Dr. Forbush Thinks

Yesterday I listened to a talk given by Chris Anderson, the author of the book, “The Long Tail.” He also has a blog over @ The Long Tail.

The idea behind his book is quite simple, yet it is also quite eye opening. Basically Chris tells us that all markets can be described as a power curve. OK, the mathematicians out there know what I’m talking about, but the rest of you are lost. So, imagine a piece of graph paper with an x and a y axis. The x-axis runs across the bottom of the graph and it describes items of different types arranged in order of popularity. The items to the left are the most popular and the items to the right are the least popular. Now, imagine the y-axis representing sales of those items. Obviously the most popular items sells the most and it will be plotted as the highest on the y-axis. So, now if you plot the points on the graph you should find that all the items lie on a curve that has a very long tail to the right.

If you are still following me, then I can assume that the math I’ve already described wasn’t to complicated so I’ll go on assuming that it isn’t.

The point that Chris makes is that in the last century mass marketing has concentrated on the few items to the left hand side of the graph and it has ignored the items to the right hand side of the graph, even though 80% of the potential market is ignored while 20% of the market is pushed with unrelenting marketing and advertising. This brings up many questions, including: “why is so much marketing money wasted on pushing items that are already popular?” It obviously has to do with what is desired by the business side of the equation, rather than what is desired for the customer side of the equation. The market shape described by Chris is not just hypothetical, it has been observed by the sales of music. The thousands of titles that are now available on line represent a market that is unencumbered by distribution of rare titles. And what is observed is a power curve with a very long tail.

One can imagine that the sales of 1000 individual rare one of type songs costs the same as selling 1000 copies of the most popular title. In the “old days” before the Internet, however it would have been difficult to know where to ship a single copy of some rare song so that the person who wants it would be able to find it on the self of the record store that he frequented. So, the idea of matching a person to a rare infrequently desired item is much easier.

Although music was the example that Chris used, this idea applies to all markets. Amazon.com showed us this with books, and E-Bay shows us this with the diversity of matching even rarer more random types of items. This long tail is the future and many new companies know this and they are acting on their own ideas related to targeting this long tail.

The key to using this information is the method needed to match the people to the items in the long tail. If we think of a plot of “all items transacted” we would start with the most popular item that is bought and sold. I have no idea what it is, but surely someone does. Maybe it is waste. Out in the tail there are cupcakes and coffeecakes sold once a year at the school Christmas fundraiser. Even further out there are even rarer transactions. If someone wants to make money out on the tail there needs to be a way to collect the things together in some way so that one can sell a lot of these rare items. For example, someone could start a business that specializes in selling home baked goods. They could collect a large number of potential bakers together online and they would submit web pages describing their food. The potential business would be a way to match all of these potential bakers with those that appreciate home baked food shipped overnight by FedEx or some other overnight shipping company.

Imagine the problems solved by the collection of all of these potential bakers. A person is not limited to one person or another person, but they could select from thousands of potential dishes or deserts. The person who cooks the meal no longer needs to advertise or search for business. Instead they rely on getting a hit on their item advertised at a place where people who are looking for food are shopping. Assuming that the business creator works out the shipping problem, then this model could offer unlimited diversity of food to a potential customer. Of course this model might not work for all food from anywhere around the world, but it is true that it increases the diversity available to the people that it can reach.

Now, this curve is not static. Items become popular and they become less desirable. This happens for various reasons. Some items just might be better than all other similar items. Word of mouth spreads this information, and the best item is sought by the majority of those looking for that type of item. Another way that an item becomes popular is by forced marketing where an item is advertised so much that people are unaware of any similar items in the market. People who need that type of item will select the only item they believe to be available fitting the desired class.

The point here is that there will be a large number of new potential business opportunities that are available looking for people to start new businesses. The idea is to create new ways to get diverse goods aggregated into groups that people will be able to search for particular rare items. There might be an opportunity for an online model train scenery supplier that collects artists together that will produce specialized pieces on demand. Or, it might be political blogs that aggregate all of the best writing on particular ideologically specific areas. Oh, I guess that’s been done already. Well, there are still phrenology and numerology aggregates that don’t exist yet.

:-}



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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

First of all, I don’t really have a clear answer to the question: “Why Blog?” When I write I search my mind for the information that I know, believe or understand from my personal experience and observations of the world. I make no claim that I have done any painstaking research on any particular topic. I write in response to what I read or hear or see. So, the question becomes, “Is what I do worthwhile if I don’t do research on every little fact or opinion that I write about?”

I know for certain that I don’t think that my opinion is above anyone else’s opinion, when it is opinion. My opinion is based on observations, which have my personal perspective and could possibly be in error or a distortion of reality, as anyone does. And, my opinions also have some basis in fact and other people’s observations. I try to point all of these things out and if someone calls me on any of these things I gladly provide facts, data or point out that it is my opinion and why I believe what I do. Hopefully this makes me informed or knowledgeable, but not high and mighty. Please differ with me where you see this differently. I am certainly willing to talk with anyone and I respect other people opinions and thinking on all issues.

But, even if my opinion is not a fact I find value in it for two reasons. The first is that when I construct and explain my point of view I pull together thoughts and ideas that have floating around with no certain anchor point in my mind. In the act of pulling these things together I clarify how I understand these things in new contexts, which hopefully strengthens my overall understanding of the world we live in. The second reason I find value in blogging is that I believe that my personal view of things is not the same as everyone else’s. It might not be the one and only view of life the universe and everything, but it is another point of view. It makes sense to me and it sometimes makes sense to others that read what I write. The sharing of my point of view hopefully draws questions and comments from my readers and that interactions helps me to grow further in my understanding of the world as others point out some things that I have most likely missed. And, because of that I welcome anyone’s point of view, especially if his or her point of view differs with my own. It doesn’t mean that I am going to change my opinion, but if someone’s different outlook causes me to think I grow as a person.

Of course what I dislike are parrots. I know when I hear parrots, because I hear the exact same story reprinted again and again. A recent example is the Mark Foley scandal. Republicans simultaneously began to bring up Democrat pedophiles from 20 years ago. Chances are that these people are simply parroting back something that they read at “Little Green Footballs” or some other conservative blog. Obviously the people parroting this back in the great Republican echo chamber of the Internet felt that justification for not doing anything about a sexual predator in Congress was to be found in the same disgusting behavior on the Democrat side of the aisle. Its hard to imagine that so many people would come up with such a lame justification based on events that happened so long ago.

And, the same echo chamber plays its part in spreading the lies of the Bush administration. When the truth comes out, sometimes many months or years after all of this misinformation is spread around the net honest people realize that what they once knew is no longer true. And, when they realize this over and over again they must come to the logical conclusion that they have been lied to. If this is the obvious case and people don’t admit that they have been lied to, then there must be some other explanation for “staying the course.”

If my writing makes you feel uneasy then I hope that it is because it makes you question what I am saying. I also hope that you question your other sources as well, because no one person has a monopoly on truth. The problem is that every person has their observations clouded by their personal opinions and experiences. Sometimes these experiences thrust you to have extreme reactions and become disillusioned or enamored with a “new” idea. But, the key is always to take everything with a grain of salt. Nothing is the answer to every question no matter how much we wish that it were.

The idealist inside me hopes that the act of blogging is a conversation with the world. I don’t claim to have all the answers, and I don’t expect to get all the answers either. Instead bringing up topics, observations and political issues offers people to read what someone different than themselves thinks about the issues. They may perhaps strengthen their own point of view or change their point of view in relatively minor ways. In the long run we all have these conversations with each other in a web of interactions and perhaps out of this mess we understand the world around us a little better and this understanding will spread to everyone. (Or at least maybe it will spread to a few more people.)



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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

In my entry yesterday I introduced the term NeoPharisees. Those who are familiar with the Bible and the English language probably understand what I meant for the term to mean. Although I created the term out of my imagination I thought that I should search the web for others who have also independently created the same term. Since the rise of the religious right and the backlash to that movement I expected to find a large number of entries, because once I thought about it the term seems to be a quite obvious and descriptive term. But I was surprised to find only twelve entries on Google. The earliest entry that I found was from 2002.



But, I was correct that the term always refers to the same Fundamentalist Christians that wave the Bible proclaiming their hatred of all things different from what they call Christian. The irony of this revolves around the reason that Jesus was put to death for the blasphemy proclaimed by the Pharisees and the hordes of Fundamentalist Christians proclaiming books, films, homosexuals and any number of other things as unchristian. This irony is captured beautifully in the term NeoPharisee.


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

I was listening to a talk radio show this morning on the topic of blogging. It was actually more specific, it was on political blogging with several bloggers represented. Bloggers from Daily Kos, Wonkette, Red State, InstaPundit were the bloggers that I remember. Some callers suggested that blogging was a method of spreading disinformation, therefore an invalid form of media. However, one of the bloggers pointed out that any media can be used to spread disinformation. Simply printing leaflets and passing them around town could tell people that a dog has been lost, or that Asians are the super race. The medium is the method for spreading the information or misinformation or disinformation and the medium should not be criticized for the error in the information.

Like all good discussions this got me thinking about this thing that we call blogging.

First I would like to try to put blogging in perspective by looking at a timeline illustrating the history of communication and its social effects. I believe that “social effects” is a broader term than “politics” but in a modern democracy “politics” has a lot to do with “social effects.” The question is basically, how do people have their will done?

In a tribal environment the group is quite small. If the chief is running things the people are freed from making every decision by giving the chief the power to decide for the entire tribe. Individual problems can be solved when an individual personally talks to the chief. As a tribe gets larger the potential for problems gets larger and the chief becomes quite busy dealing with each individual problem. When the tribe gets too large the chief appoints specific individuals to manage specific areas of expertise and each manager communicates the problems to the chief in a condensed form. This process is an example of how some individual’s issues become less important than other individual’s issues. The manager chooses to tell the chief about the problems he believes are most important. The manager has two ways in which he can proceed. He can choose to pay attention to problems of greatest significance to the tribe, or he can pay attention to problems of greatest significance to himself.

In this simple illustration we can see how the agenda plays an important role in what gets done and what doesn’t get done. Politicians can talk all they want about any issue that they believe will get them elected but if they don’t do anything more than talk about it the issue is pointless. Similarly, if politicians ignore difficult issues, then they don’t need to make unpopular choices which would possibly effect their chances to be re-elected. Politicians can easily limit their agenda to issues that will benefit their own electability.

Of course, before democracy leaders found their way to power by force or by heredity and as long as the people didn’t complain to loudly they had very few problems controlling a population. But, “to loudly” is the key here. If people complained, they could influence their neighbors and friends to complain as well. If the population wasn’t frightened of the wrath of the leader they could certainly collect enough support to overthrow the leader and put another leader in charge. Therefore, by controlling the discussion of ideas the leader was more able to maintain control of the population. Keeping the people moderately happy enabled the leader to maintain a higher standard of living for himself and prevent the masses from rebelling. If the masses didn’t know what life could be like they wouldn’t complain about the way life was.

With the advent of the printing press, people were enabled. Besides the printing of the Bible, people were able to express opinions and distribute those opinions to a wider audience. The learned and the educated were the ones who could take advantage of this newfound power. The lower classes generally couldn’t read and this class was still prevented from organizing and revolting. Soon the leadership realized the power of spreading information and control of the printing presses also meant control of the people. Since there were so few printing presses the leaders were still able to maintain control.

And so it was with each new media that was introduced. Whoever controlled the media controlled the power to set the agenda by publishing the issues for the informed readers to acknowledge. Knowing the leaders progress on the issues meant that you knew if you were living the best possible life, or if there was potential for improvement. If there was potential for improvement, then the people could get togther and change the course of things by changing the leadership. Most often this meant by force, but as the structure of democracy was being established, leadership could be selected by other means. This meant by the wealthy property owners, or the educated, or by family connection.

The issues were still controlled by the people who set the agenda. Publicizing the importance of one issue and ignoring the importance of other issues set the agenda, because every issue could never be addressed at the same time. There are just too many issues. This practice takes us to the present day where a few wealthy individuals control the major media. Therefore, only the issues that these individuals find important make it to the top of the list. The right has complained that the left controlled the media. I would suggest that the media owners control the media. Some of these people are on the left, and some of these people are on the right, but all of them are property owners. The media does not address the problems that effect the poor, the minorities, the sick, in other words “the politically weak” because those issues don’t usually rise to a high level of importance for these people. Issues that make money for the media or protect the property owners make it to the highest priority. Since there are more issues than any society could ever deal with there are still plenty of issues that never get dealt with.

But, the good news is blogging. At least that’s what it looks like today. Bloggers can set their own agenda, because each blogger can write about his or her own issues. This means that a large number of people can begin to address issues that bother them. Maybe some of these issues will be the same as the issues that the major media is addressing. This is because even property owners are human and they share issues with the general population, like the desire for clean water. But when one group begins to take advantage of another group bloggers are likely to share and publicize the issue faster than the major media. Major local and regional stories will begin to make it to the web faster than the major media agenda will allow. Even stories that are covered by the major media will be kept alive by bloggers if they are important in the eyes of the people even if they don’t rise to the same level I the eyes of the major media.

Blogging may not be a primary news source for most people. But bloggers have influenced reporters and news people by pointing out embarrassing issues that should rise to higher levels in the mainstream media. Bloggers give different perspectives to reporters who are looking for new and fresh approaches to every day news items. But, the main point is that blogging is a way that the average citizen can be heard in the marketplace of ideas. And if those ideas are on the agenda of the common man they will rise to the proper level of importance again.





Politics, Blogging, Blogosphere, Free Speech, Freedom, Liberty

Yesterday I posted a podcast. Whenever I post a podcast I also need to ping audio.weblog so they know that I have a new podcast. Yesterday when I sent the ping I received the message that I was a podcast spammer. How could that be true? I don’t even post podcasts very often. At one time I posted a podcast every day for three days in a row. Certainly that can’t be considered spamming, can it?

Well, I searched the web and I search for my  blog posts in an effort to see what might have happened to leave  the impression that I am a spammer. I still don’t know for certain, but I found a couple of spam trackbacks to porn sites and I also found an insurance company that used one of my posts in some kind of a Google bomb.

So, if you search the blogs on Google for “Fear and Rage and Forbush” you will find about 38 hits, which is very high for my post. Thirty of them give exactly the same excerpt from my post, but they give various links to attorney and insurance websites. This is only the first instance of this behavior that I have detected, but perhaps one of my podcasts was hijacked like this, and then I was marked as a spammer.

Well, the effort goes on and perhaps I’ll find a solution.

Seven years ago I found a couple of notebooks from high school. I transcribed them in order to preserve them and share them with the world. But, it also offered me the opportunity to talk to myself. I wrote some things during study hall in High School, and I answered them 23 years later. Of course my earlier self could never know what my older self had written, but the conversation is interesting none-the-less. And, teenagers never listen to adults anyway, so it isn't much different than if I were standing there talking to myself in reality.

November 20, 1975 "Thoughts, the will to think" MF

I started this book because many times I have had exciting thoughts and if I wrote them down on a single piece of paper they would be lost for sure. To start this book I will have to tell you a little about myself if you are to understand any of it.

I live in Mentor, Ohio on Hayes Blvd. off Ohio St. off 306. I go to Lake Catholic High School. I swim on the West End "Y" Swim Team. I enjoy Math and Science mostly advanced but not too advanced. I usually make predictions, fantasize and create drawings of strange objects or mechanical devices. I design houses. I love to figure out unproved facts (or if they're proven, I don't know about them). My hobbies are collecting coins, listening to rock albums, raising fish (or any other pet for that matter), shooting off rockets (when I feel like doing these things, but not all of the same things at the same time), playing Monopoly, Swimming (as I mentioned before) and that's about it. Oops I like to read Science Fiction, and this writing may show it in some places.

April 1998

Thoughts, the will to think. That's a very nice comment on something most people take for granted. Yes, beings on this earth have the ability to reflect on their actions. One must pray that that reflection will influence growth and development of each individual. In fact, your comment strikes me as being a bit odd to be presented as a revelation. In any case, I am glad that you have discovered self reflection, and I hope many others will be introduced to this concept.

I too like to swim, read, write and listen to music. Perhaps we can discuss this further at a later time.

November 21, 1975

Here I sit in study hall, no homework to do, so here I sit writing in this notebook. I am straining my brain to think of something interesting to write in it.

(10 Minutes later)

OK, Thought of something!!

1) If you have an arc can you find the size of the circle and the degrees of the arc by some arithmetical equation?

Find the length AB by the use of ruler. Use metric. Do you know the answers? I am going to work on this one at home where I can use a compass, protractor and ruler.

2) If a rocket that weighs so many grams, has so many newtons of thrust, aimed at some angle. What is the equation used to figure out where the rocket will land if the wind factor is zero and the air resistance is A.

If additional information is needed or if the information doesn't make sense (It should, there aren't many numbers used) I will make corrections later.

3) Theory: Einstein said that nothing but light can travel at the speed of light (c). But I say light or radio waves are made up of electrons, protons, etc... So is matter. You may have to change matter radio waves to make it go that fast but it will be possible. My problem is how can the radio waves be converted back into matter?

April 1998

1) If you draw two perpendicular lines, one from two different points on the arc they will intersect at one point, the center of the circle.

2) If you sum all the forces acting on the rocket, Thrust, Air resistance, Gravity and areo dynamic lift, the resulting vector will yield the force applied to the rocket.Taking this the initial position of the rocket and the initial velocity the trajectory and the timing can be calculated.

3) Oh, to dream. In my youth I had such dreams. I always dreamed the world would be the way I wanted it to be. It wasn't until much later that I learned the restrictions placed on us actually provide many of the challenges presented to us every day. These challenges make life very exciting.

November 24, 1975

At this time my worry is that Bill Dunn (our swim coach) doesn't even know what's going on in the effect of our swim team. He thinks that we are great, but he has a surprise coming. He thinks that AAU doesn't exist, but you look at all the good swimmers and they compete in AAU. He would have never get a team even worthy to compete in Regionals.

April 1998

Some people believe competition is meant to be fun. Maybe he doesn't think winning is the worlds greatest lesson, there are others. Team cooperation, getting along with one another and learning how to lose gracefully are important as well. Just remember to try your best.

November 25, 1975

Nothing to say.

April 1998

That's a very interesting comment. I believe you felt something in your heart and you wanted to express it, but when you attempted to write it down you couldn't think of a way to express yourself.

WHQuestion

I ran across a blog, called Burning Question, with a concept of answering people’s questions. The blogger was asking for people to ask questions at his site and he would write back with the answers posted in his blog. I like that idea, and in fact I tried to do that years ago before blogs were invented. This was in the day of web pages and web communities. At GeoCities I had a web page with a page where you could leave comments about the web page. I received a question every once in a while and I answered them as I got them. Sometimes the answer was easy and I knew it without even looking it up, but most of the time I would look up the answer and write back in easier to understand language.

This was good practice for expanding my writing skills, but the questions came to far apart and I would not check whether anyone had written anything for large stretches of time, because there were so few comments.

However, at some point I got an e-mail from a new web site called WHQuestion. The guys at this web site wanted people to answer questions as people who were interested in answers submitted them. The group offered everyone the opportunity to both ask questions and answer them. So, you may know a lot about physics, but be interested in knowing something about music. You can ask music questions and answer physics questions. Obviously not everyone who answered the questions was an expert, but each question could have multiple answers if another answerer had a different take on the question. Most questions would end up with good answers, because people who wanted to just BS answers would be exposed by people who actually knew the answers.

The interesting thing about WHQuestion was the incentive system used to get people to answer questions. People who asked the questions would grade the answerer as to their satisfaction with the results. This satisfaction grade gave each answerer a percentage of quality so that new questioners could judge the reliability of answers. Questioners would leave questions in a forum type of database that could be searched by people who wanted to answer the questions. There was always a huge volume of questions in the database for the entire time I was involved with WHQuestion. I was about a month or two behind a group of people who started before me and had the highest number of answered questions. The number of questions answered would be tallied and awards were sent out when one would cross a threshold. I received a T-shirt and a stack of coasters as well as the icon that I display on my blog.

There wasn't any restriction on questions that could be asked, except for the question: "Will you ask me a question to help me boost my total?" So, I found out that the group who started WHQuestion were ex-intelligence officers from Israel. They retired and they were looking for something fun and profitable to do. My T-shirt and coasters came from Israel, and the guys who ran the site were very bright, so I don't doubt whether they were telling the truth. The advantage was that they collected a huge database of questions and answers that I believe they sold to Ask Jeeves, but I'm not sure about that. When WHQuestion closed up shop they directed everyone to go over to Ask Jeeves, but the chemistry and atmosphere there wasn’t as comfortable as it was at WHQuestion, so I didn’t spend much time there when WHQuestion closed up shop.

In the long run WHQuestion was a fun thing to do on the Internet five or six years ago before blogs and it would be great if there was another place like it.






questions

I started my writing career in 1975 with the line, “Thoughts, the will to think.”

To a 14-year-old High School freshman sitting in study hall the realization that I could think my way past the four walls that held me gave me hope. Sitting in a study hall with no homework to do and no will to do anything else lead me to escape to my own thoughts and write them down. But, the escape route lead me past places of which I had no idea existed. I began writing introspectively studying why I did what I did. It led me to try to understand my actions, but it also led me to a lack of self-confidence. For I would look at my failed attempts to become socially accepted. Well, I had thought that I wasn’t accepted, but as I understand it now I wasn’t really much different than anyone else at my school. I wanted to be able to jump up and lead my classmates, but I didn’t have a vision as to where they should be lead. In fact, the student leadership also had no idea as to where our class should have gone, or what we should have done. The leadership was about planning dances and fund raising events for money that could be used to defray the cost of more and better dances with live bands. What sense did that make?

I was more concerned with how this strange social scheme worked and why people did what they did. What I wrote was confusion with why people should except that status quo’s idea of social behaviour. I was also confused with reconciling the inconsistency between what I was told by the adults in my life and the reality that I observed. At some point along the way I realized that adults lied to you and they shouldn’t be trusted to give you the facts. Instead, adults were more likely to give information that would back up their ideal view of the world, not the reality of the world.

I wrote about my first experiences with drugs and alcohol. I couldn’t understand the point of drugs even though I tried them several times trying to understand the feeling or experience that I was looking for. Alcohol on the other hand allowed me to drop the nervous apprehension that stopped me from interacting socially with my peers. If it weren’t for weekend drinking parties I might be a greek living by myself in my parent’s attic. Well, maybe not that bad, but alcohol allowed me to learn how I should act and react without thinking about every possible thing I could say and what the responses might be. By the time I was in college I felt the peer pressure to drink, but I would drink a lot of ice water and behave the way I remembered acted while I was drinking. But, by this time I was no longer writing introspective analysis pieces everyday.

Today I am back to writing down my thoughts and they tend to be as obsessive as they once were. However, instead of obsessing on what I should or shouldn’t be doing to acquire the “Normal High School Student Status,” I am obsessed about the sad state of the current political state. I know what I don’t like and I have ideas for solutions. I write about these things every day, but I only have a few hundred readers every day. How can I effect politics with so few readers? What’s the point of writing if I can’t effect change? What’s the point of writing this anyway?

Well, what I hope is that thinking about these problems will generate ideas and those ideas will flow through the blogsphere. I don’t care if I get credit for the ideas if people use them in their thinking and the way they look at life, the universe and everything. In fact, if people do take my ideas and improve on them then together we make the world a better place by pushing these ideas further forward. Of course not all of ideas are original either. In fact the way I understand the world isn’t original. In fact, the worldview of most people could hardly be called original because they take what their parents, and teachers and peers tell them and the incorporate these ideas into a personal worldview in order to understand the universe. Depending on the views of these early influences people see the problems and solutions for the world’s problems based on different worldviews. So, maybe getting my worldview out into the universe of public thought will help people who haven’t quite formed a worldview yet. But, this could be positive or negative depending on the current worldview of the person reading my views. I often get comments of the sort that say “Another load of shit blog.” This would mean that I am pushing a person further away my worldview when readers have an attitude like that. So, what’s the point?

Hopefully the point is simple. I simply want to express my views and organize my own thoughts by writing this blog. If people happen to read my thoughts, then that’s fine. And, if they comment on my blog then I have additional feedback in trying to understand my own worldview. And, finally if I do have a reader or two who haven’t formed their worldview, then maybe I can assist them in at least understand where I’m coming from. But, I certainly can’t change the minds of those who already have formed worldviews contrary to my own.

Writing a blog sometimes feels like a fruitless labor. But, I really can’t stop myself from writing. I write, therefore I am. I wrote before the Internet existed, and those thoughts are mainly stuck in a stack of dusty notebooks in my attic. So, an audience is not what this is all about.

However, an audience is a plus. People read what I write and they form opinions of me. But since I mainly write the truth about what I think and feel I would say that those impressions are largely justified no matter what people think. But, readers also have the opportunity to comment on what I write.

For the most part I love to hear from readers and I read and think about every comment that I get. Some comments are very insightful and point out things that I haven’t thought about. Some comments are just rhetoric from the right that is a stretch to even imagine how they relate to the entry in question. Some comments don’t make much sense and reading them takes some skills in mind reading in order to understand what the writer was actually trying to say.

But, I have noticed that there are comments that I suspect are not honest. When I say honest I mean that people are leaving them who have commented before, with different usernames. I believe that this has been happening since the beginning of blogging and it doesn’t really surprise me. What it does do however is to make the discussion dishonest.

I should mention that the blog in which this entry is posted is not the only blog I post in, therefore I am not necessarily referring to any particular comment, just a general trend that I have seen over the last year or so of blogging. I have seen this from both the left and the right, so I am not picking out particular side of the political argument.

However, I have seen a phenomenon once or twice where a person posts a comment that seems to have been written very poorly. The grammar and spelling could be so poor that I would suspect that only someone with a proper understanding of grammar could have written the comment. The interesting thing that seems to happen is once I reply to the person a third person who is “better educated” in writing style takes up the gauntlet and begins to copy replies from their arsenal of set responses.

Of course this all is circumstantial and it happens rarely. But when it this does happen it only makes the discussion of the issues on the Internet less rather than more important. At some point I believe that credibility will become more important on the web. When this happens bloggers that use their real name on the web with earn more credibility and those who hide the truth of who they really are will gradually loose their credibility. I suppose that that issue will need to wait for a future blog.

In a recent burst of insanity I recorded one of my blogs for all to hear. The advantage of audio is that I can emphasize and relate with the tone of my voice. If anyone is interested I posted the file at: Link

This is an experiment and I would love to have feedback from anyone who is brave enough to listen to this.

And, I know this is asking a lot, if after listening to it I’d like to hear if there are any of my previous blogs that you might want to hear in audio.


politics