Various URLs

Various websites mentioned on The WELL lately:

• The Wonderful Caddis Worm: Sculptural Work in Collaboration with Trichoptera -- If the world gives you gold and precious gems, make your home out of them.

• BubbleWarp (flash req'd)

• Eyemaze's GROW game --- part fascinating, part maddening

• Arngren.net --- ugliest website of the month

• Hey Hey 16k! -- We bought it to help with your homework! (reqs flash)

• Happiness is being ISO 8601 certified!

Tales from Middle Earth

Fascinating anecdotes going on in the movies conference, both in the I, ROBOT topic, and the LOTR: Return of the King topic, from a new WELL member who lives and works in New Zealand . . . and spent years working on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

The Canada Quiz

Meanwhile, in topic 2224 of the media conference, folks are sharing their scores from taking the quiz the government of Canada offers potential emigrants.

If Bush wins in November (or is it December, I didn't read the memo), expect Canada to be the new residence of some WELL folks.

The Return of the Krakhaus

While flame.ind continues to bob around 3rd or 4th place in the WELL's conference traffic rankings, another conference has crept back up out of the woodwork: krakhaus.ind. Originally started a few months after 9/11/2001, it's another timesink conference, a place to post meaningless drivel like the equally useless weird conference.

Not surprisingly, many of the denizens of flame.ind hang out in krakhaus.ind.

Now, krakhaus has hit the top 20 conferences in traffic, due to the many nonsensical postings done simply to generate more traffic and climb the hits charts.

Public conference visits
Sun Jul  4 00:00:13 2004 through Sat Jul 10 23:59:36 2004

 1. 5340  news           11. 1754  macintosh      21. 1065  web
 2. 4897  media          12. 1693  sanfran        22. 1058  words
 3. 3116  genx           13. 1603  books          23.  969  health
 4. 3019  flame.ind      14. 1592  hosts          24.  913  decor
 5. 3007  movies         15. 1540  plumage        25.  904  windows
 6. 2987  tv             16. 1497  sports         26.  860  newmusic
 7. 2802  popcult        17. 1479  music          27.  843  travel
 8. 2132  politics       18. 1277  obsess         28.  809  gd
 9. 2104  chow.ind       19. 1135  ny             29.  782  bike
10. 1980  current        20. 1109  krakhaus.ind   30.  769  berkeley

It's interesting to note that the independent conference on food, chow.ind has passed the current events conference in terms of traffic, and is now at #9.

Three Minutes to Midnight

And there you have it. The third most-visited conference on The WELL right now is flame.ind -- more visits than conferences on movies, politics, music, web, health, books, and 1000 other subjects. (I wonder why the vue conferences aren't even showing up in the top 30... are they that uninteresting?According to the latest monthly WELL census data -- 1 June to 1 July -- pre.vue is #46; inkwell.vue is #47; and deadsongs.vue is #189. These are conferences readable by the whole world via any web browser.)

Public conference visits
Thu Jul  1 00:00:06 2004 through Wed Jul  7 23:59:57 2004

 1. 5524  news           11. 1770  macintosh      21. 1077  words
 2. 5064  media          12. 1657  sports         22. 1068  krakhaus.ind
 3. 3168  flame.ind      13. 1625  sanfran        23.  963  berkeley
 4. 3146  genx           14. 1617  books          24.  945  decor
 5. 3137  movies         15. 1578  obsess         25.  900  newmusic
 6. 3028  tv             16. 1513  plumage        26.  899  windows
 7. 2862  popcult        17. 1492  music          27.  848  cars
 8. 2105  politics       18. 1244  ny             28.  843  hosts
 9. 2069  chow.ind       19. 1164  web            29.  797  travel
10. 1972  current        20. 1122  health         30.  764  gd

I wonder how proud Salon Media Group is about flame being #3. (I wonder if Salon Media Group knows?)

Addendum:
One of the ugly side-effects of bozo-filtering (configuring The WELL so it automatically skips over postings by users you don't wish to read) is that given the rise of flame.ind, and the corresponding rise in the use of bozofiltering, more and more discussions get sidetracked by the fact that people who are bozofiltering an individual start commenting on the automatic filtering, rather than on the topic at hand.

For instance, right now in the News conference, someone brought up the fact that Tom Ridge has come out with another terror warning and the subsequent talk is all about crying wolf. One regularly-bozofiltered individual (whose three-letter name ends in 'x' and, shall we say, whose name would win lots of points on a triple word score in Scrabble) inserted a comment and since then others have come along not to comment on his comment, to comment on the fact that he's bozofiltered. Such behavior doesn't produce anything useful, doesn't add anything to the discussion, and shows how destructive the whole bozofiltering practice has become.

I wonder what would happen if bozofiltering were to become completely private: no longer could you share the list of names you're ignoring, and no longer would the automated utility that goes around scanning for any changes to bozo lists work. People should have the ability to filter who they choose, but would it be any great loss to the community if the community didn't know on an individual level who was ignoring who?

Four Minutes to Midnight

... and closing in on three:

Public conference visits
Wed Jun 30 00:00:20 2004 through Tue Jul  6 23:59:42 2004

 1. 5373  news           11. 1711  macintosh      21. 1061  health
 2. 5056  media          12. 1586  sports         22. 1034  words
 3. 3104  genx           13. 1501  books          23. 1003  krakhaus.ind
 4. 3058  flame.ind      14. 1465  sanfran        24.  950  decor
 5. 3041  movies         15. 1463  plumage        25.  909  windows
 6. 2962  tv             16. 1446  obsess         26.  791  newmusic
 7. 2717  popcult        17. 1424  music          27.  751  gd
 8. 2142  politics       18. 1248  ny             28.  750  cars
 9. 2093  current        19. 1201  web            29.  697  cooking
10. 1874  chow.ind       20. 1083  berkeley       30.  672  hosts

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.)

Pitchforks and Torches

There's a huge scandal raging in the Media conference right now on The WELL, having to do with a certain WELL user who's a professional media figure and is known to some audiences across the country for his on-air program. Evidently someone took some of his posts from the media conference and sent them to his producer, who made a stink and got him in trouble, and now there's a huge stink on The WELL about who the perp was. Apparently a similar thing happened with another longtime WELL user who happens to be a well-known regional media personality (I completely missed that scandal, don't even know when it happened), and the prevailing theory seems to be the same person must've done both deeds.

Meanwhile, the flame.ind conference, always poised for fresh witchhunts and false accusations, having found out about W.N.O.T.W. the same day as the media scandal erupted, put two and two together and came up with eleven: they're insinuating that the perp is yours truly. Sorry, boys and girls, I'm not the perp and I have no idea who is. But you go ahead and keep insinuating that I am, since it appears to make you feel better.

Update: the flamers are besides themselves at this point, one calling me "moron" for the above paragraph, evidently thinking I wrote it as a response directed to a specific posting made a little after 8am this morning in the flame conference. Not that it matters to them, but they're wrong, my "perp" comment was actually directed at an insinuation made last night, not this morning, in the same flame.ind conference. But there's no reasoning with this mob right now, though. They keep pounding the site, clicking on every single link (here, try this one, and be SURE to check out this one!) on the site, like the Eye of Sauron searching desperately for the One Ring.

Vue Conference Updates

There must be umpteen topics in as many conferences going on this week about Michael Moore and his film Fahrenheit 9/11. Angie Coiro's started a public one in the pre.vue conference (topic 86) which you can read here.

For me the most interesting interview in the past year of the Inkwell.vue conference has been Gary Wolf interview regarding his book on the history of Wired magazine. More recent fare includes an interview with Francesca De Grandis, a self-described "feminist, mystic, and healer".

Flame Watch

So the highschool clique that is the Flame conference on The WELL has finally discovered W.N.O.T.W. And of course, they're apoplectic over it, gleefully tearing it apart, hurling insults left and right at yours truly, desperately looking for violations of The WELL's user agreement and You Own Your Own Words rules when there aren't any violations.

Life goes on, bra.

Update: now there are people in flame.ind copying paragraphs here and there from this blog and posting them verbatim on flame.ind, while at the same time raising insinuations of YOYOW violations.

Update II: Just got the following email.

Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 11:12:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mike Janson
To: brian
Cc: jeffreyp, lala, maj
Subject: brian restricted in flame.ind conference

This notice was automatically generated when the issuing host placed your account on restricted status in the flame.ind conference. During this restriction, you may continue to visit and read this conference, but you will not be permitted to respond to any topics, nor may you start any new topics. The host has designated your restriction run for 3 days from the time of this notification.

If you have any questions or wish to discuss the reasons for this restriction, please reply to the hosts of the flame.ind conference. You will find the WELL's policy on independent conferences posted in the policy conference.

Good old WELL.

Update III: Lots of traffic coming from The WELL's "backstage" conference, a smoke-filled room, er, a private conference, for which I guess one needs a "backstage pass", so to speak. One can only guess what's being discussed there.