December 2008 – Auxiliary Memory

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953. I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways. First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole. I’ve been re-reading a number of classic SF novels from the 1950s this year and many of them are fix-up novels, made by gluing short stories together, stories that were first published in the pulp magazines, and the results feel episodic. The original idea of Childhood’s End started out as a short story, “Guardian Angel” from a 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, but it works well as a novel even though it’s a series of encounters with different characters over time that could be also criticized as episodic. It cohered for me perfectly.

Second, I was surprised how so much of the story had stuck with me since my last reading in 1985, showing how memorable the story is. Third, I was surprised by how many classic SF ideas Clarke included in his novel. Fourth, I was surprised by how many social issues Clarke dealt with that would explode later in the 1960s. Finally, I was very surprised by Clarke’s belief in the limits of mankind. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke suggests that man isn’t the toughest alien around, and is unfit to be the alpha creature of the galaxy.

Childhood’s End has to be somewhat inspired by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the film, Klaatu, a traveler in a flying saucer from a distant alien civilization comes to help the Earth. In the book, Karellen, the leader and his crew from an advance alien civilization come to help Earth in flying saucers. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke takes the idea much further than the “Farewell to the Master” story by Harry Bates which inspired the film. And strangely enough both stories have deep religious undertones, with Klaatu acting out the Christ role, and Karellen and his crew acting out the role of angels, messengers of God, even if they look like Lucifer.

Klaatu came to Earth, preached about our evil ways and told the people of our planet to get their act together or face retribution from a higher power. Karellen came to Earth and stayed, gently guiding the transformation of human society with miracle powers. Both the film and book preached that human society is severely flawed, that the human race is a danger to itself, that our governments can’t help and that individuals are full of weak behaviors (the seven deadly sins). Clarke is very philosophical about the future of mankind, and if you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here because I’m going to give everything away.

To carry the religious metaphor further, both stories suggest that aliens from the stars will bring salvation to mankind. Arthur C. Clarke goes even further, and suggests that mankind must be reborn before we can travel to the heavens because our current minds and bodies are too limited to see the wonders of transcendental society of higher beings.

Clarke explores what will happen to people when the aliens solve all of our big problems. We fall back onto finding meaning in art, music, sports, sex and self education, but that isn’t enough. Karellen won’t allow people to travel beyond the Moon, and Clarke says without the final frontier our lives will become meaningless. In other words, life on Earth isn’t the real show, and it’s only until we evolve into a higher being that finally we will really understand our true purpose. Isn’t that same exact message religion gives to us poor mortals. Is this message built into our DNA? Is it some kind of ancestral memory?

When I was young, back in the 1950s when I first saw the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the 1960s when I first read Childhood’s End, I believed in what Clarke was saying. Science fiction was my substitute for religion. I’ve been a religious skeptic since I was 12, but it’s taken me much longer to become skeptical of the preaching of science fiction. Childhood’s End is a wonderful story, but so is the Bible. I don’t believe either. Whoever we are as a species, and as individuals of that species, is all we’ll ever be. Nobody will save us but ourselves, and if we are condemned to oblivion, then we only have ourselves to blame.

We might not be alone in this universe, but for now, we stand alone. Clarke really must have believed in higher psychic powers and that mankind would evolve into a super-being because the same message was replayed in his 1960s story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. ESP was a major theme in 1950s science fiction. Science fiction writers obviously believed, or wanted to believe, than humans would one day evolve their own miracle powers and become god-like ourselves. This is one hell of a wish fulfilling fantasy! Of course this same fantasy appears in both religion and regular fantasy novels. The same year 2001 came out, shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were hits, and those power fantasies are still just as popular in various forms of entertainment today.

In the year 2008 I think we need to psychoanalyze Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke and his fans, rather than evaluate the novel as science fiction. It is a metaphysical fantasy that needs to be interpreted. Do people really believe that we can’t solve our own problems and need God or alien overlords to save us? Will life on Earth always be meaningless without a purpose delivered from a higher being? Is frail mortal life so worthless? Do people really believe that homo superior will be telepathic? Or that any adaptation of nature to our evolution will include ESP powers?

Arthur C. Clarke was a scientist, so could he have been savvy enough to have written Childhood’s End for the masses, well knowing Marx’s dictate that religion is the opium of the masses and fashioned his SF novel to addict science fiction readers in the same way and sell more books?

This is why back then, I was a disciple of Robert A. Heinlein. He was “a better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” kind of guy, believing mankind would build it’s own spaceships and the Klaatus and Karellens of the sky better get the fuck out of our way, for we are a jealous people.

JWH 12/30/8

Science Fiction in My Lifetime

When I wrote this title I intended it be about science fictional predictions coming true in my lifetime, and especially what might still happen before I die. Then I realized it could also imply I was writing about the great science fictional books that came out in my lifetime, leaving me room to speculate on what far-out ideas could appear in the near future. Over at Visions of Paradise, Bob Sabella chronicles seven waves of science fiction since H. G. Wells, and wonders when a new wave will hit. I’ve lived through three of waves Bob describes, the 1950s transition from pulp mags to book SF, the 1960s New Wave and the most recent Cyberpunk movement, but I think we all live in a reality partly shaped by Herbert and Jules and their literary descendants.

Right now the science fiction scene is dormant. Most of the new books in the science fiction section at your favorite bookstore are fantasy books, or adventures set in classical science fictional worlds, like Baroque art encouraged by the Catholic Church. No radically new science fiction concepts have been created since the 1990s with the concepts of mind uploading and the singularity. What I’d like to do is recap the big SF ideas of the 20th century and then try to predict where science fiction might go in the 21st century.

How many grand ideas imagined in science fiction stories will become real in our lifetimes? Humans landing on the Moon is the shining example for science fiction stories going back hundreds of years. Before that, submarines and airplanes were predicted long before they became a reality. Some concepts are harder to judge. Many science fiction stories were written about overpopulation, terrorism and running out of natural resources after the year 2000, and some of those dreary predictions are coming true, just read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.

How likely will the exciting, positive concepts of science fiction, bear fruit in our lifetimes? Some people are anxiously awaiting flying cars and rocket backpacks. Other fans are expecting alien visitors, while some folk can’t wait to go where no man has gone before themselves. How many science fiction readers hope life-extension will keep them reading science fiction until the 22nd or 23rd centuries? I know, I’d love my own Jeeves the robot.

I keep writing about the science of science fiction over and over again, but what really are the odds of these fantastic things happening before I die? I had a revelation in the shower this morning. Science fiction’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last 35 years not because of the validity of it’s ideas, but because the story telling has gotten dramatically better and thus appeals to a wider audience.

I thought my wife and lady friends were getting more and more into the ideas of science fiction when it became obvious they loved SF movies because of the hot actors and thrilling story telling. Most people have zero expectation from science fiction, it’s just good fun. They don’t want to homestead Mars, or expect the galactic overloads to come save Earth from ourselves.

I’ve been reading a number of classic science fiction novels from the 1950s this year and I’ve been amazed at the ideas, but disappointed with story telling aspects – it’s no wonder that science fiction had limited appeal back then. I keep reading for the ideas and predictions, judging the science of science fiction, but the real success of science fiction in the last few decades has been in telling better stories.

I’m happy for that, but I want to focus on the science fiction ideas. What are the likely odds for many of science fiction’s most popular visions coming true? Let’s use the year 2050 as a cutoff. If I could live to be 100, it would be 2051, so that’s close enough to call 2050 the end of my lifetime. The odds I list are just my best-guess hunches because there is no way for anyone to really calculate them. As far as I know, there are no bookies taking bets on these future endeavors.

Colonizing the Moon – 1 in 10

It’s been over 40 years since man has walked on the Moon, so this almost seemed a dead dream until China, India and Japan took a interest in the Moon and started up their own space programs. This is very positive, except that the world-wide recession might slow things down. Still the Moon is the logical base to start a beachhead on conquering space. Colonizing the Moon is the cornerstone of all our science fictional dreams about space travel.

I think Robert A. Heinlein owned the Moon fictionally, with classics like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit-Will Travel, The Rolling Stones, The Menace From Earth, The Green Hills of Earth, Rocket Ship Galileo and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. John Varley and Rudy Rucker are modern writers who have been homesteading the Moon in recent years, giving it a twist with mind uploading, cloning and mad robots.

Some of these books are among my all-time favorite books, but I’ve got to admit, none of them have approach colonizing the Moon in any serious way. For such an old subject this leaves lots of room for future science fiction writers to work.

Colonizing Mars – 1 in 100

Growing up in the 1960s I really expected to see manned missions to Mars in my lifetime. It just seemed such an obvious step after the Apollo program Men like Werner von Braun and Robert Zubrin made it sound so doable. Well, it’s not. If you do the research you’ll find just how tough a job going to Mars truly is, not impossible, but well on the edge of the limits of what humans can do now and the near future.

And I think it’s silly to think about Mars until we can conquer to Moon. If we can send men and women to the Moon for three years, and prove we have the skills to keep them alive, then it will be time to talk about Mars. However, colonizing Mars is the next step after the Moon, and for many, it’s the main goal. On the other hand, I believe the road to the stars is paved with airless chunks of rock and we have a convenient one at hand to practice our space survival skills.

Many scientists have said it was amazing luck that some of the twelve men who made it to the Moon weren’t killed. Most of their luck came from making short journeys lasting less than 2 weeks. Moon dust would have ruined their suits, landers and machinery if they would have tried to stay much longer. Is it possible to build self-contained habitats that will last three years, the length of a Mars mission?

Science fiction has always made the near impossible sound easy. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars have set the standard for Mars colony science fiction. His work is far more realistic than most SF writers, but still way too full of fantasy. Science fiction writers might be visionaries, but they have trouble seeing the details. Speculation on how to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars is wide-open. Terraforming is a great idea, but explaining how to build a computer on Mars without help from Earth would be magical.

Manned Missions Beyond Mars – 1 in 100,000

Theoretically, it’s well within our means technologically to colonize the Moon and Mars within the next 25-40 years. We could make some amazing breakthroughs in technology that would allow us to go further, but we need to get busy, and I think public opinion will be against it. To go beyond Mars will require developing nuclear rocket technology on the Moon or out in space. Mars is about the maximum range for manned missions using chemical rockets, and that mission would be far easier if we could perfect nuclear rocketry before we try. The people of the Earth will not let scientists develop nuclear rockets anywhere near our home world. The Moon is a fine place to work with radioactive elements. The real future of manned space travel will depend on the industrialization of the Moon.

Asteroid miners have been a staple of SF since the days of John W. Campbell took over Astounding, ignoring the fact that it’s much cheaper to find the same resources locally on Earth, the Moon or Mars. Unless space ships can be built on the Moon, mining asteroids is silly. Any colony on the Moon will want organic elements, and especially hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. Moonies will probably want to mine comets.

Manned Interstellar Flight – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I guess it’s possible we could discover some magical space drive system that will let us zoom off to the stars before 2050, but it’s highly unlikely. Personally, I think the only way for humans will travel to the stars will be to build giant generational spaceships that can operate for thousands of years, but even that idea is mostly fantasy. We might have the will and tech to build interstellar spaceships in a few centuries, but for now the idea is almost pure fantasy. Star Wars like galactic civilizations are absolute pure fantasy. Even our very best hard science fiction novels are really just thrilling stories, and are rather pointless for our needs of predicting the near future. Hard core space opera gives us grand hopes, but the chances of colonizing worlds around other stars is about equal to finding biological immortality.

Intelligent Humanoid Robots – 1 in 5

Asimov, Simak and Williamson ruled the robot stories, but robot stories aren’t as popular today. Robots and robotics seem to be moving full-steam ahead though, with scientists like Ray Kurzweil predicting an artificial intelligence singularity in the near future. Hobby robotics is probably much more popular than hobby rocketry ever was. Anybody with some programming ambition can get into robotics. And after Spirit and Opportunity’s success on Mars, I can even picture an ever evolving series of robots going where no man can afford to go. That’s a goddamn shame, but that’s the way it is. I hope NASA at least starts building in real-time high definition video feeds from it’s metal Martian explorers so us biological creatures back on Earth can feel like we’re walking on Mars vicariously.

Many people believe artificial intelligence is impossible. I figure if nature can accidentally stumble upon the recipe, than scientists should be able to figure it out sooner or later. The question is how long. Robots are cheap enough compared to manned space exploration, so we should see a continual increase in robotic intelligence on space missions, and that might evolve into intelligent robots. The military is also pushing robots to do more. The more we ask of robots the more intelligence they acquire.

What’s surprising is I don’t think science fiction has ever done any really good realistic robot stories, either they are people-like and cute, or they are like Gort, all-powerful and scary. Commander Data was among the best, but not very realistic. Before 2050 I think we’ll see some pretty amazing robots, and just maybe science fiction will predict what they really will be like.

Visitors From Space – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I’d really love to be proven wrong here. We could use an alien like Klaatu or Karellen to knock some sense into us, but I don’t think that will happen. What are the odds of intelligent life developing anywhere in the universe? What are the odds of intelligent life developing twice and near enough to each other to visit? It must be tremendous. I’m not saying it’s impossible. Let’s say it will be nice surprise.

For story purposes, the concept of visitors from space is pretty tired, although it will remain popular. The idea has endless possibilities and offers so much fun and thrills. Essentially, it’s a fantasy concept equal to stories about angels and vampires.

SETI Contact – 1 in 1,000,000,000

Detecting an intelligent signal from space is probably far more likely than having aliens over for coffee. Detecting intelligent alien life in the universe would have profound philosophical implications to our society, so it’s strange that this topic is so seldom tackled by science fiction. Often it’s a setup for physical contact or acquiring super-science, like Contact by Carl Sagan. We need more books like His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem, The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt and The Listeners by James Gunn.

I figured if we were real lucky, and I mean astronomically numbered lucky, SETI would detect a signal from space before I passed on. That’s the most exciting thing I can practically hope for, but I doubt it will happen. I think if we build some really gigantic space telescopes we might visually detect artificial elements in the atmospheres of extra-solar planets.

Cloning Humans – 1 in 100

I’ve always considered cloning boring. It’s making a human without sex, but you end up with another human, big whoop. Most science fiction is about 20 year-old cloned bodies grown in a month, which is silly. Also, the idea of copying the brain patterns of a natural human onto a clone’s brain is also silly.

Uploading Minds – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

Mind uploading is a growing topic. It’s all part of the Human 2.0 theorizing, and has been slowly emerging in science fiction for decades.

[You can see the complete documentary here, or go to YouTube and watch all the parts.]

Whether you copy my brain to a computer simulation, clone, or android mind, I’m still going to die in the process. What’s the point? This is no route to immortality. I’d much rather design an AI mind than copy my own. Being alive is about experiencing the now, and that’s not copying memories. However, seeking to reach Human 2.0 status is where much of the science fictional action will be during the 21st century.

The Cutting Edge

If you really want to explore the frontier of what’s happening scientifically, right on the border of where science meets science fiction, be sure and read the Edge.org. Top thinkers from around the world examine the most far out ideas on the planet. Most of the articles are very down to Earth, but some could be used to springboard into science fiction stories.

The Future of Science Fiction

From what I can detect, I’m thinking the appeal of science fiction is even waning, at least for the moment. I examined many months of book reviews at SFSite.com and only a handful could be considered new breakthrough science fiction. If the editors there removed all the obvious fantasy titles their site would shrink dramatically. Many of the titles that most SF fans would classify as science fiction, are really adventure stories set in old comfortable science fiction worlds with few writers trying to imagine anything new conceptually. Like I said above, science fiction writers have gotten much better at telling stories.

Right now I think of all the predictions dreamed up by science fiction writers, I think robots, AI and Human 2.0 explorations are the ones most likely to come somewhat truer in my lifetime. SETI contact with alien signals from space is going to be like finding one snowflake in all the snow storms of Earth each winter. It could happen, it might take a thousand years, or a million years, or it could be next year.

I don’t think we’ll ever seen visitors from the stars, and I doubt mankind will ever be an alien invader. Science fiction has always been deceptive about interstellar rocketships, implying they’d be something like a new model airliner from Boeing. That thinking is on the order of asking how fast does Santa have to travel to visit every house on Earth.

Until men and women colonize the Moon and Mars and we learn how to build with materials found in outer space and create a new economy that has no dependency on Earth, we won’t be able to think about traveling further than Mars.

I think the dramatic new ideas that come out of science fiction will be about living on Earth. The potential of combining the Internet, artificial intelligence, robots, advanced learning techniques, simulated computer worlds, and so on will generate new possibilities for humans. Science fiction writers need to think very hard about what’s going on in this world. Sooner or later a new H. G. Wells, Jules Verne or Robert A. Heinlein will show up and surprise us.

JWH 12/28/8

A Zune Christmas

My wife got me a blue 8gb Zune for Christmas and I’ve been spending this morning downloading albums to play on it. I bought the Zune Pass which lets me have access to almost everything for $14.99 a month. I’m used to subscription music because I’ve been a Rhapsody subscriber for years, but I never had a compatible player. iPods don’t work with subscription music services. I was intrigued by Zune when I read the new 3.0 version allowed subscribers to keep 10 songs a month as part of their monthly fee. The ten free songs a month aren’t DRM-free MP3 songs though, but Zune locked songs, although they promise these songs will play even after I stop paying the rent. Well, we know how that works, don’t we. Still it’s a nice try.

So far I’ve downloaded:

Quicksilver Messenger Service
Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails
Pavement – Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed.
R.E.M. – Murmur – Deluxe
Genesis – Foxtrot (new reissue)
Joan Baez – Day After Tomorrow
David Bowie – Live in Santa Monica 1972
Arcade Fire – Funeral
Nirvana – Nevermind
The Priests

I considered getting the new box set of the complete Creedence Clearwater Revival albums, but figured I’d save that for later. I wish they had a check box for “Add to Memory Queue” for these subscription services. All-you-can-listen-to musical gluttony is hard to manage.

I’ve found a great way to pick new albums to load – I go to The Rolling Stone CD Album Review page and look for 4 and 5 star reviews. This is a fantastic way to discover new albums, and to rediscover old albums and box sets when they are re-released.

Even if I only listened to one new album a day, $300 a month value at $10 an album, the $15 a month fee still makes me feel like I’m robbing them blind. Nothing is stopping me from listening to 10 new albums a day. It’s all legal and on the up-and-up. And I think it’s a fair price. For most albums, I will only listen to them once. I doubt that I will find 10 perfect songs a month that I will want to play over and over again enough to make them worth the trouble to isolate from the rental songs. As long as I pay the monthly rental fee I’ll have access to them as long as they don’t go out of print.

I think a fun project would be to find 1,000 perfect songs. A perfect song to me are ones I would listen to over and over again without getting bored. It would be fun to have 1,000 perfect songs on the Zune and hit random play.

The Zune works with Wi-Fi and I can call up albums directly from the player, but I find it easier to just load them from my Zune library on the PC. I haven’t figured out how to delete albums yet. And there are rare delays in playing music through Wi-Fi that I avoid by downloading the album through the computer. The Wi-Fi feature will be great for when I’m away from home.

The Zune now supports Audible.com files and Overdrive library files, so I can use the Zune as a replacement for my iPod Nano that I use for listening to audio books. The players are about the same size and weight. I haven’t checked how well the Zune plays audio books, and whether or not it has a good resume feature, vital for listening to audio books. Overall, I’m very impressed with the Zune.

The earphones that come with the Zune seem nice enough, but I’ve read they aren’t as good as they could be, so I’ll start looking for reviews on some low-cost great bang-for-buck earphones. I find the Zune earphones better than the ones that came with my iPod. They are more comfortable and sound better. I’ve never acquired the habit of listening to music through earphones though, and that will determine how how I use my Zune, but I like it very much right now.

JWH 12/26/8

Out of Print – The Bad Side of Digital

There is a downside to digital music, especially if you’ve moved completely to digital downloads and have given up on CDs and LPs and want to be completely legal. Most albums only stay in print for a certain period of time. Famous records from artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones tend to stay in print forever, but not so for the work of most performers. If you love a less famous band, say Quicksilver Messenger Service, most of their albums are out of print.

I would love to hear three QMS albums again, Shady Grove, Just For Love and What About Me on my Zune or iPod. They aren’t available from Zune Marketplace. Nor can I buy them from Amazon on MP3. Nor are they for sale at iTunes. I can get them from Amazon as Japanese import CDs for $15 each. Or I could track down the original LPs on eBay for less and then convert the tracks to digital. Just when I thought I had left the physical world of LPs and CDs, I’m dragged back in.

What this means: If you REALLY love an album buy a physical copy. Rip it, make backups, and store away the original for safe keeping. You never know thirty years from now when the nostalgic mood hits you and you’ll moan pitifully, “I’d give a hundred bucks to hear that album again.” Otherwise, Zen up, accept the fleeting quality of this world, and stop trying to clutch desperately to the past.

You’d think with digital record stores everything that was ever recorded would be for sale, but for legal reasons that’s not true. Like I said, if you’re criminally minded, just steal what you want off the net. iTunes, Rhapsody and Zune Marketplace should have everything because production costs shouldn’t be an issue. If the pirates can offer everything from free, why should the legal dudes have any trouble providing it for money?

I could wait and maybe Shady Grove, Just for Love and What About Me will be legally reprinted in the Zune Marketplace and Rhapsody libraries. But what if the contract is only for five years, and I want to hear those albums again when I’m 88? That’s the problem with subscription music – it’s ephemeral.

Why even have a publication period for an album in this digital age? Why can’t artists just sign up with publishers and have their work always in print and constantly available? That might happen in the future, but I can’t trust it now.

Nothing is for sure. I could buy those three Japanese imports and twenty-five years from now CD players could be as rare as turntables that play 78 rpm records. There might be technological reasons that put music out of print too. Owning a MP3 file, free of digital rights management, might have a longer useful life span than a physical album, but only if you backup like a compulsive fiend.

But this is also sadly funny. I just got a new Zune, I have access to hundreds of thousands of albums I’ve never heard, more than can fit in any record store I’ve ever visited and I’m crying over three albums that probably, if I had them, I’d only play once because there’s a reason they are out of print. Why don’t I make an effort to discover new albums to love rather than whining about old forgotten albums?

Over the years I’ve owned thousands of albums, many of which I can’t even remember, but every once in awhile will pop back into my mind and I’ll wish I had them to play again. I guess that’s human nature.

JWH – 12/25/8

Random Blog Reading

A couple weeks ago I noticed that Auxiliary Memory was getting a bump in hits and discovered the reason: AlphaInventions.com. This site, the invention of Cheru Jackson was designed to randomly show blogs from around the world, and promote blog reading. If you visit AlphaInventions you can sit and watch a new blog pop up about every 10 seconds, like a blog slide-show. There’s a pause button in case you want to stop and read, and a input box and button to submit your own blog.

I’ve manually done this in the past with blog hosting sites like LiveJournal that used to have a random button, and Blogger which currently has a “Next Blog” button that takes you to a random site. I wish all blog hosting sites offered this feature. It’s a fun way to see the world. Hitting the random button is like teleporting into an unknown home and asking the people, “What’s happening?” At Blogger, over half the sites are in language that’s not English, but the pictures still tell a thousand words each.

I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands of sites in this random fashion and I’ve never found a person like me. There are a few bloggers that have similar interests to mine, but we have discovered each other in non-random ways. Most people discover other blogs through googling a topic, from social bookmarking sites, or from the links presented at a blog site they like. This tends to hide the diversity of the blogosphere because people tend pursue more of what they already like.

Patterns do emerge, but it’s surprising how different people are around the world, or even just nearby. All over the web people have tried to estimate how many blogs there are, with some estimates running as high as 200,000,000, which I can’t believe. Here are some numbers from different blogging sites:

WordPress.com – 5,056,620
Blogger.com – unknown
LiveJournal.com – 17,600.000
OpenDiary.com – 566,956
TypePad.com – unknown
Vox.com – unknown
Windows Live Spaces – unknown
Famous blog hosting sites in other countries – unknown

Still, even if there are only 20,000,000 bloggers, that’s quite a cultural expression of diversity. Evidently millions people on this planet have an inner-journalist in them. Those sites with unknown numbers are really big ones, so we could be talking about a major cultural phenomenon.

It only took a couple of weeks to realize that AlphaInventions was failing. The first time I looked at it a high percentage of pages caught my eye as being readable and interesting. Now it’s overwhelmed with crap. There are a couple kinds of blogs that turn me off, but they tend to dominate. The first are people trying to make money in some lame-ass way. The second, and more common, are bloggers who like to jot down a few vague lines each day. Don’t put up a public website unless you’re going to make a serious effort to provide content. I hate hitting the “Next Blog” button and finding a site that says, “We went to the movies and then went out to dinner.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to write about going to the movies and out to dinner, but you’ve got to make it into a story, or at least a movie review.

There could be tens of millions of bloggers, but there might only be a few hundred thousand serious ones, and if we distilled those down to just the ones you would love to read if you had the time, there could be hundreds. Finding them is a problem, but as fascinating problem. Think about it, there’s almost 7,000,000,000 people in the world, and blogging has the potential to connect you with the most perfect friends.

I think Cheru Jackson will need to rethink his concept. The blog slide-show idea is great. Letting anyone submit is bad. I’d like to see the blog slide-show feature combined with RSS feeds and StumbleUpon like technology so the random blogs were all high quality sites with a reader rating button. In other words, I want random great, rather than random everything. StumbleUpon is excellent for finding great reading from all types of web sites, but Jackson’s intention was to help the little-guy bloggers, and that’s a good intention.

I think Blogger.com’s “Next Blog” button is the step in the right direction. If they would add a rating button to their top navigation bar, allowing visitors to rate blogs on the Blogger site, then that could be used to show random sites with positive ratings. The social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Technorati allows pros to compete against amateurs, and that’s good for that they do, but I’d also like to see an all amateur competition too.

For some reason I mainly read sites from WordPress and Blogger users, with a sprinkling of LiveJournal users. There are many more blog hosting sites around the world that need to get in on the competition. Many advanced bloggers hide their community blog hosting services with personalized domain names. This makes their sites look more professional, but tends to hide their affiliation with their blogging community. I love being part of the WordPress world, and wished WordPress.com had a random button like the Blogger “Next Blog” button.

Of course, for Blogger.com to offer that button requires their users to show an ugly navigation bar at the top their site. I don’t know if WordPress users would like that or not. I see an admin bar whenever I visit my site for administrative purposes, which by-the-way allows me to see a random post of my own. Maybe blog hosting services could make a custom visitor bar at the top of sites an option.

Blog hosting sites do collaborate with standards like OpenID, so it might be possible they could create a random referral standard. I like that people at Blogger or LiveJournal have a certain look and feel, because it makes me feel like I’m visiting a country of bloggers with their own shared characteristics and flavor. I’d like to randomly visit other blogging countries. What’s needed is a central guide like Fodor’s, or a United Nations of blog countries to start a visa process.

Of course, these suggestions would put poor Cheru Jackson out of business. He had a good idea, but each blogging host site could easily recreate it, and in the future, with standards, the cross-border random visits could be set up too.

JWH 12/22/8