Musings & Meanderings

Hello WordPress.

It’s been a sharp learning curve so far, but even when I’m banging my head against the wall , I still have Louis singing Hello Dolly in the background.

Who knew that I’d enjoy poring over code files in the middle of the night until I figured out what they did or until I found my mistake? (If I’d only known that I should have been reading PHP instead of MySQL manuals first it might have gone a bit faster.) No, this isn’t a gig, just a hobby.

I’d originally thought of waiting to move in concert with other plans, but decided that learning WordPress and joining this community was a wonderful complement to any future development at all, and a perfect place for my personal weblog.

So here I shall muse and meander from now on.

I followed Matt’s post titled Should poetry be open source?

…to a post in which Dave Bonta thoughtfully discusses the issue of copyright versus open source in terms of his own writing

…and from within the comments on Dave’s post, I was led to and enraptured by the Poem Dancing category on Sharon Brogan’s poetry blog.

If there had been a current poem dance taking place I would have joined in, and very much hope to come across one in future.

I do believe that copyright protections still have a place, and will continue to, given the structure of the society we inhabit. I also believe in a future order in which our understanding of rights and responsibilities would be redefined in many ways. Open source is symbolic of a free internet, and a collaborative culture, where value is contributed, received and shared through means other than money. This ‘gift’ economy has grown to represent an entire sub culture, one in which free exchange greatly enhances value for all. Meanwhile, though, participants still require income in dollars to pay the rent, and most projects of any size require financial investment to achieve fruition. The frictions between open sharing and collaboration, private interests, and individual needs are many and, as we know, not easily resolved. I have come to understand that the demonstration of what can be accomplished with free is an important key to unlocking the rhythms and formulas of new orders and understandings.

A year ago I was wandering around here wondering, “Where is the public trust?”. Now my intent is to contribute to the evolution of new definitions of it.

Since today is my birthday, though, my pleasure is to release the following song fragment, which I wrote in response to the development zeitgeist, into the collaborative space…

i want fast
cars
purring like panthers
a nuclear power that sings in my veins

i want pure
lightning
unleashed by my fingertips
all destinations forever attained

the song
speeds
with a million hearts beating
unique synchronicity linking all planes

in our fast
cars

I’ve read that code is poetry. My own comprehension of code has advanced to the point where I can recognize some of it as elegant or beautiful, but the full understanding of it as poetry, well, so far I can only make this association through analogy. Becoming a parent or creating a successful business can be similar to both writing and experiencing poetry. Both are acts of creation and also, or therefore, more than a simple sum of our experiences, actions and selves.

Successful collaborative creation as greater than the sum of the individuals’ contributions… a defining element of the richest cultures?

Thoughts?
Poetry?

One of this week’s high points for me was visiting Tara Hunt’s weblog ::HorsePigCow::. Tara is a fellow Canadian, who is now in San Francisco. My loss, not to have met her before she left Toronto.

Tara is writing on the community roles we play. In her post titled Archetypes in Communities - The Caretaker, she profiles her own Jungian personality type, and refers to the ways in which interaction between people in different roles is an architectural component of healthy communities (my words).

I’ve valued Jung’s theories highly since discovering his work as an adolescent. This discovery was occasioned by reading that Carl Jung collected case studies of children who saw mandalas. I also sought out the definitions of mandala and learned that I had been one of the children who saw them.

In her second post the next day, Tara reviewed a primary list of archetypes, asking What’s Your Archetype?. Although I do agree that these personality types are more behavioral models than true archetypes, the work that Tara is doing in studying our roles in communities is most welcome.

Visit her post to find the url of a site where you can take a Myers-Briggs typology test to determine your personality type. If this sort of test interests you, check out the Personal DNA link in the sidebar here as well. Most tests such as these are far too short and standardized to give an accurate in-depth representation, so using a variety, and reading further about the various theories is the best practice. Understanding ourselves better is usually beneficial to all our relationships and interactions in life, too.

The understanding of communities, and the complex dynamics of people in them, is (imo) one of the essential steps toward creating online resources that address needs and desires we all have that go beyond personal gratification, that connect us to one another on more than a superficial level. I can also easily imagine a myriad of other online applications for more of this kind of mapping.

Go Tara.

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?