Xark!

Found at Bellascribe: Joni Mitchell & Charleston

From a post by the often-missed Peg Alford:

I learned Joni Mitchell played and temporarily stayed in Charleston, this after one of those synchronicities of three: (1) out in Big Sur, seeing again some of those well-known photos of Joni, and Graham Nash, at Esalen, and I think maybe the Monterey Pop Festival (here’s one of them of Robert Altman’s); (2) seeing a vinyl copy of (the excellent) Hejira for sale at Mole’s Record Exchange; (3) watching, DVD, Copying Beethoven — it was okay, bordering on not — which made me think of Joni Mitchell’s song for Beethoven “Judgment of the Moon and Stars.” (Not unsurprisingly, there’s a YouTube video for the song here.) After these events, I re-watched the PBS American Masters DVD, Woman of Heart and Soul, and was struck anew by the fact of her going on her own, solely, as a young woman around the country playing at these unknown places, which she’d also booked herself. I liked how she talked about a “tempering by fire.” How she was an only child but had “chosen many brothers along the way.” How she called music she wrote later out in Laurel Canyon “kitchen songs.” Her reply to young aspirants who ask for advice, “Do you want to be a star or an artist?”

Always an important, if under-valued, question.

A new addition: Fantasy Football Mashup

Many of you may remember how our 2006 experiment in regular coverage of the NFL came to dominate much of this blog last fall. What most people don't know is just how popular those posts became, routinely doubling and tripling our normal daily traffic. And with my office pool picks spending most of the season above the .700 winning percentage threshold (I finished at .677), we developed a regular following of readers who profitably bet our picks every week.

Which brought Janet and I to an interesting conversation: Yes, it's nice to get that kind of attention, but is it good for Xark to lean so heavily toward NFL content? This blog is intended to be about many things, not just a few, and I began to think that chasing NFL readers was harming the identity of the site.

So last year we began quietly reviving an unpublicized blog experiment we'd called Fantasy Mashup, and this summer we really dove into generating new copy. The result:  FFBMashup.com, a site devoted  to fantasy football and NFL coverage.

You'll notice something different: Google ads, plus a display ad pointing people towards our CafePress store where we're marketing T-shirts for fantasy football players. Xark takes no advertising of any kind, but our hope is that the traffic we generate on FFBMashup will eventually cover the various costs associated with our multiple Web ventures.

So rather than posting weekly office-pool picks and power rankings on Xark, I'll be using this blog to help steer people to the full articles on FFBMashup. For instance, you can read my first 2007 Power Ranking today. The Top 5:

1. San Diego Chargers
2. New England Patriots
3. Chicago Bears
4. Dallas Cowboys
5. Carolina Panthers

Think that's wrong? Look at my bottom five:

28. Miami Dolphins
29. New York Giants
30. Oakland Raiders
31. Kansas City Chiefs
32. Atlanta Falcons

You're all invited to drop by and tell me what an idiot I am. While you're at it, check out the materials we've been building up to help you prepare for your fantasy drafts this month.

A special note for all you Packer fans: I'm not hating on Brett Favre just because I'm a Bears fan. But, yes, I am hating on him.

Science and media

A day after the Mooney/Nisbet article on "Framing Science" appeared in the journal Science, yours truly stood on a stage beside some truly distinguished company and tried to explain to a room full of graduate biology students, researchers and professors how -- from a journalist's perspective -- they could become more effective at communicating what they know.

Where do you begin? Well, I figured the best advice was to determine what you're trying to accomplish first and then work backward from that. Because there's no single goal of communication, and you can't judge effectiveness if there's nothing to which you can compare your results. After delivering that little piece of vague wisdom I counseled the students on the value of repeating key points and suggested that blogs were a really interesting medium with implications for scientists that we really don't understand yet.

I was, of course, upstaged by the great Bud Ward, whose talk included a New Yorker cartoon of two aging scientists in a quiet, darkened lab office. One says to the other, "Well, at least we never stooped to popularizing science." There's a lot of dark humor implied in that subject, and it's not related solely to scientists.

Thinking Blogger Award

We've been tagged by Big Bad Ivy of Home Ec 101 ("What you wish your mama taught you") as part of the Thinking Bloggers Award meme. Works this way: First Ivy and Heather got tagged for Home Ec 101, and then they turned around and picked five more bloggers who make them think. Here's what she wrote:

Xark!- Xark is a wide ranging blog covering art, philosophy, religion, and politics. They do so in a thought provoking, controversial manner. Instead of just posting talking points, they start discussions.

They left out sports, jokes, geekery, movies, books, media, doodles, pictures and the various YouTube  diversions posted here, but make no mistake: I'm always ecstatic to find out that somebody outside of the immediate family actually reads us. Thank you, Ivy.

Now it's up to us now to pick five blogs that make us think, thereby extending the circle of recommendations. Since this is a group effort, I thought I'd open this one up to discussion. Any nominations from the floor?

Some possibilities:

MediaChannel: TPM scoops the mainstream

The Blogfractal

Via Michael Badger comes this outstanding cartoon from xkcd ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language") by Randall Monroe.

Bruce Sterling: Dot-Green

Via William Gibson, here's Bruce Sterling writing in The WaPo on green economics for our "stricken world that bypassed the time for action":

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green. I preached that stuff for years. I don't have to preach it anymore, because it couldn't be any louder. Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away.

Could I return to my first paragraph for a second? That part about me and the crowd of Serbian radicals? Serbia may be the world's single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.

That's just how the world behaved with the climate crisis, too. The time for action isn't now. The time for action was 40 years ago. Today we live in a stricken world that bypassed its time for action. We have wreaked science-fiction levels of havoc on the unresisting carcass of Mother Nature. The real trouble is ahead of us.

So what's the good part? They never gave up around here. On the contrary: There's a certain vivid liveliness in the way they're scrambling and clawing their way out of yawning abyss. The food is great, the women dress to kill, and sometimes they even laugh and dance.

You don't have to predict the future when you live in it.

Oh, and FYI -- this is what's on Gibson's mind at the moment...

Of course, Gibson says this wasn't the vision he had. "Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial."

Help a brother out

OK, gentle Xark readers, help me out by taking your gentle, Xark-reading asses over to my two new blogs on behalf of my employer. I want to get a little buzz going around these things before the general newspaper-reading public starts showing up on Friday...

The first blog is called Friday 5, and here's how it got started:

Janet and I were sitting in a booth at O'Malley's with Judy, the features editor, and she was looking for ideas for what to do with our Tuesday features section (previous management had placed Tuesdays in a four-topic rotation -- yowsa!). I'd been thinking a lot about lists as a way to communicate things, so I said "How about Tuesday 10?" to which Janet replied "Too many." Which was correct. But Tuesday 5 lacked the alliterative thing I was going for.

But then Judy says, "Well, we need a new section for Fridays, too," and there was the whole alliterative thing I wanted. So a section was born.

The idea with Friday 5  is to experiment with a print edition features front that does everything without traditional narrative structure. And the Web component is key. My goal with Friday 5 is that readers come away from it smarter,   and one of the areas that I want to address is living here. Living in a place isn't just about civics and elections and boards and committees and yada yada officialdom. Living in a place is about where you get your coffee, finding a good mechanic, picking a hardware store that has a knowledgeable staff. And newspapers don't write about these topics because it's such a difficult thing to balance with advertisers.

But here's where a blog comes in: If we invite people to talk about what they know and like, there's a good chance that we'll all learn things about those topics. And if it's valuable, then why not cover it in the newspaper? Rather than "the newspaper" picking five coffee shops (and what's your methodology? How do you make it fair? Did you go out and look at ALL the coffee shops in three counties?), it's possible that opening a blog discussion on the subject will lead us to some reader picks that will be useful and interesting to other readers.

Which makes Friday 5 -- the print edition -- unusual. It's a print section with a Web/blog component that serves to develop future print topics. That means that early Friday 5s won't have much to say about things like "Five great locally owned bookstores," but if the blog discussion gets interesting, later Friday 5s might well focus quite a bit on such topics. You don't launch a product like that: You cultivate it.

The second blog is Fun & Games, which is exactly what it sounds like. Inside the Friday 5 section each week we'll have a page where we'll offer different kinds of games, distractions and amusements. The first week will have a picture match-game (match the historic tiled curbside to the modern sign), a news-themed Wordfind puzzle, and a reader-interactive game in which we challenge people to see how many words they can create out of 15 state postal codes. Next week's line-up will vary. And so on.

The blog for Fun & Games is intended as the place where you can come for answers, hints, discussion and... well, fun. And again, you can't make something fun. You can only create an environment in which fun can happen.

But I'd hate to throw a party and have nobody show up. So help me out, 'cause I'm nervous.

Blinq and it's gone

I met journalist/blogger/smart guy Daniel Rubin over beers in Dave Hoggard's front yard back in October. We shared a first name, a profession, a Charleston background in the same newsroom and -- at vastly different ends of the same continuum -- a specialty. I covered the Lowcountry blogosphere part-time for The Post and Courier in a site I built in April 2006; Daniel covered the Philadelphia blogosphere for The Philadelphia Inquirer full-time with his blog, Blinq.

Blinq had little in common with Lowcountry Blogs. Our reading list hovers between 115 and 135 active blogs, depending on the month; Daniel's was easily in the hundreds, and those were just the most vocal and topical writers he had to track. Community blogging here is friendly and an awful lot like my early days in the small-town newspaper business: We notice when someone gets sick or loses a job, and we'll point to a post just because it struck us funny. Blinq was a different species entirely, covering the ever-morphing virtual buzz that crackled across Rubin's digital slice of Philly and New Jersey with a combination of caffeinated pop-culture timeliness and Great-Gig Brass Ones. Wrote Daniel: "Blogging for a Philly audience is a contact sport."

On Feb. 9, Daniel announced that he was hanging up his blog saddle to take a shot at a traditional metro columnist job. I got the news via Poynter Online today, and frankly, I'm bummed. So is Amy Gahran, writing for Poynter's E-Media Tidbits:

Personally, I'm very happy for Rubin, and I understand his desire to move on, to do something different. However, I'm sad for Blinq's community -- and for Philly.com. Rubin worked hard to build a strong, vibrant, highly engaged community around Blinq. Now, Philly.com is just letting that community die. From a business perspective, this seems to me like a huge error. I hope Philly.com reconsiders before it's too late.

And that's the beauty of it -- they can reconsider. Philly.com could opt to assign a new writer (or better still, a team of writers) to carry on with Blinq and continue to cultivate that rich community. If they do that now, before too much time passes, while the connective tissue of feeds and e-mail alerts are still in place, they could make a transition work.

The thing is, in online media community is golden. Community isn't merely fun, "feelgood," and energizing -- it's the foundation of most successful online business models, especially those that rely on advertising, subscriptions, and related products or events. You can't buy community; you must grow it and continually nurture it. Rubin did just that. Brilliantly.

A Book I Wish I'd Written

It’s been over 40 years since Marshall McLuhan first observed that “The medium is the message,” and while almost anyone of a certain age knows (and has used) this phrase, it is still only with great difficulty that I am ever able to get my students to comprehend it in any meaningful fashion.  I don’t blame them.  Regardless of the way McLuhan’s ideas shook things up a bit in the sixties, not only is the expression misused or loosely used in public discussions now, but most of the editorial focus regarding mediated communication remains on the content of media rather than on its form, on the content-as-message, then, rather than on the medium-as-message. 

One of my favorite of all McLuhan quotations—and the man was a quote machine—is the following:  “In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs” (8).  I like this phrase because it lets us know that McLuhan wasn’t ignoring the importance of content—heck, if one is starving, you better hope the machine you’re near is producing the cornflakes.  Rather, McLuhan was reminding us that while technology can always mediate different content, its use in-and-of-itself alters the ways we as humans can think, the ways we as humans relate to one another. Forty years, I repeat, and it still takes me months to make this point clear to my student because in editorial after editorial, in rant after rant, they only hear about the content of different mass media outlets.  Hence, when they hear that they are being “bombarded by violent images” or that the stories in video games are a waste of time, or that playing on the internet is a waste of time (“You should be reading,”), they are only being warned about the content.  No one whispers a word about the form of those media; neither a positive nor a negative word is spoken
 

It is with this frustration that I praise Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You:  How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.  While you’ve likely read excerpts from the book and have even more likely read about the book (it does, afterall, have a 2005 imprint), I urge you—all of you—to read this book.  It would be difficult for me to stress just how much I like this book and just how important I think it is that we all read it.  Johnson claims that he meant the book to be valuable to parents and children who are squabbling over “media usage” as well as by university students seeking to understand the ways in which media operate as form.  In my mind, and for my mind, he has succeeded in the wildest possible ways.  While I am certain that you can find points to quibble with in reading this book, I am even more certain that Johnson provides the clearest elucidation on the ways in which a medium (combined with its insertion in a capitalist economy), as it becomes dominant, ultimately shapes its content, and hence, ultimately shapes the type of thinking its users will do.  In brief, his thesis goes something like this: While it is true that when first introduced, television programs and video games operated at a very simple level, if we look at television narratives now (in shows like “Lost” or “24”) or video games now (e.g., “Sim City,” “Grand Theft Auto”) or the Internet now (interactivity, blogs), we find spaces in which consumers have to be able to follow multiple, complex plot lines and have to be able to negotiate multiple lines of reasoning as they negotiate these spaces.  While the actual “story” content of these shows, games, etc. might be facile or downright silly compared to, say, a classic novel, the complexity of the narratives goes far beyond many novels and demands a higher level of interactive thinking.