Web Sites

I recently commented that perhaps heat stroke was affecting a major tech blogger. Bing, bang, click! I don't monitor his feed anymore; no big deal. Sometimes it just makes sense to move on.

I probably monitor as many feeds as Scoble but so what? He could read more too but he has probably stopped reading more feeds than I ever have. I think it's likely that Robert has a low tolerance for feeds or podcasts that don't remain interesting when they originate from strangers or acquaintances. With friends, Robert Scoble is truly more accomodating and forgiving; it's a real measure of the man and I only got a glimpse of that when we spent some time together last February.

In the past few days, my belief system has been tested by another blogging and podcasting original, someone I've come to know fairly well. In a manner that took me by surprise because of its sudden graduality; I found myself stung by a calm and graceless piece on his moderately popular podcast. I was struck by how affected I was at the commentary I was hearing as I drove down the road. I felt chastened by the sense that I had even bothered to download the podcast.

And now I don't because I've stopped downloading from his feed and I've stopped listening. In the back of my mind I knew this was coming and I knew that he was losing an affinity for his listeners.

What I am discovering about my tolerance for opinion is that it should never be disguised by a belief that it is fully substantiated by fact. Opinion should be a sampling of the known and the surmised at a point in time. That makes opinion fungible and it allows regular folks to be able to grow, change and develop. Denying oneself of growth by not utilizing reason and education seems kind of lazy to me. Sure; you will never know everything, but that's hardly an excuse to not try to know more. The thing that really turns listeners on to podcasts is the opportunity to know more -- that's a real winner for audio. Visual media can do that too but the effort requires far more work because great visuals require great poetry and vice versa. That's a rare combination as we know from watching decades worth of TV and films.

Very few things are immutable -- maybe someday I'll even listen to that guy's podcast again -- but it's rarer than a lightning strike that you will get a chance to have a listener come back once they have stopped listening. It's okay to lose listeners by being uninteresting; people change. It's another thing altogether to lead them down a road of contempt and disrespect. If you didn't start podcasting, in part, for the listeners then please get out of the business. If you don't feel a growing respect for your listenership with every piece you produce then consider stamp collecting rather than podcasting. If you really want to know what a tree sounds like when it falls in the forest then don't be around... Your podcast is a crazy rant in the shower if you have no listeners and good listeners are not interested in crazy rants.

CBC Radio 1 "Sunday Edition" had Andrew Keen on on the show recently. Keen is author of the book The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture .

Having listened to Keen and not having read the book -- which will go on my summer reading list -- I was intrigued by his hypothesis that the internet "amateur" is swamping "credible" content. Keen's polemic speaks to the supposed legitimacy of commercial or government sponsored media outlets because they utilize professionals. In attempting to draw a distinction between low brow content and presumbly what he considers good stuff he spoke of Youtube. While Youtube is rife with low quality videos it is also a source for a potentially good material. Television is no different. There are no quality filters in the world of television, just a limit on the total volume delivered due to bandwidth and schedule restraints.

Why should the internet be treated with contempt when all that it does is extend bandwidth, deliver more content and free the creator and consumer from schedule restraints? And don't forget that possibility of opening markets and minds in far away places. Nice bonus.

Keen's biggest gripe may come down to the fact that it gets harder to figure out who is credible when there are so many more voices adding to the din. It gets really hard when there are more than 57 channels to listen to, watch or read. Keen may be on to something in discerning that "professional" writers do have a tendency to know what they should write about and where they should contribute that "what". Some bloggers, web journalists and podcasters figure they should write about, speak about or investigate anything. Some bloggers take the stance that we cannot tell them "what I can and cannot write about in my personal blog". That stance is wrong and perhaps fundamentally untrustworthy. In some respects it gives credence to the narrowness of Keen's vision of a few good writers.

While this web site is mine, I cannot write about anything here. I cannot violate personal or professional confidences, agreements, or understandings. I cannot break laws. I cannot deliberately seek to injure or cause hurt. Here's something else; you have a part to play. Your interests and expectations have narrowed and, sometimes, broadened the scope of what I contribute. Over time, the content here defines general and specific themes that are only hinted at by the tags in the left hand margin. That thematic rendering of the content's own impact -- it's "medium is the message" imprint defines a kind of branding that, were I to tamper with it, would betray my readership.

So what if one wants to write about UFO's or conspiracy theories instead of tech business or computer media? What then? I think one way to do that would be in a new forum, a new blog, a new site or some other themed area. Let that person develop a new reputation as an alien abduction expert with a new set of readers in a place called "start again". 

It was not enough that Todd Cochrane decided to try 15 minutes on Facebook. No... I had to do it too. Man, you would think that his experience would be enough. No... I had to do it too.

And now?

Facebook has my account (with my fake birthday -- I'm not telling you my birthday -- why do you need my birthday?) on "deactivation". You see; you cannot delete your account at Facebook. They will keep it and you "can come back anytime". There's nobody there from my town, my schools, my "era", my nuclear silo, my group, my work, my after-life or my make-believe Crimean War regiment.

What else did I discover? My own embarrassment at realizing that Facebook is a quasi-dating site. Count down from last year to a suitable year of high school graduation in, say, 1980. The numbers of Facebookers ('bookies?, 'booksters?, 'bookmeisters?) will fall at a rate of about 1/y from the previous year after about 3 or 4 years (where y is the number of years from this year). Take a look at the photos. Lots of young single people. This is social networking the way Tony Manero could only dream of social networking.

The interface is ordinary, the "tools" are non-existent, the look is pedestrian, the terms of use are decidedly tipped against the user and it doesn't do much. I am -- once again -- compelled to contemplate why I am so inexplicably unable to accept that pet rocks are incredible money makers. To the owners and operators of Facebook; this is brilliant. Why do Web 2.0 when the world only wants Web 1.163? Congratulations, and I will not be back. You are free to fully delete my "deactivated" account.

Facebook

Identity, differentiation and expression are important to me. I usually have loads of time for people who share those ideals, even if they have widely divergent views on a variety of other issues. The older I get, the more I write, the more I interact with people from all over the Net, the more I realize how interesting it is to communicate with people who are different from me.

The more differences I experience, the less interested I get in negativity.

So I think it's important to note that I'm not the Brad Gibson who has written for Apple Mac magazines and sites like macobserver.com. That Brad Gibson also has his own blog and occasionally he writes some things that bother me. That's okay, he's an American in England and I'm the Canadian. Trouble is, he seems to also be a podcaster too. Okay, I hope he's not quite as acerbic in his podcasts as he is in his blog... I don't know because I have never listened.

Recently, that other Brad Gibson wrote about Rosie O'Donell in a demeaning and abusive way. There was a time in my life when I was not a big fan of Rosie but her regular chairing of "Hot Topics" on The View this past season has been riveting, humourous, controverial and thought provoking. We record the show daily and spend 10-20 minutes most week nights digging into the topics. Rosie has had an incredible year on the show.

And if she had not had such a great year? Nobody -- rich, poor, famous, invisible, alive or dead -- nobody should be the target of the kind of vitriol launched by that guy named Brad. The same kind of stuff, no less, that got Don Imus fired. So as a Brad Gibson, out here in Calgary, let me say again, "That Brad Gibson is not me..."

While the headline is a tad Doc Searl-ish in its faux mystique, I'm at the point with my web site changes and infrastructure updates to coin a "new" term: disinfrastructure.

I embrace change for the simple reason that one day I'm going to be dead and I don't want to be taken by surprise. I have to say however -- even as a techie, nerdy, geeky, professional engineer -- that the last month working on my various site, server and content upgrades has been trying to say the least. Apparently, and thankfully, I am still married.

I have managed to consolidate almost all of my domains and have a spiffy new server set-up with a new host. (If all goes well I will give you a referral.) I have tons of bandwidth, a pretty good amount of storage and have the capacity to host dozens of domains. For my friends that are having a hard time with hosting, content management and updating; shoot me a note and tell me your story. I'm also thinking of providing pay-it-forward, free hosting for people I really like that just want to write. The downside of web publishing is the backroom horse-pucky of "content management" -- some people just want to get the words out.

Content in this post is written by Brad Gibson and you should be reading it from www.bradfordgibson.net.

The moral of my experience with my myriad of behind the scenes changes is that continuous change is better than batch change. I had built my media "empire" into a series of discontinuous information islands each with a separate set of management headaches. I had to take the leap to a completely new and well thought out structure so that things would not completely breakdown in the future. But step change or batch change is the hardest change of all. That's why short term dieting or manic exercise campaigns only produce short term results; they are not long term, continuous processes of productive change. The batch change is not a behaviour modifying experience; it's a trial. You get bored, you don't see results, you revert to previous behaviours and then... No change at all.

I was losing interest in my complicated path back to simpler, cheaper, more logical web content management and hosting. I got disinfrastructured. I think I made it through however and from now on you will be seeing continuous, planned change at this site and at my others -- especially currentthinkingradio.com.

Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User has posted his latest podcast and yours truly has about 4 minutes in the show. Towards the end of the show I talk about Synergy, which is a great open source software tool for replacing a KVM switch. Synergy also allows cutting and pasting between different operating systems. I use it all the time between my tablet and my MacBook.

Thanks Victor for the podcast and thanks for helping me with the switch.

Boris and the cooking crew got us going with the grub and Lee LeFever charmed with a NASCAR intro to his world wide odyssey. This could only be Northern Voice.

Hey, if you want a micro-view of the kind of stuff that goes on here then picture Keith Bao and I raving and lamenting about the wonders of drupal. Keith loves the platform for the obvious community functions and that's really important for his over 700 player Vancouver Dodgeball League. Man, if the web had existed when I was a twelve year old dodgeball savant who knows how far I could have gone.

MooseCamp tomorrow and then the "real" conference stuff on Saturday, stay tuned.

NorthernVoice NorthernVoice2007 NV2007

It was essentially about "Your Online Identity" but an alternate sub-theme of this year's Lexi.net Conference in Calgary would have to be about the power of women online. There was great online talent here from the likes of Kristin Darguzas, Janine Warner, Regina Lynn and the dooce herself, Heather Armstrong.

This was my first of the biennial Lexi.net Conferences and if they get within 50% of what Sharlene was able to do this year, I'll be back in 2008. Having spent a bit o'time at the likes of Northern Voice 2005 and the Portable Media and Podcast Expo 2006, what was especially nice about this Confab -- as they say in the land of memories -- is that I got to meet Calgary bloggers like D'Arcy Norman.

For my money, the killer tech mind in the room was Aaron Seigo . I missed Aaron's presentation because it coincided with equally killer content from JC but we spent a few minutes at lunch talking about "Why Software Stinks". Expect a lengthy podcast exposition from Aaron on the Bradcast in 2007. This guy makes KDE desktop software and if I don't post for a few days it'll be because I'm playing with Kubuntu, which is the KDE desktop based distro of Ubuntu Linux.

John Armstrong (the other half of power couple 1, he being Mr. dooce) was outstanding with his non-bullet point intro to design and identity. John's thing was more extemporaneous than I think even he realized -- I was mulling the subtleties of his links between appearance and message for most of the weekend. There is clearly an art in impression but it can be fulfilled in a variety of ways as he demonstrated with his impactful collection of logos.

The women were definitely inspiring. Kristin is one of the first "big-time" blogher.com members that I have met and she has agreed to a future chat so that we can talk about that. Her success seems to come from a perfect balance between the nonchalance of her frank writing and the nervous insecurity of her own questioning. She knows there's a big audience out there but when she sees them there is a touch of writer's anxiety in her delivery. That trait is also a characteristic of Heather Armstrong. Heather's journey is a perfect accident of need and deliberation. It's risk/reward in a new environment and it is something I saw too in each of Janine and Regina; although their topic spaces are worlds apart. The dooce was not someone I had read much. Her story is well known and she put a face on it that spoke to the inevitability of its outcomes. While she is all moving hands and fine boned fragility to see her, the dooce is also a woman of power and charisma.

A last thought; as one half of a great couple, it was motivating to watch working couples like Janine & David and Heather & John in action. Now all we have to do is get Janine & David blogging...
Update: Okay, I found David's blog. Where's Janine?

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