Previous header graphic was a picture of a white plant, and the new picture is Sheep Meadow in Central Park, with a view of buildings on Central Park West on a sunny summer day (today). The white plant is called Dusty Miller, btw. Here's the full-size Sheep Meadow picture. #
Are any Republicans who were at the RNC in 2016 who would now like to apologize for what they said should be done to the Democratic candidate? Now would be a good time to stand up.#
When I went to the DNC in Denver in 2008, every time we entered or left the facility we had to walk a gauntlet of abortion protestors. Graphic images, and loud obnoxious people. I guessed at the time this was a compromise, that the protestors wanted to do more, but were restrained by courts and police. #
Dems should make a deal with the Repubs. Every Repub who chanted Lock Her Up apologizes, and then we'll ask Maxine Waters to chill.#
You do know we're living in a parody, a dark comedy in which a mob boss with fascist leanings accidentally gets elected president. As they say, hilarity ensues. Sort of like Hogan's Heroes meets The Sopranos. #I'm not usually up this early so I tuned in to Morning Joe. Interestingly I had seen the SNL parody of it, it's been many years since I've seen the original, and OMG the show is a great parody of the parody. It's so good. Here's the original SNL parody. #
I'm fascinated by the plump Nazi women who show up as memes, esp the ones with phones. The latest calls the cops on an 8-year-old girl selling water in front of her house. Her name is Boo. (Update: She was forced to resign from the cannabis business she founded.) But the most interesting of all is the original, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In there beats the heart of a human being, I'm sure, but it's so well hidden by the venemous bile. Basically I have a thing for largeish authoritarian women who lie. #
- One of the things that came up in Trieste is the question of the decline of the blogosphere. Here's what I said. #
- I doubt if the blogosphere of 2018 is smaller in absolute terms than the blogosphere of the early 2000s. In fact I'm pretty sure it's orders of magnitude larger, if you consider the size of just two hosting services -- Wordpress.com and Tumblr. #
- Most of the people who use social media, Twitter, Facebook etc are not NBBs. They were never going to become bloggers. We learned this in the early days of the evangelism of blogs. Most people don't have the impulse.#
- What changed is we lost the center. I know something about this because I created and operated weblogs.com. It worked at first, but then the blogosphere grew and grew, and weblogs.com didn't or couldn't scale to meet it. Eventually I sold it because it was such a personal burden for me. #
- The blogosphere is made of people, but the people treated the center like a corporation, and it wasn't. If we ever want to reboot the center, there has to be a cooperative spirit, and a limit to its scope to avoid the scaling problems. You can't put a big corp at the center of something so independent, or it ceases to be independent. #
- We're paying a price now for the lack of a center as Google and others move to control the open web that made blogging possible. Bloggers need the low barrier to entry to hosting our own blogs, even if we never use it. It's our escape plan. With no way out, the hosting companies will turn into AOL. #
- There used to be a communication network among bloggers, but that's gone now. #