The LuLac Edition #111, Dec. 17, 2006

PICTURE INDEX: THE LULAC POLITICAL LETTER RESEARCH STAFF WITH BLOG EDITOR IN THE MIDDLE, A NON PAJAMA CLAD PICTURE OF BLOG EDITOR, AND BLOG EDITOR AT A TENDER AGE SAILING THE SHIP OF STATE; DESTINATION: ISLAND OF GORT.

TIME MAGAZINE

PERSON OF THE YEAR?

IT'S ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AND YOU!!!!!!


Time Magazine named the people who are on the web, the You Tube guys, the internet junkies and yes the Bloggers as Persons of the Year. While I would've liked Al Gore to get the honor, I'm okay with Time recognizing the power of the internet in spreading thoughtful opinion on issues great and small. So, if you want a compendium of the local and regional blogs, go to this site, provided by our good friend Gort 42 and see what all the jabbering is about!
http://nepablogs.blogspot.com/.

Here's what Time Magazine will be reporting in the Dec. 25th edition too:
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious. From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

THE MILITARY BLOGGER


Captain Lee Kelley is 35 and hails from New Orleans. He spent 12 years in the Army without once being posted overseas, but that streak ended in June 2005 when he volunteered for service in Iraq and became a signal officer at Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. He has always been a writer—he has noodled around with a novel, done some freelance journalism. But it turns out he had to go all the way to Iraq to find his voice.
Kelley needed a way to convey to his family—especially his kids—what he was going through. As he puts it, "something I could leave behind if, God forbid, something happened to me." That's why he started taking some nonstandard gear with him on patrol: a notebook. "Work could last either eight hours or 20," he says. "I began to look forward to sitting down to write at the end of it." When he went off duty, he would grab a shower and then bang out a story about what had just happened. "Even though I was writing down what had happened in Ramadi that day," he says, "this was sort of an escape from the violence all around me."
Kelley is a military blogger, or mil-blogger, one of at least 1,200 servicemen and -women who write about their lives online. So far his blog, Wordsmith At War, has logged more than 200,000 hits. Mil-bloggers are a different breed from the domestic blogger who keeps, say, a record of his cat's mood swings. Here's Kelley on driving in Ramadi: "You have to go around big potholes and chunks of concrete blocking part of the lane. It's not a good feeling, because all your training tells you that these are ideal sites for IEDs ... The threat is very real, and you can sense it in the air. You can't think 'it won't happen to us,' you have to assume it will. Yet we discuss it in the same tone we might talk about last night's football game."
If Vietnam was the first war to be televised, Iraq is the first to be blogged—and YouTubed. Kelley says he and other soldiers are disappointed by how the media portray the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. "If you looked at all the coverage, you'd think the whole thing is a huge mess waiting to blow up. I sometimes wonder where these reporters are. I guess it's not exciting enough to write about schools being built." Kelley and his fellow mil-bloggers aren't just writing letters to their families. Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they're writing for history. "If they are archived, blogs will give the best account of this war," Kelley says. "No one knows what's going on better than the soldiers on the front lines."

THE SPEED READER BLOGGER

Without the web, Harriet Klausner would be just an ordinary human being with an extraordinary talent. Instead she is one of the world's most prolific and influential book reviewers. At 54, Klausner, a former librarian from Georgia, has posted more book reviews on Amazon.com than any other user—12,896, as of this writing, almost twice as many as her nearest competitor. That's a book a day for 35 years.
Klausner isn't paid to do this. She's just, as she puts it, "a freaky kind of speed-reader." In elementary school, her teacher was shocked when Klausner handed in a 31⁄2-hour reading-comprehension test in less than an hour. Now she goes through four to six books a day. "It's incomprehensible to me that most people read only one book a week," she says. "I don't understand how anyone can read that slow."
Klausner is part of a quiet revolution in the way American taste gets made. The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don't care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They're increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can't match. They're not fancy. They don't have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. Publishers treat Klausner as a pro, sending her free books—50 a week—in hopes of getting her attention. Like any other good critic, Klausner has her share of enemies. "Harriet, please get a life," someone begged her on a message board, "and leave us poor Amazon customers alone."
Klausner is a bookworm, but she's no snob. She likes genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. One of Klausner's lifetime goals—as yet unfulfilled—is to read every vampire book ever published. "I love vampires and werewolves and demons," she says. "Maybe I like being spooked." Maybe she's a little bit superhuman herself.

THE MY SPACE GIRL

Tila Nguyen was 1 year old when she moved to the U.S. from Singapore, but she's Vietnamese by heritage and blond by choice. As for what she does for a living, there isn't really a word for it yet. Nguyen, 25, who goes by Tila Tequila professionally, is some combination of rapper, singer, model, blogger and actress. But what she mostly is is the queen of the massive social-networking website MySpace.
Nguyen—or, oh, fine, Tequila—may be the least lonely girl on the Internet. She has more than 1.5 million MySpace friends. Her MySpace profile has been viewed more than 50 million times. Her self-published single, the profane and attitudinous F___ Ya Man, now playing on her MySpace page, has logged 13 million spins. (To listen to it is to hear the sound track of a million parents' dreams dying.) She gets somewhere from 3,000 to 5,000 new friend requests every day. She is something entirely new, a celebrity created not by a studio or a network but fan by fan, click by click, from the ground up on MySpace.
Before she hit it big, Nguyen had posed for Playboy.com—its first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month—and modeled for car shows and auto mags and formed girl bands. But her big break came three years ago when MySpace founder Tom Anderson invited Nguyen over to his new site. She had spent plenty of time on websites like Friendster, but her outsize, confrontational personality kept getting her kicked off. She says Friendster booted her five times. "I joined MySpace in September 2003," Nguyen recalls. "At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight."
Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be. "Once they saw how I worked it, everyone did what I did and started promoting themselves," she says. Not everybody would call this a change for the better; there are those who might even prefer a friendly community to a global popularity contest. Not Nguyen. Over the next couple of years she turned her online persona into a full-fledged business. "This is my job," she says. "That's how you maintain your popularity and keep it alive."
Nguyen clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many ceos weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer's Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It's hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It's not clear that even Tila knows. But she knows why it works. "There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet," she says. "There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you."

THE WIKIPEDIA GUY

There is a list on Wikipedia of who has written or edited the most entries, and for a long time the volunteer at the top of this list was a user known as SimonP. His real name is Simon Pulsifer. He is 25, unemployed and lives in Ottawa.
Pulsifer has authored somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Wikipedia articles and edited roughly 92,000 others. "I've actually fallen to No. 2 in terms of edits," says Pulsifer, who's tall and a little overweight. "But it's a fairly meaningless measure, so I don't feel too bad." He first heard about Wikipedia in 2001, but it wasn't until 2003 that he got serious about contributing. That was the year he got a really, really boring summer job. At that point Pulsifer got "superinvolved" with Wikipedia.
Why would somebody donate so much of his time? "There's a certain addictive element," he says. Pulsifer was still in school, and writing Wikipedia entries turned out to be a handy way of studying for exams. While taking a Russian-history class, he wrote entries about the czars. He has chipped in pieces on African history and biblical studies. Some he wrote "off the top of my head." Others took research. "It's a combination of things," Pulsifer says matter-of-factly. "It's great to see your writing published online—it's not that easy to create things that are read by millions of people." He also liked the prestige that came with being a major player on Wikipedia. Granted, that prestige was mostly among other major Wikipedia players, but still.
Wikipedia isn't a paradise of user-generated content. It has plenty of errors in it, and omissions, although at this point it's considerably larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some people enjoy vandalizing it—erasing or falsifying entries. Earlier this year the entire staff of Congress was barred from Wikipedia for sabotaging one another's profiles. In a way it's as much a litmus test of human nature as it is a reference tool.
As for Pulsifer, he's quietly scaling back his compulsive Wikipediation. He no longer whizzes through 250 edits a day. "To a degree, I'm moving on," he says. He has had a couple of job offers; perhaps a well-paying gig will come along that will allow him to leave his parents' home, where he resides. No doubt a new Wikipedian will arrive to take his place. There are plenty of boring summer jobs out there.