Mike Golby cites Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” in a bloggaddendum to his response to my response to his response to my musings on blogging and ethics. And the cool thing is that he doesn’t mention my favorite line from the story, one that has been a guiding principle for my writing and preaching ever since I read it:
In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?
But the whole Borges corpus teaches so much, so deeply, about worlds, writing, belief, knowledge, and how seriously to take it all that I can’t applaud loudly enough for Mike’s bringing him explicitly into the conversation. Thank you, friend!
Mike Sanders submits 8 numbered points on “blogrolling theory and practice.” (The eighth provoked me to lengthy deliberation, being such an intolerably serious person myself.) At the end of the day, I suppose that eight points really aren’t adequate to inform the nuanced judgments one must develop in reaching so weighty a policy decision. I suggest that Mike go back and develop four or five subpoints for each of his points, ideally with several case studies to serve as examples.
I have not developed a policy. I couldn’t begin to imagine anyone who would care if I did.
More on Copyright
The anti-copyright readers don’t need more convincing, and the copyright advocates may not accept our arguments, but there may be some fence-sitters to whom Dan Kohn’s series of articles from TidBits would help clarify what’s up.
Perhaps it’ll help if some of the postcopyright promoters emphasize up front that they’re copyright holders themselves. I’ll still sell my books to anyone who wants one; they’re handy, attractively packaged, and bursting with good ideas about biblical interpretation — but I’m ready to step forward and say that I’m more interested in modulating into the postcopyright era than in extracting the last few cents of royalties out of consumers who might prefer to have online access to stuff I write.
Of course, this is the general direction toward which Lawrence Lessig is trying to point us all, though I’m probably more anarchistic than he.
Voice and Authority
I want to blog about voice and authority, but since David Weinberger just talked to Jakob Nielsen about it, I’m going to wait to hear more about what they said before I open my yap.