Day: March 13, 2005

The A-List Blogger Myth

Steve Levy has an odd article about the supposed “A-List” bloggers who, untolerably, are all white males,

Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal Web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grass-roots phenomenon. The perks of alpha bloggers—voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes—are, in theory, bequeathed by a market-driven merit system. The idea is that the smartest, the wittiest and the most industrious in finding good stuff will simply rise to the top, by virtue of a self-organizing selection process.

So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous? It appears that some clubbiness is involved. Suitt puts it more bluntly: “It’s white people linking to other white people!” (A link from a popular blog is this medium’s equivalent to a Super Bowl ad.) Suitt attributes her own high status in the blogging world to her conscious decision to “promote myself among those on the A list.”

Look, there is simpy no top rung of bloggers. Blogs like Instapundit.Com or Boing! Boing! get a lot of traffic (though I guess Levy hasn’t heard of Boing! Boing! since it also has a woman, Xeni Jardin, posting — guess we have to bump that to B level), but its not hard to push Average Joe’s blog to high traffic levels.

A lot of bloggers mistakenly seem to think that the key to getting a lot of traffic is to have some “A List” blogger link to you, which is why I suspect they have such low traffic. This server gets more traffic than it can really handle at the moment, and I rarely get linked to by this mythical “A List” group of bloggers (and I certainly don’t spend much time trying to change that or worry about it).

There certainly is an “A List” that appears regularly on talk shows, but Levy should ask those networks why they keep picking those folks (some of whom are just as error-prone/biased as the MSM they rail against, so maybe that’s the reason they keep showing up on the MSM).

Beyond that, I think Levy’s entire premise is absurd. I read quite a lot of blogs — in total, I think I know the race/sex of the authors of about 10 percent of them. Many very good blogs don’t even publish their names or a breakdown of their sexual and racial status.

What we have here is Levy and others blindly grabbing onto the trunk of the blogging elephant and wondering why the elephant only has a trunk when it should also have legs and a tail. Duh, look around a bit more and take of those blinders.

Source:

Blogging Beyond The Men’s Club. Steven Levey, Newsweek, 2005.

A Review of Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression

I’m a big fan of free things, so when Kembrew McLeod posted a Creative Commons-licensed PDF of his new book, Freedom of Expression, I downloaded it, printed it out and read it in about three days. Here’s the bottom line about the book — its a bunch of good ideas and insightful commentary sandwiched by Kembrew’s inclusion of a number of hoaxes/myths that really diminish the value of the book.

As I mentioned shortly after starting the book, McLeod falls for a hoax in the first couple of pages — he repeats the claim that Fox News threatened to sue The Simpsons, which is also a Fox property. A lot of people fell for that hoax, but in this case its quite understandable since it Matt Groenig himself started the hoax by satirically claiming that Fox News had threatened to sue The Simpson’s (Groenig was making fun of Fox News’ decision to sue comedian Al Franken).

Toward the end of his book, however, McLeod falls for a popular, but false, Left-wing conspiracy theory. McLeod wants to tie the case against the ridiculous extensions of intellectual property to what, to my mind, is a general case against private property itself. So in Chapter Five, Our Privatized World, Kembrew pulls out a laundry list of other supposed horror stories where power has been transferred from the public sphere to the private sphere. The very first example he gives is the deterioration of downtowns, and in the Left wing conspiracy theory, said deterioration is partly the fault of General Motors,

The deterioration of the American downtown began after World War II, and its slow, chocking death wasn’t natural. It had more to do with certain local and federal government policies, including those that undermined public transportation in favor of the automobile and an elaborate interstate system. It also didn’t help that General Motors bought up public-transportation companies in most American cities and systematically dismantled the streetcar system. In doing so, they replaced it with a fleet of GM buses, ripping up trolley tracks, and making way for the post-WWII flood of automobiles. The streetcars were the arteries that made downtowns accessible to large numbers of people, but by 1950 the number of streetcars in the United States fell to eighteen thousand, down from seventy-three thousands in 1936 — despite an explosion in the nation’s population.

In 1949 the federal government found GM (and its partners in crime, Firestone and Standard Oil) guilty of “conspiracy to monopolize the local transportation field,” and seven high-ranking executives at those companies were individually found guilty. However, the companies were fined only five thousand dollars each and the execs were slapped on the wrist with a one-dollar fine. Investigative journalist Jonathan Kwitny argues that the case was “a fine example of what can happen when important matters of public policy are abandoned by government to the self-interest of corporations.”

Except for the fact that GM did produce buses, pretty much every single claim in the above two paragraphs about GM is simply not true.

Was GM found guilty of monopolizing local transportation? No. Rather it and the other defendants were found guilty of attempting “to monopolize the sale of supplies used by the local transportation companies controlled by the City Lines defendants” (City Lines ran the streetcar system in Los Angeles). GM, Firestone and Standard Oil wanted to make sure City Lines bought parts, gasoline, etc. from them rather than their competitors, not to shut down City Lines or monopolize the entire transportation system in Los Angeles.

Did GM buy up street car companies just to shut them down? No. In fact, as far as I can tell, neither GM nor any of its subsidiaries ever purchased any streetcar companies.

Automobiles began replacing streetcars in the 1910s, and the advent of buses accelerated that replacement. Streetcar ridership peaked in 1920. Automobiles and buses were faster, ultimately cheaper, and could be adapted easily to new routes and areas rather than requiring laying expensive track and electric lines. They were also widely viewed as more comfortable to ride in, thanks to superior handling and features such as the advent of balloon-style tires.

Where did the myth originate? In February 1974 antitrust attorney Bradford Snell pretty much invented it out of whole cloth in testimony to the U.S. Senate. Snell’s research was funded by Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen and had the same. Snell was followed by a number of mayors who more-or-less corroborated Snell’s outrageous claims, and a myth was born.

Since then the myth has been repeated everywhere from PBS documentaries to left wing magazines to McLeod’s new book, where its appearance doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the veracity of the rest of Kembrew’s claims.

Source:

General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars. Cliff Slater, Transportation Quarterly, V.51, No.3, Summer 1997 (45-66).

Cracking E-Book DRM

The other day I mentioned ConvertLit, a program designed to rip DRM-protected Microsoft Reader format e-books into HTML. Then from HTML, you can usually convert the e-book to pretty much any other format.

This week I got around to testing ConvertLit and was very pleased with the results. First, I went online and bought two novels that are only available in DRMed form. I payed $4/each for DRMed MS Reader versions of the books.

The next step was to download and activate Microsoft Reader. That was actually the most difficult part, as Microsoft’s instructions for activating Reader are confusing and require using IE and installing an ActiveX controller. That was a real pain-in-the-ass.

Once I had MS Reader installed, however, ConvertLit made pretty quick work of ripping the novels to HTML and graphics files. From there, I used Mobipocket Creator to convert the books to the format I prefer to read on my PDA.

Along with being able to read the book in the format I prefer, its nice to have an HTML version on my HD that I can print or index and search at my convenience (PDAs are nice for reading books, but not for managing or doing complex searches on them).

Glenn Fleishman vs. Bram Cohen

Glenn Fleishman whines about BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s presentation at SXSW,

Unfortunately, Bram has very little joy in his life, as a colleague remarked to me after the session was over. He speaks in an affectless voice, offers terse and often somewhat offensive replies to many questions, and doesn’t seem to have much interest in anything but certain aspects of network programming.

Um, Glenn, as has been mentioned in pretty much every profile of Cohen I’ve read, Cohen has a pretty severe form of Aspergers. Cohen isn’t being disinterested or rude, that’s just the way he is.

For Freedom, Part Two

Irrational Games released Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich this week, which caused my productivity to crater. The original Freedom Force was the first game to break the superhero curse that had condemned previous attempts to produces a superhero-themed PC game to oblivion.

Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich could have also been called Freedom Force 1.5. Essentially what Irrational did was improve the graphics, update the AI, make some minor tweaks with controls and a few other changes.

That might sound like a criticism, but all the original Freedom Force needed were some tweaks here and there to go from good to great.

The graphics have been heavily tweaked. The 3D effects are much better, with terrain and buildings doing a much better job of handling multiple heights. This makes playing flying characters even cooler than before. The destructability of the environment has also been expanded, and awesome smoke and debris effects have been added. Nothing beats watching smoke rise and debris fly as your superhero squad takes on the supervillains in a crowded urban environment.

The AI for the first game was heavily criticized, and that has been addressed quite well in Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. In the original game, characters would just sit around and get beat to a pulp if you didn’t give them direct orders. In Third Reich, you still need to micromanage to be most effective with your characters, but if you’re in the heat of a battle and a character without an assigned action gets attacked, it will respond semi-intelligently.

In all, the changes in control, AI and graphics simply add to the feeling that you’re actually in a comic book duking it out with supervillains. It completley fulfills every fantasy I’ve had since 13 (well, at least all the ones related to comic books).

Whereas the “Danger Room”-style feature in the original game was a post-release kludge that was never very satisfying, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich ships with a fully integrated “Rumble Room” option which lets the player set up all sorts of one-off battles to test out new character designs or just have fun smashing giant robots over and over again (smashing giant robots just never gets old in my book).

I’m not really a fan of multiplayer, but Third Reich does offer Internet and LAN multiplayer support. Unlike the first game, which had multiplayer added on almost as an after-thought and offered only deathmatch-style play, Third Reich has a variety of multiplayer styles and even a basic scenario editor to try to give more of a comic book feel to the multiplayer battles.

One of the biggest elements of the original game was the mod community. For Freedom Force vs. Third Reich, Irrational delivered mod tools for download the same week the game was released. Last time Marvel got all pissed off and sent out cease-and-desist letters to Freedom Force mod sites that included likenesses of their characters, and Irrational at every turn discourages users from using the mod tools to create Freedom Force versions of trademarked characters. Some of the best mods for the first game, however, involved the JLA and other well-known characters and its likely that will be repeated this time around.

Bottom line — Freedom Force vs. Third Reich addresses pretty much every single complaint that players and reviewers raised about Freedom Force (which was still a great game, all things considered). If superheroes are your thing, its a no-brainer — you must have this game.