In today's post, Lloyd provocatively asserts:

At great risk of coming across as a jerk in this matter, I gotta say: it baffles me to this day why no one else around here does what I see as such a simple, hyperlinking, act. Looking at the names on the links on the left [excluding the 'external' folks list], I see no one else who makes a routine practice of listlogging or annotated hyperlinking.

And I am left to wonder why that is... we have proven this weblogging sphere to be an incredibly deep and powerful medium for storytelling--shared or individually--that it astonishes me why we mostly choose not to share what we think about the lives of others who have taken the time to share themselves in their weblogs.

But I need to get down off this particular high horse, and acknowledge a simple fact. Perhaps the reason is this: it takes time to listen. And in addition, to really listen, with an ear to reflecting one's own thinking, takes work. And in the end, this kind of 'work' takes a very low priority in the larger scheme of your life.

I can live with that; but it disappoints, nevertheless. It seems so easy, but it evidently turns out to be quite hard.

It seems, Lloyd, that you more or less answered your own question. I want to affirm what many of us have taken for granted -- your facility, effort, and gift for connecting others to each other and drawing people out in the blogosphere. Speaking for myself (and probably for others), I'm in awe of the way you mentor as many folks (young and older) in "real life/face-to-face" and also in various virtual spaces -- partly because I have a sense of how much work it is to do and how faithfully you do this work. On a number of occasion, you have personally made a special welcome to me into your blogging community [1, 2] -- and I have also expressed my gratitude, which can definitely be in more evidence.

Having said this, I must admit a slight annoyance at Lloyd's "high horse" on this topic. What Lloyd has done is a wonderful service and is a lot of work. I would like to think that what I'm doing is not only hard work, but also of service to the community. I've had on my overflowing to-do list the task of improving my own blogroll, with the goal of better engaging with the many blogs and websites I do try to keep up with. One idea I told Chris about (but which I haven't been able to apply yet) is to have ways of indicating multiple levels of engagement. There are a lot of things I read that fall in the category of I-hear-you-sister-or-brother-but-don't-have-anything-to-say-right-now. I've struggled to find ways to "nod my head" or say "hmmm, yes" on a blog without having to write out too much (and spend too much effort doing so).

So improving my blogroll facility and my blog-reading technology are on my list of things to do to help me better engage in this community. But at the end of the day, as you said to me at lunch yesterday, our attention is limited and small. I wish I could do more, really -- and I feel terrible all the time for not doing more (yes, that's my problem). But I can't and I need to stop feeling bad about not being to do so.

(Let me add something that may or may address the issue at hand. Even though I've been blogging for over three years now, I feel that I'm still getting the hang of this new medium. There are periods in which my blog was really nothing more than links to a bunch of things I happen to be reading at that time. At other times, I'm trying to do close readings of other readings and responding to those readings. Recently, I've been focused a lot on what's going on in my own head and heart and life -- with less linking out in this medium. It doesn't mean that I've stopped listening to others. I do a lot of listening in "my real life". And it doesn't mean that I don't plan to do a lot of listening to others. At this moment in time, I'm choosing to listen to myself -- and share what I hear. That may sound grossly self-centered -- and maybe it is. So be it. But at the same time, I'm trying to find a way to put out there as much as I know about a lot of things so that others can take advantage of it. A lot of times, that's less about listening to a lot of individuals. (For example, there's an entire edublogging community of which I am nominally a part -- and I hope to do a lot of listening to others soon. But I'm not doing a lot of that right now....)

Does that do justice to your post, Lloyd? I'm trying to listen here....

After having lunch at Restaurant
Raphael [review,
discussion],
Lloyd and I attended the matinee showing of Winged
Migration, a lovely film about migratory birds. I will not attempt a review
here but just to comment on the experience. (If you want discussion of the film
read some reviews at RottenTomatoes!)
Unfortunately, I was a bit tired and ended up zoning out at times. But that
seemed okay with the spirit of the film, which was unhurried, moving at nature's
pace in some sense (As Lloyd said, some of the scenes were rather dreamy --
so falling asleep on my part does not imply a fault with the film, but more
about my not getting enough sleep to take in serious art!).

The most basic thing that the film did for me is to help to see birds in a
new light -- and to not take for granted (to "problematize",
if you will) long migratory patterns of birds. (How do birds individually and
collectively decide it's time to fly? How do they end up at the same spots?
Do young birds learn from old birds where to fly? We saw certain birds get stranded
-- what happened to them? Why do some birds fly so much farther than others?
Do birds just get tired and fall out of the sky? And so on....) Not to overintellectualize
the film as I'm wont to do -- because the most amazing thing I saw was just
seeing birds fly close up, in a way I would never see otherwise It's actually
incredible and weird that birds would routinely fly thousands of miles. Is that
type of migration really necessary or some crazy extravagence?

(I didn't realize that Lloyd was seeing the film for the second time until I posted my reaction! Read his first and second impressions.)

From Duncan Watts' Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (pp. 61-62):

Physicists, it turns out, are almost perfectly suited to invading other people's disciplines, being not only extremely clever but also generally much less fussy than most about the problems they chose to study. Physicists tend to see themselves as the lords of the academic jungle, loftily regarding their own methods as above the ken of anybody else and jealously guarding their own terrain. But their alter egos are closer to scavengers, happy to borrow ideas and techiques from anywhere if they seem like they might be useful, and delighted to stomp all over some else's problem. As irritating as this attitude can be to everybody else, the arrival of the physicists into a previously non-physics area of research often pressages a period of great discovery and excitement. Mathematicians do the same thing occasionally, but no one descends with such fury and in so great a number as a pack of hungry physicists, adrenalized by the scent of a new problem.

Duncan Watts "holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics and has published in leading physics and sociology journals" according to his book.

On CBC Radio One, I heard some
very interesting advice from a blind man to those who are "light-dependent"
in Ontario (say my family in Toronto) who need to make it through the night
without electricity (and therefore light):

• keep doors open -- not half-open
• follow a wall with your hands
• clear your floor of obstacles
• grab the things you need for the evening to have close to you
• if you drop something on the floor, don't bend over to grab it. crouch carefully
  and use one hand to sweep the floor for the itme
• don't stick your hand out suddenly -- you might end up banging your fingers
  into an item; curl your hands before slowly lifting your hands

In forwarding my blog entry from several days ago about the Web and the church to fellow church members, I wrote a sentence that began with the words "I blogged". When asked what I meant, I realized how I was using a vocabulary that is very foreign to most people. It's interesting how being immersed in blogging has made me think that everyone is doing it!

At any rate, in search of a way to explain blogging, I turned to the handy whatis site to come up with a reasonably good definition of weblogs.

When I found out about the big power outage that has hit Toronto, New York, and a good number of other cities in the north-east, I immediately tried to reach my family in Toronto. I got through -- suprisingly -- and found out that they were sitting in the dark (both figuratively and literally). Kris, my brother-in-law, told me that they didn't know what was going on other than the fact the power was out. I read him a big chunk of the New York Times article about what is happening. I was glad that people seemed calm -- maybe calmer than I am! As I walked over to Evans Hall, I left messages for a friend in Washington, D.C. wondering about her. Later I realized that D.C. wasn't hit by power outages -- my geographic sense of that region is a bit shaky. At any rate, I hope that she appreciates the thought if not the substance of the concern.

Personally, I'm pleased that Krista feels free to diverge from the transportation theme of her blog to write about Macbeth, for instance. I've not read Macbeth myself but my image of the story has literally been transformed by Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. This film was the first Kurosawa flick I ever saw (the first of fifteen in two months, that is) and made an unexpectedly strong impression on me. I won't quickly forget the menacing fog, the mask-like faces, the blood-curdling shuffle of "Lady Macbeth's" kimono on the floor, the final volley of arrows that finally dispatches the main character. It was amazing, and I was won over to Kurosawa's art.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up to find that my wiki had been graced with some new pages written by Christian Stimming, my former housemate! Not only did he introduce himself but he also contributed to the running discussion between Krista and me on the joy of bicycling. Christian demonstrated concretely for me the power of many eyes. He read my quick page on my 1-year "sabbatical" from new committees and asked why I was still resting (since I had written the dates as 2002-2003); what I meant was 2003-2004. His comments got me to correct that piece.

Although I'm supposed to be on a personal
sabbatical year, I have a hard time resisting joining committees, especially
if they join two of my favorite things: the church and the web. On Sunday evening,
I attended the first meeting of the Web Advisory Board (WAB) for my church,
the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley
(FPCB), rationalizing my attendance as an opportunity to advise without having
to do any work (a great thing for dreamers like me).

Continue reading →

I've been running a public wiki for
almost three weeks now. What, might you ask, is a wiki? Not having done a comprehensive
search for a definition, I nevertheless recommend the following from wiki.org,
which I will quote here:

Wiki is in Ward's [Ward Cunningham]
original description:
The simplest online database that could possibly work.

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and
edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and
has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal
pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the
organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and
subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any
page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the
Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

Continue reading →