metacargocult

what i like about
this cargocult analysis
is its bottom-up originality

squeezed out of direct confrontation
with media stupidity

so i thought blogs that linked it
might be worth sifting

(what i don't like about it
is its bottom-up contingency
lacking top-down necessity)

[numbering mostly added]

I. Ignorance is innocence

cf eg "zen mind, beginner's mind"
open lack-of-prejudice can be angelic
the 1st time you try bowling you may get a strike

but "Forrest Gump" was sentimentally dishonest
(also "Being There")

we may deserve a world where
innocence effortlessly triumphs
but we've never had one

IA. Complicated explanations are suspect

g spencer brown would defend this one

if the intuition senses
a simpler way
it has the right and duty
to reject the too-complex one

IA1. The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

isn't this an explicit variant
on the anthropic principle?

IB. Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

IB1. Admitting alternatives is undermining one's own belief.

IB2. Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the
prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real
knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

The herd should be followed

The contemplative lemming gets trampled

Popular beliefs must be true.

No bad idea can survive.

People are generally smart.

Even if a popular belief doesn't pan out, at least you'll be in the
same boat as everyone else.

II. Causality is selectable

All interconnection is apparent

Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.

The end supports the explanation of the means

A successful person's explanation of the means of his
success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.

You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful
people

This is the key to the cargo cult.  To enjoy the
success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.

Your idol gets the blame if things don't work out, not you.

You have a right to your share

You get to define your share.

Your share is the least you will accept without crying injustice.

Celebrate getting more than your share.

III. It's not your fault

If it's good for you, it's good

Society is everyone else.

Good intentions suffice

You can always apologize.

There is no long term

Don't miss an opportunity.

Consequences are things that happen to others

Only you can hold yourself accountable.  Don't let
others make you do that.

If somebody starts the blame game, you can still win it.

There are evil people and institutions, and surely one of them is more
responsible than you are.

You are not the problem

An ugly image means a bad mirror.

IV. Death is unnatural

You're special

Bad things shouldn't happen to you.

Pain is wrong

Life should not hurt.

It's a Whiffle World.

Tragedy is a synonym for calamity

Bad things are never consequences of one's own action or
inaction.

There will be justice

Bad people get punished.

You, however, will be forgiven.

Lazyweb: hardest-working bloggers?

this blog
deleted my comment
that i'd posted 2500+ items last year

to say nothing of my
GoogleReader count
of sifting 1000+ items per day
from 500+ sources

which includes my flickr subscriptions
but not my 4000+ flickr faves
nor my 900+ twitter faves

and i'd love to know anybody close
in terms of hardworkingness

.

The best of RobotWisdom WebLog

[links updated]

Dec 1997

17Dec

first post:

A thread about gangs on chi.general led me to this reference source on Chicago gangs: [Wayback] which offers a ton of details-- names, symbols, alliances-- you never see anywhere else. In the newsgroup discussion [new url], "Tommy the Terrorist" wisely suggests that if gangs have corrupt cops watching out for them, then their territorial boundaries ought to match those cops' precincts' boundaries as well.

18Dec

I enjoy "Dilbert" (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/) as much as the next nrrd, but FAIR's Norman Solomon is arguing that it's sneaky capitalist propaganda. See his regular column in the Portland Alliance for May 1997: [new url]. (Many of Solomon's other commentaries are archived [new url] at DejaNews [GoogleGroups].)

23Dec

The next time you're headed for the library, spend a half-hour with Danny Yee's book reviews first: [new url] He has excellent taste...

Sam Smith... offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow at: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/usat.htm.

Salon.com... offers a cute new (though obvious) gif

25Dec

YAY! One of my favorite culture critics-- Candi Strecker-- has found a niche on the Web, at Tripod. [Wayback]

One of my very favorite singers, Mary Coughlan, a smoky Irish blues singer, formerly very obscure, now has a harrowing biographical sketch online at [Wayback] . "...during one point in her set Mary kept the audience transfixed as she sang 'Strange Fruit' without musical accompaniment, If you were to drop a pin you would have been beaten up for it... The greatest, sexiest redhead since Rita Hayworth" -The Times

JM Graetz was present at the creation of the first videogame, Spacewar, and tells it like it was: [new url]

At least someone is trying to keep an eye on netnews society: [new url]

27Dec

Michael Parenti is a GREAT political speaker who's put out a lot of tapes (on the net in RealAudio format, if you can handle that). His newest book, "Blackshirts and Reds", is an attempt to rehabilitate communism. From the preface at [new url]: "U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism." ...the book's first chapter document[s] the forgotten story of how Mussolini and Hitler were funded by rich capitalists, to crush the labor movement. And there's a horrendous compilation of the statistics of American misery ("37,000,000 regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs"): [new url] And a nice dismantling of the myth of free speech in the USA: [new url] The three [one] online chapters of his "Against Empire" give[s] a taut portrait of recent US imperialism, [new url]: "In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured."

Among many outstanding essays on another site: [new urls]

Parenti spells out explicitly his prescription for healing the USA, and debunks terrorism hype especially against Libya.

28Dec

[pending]

29Dec

[pending]

Gorillas make gorgeous representational art! [new url]

Blogger.com suggestions

1. Messing with carefully crafted ascii-art wrapped in PRE tags is lame-as-microsoft. Keep yr mitts off!
   
   
2. after you click 'publish post' you get a page with TWO 'view blog' links, neither of which shows just the one post-- this makes it hard to link it from delicious, and it's problematic if you keep extra (postdated) 'floater' posts always at the top
   
   
3. Authors have a lovely list-view, filterable by tags. Let visitors see something comparable, too. (And let them choose most-recent-first or -last.)
   
   
4. Offer a tag-cloud page. Let authors customise the 'tagportal' page that each tag in the cloud links to, writing a guided overview instead of just listing the tagged posts.
   
   
5. Add a button next to 'Post time and date' that resets it to current date/time.
   
   
6. As the author adds tags, pop up a list of other articles with each tag, and let the author check off which ones are most closely related, to be linked in a 'related articles' list at the bottom of the post.
   
   
7. Let some posts be designated 'floaters' so they stay on top on the homepage (not in the feed, though).
   
   
8. Let each blog automatically spawn a GoogleGroup, and each post to the blog spawn a (potential) thread on GgGroups where comments can be posted.
   
   
9. Offer an automatic link-maintenance service where links within posts are monitored for linkrot, and substitutes offered (via Wayback, if nothing else, or save a cluster of search-keywords that will find similar pages).
   
   
10. Start compiling a library of standard post-types (cf microformats?) like reviews, memoirs, lists of favorites, etc. Automatically maintain an index-page for these. (In general, support more structure in the archives.)
    
    
11. Integrate a del.icio.us-alike database of bookmarks. [more]
    
    
12. Merge full GooglePageCreator functionality.
    
    
13. Maintain version-histories for each page, and traffic stats.
    
    
14. Let some content be designated for-friends-only.
    
    
15. Let some pages be opened as wikis, for-friends-only or for-all.
    
    

Blogging 3.0

the information architecture
imposed by blogging-apps
(like blogger.com)

makes the way-too-pejorative assumption
that yesterday's posts
aren't worth revisiting
or revising

(except in those very rare cases
of newcomers rereading the full archives
from the start)

unfriendlily
presenting every visitor
with just the latest full posts

(with, at most
an archive-by-date link
and maybe a tag cloud)

whereas a typical
content management system
rightly takes for granted
that every page will be
indexed from topicpages
and kept regularly up-to-date

even 'blogging' each revision
in an abbreviated changelog




while bookmark management systems
like del.icio.us
do their whole nother thing

mincing any authorial voice
into an unmodulated puree




so
i'd like to see these functions
finally
fused

every page-change, and
every new bookmark
explicitly weighed
for inclusion in the main, public
site-feed

maybe rated by the author
so subscribers can filter
all but the (author-rated) best

major sitechanges
and wholly-new pages
possibly included entire

(or even
with additional optional
context-setting text
for authorial modulation)

so
uniformly mixing in a primary 'feed'
delicious/tumblelog/bookmarks
with site/change/logging

and automatically suggesting
that any 'important' new post
tagged with some given topic
should be linked from the appropriate
sitemap/indexpages

and maybe
queuing bookmarks, so tagged,
to be eventually integrated as well
into topic-overview pages

(with that pending-queue
even possibly visible to visitors
on the appropriate page)

.

Del.icio.us is unr.eada.ble

[eg]

The Necessary (Google) Web2.0 Consolidation

necessary web 1.0
was about content
and wikipedia has mostly solved
that problem

necessary web 2.0
will be about generalising
interface insights
so that all web2.0 apps share
all the predictable functionality

something google
could bootstrap into beta
within a year, i'd bet

starting from google pagecreator (GgPC)
for creating all manner of webpage
which offers authors
a private view of all their hosted pages
as a list or icon-grid
sorted by name or date

which ought to be available as well
as a public view
(effectively a changelog-blog)

and GgPC could/should also
automatically archive earlier versions
of each page, allowing authors
to reonstruct their state
on any given day

and if each created page
includes a short summary/description
and/or an illustrative pullquote
and/or a 'pull-image'
and/or a summary of recent changes

then that public blog-view
could also include
some or all of these

and the author herself
could customise a 'recommended' blog-view
of site updates
suppressing minor changes
promoting major ones
and even quoting short pages in full

which already cannibalises
most of the functionality
of blogger.com
(which should, itself
open to the public
the author's private, sortable
list-view of post titles)

but we can also add to each page
a set of topic designations or tags
which google could treat
as postings to GgGroups topic areas
(tag = topic = group)

and pages that refer/respond
to other pages
can include the URLs of those 'parent' pages
as topic/tag/groups, as well

so google can trace discussion threads
without the original authors even needing
to turn commenting on

and if this can be streamlined enough
google could let websurfers
rate every page they visit
(openly, or anonymously)
and aggregate these ratings as well

offering now a link-blog view
of all a surfer's ratings
(eg above a threshold level)

to support all this
the GgGroups interface needs to streamline
back to an ajax re-implementation
of the pre-WWW goldenage newsreader 'trn'

where you'd subscribe to
groups/topics/tags/urls/authors/communities

with killfile filters
to minimise annoying noise

and encouraging blogging-community experiments
like slashdot/digg/linkfilter/memepool

.

Blogger zen

web
log

page
stream

link
share

no dates

no titles

no self-mirror

no self-censor

here are just all
the good things i've found

a million tiny lenses
amplifying

short and sweet

why i liked them

why you may not

.

Links On The MF-ing Page: a hypertext abc

as we observe the 10th anniversary of 'blogging'
and debate the precise definition of that term

i'll go on record as claiming not only that
rwwl was the 1st proper weblog
but that it's still the
only
proper weblog

an early product of the only proper
hypertext lab on the web

because properly designed experiments
(here, experiments with links)
need to minimise independent variables
(here, like columns and styles)
and pare down each design prototype
to its barest essentials

how best to

• craft linkable pages
  
• craft links to these pages [more]
  
• arrange links on a page
  
• embed links in prose
  
• accommodate prose to embedded links
  

it seems wholly bizarre to me
ten years on
that web trendsetters
have barely begun these experiments

obsessing instead on
standards
stylesheets
and hypothetical semantic 'structures'

some abcs:

• one chapter per page
  
• escape-links at the start of each page for lost visitors
  
• related links at the end of each page for happy campers
  
• similar links gouped, with major differences emphasized
  
• linktext that minimizes disruption while reading
  (eg isolated in 'text buttons' at the end of a sentence)
  
• linktext that tries to manage readers' expectations
  (eg text buttons that specify the filetype, the site, or special warnings)
  
• page metatdata in the headers (not embedded)
  
• pages that thoroughly massage all raw search results on some given topic
  
• timelines or best-first as better organising principles than alphabetical
  

.

Synching via natural language

at our current primitive level
of electronic database evolution
synching has to obsess on timestamps
so as to avoid clobbering
newer values with older

implying a discourse pattern/
data format like
(topic, olddate, oldvalue, newdate, newvalue, comments)

but in human communication
everything else is normally subsumed
into (newvalue)
with even the topic
cited as obliquely as possible

fast bright hip slangy
as opposed to
dull literal prosaic discursive

for discourse is first of all
a status display
omitting everything 'beneath' you




alternatively
real human discourse
is almost entirely
trivial to the point of irrelevance

tom vs katie
britney's shaved head
sports and weather after this

because discourse is secondarily
just a social glue
like apes' grooming

with silences correspondingly awkward
ideally filled with
anything effervescent
style before content
eg even tall tales




on the Net
we can subscribe
to newsfeeds on topics we choose
from sources we choose
(someday) at levels of detail we choose

conventionally blogged in reverse order
so we don't have to keep explicit track
of the last item read
in each feed




humans also routinely
sin against truth
preferring prejudicial
'target values'
to actual values
consequently ignored

.

Pop Music Theory Geek Blog?

i'd like to see a blog
by someone who really knows music theory
who listens to current pop
and describes its effects
in technical jargon

but maybe i'm naive

.

From Usenet to blogs

google recently added
tags
to blogger

so if you click on a tag
you get a single page
with all that blogger's posts
tagged with that tag
in reverse chronological order [eg]


but i don't think they yet offer
rss feeds for that
'view'

nor feeds for all posts
by all blogger authors
(or all blogosphere authors)
with that tag
though technorati probably does [yep]

but since 1980
usenet
has been offering such 'feeds'

calling tags 'newsgroups'
and making chronological order practical
via a 'newsrc' file
that tracks which posts
have already been seen/read




it's purely a technical fluke
that usenet never offered
feeds-by-author

(though dejanews did
and google groups does)

and robot wisdom weblog
originated partly
to remedy this

regularly linking
my best usenet posts
(for which, unsurprisingly
i was flamed)

but beyond feeds-by-author
i was aiming too
for feeds-by-editor

not just my own best
but every keeper i found

and since i had to use web urls anyway
(via deja and GgG)
not just good usenet posts

but also good webpages

.