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September 17, 2006

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thank you... very important. I might rethink flu communication.

Fasacinating, really fascinating. thanks for doing the work.

Since I was a teen when Elvis Presley got his start, I'm definitely not MySpace material, but it seems like it is a great way for viral marketing of political messages. Is this being done? By our side I hope?

YouTube certainly is.

Absolutely fascinating (again) EP. I thought discussion of worldview (in the most general sense possible) was appropriate to the TNH discussion, but I'm sure you're right about the reality of how memes and opinions play out on the web. I also hadn't thought about how pervasive myspace and services like it are for things other than bands, etc. Mind-opening! Thanks.

Super post, ~pockets.

I'd agree with Dem--we're using YouTube well, but not MySpace.

Mimikatz, according to the Times' description of a report published on valleywag.com which I'm not seeing there right now, MySpace was created by people from the spam mail, pop-up advertising, marketing world as a marketing tool.

According to the article, and many sources to which it links, MySpace began this way: “Headed by C.E.O., founder, and chairman Brad Greenspan, eUniverse (now Intermix Media), was a multimillion-dollar marketing and entertainment company known for sites like Skilljam.com, pop-up advertising, unsolicited mass e-mails, spyware, and the adware behind controversial peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa.”

Two men from a company called ResponseBase — which, like eUniverse, was the target of many complaints about spamming — came to eUniverse when that company purchased ResponseBase in 2002. They were Chris DeWolfe, the current chief executive of MySpace, and Tom Anderson, the first “friend” of MySpace members. The three men were members of Friendster, the social-networking site that preceded MySpace, and they used that site as a template for MySpace, but with the focus on commerce rather than networking, Mr. Lapinski said.

Mr. Lapinski said MySpace’s initial popularity came not from word-of-mouth, as is often assumed, but from an intense e-mail campaign.

I'm post-Elvis but pre-MySpace so unfortunately I can't tell you much about what goes on there. The sites I ran across searching for the gay sheep story were largely "OMG! This is so fucking ridic! EMAIL RIGHT AWAY!!! THEY ARE KILLING S[email protected]^!&^!!!" sort of things. (LiveJournal sites tended to be a few steps above that.) One might question the utility of doing politics through a population that probably can't vote. But, my attitude is, if we're going to try to control the internet as a medium, we may as well try to influence every corner of it.

jonnybutter, I'd absolutely agree that TNH is the place to debate worldview. But I distinguish in my mind between pieces I write just to see where they go (which is most of what I write -- this topic came to the fore most obviously for me in a somewhat heated thread RonK wrote about Democrats taking money from Abramoff, to which Armando showed up to essentially accuse Ron of giving ammunition to the enemy -- whereas, to me, we need to be able to "wargame" out these kinds of conflicts to refine our own positions -- that was a case where I saw the piece as intended for consumption by the left only, and Armando saw it as if it had been written for a wider audience) and pieces I write intending to try to convince people outside our own sphere, like the PETA piece.

Local debate among peers is I think one of the major functions of sites like TNH and probably about 90% or more of what we do. But when it comes to countering a specific lie or attack, especially for those not already in the choir, I suggest writing in a different style that emphasizes the facts, with evidence, and limits itself to acknowledging where there is room for debate without strongly taking a side in it.

one more thought on the importance of reaching out to 'personal' sites with small readership: their readership is small but they are represented equally on google with the big sites.

So it may be intuitive to think that one post on a site with 500,000 readers is equal to making 5,000 posts on sites with 100 readers each -- but when someone else googles that topic, it is the difference between your post being a single google hit or 5,000 google hits.

Local debate among peers is I think one of the major functions of sites like TNH and probably about 90% or more of what we do. But when it comes to countering a specific lie or attack, especially for those not already in the choir, I suggest writing in a different style that emphasizes the facts, with evidence, and limits itself to acknowledging where there is room for debate without strongly taking a side in it.

Actually, I found it very interesting that, after a while in the other thread, people not 'in the choir' were perfectly willing to take a stand as to whether or not human beings were essentially a pox on the universe and to be contravened and hated, etc. To me that is the unavoidable question behind science vs anti-science, and as I (and you, I believe) noted, there's plenty of anti-science, anti-human sentiment on the 'left' - some of it in plain sight but a lot of it lurking beneath vague assumptions and sentimentalities. That's not really a debate among peers or people who already agree with each other.

That said, the work you've done is a lot more practical, because some of these sentiments *are* so vague, so unexamined ('OMG! They're killing sheep!' ). Sorting out what is factually true and what isn't - and doing it effectively - comes first!

So it may be intuitive to think that one post on a site with 500,000 readers is equal to making 5,000 posts on sites with 100 readers each...

So right you are. Some of us (like ME) are not only post-myspace, but also are still trying to get our heads around the 'Wealth of Networks' ideas...


Fascinating post, ep.

It's amazing how many arenas of thought you can provoke in a single thought-provoking essay. Thanks.

I would suggest that LiveJournal is generally underreported in that tree-view, since the there's a setting on livejournal to not index items on any search engines that respect robots.txt. Also, there are many people who might've posted it friends-only, which are items that are unindexable.

Nice legwork here. One of the perennial concerns I've had with blogging or distributing dissenting views is the idea of preaching to the choir.

You've nicely described how to evangelize.

Thanks for the efforts.

This is all just so damned inspirational!

Now, that's a decent bit of reason.

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