On Blogs and Blogging

Billmon’s op-ed on blogging in the LA Times has a lot of people navel gazing today. Given that I’ve been struggling with the question of my own relevance it seems timely.

Billmon takes issue with the fact that some of the top leftleaning bloggers (Kos and Atrios most notably) have achieved enough success to be self-sustaining financially and have arguably started to be taken seriously by the more mainstream press, as well as the political establishment.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers — those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy — is gaining larger audiences and greater influence.

The fact that the New York Times would do a major Sunday story about left-leaning bloggers is a good sign – the mainstream media is starting to admit bloggers are something more than a bizarre new Internet fad. And I think that this is more a positive than a negative. I’ve always been more interested in results than in precess. Even if this blog is insignificant, people who more or less share my point of view are getting listened to, and that’s a good thing.

There are some bloggers who, I think, have let success go to their heads, but the number is small (the annoyingly smug Matt Yglesias being the most notable one). But overall, the successfull bloggers that I most liked do not seem to have been affected by success. Billmon is going through some sort of crisis of the soul, I suspect. What it is I don’t know and I am not going to speculate. I hope he’s OK, because his blog was consistently excellent and I’m sad he has decided to shutter the Whiskey Bar.

I’ll just add that the day Kevin Drum linked to a post here and I got 650 views in 18 hours was the day I realized exactly how big blogs really had gotten.

At any rate, blogging ablout blogging is somewhat of an exercise in navel gazing, something I’ve been doing too much of, so I won’t belabor the point.

Final side note – As it happens I have a Six Degrees connection in all of this – my husband was a co-worker of Kos’ before Kos went full-time with the blog. That does color my attitude a little.

Thoughts on Leadership

Pandagon this morning pointed to an article about leadership, to which I wanted to add some thoughts.

A personal anecdote – a few years ago, the department I was working in went to have an offsite team-building exercise. This one involved climbing “rock walls” in a warehouse in the Mission District. What was interesting was that the instructor/facilitator who was working with our team thought the wrong person was the manager of our group. The actual manager was no leader, and she picked up on that immediately. It really brought home my understanding of the difference between leading and just being in charge.

Leadership is one of those things that to be really good at it, it has to be inborn. Which is not to say that someone who is not a natural leader cannot lead effectively, but s/he generally has to work long and hard at it, and also should have some other positive attributes to help compensate. (This is pretty rampant in the technology industry – developers with good ideas rarely are good natural leaders, but some can work at it and become effective.) Less so in politics, although Al Gore is a good example of someone who has a lot going for him but is not a natural leader.

I don’t claim to be a stellar natural leader, but I do know how to lead. For me, it’s a feeling almost like being on stage — when you are actively in the process of leading, you need to be putting out that extra energy necessary to carry everyone along with you. Not to get too Biblical, but the phrase “Let your light so shine before men” is pretty apt. You don’t need to always be right or always have the right answer, but you must have a clear picture in your head of where you are going and you must able to effectively communicate why you need to reach that goal.

You don’t need to be a genius to be a leader, although a total moron would have difficulty grasping the issues well enough to lead. You need enough self-confidence to know when you have enough information to make a decision, so that you don’t fall prey to information paralysis. You also need enough humility to realize (and admit) when you’re not right or when someone else’s idea is better than yours. For a really good leader this not even a conscious process, it’s just a part of who they are.

All this is true whether you’re leading a backyard book club or the United States of America.

Friday Kitten Blogging

In honor of Gimli’s one-month anniversary at our home, here’s a new photo of him:

Gimli will be six months old in a couple of days. He doesn’t quite have kitten proportions to his body anymore, but he’s not cat-sized yet. His paws and tail are disproportionately large for his body, though, so we expect he has a bunch of growing yet to do.

Happy Autumn!

The autumn equinox is today, marking the official end of summer. Not that we here in San Francisco notice it, because the weather is at its best right about now. Sometime in November it will get a little cooler and rain a lot until March or so. Then it warms up a bit and the rain goes away, and we’re back to normal again.

To someone who grew up with Northeast winters, it feels like there are no seasonal differences out here. I don’t really miss those days when the wind-chill factor approached zero, but like the old song says, autumn in New York was a beautiful thing. I miss the days when Central Park looked like a big patchwork blanket of fall colors and there was a crisp freshness to the wind that you never had in summer. I hated how early the sun went down, but there were the holiday lights to cheer you up – walking through New York in December was always a joy. The real slog was January through April, when all you had to look forward to was spring and spring always seemed too far off.

Of course, there’s a lot to be said for never needing a down jacket and being able to wear flip-flops and a t-shirt in March. And Lake Tahoe is only 4 hours away if I want cold and snow. Perhaps this year I’ll be able to scrape the bucks together for a ski weekend, I haven’t seen snow in two years. A girl can dream.

Please check in at the security desk

I haven’t been in large office buildings much the past few years, but having started classes at UC Berkeley’s extension campus in downtown SF I am now going to one several times a week. And the security is ridiculous.

Call it a sign of the post 9-11 times, I suppose. Every person who enters the building is supoposed to sign in and show photo ID. Fine, but you’re talking about a building where both Berkeley and SFSU hold classes. At peak times you’ll have several dozen students lined up at the desk trying to get in before class starts, and two harassed, overworked guards trying to check everyone in. Someone ‘unauthorized’ can get in with no problem by scrawling something illegible on the paper and waving their wallet in the general direction of the guards. There’s no metal detectors or bag checks, so it’s not in any way a deterrant. It’s more of an annoyance to the students who are standing there checking their watches and wondering if they’ll get to class on time.

Seems to me this is just another example of a vast trend in America — doing something to look good although no actual result is being produced. The building management’s insurance company likely insisted on it, and if they didn’t, then some of the major tenants’ insurance companies probably did. After all, if a terrorist decided to bomb a classroom of people studying accounting and there was no building security someone might get sued. So now there’s a desk and some people and a nice set of policies to point to in case of an emergency. Not that a spiky haired kid and an overweight older woman behind a desk could really do anything about anything except possibly call 911.

Now maybe there’s hidden cameras with facial ID working to provide some accurate security, in which case I take it all back, but even in the unlikely possibility that there is, why go through the farce at the desk at all?

What’s even more annoying is I have to go through this three or 4 times a week for the next couple of months.