[via Fimoculous]

Writers are a sensitive bunch. We're like flowers, really. I exaggerate [Not much! –day ed], but all creative types crave validation. And it takes a long time to trust that whatever you made is just good, without praise from critics, strangers and high school English teachers. One of the things I like about keeping a private blog is that only a few of my friends read it and I don't get any feedback. For one, I'm too much of a flower to take it. And for two, I don't have to think about whether what I write is good or bad, which lets me just write.

But having instant feedback is exciting and fun. No judgment, but I have a word document where I save all the nice comments I've gotten at Gawker. Plus, reading comments is a great way to seem engaged with work while actually just being self-involved.

Of course, the flipside is that people can be nasty, too. Most people objected that to my claim that Gawker commenters are "mad." Because of the Gawker invite system, executions and the Darwinian nature of comments, the site doesn't stand for calling our west coast editor "fucking retarded." But you guys are quick to point out any grammatical failings and let me know when things are old.

But even though I'd love to continue on about me, as yesterday's experiment showed, commenting isn't all about the writer. A good post will encourage a dialog amongst the commenters. Often a mediocre post will do the same. And after, say, the 40th comment, the conversation becomes hard to follow for the casual observer. But as a public forum, and as a business model, that's a good thing. Commenting is also an opportunity for office drones to prove themselves to be real writers. Our own Richard Lawson was discovered as a commenter, and as 8Millionth admitted, "more people will read comments on a popular blog than the same words written on an unknown blog."

But getting back to me—a friend mentioned that he likes reading the comments because people talk to me as if they actually know me. That can be fun and weird, like when my family's dog made the comments last week.

Of course, the person I am in real life (very clumsy, occasionally socially awkward) and my online persona are two different things. But maybe not that different. Earlier today I sent my dad a sappy email and then asked how much financial aide that would get me. His response: "Zero because you spelled aid wrong."

Eveyone's a commenter.

One guy, Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics, thinks the rudeness of certain commenters detracts from the overall discussion:

The extreme license given individuals to vent, dissemble, excoriate and indulge their hates verbally, winds up destroying the expressive freedom that other people, less bold and less opinionated, need. ... The overall result is a less expansive, less robust sphere of expression &mdash and sound, worthwhile thoughts aren't shared.

If someone isn't bold enough to express his or her opinion anonymously in an online forum out of fear of meanie commenters, that person is a wimp. Sorry, it had to be said.

Wasserman goes on to say there should be rules. Even at Gawker, there are rules: the unfunny are executed. But what about major news organizations? How should they police the smarter than you, more insanely random than you, boring and bored? And frankly, are these people even worth policing/ Do most Times readers care about the vocal group of commenters?

And so, I open it up to you, the commenters. Why are you here? Why are you so nasty? What should be done with you?

• Someone posted to JuicyCampus links to a gay porn featuring a Yale sophomore.
• The sophomore was named.
• This sophomore was interviewed by the Times and did not deny being in the porno.
• But instead of being all, "OMG, I went from being a gay porno D-list star to attending YALE UNIVERSITY I RULE," he was all, "I'm trying to zone it out," which is still not that devastating a quote from someone who was supposedly "panicked and dispirited."
• But this other girl had it real bad: She was named in a discussion about the "biggest slut" on campus! Who wants to be called a slut in college? And who defeated her in the "biggest slut" competition? How did THAT girl feel? Why is the internet making this happen??
• The Times talked to another girl named Ashley, who was also named in a big discussion about sluts but who allowed herself to be named in the article.
• Ashley actually had some healthy perspective about the whole thing.
• Ashley: "It’s amusing, really... It’s all so exaggerated and extreme that you kind of know it’s a lie. It’s a site for cowards and melodramatic people."
• That's it, those are all the awful things named in the Times piece.
• But! We need to ban something, according to this guy from a company that goes around trying to get things deleted from the web, reputationdefender.com:
• "He added that the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides the site legal protections, was 'functionally Mesozoic' in the blogging age. Juicy Campus, he said, 'is not encouraging people to be themselves, it’s encouraging people to be the worst version of themselves.'"

Times: A Crash Course in Online Gossip

"According to researchers in Palo Alto," Wilson says, "1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales believes the same; he told the Times, "the vast majority of work is done by this small core community." So Slate buys the party line. But these are fake statistics: The Palo Alto study counted the number of edits. If I add five hundred words to an article about fortune cookies, that counts the same as if I rename a category. All this proves is that a small set of wonks are organizing Wikipedia.

The masses are still writing it. Aaron Swartz compared the number of letters added to several articles and found that most articles are written by people with little other Wikipedia experience. That is, most of Wikipedia comes from people who dropped in and added a chunk of text. All the edits? Those are just Wikipedia diehards rearranging the other users' contributions. (A more thorough study confirms Swartz's conclusion.)

It's obvious, really. Why does Jimmy Wales believe that only 500 people wrote everything of import on Wikipedia? With 2 million articles on the site's English version, that would mean each core user wrote nearly 20,000 articles in the seven years since the site launched. That's eight articles a day per user, and clearly physically impossible. Is Wales unaware of this math, or is he so bent on maintaining Wikipedia's respectability that he can't admit how innovative it is?

So much for Wikipedia being in the hands of the few. But Wilson also aims at Digg, saying the site "is largely run by 100 people." The top hundred Digg users submitted almost half of the stories that went to the front page, he points out. Of course, Digg recently adjusted its algorithm to lower the influence of those Diggers.

Wilson tries to spin this: "The super Diggers published an open letter of grievances and threatened to boycott the site," he says, implying that the hundred top users were in united revolt. But the actual threat only came from four users. That's hardly enough to threaten the site.

As Wilson notes, founder Kevin Rose talked to these four Digg users and reached what Wilson calls a "shaky truce." What exactly is shaky? Rose and CEO Jay Adelson merely explained what they had just done and how it would encourage new users to contribute. They didn't actually concede anything to the four users.

Isn't Slate supposed to be the reasoned, second-guessing news source? Then why does Wilson assume Rose has any fear of his top users? Talking to these users wasn't Rose's way of saving his site. It was a cunning move to make these users feel important, and get his message out to the entire Digg community. Rose came away doing just what he wanted and making everyone thank him for it.

Wilson even reaches for unsubstantiated arguments against Digg; he points to rumors that the site hires secret moderators to delete stories. Rose has denied this publicly several times; it's hard to believe he'd lie about this one aspect of the site when he's been so open about all others.

It'd be easy to blame this story on Slate's need to be contrarian, but the message here was so conservative and mainstream, it seems it's just a plain old bad story, bad enough to be retracted. If only we could vote on that.

Most news outlets make a big deal about protecting their copyrighted content, but the "fair use" clause generally lets other outlets off the hook. Unless your little blog is making money off the link without sharing the loot, or posting content in full without the link, most are happy to take whatever views or buzz comes their way without much fuss. You won't catch the traffic-giant New York Times turning down free links. "Links may be created to The New York Times on the Web homepage, any area or articles that you can locate in a search of our Web site," reads its user agreement, which is just as grammatically confusing as it sounds. But very open-Internetish!

So why is BusinessWeek so picky? Accessing a "deep link" takes a reader to pages several layers within a site—they carry far less advertising space than the site's homepage, which is where they'd rather greet you. This kind of myopia makes it okay to link to Google's version of a BusinessWeek piece (giving the traffic to the search engine), but not to the BW article page itself. Courts have generally ruled that so long as you make it clear who the owner is, no URL is more valuable than another. But hey, they're a big scary magazine! Do as they say. At least, until they realize their business model is retarded.

Bai's basic gist is money no longer matters, because "in this new world, the most effective political ad makers may be amateurs like Phil de Vellis, the Internet consultant who recently took it upon himself to make a powerful pro-Obama ad, based on a famous Apple spot from 1984, that portrayed Hillary Clinton as Big Brother. The ad, which de Vellis made on his Mac in a single afternoon, ricocheted around the Web, reaching millions of Democratic voters. It cost nothing."

"Amateur" is, clearly, a pretty heady concept: what Mr. Bai leaves out of his piece is that De Vellis is about as much an amateur in terms of his political experience as former President Bill Clinton.

Sure, De Vellis made the 1984 ad on his Mac, but that doesn't change the fact that he is a political consultant by profession—that is, back when we were still in Web 1.0, he was working for the D.C based internet strategy and communication firm Blue State Digital, which provided nerdy computer stuff to Richardson, Vilsak and...Obama. But hey, he'd quit the biz—shot out on his own, blazed his own trail. After he was outed by HuffPo, he explained why he made the internet-wide sensation that shook the foundations of the American political scene:

"I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it—by people of all political persuasions—will follow.

According to Mr. Bai, the New Model hardly puts a dent in today's political coffers, leaving most of the millions to do their real job: get reported on. "Money still confers legitimacy on a candidate among the media and party activists," Bai writes, arguing that the really pressing issue for political strategists today is how a candidate can most conspicuously consume all of his/her purely symbolic capital. What with all the amateur post-professional high-tech political apparatchiks doing your pro-bono po-mo pro-mo for you, what's a candidate to do with the likes of a hundred million?

The best possible thing: go to the moon. Just imagine: "CLINTON 2008: I WENT TO THE MOON!" Now that would confer legitimacy.—LUX

The big questions, as per the "Talent Quest" website: "Do you have what it takes to be public radio's next great host? Do you have that most elusive of qualities - hostiness? Now is your chance." And just what is "hostiness"? No better way to know then to dig through the submissions, all of which are available for streaming along with comments from their creators and banter between friends.

On the whole, it seems that kids (and olds) have learned about as much about NPR house style from the SNL parodies as they have from the actual programming. Let's see... anemic tonal detachment? Check! Coffee house world music? Check! Subordinate clauses, apposition, and em-dashes? Ballin'! Film professor Jeff Midents crams fifteen clarifying phrases/clauses into his two-minute riff on green-eyed artist Nawi Oleen which averages out for one every ten seconds, enough to give the boy Robert Siegel a run for his money.

Which is not to say there's not life out there. Peep "soultalker" a.k.a. The Pleasure Activist on the topic of liberation and sexuality: "I LOVE 'BODY JOY.' WHAT A GREAT, GREAT NAME FOR A BUSINESS." Also check out GW affiliates Gabe and Kibs' "After the Fact" with Ulysses McLoud, a fictional high school teacher fired for refusing to grade his students ( "It reminded me of one of my favorite books by Nathanial Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter....I'll admit it, I was sick of these kids getting dehumanized").

Then there's the almighty Nurmi Hasa, a self-proclaimed lover of literature who "divides his time between Second Century Rome, fin-de-siecle London, pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, and 21st Century Cascadia." Make sure to actually listen to this one; doggie starts his piece with a fireside chuckle, then purrs his way slowly through the rest like a big furry cat:

You know, I often feel as though I'm living more than one life, which makes me sort of an intellectual bigamist, I suppose. I mean, there's my real life and my life in books, not to be confused with the lives I lead in music and British television shows.... [My life in books] isn't organized by date or event, it's organized by writer. As in, 'before Hildesheimer,' or 'after Saki.' And I don't read books; anyone can read books. I read writers. If you grab me, I'll track you down and inhale everything you've ever written. Which I suppose makes me an intellectual stalker as well as a bigamist. Like most folk in the rain soaked northwest I always have a tome or two going...

If you're wondering where exactly Linda felt that chill, look no further than her submission, a politically porny yarn about a house by the sea occupied by five wives/mothers who have put their lives on hold for the duties of family. Over a pale, quiet piano, Linda describes her "Momma, I'm So Sorry" fantasy, in which she pairs each of her little women with a "brilliant," "talented" young man, who is paid a cool million to do her bidding so that she can explore her passions. "After six months, with a woman unfettered to do whatever she could dream of doing and a man saddled with what most women do every day," Linda says, her p's and t's light as a feather, "I'd see what those lives were like now that they had been changed by living in each other's shoes. All this would happen in my house by the sea."

Another thing that would probably happen there is drowning, right fellas? According to her bio, Linda was raised Jewish by her "Japanese mother and Brooklyn-born father." These days she's keeping busy doing Zen practice and reconnecting with her Buddhist roots. Her secret talent? "It's goofy: I can hum and whistle at the same time, thus sounding like an alien spaceship approaching."

Mr. Hasa, for one, is impressed and enchanted. While Linda visits other people's pages and posts questions about why more women aren't entering the contest, Mr. Hasa, "a pretty radical feminist... happy to speak up on gender issues," warmly responds to her on her own page: "Lovely production, lovely voice, lovely sentiments. 'Two hundred a year and a room of her own.' Yep. Women sacrifice far too much in this culture. And for what? For men to have the time to blow up little brown children? Nope. Not right."

They go back and forth like this for six more posts, each one more tender than the last. Next thing you know, they'll be meeting up in the local library's private A/V room. No one tell Mr. Linda!

Deadline for submissions is May 14th. Three rounds later, a winner will be announced on September 24. In the meantime, Ira Glass: "Enter the Public Radio Talent Quest. This is no joke."—LEON

For those non-dorkuses in the room, the whole Web 2.0 thing is basically a way that companies are differentiating themselves from all those idiots from Web 1.0, who took way too much money from venture capital firms and hired way too many people before they remembered to actually make money. Web 2.0 companies, like MySpace and flickr and YouTube, kept themselves relatively lean and mean before selling out for massive amounts of money. Now it seems as though Mediabistro is trying to convince everyone that they're also a Web 2.0 company, even though, well, they're not. Oh Laurel. LaurelLaurelLaurel. When will you ever learn?

Web 2.0 Summit [Web 2.0]

Earlier: Breaking: Someone, Somewhere, May Be Buying Mediabistro. Possibly. Again.

yh collab: redesign famous logos in web 2.0 format! [Yah Hooray]

[Via Kottke]