Standing on the Corner with Pamphlets in Hand

Welcome to my street corner. I recently listened to a speech by Eben Moglen called “Freedom and the Future of the Net: Why We Win.” It’s good stuff. Very interesting. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find a transcript of it, but as a value-added service to the MTF community, I transcribed this, where he is discussing how the “artificially large person” (e.g. Christina Aguilera) is manufactured for the purpose of selling things, and:

But all of this depends upon denial. Exclusion. You can’t have it unless you pay. And it’s not actually the best way if you are a musician, to distribute music, to refuse to let people have it. It’s not actually the best way if you are a writer, to get read, to refuse to let people read. The creators by and large want straightforwardly — not surprisingly — a low friction mechanism for giving what they make to people who may want it. And they would like to get paid for that when people like what they make. Where possible, which isn’t always possible, musicians would be very happy busking on a street corner where there are six billion people. Which they now have. In the twenty-first century, there will be no such thing as an unpublished poet, which is good, because in the twentieth century there was damn near no such thing as a published poet.

– Eben Moglen, Freedom and the Future of the Net: Why We Win
(mp3 from punkcast.com)

I think he said “busting on a street corner,” although that’s not a familiar expression to me. It’s easy to take from context that he means jamming or performing. (Correction! Almost certainly busking instead of busting.)

This snippet isn’t central to the speech, but it provided the image that inspired this post. Moglen tells it well and creates lots of pictures and ideas in my head. Here we are with this amazing world network where we can all talk to one another. We don’t need someone with a printing press in order to get our words out, and we don’t need someone with deep pockets to create and distribute physical media for music anymore.

My Street Corner

So here I am on my street corner. I’m a scribbler instead of a musician, so I have a stack of pamphlets to push in to the hands of anyone who will take them. It is great to have the potential for millions and billions of people to read my little screeds, but it’s not so easy to establish myself on a busy corner. (And if I did, hoo boy, can you imagine the mess from millions of people throwing the piece of paper to the ground as they walk away?) My out-of-the-way corner begins with the few people I know personally whom I can coerce in to walking by and then humor me by saying, “It looks really nice.” And then, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but it looks nice.”

Another strategy is to hang out by more popular street corners and shout at the crowds gathered there and hope a few people will turn and notice. One corner like this is Free Software Magazine, a site with a good readership and interesting articles about the Free Software Movement. I’ve posted a few comments there with a link back to MTF and have been pleasantly surprised that many people take the time to visit my squalid little corner of the Net. (I’m sure because my thoughtful and cogent remarks make them hungry for more.) If you are one of those people or if you found me by some other comment or link (although Google sadly tells me that no one is linking to me yet), thank you for stopping by. You may notice I don’t have a lot of content yet and I’m not posting frequently. It may even appear that I’m just ponderously ruminating on nothing in particular. Maybe as if I’m avoiding getting to the meat of my topic. Well, let’s talk about that.

Posting Frequency and Regularity

If you read blogs and other sites that host articles, you know they vary widely in how often new stuff is added. Setting aside the obvious factor of subject interest and writing quality, I think one of the key factors for regular readership of these sites is frequency and regularity of posting. I don’t think people have to post everyday — although that is appealing to my own OCD tendencies where I’m always wanting to reload to see if there’s anything new — but I think it’s important to post regularly. Once a week works ok for me. If someone adds something new at least once a week, I’ll keep returning if I like it.

There are other sites where I like the content but they are so irregular that I eventually drop them from my bookmarks and feeds because even I’m not that obsessive to want to keep spending time keeping track of them when things rarely happen. I realize the idea of syndication and feed readers is that you don’t have to keep track of them so closely, but they’re still in my list and I want a list that is manageable. (And maybe I need to look at other ways of keeping track of my feeds. I use the Sage extension for Firefox and really like it, but I wish there was a way to see in the list if there are new articles before clicking on the feed and waiting a second or two for it to load.)

So in these early just-getting-started days, I’m mainly trying to establish a regular writing rhythm. Something sustainable. My goal with Moving to Freedom is to post at least once a week. Posting every day requires a lot of time and I don’t want to feel pressured to maintain that pace if I have other things going on. Of course there is danger that if I keep writing these rambling navel-gazing kinds of posts that I won’t actually attract a vast and devoted audience.

(I suppose it’s also possible I could say the same amount of nothing in shorter daily entries.)

The Subject of this Blog

As to the subject of this blog, I’m still looking forward to the journey of moving to freedom.

Part of that journey is figuring out what freedom means. It’s such a big topic. I’m interested in big questions of freedom and a free society, but I don’t feel qualified to pontificate on them. So I don’t know if I’ll just link to others who are better qualified or if I’ll ignore the heavy material altogether and focus on frivolity here.

There’s also the specific task I’m setting for myself. To actually move to using GNU/Linux and banish Windows to the periphery. This is a politically and philosophically motivated goal, but a practical objective. Something I can describe in technical terms. “HOWTOs.” Or maybe I’ll focus on the politics. There are a million technical and practical free software sites out there. Maybe we need more impractical ones. This is why I’m sort of hanging around and providing a lot of blah blah blah so far. I’m busy perfecting my business plan. Wally is my role model: “To the untrained eye it might look as if I do no work. But inside here is a raging sea of knowledge management and strategic thinking. Did you hear that gurgling sound?”

I’m looking forward to the practical objective of using GNU/Linux with mixed feelings. Excited by the idea of freedom, but still with a lot of trepidation based on past false starts so that I’m kicking the can down the road and not really making a run for it yet. If it’s vaguely out there as something I’m going to do then I can daydream about how wonderful it will be. And in addition to various mental neuroses that get in the way, other things are always competing for time and attention, such as:

WordPress “consulting” Work Interferes With Posting and the Process of Moving to Freedom

The past few weeks I’ve been spending time helping my sister get a web site going using WordPress. It’s not a blog, really, so it has required a lot of modifications which I’m enjoying.

This suggests some material for MTF, with WordPress being a good example of free software. The community around the software is stupendous. There are a lot of smart people contributing to this project and helping people use the software to do all kinds of cool things. I’m fortunate to be a late adopter. When I search on Google for help, I find all kinds of discussions and solutions to my problems that have been around for a year and more. I can see that many things I use were added over time in response to requests. And it’s just so great that this is free, as in speech and as in price. The libre part means that this community–which apparently has long moved past critical mass–will continue to enhance and support this great software, and the gratis part means I can easily recommend it to my sister. It’s very low risk for her to try it.

It wasn’t that long ago that I had to choose which blogging platform to use for myself. I hadn’t really heard of WordPress. I was most familiar with Blogger and MovableType. As I looked in to the available choices, I found people mentioning WordPress and I tried out the hosted wordpress.com site. I immediately liked the ease of use of wordpress.com without being aware that it was free software. Once I saw that it was free, the choice was easy. It’s always a thrill to me when I see software offered under the GNU GPL license. It tells me that here are people that care about freedom, and I immediately feel a bond with them.

So, Anyway, to Recap

I’m working on it. I’m going to try providing these weekly (at least!) postings for you, even if it means staying up until midnight on a work night to get them out. I think I had more to say and I could have also trimmed out a thousand words here as a service to you, but it is very late and I have to just let it go. Thanks for visiting!

Coming Attractions:

I’m planning on sharing some charts from Google Analytics. I mention in the privacy policy that I’m using this service and thought it may be interesting for people to see what kind of data is being collected. Is that a fair trade? Google collects valuable information about you and in return I’ll share what is collected? Again I want to emphasize that I’m only interested in aggregate data. I can’t speak for what Google does with the data. If you’re uncomfortable with being tracked like this then you can block the service. Keep in mind that there are other services observing you out in the wild, like Site Meter. Which I’m not using. It costs money, after all.

Attribution Note:

Thanks to Xavier Servettaz for kindly giving me permission to use his photography here. As far as I know, the pictures in this post are “all rights reserved” by Xavier.