Saturday, July 12, 2008
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Nerdcore and the Care-O-Bot Hey folks. A quick weekend episode for your enjoyment. I'll have the MP3 feed going soon, but for now you're still stuck with the video only feed.
In this episode, I talk a bit about Nas, Nerdcore, MC Frontalot, Robbie the Robot and the new Care-O-Bot.
Get your MP4 link here.
Labels: care-o-bot, mc frontalot, nas
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 4:55 PM[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Why Go Negative? Up until Steven Hodson joined up at Mashable, I think there was little contest with regard to who was the most controversial writer at the company (now, though he gives me a bit of a run for my money!). Although no one has explicitly asked the question, I'm pretty perceptive, and I'm sure a lot of the folks who know me and read the site often wonder why I take my articles the direction that I do (that direction being usually politically unpopular positions, and technically unorthodox statements).
There's a complex consortium of motivations behind it. I'm conflicted whether or not I want to pull back the curtain on this. On the one hand, I only have about six or seven readers - but as we learned from Loren this week is that things you say can have a way of coming back to bite you much later. Fortunately for me, none of this could be construed as racism, so I should be fairly safe.
In no particular order, my motivating factors:
- By and large, and particularly from the blogger perspective, readers are unengaged and lazy. If I write straight news pieces, by the numbers, about 1:10,000 readers will comment on a piece. If I add two paragraphs of analysis (read: opinion), I can increase that ratio to 1:1,000. If I use a controversial position, I can increase it to 1:100. It's so predictable, I can count on it.
Controversy is a cattle prod that's useful for shocking the readers out of their reverie when they've had a long holiday weekend or a particularly boring news week. - I'm a bit of a contrarian, with conservative and libertarian leanings. First and foremost, I'm a contrarian. As a youngster, I discovered I was different (read:nerdy), and would always be ostracized for it. Instead of being bothered by this, I embraced it. Nerdy became my hallmark, and when the crowd zigged, I zagged.
When it comes to politics, particularly in the Web 2.0 crowd, this manifests itself as me talking up my conservative leanings and supporting the underdogs (which are generally Republicans). Perhaps I'll post some sort of political manifesto later, but germane to this topic, I think it takes a lot more intelligence and guts to act as an apologist for unpopular positions.
As the blogosphere is a meritocracy, despite how much folks hate you during the debate, the rewards always come back to me in terms of increased attention. - I like to think of myself as an anti-evangelist. Don't get me wrong, I love most of the theories and philosophies behind Web 2.0 and social media (which is why pundits like Drama 2.0 and Strumpette baffle me - they seem to hate all this stuff yet keep doing it). I couldn't live in this world without that love. Taking a contrarian angle to it all, though, allows me to pick apart the sometimes over-exhuberent evangelists and the often very naiive startups they represent.
A nest built against the wind will always be stronger than one built during the calm. That's one of the great strengths of blogging as a journalism platform, too, incidentally - those same principals apply to whatever statements I make. If they're blatantly wrong are shakey, their mettle is tested by the commenters - It gives me something else to write about. Sometimes when I write, I intentionally don't make the strongest case possible, so as to invite criticism. Sure, brevity plays a part. I learned this from watching pundits like John C. Dvorak, Chris Brogan and Steven Hodson. It gives you an opportunity to come back and engage in comments and sometimes follow up with another post, rebuting with your deal-sealers.
- I'm the whetstone that sharpens others' knives. Sometimes I pick a position that I don't necessarily agree with and defend it because I want the reverse position to come out on top. In almost all cases, I welcome disagreements, but in these cases I offer up a position that I know can be easily refuted, but I defend vigorously so that others won't always go for the easy answer.
For example, when I did a lot of political blogging, I'd often speak out in defense of the folks who argued for gay marriage bans. Like racial issues, gay marriage is something that most enlightened folks think is an imperative right. The means they often use to argue for this are generally deeply flawed, logically. What's worse, most of the proponents for gay marriage bans use horribly flawed arguments - leading to a cacophony of ridiculous yelling.
By inserting a bit of analysis and support for an unpopular opinion, I can cause folks to re-examine why they're for a certain position, and when it comes to enacting their policy on the topic, it is more likely that it won't enflame and enrage the other side yet still accomplish their goals.
Labels: amanda chapel, chris brogan, john c. dvorak, steven hodson
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 12:07 PM Wednesday, July 9, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Josh Catone Leaving ReadWriteWeb for SitePoint As Richard MacManus announced a few days ago, Josh Catone is leaving ReadWriteWeb for greener pastures. It turns out those greener pastures are SitePoint, the well known online marketplace for many things, most notably Web 2.0 startups:
Time to announce where I’m going to be doing my blogging post-ReadWriteWeb. The answer? SitePoint.
SitePoint is a huge web development community, and I’ve been brought on board as Lead Blogger to push out a new focus on their blogs toward web tech news and analysis (the same sort of stuff I’ve been writing for the past year over at RWW). I’ve been a regular on SitePoint’s forums since 2003, and I was a moderator there for about 4 years. So in a way, this is a homecoming for me.
Theoretically I’ll be contributing to all the SP blogs, but really I’ll mostly live in the ‘News & Trends’ category. My goal is to really own the main page of the site in terms of timely, blogged, web tech news content.
I know I'll be reading the site more frequently, but it was already a place that resided within my concentric circles of online web browsing.
Update: Sarah Perez, to the best of my knowlege, isn't leaving RWW. And Josh should put his name on his blog somewhere.
Labels: josh catone, sarah perez
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 8:11 PM[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
What's Wrong With Video? Sean and I had a great discussion about online video, and what really grinds our gears over it, on yesterday's Mashable Conversations.
Check it out. Discuss.
Labels: mashable, sean p. aune
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 11:14 AM Tuesday, July 8, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
I Resent The Implication... This is a generalized response to the folks all over the web who have been hinting around at my motivations for defending Loren Feldman over this stupid Verizon deal. Don't get your panties in a bunch - if you didn't actually imply I'm any of these things, then it isn't meant for you. The rest should know who they are.
I resent the implication that I'm a racist because I took the time to understand the point that Loren Feldman made with his TechNigga video.What really bothers me the most is that too often, citing facts and examining the case objectively when talking about certain subjects has the potential to make me part of the "untouchable caste." I realize that often I play the heel and devil's advocate in my political and technical commentary. That's probably the only thing that's saved me from wide-spread derision in my comments on Loren across the blogosphere the last 24 hours (the fact that everyone expects me to be contrarian).
I resent the implication that I can't understand race relations because I'm a white man.
I resent the implication that I'm an idiot for stating the facts of the situation without responding on emotion.
I resent the implication that I'm supposed to take knocks on the chin for my various cultures and subcultures in good humor, but I can't return the favor for certain other cultures.
I resent the implication that you're morally superior to me because I'm not repulsed by what was essentially a poorly crafted joke.
I see a lot of folks making a lot of the same points - points that aren't racist at all and have a lot of validity to them - being branded as something they aren't simply for positing them in conversation.
I humbly submit that those who would willingly dehumanize someone in their mind for having the momentary lapse in judgement that caused them to defend Loren Feldman are just as much of a close-minded bigot as they accuse Loren of being. posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 9:22 PM
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AI, Semantics, and Other Cool Intelligent Sounding Stuff I was recently a guest on Falken's Maze, a cool sounding name for an even cooler podcast about semantics and AI.
In case you only know me through my writings at Mashable and aren't a long-time friend of mine, you may not know that I'm a huge buff of AI, and have had a lot of experience programming and configuring various chatterbox systems (my particular favorite side of the AI field). I spent a lot of time in the mid 90s as well as after the tech bust in 2000 playing with, coding for, and engineering various chatterbox systems.
As I said on the show, as I'm getting acclimated to where AI is currently after having put it down for a few years, I'm surprised by several things. First of all, I was surprised that semantics and semantic web is actually, in part, about AI. It has a huge marketing problem. When you hear it described, you typically get the impression that it's all about tagging.
The semantic web folks, unless they want to stay stealth, need to push the AI side of things. Everyone loves Minority Report and I, Robot. Associate cool stuff like that with your brand, and you too will be cool. Simple as that.
The other thing that I'm impressed with is that "the cloud" hasn't yet been suitably applied to chatterbox AI. The major problem with chatterboxing is the fact that you need immense computing power and an immeasurable database of responses to really beat the Turing test effectively and consistently. We have that now.
I haven't seen evidence of this train of thought applied yet (and maybe that means I need to "get on that project"), but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Labels: carla thompson, josh dilworth, mark johnson, semantic web
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 11:14 AM Monday, July 7, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Edgio Dead and Decaying
Something I saw that warrants mentioning today, but not a particularly big writeup, is that not only is the site dead, but it's decaying. According to the last blog post on the company blog, "This blog will remain in existence as a historical record of edgeio."
That is apparently not destined to happen. I noticed this afternoon after seeing a number of "wordpress test posts" pop up in the company feed, which is still subscribed in my "corporate" classification of feeds in Google Reader. Curious to see what was happening over there, I clicked on a number of them, but they had all apparently been deleted by the time I saw them (which was relatively soon after they showed up in the feed).
To see what else I could find, I clicked over to the blog site itself. The front page is still there, showing the last few posts, but all links to archives or categories result in 404 errors.
Like I said, not particularly newsworthy, but interesting.
Labels: edgio, mike arrington
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 7:57 PM
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