Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Cluetrain 2003

Moderator: Christopher Lydon, Berkman Center

Panelists:
Elizabeth Spiers, NY Magazine–formerly Gawker but now TheKicker
Doc Searls, Linux Journal
Jim Moore, Berkman Center
Adam Curry, United Resources of Jamby

• Adam Curry: When you talk about what people are doing with the web now, think about the way the telephone was used when it was new–to call ahead and tell you that a telegram is on the way.
• Elizabeth Spiers: People talk about “the web”, “the weblogs”–from my point of view, the web is incredibly granular.
• Adam Curry: I wake up in the morning and the latest Chris Lydon interview in on my iPod. I didn’t have to do anything, I didn’t have to understand how it got there. I call it a kind of reverse Tivo.
• Chris Lydon: I’ve drunk so much of Dave Winer’s weblog Koolaid now, I get dizzy.
• Jim Moore: What we need is not so much Smart Mobs as wise mobs. The collective wisdom of the second superpower gives us that possibility.
• Doc Searls: The only recourse people had in 1974 (in the movie Network) was to go to the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”–but they were yelling in complete impotence.
• Esther Dyson: What happens when blogging becomes genuinely democratic? What happens when not just the people in this room are blogging, but people outside this room–all kinds of people?
• Elizabeth Spiers: As the blogosphere increases, you have the problems of figuring out who’s good. And there’s a technical problem of how you find good new sources.
• Kevin Marks: Bloggers tend to correct their mistakes a lot faster than newspapers do. It’s kind of an asymptotic approach to the truth.
• David Weinberger: Weblogs have finally killed the myth of objectivity. We’ve known for a long time that objectivity is impossible–it would be like the art of seeing the world as if nobody is looking at it. Truth is a property of the net itself.
• Ted Henderson: People have compared weblogs to the telephone. I don’t know many people, except maybe teenagers, who pick up the telephone and dial random numbers to get their message out.
• Henry Copeland, blogads.com: People here talk about how great it is for weblogs to kill the gatekeeper. A lot of people think the gatekeeper is liberal, and a lot of weblogs are conservative. So I don’t think you should
• Adam Curry: The discussion today has been very US-centric. We talk about big media as big US media–we talk about Iraq, and Washington politics. That’s not what blogs in Europe are talking about.
• Kevin Marks: The net is too big for us to see all of it. It’s like Caliban’s mirror, because you see what you’re loooking for. If you look for dark things you’ll see dark things.
• Kevin Marks: The net changes the power law of the media curve. If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power curve that goes all the way down gradually, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single click. If you look at popularity in the “real” world–best-selling books, or top music–the power curve drops like a stone from a very high level. That’s because in order to get a book published, or a piece of music recorded, you have to convince somebody that you’re going to sell a million copies. You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.
• Jay Rosen: There are no masses, there are just ways of seeing people as masses.

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You can get links to pages of speakers I missed from the blogroll at BloggerCon.

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