I’ve also just started a blog of sorts, although in true minimalist techie tradition, I’m just putting up pages written directly in html with vi, and letting the webserver generate the index. I also have no plans to add stuff daily, but I’m all for a longer journalistic style. One of the more significant things in David’s closing speech was something he barely even talked about: a blog is a real opportunity for many more people to begin the “find their voice”, and really connect with other people on the level of ideas. To Susana, you have to suspend you judgements and just do it, the worst that can happen is no one will read it.

Not just being mentioned in their blogs, but getting comments or email that let you know people are reading and interacting with your words. We have heard “attention is the currency of the web”, which sounds pretty banal, but it really is true. People also talk about ego and recognition being what drives people to contribute to open source projects, but a paper I read recently suggested that the important thing here is that it is recognition in a community. In other words, it is much less the larger user community and associated accolades, but the direct interaction and feedback withing the smaller working community. Like the street culture Biella discussed, it’s the instant feedback that both gratifies and helps us quickly develope our chops.

I thought it was Kurzweil who he was taking to task? Really, it is anyone who thinks strong AI is possible. There is a little bit more about this on my pages if you are interested. It is a very old debate that I have been taking a middle road on all the way back to USENET comp.ai groups back in the 80s. Sort of a hobby of mine.