Bloggasm

Kenneth,

I just read your article about Polar Bears, and came across this line:

“In October 2007, NASA announced the results of an in-depth study of Arctic sea-ice melting and found that what has caused the unusually large melting seen in the last eight years was not greenhouse gas-induced global warming.”

Wouldn’t you say this is fairly disingenuous, considering that “greenhouse gas-induced global warming” was never once mentioned in the NASA press release you cite? A person reading that paragraph in your piece would think that the NASA study addressed green-house gases and concluded that they had nothing to do with the ice melting. The press release does not really address what is causing the wind patterns, and whether they have been caused by green-house gases. In fact the release attributes the patterns to “Unusual atmospheric conditions.”

How familiar are you with the cause of wind patterns? How familiar are you with the effects of atmospheric temperature on wind?

What do you have a degree in?

Why do you cite mostly news reports in your study, rather than peer-reviewed literature?

–Simon

When discussing the connectivity and overall power of Web 2.0, it’s hard for internet evangelists to refrain from getting a little starry-eyed and at some points downright hyperbolic. We are young Clark Kents watching the Fortress of Solitude rise quickly around us, amazed at how the mammoth structure connects and solidifies in mere seconds.

Perhaps this is why we gathered around the intertubes to watch Clay Shirky’s speech on harnessing the collective power of Web 2.0. It’s because he so eloquently patted us on the backs and told us bloggers, Wikipedians, and twitterers to Go Forth! Speak! Change the World! We nodded our heads, as we so often do, at the assertion that until only recently media was a very passive entertainment. This old form of media did much to amuse but little to quench our desires to build.

As is often the case, tech writer Nicholas Carr has burst our bubble. In a post titled “Gilligan’s web,” he attacks what he calls Shirky’s “liberation mythology” by addressing the very anecdote that Shirky used to illustrate his point: Gilligan’s Island.

To recap, Shirky spent a good deal of time in his speech talking about his (wasted) days sitting on his couch and watching the shipwrecked group try and fail to get off the island over and over again. This time spent watching, he implied, was utterly unproductive and at the end of the day he had nothing to show for it.

But as Carr documents, Gilligan’s Island, the very show used to epitomize old media, has become a plentiful destination in Wikipedialand, the very kind of media that Shirky is deifying:

Not only is there an entry for the show itself, but there are separate articles for each of the castaways - Gilligan, the Skipper, the Professor, Mary Ann, Ginger, Thurston Howell III, and Eunice “Lovey” Howell - as well as the actors that played the roles, the ill-fated SS Minnow, and even the subsequent TV movies that were based on the show, including the 1981 classic The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. Best of all is the annotated list of all 98 of the episodes in the series, which includes a color-coded guide to “visitors, animals, dreams, and bamboo inventions.”

But this is only a lead-in, Carr’s own anti-anecdote. He uses it to “underscore the symbiosis between the pop-culture artifacts of the mass media and so much of the user-generated content found online.”

Shirky’s main problem, Carr posits, is that he makes it seem that before the advent of the web, we were slack-jawed television addicts, unable to take our “cognitive surplus” and put it to good use. That’s just plain hogwash.

The nerds among us were certainly busy. In sixth grade, for instance, I didn’t even have an email address. Instead, a group of my friends got together and formed a “publishing company” called Strange Comix. We each had our own comical superheros, our crude drawings, and our pulpy plots. We took these and shared and collaborated and produced dozens of stapled-together comic books.

Other people got together and produced demo tapes of their bands, or shot short films using hand-held cams, or formed book clubs and discussed their favorite literature.

Yes, the web provided an avenue to amplify all this — those short films became youtube videos and those book clubs became lit bloggers — but the cognitive surplus was certainly already there.

So what does this mean? In some ways, it indicates that the web might make us less active. Take the book blog, with its open comments section and opportunities for discussion about literature. Could a hearty debate in a comments thread ever come close to the real-world discussion you’d find in a book club? By being glued to our computers and inputing all our “cognitive surplus” into the web, is it sucking up the cognitive surplus that might go into painting murals or practicing with your band? Do the online donations you make to Barack Obama even compare to putting on your shoes and going door to door to tout his message?

Maybe, maybe not. All I can say is, the half hour I spent writing this post has kept me away from my daily workout. I will pay for my Web 2.0 evangelizing with my flabby thighs, and perhaps my poorer health isn’t necessarily worth the creation you’re reading before you right now.

Updated below

When it comes to political satire, pseudonymous blogger Jon Swift has been adept at transferring irony and sarcasm to the printed word — not an easy feat given the absence of nonverbal cues and voice inflection. In the online world, he was revered by blogs on both the right and the left. And despite his infrequent postings, he was still able to gather quite a readership, with thousands of inbound links, regular visitors, and RSS subscribers (see an interview I conducted with Swift over here).

Why then — at the height of his popularity — did he disappear from the web completely? His last post was published March 15, and in it he gave no indication that he would be going on a blogging hiatus. Since that last post, dozens of his readers have entered his comments section to express their worries. “It’s hard to come to an optimistic conclusion about this disappearance,” one commenter wrote. “I still hold a little hope that he’s gotten a richly deserved book deal but can’t say so or something positive like that, but I’m increasingly afraid he got hit by a truck or something.”

Unfortunately, Swift went to great lengths to hide his identity, at one point even turning down a Huffington Post guest-blogging gig just so he wouldn’t have to reveal who he really was. Given this, it’s incredibly difficult to investigate his current status and find out if he’s still out there somewhere.

Below I’m going to lay out what we know about Swift and his disappearance and hopefully others will eventually chime in with new information. Feel free to provide any input into the comments section or to email me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com if you know anything.

Though it would seem that Swift departed from the web on March 15, there’s evidence that it occurred much later. If you check his Facebook mini-feed, for instance, you’ll see that the last time that he engaged in any activity on the social networking site was actually April 13. On that day, he joined a Facebook group called “Free the Jefferson 1!”

There’s evidence that whoever Swift is, he lives and/or works somewhere within New York City. The first indication of this is his Facebook profile, which lists that as his location.

But I’m also reminded of an incident that happened in December. Swift emailed me to ask if I was interested in participating in his “best of the blogosphere” post by submitting a link to one of my articles. I replied to his email with a link to a specific post of mine. Five minutes later, I noticed in my sitemeter logs that he had clicked on the link from his email — it was very obvious that he had been the one who clicked on the link.

Curious, I checked out his IP address. He was surfing the internet from a law firm in New York (unfortunately I can’t remember now which one). Wondering if I could maybe guess his identity, I went to the website of the law firm to see how many lawyers it had so I could maybe figure out who he was. But that path quickly went cold, because the law firm in question had somewhere around 200 lawyers.

Given his chosen expertise (if he is, indeed, a lawyer), I can certainly see why he didn’t want his real name affiliated with partisan political blog posts. There’s no doubt that he was trying to protect his career and possibly his personal life.

So what does this say about his disappearance? Did someone come close to giving away his identity? Was he afraid it would negatively affect his career? Did he, as that one commenter suggested, get hit by a bus?

That’s what I’m hoping to find out. It’s my goal to have this blog post either draw out Swift himself or someone who knows of his condition.

So Swift, you jokester you. Where are you?

UPDATE: Melissa McEwan from Shakesville published a post today after having a conversation with Mr. Swift:

Well, let me assure everyone that he is fine. I just spoke to him at Swift HQ and can confirm he’s not trapped under anything heavy and hasn’t been hit by a bus—he’s merely busy, nose-deep in an alarmingly modest proposal, natch.

Hmm. I don’t doubt McEwan’s reporting, but it still leaves me wondering why Swift hasn’t been responding to emails, facebook messages or his worried commenters. Very odd.

Last week I published a study showing that four major conservative blogs — michellemalkin.com, redstate.com, littlegreenfootballs.com, and powerlineblog.com — focus almost entirely on non-policy issues in their Obama coverage. Instead, they focused largely on guilt-by-association stories by hyping every controversial figure even vaguely tied to Obama. For instance, they published dozens of posts criticizing Obama for serving on a few panels with Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers (even though Ayers wasn’t a member of the campaign) and the fact that Hamas had issued a quasi endorsement for Obama.

Over the weekend, Newsweek broke a major story that McCain’s handpicked choice to manage the GOP convention this summer is lobbyist Doug Goodyear, whose firm once represented Burma’s repressive regime. It has also been revealed that Doug Davenport, a regional campaign manager for McCain, was a lobbyist at the same firm who worked directly on the Myanmar account during 2002.

In the short span that the Newsweek article has been online, it has become one of the most widely linked news articles on the web.

But guess who’s missing from that long list of blogs who have addressed the article? You guessed it, the four blogs in my study. The blogs that went to any length to launch guilt-by-association attacks on Obama for people who weren’t even involved in his campaign (Ayers). Now here we learn that McCain’s hand-picked manager of the GOP convention (which is a metaphorical representation of the entire Republican party) and one of his regional managers were lobbyist trying to spruce up the image of a repressive regime that is currently getting a lot of negative news coverage, and not a single one of these blogs think it worth mentioning?

Sorry guys, you make the rules. Now it’s time to play by them.

It’s been over 24 hours since the story broke. Let’s see how long it takes them to address it, if ever.

In the lead-up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, most television news pundits were relying on polls from professional pollsters — like Zogby — to predict the outcome. But a pseudonymous blogger known as Poblano was using a different methodology — demographics.

Guess whose predictions were more accurate?

“Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina,” writes the National Journal. “Looking back at Poblano’s efforts in Pennsylvania, pollster Dick Bennett decried the models as ’stepwise regression run amok.’ Slate’s Mickey Kaus predicted failure for ‘a sophisticated model that ignores… what’s been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright.’”

But in the end, they were wrong and Poblano was right.

What’s perhaps scary is that he was able to make these predictions based on demographic sub-groups. Are they really that predictable? Is this evidence that no matter what happens in a campaign, these subgroups will always vote the same?

The National Journal article has a nifty chart that gives a clear picture of how accurate the blogger’s results were compared to all the professional pollsters.

This is pretty sick.

Several hackers began posting on an epilepsy forum pictures of rapidly-flashing images.

“The breach triggered severe migraines and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed the images,” writes Wired. “People with photosensitive epilepsy can get seizures when they’re exposed to flickering images, a response also caused by some video games and cartoons.”

The FBI is investigating the breach.

According to Wonkette, this was located on ABC’s The Note until someone realized that putting the two pics side-by-side like this wasn’t exactly family-friendly.