I came across this blog called Brain Waves. If you don’t know about it already, I recommend adding it to your list. I’m interested in all things related to neurology – not the science of it, but how it affects everyday life. To wit:
Neurocompetition
Neuroculture
Neuroeconomics
Neuroelectronics
Neuroesthetics
Neuroethics
Neurofinance
Neuromarketing
Neuropolicy
Neurosociety
are all covered in this blog. Zack covers a wide range of topics with solid writing and lots of embedded links. It’s one of those blogs where even reading through the last 20 posts creates 20 new windows as you click all the different links to find out more. Interesting stuff. Following this field at a practical level is essential to better understanding how our brains make us do what we do and think what we think.
A new life begins for the next nine months
That was quick. Summer is over, as of today. I started junior year this morning and it felt weird to be back. Nothing has really changed – I love high school for the same reasons, and I hate it for the same reasons. I love it because I surrounded by really smart kids who are super funny. And those things (smarts and humor) are very very high on my evaluation of somebody. I hate it because there’s something woefully wrong with how this country approaches education and, as David Brooks puts it, lives in the future tense.
I will be busy these next nine months (see what I’m studying)…even busier come the winter during basketball season. But I’m not going to wear this on my sleeve. I know being busy is hip and I don’t want to be hip in this way. How will these next nine, long months affect my blogging? I don’t know. I will probably post a little less frequently – say, a few times a week instead of every day or every other day. Fact remains, my business and activities at school come first. What I am not going to do is give up on this blog. No no, the more time I spend in this space the more I’m learning. And learning is good. So you can be assured that this blog will stay active and I will continue to try to engage you.
After all, I try not to let school get in the way of my education. (Mark Twain)
Doc Searls Comment on My Post Yesterday
My post yesterday “Linking to Articles That Toot Your Own Horn” referenced Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls by name. I don’t know either them and just started reading their blogs. I was surprised, then, when within a couple hours both had written in to me commenting on my post. Doc’s comment is excellent and contains some terrific links which I recommend checking out. Thanks, Doc, for such a thoughtful response. It’s below in its entirety.
Thanks to Technorati, PubSub and referer logs, a certain amount of b’logrolling is inevitable.
For what it’s worth, I try to read and link to blogs that are outside the circle of usual suspects, and to point praise, when it’s deserved, in unexpected directions. But what should one do when wanting to point to a post that also toots a horn in your direction? In my case, I either ignore or acknowledge the praise, and post anyway.
But your post has me thinking… Is there some kind of disclaimer protocol required? What’s not “transparent” in an environment where everybody’s alreay equipped to fact-check everybody else?
The way I see it, blogging at its best involves building new understandings of vexing issues. People often team up around that kind of effort, something like farmers do when raising a barn. If one builder high-fives another builder when they frame a particularly well-crafted door or floor together, is that a bad thing?
Perhaps it is, from the perspective of traditional journalism. There it is customary to write with with a tone of finality, from an objective distance, and to regard all forms of enthusiasm with a degree of suspicion. That’s one ideal, in any case. It’s also one that doesn’t work in the parts of the blogosphere where participants are trying to be constructive and not just objective, where they are busy making and changing minds, and not just digging up facts and issuing opinions.
In that last link, I point to a post by Jay Rosen in which he took an idea I tossed out and built something interesting and substantial case around it — far better than I ever could have done on my own.
My point, which just came to me…
Much of what we’re doing here amounts to teamwork. It’s not formal, or even conscious in many cases, but it does involve lots of “yes, and…” posting. Sometimes praise is involved. More often it isn’t. What matters is that we’re not doing it alone. And that we’re only beginning to understand what that’s about.
So thanks for making us think. Much appreciated.
INdTV Web Site Launches – TV Network For Young People, By Young People
Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have teamed up to create INdTV, a television network geared at young people to contain programming on politics, current affairs, entertainment, media, and culture. When I first learned about the founding of this network – to be live sometime in 2005 – I was immediately intrigued. To have the opportunity to get into 20 million US homes by TV with a channel that would engage teenagers and/or the 25 year olds is exciting yet very challenging.
Since the founding team is operating in San Francisco, out of apartments and coffee shops at the moment, I contacted them to learn more about it, share ideas I had, and just generally get involved. I hooked up with Jamie Daves last week. Jamie has been involved in high-level politics for most of his 30-odd years and thinks like a savvy entrepreneur. There’s only a handful of people working for INdTV full time at the moment and Jamie is in charge of a lot of different aspects of the up-and-coming network.
Fundamentally, INdTV is still trying to figure everything out. Who is our audience? How do we reach them? How will we be different from MTV and CNN? How can we be edgy and rebel but also smart? And the one million dollar question: what types of shows/programming we will create? I didn’t realize how much on the ground floor things still were, which made my brainstorming session with Jamie all the more exciting. The point I tried to drive home with him was the challenge of the medium, TV. I don’t watch TV – at least I haven’t in several months – mostly because it isn’t “on demand” and the programming for the most part sucks. Thus, for INdTV to engage me (or a growing number of young people) they would have to have a formable web presence. Indeed, blogs seem to be part of the plan. (In fact, I strongly encouraged them to set up a blog right now, to document the work they do putting together a TV network. Not only would they be “walking the walk” but it’d engage a healthy audience before the network is even live.) My other main point to Jamie was the need for the network to be transparent. The last thing young people want is another “evil media” player run by old white guys smoking cigars.
So…check out their web site (which I provided feedback on but too late to get the stupid tattoo off the guy’s arm before they went live) and see if you’d like to become a Digital Correspondent, a full-time position which is bound to be quite interesting and fun.
Linking to Articles That Toot Your Own Horn
I’ve noticed something on the 20 odd blogs I read on a regular basis and it has to do with people enthusiastically linking to articles that toot the linker’s horn. In the entrepreneur blogs I read, people will routinely link to articles that will mention them in some way (I am guilty on one charge of this). In the VC blogs I read, they may cross-link to each other’s entries where they both say marvelous things about the other. And it culminated yesterday reading Jeff Jarvis’ blog in which he enthusiastically endorsed an article by Doc Searls. Having never seen Jeff so enthusiastic, I checked out the article. It was a great article, but it also calls Jeff Jarvis “perhaps the most important entertainment writer of our time.” Hmm. I’m not saying there’s something inherently wrong with this practice, I just want to point it out and put it on the radar screen…in the name of transparency.