Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

When searching for people who linked to Vancouver real estate bloggers in The Tyee (which includes myself), I mistakenly put the URL in the 'blog directory', and not searching blog posts as intended. Instead of results, I was confronted with this error: “There are blogs, and then there's whatever you just typed in. If it's a blog, we don't know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it's a blog that doesn't exist. Maybe you don't exist. (In which case, please ignore this.)” [screenshot]

I still don't like Technorati's use of re="nofollow" (especially relevant in the wake of Wikipedia using the 'rel="nofollow"' attribute on all links), but at least they have a sense of humour on their error messages.

A month ago I read Digital Maoism, an article by Jaron Lanier which argued that because so many in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) have an unquestioning belief that technology is here to solve all our problems, that extreme views (including, as he argues, collectivism) have mainstream appeal among technologists. I had a hard time with his argument that anonymity and the neutral viewpoint on Wikipedia leads to either bad writing or persistent inaccuracies on the site, but listening to Open Source's episode with Lanier, James Surowiecki and David Weinberger I found myself agreeing with Weinberger the most (Surowiecki and Lanier mostly agreed with each other, disagreeing mostly on emphasis and to which cases the "wisdom of crowds" applies). Where Weinberger argues that “having an extended conversation in which they are trying to get past themselves so they can get to something they agree on and write it down”, Lanier can only disagree by pointing to the discussion pages, which can get pretty raucous. I believe Weinberger meant the pages themselves, which are, in a sense, “extended conversations” towards what Cory Doctorow calls "the current negotiated truth".