Prometheus 6   

Giving in to the inevitable

So I've decided link whoring isn't the greatest sin known to man ("Hunting for Bambi" far supasses it).

Still, all things in moderation is still the rule of the day. One doesn't want to go linking to any random folks. So I'm giving a little more thought to some questions asked by an old friend, to wit:

> c) what's your _motivation_
I guess my motivation is to counter particular ideas. Some I counter by logic, some by rhetoric, some by example.

> b) what's your objective
With p6 I studying the "Tao" of BlogNet, think out loud and have fun with stuff once in a while.

> a) who is your target demographic
never thought about it beyond "the kind of people who read blogs."

I answered the questions in reverse order because that's the order in which I originally considered them. And these are my answers, in the fewest words possible. But I'm going to inflate the word count for a minute.

My motivation
When I watch TV, talk to folks or whatever I have a bad habit; I listen to them and refer what I'm hearing back to my understanding of events and the way the world works. Worse, I check to make sure the statement makes sense in light of my understanding of how physical reality works. When you do this, it becomes apparent how much crap is spewed and called information. You watch and see people accept what they are told and modify their understanding of events rather than using their understanding to test and challenge new claims. This is SO not a good thing

Because of this, I do two things here at P6. I relay things that point at what I see as the truth. They rarely point at absolute truth (the cartoons being a big exception to this) but tend to point at a place from which you can see the truth. The other thing is, I write some original material. The vast majority of the original material is intended to map some social complexity to the simple physical reality that it actually is. Doing this tends to verify everyone's observations and shitcan most of the explanations.

This is the major reason I've decided to seek out some reciprocal linking. There's no use doing all that in an empty room, and as chaotic as is the business of tracking link counts (how many service will do that for you? And the Ecosystem seems to be the official numbers but just yesterday N.Z. Bear ran the system twice and P6 dropped seven links between the first and second runs) folks still pay attention to them as a sign of authoritativeness.

My objective
P6 wasn't intended to be my final effort. It was a way to understand blogging, both the physical act (what kind of software is needed) and why the craze took off. I have a great interest in social software, remote learning and other digital methods of connecting and strengthening people. This his how blogging came to my attention and this bias has a lot to do with the angle at which I approach all this.

Everything has its own Tao, a way of operating which is determined by its original nature. The BlogNet is no diferent. For instance, I don't know what Technorati was intended to be but I use it as kind of a beeper. You see who linked to you, check them out and respond, which they see,and so on. Technorati, to me, is a conversation enabler, as is the detail report from the Ecosystem. They don't scale for these purposes, though; I can't see any of the "Higher Beings" or "Mortal Humans" recognizing a new link among the hundreds in their reports.

Anyway, Prometheus 6 is/was a tool to investigate how BlogNet could be best used to add or modify ideas in the public debate space, and such investigations need to be done from the inside so I jumped on in.

My target demographic
I'm letting this one work itself out. My own approach to things is less about explaining how to deal with something as to remove things as elements of concern… to counter error by pointing out its unreality rather than its opposite. An example of this was my rendering of Ari Fliescher's absurdities into Ebonics.

It ain't but so many folks can roll with that. I'll take 'em all.

Prometheus 6 isn't specifically about racial issues, but as a Black man I couldn't avoid interest in them if I wanted to. And though I will expound on racism I have little use for discussing racists that have no impact on me (which, much to their dismay, includes the vast majority of them). I'll deal with issues of social justice as a Black partisan. My goals tend to match those of the activist community, but my philosophical underpinnings tend to be mad different, so I differ with them about a lot of the stuff that should happen between the beginning and the end.

What does all this have to do with link whoring?

This is all the stuff I'll be taking into account while looking at sites to reciprocate links with. General political blogs are easy to locate, those that immersed on a Black gestalt are lower profile and therefore harder to locate. I've already found a couple to link to: idols of the marketplace and The Black Hand Side strong enough that I've blogrolled them immediately (yeah, I know I'm easy, and to Kamau: I can't find an email address on your site so if you see this through some link reporting system, consider it a reciprocal link request). Take a look at them and if you can refer me to similarly strong voices, I'd appreciate it.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 7/14/2003 09:07:51 AM |