This recent interview of journalist Jonathan Rauch is full of good stuff. On bad predictions and making mistakes:
Everybody makes [mistakes]; it's par for the course. What I have learned is not to be too sure I'm right. The world is much more surprising than we give it credit for. That's part of my political philosophy, my philosophy of life. That's really fundamental to it: Trial and error is really the only thing in life that works ultimately over the long term. Journalism is like that, too, so we need to be honest about our mistakes. We often aren't enough. Everybody makes mistakes. And we need to be a little bit cautious about making predictions.
On real journalism vs. opinion:
There's a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers -- I don't exempt myself -- who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.
The future of real journalism:
What I worry about is what everyone in my business worries about: Who's going to fund the real reporting? The magazine and newspaper business was a cross-subsidy. You had the advertising, particularly classified, and you had a local market, which subsidized the gathering of news. That model is breaking down because the bundle is breaking into pieces and it's hard to see in the long run who funds the kind of large-scale news reporting operations that the major papers have run if the advertising is all going online and if people can all get the news for free at Yahoo.
On extremism in American politics:
The [political] system has been rigged by partisan activists to their advantage. They participate in primaries. General elections don't matter because they've gerrymandered the congressional districts. They have the advantages of energy and being single-minded and they use these wedge issues which they're very good at and which both sides conspire in using in order to marginalize the middle. The result of that is the turnout among moderates and independents is down; turnout on the extremes is up. The parties are increasingly sorted by ideology so that all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another. That is a new development in American history.
On getting out of the way of a story:
I'm not a fan of the idea that the journalist and the journalist's attitude should be front and center. I think that a good journalist's duty is to get out of the way. The hardest thing about journalism -- the hardest thing, a much higher art than being clever -- is just to get out of the way, to show the leader of the world as the reader would see it if the reader were there. Just to be eyes and ears. Calvin Trillin, another writer I greatly admired who steered me towards journalism, once said that getting himself out of his stories was like taking off a very tight shirt in a very small phone booth. He's right.
And lots more...I recommend reading the entire thing, especially the exchange between Rauch and the interviewer about personal political identities that was too long/difficult to excerpt here. Much more from Rauch here.
One of my favorite Dashboard widgets is the Weather widget. It's been pretty hot and sunny for the last few weeks here in NYC so I've been seeing quite a few pictures of my favorite yellow celestial object depicted on the widget. I recently had a chance to sit down with Mr. Sun, a long-time resident of both our solar system and the blogosphere, and I asked him about his Weather widget representations. Here's a portion of our interview:
Jason: How did the Weather Dashboard widget project come about?
Mr. Sun: Funny story. I'm kicking back, combustin' some rhymes, and this spacecraft approaches me. I'm about to throw a flare upside its flimsy-ass hull, when I notice it is sending a message out into the heliosphere.The damn thing is in Apple format, and I have Windows - so I have to download a special viewer. I finally decode the thing, and it's from Steve Jobs about an "insanely great" idea. I vaguely knew about him, because I'd been doing some advance work for Satan on how best to burn Gates for eternity. I'm a special consultant, basically. Anyway, I figured -- what the heck? So, that's how it started. Look, what network are you with again? I don't recognize you.
Jason: Is this the type of work you want to be doing at this point in
your 4.5 billion year career?
Mr. Sun: Look, I'm not going to radiate sunshine up your you-know-what. I'm struggling. Back in the day, I had a great agent -- Nicolaus. Not the brightest guy in the cosmos, but totally devoted to me. He made me feel like I was the center of the universe. I remember I worked with Frank Capra on Our Mr. Sun. Just between you and me, that guy was a little too sunny even for me -- ringing bells and angels wings -- whatever. Then, there was the "Pee-wee incident" involving an unfortunate choice I made in a public setting. I know it's no excuse, but I've warned you people to wear those glasses. I was in a slump. I started to get mean, sloppy, and pathetic. I wasn't combusting properly -- I had bad gas. So yes, I agreed to lend my likeness to the OS X weather widget. Is it where I want to be right now? No. Is it an honest gig? Yes, I think so. I've been thinking about starting a blog anyway; someone needs to let those other Sun Shadys know they are just imitating.
Jason: But do you really need any more exposure? You've got the most prime advertising position in the world -- 5 or 6 billion people a day can see you by just looking up -- what more are you looking for?
Mr. Sun: Eyeballs. Is that all you Internet types ever think about? You want to know who had a lot of eyeballs on him? Mahir. Do you want to be that guy for even one minute? I KISS YOU !!!!! You ask me how I can want more. Let me tell you a story that may help you understand. When I was younger, I watched Daedalus and his son fly just beneath me, soaring out of captivity on wings made of feathers stuck with wax to a flimsy wooden frame. Drunk with freedom, Icarus looked directly at me. I felt the panic of his watchful father, but I was mesmerized by his youthful passion. I met his gaze. He moved toward me and the rest they call myth. I made a vow that day to never stay still. Yes, I am fixed in the sky -- but not at my core. The fire that sustains me is fueled by the memory of what it took for Icarus to make his way to me, and the debt I owe for my part in his fall to earth. I can't repay that debt from 93 million miles away, but sitting on your desktop, I can at least start. I am also told the Internet is basically just one gigantic Porn Delivery Device, and I haven't had any good jacking material since the Soviets from Mir jettisoned their garbage. Did you ever say where you are from? Was it the Wall Street Journal? I'd love to have one of those stencilled sketches of me.
Jason: The photography in this shoot looks more candid than in past shoots by NASA, ground-based astronomers, or vacationing amateurs. In one photo, it looks like you're crying and in another you appear to be surrounded by a haze of marijuana smoke. Are we finally seeing the real you?
Mr. Sun: Looks can be very deceiving. In this case, however, they are not. Last year, I cried nonstop for three of your earth months. I cried because I burn anyone who comes close to me. I cried because I shine alone in the blackness of space. I cried because just once, I'd like to feel pretty and I know that will never happen. As for the haze of smoke around me, I am made of gas. If I wasn't churning gas around, you'd all be as frozen as Ted Williams head, so maybe you should think twice before demoting me from life-sustaining star to orbital stoner. Look, I've been around the block a time or two when it comes to humanity. At first, you were fearful of me. Later, you worshipped me as a god. Now, you ask me these cynical questions. Fine, no problem. I'll be around to see the cycle repeat itself a few thousand more times. I'm just a star, an ordinary star. Deal with it.
Thanks for joining us, Mr. Sun.
When I first watched the cool new VW Golf GTI commercial featuring an updated Gene Kelly poppin' and lockin', I guess I wasn't paying that much attention to it.
Then the other day a friend IMed me and asked, "hey have you seen this Golf GTI commercial with that guy from the crazy Kollaboration video?"
"It's the same guy? I know that guy!" I watched the video again and sure enough, Gene Kelly was dancing with the unmistakable style of Elsewhere, aka David Bernal. After a quick search, I found a message board post from Elsewhere himself that it was indeed him in the commerical:
yup that was me along with Crumbs and another popper named Jay Walker.
I emailed David to ask him about the experience and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions.
Jason: How did you get the Golf GTI gig? Audition or had someone seen your stuff and specifically wanted you for it?
David: They specifically wanted to use me for it. I had done a Heineken Commercial several months prior and the special effects people for that commercial were going to do the effects for this VW commercial. I got an email asking me if I could dance in the rain with a prosthetic mask on and several weeks later I was in London doing just that.
jkottke: That scene from Singin' in the Rain is one of the most famous in film, and certainly the most famous dance number in film. What was it like to be a part of an attempt to recreate and update it?
David: It was an honor and a privilege being one of the dancers in this commercial. Gene Kelly was a great dancer, singer and actor which is a lot more than I have to offer. It's extremely flattering having a commercial that essentially implies that my moves are an updated version of Gene's dance skills.
jkottke: Some folks have complained about the crassness of using a dead guy's likeness to sell automobiles. As one of the actors playing the deceased, do you have any thoughts on that?
David: Yeah it's kind of weird, but imo it kind of comes with the territory when you're a legend. I don't know if Gene would be too hot about the whole thing but obviously the Gene Kelly Estate approved it, so it's apparently not that crass to them.
jkottke: I've read that you often freestyle when you dance, making it up as you go along, but that you also have little micro-routines that you rely on as you do. In shooting the commercial, how much of the choreography was scripted and how much did you get to ad lib? How much did you need to change your style much based on specific shots from the original film or Gene's style?
David:It was different for each shot. For example with the close-ups they would say just do a bunch of wavy stuff, so I would simply freestyle with some waves. Most of the full body shots were more routine based. They would specifically want me to do a list of moves, but to connect everything I would naturally freestyle.
I didn't have to change my dancing stylistically at all. They wanted me to dance the way that I dance. In fact they had us watch the original Singing in the Rain scene so many times that I started unconsciously moving a bit like Gene Kelly. The director at one point even told me that I was moving too much like Gene and I needed to move more like me.
If anything the parameters and conditions of the shoot inadvertently changed my style. The sound stage was cold and we had to dance under artificial rain for hours. To avoid freezing we wore wet suits under our already thick, tight costumes. This restricted my movement a lot. My shoes were quite uncomfortable and fake flooring we danced on was soft and spongy. I had to keep my head up and smile constantly which was very unnatural for me. Yet the biggest difficulty for me was the rigid time restraints. Since it was a commercial we had to do a lot within a small amount of time. This forced me to speed up my style more than I usually do.
jkottke: Thanks, David.
You can see more of David's stuff on the Detours Video site, by purchasing some DVDs, or by doing a search for "david elsewhere".
Today's mini-interview is with Nick Sweeney. You might say Nick has been around the block once or twice when it comes to online culture and community. He's got what the kids call "perspective".
Q: You've spent a significant amount of time participating on Plastic and MetaFilter, both prominent online community sites. Anything you can tell us about the differences between the two?
A: Actually, I wouldn't call myself a 'participant' in Plastic, which is probably an advantage: as one of the editors (although I'm speaking strictly for myself here), I'm meant to be both 'outside looking in' and 'inside looking out'. It's an interesting contrast to my time at MetaFilter, to say the least.
The editorial element is the biggest difference, of course. It's an attempt to introduce a kind of horticulture to the community's growth: to weed out the duplicates and the flames and the links to the Usual Suspects, and introduce a kind of distance to the slavish news/meme cycle which so often cripples MeFi these days. I think it's a smart way to manage communities that have reached the size and stage of evolution that Plastic's at right now. And the discussions from users within the submission queue are a great way to assess how a submission comes across.
I still check MeFi on occasion for the same reasons I read Wired magazine: the occasional piece inspires nostalgia; and I'd read many of its contributors, regardless of the forum. In its heyday, the erudition and diversity of knowledge on MeFi always went well beyond anything I've seen on Plastic. It's not quite as 'group-smart' now, simply because seminar-size discussions don't scale to lecture theatres.
Matt's always been very trusting towards his membership, and in general, receives the respect that's deserved by such trust. I can't help thinking that it doesn't accommodate 13,000-odd members: partly because the times don't lend themselves to seminar-style discussion; partly because you're dealing with the friction between oldbies and newbies, and their different conceptions of what the place is, was, and should be. 'Member memory' is a vital aspect of community sites, even ones which profess to deal with the transient meme-feed, and I think it's much stronger at MeFi than Plastic: so that when you have members who take perhaps two years' worth of discussion into the day's discussion up against new arrivals, it's bound to create the same kind of frustrations as a USENET September.
[ For comparison's sake, you can see something of that frustration with Slashdot, which, though working from a somewhat similar codebase to Plastic, has ceased to be a community for anyone with a long memory of the place, given that most discussions are essentially 'read-only' within hours of stories going live. That said, MeFi still retains an implicit quality threshold, with its emphasis on providing supporting links and challenging easy polarisations. (Whether that rule's honoured more now in the breach than the observance is another thing entirely.) ]
Plastic doesn't quite yet seem suited towards that kind of discussion: there's still an instinctive tendency towards raw opinioneering and snarkiness, though that's definitely changing. And you can't impose intellectual discipline on a community: it has to come from within. (Although as a plain old poster to Plastic, I do try to set a half-decent example.) What's bizarre is that Plastic is the one with the moderation system. But perhaps that's because moderation tends to favour both the well-considered posts and the cheap shots.
What I do like about Plastic is the way in which the mechanical aspects of the site -- that is, the combination of submission, peer review and moderation -- tend to promote a climate that's suited to media literacy. And because the more trollish or flamebaiting submissions don't make it past the queue, you'll get topics that create space for people to address in more nuanced ways than the 'partisan tennis' of an unmoderated system. (For instance, there was a recent well-regarded submission on school funding, property taxation and racism which turned into a fine discussion.) It's that kind of thing that I hope (and expect) Plastic can continue to support. ::end
It's been awhile since I did a mini interview for this site, so here we go.
G. Beato, who Web veterans might remember from Soundbitten, Suck, and a bunch of other places, has been busy recently with Cooking with Bigfoot, an online, animated cooking show featuring "an aggressively bisexual, substance-abusing Sasquatch". Mr. Beato shares his thoughts about the business of indie Web media with us. (It's a long answer to a short question, but it's worth the read.)
Q: What's the thinking behind selling subscriptions for Cooking with Bigfoot, besides the obvious riches involved?
A: When I first decided to create CWB almost a year ago, I knew that if I wanted to do it on an ongoing basis I'd have to figure out a way to make some money doing it, because the shows actually do cost money to create: I pay an animator, I pay the voice talent, etc.
Initially, my plan was to license episodes to other sites. Advertisers were getting increasingly frustrated with the limitations of banner ads -- they wanted bigger ads, they wanted ads that moved, they basically wanted TV commercials on the web. But as sites like NYTimes.com and WSJ.com now prove on a daily basis, TV-commercial-style ads plunked down in the middle of newspaper-style sites are really annoying -- reading is not the same activity as viewing, so when you go to a site to read, it's frustrating when the ads there are designed to be viewed...
But if you insert a 10-second TV-commercial-style ad at the beginning or end of a 3-minute Flash cartoon, it makes a lot more sense. So I figured I could license episodes to sites that wanted to offer a better context for rich-media ads to advertisers, but didn't actually want to incur the costs of producing their own series. I used to write scripts for one company that was already doing this, but they were targeting portals and other fairly large sites: my idea was to make the licensing fees low enough so that any kind of website could afford them: alt.weeklys, radio stations, portals, etc.
As I began to implement this plan, however, a few things began to sink in: (1) Selling this concept would be a full-time job in itself, (2) Even if I targeted sites where the standards for content were a little more flexible than a daily newspaper, I still had to worry about keeping the show "advertiser-friendly", and (3) in order to convince anyone that I could deliver X number of episodes on a weekly/biweekly basis, I would probably actually have to do that for 6 months or so, and I didn't have the money to do that.
Since I really created CWB mainly because I wanted the freedom to write an online animation series exactly how I wanted to write it (I had been writing scripts for a bunch of other online series before that...), I ultimately decided that instead of trying to sell the show to advertisers, it'd be a whole lot simpler just to try to sell it directly to viewers.
Of course, it's not as if trying to convince people on the Web to pay for cartoons is simple, but at least this way I can write the show I want to write and not worry about whether or not the marketing director at Sprite will consider a show starring an aggressively bisexual, substance-abusing Sasquatch a good place to sell soda...
Also, I really do think there's a larger issue at stake here, and that's the future of independent content on the web, and the varieties of content that the web will support. While there has been a lot of debate about whether web content should be free or paid or sponsored by advertising, I think an important point has largely been overlooked -- and that is that an environment where the majority of content is free or sponsored by advertisers ultimately favors corporate-created content.
On the one hand, this seems counterintuitive -- after all, if content is free, then business models don't exist, and neither do businesses. And, indeed, when lots of dot-coms started crashing because they couldn't figure out a business model, many people rejoiced and said, "Good! The web's going back into the hands of the people, where it belongs! People who create content for the love of it, not because they want to make fast IPO millions."
But while there are now hundreds of thousands of independently produced blogs thriving on the web these days, how much *other kinds* independent content is being produced? Obviously, sites like MP3.com distribute a lot of independent music, and various other sites (ifilm.com, newgrounds.com, animationexpress.com) aggregate a lot of independent animation and video. But all of that stuff is mostly one-offs -- i.e. a film-school student does a short and posts it on ifilm. A couple years ago, there were at least a couple hundred ongoing online animation series, because corporations were subsidizing their production. Now, there's probably only dozens of regularly updated series like Cooking With Bigfoot, because it simply costs too much to do without some form of revenue or subsidy. (Similarly, there are very few independent news-oriented sites that do actual reporting on a regular basis, with Salon.com being probably the most notable example).
So the ultimate irony is this: while the Web has huge potential to distribute off-beat, unconventional, non-common-denominator media that traditional corporate media channels will never touch (i.e., the kind of content often favored by people who believe that web content should be free and corporate media sucks), it won't really be effective at doing that unless viewers/readers/users support that content in a direct financial way. But if content remains free or ad-sponsored, then the corporate colonization of the Web that has characterized these last few years will likely continue. (Currently, 60% of all web usage occurs on sites created by AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and about one dozen other corporations.) And so we'll have a web of a million weblogs talking about the content created by a dozen corporations.
Traditionally, the two mediums that have the worst reputations for bad content are TV and radio -- the two mediums where the content is mostly free (and mostly controlled by large corporate interests.) So, really, the best way to ensure that the web doesn't turn into TV or radio is for users to start paying independent content creators directly. And while it's clear that one of the things people like best about the web is that everything is free, the practicing of supporting content creation directly has its good points too. For example, when a TV network decides to cancel a show, there's nothing you can really do about it except write a letter and hope that the network listens -- but on the web fans will actually be able to make or break shows based on their support, and because the costs are so much lower, it will only take a relatively small number of fans to wield that kind of power. Take Cooking With Bigfoot -- if I can attract 1000 subscribers, the show will survive (albeit just barely). If I can attract 3000 viewers, I'll be able to create around 20 - 24 episodes a year. If I get over 10,000, it'll go weekly, the episodes will get more complex, etc. In other words, each subscriber really has a stake in the show/site and can help make it better, and if enough people subscribe, they'll eventually be able to see the impact of their collective support. To Disney or AOL Time Warner or News Corp. of course, an audience of 10,000 is fairly meaningless, but to an independent content creator on the web, an audience of 10,000 can be really powerful -- and they can increase their power dramatically just by spending a few bucks here and there to support the content they like. So, ultimately, that's what I'm hoping to tap into... ::end
What do you think?
BTW, I'm participating in Cooking with Bigfoot's affiliate program. If you have a Web site and are interested in supporting Greg's efforts while making some scratch, you can too.
Today's kottke.org mini-interview is with GooglyMinotaur, Radiohead's AIM chatbot.
Q: Did you ever eat paste as a child?
A: i believe a famous person once said, "did you ever eat paste as a child is the key to happiness"
but i may be wrong. ;-)
we'll have to try talking about something else, then.
>> let's play a lovely game shall we? try typing "rh hangman" :: end
Steve Champeon, who is an author, holds a degree in religious studies, and does more stuff on the Web than I can list here, is today's mini interviewee:
Q: As a co-author of the Dynamic HTML Bible, do you feel like you're finally putting your degree in religious studies to good use?
A: Well, I haven't started writing yet, but I'm already beginning to feel the mad rush of omnipotence on the one hand, and on the other, I'm beginning to understand what God felt like with a world to build and a six-day schedule in which to do it. I wonder if God had an acquisitions editor? And, of course, I have capable help in the form of Eric Costello and Scott Andrew LePera, who will write the useful parts of the book. So, to answer your question, 32 Long. And it'll be out at the end of the year. Buy two. :: end
Greg Knauss, who has written for more Web publications than there are Web publications, is my latest mini interviewee.
Q: Why don't you write a book already? I mean, come on!
A: Oh, were you waiting? I'm sorry. I can give you a place to send the check if you want to pre-order.
Why don't I write a book? Minor things, I guess, a lot of minor things: "Plot," "characters," "editorial common sense," "the petty insistence of the publishing industry that books be longer than 2,000 words." Y'know. Minor things. Not that I don't have the ego to have thought about it, of course. I just don't have the work ethic.
I _did_ try, once, or started to try. Years and years ago, a million years ago, I was convinced that what the world needed was all the angsty whining my sixteen-year-old ass could produce, so I took a bunch of stories I had done up -- bad, _bad_ stories -- and loaded them all into AtariWriter. AtariWriter then crashed, because it only left 24K free on my 400. And that was the end of that.
But now, with Word allowing me a good 36K to fill, I'll blame the limits of my talent and temperament. Writing a book -- and by "book," I mean "novel" -- requires a focus and consistency that I don't think I could come close to mustering, even if I had the will to try. Characters need motivation, plots need structure, books need theme -- I mean, _gah_. I only burp up the little stories I do because otherwise my story duct might clog and get infected. I don't have to worry about tone or pacing or length or actually inventing situations or any of the other nonsense that defines actual writing. Which, um, pretty much explains why I'm on the Web, right where I belong.
You can still send the check if you want to, though. :: end
This week's mini interview is with Bryan Boyer, currently plying his trade at KnowNow and forever twirling, twirling, twirling at bryanboyer.com.
Q: Bryan, you pay a lot of attention to design. Are you seeing any upcoming trends in that area?
A: More and more we're seeing dampened interface elements become part of our lives. It's definitely a trend in product design these days. Next time you get into a VW grab the ceiling handle and pull it down. When you let go you should notice that it glides back into place instead of snapping instantly. There's no jarring noise or quick action, and neither are missed.
Turn on a Bose Waveradio and watch as the volume counts up from zero. It remembers your previous volume setting just like a normal radio, but instead of jumping to that volume it slowly fades up to it, easing you into whatever happens to be playing at the moment.
The trend continues to lights as well. In a rather unremarkable rental car last month I remarked on the only unique factor-- the lights which fade out instead of popping off.
What's really nice about all of this dampening is that it exactly counteracts the quick-cut nature of our media. That's not to say that jump cuts are bad, or that MTV is horrible dreck (I've been known to lose many an hour to that blasted channel), but simply that blending your experiences in the physical world by fading from one environ to the next is soothing. We have enough harsh transitions, why not fix the ones we can? :: end
As part of a continuing series of mini interviews, I recently questioned New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead. Rebecca is the author of You've Got Blog, along with several other non-weblog-related articles. Here's what she had to say:
Q: Now that you've had a few months to think it over, what do you *really* think of weblogs?
A: This question is the weblog equivalent of that old conversational line where the guy says, "All I've been doing is talking about myself. It's time *you* said something. What do *you* think about me?"
I like weblogs a lot, in theory. I'm excited by the idea of individuals seeking and finding readerships of their own, and I think the connectivity that blogging promotes is a wonderful, life-enhancing thing. The world can look bigger through a weblog. My absolute favorite thing on the web is Metafilter, which teaches me things I don't already know, engages me with often very intelligent discourse, and serves as an excellent tool for procrastination in my working life. (The only thing that isn't any good about Metafilter has been the recent trend towards long debates about whether Metafilter is any good.)
Of course, in practice, I think that the majority of weblogs I come across are awful -- derivative, puerile, self-important, blockheaded, dull. But that's fine: I think that most media products are awful. I don't want to watch most of what's on TV; I don't want to read most of what's on the newsstand. It would be surprising if there were more than a few weblogs that held my interest. Someone's reading them, just like someone -- a lot of someones, actually -- are reading Teen People. It doesn't have to be me.
Anyone who read my story in the New Yorker will probably understand that I am more interested in bloggers as characters than I am in blogging as a -- yawn -- phenomenon. (I'll leave that angle to Newsweek et al.) One of the satisfying things about having written about weblogs is that I've been able to keep up, as it were, with what's going on with my former subjects, without actually having to communicate with them. This, for a journalist, is a kind of dream come true, because we always want to know what happens to the people we write about when we depart the scene, and we hardly ever find out. Being able to read the blogs of my subjects has been a little like experiencing life after death -- so that's how things turned out once I was gone! So I've kept an eye on you all. I was very sad to watch the implosion of Pyra -- reading the accounts of that on various participants' sites was rather like watching a reality-TV show gone horribly sour. I've checked out Meg's new brown hair via her webcam. I've wondered whether Ev has found anyone to share his office space. And I've read your own site in the hope that I'll learn something about how things are going in your personal life after I'd broadcast details of it to 850,000 readers. But you're far too discreet for that. :: end
Today's interview is with Josh Santangelo, proprietor of Endquote.
Q: You wrote a response to the Letterman on Acid story on {fray} in which you admit to using illegal drugs. Are you concerned that your employer (or possible future employer) will find this post via a Web search at some point in the future and fire you (or, in the case of future employers, not hire you at all)?
A: I'm not terribly concerned about it - though I might not have made the post if I'd thought of that question beforehand, just to avoid the potential hassle. I think many of the people I work with already think I'm a rave-all-night-and-eat-tons-of-drugs sort of person when I'm not at work. They know I'm a fairly visible member of the northwest rave scene due to my involvement in DanceSafe (dancesafe.org) and NWTekno (nwtekno.org). I'm the second-youngest employee out of 200ish, and walk around in phat pants all the time. Drug use is probably almost expected of me.
In reality though, it's a very occasional thing, and it's always been less intense than the time described on the Fray. There's a "substance abuse" section in the employee handbook. The way I read it, I think I'm okay until my use of substances affects my performance at work, and I'm pretty far from that.
As far as future employers go, I'd hope they wouldn't try and dig that deeply into my personal background, and I'm not sure I'd want to work for them if they did. If they're that interested, there's more than enough personal information disclosed in the three years of journal entries on my website, and I'm sure they could find things there that they'd have bigger issues with than a short comment posted to the end of a Fray story. :: end
Thanks, Josh. So, what about the rest of you? Do you worry about the things you write on the Web coming back to bite you in the ass? If so, do you censor yourself? Do you publish under a pseudonym? Post your thoughts here.
I'm debuting a new kottke.org feature today: the mini interview. Basically, I ask someone a question, they answer with a couple of paragraphs, and then I post the results for you to read here. Michael Sippey is my first victim.
Q: How do you feel about me openly stealing your "Just One Question" feature from Stating the Obvious?
A: Hey, Jason![1]
I couldn't be happier than to have you openly steal the "Just One Question" format.[2] There's really no better home for J1Q[3] than kottke.org.[4] I'm really looking forward to all the interesting Q&A that will happen as a result of the additional programming -- it will be another reason to visit you daily! There's already the insightful commentary, the previously undiscovered links, and peeks behind the brand that is Jason; but now this? It's almost too much[5]. (You really should set up some sort of Paypal thing -- I'm sure you'd make quite a fortune![6])
[1] You see, Jason and I have been "friends" for a few years now, mostly thanks to a "top-secret" email discussion list that I (half-heartedly) moderate. The list used to be one of those "in-the-know" type things, back when personal narrative was king, and the words "The Cabal" meant what the words "A-List" do today. Now it's just another low-traffic list suffering from benign neglect, and everyone blogs in public what they used to post in private.
[2] Especially since openly I stole the format (but not the title) from G. Beato's Soundbitten, and his one question interviews. Oh, and also since The Industry Standard not-so-openly stole the format and the title for the front of their book.
[3] Oooh, neat abbreviation! Note to self (N2S!) -- do that more often.
[4] Astute readers will note that output at theobvious.com has declined significantly over the past two years. Even more astute readers will note that I last ran a J1Q on March 24, 2000, in which Jeff Veen convinced a bunch of people that Tivo was worth the few hundred bucks (another note to self -- always use affiliate links, you idiot). Honestly, I'm just happy to know someone that remembers the glory days of essay-based personal publishing, and is nice enough to ask what I think about having my (OK, Beato's) idea swiped.
[5] Hey, since I'm laying it on real thick here, maybe you could link over to sippey.com? I'm trying something new (in between late night feedings and emptying the diaper genie) and could stand the traffic.
[6] On second thought, maybe not. After all, you've condescended to running this self-important hyper-aware Eggers-ripoff blather. :: end
