The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

This one’s been getting buzz among music fans: a YouTube video featuring Kermit the Frog performing Hurt. Don’t show this to any Sesame Street fans; Kermit’s “heroin junkie” scenes will traumatize them.

[Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 5:17 p.m. EDT — Edited to correct grammar and to boldface a very important point.]

There’s a reason that I like to call Doc Searls “the adult supervision of the blogosphere”. He’s taken a reasoned and very measured approach to the Kathy Sierra affair in his posting titled Getting Past the Bottom of What Went Wrong. Now he reprints a letter by Alan Herrell, a.k.a. The Head Lemur, which sheds some light on what happened. Here’s the most relevant snippet:

…just about every online account that i have has been compromised. Most importantly my digital identity and user/password for typepad and wordpress. I have been doing damage control, for my clients. How the fuck i got to be part of this mess is revolting.

The Kathy Sierra mess is horrific. I am not who ever used my identity and my picture!!

Be sure to read the whole thing, and pass it around.

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This brings me to an important point, one that I should have made extremely explicit, especially in light of the strong emotions that this subject brings up. The evidence for the “who did it” part is still circumstantial, and it’s awfully tempting to point fingers and name names — it’s slander, and it ain’t right (Kathy herself did this, but I’m going to wait a little longer before I comment).

For the moment, the best points to discuss are:

• Balancing freedom of speech and its unintended consequences
• Identity and anonymity
• Snark, satire, lampooning and so on — where do each of us draw the “too far” line, and why?
• The nature of the commentary so far

Let me know what you think. There’s been a little-back and forth going on in the comments to an earlier post — take a look and if you’re so inlcined, feel free to join in.

The latest articles on Global Nerdy are…

• Samsung Introduces 64GB Flash Drive: Compared to a conventional 80GB hard drive, Samsung’s new 64 gig solid state hard drive has 4 times the read speed, 6 times the write speed, 1/4 of the weight, 1/3 to 1/15 the power consumption and no moving parts.
• Developer Links: Some of the most interesting (to me, anyway) links for developers I fdound yesterday.
• Microsoft to bulk up ad business with DoubleClick? “Microsoft is late to the digital ad game, and, like all of the latecomers to the business, is having a difficult time making up ground with a direct assault on Google’s search lead. A deal for DoubleClick, however, would buy them significant distribution of more traditional digital ad formats, while they build the portal/destination business at Yahoo!’s and AOL’s expense.”
• When MS Said They Were Adding Transparency to Windows, I Don’t Think They Meant This: Microsoft’s PR company’s dossier on a reporter doing a story on Microsoft gets emailed to that reporter; hilarity ensues.

“We don’t take kindly to ‘your kind’ ’round here is a stock bit of dialogue from a zillion movies set in a small town in the southern U.S., but it’s also the opener for this warning that a guy in Franklin, Tennessee (home of Veggie Tales!) hands out to those who dare to break their U-turn laws…

Click to the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Here’s the text of the letter:

Dear U-Turn Laverne,

We don’t take kindly to “your kind” in this small town. U-turns were outlawed way bak in the horse and buggy days which obviously you are too young to remember. We were are [sic] appalled when we witnessed your u-turn almost directly in front of the old movie theatre. Let this be a friendly warning “OUTTA TOWNER” that we will kindly perform a citizen’s arrest if we cathc you even appearing to pull another stupid stunt like that. Your lic. plate has been recorded & you have been fore-warned “buster”

Signed,

Concerned citizen’s [sic] for a better-safer Franklin!!

If they’d pulled a three-point turn, I think the “Concerned citizen’s for a better-safer Franklin” would’ve simply shot them on sight. I get the feeling that they’ll be talking about this for years to come: Hey, Jed, remember that there time back in aught-seven when them outta towners pulled a u-turn? We done showed ’em!

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Before I Begin…

…Make sure you’ve read this article first.

The Ridiculous Star Trek “Nazi Planet” Episode

Please bear with me: I’m going to start with a Star Trek reference.

Let me recap the original Star Trek series episode Patterns of Force (a.k.a. “The Nazi Planet Episode”) . In this episode, the Enterprise is dispatched to search for John Gill, a prominent Federation historian who has disappeared on the planet Ekos whose society he was researching. Our heroes arrive on the planet and discover that it’s run by Nazis, and that the historian they’re searching for has installed himself as the Fuhrer.

After much adventuring, they discover that although Gill appeared to be the leader of this brutal and warlike society, he had become the drugged puppet of his deputy, a native of the planet with an ambition to become its supreme ruler. Kirk, Spock and McCoy defeat the deputy Fuhrer, and Gill confesses that his original intent was to help the planet’s society evolve from its backward anarchic state into a functioning civilization. His plan: model the Ekosians after what he thought was the “most efficient system the Earth ever knew”, the Nazis.

The premise of this episode always struck me as ridiculous. How could a respected historian (I’m assuming he’s respected, as they’ve sent the Federation’s flagship to go looking for him) ever come to the conclusion that he could fix a broken society by modelling them after the Nazis?

How could anyone think that a society that mimicked the Nazis down to the last detail — the swastikas, uniforms, SS, the “sieg heil” salute, technology, fascism, the obsession with order and a leader called “The Fuhrer” — would not end up duplicating the brutal, threatening and hateful aspects as well? Where did this guy get his history degree?

The Ridiculous MeanKids.org and Bob’s Yer Uncle Websites

It started with a debate over at Tara Hunt’s HorsePigCow blog in the comments for her More on Higher Purpose post. Some of the commenters who took issue with the thesis of Tara’s post — really, people, what’s wrong with having a higher purpose? — were getting out of hand, and Tara exercised her right to delete those comments. “They remind me of the mean kids in high school who used to draw pictures of me with zits all over and laugh at my expense,” she wrote.

Inspired by Tara’s reference to “mean kids”, Frank Paynter created MeanKids.org, where people who had a bone to pick with the current darlings of the tech blogsphere — Tara, Kathy Sierra, Maryam and Robert Scoble — could comment freely. It was meant to be, as Frank would end up writing in his online apology, “purposeful anarchy. I thought the people at MeanKids would create art and criticism, pointed and insulting satire”.

It’s a statement that’s as accurate as “The Hell’s Angels is a social club for motorcycle enthusiasts.”

MeanKids.org — don’t bother trying to visit; it’s been taken down — was a real-life online version of the “Burn Book” from the movie Mean Girls, a book in which the Plastics (the clique of mean-but-popular girls) write nasty things about everyone in school.

On MeanKids.org’s dismantling, Frank writes:

Misogynistic postings at MeanKids.org led me to try to moderate, but indeed the group there was of the “You Own Your Own Words” tradition, so moderating or central editorial control wouldn’t work. I tore the site down.

Feeling a need to keep the online “Burn Book” going, Chris Locke wrote in an incredibly obnoxious, ungentlemanly and self-congratulatory blog post that he created Bob’s Yer Uncle. The mean kids migrated there, and that’s where the really nasty stuff about Kathy Sierra appeared.

Here’s Where it All Comes Together

John Gill’s mistake — fixing a problem by following a terrible example — was repeated by Frank Paynter.

In creating MeanKids.org, Frank created a little online space that mimicked a high school “Burn book”.

And like John Gill, Frank got supplanted by a cartoonishly vicious, amoral deputy who took his idea and ran even further with it.

How could anyone think that a society that mimicked high school down to the last details — the put-downs, smack-talk from a safe distance and encouragement of adolescent behaviour — would not end up duplicating the brutal, threatening and hateful aspects as well? Where did this guy get his life experience?

I no longer think that the premise behind the Star Trek “Nazi Planet” episode is as ridiculous as I once thought.

Over at Global Nerdy, the tech news blog that my pal George and I run…

• 10 Things You Need to Ask Before Picking a Domain Name Registrar. In which I point to Tucows CEO Elliot Noss’ article which reminds us that with domain name registration, cheaper does not always mean better.
• That Reminds Me of a Story… Some links to a couple of articles talking about the impending demise of the dead-tree version of the newspaper and a story about the perceived influence of blogs.
• Big Content 1, Cablevision 0, Apple ? “Are things going so well in Hollywood that Big Content can take their cable-operating friends to court as well as their internet-based frenemies?”
• No Web Presence? It Might Hurt Your Job Prospects! Many recruiters and HR departments Google candidates, which means that if you don’t have a web presence, you don’t “exist”.
• The Downside of Having a Web Presence (or: Kathy Sierra vs. the Anonymous Web Thugs) It’s a cross-posting of this article — make sure you read it.