Creepiness on Twitter

Medicine shows of the late 1800s.

I usually only spend about 15-20 minutes on Twitter, reading it like an inbox, responding to people I'm following, and maybe sampling the big feed. Every day, lots of people follow me, especially if I argue with someone on Twitter. People are often shocked at being debated on Twitter, they are usually in a warm, comfortable, smug mode where they feel they are dispensing little pearls of wisdom to the masses that they imagine have suddenly gathered, slack-jawed, in awe of their broadcasts, so confronting them usually comes as an enormous shock. The culture is very California, where people constantly trade inanities, saying "super, thanks!" "hey, great link there Ted" etc. all day long, just dispensing little love pats like they do at the Lab. It's a terribly cloying atmosphere. You actually look forward to finding grumps like @Obscurantist or @warrenellis who dispense some black clouds once in awhile to disrupt the endless sun rays beaming out of Silicon Valley, mainly from Scoble's i-Phone.

I was a very early adapter on Twitter, and I don't recall why. Somebody in SL or on a blog mentioned it and I went on it because I thought it was be a Lite way of sampling the "lifecasting" that Jerry Paffendorf was touting at the time (he since gave up all that youthful nonsense, disappearing into a secret NDA's Silicon Valley project, like the equivalent of working in a Soviet "post office box" or secret factory). I would have to agree with @jayrosen_nyu, whose ideology I generally don't care for (of the Beth Noveck groupism variety) that what happens on Twitter is mindcasting, not lifecasting. But I never put Twitter on my phone -- well I did once for 15 minutes, regretted it immensely, and got rid of it. I have 1,000 followers, so it gets busy. I follow about 1,000 too, but I should work at filtering them a bit more, because lately, I've been getting creeped out on Twitter, which is basically serving as a giant platform for data-scrapers and hustlers to find you, chloriform you, and take you back to their websites where they will scrape you some more, all in a cloud of "socializing".

Creepy. And here's why. Not because of weird stalkers or griefers -- there aren't that many, and I don't care about them (although that one real creep I turned up on the Herald forums saying that he was going to call the child welfare services of my city and warn them that I was a danger to my own children because...he didn't like what I said on Twitter lol. Which was to accuse him of being a violent deranged fuck. Which, of course, he is lol.)

No, I mean a different kind of creepingness -- 1984 creepiness. First, some background. Generally, I have a lot of time for the makers of Twitter. They seem, unlike the Lindens, or the A-listers who hog the attention economy on their service or blogs, and other assorted geeky types, to be less arrogant and more thoughtful and just simpler. Their TOS is simple and direct. They came through the fight on block-track ok, I thought, that is, they didn't take Gillmore's side (but they shut down track completely, probably for reasons of data base strain). Twitter's makers @evan and @biz seem to be devoted to keeping the service free, they didn't cave to the concerted, angry campaign from a woman who bitched about stalking who in fact was the community manager of a competing service. The point about Twitter is very simple: you don't ask the makers of it to do anything, you simply don't follow people you don't want to hear from. Just don't follow, and you don't see them, unless, of course, you can't help but peek at your vanity search feed in Tweetscan, and then you might see the talk-back. No, stalkers and spammers of the ad variety aren't the problem. It's something else. Someting unfollowing can't fix.

THE UNREALITY OF CONNECTIVITY

In part, it's the giddy facetiousness that people engage in, in this vast placebo for a real life and real action, a virtual world of connectionism where the person who gets the first pictures from the airplane accident in the Hudson River is more of a hero than the unsung person who first used their cell phone to call 911 to save them. The idea that covering an event makes you somehow responsible for doing good in reality. That ridiculous story of the American student arrested in Egypt whom all these people thought they had "saved" on Twitter. All that nonsense. It's like the claims that the bloggers and Twitterers in the early hours of Gaza or Mumbai are better than journalists just because they are first, even though usually they are horribly partisan. It's that the concern of "partisan" just doesn't exist -- authenticity and early posting is all.

But where you really feel the day-to-day creepiness on Twitter is with two types:

o the you2gov, gov 2.0, e-gov types of people, consultants and civil servants invading government with social media tools under the guise of making government "more responsive" or "more transparent" and even "more democratic" but ultimately infiltrating the space with their own usually "progressive" point of view

o the ad men, who now have names like "Solutions Providers" or "Experience Managers" (and whose websites never contain the words "public relations" or "advertising" so you can't always tell what they are at first -- some of the most hokey are in SL of course and familiar to us)

HYPERVENTS

After the first wave of geeks, like Second Life, Twitter was invaded last year by all kinds of advertisers and consultants trying to hustle new media as the Next Big Thing. There was instantly  books about how to make millions with Twitter, there were Twitter seminars and people you could pay $650 to teach you how to Twitter for profit with names like Liz who look like very well-preserved bottle-blonde suntanned poolside specimens of the group "Ladies of a Certain Age". They were all those sunny Californians but also a lot of pale and lumpy mid-Westerner dads who love to tell you how many kids they have who basically work out of their homes and try to convince everybody to pay them money, telling them that they will make money off the Internet by...convincing other people to pay them money to tell them the same thing. It's like a kind of vast pyramid scheme.

These kinds of people are always instantly visible so that you can unfollow them because they always give themselves perky names, their websites are vanity websites just for themselves, or sometimes a small company that is really just them and their girlfriend, or they spam you with SEO tips and write little blogs "12 Ways to Get Your Tweets Retweeted" and such.

None of these people would be so terrible -- I actually appreciate them and they are what makes America great at a certain level and less prone to the socialism of Europe --  if it weren't for sort of a tie-in to the U-Gov people in the other category -- they work together --- and with just a kind of...invasiveness. I mean, advertising on TV and radio and bus shelters was always kind of in your face, but this stuff, well...let me give you an example.

DON'T JUST SELL ME, PLAY WITH ME, NO ACTUALLY COME AND INVADE MY TWITTER STREAM

I write on Twitter that I'm sick and tired of seeing that ad for some medication against arthritis pain, showing this graying middle-aged woman trying to play tennis, on the splash screen when I log in to Yahoo. I'm damn sick of it! I don't know if it is pushed to me as a demographic when I log in on a certain account, or what the hell -- I think it is, because when I log in on another account, I get a different picture.

So shortly after posting that comment about the Yahoo ad on Twitter, I notice in my email box the following:

@arthritispain is following you on Twitter.

At first I thought this was a griefer account, but in fact, it was just some guy hustling arthritis cures off his website who just picked me out of the stew and started following me to essentially force an ad in my face and force a click on his website. So I blocked him, so he can't follow me, which is a bit pointless, of course, because he doesn't have to follow me to be able to pick my words out of the ether, but then by not following him, I don't see him or have to think about arthritis pain again. But, creepy, huh? And I don't know if in fact he's got that automated somehow, it's quite possible.

Or I have some conversation about health insurance and how the Bail-out should help make it possible for more people to get insured. And soon, I get some faux-concerned dude offering me a link to a site where I can buy health insurance through a middleman (no thanks) and then, when I respond to him that these premiums are too expensive, another apparent insurance hustler or some kind of social media huckster selling *something* comes and faux-commiserates about how hard it is to find cheap insurance.

These people are not my friends. Remember how Philip always used to talk about how fun it would be to be on the same Internet page with all these people, and see them and talk to them? Er, I'm rethinking that right about now.

THE VERY FIRST TWEETATHON IN THE HISTORY OF TWITTER!

Now, hold on to your hats. A guy named @JoeComm (he must have given himself a new last name that sounds like "Communications" or "joe.com" or something) who I discovered merely because he follows me is having a...Tweet-a-thon. This is like one of those old television  marathons with celebrities and such to raise money. Now, you would think, being on free web 2.0 media where we don't have to pay anything and the Twitter makers get their money from rich venture capitalists and not our donations and subscriptions, that we wouldn't have to suffer through anything as awful as a telethon. Good God!

But here's Joe, and of course, he's not making money for Twitter, because it's not like TV, he's telling us that he is raising money for some clean water cause. And that's where I begin to feel the creepiness. Joe is just some guy, well maybe even a very famous guy on the $650 conference circuit, I dunno. People like that often follow me not because they they have the slightest interest in what I say or the topics I discuss, but merely because I'm chatting and have a thousand followers, so they figure they can bounce a topic or link off me. It's like a kind of pool-shark move, a way of "leveraging" other people on the service in a kind of game of cueing the balls to hit off the banks.

So, when I see all this Tweet-a-thon stuff, it feels to me as if this guy is hitching his business of selling social media consulting -- PR advice, basically -- to a charity to sort of...cleanse the whole thing. Make it seem like he's not really an ad man hustling consulting or ads or products or himself, but offering some grander Zen tie-in to some good cause, that he can then brag about as having helped by harnessing the massive power of Twitter blah blah. It's like those people on Second Life endlessly raising money for Katrina or now the Australian fire victims, but hey, it also gives them a chance to hustle their shoes and skins and purses for sale and get their logo in your face, and get the entire thing halo-ized.

It's good when business gives to charity. Corporations do this, and it fuels the non-profit sector. Like, the Philip Morris people give to the ACLU or to help little starving children or whatever. But, they are hoping to sanitize their image. Let's be clear about it. The Joel Comms of Twitter don't have any image problem for doing something like selling cigarettes -- that's not it -- but still, they are trying to appear more holistic and organic than they are -- because ultimately, they are selling stuff, and what they are selling is a kind of vicious circle, like those people hawking get-rich-quick real estate gimmickry on late-night TV. They are selling you the prospect of using the media to sell with -- and tyring to be a proof-of-concept. But...It is hard to make selling stuff look different than it is. I don't mind if people sell stuff: what I really hate is when they pretend that they aren't doing that, but Creating My Experience or Making a Better World. It's fake.

MEMORYHOLE.ALLTOP.COM

Advertising is as American as apple pie. Of course, we hope to solve many things with it, including things like government. I do wonder when Obama will stop advertising, and when his supporters will stop advertising, and do stuff. For example @guykawasaki spammed this video today, and I had to say, it was kinda creepy. Creepy because my take away from it was to "get it" -- the undertone of the message. We were supposed to see it as this big American feel-good. People Coming Together and all that. Believe. Hope. Ready. Blah blah. But...but...there's the guy in the tuxedo. Evil, rich! Probably helps evil Madoff! And he says "Anxious". Well, good! Let him die! And then there's those people on the subway in New York City, hmmm, they look like they could be Jews in Brooklyn, and they hold up a sign saying "Anxious" -- and they're right to be, because who knows, what Obama will do with the Middle East! And then there's some white middle-aged women, and they don't hold up the right sign like "Believe" or "Ready" but put up "Skeptical" or something. Evil! Evil old ladies! And so on. That's just what's wrong with coming-together bullshit propaganda like that, it comes together by making caricatures of people who are apart. Evil.

Of course @guykawasaki is another interesting but creepy story. He seems like one of those really nice guys, even though he is rich, famous, has best-selling books, etc. It seems like it's really him talking on Twitter, the reason I think that is because it's manic and emotional. Once not long ago I criticized something he was doing, well, I felt his pages looked like those big link farms you get sent to if you type in the wrong URL. He took a fit and said something odd like "Well I'm not going to give this up just because you don't like it" -- which was over-emotional and weird -- like criticism would mean for him to give up his site, which, of course is a great idea, fed by enthusiastic Twitters, run by @guykawasaki himself, who is a great guy and interesting and fun. He's a great antidote to Google. God bless him!

But...he has his dark side. Who knows why my website was included on virtualworlds.alltop.com  It was a mystery to me, as he put on mainly the hugely trafficked sites, like massively.com or Terra Nova or the Herald or the official Second Life site. I got on, all the way at the bottom, and all the way to the right. Who knows why? Occasionally, it would lead to a click I could see in my stats. The page wasn't ordered by traffic; who knows how it was ordered!

That's just it. It's a proprietary secret. They aren't Google, which is secretive enough, but which basically more or less puts up first in search the stuff with the most links or whatever. With Guy, who knows. Why this and not that? Why Koinup.com twice? Why Tatero's "Dwell On It" website which she never refreshes? Etc.

Then, suddenly, I'm gone from that page. Why? But...why was I ever on it in the first place? I ask Guy -- but of course he is silent and inscrutable. Nobody ever can know why they got on or off All Top. It reminds me of the poem...the big top...and "nothing, nothing, nothing at all".

So I joked and said, we need a site called memoryhole.alltop.com where those of us who were once on this august famous guy's website could then be delegated once we fell off lol. I bet other people wonder what happened to them too, as it is not based on traffic, or sort of "the best of the best" or anything visible but Guy's gut. Creepy, at the end of the day!

U, 2, CN GOV!

The U-gov stuff is the worst though, and I will try to follow it more now that I see that it is starting to crop up all over. Oh, sure, a lot of it is just spiffed-up communications to make the boring and complicated things that government does a little more user-friendly. That's ok. But, that's not what I mean. I always thought that e-government was something we, as a nation, would get to decide on, to chose, by voting. By referendum. By public debate. By law. Instead, what is happening is through the aggressive, determined machinations of a very concerted group of Silicon Valley-funded social media makers and consultants, it is being forced on us, put into play on websites by officials desperate to seem "relevant" to the "young generation". It's sick. It will backfire. People will jam it.

It was bad enough with the Obama campaign, all those fake followers being called a new movement that would overthrow representative democracy (and by the way, I'm not the only one saying this, as this guy, on a much more prestigious blog than mine, says it in even more stark terms! He even calls it "the war of all against all".) We saw change.gov go to whitehouse.gov and then change.org, which actually technically has no relationship to change.gov, dine out on that relationship. They filled up rapidly with the usual predictable types taking the Palestinians' side in the Gaza war and such. You could try to debate them (I and a few others did for a week) -- it was hopeless. It was filtered, managed, censored, directed content. More moveon.org type of "managed democracy" a la Putin.

And here, I got into a big fight with this guy named @you2gov who claims his site is non-partisan, free, unbiased, and just about Doing Good. Naturally, you visit it and see it filled with the usual obsessiveness -- right this minute I'm looking about clips on Israel and rich people in Russia, but any day you look at it you can see the tilt. And I begged to differ. Because of course he has a point of view, and he is no more neutral than the old media that claimed to be neutral, and no more about "empowering people" then my left elbow, because he's got a point of view, and he wants to empower *other likedminded people* to go glom on Washington, not sustain any kind of reasoned debate.

My first tip-off that all was "not quite right" is when I went to his Take Action page. Here, I had to register with my real name and zipcode, and bat off a plea for my phone number and IM addresses, before I could even see the list of things this dude felt I should be taking action on. The largest group served up for me to view under "Groups" was naturally "Obama for President," with a token Conservative America showing just for that moment as a "new group". The template presented was a giant data-scrape of my connections, my groups, my SMS, everything -- imagine how valuable this will be to political marketers like Raph Koster's brother! -- with a rab bag of thousands of clips which are likely fetched up by spiders automatically, not put in manually by those interested in them (hard to tell). I thought there might be a pre-fabbed "action" for me to take like move.on, but I didn't see any ("issues and actions" is more like a feed reader).

I kept trying to find the concrete issues in this fabulous new social media site where I would meet my fellow...erm...let's say insurance-less Americans wishing to battle for health care rights or something...but I could only click my way to a...sales site shopping you2gov's owner's software package, which you apparently buy and then get maps and lists of government officials you can now lobby more fabulously with your, uh, new social media tools. Shills the ad, "What if you could research up-to-date legislation, share and engage your advocates and contact government officials, as well as be able to fully manage your constituent/member relations and content online with the powerful "SNCRM", simply by filling out easy to use forms and then pressing “Send?”  SNCRM stands for Social...uh..social something. Help me out here.

I kept clicking, but apparently what I was supposed to do was read the clippings, take the issues on the floor, use a template, and fire off a letter, enabling you2gov not only to scrape my interests and address and such, but adding my pixels to the mountains of email that Congress and state legislatures receive and simply cannot answer except with form letters.

When I challenged the biased news coverage on his site, you2gov (his RL name is Alan Silberberg) bristled that he in fact ran Fox TV news clips. Running clips from "the enemy," hated by all those on the left, doesn't therefore make you unbiased. The selection of topics, the tilting of the action items, etc. etc. -- it's all the usual stuff, they have all come out of moveon.org's overcoat.

POLITICAL COMPASS POINTS TRUE LEFT

You2gov couldn't bear it when I asked him his political views. I asked him to take that popular test that tells you where you sit on the spectrum. (A longer one is here.) I'm in the centrist box, but on the left of the box -- but not a leftist extremist. I'm not the conservative nutter from the industrial religious complex on the right as so many imagine.

But this guy couldn't take the test. No doubt he thought it was *gasp* McCarthyism! I just wanted him to *come clean*. I don't CARE if he is on the left. Just don't pretend you are using social media tools for ANYTHING other than *flogging your own political perspective*. THAT he has such a perspective is ABUNDANTLY clear when I ask just what he's doing on Twitter, with proposing 10 million people flog the law-makers in Washington about the Bail-out. He implies that if only the 10 million (I guess the list was culled of the dupes and no-shows and alts, down from 13 million lol) would be "empowered", why, this would change everything about the Bail-out. Huh? What don't you like about the Bail-out, I ask?

BAIL ME OUT

See, that's just it. The social media tools have to be used here and now to debate with, not just for this one dude jawboning about "empowerment" to harness as his personal mailing list to flog his sectarian viewpoints. That means debate *now* instead of pretending you have no point of view and you are just some grand "facilitator". That is so fake! I point out that I personally get nothing from the Bail-out. The house I could have owned was foreclosed. Too late! I don't have a payrolled job to be able to collect that $7 a week extra in the paycheck, I'm an independent contractor. I don't have health insurance -- what do I get out of the funding of research to pick better treatments. And so on. I don't get anything out of the Bail-out. It's as if it doesn't exist. At least George Bush sent out checks for about $200 and $300 those times he sent out those "stimulus payments". Obama's checks are dissipated into "programs".

But...I don't think it's all that bad. I don't see anything wrong with it. You have to try to help home-owners hang on. Lessening taxes for the working middle class, improving health care by funding research, improving the environment by funding alternative energy research, these all sound like fine things to do. Obama is helping his own class first and foremost, when I see the Bail-out package -- not poor inner-city blacks, because they aren't his class, but academics, professors, intellectuals, scientists, who will be doing all that government-funded research now. That's ok!

But...I fail to see why there should be some grand transfer of wealth to the poor, because it doesn't then stimulate the economy. Save the middle class, and you have saved the sector of people who spend on everything from furniture to education and you stabilize society.

You2gov, who five minutes before that was telling me his site is non-partisan and he can't tell me his political views suddenly explodes. Why, what I'm saying is "trickle-down theory" and that's of course some evil supply-side awful economic idea from *gasp* Reagan or something. That was tried for 50 years and didn't work! Erm, ok, so...it's ok to spend money on "job creation," which is just a giveaway welfare wealth transfer, and THAT isn't called trickle down? Hello? LOL I mean what are you smoking?

One could debate the merits of job creation or increased health insurance or whether saving homes is worth it -- but for that, the guy has to come clean. He has to admit he a) has a point of view and b) he wants to collect people to share that view and petition Washington with it. That would be ok. But...he doesn't. Instead he accuses me of "attacking him". Read my updates and you'll see that's just plain silly. What a wuss! And then he starts in with the "have a nice day" and goes back to mindlessly, airheadedly flogging this sunny "you2gov" crap, as if it wasn't a vast shill, and in fact, all about infecting tools with a certain perspective -- not at all what it claims.

DRILL DOWN -- TO FIND THE INHERENT BIAS IN THESE 'TOOLS'

Meanwhile, when I finally, after registration, a data and IP address scrape, and a drill down to his forums, I was rewarded by finding what Mr. Bi-Partisan You2Gov.com Neutrality  Empowerer Tool Maker was all about:

How our International Relations are going to change  2 Months, 2 Weeks ago         Karma: 6  Karma+ Karma-
With the help of incoming Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Commerce Richardson, USTR Xavier Becerra and other top diplomats and leaders, the United States of America is going to get to get a much needed makeover of our Foreign Policy.

While some in the right may shudder at the thought, the majority of Americans voted clearly for several principles to be re-asserted both by the government and by the people.

These are loosely:

1. Elimination of rendition programs to countries with known histories in modern times of torture.
2. Elimination of false claims of weapons, chemicals prior to starting any new wars.
3. Re-Establishment of the principles signed by the United States and so many other countries in the Geneva Conventions and Articles.
4. Re- Assert the US leadership in Human Rights, Diplomacy and Democracy.

I am sure there are lots more so feel free to contribute here.

Well, actually, people didn't vote on those issues in any recognizable form. One can hope Obama puts into practice some of these policies, like elimination of rendition. But issues like "leadership on human rights and diplomacy" for some might involve embracing the dubious Durban-2 review conference, let's say, just to pick one contentious issue, and for others, it might involve boycotting it. These are all debatable issues. But with Mr. You2Gov Neutrality here, we do NOT have an honest broker. We have someone snarking at "those on the right shuddering at the thought" as if the project of government is to "stick it to them" and as if religious groups on the right actually called for rendition to states that practice torture (they didn't do that).

And, judging from the forum posts, which all seem to be made by the site owner lol, this site isn't really a real place. It's not where authentic conversation can take place. And it never *will* take place as long as the site owner keeps pretending he is a neutral broker and empowerer of people, when in fact, he laughs with malicious glee at the concept of "people on the right shuddering".

Once I started clicking around on Mr. Twitter today, who serves up recommended people to follow, I saw lots more of that you2gov kudzu growing, with everybody among the cognoscenti consulting chattering classes wanting in on this, because it pays consulting money, but more importantly, it gives that power of a group that the Personal Democracy gang want when they flog this stuff - it puts them into the influencers seat.

Imagine, Mr. You2gov accuses you of "attacking him" if you disagree, point out he isn't the neutral thing he claims, and ask him to be *accountable*. That's what you do with government! You demand explanations, you ask it to be straightforward. And yet...we're not allowed to do that with the Twitterati! We're supposed to put our heads down, follow, and re-tweet -- the way HuffPo retreats some bland thing that @craignewmark says to me when I comment on the need for health insurance -- just because he's @craignewmark.

HOW TO STAY THE DYER'S HAND?

I caught one Twitter Guru telling all his buddies that the way to get traffic to your blog is to quote the A-listers. That way, when they search for their own names on the Internet, they will see your blog quoting them, and maybe come give your blog a hit and maybe talk to you. I find that sort of awful Social SEO stuff cloying and duplicitous. I can't imagine deliberately putting the name of an A-lister on my blog, just blindly quoting something he said, just to try to lure him into clicking. I told the guru that I'd rather think for myself. He then huffed that I didn't get what he was saying. That he meant having a conversation with the A-listers.

But that's just it. They've utterly devalued the meaning of the word "conversation". It's not a real conversation in which people come clean with their sincere views and debate in earnest. Instead, they are paid Twitterers. They are paid to twitter and pretend they care about arthritis pain. They are trying to hustle money as consultants trying to pretend they provide this great public service of "empowering" the millions to go march on Washington. They get their brand name memed around by organizing a Tweetathon for charity -- how could Robert Scoble say no, when asked to support a worthy water charity and be among other A-listers in the first Tweetathon?

What happens is that the entire matrix of Twitter then feels polluted, with ads, with hustlers, with fake me2govs and retweeters mindlessly copying the entire polluted mix. The kind of thinking and deliberation and debate that should happen in a healthy democracy is being shattered.

Twitter is only a medium. It can only reflect what it's in it. Of course, it's format is responsible for some of the way the content does emerge, but that can't be helped if it is to preserve its 140-character soul. All of this merely renews my sense that I have to find authentic people to follow, and continue speaking forcefully and truthfully, and not caring if they don't follow me. And that all of us can't let e-government, with its weird amalgam of e-consulting and social media, be installed by stealth.

Comments

[Pierluigi Casolari]

As founder of Koinup, I'd love to explain why there are two Koinup mentions on the virtual.alltop.com

Twitter is completely unrelated to this story.

Some months ago Koinup stuff contacted the Alltop editorial board in order to have Koinup listed in their virtual websites aggregator.

We suggested them a couple of links, they reviewed and later approved them.

The links listed are different. The first is about the latest works posted on Koinup. The other is about the latest places added to the Places Directory
http://www.koinup.com/places

If you someone is interested in visuals related to virtual worlds, these two links could help a lot to get useful informations. So I think that the Alltop choice to list them is all about the usefulness of resources, at least regarding Koinup

thanks for mentioning my website

[Ann Otoole]

People don't get the real joke of these new wave communications mediums.

I'll clue you in to the level 80 stuff:

Here I sit trying to plurk but all I could do is tweet.

Yes that is right. All your big deal things are all based upon bathroom related toilet noises.

The joke is on all of you that promote this literal crap rofl.

Someone is getting rich, they name this "crap", you are eating it right up, and you ain't ever gonna get rich with it. They got the money.

Next big thing will be.... *drumroll*...

Proont. Proont at your friends. They will love your proonts.

[BitsAndBytes]

Twitter is blocked for a lot of people at work so I guess if you want to stay informed about SL on your lunch break you're SOL.

So ridiculous. Why can't they just have a properly running forum? Twitter is incredibly annoying.

[Prokofy Neva]

Pierluigi, I'm a member of Koinup and have always been enthusiastic about the service (though not enthusiastic about the connection to the loathsome Hamlet Linden), but I think it's absolutely unfair and unjust for Koinup.com to have two scarce spots on Virtualworlds.alltop.com I don't care if they are "different," with one having a directory of places. You might just as well say that secondlife.com gets two slots because it has "Showcase" and is "useful". One is plenty. Visitors can find the places once they visit. There are so many competing sites in this category now that it isn't right to have two. Guy Kawasaki should realize he has a kind of stewardship for the community and not fill up the alltop with doubles or with dubious links that he himself, based on some quirk, or based on some arcane internal unpublished criteria, decides to indulge in.

I really loathe the idea that somebody can declare themselves "more useful" than others or that "usefulness" based on some stupid geeky Silicon Valley notion would prevail. That sucks. Explain to me how I could once be in the list, and was "useful" and then fell out, and became "not useful" a mere social parasite as the Soviets might say. What, I'm supposed to change what I write now, and never criticize Guy Kawasaki on Twitter for fear of being thought "not useful" lol? Fuck that shit. I'm pretty sure my removal came AFTER I said something critical to Guy which he pitched a fit about, he is very emotional in fact.

If they don't think Alexa is accurate for traffic and want to add in other types of notions, then they should come clean on what they are. The site has no credibility and merely becomes a subjective A-listers A-list, that's all.

And mind you, for that virtualworlds.alltop.com page to become credible it need to include my page. I'm certainly not the most read or beloved SL blog. However, I do have a pretty big readership and linkage.

So if I was once included under some set of criteria reflecting that, and included not because I contacted their editor and demanded inclusion, but becbaues they decided on their own, then removing me is a political statement that shows the bias and *non-usefulness* of alltop.com itself.

I'm puzzled by this page, really. It may have things broken on it. Right now, it has Second Life's Official Blog on double, i.e. not different links, but twice. It also has 3pointd.com which hasn't been updated in about a year and died! It has SLOG, which is virtually moribund.

Is it rotating through some compiled list?

Koinup.com isn't even on there now, and other sites with far less traffic are showing up. Huh?

But if Koinup is on there twice and there is some normal criteria, that's wrong. No one should be on twice on a scarce eyeball space resource like this. You're taking away from say, sluniverse.com which is older and larger in terms of pictures and also has an active forums.

[Prokofy Neva]

Sorry, Koinup *is* on, just pushed down to the bottom, on twice, but now pushed off the top rankings -- or perhaps that means nothing. That's just it. How do you make sense of the selection and ordering of this site? SLOG or some Neko site isn't more important than Koinup or others there. It's nuts.

He now has Twitter feeds, which I think violates his original principle. It should be persistent websites.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Thanks for pointing me out to Alltop, I'm afraid I haven't been following Guy on Twitter recently to learn about it :)

Your article is definitely thought-provoking in an interesting way: a strong argument *against* e-democracy, or "democracy to the masses", or "personal democracy" or whatever you wish to call it. It made me certainly think about how hard it is to experiment with new models of citizens' closer participation with their governments.

Ok, so we're seeing how NOT to do it, and I certainly will agree with you that you have given quite good examples of BAD ideas — of what to AVOID at all costs.

I, for one, would like to see a few GOOD ideas as alternatives. A few came to mind, but after thinking them over a bit, they would easily be "gamed" just like the examples you gave. I'm out of ideas.

So, Prok, what would you suggest?

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm not at all opposed to e-democracy, Gwyn. But I want the process and tools of e-democracy to be democratically decided, too. They haven't been, just like websites. They are viewed as "technical matters". Maybe websites could get away with being only the domain of gov tekkies, but social media is, well, social, and it can't be run by geeks only.

The people who are setting themselves up as a consultants offering the service of e-government in the private sector are of the greatest concern to me right now. That's because these are people with decided political agendas, very much skewed to the left, with very rigid ideas about Palestine, China, net neutrality, the bailout, whatever, pick a topic. And I don't think they can pretend to be brokers of these tools for everybody, on both sides of the aisles, when they have the power to shape impressions, block people in discussions (as they do on change.org), filter out what they don't like, and data-scrape in order to sell their candidates down the ballot to captive audiences. This is wrong. They can do that, but then they need to register as a lobbying organization and be up front that that's what they are all about.

Just as lefty NGOs that stray into politics get banged on by the right and their status gets challenged (and visa versa), so those trying to pass themselves off as mere common carriers or discussion sites or e-government sites performing services need to be scrutinized.

It would be one thing if there were thousands of these sites left, right, and center so that we could see that tools have channels. But we don't. Instead, we see a decided, secretive lobby trying to overthrow the tools to put their people in power (like Personal Democracy). They are mere political magazines, but political magazines now with the power to get millions, not tens of thousands of readers, some of whom are lured there by a fake bipartisan shill.

I think there are some broad elements of e-democracy that have to be discussed very thoroughly and openly before you can decide "what to do". These elements include:

1. Who controls the data from e-government sites and what can they do with it? let's say Facebook decides to get in the e-government business, promoting, oh, a struggle against Proposition 8 in California. Or for net neutrality as a federal policy. Do they have to abide by FCC regulations about equal time for political debates? They aren't television stations, even with more views and attention. So why don't they?! Does their awful TOS come up as an issue, regarding the copyright of content? What about privacy? Will they block people they view as "trolls" they don't like? Will they capture lists of them and ship them to operatives for attack ads? And so on. There are millions of questions, and no one gets to discuss them because we are steamrolled.

Then there's the question of how government sites should be run, and who gets to decide that policy, and whether geeks in government offices get to decide it all, with hired e-gov consultants, or whether the public can decide -- and naturally, I weigh in on having the general public who is impacted by all this be intimately involved in the decision-making process.

If the Cory Linden concept of voting, common among geeks, takes on (look at how IETF rejects voting as well), imagine how horrible that would be to have *as a country*. Where you couldn't vote for candidates, or vote "yes" or "no" on a proposition, but only got to approve platforms pre-set for you by geeks in e-voting. That's just to cite one obvious problem.

[Pierluigi Casolari]

I can't say exactly the reason of the ranking in the alltop page. On the top feature apparently sites with a higher ranking and on the botton the others. I have asked, some weeks ago, alltop board to clear that and they said they own a specific ranking algoritm to place the websites on the alltop pages.

Onestly, I feel that it is a good brand feature to be listed on those pages, but on the contrary I can say that my website is getting really few traffic from there (probably because of the botton placement)

Probably you're right asking more trasparency in the displaying of the websites. Probably they should also improve their submission form and work a bigger number of websites per category.

Regarding the two Koinup pages, we submitted to them much more ;-)
they accepted these two, probably because they considered useful resources. But, I agree with you there are many useful resources out there. And probably a virtual world expert in their board could help to have a better coverage of the virtual worlds space.

Thanks for the kind words on Koinup!

[Monk Zymurgy]

I am getting annoyed with XstreetsSL..they rank all of the listings in order of product price..I sell a working board game in SL, it is nicely made and functions beautifully. I have got 2 positive reviews *beams*..I sell the game for 500L$, i am sure if i upped the price to 1500L$ i would get more eyes, and maybe more sales. Is this another example of LL's tekkie communistic culture, where the geeks at the website are ruining my experience? or is it capitalistic driven systems, engineered to reap profits through unclear methods of promoting higher value goods? after reading this blog more regularly..I am bamboozled.

Oh yeah they put up the seller fees too :( i make 10L$ less per sale since the labs swallowed up the service.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

So let's set aside all those "wannabe e-democrats" and focus on real solutions. If I read you correctly, Prok, you'd go for solutions like:

- Government-sponsored solutions, since they're liable to scrutiny by the public (by the mere fact that they are from Government; and at the very least you can vote them out of office if you disagree with their "innovations" in e-democracy)
- Registered political groups (parties and correctly-filed political/lobby non-profits), mostly because these are bound by legislation that defines how they are supposed to behave

... and that would be pretty much it.

Would an official Government list of sanctioned e-democracy initiatives help? Basically, as a citizen, you'd have the choice to look it up, see if it's a sanctioned initiative or not, and stay away from it if it isn't. But if it is, you know what your rights are.

Would you require an Overseeing Board (like a High Authority on e-Democracy) to make sure these e-democracy initiatives would comply to the rules? Or would that be unnecessary, bureaucratic, and cumbersome?

I'm really not "proposing" anything or even claiming that I might do a proposal at any stage; I wouldn't even know where to start. But it's also true that I'd be quite happy to suggest to some politicians how they'd best deal with it, in case some of them suddenly find it interesting enough to launch their initiatives — and they should be prepared to do it *right*.

[Prokofy Neva]

Gwyneth,

You are *so obtuse* sometimes -- oh, in fact that's a gimmick in which you are trying to point up some imagined "Hyprokisy" of course.

I haven't said that "only official government sites get to practice e-government". Don't be silly. I don't get to do that, dear. In a democracy, everybody gets to practice democracy all the time in a million different ways the way they want to, without my say-so. I'm entitled to weigh in with a prescriptive just as much as you2gov or Dave Winer or Shel Israel or Micah Sifry any of these heavy influencers get to do on their blogs and Twitters. You are never bothered by them doing this, hmm?

Personal Democracy has a blog up recently ridiculing the idea that anyone would be concerned about a member of a co-del Twittering his arrival and location in Iraq. We're supposed to believe, with the incitement of this e-gov site, that if someone reprimanded this *elected representative*, *representing people* for foolishing broadcasting his whereabouts in a war zone, that they are old-fashioned oppressive net-nannies and refusers to embrace the inevitable. But, um, why can't we be concerned about the implications of a congressman twittering his location to snipers? Why isn't that ok? The lack of awareness about this, the sheer snottyness in implying that there can't be a debate on this -- that's the soul of the e-gov crowd -- and it stinks.

These home-made consultant-based e-democracy sites are free, in a free society, to put up their site and do whatever they want. I'm free to trash them to show how elitist and undemocratic they are, and a threat to freedoms. That's normal and necessary -- I need more company.

I'm exposing their hypocrisy in claiming to be honest brokers and managing a bipartisan contribution to democracy, the way television and newspapers did (and didn't just claim to do) -- that's really all there is to it. The e-government mafias are not the fourth estate. Whatever the bias you think old media had, it didn't take its subscriber lists and spam them with political infomercials. Can the same be said of these e-gov sites? No. What are they doing with the data scraped from me? If I'm supposed to worry about the real government holding my data, why can't I worry about these unaccountable private groups doing the same thing?!

What I want is a public debate with all the bells and whistles -- of the sort you are supposed to have in a democracy, Gwyn, not a fascistic dictatorship which your country had for 30 years.

If there is a proposition afoot, as there was put out by you2gov, for example, that it would appropriate to have 10 million people which he incites glom on to Congress during the Bail-out debate and have THEM prevail with his "progressive" viewpoint, why can't I debate that process? Why can't we all?! He claims he is merely "empowering" 10 million to be informed and weigh in as they please. But based on the information he will give them, or the skewed information the other e-gov sites will give those people, what are the results?

So picture these 10 million people now have an amplified, instant, heavy enormously pressurey voice. The 132 million people who voted for Obama don't have this voice; the rest of those who didn't don't have this voice; just the wired Wired lefty readers incited from a Twitter. Why would they get to push a massive flash-mob point of view over on elected representatives? Why is that fair or just or even necessary? Who decided that we will now have rule by flash mobs, Gwyn?

Alan Silberberg thinks that if the 10 million are engineered to say "jobs," if the elected 400 some Congressmen and their staffs put together a package that says differently "home loans, jobs, health care, energy research" that the 10 million should just win...because. Because they are empowered e-democrats.

I'm for exposing these mechanisms RUTHLESSLY and debating what the proper response of Congress is to flash-mobs of this nature. If 10 million Facebook friends decide they want not jobs or health care but bandwidth, so they can play WoW and sell their Google ads, do they get to win because they are wired?

Seriously, instead of trying to play "let's hunt for the Hyprokisy" try to really think through how this fabulous social media-mediated "democracy" is going to function *really* when it really functions, and not with 40 on a sim in Neualtenberg Gwyn, but the way you dream of it functioning, when you can perpetrate it on the masses.

Old media were trusted institutions that spent hundreds of years building up that trust, and even they didn't have it at all times with all people. Why are new media *supposed* to be trusted, sight unseen, Gwyn?

As for overseeing boards, why the the horror and *fear* of democracy, Gwyn? Democracy is elected governments making institutions. One of the institutions they might make is an e-government policy board -- and one that Beth Noveck doesn't get to decide alone (I bet Ren Zephyr is just salivating at the idea that finally, America seems to be working like England, where somebody on Terra Nova gets to be National Consultant Number One heavily affecting all policy for the government on virtuality and social media, instead of having a more complex and messy process of think tanks, newspapers, citizens' groups, etc. as is usually the case.)

Obama has various task forces he's appointing that put executive power over congressional power, and nobody is really noticing or complaining about this when it comes to research oversight, for example. Why aren't YOU complaining when beloved Obama makes an executive-branch task force? Why wasn't THAT bureaucratic, Gwyn?

Indeed, citizens' task forces and government task forces of various types SHOULD get formed about virtuality and social media, which will have impact on hundreds of millions in the not-too-distant future, and this SHOULD NOT be decided by Clay Shirky or Beth Noveck or Micah Sifry. They are mere lobbyists, lobbyists hiding behind the mask of "personal democracy".

There's nothing wrong with demanding "rightness," Gwyn. You seem to imply that this is somehow inherent evil if there is "one set of values". Those values would be accountabiliy, transparency, fairness, due process -- the same kind of words that these e-gov sites constantly wave around as a shill, but without any authenticity whatsoever.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, you were the one lecturing about how closed, expert parliamentary commissions were the way to go, back in the day, Gwyn. Are you for having them in the private sector now?

[raymon]

" ... the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit." Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland co-edited "Commodify Your Dissent," with a foreword by Lewis Lapham (1997)."
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/interviews/frank.shtml

[Prokofy Neva]

>Then, suddenly, I'm gone from that page.

So I joked and said, we need a site called memoryhole.alltop.com where those of us who were once on this august famous guy's website could then be delegated once we fell off lol.

Well, guess what, I'm back on that page! @guykawasawki answered me himself and said most likely it was a broken feed. I looked up the knowledge base for such issues on Typepad, and sure enough there was a broken feed issue, Microsoft document code disrupts the feed, it doesn't mix with a blog post, if you have pasted something into the blog template. Now that's annoying, but now that I have learned about it I can fix it. It's listed in the help section.

There was a more complicated thing going on with atom feed that I didn't understand at all but I kept fiddling this and that and finally it kicked in.

So it turns out I was wrong to suspect @guykawasawki of sinister dark deeds and putting blogs down the memory hole! it seems it was only a broken feed issue!

But...there's still the open issue of just what *is* his formula, which he's telling, for his selection process. It's a real mystery. It's not based on traffic. And the mystery of how certain blogs fall off not due to feeds being broken.

Once again I can point out that the reason you can even come up with "conspiracy theories" in the first place is because in social media, we are in a closed society. We do not know the processes by which the coders make decisions, and we can't be expected to distinguish between their broken tools and their diabolical interventions hiding behind tools. Nobody knows the formula for what goes on alltop and they won't be telling you, like the Lindens won't tell you how they do search/all.

[Prokofy Neva]

raymon, the Thomas Frank piece is interesting, but I'm on a completely different page than he is. He's infused with all that Marxist cant and fear of business destroying cultural aesthetics that Reed Steamroller exemplifies in cruder form. I don't have those fears and horrors of polluted discourse blah blah. I also think he fetishizes industrial workers and workers' world power and all that kind of Marxist claptrap that is now really getting on for 150 years past the sell-by date.

Industrialized workers belong to another era; unions are eroded for good reason in a world run by consultants and part-timers and work-at-homes. Freelancers' unions never quite decomplexify themselves enough to get going. All of his sentiments are old-fashioned. The world changed, and those Marxist-fed ideologies have to go. In fact, they are death.

If the hippie culture of the 1960s was commodified and resold in the 1970s and 1980s, so what? that's the story over and over again in American history as cultural waves start with minorities and then become mainstream. It's a natural process.

[raymon]

... yes different page though it seems a part of twitter is following a process of commodification and reselling ... yes a natural process ... fyi feed works for me using NetNewsWire ...