Eclectic Views

    

For several days the controversy between Kathy Sierra and some bloggers
including Chris Locke has been burning up the blogs.

Here's Laura Lemay's summary of the situation:

http://blog.lauralemay.com/archives/2007/03/kathy_sierra_or_imminent_death.html

I saw her pointer in the blog conference on The WELL.  Her write-up
answers the assertion Chris makes about YOYOW -- You Own Your Own Words -- 
as accomodating threats.

Laura's post is worth reading. She says: 

  [Chris] ironically brought up the Well in his defense of the sites 
  in question. He talked about "You Own Your Own Words" being the 
  core ethos of the Well and how he had taken that to be a guiding 
  principle. He interprets it as "I will not take responsibility for 
  what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote." 
  But there's two problems with that statement. The first is that 
  YOYOW doesn't mean you disclaim or censor anyone else's writing. 
  It means literally what it says -- you have copyright ownership over your 
  own words. No one else can take them, use them or post them anywhere 
  outside the Well without your permission. The other problem is that 
  YOYOW is only one of the well's core ethos...es (ethosii?). The other 
  one is that no one is anonymous, so you MUST take ownership of your 
  words. The O in YOYOW has meaning. Your real name is attatched to every 
  single post. Which brings us full circle to the notion of identity 
  on the internet, and standing up for what you say.
  

    


Inside in the <policy.> conference there are discussions going back
for years about YOYOW and copyright, fair use, responsibility, anonymity,
liability, etc.  I posted a reply to Laura's blog with a pointer to
another page out here, which points out some of the additional 
standards The WELL has asked (if not compelled) people to meet over the 
years:

          http://www.well.com/conf/guidelines.html

If you have a complete account, you can type "?etiquette" (no quotes)
at the OK prompt to see that old admonition at the bottom of that page,
in its original context.  "Other users have feelings" is part of our 
local tradition, too, though we have many kinds of people, conflicts,
personalities and styles around here.
  

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Here's a better URL for the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide mentioned in <2>...
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/
  

    

Here's another good piece:

http://xianlandia.com/te-amo/2007/03/28/you_are_your_own_words.html

You'll find a discussion inside The WELL in the <blog.> conference, too.
  

    
I like to think of YOYOW in a karmic sense.  They are your own doing, 
and you swim in their rippling consequences - intended, anticipated, 
or otherwise.

In my experience, those consequences can include efforts by competing
groups of one sort or another to suppress free agentry in general or to
suppress opinions in conflict with their own, or with their interests.

Not saying that has anything to do with what K.S. has encountered,
which has a distinctly juvenile tone to it, and likely has little to
do with her, aside from her appearance.
  

    
Her personality as a sunny, upbeat, encouraging type probably has a lot to
do with it too.  
        
Could her work be seen as just too hello kitty? I think that may be 
part of it -- and there are those "juveniles" of all ages who cannot bear 
a sunny or saccharine style, and would rather attack it than step away 
from the blog or the conference session.

I don't know.  I can be as dark and cranky as anybody, and I once blogged 
somewhat negatively about Tara (the one Kathy was defending as this 
escalated) myself. (My theory is that all we can do is to remind one another
to have a little compassion or even cold, formulaic good manners.  Short of
wading into the world of lawsuits, of course.)

Why do people try to take down cheerleader sorts -- even business 
cheerleaders?  What's so bad about encouraging folks who want that, when 
you can so easily avoid it if you are what sports people call a "negative 
motivator"?  How much does "girly" style have to do with all this?
  

    
(conference session in the above post referring to the real-world events
Sierra speaks at, not to WELL conferencing, just to note.)
  

    
Hello Kitty doesn't bother me, except in role models.

Fact is, I say "Hello, kitty" to just about every feline I meet, 
or do my best purr imitation, or both.
  

    

Do you take more femme, girlish women as seriously as "businesslike" women
... as experts?  You are probably quite fairminded, personally, but I think
girly-girl gets a bit of cultural disdain,  and that it is a very complex
puzzle.  
  

    
I think I probably take women who have both femme and businesslike sides
more seriously than those who are all one or the other.
  

    
I didn't mean to make an example of you, but you confirm what I think 
most of us know.  Style does have an effect on who respects a 
particular expert.  I have a hunch it was part of the dynamic in the 
lead-up.

More discussion of this is going on inside, in the Blog conference.
http://www.well.com/conf/blog/   
  

    
Well, in the case of being in possession of both femme and businesslike 
sides, it's an indication of whether both hemispheres of their brains are 
properly wired and working.  Much the same applies to men, except that I'd 
use some other word than femme to describe the intuitive side.
  

    
Of course. I'm not talking about internal intuitive sense or 
bio markers like estrogen levels.  My suspicion has to do with having seen 
years of posts by people who are allergic to cheerleader or sugary coaching
archetypes, versus other more somber or tough styles. In literary terms,
there's a matter of voice. 

Dislike of men for being too yuppie, too girly, too jock-like, etc etc 
also goes on when we evaluate experts and public figures.  It's part of 
why people decide they "hate" a writer, expert or celebrity.  The 
actual skills and qualities of the person may not have a thing to do with 
it.  
  

    

Meanwhile, this fracas has shifted to a debate about what to do.  Or not 
to do.

Did you see Tim O'Reilly's draft cultural badges for blogs?  Visually, 
that's blogs with rules -- they sport a sherriff's star -- vs. blogs 
without rules -- who put up a picture of explosives as an icon.
It's more complex, but the images were rather alarming.  I posted a 
response to his call for comments.

I then re-posted my thoughts in the <blog.> conference here nito the 
main conversation on this subject.  A few minutes ago I reposted to 
my personal external blog too.  

Here's that link (rather than reposting that whole thing here again.)
<http://gailwilliams.wordpress.com/2007/04/10/civilty-codes-of-conduct-and-sustaining-community/>
  

    
I see that link isn't working now.

        "Sorry, but the page you requested cannot be found."
  

    
All still working for me, but another option for that external page:  
http://tinyurl.com/yrqpx5

For entering the blog conference, if you are logged in, try the shortcut
box:  g blog

If you're reading on the outside, you can log in for that conversation 
from the Blog Conference description too: http://www.well.com/conf/blog/

I hope that solved the problem?
  

    
Yes, the link to your blog is working again.
  

    
Thanks.  Check out what Jon Carroll wrote about The WELL, rules, blog 
codes of conduct and common sense:

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/04/12/DDGTLOSCEK1.DTL>

Cute little aside:

       "If you spend half an hour in an online 
           forum and you're not sure which poster 
           is the clueless one, probably it's you."
  

    
Responding to <14>...

Actually, I suspect the specialization of the cerebral hemispheres
(logical vs. intuitive) is closely related to the "femme" style.

That specialization comes in degrees of polariztion.  On average,
womens brains are less polarized than mens, but that's only a
statistical mean, and there's a lot of variation within each gender.
What I'm suggesting is that "femme" is probably a manifestation of
greater polarization in women, and maybe also compensation for the
effect of an unusually polarized logical side threatening one's
sense of oneself as feminine.
  

    
Thats a very logical sounding statement satyr.

How do you feel about it yourself?

<g>
  

    
Hard to say.  ;-)  I (the logical side) have never been particularly out
of touch with my intuitive side, which suggests that I'm not unusually
polarized, for a guy, but I sometimes go off on tangents of the sort that
are candy to my logical side, and then hit a wall with "BORING" scrawled
across it in big red letters, so pursuing projects of that sort becomes a
kind of negotiative process; there has to be something in it for my
intuitive side or it won't buy in.  For me, bargaining on the order of
"let me concentrate now and we'll do something just for you later"  
doesn't work so well, but I can imagine that it might for others, and
might take the form of indulging in feminine frills.
  

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