Middle East Complexities

Tim poin­ted at a piece list­ing immor­al solu­tions for Gaza, a piece which nicely proves that find­ing a good solu­tion is impossible, and find­ing the best of the bad solu­tions often seems equally impossible.

I’m sure I’m not the only per­son flab­ber­gas­ted by the whole Israel/Lebanon/Palestine mess, and I’ve read a few books try­ing to make some sense of it. The only one I whole­heartedly recom­mend is Thomas Fried­man’s From Beirut to Jer­u­s­alem. The book is old; it was first pub­lished in 1989, but it is (unfor­tu­nately) still rel­ev­ant in that none of the prob­lems it describes have been solved. Many of the people are no longer in power, or no longer on this earth, but the prob­lems they did­n’t man­age to solve are still here, still affect­ing the lives of those who live in that part of this world.

I’m not going to try to sum­mar­ize the book; there are lots of reviews out there. Suf­fice to say that if you don’t know much about the Middle East, but do want to know some­thing about why people dis­agree so viol­ently and why a solu­tion still seems so heart­break­ingly out of reach, get this book and read it. You may dis­agree with lots of it, you may find char­ac­ters described with­in it worthy of respect or you may find them despic­able. I learned a lot about some of the fault-lines with­in Leban­on, Israel, and Palestine soci­et­ies, and the hor­rible con­sequences that have come of well-mean­ing actions.

Mastering the Digital World

Yes­ter­day I went to the stu­dent show­case at the mas­ters of digit­al media pro­gram, a gradu­ate degree in digit­al media put on by Van­couver­’s major post-sec­ond­ary insti­tu­tions. Unfor­tu­nately I had to leave early, but I was impressed at what I saw. The centre is run by Dr. Gerri Sin­clair, whom I’ve known for some time, and she’s obvi­ously had a lot of fun put­ting togeth­er a pro­gram that not only teaches about digit­al media, but teaches worth­while pro­ject tech­niques such as per­so­nas and agile development.

I’m curi­ous as to what sorts of jobs the stu­dents will end up in, par­tic­u­larly for those who go to what one could call less cut­ting-edge com­pan­ies, and how they will fare. The pro­gram is still new, but I think it has the poten­tial to do a lot of good in com­pan­ies, giv­en the focus that I saw on mak­ing the tech­no­lo­gies appeal to the ulti­mate users. They are run­ning an Open House in a couple of weeks; if you’re inter­ested in what these stu­dents are doing with digit­al media, that would be the place to go to check it out.

Ebbs and Blogs

One of the inter­est­ing ses­sions I went to at North­ern­Voice was the Blogs are Dead; Long Live the Blog­ger ses­sion facil­it­ated ably by Chris Lott. There’s a write-up on this wiki; as usu­al a lot of thought-pro­vok­ing stuff was said, only some of which I’ve found recor­ded. I’ve noticed changes myself over the last few years of observing part of the blog­ging world (by neces­sity, only a small part). 

I’ve noticed that lots of people aren’t blog­ging as much, or indeed any more, for var­ied reas­ons. Some spend more time on twit­ter, which scratches their com­mu­nic­a­tion itch, and effect­ively let their blog lapse. Some post no longer need to tell friends and fam­ily what they’re up to via a blog. A fair num­ber of crafters are on Ravelry and post their pro­jects there and don’t need a blog any more.

I’ve noticed changes in the blogs, too; maybe because many people whose blogs I read are using twit­ter et al for the more “trivi­al” dis­cus­sions and thoughts, the blog post­ings tend to be about weight­i­er sub­jects, or work-related. In many cases the tone is more form­al and (dare I say it) bor­ing; I’ve giv­en up on quite a few blogs that used to be fun to read, even if the sub­ject mat­ter was incon­sequen­tial, because they now are more weighty and ser­i­ous and not as enter­tain­ing. Or they’ve turned into col­lec­tions of links. The occa­sion­al link posts, with com­ments as to why those links are worth click­ing on, is fine, but I quickly tire of blogs that con­sist solely of links to oth­er blogs and art­icles. I really can­’t be bothered hanging on in the hope that the author will even­tu­ally come up with some­thing original.

One big excep­tion that I’ve noticed is the craft­ing blogs, which (not­with­stand­ing the people who’ve quit now that they’re on Ravelry) have much the same type of con­tent. I star­ted a craft­ing blog after join­ing Ravelry, and I know oth­ers who’ve done the same. Many crafters see their blogs as a refresh­ing change from work, delib­er­ately not talk­ing about top­ics out­side the bound­ar­ies, keep­ing the dis­cus­sion focussed (more or less) on the ser­i­ous craft­ing issues of types of yarn, wheth­er the knit­ted object will fit once it’s fin­ished, and the best way to cre­ate a par­tic­u­lar design or concept. Or just post­ing “I did this this way and this is how it turned out.” 

I don’t think the blog is dead; it’s just chan­ging as the concept dif­fuses out­side the circle of early adop­ters who are busy twit­ter­ing at each other. 

Bravery

You can see bravery in places you don’t expect it to be needed. In the safe con­fines of a blog­ging con­fer­ence, for example. Read Meg’s post­ing, and Nancy’s response.

I was in that ses­sion, and where Meg was brave enough to tape her pic­ture on the wall, I was not. I threw it in the bin on the way out, cast down by my own inad­equa­cies. Strange how a ses­sion that seems easy and fun on the sur­face can trig­ger so much intens­ity inside.

MooseCamp 2008

Anoth­er nice Fri­day in Feb­ru­ary for Moose­Camp; some­how the Moose­Camp day man­aged to score nice weath­er two years in a row. This year’s Moose­Camp was big­ger than pre­vi­ous years, and I think we’re get­ting to the lim­it of how many people we can take without los­ing some­thing. We also seem to be get­ting a lot more people who are inter­ested more in com­mer­cial aspects of blog­ging and social media than the per­son­al side, so I’m not sure how that’s going to play out in the future either.

I spent much of the morn­ing on the t‑shirt and regis­tra­tion desk until things settled down, then went to the mul­ti­lin­gual ses­sion, mostly since I occa­sion­ally won­der wheth­er (I should try blog­ging in Ger­man as well as Eng­lish. There were quite a few people in the room, but it turned out that only two of us were inter­ested in the sub­ject for a per­son­al blog; every­one else was inter­ested in the sub­ject for a cli­ent, or for their com­pany. Which isn’t bad, and I’m sure the oth­er people in the room were glad to know that sev­er­al oth­ers were inter­ested in the cor­por­ate aspects of the sub­ject, it was just of less interest to me personally. 

Pho­tocamp took the first part of the after­noon; inter­est­ing as always and some decent tips on light­ing, even for the few of us who use little pock­et cam­er­as (there were some ser­i­ously big cam­er­as on show).

I spoke in the last part of the inter­net boot­camp. The talk I’d pre­pared was meant, in good uncon­fer­ence fash­ion, to be reas­on­ably inter­act­ive. James agreed to help out, since he also found the top­ic inter­est­ing: What Next? The idea was to talk to people who’d been blog­ging for a little while and wanted to take their blog to the next level; I was primed with top­ics such as broad­en­ing the focus versus nar­row­ing it, how the tone and style of blogs tend to devel­op, what effect incor­por­at­ing work top­ics often has, mul­tiple blogs versus one blog on mul­tiple top­ics. A few minutes in it became really obvi­ous that people wer­en’t inter­ested in the sub­ject, and when I asked why they were there, almost all were inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how their com­pany should start blog­ging, or make their com­pany blogs more effect­ive. So in even bet­ter uncon­fer­ence style, I changed the sub­ject and star­ted talk­ing about how Sun had imple­men­ted blog­ging. Most people seemed much hap­pi­er with that sub­ject, and we dis­cussed a lot of related issues. For­tu­nately it was the last ses­sion of the day so the fact we then went over time did­n’t seem to upset too many people.