I
found that I had served 8,750 distinct hosts and transferred over 3.8
gigabytes in the month of October. Considering I only posted four
articles in October, most of which were probably interesting only to
me, and considering that was a pretty average month, this came as quite
a surprise. What were people reading?

It turns out that two of my four-year-old’s drawings, My Mommy Saying Goodbye to Bobbi and Cinderella and the Prince,
got 430 and 340 page views. So my four-year-old’s drawings are by far
the most popular things on my blog. The next most popular was Sleeping Beauty. My own writing was a respectable fourth.

Now, I love my daughter’s drawings, which is why I made her a gallery
on my blog. And I think her grandparents have looked at them once or
twice, but that was back in January when I posted them. So
who discovered my daughter’s talent last month?

A check of
the referrers told the story: Google image search. Search for
“Cinderella and the Prince”and you’ll get something like this:

Which would you pick?

And it also seems that lots of people need to illustrate “goodbye.” This one expresses their sentiments exactly.

1. The Internet is still too hard for most people to use.
   “There are still multiple, overlapping digital divides. My parents are
   still not sure what they're looking at when they're looking at the
   monitor of their Apple Macintosh. What to me is naturally a model
   dialog box is to them just another rectangle among many on a screenful
   of confusing metaphors.”
2. Blogs
   are just the best current disintermediation tool, and other social
   networking tools will only succeed when they, too, cut out the
   middleman. Blogs dispense with “the broadcast middleman that has
   dominated global communication and replacing it with people-to-people
   communications channels that will yield their own media forms, more
   collaborative and more granularly nuanced”. Almost all other social
   networking tools today force us to disclose information in some awkward
   format, information we've already shared in other places, to some host
   middleman who actually (in the process to trying to get some agency fees) gets in the way. We need new tools that enable social networking unhosted, disintermediated.
3. All communications and networking is moving to peer-to-peer. Quoting Mary Hodder
   xian says “this peer-to-peer revolution will extend far beyond music
   and other media sharing, and actually represents a new paradigm of
   person-to-person communication and networking, part of the revolution
   in self-organizing human communities.”
4. Real communities are only formed when people meet face-to-face to work toward some specific common goal.
   “Communities are created only when actions are involved, when people
   rise up from their easy chairs, leave their homes, inconvenience
   themselves, discover the church basement or the community center, enter
   a stranger's home or fight City Hall in the streets.”
5. Tremendous advantage accrues to anyone who pioneers a new technology successfully.
   Only a dozen companies have really done this, and they now dominate the
   desktop and all its extensions. If you want to achieve 'first mover
   advantage' in cyberspace now, your idea is going to have to be so
   disruptively innovative that it slays one of these giants, otherwise
   one of the twelve will just “imitate, catch up, and outcompete”. Unless
   you're content to be a small niche player, you might be better working
   for one of them, and leveraging their customer access for your
   innovation (this latter bit is my opinion, not necessarily xian's).
6. Online
   networking is great for support groups, but dreadful for changing the
   system, and often detracts from actually getting things done. Quoting danah boyd,
   xian says that online tools “allow those with the same views to talk
   with others with the same views”. This is enormously helpful if you
   want to find others with the same disease or working on the same
   problem, but in political forums it can lead to groupthink and to the
   delusion that your message is going beyond the choir. Despite the IEM's Wisdom of Crowds, for months, that Bush would win, in our progressive echo chambers we were convinced
   otherwise. And those of us who are Meyers-Briggs introverts have a
   tendency to mistake ranting and advocating change for actually doing
   something, to the point online forums of like minds can actually
   paralyze us from getting up and making change happen.
7. Information, like ideas, is worth nothing; it's doing something with it that creates all the value. This is a more prosaic way of saying what McLuhan said with delightful ambiguity: Information is always trying to be free.
   If you really think you're going to make money distributing or
   aggregating information or maintaining databases, it's time to give
   your head a shake. The number of paid-subscription newspapers in the
   world is dropping through the floor, and most of those left are losing
   money. Most of the millions of brokers and consultants in the world
   give away information, and are now starting to give away advice as well
   – they make a living by acting: showing you what to do, or implementing their advice.
8. Artificial Intelligence doesn't work in matters of taste.
   Those services that use AI to tell you “if you liked this
   book/CD/movie, you'll probably like this one”, are mis-using complexity
   theory, and producing nonsense. Personal taste is infinitely variable
   and contextual, and predictive models just don't work. Xian jokes “How
   long do you think it will be before a social network tool tells you
   'people who like this person will also like that person'.”
9. There is no useful taxonomy of relationships.
   This might almost be a corollary of #8. Models that show degree of
   affinity or degrees of separation are endlessly fascinating but fatally
   flawed. Each of us defines the quality and intensity of relationships
   differently because relationships are purely subjective and perceptual.
   Xian quotes Clay Shirky: “Lists
   of computer-readable definitions of relationships are self-critiquing;
   Human relations have the additional and curious property of changing
   the relationship through the very act of labeling, as anyone who has
   ever said 'I love you' can attest.” Any objective, conceptual model
   misses the whole point. To me, you may be a friend of a friend, but to
   you, I may just be annoying and presumptuous, an unwanted caller.
10. Social networking tools are largely redundant for bloggers, but for others they're essential to establish online presence. Those of us on the blogosphere take the importance of our blogs as networking tools for granted. Xian says Dina Mehta gets it when she says “my blog is
    my social network”. Those who are blogless — even those who have
    ordinary, non-conversational websites — need another mechanism to
    build online networks. While bloggers can shrug off the failure of YASN
    ('yet another social network') tools, for the rest of the 20% of the
    world who are on this side of the digital divide this failure is
    important. Bloggers should help find better solutions.

In his chapter “Achilles' Heel” Barabási describes the interplay
between robustness and vulnerability. What does robustness under
failure and vulnerability under attack mean for a blog network? It
means that the hubs are extremely important, especially when there are
very few of them. If we are cultivating a blog network, we need to be
especially encouraging and protective of the hubs.

How Organizations can Get Human and Credible with Blogs, Podcasts, and Journalism

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