An Example To Follow

A friend read the recent businessweek article on Dan Gillmor and Bayosphere in which I'm quoted (accurately) and said "guess who got the negative quote". I hope he was kidding, but it forced me to think about the quote, and any future quotes. What's the difference between a negative quote and a critical quote? There are rare cases where I feel the former is justified, whereas the latter is probably the norm for me. But to the readers eye, perhaps the line is blurred. If you have a tip to help differentiate one from the other, I'm all ears. But the real shame for me was that I hadn't read Dan's thorough self-evaluation of the Bayosphere experiment before speaking with Heather Green of Business Week. I would have then built off his own points. The emphasis also could not then have been on anything but the net positives from the experiment. Just wrote a followup on Bayosphere, with this conclusion: Another version of (Esther) Dyson's "always make new mistakes" is the standard in science: You only progress by proving something wrong. Dan's allowed us a calculus whereby he's made mistakes and we've progressed. Very generous indeed. The rest of my Bayosphere post. Also, here's what I said as a comment to a followup post on Businessweek, re: Bayosphere "...it's important to note somethings that I think distinguished Bayosphere from start. Primarily, that Dan, better than anyone or any site I know, created a space for the expression of diverse opinions. Blogs and their related communities are generally quite partisan, especially when it comes to Politics. I thought (and think) that Dan, through his personality, focus on quality of discourse, and through the openness he engendered, created a unique space for differing viewpoints, across the spectrum of opinion and politics. This is hard to do, and rarely seen on the net, so for those looking for lessons on what to keep from Bayosphere, I'd recommend an analysis of Dan's explicit and implicit sculpting of the space for community expressions. ..."