Musing about Blazinge Fellows

Can’t afford to go to Burning Man? Don’t have a ticket? Not your cup of tea? Worry not, help is at hand.

[Thanks to Mary Harrington, the Chief Community Officer at School of Everything, who brought this to my attention via Twitter].

It’s not every day you come across a Chaucerian blog; I’d seen it some years ago, but my bookmark stopped working and I’d assumed it was defunct.

But it’s back with a bang. Blazinge Fellow. Read all about it.

And I couldn’t help but think: Maybe we have another opportunity to “shift time”, but this time via the Web. Maybe we could translate texts from time X to time Y, backwards or forwards in time, but in the same language. I can see a few places where such a facility would be useful. Any views?

More bridled optimism

Having watched him and tracked him for quite a while now, and with the form he’s shown in the last two majors, I cannot help but believe that Camilo Villegas will win a major soon. You heard it here first.

He has this crazy insouciance when he plays, as if it is perfectly reasonable and normal to try and birdie every hole, and to eagle a few as well. Reminds me of a young Calcavecchia, a young Gamez. A cavalier attitude that brings to mind Viv Richards and Seve Ballesteros. An attitude that yells “I’m really enjoying this”.

An attitude that says that it is perfectly normal to line up putts the way he does, shown above.

Watching the re-runs of Usain Bolt celebrating his 100m win mid-race reminded me of this one really important thing: that a sportsman must enjoy doing what he does. That every person must enjoy doing what she does. Otherwise it’s not worth doing.

Circle-linking

When I read this evocative piece by Tim O’ Reilly on Linking To Yourself, and began to understand just how widespread the “habit” had become, I began to wonder. Doesn’t it make you go blind, or something like that? It should.

I thought Peter Kirn’s comment summarised it elegantly:

1. Link externally when appropriate; don’t create a walled garden.
2. Identify internal links as such; provide an option.
3. Link to what’s useful to people

As David Weinberger said in Cluetrain, hyperlinks subvert hierarchies. Broadcast models and walled garden approaches are fundamentally hierarchical in construct, with controlled audiences meekly fed controlled content in controlled ways. It is natural for those who believe in such models to want to prevent the subversion, since it represents a loss of control.

It is also natural for all of us to see them for what they are.

Of course there are good reasons to link “to oneself”. In the comments, Tim gives the example of Wikipedia cross-references. One of the powers of the writable web is the ability to provide rich context quickly and cheaply, wherever that context is to be found. And sometimes the best context is found in something you may have written earlier. That makes sense. But linking to oneself to the exclusion of any other form of linking is just plain silly.

Some of the comments suggest that the reason a walled-gardener does this is because of the Google ranking. Now that makes me Confused. I have always assumed that self-linking is made valueless by PageRank. Live and learn.

…of abundances and scarcities…

People tend to value scarce things more than they value abundant things. Not all scarce things, though, as this site shows:There I was, blithely catching up on my reading after returning from the vacation. Blog by blog, checking up on the recent output of the people I spend time “following”. Quietly reading Zephoria. And, following the links in answers to bizarre questions, I found myself in Graham’s Paddock.

So what’s the strangest collection you’ve personally come across?

Bridled optimism

Cricket: Just getting back into the swing of things after a truly lazy vacation, I noticed that a reader (named Murali!), in a recent comment, asked me what I thought about the recent Indian “collapse” in the first ODI versus Sri Lanka. Once I realised that the match had taken place in Dambulla, I became less concerned about the result. Here’s why, as told by Cricinfo:

Over the last 10 years, the team batting first has scored less than 200 runs more often than not, 12 times out of 21. Eight different teams have managed to “achieve” this, and they lost 9 times out of 12. The Indian total of 146, therefore, does not represent as abject a collapse as it would appear on the surface, despite the magic and mystique wielded by the spin pair of Mendis and Muralitharan.

So I will follow the next game with bridled optimism, even though I hear Sehwag has gone and gotten himself injured.

There was a separate comment made about the “carrom ball”, where Mendis’s action has been compared to that of John Gleeson. I never saw Gleeson play; when he visited India with the Australians in 1969, he didn’t play in the Calcutta Test. With his unusual action, Mendis is sure difficult to read; sometimes I get the impression that even Mendis doesn’t know what the ball is going to do when it leaves his hand. But batsmen can take heart from the Australian tour of South Africa with Gleeson. Nobody could read Gleeson either…except for a young Barry Richards, who didn’t care, and who never became one of Gleeson’s victims.