Musings & Meanderings

So I finally got around to checking out Mahalo.

At first glance Mahalo seems a hybrid of a crowd sourced resource such as Wikepedia, Larry Sanger’s Citizendium which will be authored by experts, and a community compiled compendium of links to, hopefully, aggregate and replace all those great resource pages that individuals used to build and maintain, and my first response was “cool”. What I saw was an ad free human recommendation search engine. Who couldn’t get into that?

The initial impression was strong enough that I registered, as Vera, and then stopped.

There’s a basic premise here of crowdsourcing for the crowd’s own benefit but combined with quality control that is certainly appealing.

There are dozens of sites that I could submit (for which there are not yet categories), dozens of subjects that I could make a page or ten for, but I’m not a student or part time enthusiast looking to make $10 or $15 per submission, and keeping track of what I sent in while it was waiting on approval sounds a bit too much like work for which I don’t have time.

I could certainly review submissions on a range of subjects that I care about and have studied most of my life, but I don’t want/need a full time job, and the Mahalo Greenhouse (for growing things) is apparently structured with full time guides reviewing submissions.

Taking another step back, there are many non-tech individuals whose Favorites would make a better search result in the areas in which they are passionately interested, better than any existing search engine or recommendation site could produce. Some of these people wouldn’t share that list for love or money because it represents a competitive advantage in their livelihood. Others whose lists are hobby rather than professional income related, still, if I look at Mahalo through their eyes, might not find incentive to participate. For one thing, they aren’t part of the .001%.

Jason says that Mahalo is being built for them/us, the other 99.999% of the billion or so people online worldwide. If that’s the case, then I’m hoping to see guides and contributors from all the places and communities where they/we are, or at least distributed mostly across North America and the UK, since Mahalo is, for the time being, in English.

One of the things stopping me from contributing is the impression I’m getting that Mahalo intends to become a destination/community but I can’t find it. Let’s say that one of the topics that I could build something on was 20th century art and design (or at least a number of the thousands of pages that such a broad category should eventually contain). Based on the intimated goal of community(ies), I’d be expecting or perhaps hoping to ‘meet’ and possibly ‘confer’ with other members contributing on the same, or related topics. Would we, these loosely associated community members, discover one another accidentally via and then outside of Mahalo? Would our contributions be subject to the approval of ‘one of us’ or only of a paid employee of Mahalo who is or isn’t as knowledgeable in our areas?

Then there is Jason’s invitation to Jeff Jarvis to join Mahalo as an ombudsman. Bringing in an individual of stature who has a background in journalism as well as diplomacy skills to interact with the contributing community sounds like a good idea. The term ombudsman is a respectful one, generally referring to an appointed, or company hired, official whose duty it is to protect the voice and interests of the constituents, but it also implies that the constituents are the masses outside the gates who need a spokesman and are unable to elect or appoint their own.

Mahalo is, I’m assuming, a privately owned corporation in which we the contributors will play roles varying from contract employees to unpaid contributors to users. This picture does not vary too greatly from many other web constructions, and the idea of a crowd sourced human compiled search engine with quality control, as I stated earlier, is an appealing one.

The pieces of information that I’m missing here, the reason I stopped after registering, are in the questions of where the communities are, how they are to define themselves and function, and what their intended role is in the future if Mahalo turns out to be a big success? For those of us in the 99.999% who have painstakingly built various favorites and link lists in many categories over the years for our own use, what draws us to and keeps us returning to Mahalo, and what are the incentives for contributing?

I understand that Mahalo is new, at a Beta stage. My questions are not intended as criticism, or as an expectation of definitions that are not fully formed and expected to evolve. If Mahalo grows to be a big success, these questions might even matter less to me. Am I seeing a projection of community where there is really only controlled and directed crowd-sourcing?

The title isn’t a mistake. You are reading Vera’s weblog, and I still hold the same views about irresponsible and malicious behavior being encouraged and enabled by anonymity online.

The important word there is irresponsible, the opposite of responsible.

I’ve long understood the value of anonymity in many specific circumstances, but that understanding was fairly fragmented until now, because I did not relate to anonymity personally. This was, ironically, despite the fact that I guard my privacy fiercely, and even my personal support of causes is done privately or anonymously. I also have a healthy respect for the potential power of machines (which I’ve been using since 1982-3) in certain hands. People wiser and more experienced than I about the internet, however, support anonymity strongly, and therefore I have continued listening harder than ever to understand why.

Matt’s post on Moderating Internet Forums handed me a final key to seeing the whole picture. Thank you Matt. You have my respect and loyalty. Your voice on the subject of freedom has resonated with me since I first started reading here, and your occasional post on the importance of anonymity was also instrumental on getting me to ‘listen’ even harder.

Anonymity online is not about my identity, about whether I go by Vera Bass or one of my handles. Yes, I have handles …in communities I’ve been part of over the years… where people get to know each other over time and many of us also sign our real names in forum posts, exchange email, etc.

Anonymity protects my privacy and my freedom. This is related not to whether I choose, as I do, to speak openly and stand by my words, it is related to my abilities to protect the rights and privacy of my family and myself.

Last fall, when I first started blogging, I wrote posts, and participated in related conversations as well, protesting the division of the web into an either or experience. My posts such as Them and Us, followed by UsThems, insisted on the viability of a free society where commerce and other pursuits could co-exist naturally, based on mutual respect. Over the past year, and during my prolonged absence, the growth in ‘free’ web services, such as social sites and personalized search engines, has increased dramatically (not surprising given the sale of MySpace and then Youtube more or less a year ago).

Over the same period, the proliferation of these companies has increased the tracking and information gathering on our activities to the point where a blog or web site with ads and other services cycles through dozens of trackers before loading.

Unless we re-claim the permission we have become accustomed to granting tacitly, no company, from Google to Facebook, has any incentive beyond public relations to grant us participation and choice in the information collection processes. When public protest against current practices grows a little too loud, it is typically silenced with a token concession that is usually mostly meaningless. There is no sign so far that initatives such as open ID can gain the massive adoption that would be required to stem this tide.

On Jeff’s post titled What’s Worse Than Crashing?, about how the insidious can be worse than the blatant, I commented that the answer lies in education. Good habits and practices are taught to us by the people around us who care, the same way that I admonished incessantly every one of my family members when they first started using computers, until they formed basic habits, such as saving, backing up, etc. I have always been meticulous about not keeping anything truly critical on the machine I use to surf and blog. I’m a heartless consumer of trees, relying on paper via fax machines and hard records for many highly sensitive things.

There are people with ill-intent, both online and off, although, as my late and much-loved mother-in-law used to say, in her Brooklyn accent and with a half-smile and a cute shrug, “Whaddaya gonna do? …things are tough all over.”. I can’t personally do much about the behavior of predators beyond the scope of my vision, but I can do plenty about my own behavior and about contributing to the education and awareness of those around me.

Now that I finally comprehend anonymity used, not to hide behind, but as an instrument of freedom, and especially free speech, many of the issues of online behavior that were lumped in discrete categories such as Code of Conduct, Policies, etc. are coalescing for me perfectly as citizen rights in a free society.

—–
August 31, 2007

Blogger Blog post on malware in Blogger includes links to two sites on computer safety:
The University of Pennsylvania’s Information Security portal.
US-CERT safety tips.

…even if you don’t personally need to learn more about computer safety, you may have family and friends who could benefit from reading all the pages on these sites. Of course you may have to bribe reward them.

—–
August 20/06:
Bringing scambaiter SnosKred’s Six Part Internet Safety Primer up out of the comment dungeon.

The post on A List Apart titled Staying Motivated led to one of my best blogosphere experiences of the week. From the ALA teaser… “Been stuck in a creative rut so long so you’ve started to decorate it?” …through the well thought out post itself, I was involved to the point of reading the comments, and then seeking further information on the post author. Anyone who can write a post on as multi-faceted, and as frequently dwelt upon, a topic as motivation so well that I continue reading, and so exhaustively that I have nothing to add, deserves my attention.

Kevin Cornell is a graphic designer in Pennsylvania whose site is now on my blogroll under Arts & Culture.
His post titled On The Nature Of Art was a pleasurable highpoint of my blog browsing this week.

If you’re more attuned to the Tech & News & Ideas portion of my blogroll, check out the Internet Research Group, a client Kevin enjoyed working with. They have an excellent take on the difference between this medium and TV.

P.O.W.

The flavor that I like best is POW - right between the eyes. Sometimes POW is a gradual thing, though, evolving over time until the whole emerges like a dazzling multi-threaded fabric. This time lapse can be either a function of the writer’s personality, or a progression of my own comprehension of a field or topic with which I’ve been previously unfamiliar.

Other great flavors of POW include:

- to the heart
- to the senses
- to the funny bone
- to the mind
- to the desires

POW is powerful because it’s personal.

To me, POW isn’t about traffic, it’s about connection. It’s about preferring 10 friends to 1000 acquaintances. If you are blogging full time and readership is important, then you have to convey not only why you care but also make your readers care. That means either writing on a topic that many already care about or becoming a true evangelist.

Even the A-list bloggers on the most popular topics, including news, politics, and web development, are continually evolving as something other than reporters or journalists, because this medium is about personal connection. They’re developing a hybrid between the old forms and pure blogger form. Reading a great blogger isn’t like reading a newspaper or magazine, it’s more like reading a personal letter in conversational form. If the person writing to you obviously cares, then an almost involuntary assumption follows that they care about you.

POW is ‘Pointing Out Why’. Why you care.

Traditional wisdom and advice to anyone taking up writing is to write about what you know best. Yawn. I could be the world’s biggest car geek, and you could be the world’s best mechanic, and you could write everything I ever wished I knew about carburetors and alternators and transmissions, and still manage to put me right to sleep. Start telling me about everything that gets you worked up or passionate, though, and you just woke me up. What you know isn’t going to POW (to) anyone. What you care about is.

The voice that most inspired me to read blogs still resonates with POW at Creating Passionate Users.

Dave Winer’s post is one of my favorites on what a blog is. This isn’t because his definition is all encompassing, it’s because it tells me what turned him, and many pioneer bloggers, on about it all. It defines a personal meaning.

Pointing Out Why can have a general or a detailed focus, or both at once. If you’re a user centric mass market developer, you do have Coding Horror in your reader, right? Even if you personally support Bad Vista? Jeff Atwood talks about details as much as about the big picture in a wry manner but how much he cares is unmistakable.

POW can be subtle. It can also be delivered in an elegant and sophisticated manner. Although I’d never heard of Leon Friend before reading this eulogy at Design Observer, I sat for a moment of silence, both in sadness that I would never know this person, and in respect for the depth of meaning which he had conveyed to others.

Although I read/skim a hundred blogs for the purpose of knowing ‘what’s going on’, the writers I actually stop and read most often are those who care, and take the trouble to convey (or point out) why. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with them often or rarely. I’m a devoted reader of Clay Shirky and Lawrence Lessig and Nick Carr and Anil Dash.

Matt Mullenweg is one of my favorite voices, and although he rarely comes out to play much anymore I click into every single post in the hope that it will be more than a single sentence or link.

Not incidentally, the internet is here, for all of us, because of people who really cared; they’re the reason we can read stuff like this.

The examples linked to here are mostly related to internet and web development, because it is a topic that I write about often, and also because this category accounts for about half of my reads. If you have favorite examples of POW in any category, post them in the comments, please, or email them to me?

Every one of my favorite bloggers is a person that I can easily picture spending time with in lively conversation or even argument on a topic that we both care about. For me those topics include art, design, modern history, being a mom, and many other things in addition to the entrepreneurial or internet related.

Presentation, including mastery of the language you’re using, makes a difference, but to me, hearing what you really care about, what you believe in, makes the biggest difference of all. I don’t have to agree with you, but if you don’t seem to care much, then I likely won’t.

What is your definition of a great blogger or blog post?

Anil Dash opens his post titled
The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition with,

“The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.”

It’s an excellent post and commentary, focused on the failure resulting from what I call the technology schism, where both enterprise and consumer product developers each view their constituency from whatever their own, one dimensional viewpoint happens to be.

Anil demonstrates that an integration of viewpoints is essential to the development of any truly useful technology by saying,

If you create a tool as powerful as instant messaging, for example, you won’t be able to stop adoption in the enterprise — you’ll just need to add enterprise features.

Who bears the primary responsibility for the ‘abdication of potential’ that obviates the creation of powerful tools? Is it really Apple or Microsoft or IBM? Each of these entities is, after all, a corporation, the stewards of which are responsible for staying on track and delivering on their promises to their shareholders. That is their first priority, and, no matter how high social responsibility ranks on any corporation’s priority list, it can never occupy the top slot.

The conflicts that arise between benefiting non human entities and individuals are considered and dwelt upon on the personal level, where individuals are (to a greater or lesser extent) recognized as essential to an entity’s endeavors, whether as employees or customers. Yet the societal context is largely flattened or even entirely missing from even the more developed and enlightened of these viewpoints.

Nowhere do I see the emptiness of abdication growing as widely and deeply as in the gap between large scale and constituency applications of technology. Increasingly, tools and development for communities and small businesses lag further and further behind in sophistication and innovation, as primarily the development of consumer products with mass market potential is pursued.

The deepening gloom in this expanding chasm is, imo, the most unfortunate aspect of technological development to date. Societal formation, relationships and responsibilities, are weakened here, yet this is the place where our personal time and our work time intersect, the area that should be the heart and soul of this extended dimension.

I believe that commitment of time and resources to development in this area would also result in tremendous benefit to private enterprise interests as a direct result of benefiting the communities, and that we as individuals and in groups should be collaborating in such development for our own collective benefit, as well as that of our institutions and other civic bodies.

Our personal time is as meaningful as our work time. The full scope of this, from a personal perspective, a business perspective, and a community perspective, only becomes visible when these perspectives are all considered together. The better we enable our goals and activities in each and with one another, the more of that meaning we can all realize. Anil’s post addressed the lack of attention to a balanced entirety of personal activity and endeavor. It is through the collaboration and communication conducted within enabled and growing communities that I believe that valuable attention is created.