The Republic of T.

Back to blogging meta, I guess. I don’t know what’s going on up there at the pinnacle of blogging. From where I sit, it’s impossible to see beyond the clouds to the peak. But something’s going on. First there was blog related stress and heart attacks at GigaOm. Now the New York Times is again covering the travails of top tier bloggers, this time with an article suggesting that Gawker may have “jumped the shark.”

“THE ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message last month to a prospective hire, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

“And it’s 100 words long.

“200 max.

“Any good idea can be expressed at that length.”

A few weeks later on Gawker.com, the news-media gossip Web site that is the flagship of Mr. Denton’s online publishing empire, he spent 339 words explaining changes at the site, including his decision to take over as managing editor after three senior bloggers had quit, and the hiring of Richard Morgan to cover television.

One day later, on Jan. 3, Mr. Morgan also quit. In an interview, he said that Mr. Denton, in his fixation with attracting new readers, was letting the site degenerate.

The next day a new Gawker blogger assigned to cover pop culture posted 406 words summarizing some of the most popular scatological sex videos on the Web, with links.

Within minutes, some longtime readers were posting comments asking, in a reference to the cliché that has come to mean something or someone has lost touch with its roots and has no more cultural relevance, whether Gawker had jumped the shark.

100 words? Well, that just one more reason I’ll never write for Gawker. But if you read beyond the first 200 words the article gets really interesting when it suggests that Gawker slipped into “Perez Hilton mode” and thus began it’s decline.

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When we take the kid to see Santa tomorrow, I probably won’t sit on his knee, but I might ask him for one of these. I know I wanted a Sony Reader last year, but my “to read” pile is reaching from the floor to the bottom of the window sill, and it’s now 2 stacks deep. I may need the Kindle just to keep the hubby from wanting to turn my “to read” pile into kindling.

I knew it. So, last week I griped about the whole working-at-home-vs.-working-around-people thing. And during my travels in search of wireless internet access and the proximity of other people, I’d started to develop a sneaking suspicion that — with more and more people working from locations other than an office — some institutions that offer the lure of wifi also wield a stick to make sure the “road warriors” among us don’t adopt their space as a semi-permanent office space.

Maybe I’m being paranoid. I mean, there are the obvious, reasonable measures that most places take, like logging you off their wifi after you’ve been there a certain amount of time (that’s if it’s free wifi). I can understand wanting to open up a table for a new paying customer when I finished my latte/frappucino/chai tea a couple of hours ago. But I swear there are some more subtle strategies employed. Like the lack of electrical outlets. And electrical outlet is an invitation for someone like me to sit and stay a while, after all. And if there is an outlet available, more than half the time the seat or table nearest it is occupied by someone who’s not using the outlet.

That’s not a problem. After all, people can sit where they want. But I swear there have been times when I’ve seen people sit by the outlets all day. They’re there when I make my first pass, and they’re still there if I pass by a few hours later. I’d swear that the store owners are paying people to sit those outlets, but I know if doesn’t make much sense. But they are taking out the comfy chairs.

Technorati Tags: books, business, culture, current events, life, work, web

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I haven’t shared this bit of news on the blog yet, but in the past month I’ve made a transition that I’d been told was the next logical step in my career, but that I’d been resisting for almost a year. I’ve become an independent consultant. That is, I’m self-employed. Aside from farming out myself as a freelance writer, I’m primarily working as a “blogging & social media consultant”; a title I invented and started toying with around the same time.

One of the reasons I took the plunge is because Parker is getting closer to school-age, and eventually he’ll have a sibling who will also go to school. As I’ve been paying attention to the kinds of trouble some young people get themselves into, looking back on my own past, and wondering what kept me out of trouble. I think it made a huge difference that I never came home to an empty house. When I opened the door upon coming home from school, there was almost always someone there. In my case, my mom, who didn’t work outside the home. I’d been thinking about how to structure work so that I can be there most of the time when our kids get home from school. Well, I figured out how.

So far, so good. A number of interesting opportunities have already come my way (but not so many that I’m turning some away, yet) , and it helps that my former employer is one of my first clients and has been hugely helpful in sending other opportunities my way. Things look good and likely to get better. And I’ve enjoyed the independence of begin able to work at home or anywhere else that has wi-fi web access. But there’s just one drawback that’s been bugging me lately.

Technorati Tags: current events, life, work, technology, web

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I’m a little late on this, and Andy has pretty much covered it, but in case anyone hasn’t heard Bill Gates bailed out PlanetOut, to the tune of $26.2 million. That’s great, Bill. Honestly, I could kiss ya. Even if you’re not the richest man in the world anymore. (Besides, you’re better looking than that Carlos Slim Helu who’s got you beat by billions.) And, as for all those times I shouted “Whose d***k to I have to s***k to get my computer to work?!”, back when I used Windows? Let’s just forget about that, shall we? That is, unless you’re coming out of the closet as a … liberal.

Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

So pucker up, Bill At his rate, I might even forgive you for going neutral on gay rights, and just in time for the Washington state gay rights initiative to fail by one vote (since it passed a year later), and for hiring Ralph Reed, and even for contributing to Tom DeLay (or to the charity he used as a source of soft money political contributions). Ew. OK. Maybe not that last one. It kind leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

This is strange. I know I probably shouldn't complain about free wifi (well, sort of free, since I bought a muffin and a bottled water to justify occupying a chair for a while) but I'm sitting here in Caribou Coffee, catching up on my blog reading, and happened to click on a link to a TMZ post only to find that the site is blocked on this wifi network. Now, I know it's their network and everything, but c'mon Caribou. If this were a school or a public library, I could understand. But if I'm enough of a big boy to quaff a cup of coffee, I'm probably enough of a grown-up to decide what sites I should and shouldn't access. And if there's somebody who might be offended they should probably either (a) mind their own business or (b) grow up. 

I have a confession to make. I love Google. I also fear Google. But I can’t leave Google. We’ve been together for so many years, and shared so much. It’s given me so much, but it can take even more away. Don’t get me wrong. Google’s been very good to me. But I’ve heard that there are some people in its past, before me, that it didn’t treat very well. And, to be honest, I’m not sure I like some of its friends. I’m know some of its friends don’t like me, and I hate to think of Google telling them everything it knows about me. And, I never know if it will turn on me or not. So I can’t walk out. Google has way too much on me. In a sense, you might say Google owns me. And what Google owns, Google can sell out.

It started out so well. When we met, Google was just a simple little search engine. Kind of plain, but willing to get just about anything for me, and all I had to do was ask. And it had a kind of charm about it, complete with a rags-to-riches success story. Yet, it stayed simple in spite of its success. On the surface anyway. Things aren’t so simple now.

Technorati Tags: current events, politics, privacy, government, puppy, technology, web

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[Ed. note: I'm actually out with Parker and his daycare class today a field trip to the zoo. This post was written late Monday night, when I should have been sleeping in preparation for spending the day with 20 or so 3-to-5 year olds.]

I’ve spent the evening reading various posts about diversity in the blogosphere, and I intend to write a longer post about all that I’ve read later. It’s a topic that I’ve blogged about before, and a lot of bandwidth has been burned since the last time I posted about. So I’m trying to figure out what started the fire this time. But reading some of the posts and comments brought to mind an issue that I haven’t written about much.

In, I think I’ve written about net neutrality exactly once. But in reading about diversity in the progressive blogosphere, it occurred to me that net neutrality is an issue that could have a huge impact on that diversity. And progressive people of color could have a huge impact on that issue if we can get our communities and institutions to pay attention to it.

Technorati Tags: blogs, current events, politics, net neutrality, race

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Instant Karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna look you right in the face,
Better get yourself together darlin’,
Join the human race,
How in the world you gonna see,
Laughin’ at fools like me,
Who on earth d’you think you are,
A super star,
Well, right you are.

~ John Lennon, “Instant Karma”

It’s not nice, I know, to gloat over another person’s misfortune, but in this case I think it’s alright to marvel at the wonders of karma, or at least that what goes around occasionally comes around too. Last month I blogged about a website called AutoAdmit, where some law students say anonymous comments cost them jobs. The owner of the site, Anthony Ciolli, refused to remove those comments after the students, citing freedom of speech as the reason. 
Funny how the worm turns. Via Majikethise comes news that Ciolli was recently turned down by a law firm himself.

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Ah, dammit. After casting about for a place to host the images posted on this blog, I pretty much settled on Photobucket. Now it looks like Fox Interactive may buy Photobucket. I’m not sure I can live with Fox having anything to do with my content. So it may be time to take another look at image hosting.

I've been thinking about adding this category for a while now. And I totally admit that it's inspired by Oprah, more than a little. However, not being the Queen of all Media, I won't be giving away the items I post about here. But this blog has been pretty heavily political for a while now, so I thought it might be nice to post about something else, like reviewing stuff that I've come across and liked so much that I want to talk about it somewhere. Who knows? Maybe someday, I'll attain Oprah-like status (or even a fraction thereof) and be able to do giveaways. But for now, maybe people who read these posts will discover something they might want to try out, but haven't heard of before.

I've always been a music lover; something my extensive CD collection and the 4,000+ songs on my iPod can attest to, and something I think I came buy naturally, since my dad was an avid music lover and my brother is also. I owned one of the first models of the Sony Walkman, and since then I've rarely gone anywhere without some music pounding in my ears; from riding the bus to school to commuting to work today. Along the way I graduated t portable CD players, and finally to the iPod, and developed some related obsessions along the way.

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I wrote about my gaming habit earlier. Well, I’ve acquired a new gaming distraction. It started last week on our company retreat, when I had fun with the Nintendo Wii and joined in another game that everyone seemed to enjoy. It wasn’t something I’d have ever tried in public of in front of strangers. But once I tried it, I wanted to do it again and again. And since then I have.

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Well, at least now I know why I did it.

On December 31st, the four-year-old PC I used almost exclusively for gaming up and died on me. I turned it on to find that it wouldn't load Windows XP and made a strange clicking noise for several minutes before telling me the second hard drive was fried. Shortly afterwards, the mother board joined the hard drive in its demise. I knew then it was dead. I'd added a second hard drive, upgraded the RAM and the video card, but a new mother board was beyond my capabilities.

By January 1st withdrawal and depression started to set in. By January 2nd, I was out buying a new PC, just for gaming. I felt silly at the time, but now I know I was just fulfilling a psychological need.

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