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TEST
The Becker-Posner Blog: TEST. I've never quite figured out what it means to spew a TEST message onto the ether. Does anyone want to know that it has been seen? If nobody responds, does a tree fall in the woods? I ponder weighty questions like that.
While we all wait breathlessly for the Becker-Posner blog to get going, I figured I could do a trakback ping to this test posting that made it into the Becker-Posner RSS feed. The archive page seems to have comments and most everything else disabled. The test message is archived but is not shown on the default page. But the test reached me, so I want to speak up. I can use SimpleTracks and ping the trackback URL, even without an article back on my blog (tit-for-tat, that).
My cleverness was for nought. The SimpleTracks manual trackbacker reports that "An error occured. The TrackBack server said: Invalid TrackBack ID '567'". That's like getting to the bottom of the Cracker Jacks only to find no prize. A new emotion for this blogging life: dejection.
posted by orcmid
at 12/4/2004 06:18:57 PM
Swept Along: Israel Outed by Scoble
ItSeemstoMe: Scoble & Israel: an Odd Couple. The pre-natal stirrings of The Red Couch have brought up some lovely reactions by Shel Israel to Robert Scoble's excited launching of their joint writing effort. Based on the comments that have already decorated Shel's article, there are enough readers and kibitzers around. The great thing that I see, right now, is the contrast that Shel makes between himself and Scoble, and how he is being drawn out to show up in ways that are scary for him. What a courageous gift to us they are constructing together. Thanks guys, I'm rooting for you.
posted by orcmid
at 12/4/2004 01:03:32 PM
Scoble's Red Couch Opens
Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger - Link blog, Red Couch opens, some quick hits before heading to bed .... At 3:40:57 -0800 somewhere served by Oakland airport, Scoble finally winds down. He's way ahead of me. I comment on one of his entries and I find myself playing straight man to his next entry. It would be smart (as I do in my on-line classes) to read a complete thread before replying to an early comment, but then this particular sequence would not have been so exciting or fun. (There are Scobleizer postings I haven't read yet, so he really didn't go to bed or he's up and moving again. It's 08:59 -0800 right now.)
"The Red Couch" is now a blog on MSN Spaces and it will be interesting to follow. Subscribed. I hate having to go through the ActiveX prompt all the time but it seems to be one of the penalties of dealing with Microsoft sites. Here I'm declining to let it run just to see what that costs me. So far, I can't get to the comments and the photo space is empty. I can live with those omissions for now. I also accept that the background red-orange is intended for the red couch, but it is hard on my eyes. White on red-orange doesn't work so hot for me either. Yes, I know, it is one of the butterfly colors on MSN.
Meanwhile, back on Scobleizer, I notice there is a "Live Message Alerts!" button down below Scoble's cell phone number on the right sidebar. Cool! That relates to what I am looking for at making it easy for people to do civic things and to find out that they've done it. I receive MSN alerts on my cell phone now, mostly a daily game to see how well they can predict the Seattle weather though there's not much one can do with a sliding 5-day forecast of rain, rain, showers, showers, rain. I can't quite figure out how these alerts can be hooked up using the page that Scobleizer's button leads to, but this is something that might have great value for coordination of ODMA support.
posted by orcmid
at 12/4/2004 11:05:58 AM
When Possibilities Inspire Their Sources
Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger - New Book Born -- The Red Couch. OK, Scoble was so energized by the interaction he had with one of his readers that he himself caught fire. I can be a little arch about this and say, "Scoble, see who you are for the world, it is now giving possibility back to you with interest?"
Scoble is inspired to go completely off the charts with a proposal for a virtual collaboration leading to a book. He's declaring that the entire book will be developed by blogging, and then sold to a publisher on eBay. His initial brainstorming/FAQ makes me salivate and want to do something similar. I bet that the title sticks, too.
Here's a completely transparent approach to collaborative work that is also its own dog food. You have to love that. I also love all the ways this is going to put kinks in our ordinarily proprietary, stingy way of hiding our work until it is done. Especially something that we fear has competitors in the timid mercantile, zero-sum view of the world that is aroused so easily.
Last night I was looking at checklists on Gantthead (registration required, yadda yadda) and an entry about virtual projects caught my eye. It has to do with remote/distributed stakeholders and distributed developers too. I am going to look more closely because I want to see what is adaptable to conduct of an open-source effort that has strong community-contribution qualities. It is a specialized-niche community, but that makes for a nice small laboratory for perfecting an approach that may also work for greater undertakings.
In the spirit of Scoble's work at public collaborative authoring, I think there is room for a little wikification here. In a sense, blogging with good and automatic tracking-back arrangements would provide a sort of distributed wiki of the kind I have in mind. But that's not what my project is about, and I am not going to derail myself from that commitment to address this. Hmm, it would be weird if MSN Spaces were the right kind of tool for this. I've been thinking of it as a toy, but it might be just the right toy. Heh.
posted by orcmid
at 12/4/2004 10:48:13 AM
Bloggers as Gatekeepers and Citizens
Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger - Nathan did the right thing for MSN Spaces. Robert Scoble has a vision about blogging and what that provides for transparency and, more than that, what transparency provides for relationships among stakeholders in computing or other civil enterprise. As a Microsoft Evangelist, it makes sense that he would bring that passion and commitment to his job. More than that, although he speaks (mainly: blogs) about what the possibilities are, the biggest thing is that he conducts himself in a way that fulfills his vision and keeps it in the world. That may sound funny, but it is hard to make words about someone who forwards a possibility by living it without sounding a little woo-woo. Translated to commerce speak: Scoble walks the talk that he is the author of. I think he's learning what a high bar he's setting for himself. It looks to me that he's up for it.
Scoble's perspective provided a blogosphere civics lesson on Friday, 2004-12-03. The simple fact that Scoble publishes his cellular phone number and is resolved about it led to quick resolution of a security concern.
There's such a tremendous lesson here that I have been posting all of my contact information and ways to notify me about the status of my blogs and anything else that comes up around the sites that I operate. I am about to begin an open-source project and an ODMA support refresh. I see lessons to take into those activities too. I want to support people who are in some sort of bind or have discovered something that they want to hand off as easily as possible and get back to their real jobs. I don't know exactly what that will look like, but blogging may be a part of it. As will continuing to publicize the email address of my cellular phone's small-message-service service.
The fascinating thing about the gatekeeping that Scoble does, and it is probably somewhere in the evangelism 100-level manual (or it should be), is that Scoble operates as a reflective gatekeeper (all puns intended). That is, he is our gatekeeper for looking inward to Microsoft and also as a reflector of other contacts out here in user space. I don't know how that looks from the inside -- I bet he offers the same voice there, as well as great permeability -- but it works great out here. I have some pent up backlog here about the emotional life of blogs, thanks to Julie Leung. There are some other promises that I haven't kept here too. So what you'll be seeing today are some entries that weave around the social power of blogs as it looks from where I sit.
posted by orcmid
at 12/4/2004 10:17:36 AM
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