DISQUS

Steven Hodson · 2 years ago

As a fellow opinionated contrarian (read - cranky old fart) blogger I think I share much of your feelings about this obsession with "the next shiny new thing". You make mention of of what is happening in Burma which I truly displays a real lack of social conscience in this so era of Web 2.0 "do no evil".

We seem to be more concerned with qualifying and quantifying social networks and social graphs rather than giving a damn about real social issues. If we did then survivors of Katrina wouldn't still be living in FEMA trailers, [middle class] poverty wouldn't be a growing dividing line between technological class separation.

Thank you for an excellent post and I've added your blog to my RSS feeds.

jeneane sessum · 2 years ago

Respectfully, Ditto. And thank you.

karoli · 2 years ago

Thanks to you both for your comments. I noticed the discussion more or less died out today, but I'll bet there's a lot of eyes on that leaderboard.

Back when Twitter was all the rage (in March), I was shouting out as loudly as I could about the Julie Amero case and the injustice of the clash between technology and the law. I tried as hard as I could to get someone -- anyone in the "higher blogosphere order" for lack of a better term, to put a louder voice to it than I.

Yet all I saw, over and over again, was more "Twitter is the new blog, yada yada" and no one could really take the few minutes to shout out about Julie, except for Cory Doctorow and the folks over at BoingBoing. And even when it did catch a little bit, no one really went in depth with it.

Now we're seeing tons of people under prosecution for possession of images, videos, etc. who were stupid enough or unfortunate enough to use peer-to-peer file sharing on unprotected computers and download material without discretion as to what it really might be. And still, no real tech voices beyond the antivirus and antispyware folks.

Maybe I should create a PayPerPost opportunity for folks to blog it...would anyone listen then? No, it'd probably still be all about Facebook.

Steven Hodson · 2 years ago

I remember the Amero case well Karoli and as an aside it was well covered by the security related blogs like Threat Level, Freedom to Tinker and Sunbelt Blog which is the home blog for Sunbelt Software (Kerio Firewall etc) of which Alex the CEO of Sunbelt was one of the first to come to her rescue. He also testified free of charge as an expert witness for her defense.

But the large point you are trying to make I do agree with - the tech blogosphere in general - and the more popular they are - glosses of social issues with very little involvement past a single line in a post or such. Instead they will bitch at the drop of a hat if their iPod has a scratch or they will discauss ad naseum the merits of social networks over social graphs.

kind of sad in a way.

karoli · 2 years ago

Hi Steven,

Oh, the contributions of Alex and all of the volunteers are not to be minimized in Julie's case, nor was I trying to. But one link from Robert Scoble to Alex's blog, or an orchestrated outcry about it from the so-called A-listers at the time would have made a world of difference. As it was, they ultimately blogged it after the fact.

The people who made the difference were Alex, et all and the knitters and food bloggers and other ordinary people who got the word out and dug into their pockets to give to Julie's defense fund. Just imagine how much easier their job would have been had they had some megaphones from the top dogs.