Anne Truitt Zelenka

Simmering on the mental burner…

• Alone, together. I miss reading a good newspaper right when I wake up. The Maui News takes me all of five minutes to read, hardly enough time to finish a Pop-Tart, especially if it’s brown sugar cinnamon. So I’m happy when smart people like Virginia Postrel find and summarize interesting articles from top news outlets for me, like this one on scrapbooking among suburban moms. I don’t do scrapbooking; how could I fit it in around my blogging? How can I fit anything in around my blogging? I was interested to read about anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff’s description of such activity as representing the broader trend towards “alone, together” pursuits where a person grows and expresses herself as an individual within a larger community. Sounds like blogging, huh?
• The contribution society. Since I was thinking about perfect competition over the weekend, I’m in an economic frame of mind. But I’m not all about naked self-interest; I want to contribute something of value to the world. James pointed me to his March 2005 discussion of the contribution society; that makes me wonder where and how cooperation and altruism fit into a competitive world. Obviously, there are game theory and behavioral economics approaches that explain these things. And probably some powerful marketing metaphors too. I’m not sure yet how to tie it all together in the context of Web 2.0.

  My biggest wondering: if perfect competition squeezes out all the abnormal profits and yet much of what’s available today is funded by the abnormal profits of yesterday, how do we make this a self-sustaining industry? Or is it already? What happens when the money runs out, as it might if we enter an era of flat returns in nearly all sectors, as the yield curve seems to be indicating? I can think of it solely in terms of myself, because I am funding my current activities out of my gains from the last boom (and on my husband’s back too, but let’s leave that aside). Soon, however, I must make money at this or something else. How, without trading in all the fun? To put it more nakedly and self-interestedly, how do I make a contribution and get paid too?

• Users as developers. Doc Searls wrote about UDDT or “Users and developers, diggin’ together” on the how-should-VC-transform topic that’s been bubbling about. I want to change that to Users as developers, because that’s what I see happening. Last week after returning from Search Champs Dori Smith wrote about the need for widgets that people who only know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can use to put together Web apps. Much maligned Ning is providing a way for nonprogrammers to create their own social web apps. One slam against them is that you really need to know some technical stuff like PHP to make truly innovative apps with it. But we’ve seen with blogging that non-techie users are more than willing to figure out the stuff they need to in order to get the results they want. It’s straight out of Clay Shirky’s Situated Software:

So with programming; though all the attention is going to outsourcing, there’s also a lot of downsourcing going on, the movement of programming from a job description to a more widely practiced skill. If by programmer we mean “people who write code” instead of “people who are paid to write code”, the number of programmers is going to go up, way up, by 2015, even though many of the people using perl and JavaScript and Flash don’t think of themselves as programmers.

• Browser boogie. IE 7 beta is available. Reveal is cool, so says Stephen O’Grady and he’s right. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to install and run Firefox extensions? Wow.
• My BlogHer blog. It’s here. The feed containing only my posts is here. I had a funny experience on my mom blog where I announced my association with BlogHer and one of my readers realized that I was the same person whose smiling face she saw on the BlogHer site chatting about tech. It was a weird moment where I felt my self identity coalescing on the Internet.

Perhaps I should have made this into multiple posts. What I like about throwing it all together is that it feels more tentative, less like I think I really know what’s going on, and more like how it’s happening in my mind. Getting into tech blogging has been a little bit like that childhood story of stone soup for me. I didn’t start with much but a pot and some water, but I took a carrot from here and two potatoes from there, some fresh herbs, a little chicken, and yum! It tastes good!