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

Two Irishmen jumped off the Empire State Building…which brings me to my own suggestion for turning the Kathy Sierra horror story into a victory for blogging kindness. Let me tell you a (non-PC) story I heard from my dad…

***

Pat and Mike and their half empty bottle of whiskey somehow get to the top of the Empire State Building. “Sure, and a leap to the ground would be a glorious end to this fine evening,” says Pat.

“I’m not so sure,” says Mike. “What if it hurts?”

“Ye baby” says Pat, “watch this.” So Pat jumps over and hollers back up to Mike, “Jump, ye baby, it doesn’t hurt at all.”

So then Mike jumps, and he and Pat are both flying down through the air and feeling grand. But Pat is still that little bit in front. So Pat hits the ground first. And Pat yells up to Mike, “Mikey–go back, go back–it hurts, it hurts!”

***
Good people around the blogworld are asking how we can defend cyberbullying victims like Kathy Sierra. But the great story here is that Kathy defended herself against bullies who lured each other on into more and more outrageous posts and comments.

One minute the bullies, like Pat, were flying high, with power to hurt and diminish whatever they touched. Then–thanks to Kathy–bullies hit the reality that a wide public is reading ugly comments made about *them*.

It hurts, it hurts.

No, I’m not rejoicing in anyone’s pain. There’s been more than enough pain to go around in this whole sorry mess.

My point is–let’s get back to the positive here–that warning cyberbullies to “Remember Kathy Sierra” is powerful and likely to succeed. It’s not a call to improve your morality. It’s a call to remember the horrible wrath that rained down on anyone who had even tenuous connections to sites where anons gathered to bully Kathy Sierra. Respected people, good people, like Frank Paynter and Jeneane Sessum, whose work on the web had made them widely loved, suddenly found themselves under truly scary attack by angry (and well-meaning) people who were ready to shoot first and maybe aim later.

“Remember Kathy Sierra.” It’s better though longer than “Stop Cyberbullying.” And it’s shorter than my alternative warning to potential cyberbullies:

“Go back, go back. It hurts, it hurts.”

***
p.s. I bless Andy Carvin for “Stop Cyberbullying Day,” (also Scott MacLeod for some great cartoons.)

Dixie Chicks

Originally uploaded by Kingsnake.

Frank and I watched that Dixie Chicks movie tonight–three young women, toting seven babies among them, trying to make a career in the public arena, end up a focus of loonies who think it’s great fun to target prominent women with ugly insults, an attempt to wreck their career, and some (maybe credible and maybe not) death threats.

I had no idea, when I borrowed Shut Up and Sing from my little sis in Florida, that it would be so relevant to the current blogstorm surrounding ugly insults (and more) aimed at some of the blogosphere’s most high-profile women on some websites that just got called out by Kathy Sierra.

I’m glad that by pushing back hard and loudly and effectively, Kathy Sierra has got some much-needed wider public attention to cyber-bullying. I would have preferred it if her mention of their names hadn’t aimed lynch-mob psychologies toward two of my most admired elder-bloggers, Jeneane Sessum and Frank Paynter. (And I am proud of my old friend Dave Winer for stepping up to defend Frank and Jeneane and even Rageboy, all of whom have said some pretty harsh things about him in the past.)

I’m not in favor of lynch-mobs–and I should probably take Dean Landsman’s good advice to “Blog no evil.”

But I’m not ready to make nice on this.

I think that those who wrote ugly stuff about Kathy and Maryam and Tara deserve to think about what it would mean to have their own real names permanently attached to the nasty stuff they wrote in some “sekrit” web clubhouse.

Doc Searls was told that some unknown hacker made all this big mess. If that’s the case, said hacker has been responsible for criminal acts far beyond cyber-bullying, and I look forward to reading more about police efforts to learn the troll’s identity. Update: Doc has now expressed some doubts of his own on this story.

I hope that Kathy and Maryam and Tara will dismay their tormentors, as the Dixie Chicks did, by moving on to more renown and new achievements.

Nextbigthingitude? What a great word Halley has dreamed up for Twitter. But it’s more than that.

Twitter is an experiment in turning OFF a few social taboos, to see what happens next.

Twitter, like blogging, shuts down the taboo that says “Don’t talk about yourself, people don’t care.” Twitter, like Orkut, gives delicious permission to ask for and offer friendship to people you like, while withholding your friendship from people you don’t like so much.

Don’t string theorists believe that the world has tons of extra rolled-up dimensions? Twitter-ers are playing games with the social dimensions, collapsing a few just to see what might happen next.

And what happens next is, most likely, that we all get bored. Or maybe we don’t.

Maybe we decide we want this crazy new-fangled interaction toy that nobody wanted before it was invented–just the way we decided we want email and cellphones.

Besides–it’s fun being part of this experiment–join me!

Thanks to the American Dialect Society for remininding me just what words were new, way back in 2002, when I started blogging:

2002 Word of the Year: weapons of mass destruction or WMD, sought for in Iraq. Most Likely to Succeed: blog, from “weblog,” a website of personal events, comments, and links. Most Useful: google (verb), as in “to google someone,” to search the Web using the search engine Google for information on a person or thing…

Think that’s pretty funny? When they started in 1990, a most-useful new term was “laptop computer,” which they thoughtfully defined as “a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds.”

When did the tipping point come for “blog”, “blogging”, “blogger?

When was the last time your Uncle Norbert said, over Thanksgiving pie, “Lucille tells me that you’ve now got something called a blob?” And now, didn’t Aunt Tillie suddenly friend you in Twitter, asking to be blogrolled? I think comments are open here, though I’m still not totally sure how WordPress works…

Thanks to Resource Shelf whose link to new words just added to the OED sent me on that trip down memory lane…

Here you see Einstein (happy birthday, professor!) on the front porch of the Princeton house where Frank and I later spent about eight happy years.

It’s an artist’s conception, so you don’t see any tourists ringing the doorbell.

Welcome to my new blog. Please pardon me if it’s now a (messy) open house. I had been planning to fix it up more before sending out any virtually-engraved invitations. Things moved too fast for me.

Einstein’s ninth law is that nothing moves faster than gossip through the blogosphere.

Or maybe something moves faster–but that something sure isn’t Betsy!

Wow, looks spacious–clean–no cat hair on anything–we’ll, we’ll soon fix that.

Cecil Coupe with his MvManila software managed to collect all the posts and all the pictures I created using Manila over the past four-years-plus, and move them into WordPress so that they all link to each other in the appropriate way, despite the changed URL. Pretty amazing–we ran into some ISP obstacles along the way–through it all, Cecil remained a (very hard-working) pleasure to work with.

Thank you, Cecil!

I found Cecil using a Google search for “move Manila blog” but I put some links in here so that you can find him even faster.

Dave Dan Mal Amanda
Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Whew–how did it happen that I drove into Boston’s Chinatown this weekend? There be dragons, at least when it’s Chinese New Year.

Dave Winer hit the right coast this weekend for two conferences, with some new ideas for organizing our national conversation.

Back in 2003-2004, I remember a previous idea of Dave’s that I thought sounded pretty crazy–that the Dean campaign should spend $$ to create accessible blogging software/hosting. Piffle, said I and others–of course SixApart, WordPress and others have since then made millions doing exactly that.

In the photo: Dave Winer, Dan Bricklin, Mal Watlington and Amanda Watlington dim-summing at Chau Chow’s.
More photographs of Boston brunch/bloggers — e.g. Shimon Rura, Mike Walsh, Tracy Adams, and j, aka jkbaumgart — are tagged “Chauchow” on my Flickr page.

Movable School
Originally uploaded by jessamyn.

George Washington Carver (1861(?) – 1943 ) has been both praised and debunked at great length by many people in Wikipedia (and elsewhere of course).

But did he invent peanut butter? Well, probably not–depending on how you define “invent” and how you define “peanut butter.”

The funny thing over in Wikipedia is how some people want to define and redefine peanut butter so that it means essentially “something that GW Carver could not have invented.”

For example, Carver could not have invented peanut butter because ground peanuts were well-known in Africa. So peanut butter was invented in Africa.

Also, ground-up peanuts appear in an 1885 cookbook. So peanut butter was invented in 1885. Not to mention that “nutmeal” was patented in 1897 by Dr. Kellogg. Er, did I say “nutmeal”? Sorry, Wikipedia calls that invention “peanut butter.” So, GW Carver didn’t invent it.

Yet another reason Carver didn’t invent peanut butter–his recipe just described some peanuts ground up, disgusting and oily. Real peanut butter is the modern stuff that somebody patented in 1922.

It reminds me so much of the Wikipedia ruckus over questions like “Did Dave Winer invent podcasting?” Of course nobody ever asks such silly questions except for the people who want to define the words “invented” and “podcasting” to make the answer come out that just about anyone, maybe your Aunt Lulu, might be the one who deserves every bit of the credit for podcasting, but it sure as heck is not Dave Winer.

No, whatever Dave Winer did in modifying RSS and blogware and aggregators so they could link audio files to RSS — or in promoting “audioblogging” including gathering all the major audiobloggers at Bloggercon in 2003, after which podcasting really took off–well, whatever he did deserves barely a mention because he really didn’t “invent” podcasting, and anybody can define “podcasting” to make sure that somebody else did “invent” it.

Now, most modern sources don’t claim that Carver “invented” peanut butter. Most of what he published about his research appeared in agricultural bulletins for poor farmers. There he extolled long lists of peanut recipes, urging farmers to rotate their cropland from soil-draining cotton to nitrogen-replenishing legumes like peanuts and soy. At the suggestion of Booker T Washington, Carver designed a mobile classroom on wheels to carry his message out to the desolate farmlands.

George Washington Carver was a big-picture guy, and his big picture was the desperation of ex-slave farmers bent low under the heavy load of King Cotton. The teaching, the research, the promotion of his findings–those were all little details in Carver’s big picture.

But no, Victoria, he didn’t invent peanut butter. Lots of Wikipedia readers can tell you that.

………………………………..
p.s. Clarification–my experience has been that *most* Wikipedia editors are sincerely trying to make articles better, more accurate and informative. But we do get some very persistent point-of-view pushers from time to time, and their antics are more fun to write about.

Kevin Marks, whose contributions to Bloggercon 1 inspired my artistic-but-evil twin to create this image, is moving his X-ray vision and other skills from Technorati to Google. So say Dave Winer and a bunch of other people*. Will Kevin–(congratulations, BTW!)–be any different now he’s begoogled? I hope not too much, because Kevin was already super.

* Update, February 17. Three days after I blogged this, Technorati still hasn’t indexed this blogpost or added me to their list of bloggers linking to Kevin’s post. Sigh. Yes, I long ago “claimed” my blog at Technorati. Yes, two days ago I manually “pinged” Technorati that my blog had updated. No, I don’t think bloggers should have to bow down like that to the gods of “who’s in the web conversation” to be included in Technorati’s much-vaunted record of “who’s in the web conversation.” And it didn’t do me any good anyway.

The Google blogsearch, however, added my post about one day after I made it. Not very fast, but at least it was accurate.

• Postcard from a bobblehead in transit.
• The shaggy-guru “life-is-a-fountain” story.
• Aargh, dude! Pomos are indexing my Discourse!.
• Coders and cannibals: Can you tell them apart?.
• Blizzard in progress.
• Pioneers and people “early to the party”.
• Web 2.0 as a giant Schrodinger’s cat.
• I’m a Second-Law-of-Thermodynamics person.
• Hermit crab and the fingers of a blogger.
• Now we know what the little red hand really means.
• User-generated discontent. (coal barge)
• Phone Jammer Gate for beginners: A reference page.
• Tom, the loud cat, or enough politics for a while.
• Another week in yet another hotel room.
• Younger than springtime?

Who’s in charge of prosecuting the phone-jamming?

• Funny ha-ha: Tobin’s attorney on bloggers.
• A river runs through it…
• Phone-jamming: What real people think.
• Meet Guy Goma, BBC blooper-saver.
• Paku-paku, Mr. Pac-Man!
• Arms length? Maybe. Clean hands? No..
• Phone jamming wonkery from James Tobin’s sentencing
  .
• Warm heart, sharp wit: Freeman Dyson.
• Figs 2.0: The VC pitch from BC.
• Theory of something at a University 2.0.
• One second from eek!
• Some wounded veterans have funny ha-ha medals?
• Emblematic of life..but then, what isn’t?
• The path to wisdom leads past a big straw hat…
• One of those wonderful, wonderful moments at BlogHer.
• Big storm, and a tree squished Frank’s parked car…
• Terrifying thoughts from the Wikimania speakers’ lounge.
• My advice to citizen reporters.
• Summarize 3+ years of phone-jamming news in 3 minutes.
• “Paris Hilton” quantum effects on the two-way web.
• Amity inside Frank’s smooshed car, now minus the tree.
• Side view of surprising Swarovski waterfall.
• Opera postscript, and scientist-wrangling how-to..
• Alpine cemetery glows at night from candles lit on each grave.
• Judy and jewelweed inspire skunk-tomato story.
• Republican spinners heart “The View” of Rosie.
• The craziness inspired by four big, big cup holders.
• Happy 80th birthday to T D Lee!
• Frank Wilczek explains dark matter in 24 seconds.
• Searching for placeblogs, with town names from an old atlas.
• Dressed in blue jeans and (sometimes) dragonfly wings….
• If you live in NH, you need a woodpile…
• Could Frank Wilczek be right about this too?
• Breaking news: Not guilty by reason of saying ‘I take full responsibility’.
• May God’s blessing be with you, Ms. Vinny.
• Impossible problem checkmated by open-source software.
• Do you want your two-year-old forced to wear Manolos?
• Things to think about when you vote today.
• We’re in Norfolk, our suitcase is still in Boston.
• Thanksgiving goofs–just part of what families need.
• So many songs about rainbows…
• View from the backseat, ca 1989.
• To boldly go where I’ve never been before ….
• Funny ha-ha and peculiar–just five things?