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

Top ten quotes from discussion led by Jay Rosen:

1. Chris Lydon (responding to Jay’s question, “What is moving blogs
   toward journalism?”): “We’re moving toward journalism for the same
   reason we bombed Baghdad–because we can.”
2. Henry Copeland: “150 yrs ago, one of the mainsprings of journalism was partisanship. That has been denatured in the big media.”
3. Dean Landsman: “Look at LiveJournal. Those are journals–but is that journalism?”
4. Callie Crossley of WGBH:
   “I am a journalist. Journalism is not just the tools. Journalism is a
   set of practices, a framework. It involves the selection of material,
   framed by some ethics about how you get the material.There are people
   on the web who are journalists, and there are bloggers, and the two are
   quite different.”
5. Dan
   Gillmor (responding to Jay’s question, “You had a whole career in
   journalism before you became a blogger. How did it change you?”) : “Not
   as much as you think. I was a columnist. If you write about tech in
   Silicon Valley, you are used to feedback from readers, and you learn
   they know much more than you do.”
6. Jay Rosen: “Trust is part of the brand in journalism. The reader doesn’t
   have to re-decide, every time a new byline shows up, do I trust this
   person? In a blog you have to re-do that every day.”
7. Jeff Sharlet: “As journalist, I covered the Christian right. As
   a blogger, I find myself more and more becoming part of the community
   of the Christian right.”
8. Micah Sifry: “People are hungry for filters they can trust. We
   are awash in information….An expert, somebody who grabs onto
   something and sticks to it, is serving a useful function.”  David
   Weinberger says, “I’d rather have an aggregator than a filter–100
   different viewpoints from all over the world.” Micah responds, “It’s
   not either-or.”
9. Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor: “I think journalism needs
   an enema–I think blogging is the best thing to happen to journalism.”
10. Mary Hodder: “Blogging pulls back the curtain. If a campaign reporter has some particular opinion, I want to know it.”

For more: See Jay’s own discussion, blogposts by Jeff Jarvis and Will Richardson, and photographs by Werner Vogels.

Brand-new and piping hot today–Halley Suitt has corraled David Weinberger and a few stellar others into a group blog for Worthwhile magazine.

The magazine doesn’t exist yet, but when it does it will be about passion and profit and what makes worthwhile work.

The blog is funny and sharp and full of interest, as you’d expect with those writers–did I mention Tom Peters?

If the magazine lives up to this blog prequel, it’ll be–oh damn, can’t resist this, sorry–really worthwhile.

…but every now and again I read something over at Halley’s Comment that makes me say, as if I were a believer:

Thank God for Halley!

There’s somebody beaming out human, baffled, but hopeful thought from the planet I live on…and that somebody is Halley.

According to Bruce Sterling, American internetters are slowly-boiled frogs.

We have grown used to deceptive spam and popunders–we dodge them daily without much conscious effort. (How many emails with 30 kb attachments did you delete yesterday?) Bruce says:

If you could get every scam artist, phisher, and 419 scammer and surround this building, we’d see them as a terrifying army, but they have carte
blanche to go anywhere in the world and terrorize people less
sophisticated than ourselves.

Thinking about it now, he’s totally right.

As we put more and more good stuff up on the web, and democratically encourage folks around the world to get out there and find it–maybe we should take some responsibility for the risks they’ll encounter.

How? I don’t know. But just realizing the problem exists (thanks, Bruce!) I know more than I did yesterday.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for transcribing Bruce Sterling’s wonderful, rambling rant at sxsw. Damn, if I could have stayed just one day longer, I could have gone to his party.

BTW, I just finished reading Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction–loved it–buy it, if you haven’t already read it!

How do you picture a CSS ninja and PHP jedi knight? Someone like Simon Willison of incutio?

I imagined some supercoder with years of geek backstory.

Instead, when I met him at sxsw kickball, where were those imagined gray hairs? Where were the frown-wrinkles from hours of scowling at pages of bad markup?

As you can see, they were hidden by his ninja headgear.

Wow! I met every single one of these people at SXSW, no wonder I had a good time:

• Yvonne Adams (wearenotsheep)
• Doug Bowman (StopDesign)
• Danah Boyd (danah.org)
• Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon)
• Tantek Celik (tantek.com)
• Anil Dash (Six Apart)
• Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing)
• Jeremy Dunck (dunck.us)
• Eliza Evans (U Texas)
• Dan Gillmor (San Jose Mercury News)
• Adam Hill (TheBigPixel)
• Col Dave Hughes (Old Colorado City Communications)
• Neil Iscoe (U Texas)
• David Isenberg (isen.com, Stupid Networks)
• Joi Ito (neoteny.com)
• Scott Johnson (Feedster)
• Pete Kaminski (istori.com/log/)
• Susan Kaup (sooz.com)
• George Kelly (AllAboutGeorge)
• Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Ph.D. (mamamusings, RIT)
• Kevin Lawver (Search Ninja)
• Jon Lebkowsky (Polycot Consulting)
• Adina Levin (Socialtext, EFF)
• Jonas M Luster (netwarrior)
• Cameron Marlow (Blogdex)
• Michael Moncur (Quotes of the Day)
• Craig Newmark (craigslist.org)
• Nikolai Nolan (Bloggie Man!)
• Jorge Ortiz (d-volution)
• Matt Pusateri (MattMedia)
• Mike Pusateri (cruftbox)
• Zack Rosen (deanforamerica.com)
• Chip Rosenthal (EFF-Austin)
• Sam Ruby (intertwingly.net)
• Wendy Seltzer (EFF)
• Dave Shea (CSSZenGarden.com)
• Jim Snider (New America Foundation)
• Jon Udell (infoworld.com)
• Michael Alex Wasylik (perpetualbeta)
• David Weinberger (JOHO)
• Kevin Werbach (werblog.com)
• Simon Willison (incutio)

Who challenged the sxsw electrical outlet policy, inspired Joi Ito, and set off the cries of outrage from Cory Doctorow, Robert Scoble, Dan Gillmor, et al. that resulted in the conference change in policy?

It was my friend Jonas M. Luster, hereby memorialized as a knight in shining armor, riding a white horse. Thanks, Jonas, on behalf of all the people you stick up for in your many chivalrous avatars.

Back row: Chip Rosenthal (EFF-Austin), Eliza Evans (U Texas), Jorge Ortiz (d-volution), Jon Udell (Infoworld), Wendy Seltzer (EFF), Neil Iscoe (U Texas), David Weinberger (World of Ends).

Front Row: David Isenberg (WTF2004), Betsy Devine (Feedster), Jonas Luster (Karma Warrior), Pete Kaminski (Socialtext), Adina Levin (Socialtext, EFF).

Thanks to David Isenberg for the (larger version of this) photo!

Typical funny sxsw conference moment–first morning, waiting for Kevin
Werbach to start his talk, visiting people in #sxsw IRC, wondering when
I’ll meet some of the people I know from Joi Ito’s chat. Sitting in SXSW IRC, and jluster (aka Jonas M. Luster) asks where I’m sitting. It turns out he and I were sitting in
the front row, 3 seats apart, with Sam Ruby (whom I also hadn’t met)
between us. On the other side of me was Jon Lebkowsky, and on the other
side of him was David Isenberg. Awesome.

OK, in our last episode, we left Betsy in typical Betsy-mode, sitting with
my computer in my lap and talking back while typing to a very good talk
on spectrum by Kevin Werbach.

I then ran off to play the annual kickball game, organize by Anil Dash of SixApart.

Opposing pitcher and search ninja Kevin Lawver
rolled 100% strikes while demonstrating a high level of trashtalk–is
there a major league for adult kickball? And Flash-meister Matt Pusateri, who got me out at first–I have forgiven you, and I am sorry I threatened to tell your mom what you did.

The awesome George Kelly of AllAboutGeorge kicked a home run for my team (our clever team name was Two, altho Gnu was also nominated.) 

Others who demonstrated remarkable skill are redheaded Yvonne Adams (WeAreNotSheep),  Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon),
Simon Willison (Incutio), Michael Moncur (Quote of the Day), and Jeremy Dunck.

But my very top props go to Michael Pusateri (aka Argyle), not only for kickball skill but also for
creative writing, as witness this praise of my skill in IRC, for which
I only had to hint the tiniest bit:

Same time next year, Anil–and next year team Two will be number one!

Here I am in the wild wild west (Austin Texas–sxsw, yee ha!) sitting next to famed #joiito Texan adamhill.
Although he lives near South Fork and drives a shiny red convertible,
Adam claims not to own cowboy boots. Another illusion shattered. Four
of us sitting in a row in this corridor–Jonas Luster, Joi Ito, me, and
Adam. We’re all of us talking–in the IRC.

Kevin Werbach talked about freeing up the electronic spectrum this morning, great talk, see his blog and the Feedster search for Werbach.

He envisions a world where the electronic spectrum is no longer
auctioned off piece by tiny piece to rich monopolists–a world where
the spectrum is cleverly shared by all who want to use it–a world
where troublesome folks are dealt with by tort law and common law
rather than a complex new system of criminalizing regulations.

I wasn’t the only one to worry out loud that many powerful
companies have big investments in a scarcity model for the
electronic spectrum.  If you look at what happened to the Clinton
health plan, you have an idea of the way private money translates into
public power, and the way a plan benefiting many people can be blocked
by a determined few.

Looking on the bright side, the “Clinton health plan” example could be
a huge fund-raising issue for groups promoting an open spectrum.

Gosh, I’m tired. And I didn’t even get up to Anil Dash’s kickball game, or the
interesting things Dan Gillmor and Lisa Rein said about small media….
Read somebody else’s blog, I’m sure it’s out there!