Friday, June 23, 2006
Building a lever big enough to move the world
Doc's been building a big enough lever to move the world. Now, if only enough people jump on...I said that we'd already changed the world twice, with computers and the Internet itself.
And doc said:
- What we have with blogging is a chance for everyone to change the world. Still, what I mostly do is roll snowballs downhill, and once it starts gathering, it's not mine anymore.
That's how I feel about blogging, and yet I inadaquately expressed later what I meant about me "getting off the lever", was that what we needed was more snow balls rolling downhill. See those t-shirts doc and I are wearing? Two lovely snowballs.
I felt compelled the next day to wear my mozilla 1.0 T-shirt - the predecessor to firefox - because mozilla spent years in the woods before it finally "made it", and I got awful tired of using what levers I had to get it rolling downhill.
So I tried to talk about how many times an issue that the blogosphere has fought for has been defeated, how often a good technology got killed or thwarted in the bud like ReplayTV's commercial skip feature - or how the recent debate over "network neutrality" ultimately went down in flames, becuase if there is one thing I'd like to see the blogosphere have is a longer term view.
The cause of returning the analog television spectrum in 2009 back to the people would be one of my picks for a new snowball, as one example. That's a few years off. What sort of snowball could we build for that meme by 2008?
Or re-take the meme "network neutrality" - make it be about something simpler like "network asymmetry", or everyone having a right to their own IP address to do with as they will, or something, anything, any positive meme along these lines that sticks together long enough to survive the long roll downhill.
Tags: Bloggerconiv, Bloggercon, Doc ¶ 5:18 PM
