Spontaneous ∂erivation

The Mumbai terrorism still continues even at the time of this blog posting, and so do the tweets.

Many people are talking about the Wired article on social media (and especially Twitter) and Mumbia, but I found this article at Vator.tv to be more informative.

With respect to updates on the web, Gauravonics’ round-up post is routinely updated, and has links and screenshots of various social media sites (the Wikipedia page, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr).

Over at India Uncut, Amit Varma blogs his narrow escape from the violence.

On Blogger, Mumbai Help has been set up with informative links, including right now lists of the injured and dead.

The photo on the Guardian’s article is very… strange and fitting.

The Hindustan Times really has the scoop.

He seems to have given up New Hampshire anyways, or is counting on voters already reading into his tax message.

The picture in this post at Making Light is worth 1000 words, or perhaps more, I think.

It’s been amazing to watch how the Internet has completely changed the election. The Anchorage Daily News would never have gotten their message out to the lower 48 and Hawaii if it weren’t for the Internet. If it weren’t for YouTube, the ability to replay outrageous clips from interviews has worked against Rovian tactics of denial of mistakes—indeed, it’s more than worked against, their tactics exploded in their faces.

If it weren’t for cable and the Internet web pages of certain comedy news shows—ComedyCentral’s Indecision ’08 being high among them—the jokers, the real power behind what’s going on for real, would never have been able to touch people as well as they have. Even YouTube has contributed to the effort, as people make their own videos and channels dissecting and destroying the ridiculous attempts at redaction of a Rovian campaign. Even Google has contributed as people find source material in the form of articles and pictures—and each other.

If it weren’t for social media—from blogs and Twitter, to StumbleUpon and YouTube and even Pundit Kitchen (of the ICanHasCheezburger family)—people would never have connected to each other as well as they did, realizing that they have something in common: the economy, pulling out of Iraq, Palin’s persistent stupidtude, McCain’s inconsistent stands. And those connections built upon themselves, rabidly and so quickly that the Rovian political aides to the McCain campaign never knew what hit them (and, I imagine, still don’t).

Obama understood. And that was how he managed to whip up a grass-roots network support the likes of which the world has never seen before. And all because of the Internet and what its audience of humans, a most gregarious and social species, has managed to develop from it. The old style Rovians don’t understand it—I’ve seen supporters, feh, say that Obama only has that much money because he has rich supporters behind him, insanely rich ones. They only say this because they think it’s the only way it can be done—they don’t understand just how many people there are who are tired, who are exhausted, who are willing to contribute $5, $10, $15, $50 towards a cause they believe in. Rove politics’ cynicism and disrespect for the “little people” was never quite so obvious to me as in that moment.

And never quite so obvious to the American people before.

I’m sure that the Rovians will have learned something from this, if their arrogance doesn’t get in the way. In which case they are quite capable of using the Internet as a massive disinformation campaign… but they would have to win the hearts of the Internet first. And they’ve already burned that bridge, for many years to come.

I have never seen a party disintegrate themselves quite so completely and so devastatingly. I don’t think this amount of damage even happened during the Watergate scandal. I can’t believe this is happening. How can the base of a party be, well, based on a fringe element? Or was that element already there in devastating numbers? I’m almost too scared to ask the question, but the Internet during this election has practically been about asking the questions, even the disturbing ones (perhaps especially the disturbing ones).

For the thinking conservatives among us, the ones who will be excommunicated from the Republican party, since it’s rotted to the point where the base is frankly what the Dixiecrats have evolved into, I hear the Whig party is still breathing, if very shallowly. Plus it’s got an owl for its mascot. Owls are cool. They can twist their heads 180 degrees and get a new view on things.

I’m afraid that the Neocons, the New Republican Party born out of the ashes of what Rovian politics has done to the Old Republican Party, cannot do this. Or perhaps I should be rejoicing. Eight years of an incompetent administration are way too many.

I know that I’ve said on this blog some time before that S∂ wouldn’t discuss politics again during the election. As you can see by my StumbleUpon reviews during these months, and later the various Pundit Kitchen collections I’ve been posting and even been creating, I haven’t been staying out. And that’s because this is an amazing election year—one that’s for the record books.

And because, frankly, this is my country and I should bloody well be caring about it. As Some Canadian Skeptic commented on Beyond the Palin¹ :

I’ve read a lot of comments on here (and other posts) that usually have to do with the following notion(s):
“They’re all crooked to some degree or another”
“The lesser of two evils”
“Why can’t we just agree to disagree? Why do we have to try to convince other people?”
“Just let it go! This is supposed to be about astronomy!”
“I disagree with Phil’s politics, so I’m leaving, and never coming back!”

As a Canadian with a poltical science degree who has been watching this increasingly bizarre campaign sink into terrible depths of vitriol, naked racism, sexism, and a loose-change understanding of feminism (expensive clothing has NOTHING to do with feminism!!!), it’s comments that espouse apathy that really get under my skin.

Firstly, it’s your country. Care about it. Don’t berate others for caring enough about their country enough to try and express themselves.

Secondly, everytime your country shivers, the rest of the world quakes. I think no other country on earth knows that quite as well as Canada. The idea that one candidate is just the same as the other, and people should stop getting so uppity is not only demonstrably false, but it is flat-out irresponsible.

The full comment is required reading for those who insist that there’s no point in voting.

How political campaigns are carried out now has been radically changed. Never before has the narrative of such things, the kind that generates endless The Making of the President books, has been laid out before the general public—and the world—as plainly and as early as this.

And all because of a little thing called the Internet.

1. The fact that a famous blog about astronomy has gotten involved should tell you the breadth and depth that this election has gotten into the bones of the ‘net [↩]

The Legitimacy of the Blog

I’m amazed how much I still learn about blogging, even simply as a writing medium over a marketing one. A lot of my older prejudices have been stripped away or reformed of late.

I know a lot of people don’t really respect blogging as legitimate writing—how can something that’s so informal be such and all that—but I don’t see it as being too different from writing an amusing column in the newspaper. There are some sports columns that would really make it as blogs, for instance. Dave Barry columns in the past would have done well as blog entries. And some serious political editorials, that manage nonetheless to expose humor as well, also would have done well online.

And nowadays they do.

Like anything, there’s the 90% rule in blogging as well: there are good blogs, mediocre blogs, and bad blogs out there. But the other thing about blogging is that you can have fun anyways and still get your stuff out there (and at little cost, or at least less cost). Blogging captures so well both great and not-so-great writing, both the serious and really informal.

I think that’s where most of the lack of respect comes from. But dude, there are some really awful novels published every year, and many more awful manuscripts submitted around the More Srz Bizness, so whatever.

Sacrifices for Change of Focus

I’ve lost a lot of audience even in the past year, but have managed to break even (well. Just once) with gaining new audience, though that bit takes longer than the losing bit.

When I began trending away from a personal blog to a More Serious Blog—less personal whinging, more talking about serious stuff, I guess—I lost my personal audience entirely. This loss hurt more than any other loss I’ve had with respect to S∂, but I went on and gained a new audience of bloggers and suchlike (my meta-blogging months).

Then I got tired, and switched over to Fantasy and Science Fiction and Kindle Love, with something of the personal subjects I used to cover (but not all that much), and lost most of my audience again, though that didn’t really hurt. This has been much harder to recover in terms of visitor numbers and views, and I still haven’t managed it.

The Numbers

There are days I’m lucky to get over 70 visitors; back in the meta-blogging days, my visitors worked up to over 300 per day and well on the way towards 400.

When I switched focus in July, I bled visitors at about 80 a week unto the new numbers, which was not the greatest thing to watch on my Mint console in the world (and the Visits Diff doesn’t let me forget it and will do so for the next two years). Mind you, these are very tiny numbers, all of them.

There has been a gain, however: interestingly, though my old audience consisted of bloggers, my new audience is far more enthusiastic about the RSS subscriptions; that has more than doubled, from 30 to a bit over 100 in three months. So it’s not all bad.

Some say worrying over numbers is a bad thing to do. Sure, not everyone should read the numbers—family blogs do not typically head into 1000 visits per day range, but they still accomplish what they set out to do more successfully than I—but I write to be read. My goals in blogging are a bit different from personal blogging. (And some will scold me for having such goals, and how impossible such goals are, yadda yadda yadda. What can I say? I’m too damn stubborn to die? That sounds about right.)

Social Media

For a while I didn’t know how to feel about it. One thing I have learned is that blogging is personal; yardsticks and methodology differ from blogger to blogger, and it’s rare that you find more than one with the same personal, ah, configuration. Measures of success also differ, but even among the bloggers with the same measures of success they differ. It’s interesting to examine.

How people use social media effectively is also pretty individual.

Some will say the differences don’t exist, and they’ve been doing the same amount of examination. All I can say is that when I look at a beach, and when an artist looks at a beach, we see two different scenes. I can try to see all the detail I like, but an artist will see the details that let them create art. And sometimes it’s a forest-for-trees thing, and sometimes the opposite. Plus, y’know, I’m not necessarily the artist here. You may be the artist, and I may be the unconditioned observer, but our observational differences still exist.

Observations on Twitter and StumbleUpon

Anyways, I’ve settled on certain observations about social media, particularly on Twitter, and expect them to change anyways in the future. Learning is very much about change; learning that doesn’t change you isn’t deep. For some time I’ve settled on

1. Twitter is about conversation, sharing experiences, and trends. It’s blogging on speed and meth. I like this, other people also, some not so much.

2. StumbleUpon is about sharing. It’s also one of the more useful of the social media bookmarking services out there, with a huge audience, nice features (not necessarily the most or the greatest but still), and much opportunity for additional blogging.

You can see my approaches to Twitter and StumbleUpon down the wider sidebar. So far I’m pleased, and it makes a difference in my online conversations. Some of my conversation is more appropriate for Twitter versus StumbleUpon versus my blog. So mote it be.¹

Prospects of Pay

Observation #1: It’s changed my outlook on what I blog for free and what I want to blog for pay. The difference is already there.

Observation #2: This means I’ve been both cutting looser with the Spare Bits and focusing closer on the Kindle Love.

Note #1: Yes, I plan quite a bit in advance, so I see the future some four weeks down the line, in a fuzzy kind of way.

Observation #3: I’m probably going to be doing deeper reviews and articles on the F&SF bits, because it matters more in terms of audience.

Observation #4: The above points make me a bit nervous, but I’ll get over that; right now I’m doing some extra writing to see how well I’ll fare if I go this way or that way on schedule.

Note #2: Schedule is totally mine to decide. This is very nice and not always obtainable.

Observation #5: Damn, this is a good blogging jobbity to have, based on the market I’ve seen.

Pondering #1: I wonder if a friend of mine ever got that totally tea geek blogging position.

Note #3: He’s ambitious with tea experiments, which is sometimes good and sometimes leaves you with a headache and Victorianish fainting spells.

1. Strangehaven where are you? [↩]