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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.)
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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.
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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".
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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.
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Public conference visits Sat May 29 00:00:28 2004 through Fri Jun 4 23:59:46 2004 1. 5738 news 11. 1849 chow.ind 21. 1122 plumage 2. 4889 media 12. 1671 words 22. 1042 ny 3. 3474 tv 13. 1663 macintosh 23. 1014 byline 4. 2900 movies 14. 1606 books 24. 925 gd 5. 2852 flame.ind 15. 1432 obsess 25. 903 classifieds 6. 2847 genx 16. 1413 sports 26. 859 web 7. 2625 popcult 17. 1394 music 27. 823 health 8. 2365 politics 18. 1351 berkeley 28. 808 newmusic 9. 2270 current 19. 1253 hosts 29. 736 parenting 10. 1882 sanfran 20. 1183 games 30. 703 cooking
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Thu May 6 00:00:01 2004 through Wed May 12 23:59:40 2004 1. 5448 news 11. 1946 flame.ind 21. 1124 health 2. 5435 tv 12. 1791 chow.ind 22. 1030 parenting 3. 5013 media 13. 1777 sanfran 23. 994 music 4. 3237 genx 14. 1725 obsess 24. 983 newmusic 5. 2811 movies 15. 1685 books 25. 982 gd 6. 2735 politics 16. 1674 sports 26. 880 games 7. 2486 popcult 17. 1559 plumage 27. 869 web 8. 2224 hosts 18. 1523 words 28. 847 travel 9. 2142 current 19. 1436 berkeley 29. 841 attack 10. 1965 macintosh 20. 1352 ny 30. 805 cars
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