The importance of blogs in anchoring/framing and building metaphor

There are three big debates right now that will help shape or kill everything we care about.

  • What is the internet?
  • Who owns it and how do we pay for it?
  • What about the stuff that touches it, whatever it is, and how do we pay for that stuff?

I have taken part in many discussions on this and related issues, covering the web, telcos and cablecos, big media and music and film, copyright, intellectual property right and now digital right.

And all the debates boil down in the end to the words and images we use. if we are to protect what we care for, we need better arguments, better metaphors, better anchors and frames. And blogs are great tools to do just that.

Recent discussions about opensource and internet and the iTunes decision in France have only served to bring this out more glaringly to me.

So here’s another to throw into the pot: Dana Blankenhorn asking about the internet, following on from some posts in a separate “Cook Report conversation”. Well worth a read, just to see how much imagery matters.

Are we moving to a time when sticks and stones will hurt us less than words? Are we already there?

On blogs and diversity

Blogs are an opensource marketplace of ideas, as per Cluetrain.

Wherever I go physically, there are hidden biases that prevent the richness of diversity coming through; diversity in culture, in gender, in age, in background, whatever; diversity that enriches and improves what I experience and learn.

I can prevent these biases from existing in cyberspace. But to do this I must take active steps.

SO I will work hard to read the blogs of people whose ideas I would otherwise not come across.

eJamming

Rollie Cole pointed this out to me; we’re part of a Cook Report conversation that only Gordon can pull off. Thanks Rollie.

eJamming. I love it. Just possible that we will start seeing some real problems with today’s IPR law when things like this start happening. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh had better start dusting off his Cooking Pot Markets theory.

I place no restriction on the use of my source for any purpose

I was reading Halley Suitt in her Top 10 Sources persona, and came across this by John Palfrey. It made me think.

So I want to be able to say: I place no restriction on the use of my source for any purpose.

So there. I’ve said it.

Blogging with children

It’s been that kind of Saturday. My central heating (which broke down last week) gets fixed, yippee. Liverpool beat Everton. Yippee twice.

And I come across this piece, Why I blog with kids. There’s a teacher somewhere who blogs with his kids. Thank you Clarence Fisher.

And reading the post takes me to another, which asks today “Why aren’t we all blogging?” And Nancy Mckeand, whose blog it is, subtitles it “A first attempt at blogging with no idea where it will take me”.

Teachers who make themselves vulnerable in this way will succeed in their primary goal, to impart learning to their wards in order that potential may be reached, extended and released. Here’s to Clarence and Nancy…. and others out there I may never hear about.

Yippee thrice.