purple motes

The FTC's revised Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising have created a brouhaha in the blogosphere. Most persons already understand principles of ethical blogging. Don't lie, but you can write fiction. Don't steal, but fair use isn't stealing. Don't manipulate, but you can display your rhetorical skills.   Don't write as if you have no interest in a subject; make your interests clear.   Persons who fully understand these principles should find the FTC guides straight-forward.

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For more than four months, hundreds of persons a week have probably viewed a display of minerals and meteorites exhibited at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC. A collection of minerals and meteorites were part of James Smithson's bequest to the United States for founding the Smithsonian as an institution "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." James Dwight Dana, a mineralogist, looked at Smithson's collection and described the minerals:

a choice and beautiful collection...comprising, probably, eight or ten thousand specimens. The specimens...are extremely perfect, and constitute a very complete Geological and Mineralogical series....

Dana described Smithson's meteorites as "a valuable suite of meteoric stones, which appear to be specimens of most of the important meteorites which have fallen in Europe during several centuries."

The minerals and meteorites exhibited at the Smithsonian are not Smithson's collection. They are a small number of specimens gathered from a variety of sources to indicate what Smithson's collection probably had been like. The exhibit explains that the minerals and meteorites in Smithson's collection were destroyed in a fire that greatly damaged the upper floor of the Smithsonian Castle in 1865. But how could a fire destroy minerals and meteorites? Stones don't burn!

Heather Ewing's deeply researched book, The Lost World of James Smithson, notes:

There remains some confusion about what exactly survived from the regents' room in the south tower. The report investigating the fire states vaguely that among the losses is "a part of the contents of the regents' room, including the personal effects of Smithson, with the exception of his portrait and library." Smithson's library and portrait survived because they were kept in the west wing of the building ( which was unharmed in the fire), where the institution's library was housed. [p. 356, note 9]

The fire at the Smithsonian apparently was an open fire fueled by wood and interior furnishings. There's no reason to believe that the fire was hot enough to melt or transmute minerals and meteorites. The fire would have left Smithson's minerals and meteorites disorganized and covered in soot, but not destroyed or even significantly damaged. So what really happened to Smithson's mineral and meteorite collection?

The Smithsonian Institution has for more than a century offered nationally sanctioned and acclaimed displays of authoritative scientific knowledge. In those circumstances, a claim that stones were destroyed in a fire apparently passes unquestioned. That's an impressive monument to the value of blogging and Wikipedia.

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Most blog posts did not include any links. A recent study selected 44,362 blogs in a way biased toward finding linked posts. Among all 2.2 million posts in those blogs in August and September of 2005, 98% of the posts had no incoming or outgoing links.[1] This isn't a matter of A-List bloggers exclusivity or blogger masses languishing at the bottom of an influence hierarchy. Most blog post don't even have any outgoing links.

Most bloggers probably blog in a room by themselves, sitting down, typing on a keyboard. Much blogging seems to be about self-expression, like writing in a diary back in the days of secret, personal histories, or about news reporting, like that in traditional media, but with much smaller audiences.

Humans in physical proximity are naturally social. Silence is awkward. Not making eye contact raises suspicion. Persons with nothing in common and no reason to communicate will nonetheless communicate when in physical proximity without a strong alternative focus of attention. Only persons united in an intimate connection are likely to feel comfortable being together in silence when communicating is an authorized possibility. In physical proximity, self-expression and monologues without regard for communication tends to be interpreted as offensive.

Alternative circumstances of communication evoke remarkably little of this natural human sociality. Communicative circumstances are important. Blogging is not like being in a room with other people, even though other persons’ blogs are readily available to a person blogging. Bloggers forlornly lamenting that no one links to them should realize that this does not mean that no one would talk to them.

[1] Jure Leskovec, Mary McGlohon, Christos Faloutsos, Natalie Glance, and Matthew Hurst (2007), "Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs: Patterns and a model," Paper to be presented at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2007), Minneapolis, MI, USA, Apr. 26-28, 2007 (pdf). Blogs were selected through link traversal (see Sec. 4.1 of paper). For share of isolated posts, see Sec. 5.3.

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In the excellent Iron Cross cyclocross race, I fell down several times and injuried my wrist. I'm temporarily limited to typing with one hand. Thus short posts this week.

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All my friends' drivin' traffic I must blow some fog.

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