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Jeff Pulver Sent Two BIG Ideas My Way

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What’s His Big Idea?

I enjoy watching Jeff Pulver take on life. He’s a guy with BIG ideas. He also makes them happen, This week via email and a couple of blog posts, Jeff passed two of his great ideas on to a few folks that he knows. I was lucky. One of those folks happened to be me.

What’s Your “bestof”?

Friday, Jeff wrote about blog posts he’d like to make “sticky.” His idea seems simple enough — we might all consider it. His thoughts were that we mark certain signature posts with the same tag so that first-time readers could find them easily. After an email conversation, the appropriate tag chosen was “bestof.” Tom Evslin, offered to program something that would tie the posts together — if it rains this weekend. (I didn’t want to hope for rain, but the code will be nice. I’m guessing Chris Brogan, Jeff Jarvis, and Kfir Pravda — all part of the same conversation — might have been thinking the same thing.)

Imagine the value of this “bestof” tagging convention, if it caught on — readers would know to Google a name and “bestof” to find the work that defines a writer’s viewpoint. Reporters and other bloggers could find a blogger’s expertise with ease.

I’m updating the About Liz page in the sidebar to include a “Bestof” section that will include a handful of posts that I think fit this category.

BlogDay2007 Tag from Jeff Pulver

Three years ago, Nir Ofir started blogDay. As he says,

I initiated the blogDay in 2005 with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to discover new blogs and expose them to the world.

blogDay 3 is August 31.

Today Jeff Pulver launched a game to encourage folks to join the celebration — BlogDay Blog-Tag: A Game to Celebrate BlogDay3. He asked me to play. Jeff offers these simple suggestions for how to make it work seamlessly.

[R]ecommend five blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from [your] own culture, point of view and attitude. The goal of this version of blog-tag is for the readers of our blog posts to find themselves leaping around and discovering new voices and Blogs to explore. This in turn will help celebrate the discovery process of finding new people, their voices and their blogs.

When creating your BlogDay blog entry, please try to follow these instructions:

1. List five Blogs that you find interesting and if you can tell, include the city/country where they are from.
2. Identify five Bloggers to tag to join in this game with you. I recommend emailing the bloggers you tag to give them a heads up of you tagging them.
3. Use the tag: BlogDay2007 in your blog post.
4. (Optionally): Contact the owners of the blogs you shared as your “blogs to take a look at.”

I can do that.

I wonder who Ann, Sean, Chris, Troy, Phil might also recommend as world blogs we might explore.

Thanks, Jeff, for getting me to stretch in these ways.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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When Did AT&T Become Not For Profit? Was I Absent that Day?

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Tom Evslin at Fractals of Change has been following Mr. Whitacre of AT&T more closely than I have. Tom’s detailed account of the merger with BellSouth is quite clearly focused. I’ve only pulled highlights. Read his analysis at at&t Blames Commercial Entities for FCC Delay.

Mr. Evslin’s report begins with the fact that the FCC has again delayed voting on AT&T’s merger/acquisition with/of BellSouth. He includes these lines from the NY Times in which AT&T is quoted as saying:

“While we regret that the merger has been delayed by the self-interest of commercial entities and their litany of unreasonable demands, we look forward to the F.C.C.’s approval so that we can get about the business of providing the overwhelming benefits the merger represents to consumers, to the economy and to the public interest.”

. . . we regret self-interest of commercial entities?

Excuse me? Are you implying you’re not part of that group? When did AT&T become not for profit? Was I absent that day? If you’re going to imply something untrue to me, please have the decency to be convincing.

Dear Mr. Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, first you said you will charge me and my destination to use “your pipes.” Now your company says that commercial entities are in the way of your “overwhelming benefits to the public interest.”

Tom Evslin says,

It’s the hypocrisy that’s annoying. Much more important is that this acquisition is significantly anti-competitive and is NOT in the public interest, far from it.

I have to agree with him.

Refusing emergency wireless voicemail access is only one in the list of things NOT “in the public interest” AT&T and BellSouth have done to date. MA Bell is back. Do read on. I missed most of this until Tom Evslin put it in one place.
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Net Neutrality 8-1-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

More networked journalism: All for one, one for all

Imagine this from the vision of Tom Evslin: What if all our Skype widgets had a button that allowed us to test and report the speed at which our Skype voice packets were being allowed through by our ISPs. What if then — following the 1 percent rule — just 400,000 of Skype’s 40-million-plus regular users hit that button and reported in how Skype’s — and other applications’ packets — were treated by their ISPs.

This would produce an incredible data base showing whether ISPs are, indeed, discriminating against certain packets and applications to advantage their own. I suspect Cablevision of playing wack-a-mole with my Skype because it works fine on slower lines elsewhere but horribly when I try to do interviews with the Guardian or the BBC (which prefer Skype) from home. But I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true. . . .

Now a reporter could take that data and go to ISPs to find out their side and get a good story out of this that has a big impact — one way or the other — on the net neutrality debate. Is there a smoking gun of discrimination to favor ISPs own packets? Or not? Let’s find out and report it.

Now, of course, there is also a sort of Heisenberg principle (using the bastardized definition of it) at work here: When the reporter calls, the ISP may say, ‘Oh, this is a mistake. We don’t discriminate.’ And whatever was switched on gets switched off. Or this could happen simply when the ISPs notice that they are being watched by the magic button. So the act of reporting affects the news reported (but then, it often does).

Now a journalist might say that this ruins the story. But the essential role of reporting remains in force: Journalism is a watchdog and now companies know that their customers are their watchdogs. Every customer is now a reporter.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE