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

Who’s coming to Wikimania and to my talk?

Everything that anybody’s Web 2.0 startup is suddenly struggling with has been under construction at Wikipedia since 2001….

For example, coping with the ups and downs on your site triggered by stories in the media.

I’ve been looking at edit wars and vandal waves until I now see Excel spreadsheets in my dreams. (Aside from a few days off at beautiful and intense BlogHer 2006.)

Much more to say next time that I’m not messing with spreadsheets….

Going around the circle, introducing ourselves:

Marisa: My name is Marisa and my blog is “Nursing Student Hell.”

(Somebody else, very excited): I read your blog! I read your blog!

Marisa: You do? I’ve never met somebody who reads my blog before.

I love this conference.

“I need some strong dudes to hang drywall,”
yells the truckdriver. A mob of eager workers rushes forward; soon the
rickety truckbed is full of strong dudes who’ll hang drywall all day
and go home with minimal pay.

Many of our brightest young college graduates will be facing career
choices like those of the “strong dudes,” as bigcos redistribute jobs
to the lowest bidders around the globe. More than one startup is
already figuring out how to broker web-based piecework so that jobless
people who trained for “good jobs with computers” can compete for the
privilege of getting
paid much, much less than the value they generate.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of this story, I read in
Scobleizer
that Jason Calacanis is taking heat for wanting to pay Digg’s best
diggers to come do for him what they’re now doing for free at Digg.

Jason Calacanis retorts, “You know what the difference between the so-called “elite” and
the top users in the masses are? One group gets paid and one
doesn’t–that’s it.”

You don’t have to be at a conference full of great women to understand
that lots of valuable work in this world is underpaid or unpaid.
But…offering to pay even the top 12 people a tiny fraction of what
they’re worth–what a revolutionary idea!

Frank and Beth

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Will the next post at listics.com be written by Beth instead of Frank? Or will it be written by Frank channeling Beth? Tune in tonight and see if you can guess!

Rebecca and Aura

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Rebecca Gerendasy (http://cookingupastory.com/) videoblogs the intersection of food and life. Aura Novembre (http://www.newstex.com ) is doing blog-outreach for Newstex ("Content on Demand"). What a great party!

Modeling a sportscar

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Dear Frank,

I think you would look very good in this Saturn convertible.

Or anywhere else, for that matter.

I am having a great time at BlogHer–see you soon!

Love and xxxxx from Betsy

…but not into jobs in the actual US of A.

Link to Lisa Williams and write to your congresscritter…

blogher2006 001

Originally uploaded by Lisa Canter.

Lisa Canter (“Lisa’s Room”) took this great photo of the wild array of business cards here…almost as diverse an assortment as the wild array of people here….

Getting to San Jose from Cambridge, MA was a trip, in (almost) the worst sense of the word.

Our airplane sat on the runway for 6 hours (2 in Boston, 4 in Chicago) — I didn’t bring enough fun things to do for a 12-hour trip, but fortunately I was sleep-deprived enough to get entertainment value from my dreams.

I started a public photo pool over at Flickr for BlogHer 2006, add yours if you’ve got them!

With half a nod to those “priceless” advertisements…

Owning a straw hat you can bow-tie under your chin so it doesn’t blow off…

I wouln’t have minded chasing a flyaway hat when I was 20 …

Re-finding the hat, crumpled up from its latest packing

I would have been so cross with myself when I was 30 …

Deciding that ironing a straw hat fell under the heading of “scientific experiment,” not “annoying drudgery”

I was just learning how much that helped, back when I was 40 …

Ironing that hat back to good-enough, knowing that I could crumple it up again with an easy conscience…

Just one more thing I’ve learned, since I turned 50 …

Throwing the hat back into the closet, because I am taking too many things already!

Yes, I would have had the sense to do that when I was 10!

And I’m glad I still do! Off to BlogHer–see you there?

Pomo blablabla or real information?

Here’s more from the same anonymous commenter on Zephoria:

This incertitude to understand someone, even close, demands two things, and the fact that youngsters grew up facing this problem explains why they have commpletely adopted these behaviors:

– prefered communatarism, strong identity markups beyond the usual “prefered music” categories, ties to others as a social branding: you need those both to lower your cost to be situated, and to be surronded be people who can understand you faster and better;

– transparency, a concerning transparency: youngsters prefer to show to anyone they adress, schedule—anything because they know they won’t know why it will be used for (and they trust openness); setting up a availability rule is too tedious (and artificial: you have to justifiy the rules you want to be followed) and closing one’s access will mostly prevent relatives to find you back; well, you won’t hear about the other ones anyway. . .

I had trouble parsing this but got something out of it despite the annoying mannerism of its own social branding. (the social branding of no upper-case letters makes things hard to read, danah!)…

I got to Zephoria’s post on Wikipedia via a link from David Weinberger, who has a new issue of JOHO online….

…now with a Wikipedia-themed bogus contest…
so even though I am in theory working hard on my own talk for Wikimana, whose title should maybe have referenced Paris Hilton rather than quantum mechanics, but I didn’t think of that when I was writing my abstract….

…it’s only 8 a.m., and I need to refocus.