Motherhood and Apple Pie

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lesscode.org: Motherhood and Apple Pie [@lesscode.org]:

The internet is not an accident. The internet was not bound to happen. There was no guarantee that the internet would reach its current state as a side effect of emerging digital processing and communications capabilities. We did not recover complex alien technology.

The internet, that place where all eventual business will be transacted, all content and media will be distributed, all correspondence will be exchanged, all history will be recorded, and all pornography will be is being admired, has a design – and its meant for exactly these purposes.

Many of the principles that led to this design are still with us today, although I would challenge you to ascertain them by observing the mainstream technologies being peddled by leading vendors, publications, and analyst firms. Those who rose to power in a much different environment, where the short-term profits of disconnected, dead-end business software was deemed more important than laying a fertile ground where millions of new ideas (and hence new profits) could bloom.

But the dead-end has long been reached and so these industry leaders have turned their attention to this new place, built on principles and values very different from their own, and have somehow reached the conclusion that this thriving ecosystem must be re-arranged such that they have somewhere to place their baggage. Instead of embracing the people, principals, and technologies that gave rise to this phenomenon they have chosen to subvert its history and to implant the ridiculous notion that it is â€Ŕincapable of meeting the stringent demands of the business community.â€?

Not only have these business radicals claimed the internet as their own but they have also somehow gained the confidence of all the worlds industry in their ability to deliver a new and sparkling internet, one no doubt capable of reproducing the complexities and flaws that plague existing mediums so as to make it feel more like home. They’ve brought their own principles and agendas, asserting them as obvious and correct while ignoring the wisdom we’ve gained and shared and gained and shared over years of collaborative practice and observation of working systems at this scale.

A great essay. I don’t agree with some of his conclusions, but it and especially its source material are must reads.

How do I resolve social mobility?

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An interesting question: Ask MetaFilter: How do I resolve social mobility?:

Any anecdotes about fitting in with a new class that’s not the one you grew up with? This isn’t so much “selling out” versus “keeping it real,” but just the ways that people adapt to the change.

I’ve found the people I meet and spend time with are more and more from a higher social class than the one I’ve grown up in (we’re college-age, here). Further, the more ambitious I get, the more I notice the effect. So how does one resolve the issue of living in “two worlds?” It’s started to feel like I need to make a choice between alienating all my old friends/family, or giving up on whatever big, important things I want to do with my life. Obviously, that just ain’t gonna work, so I’m looking for advice from people who have felt the same way at some point.

One other thing to note: at least into the forseeable future (next 5 years), I’ll be in the same socioeconomic class, in that I’ll still a college/professional student, without some new level of income. It’s not that I’m nouveu riche all of a sudden, I’m just socially conflicted.

10 Days till this year’s Sleeping Angel Music Fest

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On September 15th 2001, just four days after 9-11, our nephew, Hunter, 3 and 1/2 months old, passed away from SIDS.

As a response, my brother’s family started the Sleeping Angels Fund to help families who cannot financially afford a burial memorial after losing a child so young. Sleeping Angels will be holding its second annual music fest in ten days, August 5th and 6th. Various bands across our area will be playing to help support the fund – including – possibly – my own on August 5th. I hope to see you there.

Mark Cuban on IceRocket

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Blog Maverick: How many bloggers love me… let me count the ways:

…Its deja’ blog all over again.

Today, there are what seem to be thousands and thousands of bloggers who spend most of their time writing about what other bloggers blog.

Thats not a bad thing.

There are people who read my blog and often link back. In fact, its a good thing. It expands my audience to the upstream bloggers’ audience.

What is getting a little wierd, and I have to admit entertaining, are the “incentuous networks� and how they sometimes try to game blog search engines to increase their rankings.

Some of the blog search engines try to rank “authority” based on links to a blog post. Thats cool , and its a valuable tool

Lots of bloggers like to show how many other sites have “linked in”. Again, thats cool and its a nice little ego boost, even though because of the different ways to count the links, its not really of much use beyond bragging rights. But hey, if someone stumbles upon your blog and there are lots of big numbers, they are more likely to read. So I guess its useful from that perspective alone

But all of which has led to an interesting type of pressure occurring in the blog search engine market.

Bloggers want blog search engines to have features designed for bloggers.

Thats not a bad thing. As different bloggers do evaluations of different search engines, we will find out more features that are desirable for bloggers and how best to implement them.

But it leads to a question.

Should a blog search engine be designed as a tool for bloggers, or as a tool for people who happen to blog and everyone else.

Of course they arent completely mutually exclusive. You can have features that support both, but as the number of features grow, the responsiveness of engine declines.

And since blog search engines are relatively new, It could create a lot of confusion for those who dont want to use a blog search engine as a blog reference tool, but rather as a more traditional search engine that is keyword based.

This post of course is a long way of saying that despite all the evaluations going on around the blogosphere, blogs.icerocket.com will focus on providing a service to the majority of internet users who dont blog, or who blog as a social experience.

In particular we will focus on supporting business users who want a continuous feed of fresh information relating to those things that are important to them.

So far it seems to be working well. Our traffic is exploding.

Hopefully the bloggers who use our tags , scripts and other tools we will be providing will notice lots of new traffic driven to their sites. Hopefully it will be mostly first time blog readers experiencing all the great content bloggers create every day and they will love your site so much , they will subscribe to it.