Reluctant Blogger

Experimenting with wp custom fields. Pls ignore.

I’ve never blogged under my own name before. The timing of this is then, I suppose, a little ironic given that it was prompted by events that caused some very well known bloggers to temporarily and perhaps permanently give up blogging. For anyone not familiar with what occurred, a very brief recap is here.

This will be a long post. (EDIT: Series of posts) It’s also a work in progress as I think through some issues, so please read with that in mind.

It’s about, among other things: personal history, blogging, Nazis, the Kathy Sierra incident, fear, Ze Frank, and “Radical Transparency.”

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Largely overlooked in the discussion of the Kathy Sierra incident this week, was an interesting juxtaposition with some other articles. In particular ComputerWorld’s “Web anonymity can sink your job search” and Wired’s already infamous issue on “Radical Transparency” and lots of attendant discussion all with basically the same message: you’d better start exposing yourself in public, online, stat if you want to participate in the business world (or get a job) anymore. Wired also helpfully included an attractive model in a removable Mylar dress with the header “Get Naked” just in case anyone was still missing the point.

I’m tech-savvy, blog-literate, and as a freelancer am almost always looking for my next job - but I don’t have a “personal” blog, and I certainly don’t seem to be participating in any Naked Conversations. So what gives? It’s certainly not due to lack of effort or material; I’m a regular contributor to a lot of different blogs and forums online. A quick survey of my participation in “The Conversation” just this week would include comments at:

• TechCrunch (re: Twitter vs. Dodgeball)
• Photo Matt (re: Facebook and age discrimination in the tech industry)
• Ze Frank (random thoughts and a snippet of a song I wrote for the sports racers)
• Publishing 2.0 (My own prescription for saving the news biz)
• Twitter stream (playing with the newest shiny toy in technology)
• CPU (hate speech incident)
• Scobleizer (hate speech incident)

There’s more, but that’s enough to make my point, and that’s pretty normal for me on a heavy work-travel week. Not a lot, but also still more and better thought out, frankly, than the contents of a lot of blogs - - and certainly a sufficient post-rate to establish some kind of an online presence. However - despite all of that contribution, over many years, I’ve never put everything in one place, nor have I put it under my own name before. Why?

Because online anonymity is an illusion, and some of us have legitimate reasons for wanting (and even needing) to keep our privacy.

I’m planning to explore both those reasons, and some possible strategies for addressing them in a transparent age over the course of this essay.

I will post Part II (On Violence) as soon as time allows.

I agree that ignorning stupidity is often the best course of action.

However there are other times when the only appropriate response is to stand up and say in no uncertain terms “NO.” - followed, if necessary, by “and kindly back the fuck off.”

It’s very important to know the difference. Not surprisingly, the president puts it a little more eloquently than I do:

When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable.

I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion around this topic the last several days defending what occurred to Kathy as freedom of speech.

Although I would have thought her title made this clear, it seems perhaps not. I’ve also *already* received messages re: my earlier statement about hate speech. Just so people have it as a reference point, the Supreme Court had this to say in 2003 in the cross-burning case Virginia v. Black:

The protections the First Amendment affords speech and expressive conduct are not absolute. This Court has long recognized that the government may regulate certain categories of expression consistent with the Constitution. … For example, the First Amendment permits a State to ban “true threats,” … which encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. … The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true threats protects individuals from the fear of violence and the disruption that fear engenders, as well as from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur. … Intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.

In other words, white supremacists have the right to burn crosses at their rallies. As repugnant as I find it, I understand and defend that right as the price of living in a free society.

On the other hand, white supremacists DO NOT have a right to burn crosses in front of my house. The purpose of intimidation, hate speech, and for that matter terrorism, is to LIMIT freedom. It’s for that very reason that it must be equally intolerable to a free society.

I agree with those who say we don’t need any more rules or regulation on blogging behavior - they’re right. What we do need is a little more respect for the rules we already have.

Nobody comes here yet, so it’s kind of silly to be posting lazyweb questions - this is mainly a placeholder reminder for myself for now. I am putting together some DVDs for a good friend of mine who just spent the last year and a half at sea. Started out being an introduction to Jonathan Coulton and most of the year of ze frank’s the show, and is now turning into a multi-volume set of music and short form video for somebody who has basically been unplugged from much of popular culture for the last year.

Any suggestions as to what I should add? When I get around to it, I’ll post a running list here of what I have so far.

“the features of similar services should be compared as that’s how we best judge which service is a better use of our time.”

Blake: I hear you - and I wish that this were true - it would make the tech world a much simpler place to navigate.

However - I’m pretty sure that Metcalfe’s Law dictates that the size of the (exposed) network is the primary determinant of value. I have no idea how many overall users Dodgeball has vs. Twitter, but I know which one provides me with more immediate potential points of contact.

(Hint: my twitter page is linked above. Feel free to stop by and friend me if you like. I would gladly provide a similar link to my dodgeball page if I knew how - or could even tell for sure if I had one…)

test autoposting via mcomm from discussion thread at Techcrunch

This is a placeholder post.  Its purpose is to serve as a link destination for ideas that I want to explore further when time and circumstances allow.  With this, I can simply link to this spot, then whenever I want to review my list of ideas that I might want to write about, I can just check my trackbacks to this page.

If you’re a visitor and you’re reading this, then I apologize for head-faking you with a blind link.  Feel free to shoot me a note to complain if you like.  :-)