder how much the so-called "blogosphere" is a product of American culture. This is a question, not a statement. When I look at my blogroll, I see a good variety of countries represented: Italy, England, New Zealand, Sweden, India, Canada. The rest are American. But my point is actually not about where people are located, it's about how people on the blogosphere communicate and what we write about - which seems to me to be very Americanized.
I include myself in this. I write mostly about Web technology and subjects like Individuality and blogging - very US-centric topics. I use mostly American-produced software to write, read, converse and rank in the blogosphere. My RSS Aggregator is overflowing with bloggers writing about Howard Dean, Orkut, IT outsourcing, Janet Jackson, etc - stories that mostly originate and propagate in America. It's not just the blogosphere of course, it's tv and movies and the rest of modern western culture. But I've not seen anyone else in the blogosphere raise this as a concern. Is it a concern?
That's not to say that little countries on the bottom of the world don't have any influence on American culture. Look at this year's Academy Awards. The New Zealand-made film The Lord of the Rings is widely tipped to rake in the Oscars this year. Wellington lad Peter Jackson will probably take out Best Director. Another kiwi is up for Best Actress - young Keisha Castle-Hughes. Us kiwis are rightly very proud of New Zealand's success in the highly Americanized movie industry. But shhh, actually Lord of the Rings is a very American movie. It's a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. An incredibly well-made one, to be sure. But we cannot escape the fact that it never would've got made if it weren't for US money and the Hollywood studio bigwigs who gave it the green light. And those decisions were made based on whether the studio bosses thought American audiences would pay to see it.
Having said that, Whale Rider is a beautiful New Zealand movie (starring Keisha Castle-Hughes) that has little American influence. It's uniquely kiwi. So I'm not saying that American culture blocks out the chance for other cultures to be heard or seen. But US culture does tend to dominate creative output - be it movies, tv programs, weblog posts.
I'll leave you with a final bit from the Herald article:
These columns are not anti-American; they are an attempt to create dialogue, to raise consciousness of the consequences of the globalising, systemising and McDonald-ising of our culture and how US domestic and foreign policy affects us all.
Unsurprisingly, most of the disgruntled letter writers are either Americans living here or with business connections in this country, or New Zealanders with business in the US. Take from that what you will, but to them and others who disagree with the contents of these columns, I have one comment - question authority; everything on television or the radio that purports to be fact and everything you read (including this column).
Well I guess that's what the blogosphere is good at - creating dialogue and questioning authority. But I ask you: is the blogosphere a self-perpetuating system, in love with the sound of its own voice? Are we all trying to grab our own piece of the American Dream? Is the Blogosphere a virtual avatar of America herself?
