A very famous person who spells his first name the right way blogged about a post I put up yesterday.

I can’t find a way to leave a comment on his post, so I’ll use this lovely Sunday morning as an opportunity to take up his offer of a conversation, though it has (obviously) nothing to do with what I tried to start between us. I also had earlier put up attempts at having a public discussion with him - so maybe we’re getting somewhere.

I always try and look at the bright side of a situation.

I appreciate the subtle but clear message “look dude - I don’t mind talking to you in public, but it has to be on my terms.” So here goes.

I was an Opera major at Oberlin. Fredereick Rzewski, John Cage, Anthony Braxton, Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros and lots of others came to visit us and give symposia while I was a student at Oberlin. I remember hearing “The People United will never be defeated” performed by my girlfriend at the time - Mary Donovan.

I have fond memories of meeting John Cage several times. On our second occasion of meeting he remembered me from our first encounter and we talked about the wild mushrooms he had just picked while coming in from the airport. As he offered me some of these mushrooms, marinated in Tamari he talked about the time that he studied with Schoenberg - I believe it was in the 1930’s.

Schoenberg was trying to explain harmony and 12 tone to Cage - and said “it’s like walking through a wall” - at which point Cage responded “then I will spend the rest of my life bumping my head against the wall”.

So too - do I feel like this situation of trying to talk to Marc.

I was searching on ‘open privacy’ yesterday and found a Ning network on ‘network creators’ (which I guess are people who start social networks.) It had over 12k members so I thought “well Ning isn’t ALL p0rno!”. We have also been contacted by the folks from the diabetes network, so we know there’s “some” action going on there.

To me - Ning represents the state of the art in meta-networks - systems which spawn off social networks - so folks can have their own. I really think it would helpful to us all RIGHT NOW to understand how these niche vertical networks form and grow.

At what point do they become viable and worthwhile to revisit?  In other words “how do you start and run a niche vertical network?” This is something that is asked of me - almost on a daily basis. It’s the #1 issue that many many entrepreneurs have to deal with.

And BTW the answer isn’t “just sign up for Ning!”

That’s not what I talking about! I’m talking about using Ning’s stats and current uptake patterns as a way for folks like danah boyd to understand that we’re moving from giant centralized social networks - to 10,000’s of niche vertical networks.

It’s why Ning got a $500M valuation.

So “Hey Marc!” - I agree with you that ‘The People United can never be defeated’ - is a great piece, coolio. But unless it wasn’t clear earlier - I used that title to refer to user’s demanding ownership over their profile data, social graphs and content.”

And while we’re at it - are you hip to Bob Ostertag? We went to school together. And Michael Morgan. And Colenton Freeman.

Oberlin the the 70’s was an amazing place. It had one of the world’s first electronic music studios and it was there that I learned 6502 assembler, APL, how to build a sequencer out of TTL logic and the in’s and out’s of tape music.

Oberlin gave me my foundation which I’m still standing on. FWIW

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