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". 

Suppose I told you the headline of this article was my own. Would you believe me? Could it be possible that I invented the calculus of my headline at roughly the same time as Ethan Johnson and then posted a little later with the only difference being that he utilized an extra, and optional, comma? Well it's possible but clearly I'm not telling the truth. You picked that up didn't you?

If you read regular web writers -- call 'em bloggers if you must -- then everyday you read the egomaniacal, the heart felt, the goofy, the cogent, the sycophantic, the miserable, the sublime, good, bad and indifferent. Regular reading instills a discipline of thought instantiation. By that I mean that you shape your thought patterns around arguments that are coincident, similar, suggestive or altering. For instance, some days blogger A may make sense to you and other days you'll wonder why you bother clicking the mouse on her feed. Always, one hopes, you are looking for new ideas, new feeds, new writers; weeding out the ones that don't seem to provide the value of positive or negative thought mathematics. If you read and move on most of the time, then the writing is no longer stimulating anymore; stimulation can be agreeable or disagreeable. The thing about writing is that it should provoke thought. Genuine writing is a rendering of perceived understanding, a creative act because it attempts to capture and convey; in turn it may incite more thought and more writing by others.

That is not conversation.

Having occasionally written about and accepted the written thoughts of Ethan over the years, as well as having had actual conversations with him -- you know with the full duplex, talking thing going on in real time -- he and I know there is a difference. There is no more a conversation taking place in the wider blog space than there is in the wider marketplace. The passage of time has shown us that markets are not conversations and there is no such thing as a real community embedded in any web site or grouping of sites. How ridiculous would it sound if somebody declared that "Newspapers are conversations". Sometimes literal meanings are really good for what they are; a conversation is about talk; not about words. Community is about people engaged in living in an area of reasonable proximity or familiarity. Community is not about reflective affinity; that's called empathy.

The empathetic nature of modern media causes certain thought leaders to attract followings of the like minded with the occasional sprinkling of the caustic. Mayhem ensues. While most of these people would never get in a street fight, they tend to slag each other in writing without a second thought. Could that be because the norms of standard conversation invoke a social protocol that leads to a shared attempt, at least initially, to get to an understanding? Has that happened during any part of the current A-list blogger dust-up? They're not having a conversation, they're having a turf war. It's a bunch of blather about ego that's worth several thousand dollars. We needn't waste any more time on the fiction of community or conversation in the web space.

But we will.

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..."

I recently received an email from Amazon that announced an open beta for their latest linking concept. The idea? With a small piece of javascript code Amazon will embed contextually related links on existing posts in your site. If the context is right, this is a really neat way to effortlessly drive revenue from older content.

I experiment with paid linking technologies in order to keep on top of the business and revenue aspects of web communication. If people don't have reliable techniques for earning revenue on the web then great ideas may not survive. Adding new links in older material sounds like a potentially fruitful idea for many web writers.

I picked a single article from 2004 as a trial page for Amazon's context links; my reminesces of Rick James after the news of his death in August 2004. It's a pretty focused piece on James' music, his career and a Buffalo concert appearance. I figured the context was pretty clear. I expected to see links to Rick James CD's, books on music -- maybe stuff about funk, R&B -- or maybe videos highlighting rock concerts. What did I get? A link to novel about a girl's life in a ghetto keying off of my reference to one of Rick James hit songs, "Ghetto Life". That's a miss. A link to a book about Buffalo Bill -- of all things -- where I mentioned a Rick James show in Buffalo. A bigger miss.

The craziest link of all? Later in the post I mention the late, great singer Robert Palmer which Amazon picked up as a link to "Biostatistical Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology" by Robert C. Elston. Robert Palmer and Robert C. Elston --get it? See how much similarity there is there? Neil Young is also mentioned in the post but there is no link related to him.

I'm not sure where the context is in those links but not a single one refers to a book, CD or video by any of the artists mentioned in the post. What's more, the unrelated links embedded by Amazon are just going to annoy readers. Since these links are added "live" by Amazon, they will probably change and morph. I'm going to keep the context links live on just this single post to see what happens. For now, it looks like this program will be beta just a wee bit longer.

If you are experimenting with context links or if you have any input you would like to provide on this concept please leave a comment here on bradfordgibson.net.

Over at currentthinkingradio.com, I've posted an article about Paul Colligan's big question. Are podcasters slowing down podcasting's growth? Um, yeah...

It was a day of MooseCamp fun but the big dividend was our table of four at Vancouver's Shiro -- which roughly translated means "great Sushi". How I ended up sitting with Buzz Bruggeman, Robert Scoble and Maryam Scoble had more to do with Buzz's leadership and the small size of the restaurant than anything I did, but sometimes you just have to show up.

So what do you want to know?

The blogging community -- those that really believe this is a discussion not an elevator pitch -- know that we're all here to engage. We talked. What else can I say. Maryam is a compelling woman; charming and delightful. Robert is pensive, which may mistakenly be taken as aloofness. Buzz is engaging, articulate, a leader and an encyclopedia of personal experience. Buzz remembers things and he pulses with the connectedness of our digital age. When you sit and eat raw fish with these folks you know why the digital web can never match the analog stimulus of eye contact and great conversation.

When it's your turn to have dinner with Buzz and the Scobles, don't think about what you need to do to get a link, be noticed or sound controversial. You made it to the table; you are part of the tribe. Be prepared to listen. Ask questions. Some of the things you are doing may or may not be relevant. That's okay, we're having a conversation here.

Thank you very much Robert, Maryam and Buzz.

PS: Robert, we will hold a night open for you in Calgary when you come through this spring for the W3C. Come on Calgary bloggers and podcasters let's treat Robert to great dinner!

NorthernVoice NorthernVoice2007 NV2007
Buzz Bruggeman Robert Scoble Maryam Scoble