danah boyd has a sane comment on the silliness that’s been making the rounds in the wake of a Chronicle of Higher Education piece on the job market perils of academics who blog:

In academia, your brand is this aggregate of your eccentricities and expertise. I do think that you can soil your brand in any public or semi-public environment. This is why you put on a particular face during conferences, at dinner with like minds, etc. Certain institutions have more tolerance for eccentricities than others. My guess is that the Midwest humanities department has virtually none. But find me a prof at MIT that is not quirky as hell. In fact, i think that “normals” would be upsetting there.

Ho hum, another day begins with a scan of blog stuff, and it occurs to me that what I’ve been tracking for the last month via a ruminative Web page is really blogfodder. So here are some running notes, to try on a more public record of what I’m following:

The first half hour is spent on two links from the first (this time it’s Bag and Baggage), which points to another location,
Doc Searls, “Re-Grokking Grokster” from Linux Journal’s Suit Watch newsletter, with this
on Mark Cuban:

At the Web 2.0 conference last fall, he said, “When you’re sitting around a table at a tough negotiation, you need to look around and see who the sucker is. If you don’t find one, it’s you.” IT Conversations has a podcast of the whole interview…

Of course I’ve grabbed that Cuban interview to listen to later today…

On to the next blog, JD Lasica’s Darknet, which offers When the studios won’t give permission, quotations of responses to his requests to use short clips in a home video.

Next up: Keyhole Community for Google Earth explorers

I’m more and more aware of the significance of filtering blogs, like Global Voices Online and Edu_RSS, which I scan and occasionally follow outward.

Last night I marked for re-reading a post at Maciej Ceglowski’s Idle Words. The moray eel just may be an appropriate totem, hole-living, sharp teeth, unpredictable…

Who knows when this will come in handy?

According to Dr. Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, “the largest likely factor for sea level rise is changes in the amount of ice that covers Earth. Three-fourths of the planet’s freshwater is stored in glaciers and ice sheets, or about 220 feet of sea level.”
( http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003072.html )

Now here’s an interesting version of the research process, well worth repurposing to fit the circumstances of a searcher in a scientific field (though it’s cast in Venture Capital terms), from Tim Oren’s The Art of the Fast Take:

…every technology and market has a private language. It’s built of terms of art, but also names of landmarks such as products, famous papers and projects, labs, and researchers and other experts. To begin to understand the market you need to learn this language. Fortunately, such a distinctive use of language and interlinkage of people and information artifacts is the very best thing you can have to feed Google or other modern search tools.

The posting is about a page and a half, really worth the time to read and cast to fit one’s own purposes. A few more bits:

You are looking for reviews or survey articles, as recent as possible. Skim them. Make sure these guy’s idea isn’t obviously misfit or already common knowledge. But you’re mostly looking for more names, particularly of analysts, technologists or researchers who are commonly quoted… You’re looking for competitive analysis, and also for corporate white papers. The latter will be ‘spun’, of course. What you’re trying to extract are the key competitive issues, current and envisioned, and the code phrases used by the various competitors to tout their advantages and diss the opposition. You may strike out on the analysts if it really is a nascent area… With luck, you’ll know someone on the list, or have a mutual friend. Buy a couple of lunches… Somewhere, there is a good argument going on in this field. Go find it. It may be on blogs, mailing lists, or at conferences, but it’s likely to have an online presence and perhaps an archive. Read as much as you can handle, taking careful note of people and company names… Get a big piece of paper, your various lists of terms, people, products, etc., and make a network graph, cluster chart, or whatever works for you, noting central issues and people. You’re not an expert, but you’ve now got some of the fundamentals of the technology and the market structure laid out.

OK, so scholarly research isn’t business, still less VC activity, but there’s a lot here that’s just exactly what we’d like our students to internalize as they start to figure out a field or a research area. Nicely done!

“…when something is driving enough people into insane belief systems that we see regular explosions in our cities, it would be smart to care—a lot—what that something is. Because, on the evidence, I don’t think the leaders of the Western world have a clue.”
(http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/07/07/London-Bombs , via Alex Halavais)

Jon Udell sez:

In the realm of content as in the realm of software — two domains that seem determined to merge — everything is changing all the time. We will increasingly require, and come to depend on, tools that help us visualize and manage the flux.

…this in the context of a two-minute screencast using Don Phiffer’s animation of Wikipedia changes Greasemonkey script.

Chris Anderson of The Long Tail comments on six months of blog activity:

Even today I am still amazed and thrilled at how rewarding it is to give away my time, ideas and research here, because I get back so much more in return. The power of the gift economy is truly remarkable, and we’ve just begun to see all the places it can work.

Skeins of wriggling co-incidences: here I am reading Charles Stross’s just-released Accelerando and I come upon the word ‘agalmic’ [“Manfred is an agalmic entrepreneur, a specialist in giving good ideas away for free to people who can do things with them”] and it rings no bells… so quickly to Google, natch, and one of the pages I happen upon is that of D. Tinker, “a retired biochemist living in the Annapolis valley, Nova Scotia…”, and he has this lovely summary:

Why do people contribute time, energy and money to something that cannot possibly bring them material rewards? Good question. Here’s a short essay [by Robert Levin] that explores this kind of activity, for which the author coined the term “Agalmic” enterprises.

…and so I have a word for a phenomenon I’m conscious of being a bit player in myself.

given at Stanford last weekend, and it’s certainly one of the more useful and memorable exhortations to graduates. The paragraph that really resonates for me is right near the end:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

The Whole Earth ideals and mindspace have been building blocks for my own life, and the parallel to Google is apt: what Gardner Campbell calls “real school” seems to me to be something we carry around in our own minds, and draw upon in all dealings with others –students, colleagues, acquaintances. The task that matters is continuing to educate ourselves.

I’m always glad to see another Jon Udell post come up in my RSS feeds, though some of them are beyond me. Today’s Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge is an especially graceful bit of teaching, reminding us that Wikipedia’s “radical transparency” is really a better mousetrap:

Some knowledge is purely factual, but much is socially constructed and therefore inevitably prone to bias and dispute. Wikipedia’s greatest innovation is arguably the framework it provides to mediate the social construction of knowledge, advocate for neutrality, accommodate dispute, and offer a path to its negotiated resolution.

Udell also points us to a list of disputed topics and a list of previously controversial issues. I’d love to see (and so I suppose should make myself…) a screencast of the podcast revision contretemps, but beyond the soap opera dimensions of that food fight lurk some really interesting ideas about the uses of the wiki medium.
Addendum: waxy.org prods the clever to automate: “I’d love to see a tool for animating Wikipedia history for a given entry or block of text…”