Various Random Things

1. WellSheet
Since there's suddenly an audience reading the blog (gosh, that's a first) I thought I'd mention a few things about the origins of W.N.O.T.W. One, as you've noticed, the blog's only a few months old but already seems run-down. That's because it's been a super low priority project, with a total of maybe 3 hours -- TOTAL -- put into it since April. The site's prolly had maybe three or four visitors before July 2nd, 2004, when all "WELL" broke loose. (Contrast those three hours with the number of hours people are currently devoting to repeatedly visiting this conference yesterday and today, all the while flaming me and accusing me of all matter of heinous transgressions, personality disorders, low intelligence measurements, no doubt questionable genetic background, and who knows what else in various public and private conferences on The WELL.)

Thinking back, one of the things that inspired me to do W.N.O.T.W. is fellow WELL user Roger Karraker's HellSheet, which Roger defines as "1. a critique of a newspaper written to improve it. 2. by extension, any constructive criticism. 3. A weblog by journalists, dedicated to improving the New York Times." Alas, activity in Hellsheet seems to have died down a lot; I don't know if Roger has plans to continue doing anything with it.

In my case, W.N.O.T.W. was going to be "WellSheet", a public weblog by a WELL user dedicated to improving The WELL. That implies that this WELL user thought that The WELL could use some improvement. That would be a correct implication: I believe there's room for improvement technically, business-wise, community-wise, f2f socially-wise, in all sorts of ways. But I realized I didn't have the time or the energy to run a blog about all those things. Besides, there are several conferences online on The WELL devoted to such debates.

So in the end the idea was, experiment with a blog that would essentially condense various things I'd seen or heard on The WELL and post them here.

The vision of W.N.O.T.W. is that it would be like The New Yorker's Talk of the Town meets The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street, with an added section called FlameWatch, to keep an eye on the Flame.ind conference's daily rankings in the top 30 WELL conferences.

Given the tiny amount of time devoted to this blog so far, it's hard to say how it will develop. It's an experiment. I pour $150 per year into Salon.com and The WELL, and I am going to use this blog as a place to comment on the perceived value I'm getting out of my subscription and about what I see going on there.

2. Flame
One of the things I see going on there is flame.ind. The flame.ind conference is, in my opinion, by far the worst thing about The WELL. You certainly won't hear about it prominently at The WELL's website. You're not going to read about flame.ind in a Salon.com SEC filing, about how it's climbing the charts, on its way to being the #1 conference on The WELL. No, it's not something I think Salon would be proud of. If the WELL were a rock, and you picked it up, then the flame.ind conference is the dark, mildewy underside where ugliness dwells. It is a hate-filled place that brings out the worst in people. It's a destructive place where intolerance is encouraged and condoned. It's a place where the prevailing fashion is to identify who this week you despise, who this week you hate.

In a way, the flame.ind conference reminds me of the Landru episode containing the "Red Hour" back in the original Star Trek series. The "Red Hour" was a time of day where otherwise calm and peaceful people went crazy, as if to let loose all that pent-up anger and frustration inside. On the WELL, flame.ind is a place, rather than a time, but it serves this same overall purpose. It's a place where personal attacks, character assassination, harshness, cruelty, profanity, ridicule, snap judgments, freeper-like closemindedness, not just jumps but amazing leaps to conclusions, kneejerk name-calling, and a general lack of civility --- behaviors generally frowned upon elsewhere on The WELL --- are the norm.

I might be wrong but I suspect there were two original drivers for the flame.ind conference. One was that it served as a place to comment on the postings or general behavior of certain WELL users that the Flame conference participants felt was "noteworthy", i.e., deserving of frothy ridicule. Over the years there have indeed been some kooky WELL users who drove many WELL folks batty with their inane, sometimes completely nonsequitur postings in various conferences. The WELL has had its share of "frootbats", "bozos", "psychos", "idiots", "morons", "assholes", "loons", "drama queens", wearers of the proverbial "tinfoil hat", "bores", "humorless bores", and on and on. Judging by the activity on flame these days, I suspect they'd argue The WELL is still a Wild Kingdom of such flora and fauna. The second driver for flame.ind was, again I'm theorizing, that it served as a place to collect, admire, and comment upon classic "flames" --- messages where one user tore into and put to everlasting shame another user somewhere on The WELL. Some of these flames, only a very few actually, have over the years indeed been impressive and worthy of being called "classic". But as the flame.ind conference has evolved, or more like it --- devolved --- I would argue it's become more a place simply where a certain subset of the WELL population, who enjoy impressing each other with expressions of disgust and ridicule for others, congregate to do just that. It's a clique, a clique that bristles at being called a clique. Oh, they'll flame me for calling them a clique, and flame me more arguing forcefully that this whole essay is about me feeling sad for not being a member of said clique. I don't want to be a member of it. I'd be ashamed to be a member of it.

I find it ironic that one of the founders and hosts of the flame.ind conference works during the day as head of an important public-facing organization within an extremely well-known global corporation where, irony of ironies, he not yet sixty days ago received that company's extremely prestigious "community award" for community spirit and dedicated service to the company, its many millions of customers, and its many business partners. A living exemplar of that company's widely-known ideals and principles --- ideals and principles that represent the very opposite of the intent of flame.ind. I wish more of that company's community spirit, and those same kinds of ideals and principles, spilled over into The WELL. Maybe if they did, the flame.ind conference would finally go away.

The idea behind W.N.O.T.W.'s "FlameWatch" is that it's akin to the Midnight Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The daily ranking of flame.ind (I see today it's ranked at #7) represents how close The WELL is to "midnight." When flame.ind gets to #1, so the theory goes, it's adios muchachos. At that point, the ugliness underneath the rock has spread to cover the rock. I find it alarming when the flame.ind conference reaches high into the top ten rankings, sometimes even the top five. Think about it: when that happens, there's more activity in the flame conference than there is in conferences discussions about politics, sports, books, music, health, travel, writing, cars, etc.

3. Creepiness
A word that has crept up amidst the W.N.O.T.W. dischord on The WELL over the past 48 hours is "creepy". There seems to be a sense that W.N.O.T.W. is violating an unspoken rule --- maybe not an outright term or condition of the WELL User Agreement, but some sort of understanding that what's said on The WELL stays on The WELL. A breach of confidences. Stealing the magic. Maybe the reaction of creepiness comes from my occasionally mentioning actual user ID's or people's names when paraphrasing what someone has found or mentioned or commented upon where in a posting in a conference somewhere. I don't know for sure, but it's a guess. Technically I do not believe it violates the WELL User Agreement. But I can see how saying "(brian) is posting about the $10,000 he found when a bag rolled out of the back of a Brink's truck -- and he says he's not going to report it to the authorities!" would be uncool :-) From now on, I'm not going to mention user IDs or peoples' names unless the information is already public. Naming names is not important or interesting. Covering random stuff seen mentioned on The WELL is what it's all about.

4. What's Next
I'm not going to all of a sudden pour a lot of time and energy into this blog. Its priority remains low. From time to time as I read about interesting things on or happening on The WELL, maybe I'll post about them here, where the three or four non-WELL-user visitors can ponder them. :-) (I haven't checked, but it may very well be that those three or four non-WELL-user visitors are non-human as well: bots from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. That's fine, whatever.)

Posted by brian at July 3, 2004 08:44 PM

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