Thinking of Eric Raymond

I want to get this right, Eric. I’ve been thinking of what you described in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, I won’t slow down here to say you are an eloquent and gifted writer, but you are. I’m thinking of way you describe programmers working together in the open source fashion, sharing brain power, networking brains, “parallel processing” in their many brains, a peer network of great intelligence and I’m wondering if this might be something writers are doing in blogs.

Maybe blogging has those same dynamics of open source programming, where there is no doubt the networked power of many people taking an idea and thinking it through about 25 iterations in … 25 hours … instead of 25 days or 25 weeks of 25 months or 25 years … maybe that’s what blogging is actually about.

And I’m thinking of this, Eric, because yesterday at the Harvard Conference, Doc and I both had a “Whoa! Aha! Hey!” moment when one of the Harvard Business School professors, Robert Cialdini, was describing a conversation with the DNA guy Watson … or was it Crick? … no, it was Watson who was explaining why they had the breakthrough on DNA and some other more intelligent folks did not.

The reason? He gave a few preliminary ones, but the humdinger was that they chose to collaborate and leverage the power of their colleagues and the other researcher thought that that wasn’t necessary.

If blogging is open source thinking, then that may be why it’s such a turn-on. I mean, really, how much of it is the content – how much does anyone want to read about someone’s cat or whatever … but it’s not about that, I mean the cat stuff is just as cool as any of the rest of it. The cat stuff matters, in that it’s what takes up space in a blogger’s head with everything else.

If you’re “going in” – yes, if you plan to do some cranial scuba diving -- you need to get in deep with the cats, the disappointing dates, the RSS fights, the discussions of freedom and authenticity, the visit to a 90-year-old mom in North Carolina, the thoughts on privacy and homeland security, all of it – because YOU NEED TO GET INTO ANOTHER PERSON’S HEAD. So blogging is parallel processing, one networked brain made of many, e pluribus unum, with feline fur.