"Here we have Locke at his finest, his mind flowing free..." writes Frank Paynter of my previous post -- after making fun of my ass for about three screens. "...the dude's getting into the carpenter rap again... let's hope we're not going into the christian martyrdom darkness." Yeah, very funny Frankie. Just you wait. Look at him there, all pleased with himself. He has no idea what he's in for.

But at least he interspersed his parody with gratuitous Highbeam pointers. As CBO's main purpose is to showcase the value of Highbeam Research, this is goodness. Especially as I've developed so many... well, let's call them side-purposes. For the kind of setup you're seeing here on CBO to work, corporate underwriter and blog underwrtitee must be at least somewhat symbiotic.

SYMBIOSIS, the habitual living together of organisms of different species. The term is usually restricted to a dependent relationship that is beneficial to both participants (also called mutualism) but may be extended to include parasitism, in which the parasite depends upon and is injurious to its host; commensalism, an independent and mutually beneficial relationship; and helotism, a master-slave relationship found among social animals (e.g., the ant and the aphid). True symbiosis is illustrated by the relationship of herbivorous animals (e.g., cockroaches, termites, cows, and rabbits) to the cellulose-digesting protozoans or bacteria that live in their intestines; neither organism could survive without the other.

from: symbiosis
source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2005
via: HighBeam Research

"One morning Gregor Samsa awoke to discover he had been transformed into a gigantic cockroach." So wrote Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis. Think of Chief Blogging Officer as a lowly cellulose-digesting protozoan. Which metaphor, I hasten to add, should in no way be taken to suggest that Highbeam Research is a giant cockroach. But I guess it does, doesn't it? Well, it's not what I meant, OK? Click on the cockroach if my meaning seems ambiguous here. Can we just leave it at that? Otherwise I'll have to erase this whole post and start over. Let me see if I can find one more suitable for Frankie. Yeah, here we go...

The emblems of banality speak volumes about the longings and desires of the postmodern subject. Disputing the politically inert critical strategies of parody and irony that characterized postmodern photographic practice, Goldstein argues for the need to confront our desires rather than ignoring them, sneering at them, or disengaging from them.

from: Boredom, repetition, inertia: contemporary photography and the aesthetics of the banal
by Eugenie Shinkle
source: Mosaic (Winnipeg), 1 December 2004
via: HighBeam Research

Let Dr. Frankenfurter chew on that  for a while. Meanwhile, on a ...cough... more sober note, I came across this brief post by A.K.M. Adam...

March, 04, 3005 Props For Our Man It's a treat to see e-learning pundit Stephen Downes commend our hero Chris Locke's recent column on serendipity and research at his Chief Blogging Officer gig. "Someone who finally understands search' -- indeed!

For readers who have arrived here from other dimensions (according to our stats, CBO is especially popular with the Fourth and Tenth), your first question may be: who the hell is A.K.M. Adam -- though given the collar, you might not have said "hell." Silly you. Simply AKMA to his many friends is a) Professor of New Testament studies at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (formerly of Princeton), and b) a prodigious blogger. If you click on the Seabury-Western link, you'll see he's written a number of books, among them one titled What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?. I figured I'd show you that one, so I went to Amazon to get the cover clip you see at the top of this graf. Then, poking around in the reviews, I found this introductory disclaimer by David E. Rogers:

Let me say up front that I'm a big fan of the author's Weblog. He's first on my blogroll by the accident of alphabetism, but he's also at the top of my list of must-read bloggers. So don't expect this book review to be impartial or anything.

If you click on David E. Rogers in this Amazon review (as I did, naturally), you find this:

About me: I'm a Los Angeles-based information architect, instructional designer and writer -- and a true believer in the Internet. Learn more at my weblog: http://dave_blog.blogspot.com

I go there too (naturally) -- the site is called Connect & Empower -- and find many familiar "faces" on the blogroll, two of them my own. Like looking into a more than usually populated mirror. Here are AKMA, Chief Blogging Officer, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, that old dog Frank Paynter, Halley Suitt, Jeneane Sessum, RageBoy (!!!), and Tom Matrullo, among others. It's been said that blogging is incestuous. Yeah? Well hell, how could it not  be? Many birds of a feather are worth two in the bush. Although... no, nevermind.

The other question you may have had about AKMA's post about my post, is who, precisely, is Stephen Downes? Not hard to find out if you follow AKMA's link. Sure, you already knew what it said there, basically, as AKMA quoted it. But note the link to Nietzsche! (Hey, your guess is as good as mine.) So I back up to the bio page, and encounter this:

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Stephen Downes lived and worked across Canada before joining the National Research Council as a senior researcher in November, 2001. Currently based in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the Institute for Information Technology's e-Learning Research Group, Stephen has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata as well as the emerging fields of weblogs in education and content syndication.

I look him up on Highbeam and come across the following. Downes was obviously very early in to the whole syndication infrastructure that's now become a standard feature of the blogging world.

Finding a clear explanation on the Web of RSS and how to create and use this XML format for content distribution or syndication can pose quite a challenge. A less technical online introduction is Stephen Downes' An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers [Microsoft Word document], published on November 2, 2002.

from: So you want to start a syndicated revolution: RSS news blogging for searchers by David Mattison
source: Searcher, 1 February 2003
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2003 Information Today, Inc.

Then, on an entirely different note, I find that AKMA's post has been picked up by wood s. lot and dropped into his blog right above this picture of Alan Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Gregory Corso.

I met two of the three of them the next year, in Boulder, Colorado, where this was taken, and where I still live -- though I've moved away and moved back twice since then. I never did meet Gregory, though I carried a copy of his City Lights book of poems, Gasoline, in my back pocket when I was my daughter's age now. She turned 15 yesterday. Anne Waldman might recognize me on sight, as I would her, from passing in various shrine rooms and meditation halls. We never spoke about poetry, if we spoke at all. I sang this bit of the Diamond Sutra to Ginsberg in a very crowded kitchen at a very drunken party. Quoting here from memory...

He said: "You didn't write that!"

"No," I said, "I made up the melody."

Last time I saw Allen was in a Chinese restaurant that was later my office, and later still the scene of the end of what turned out to have been merely a relationship. He was asking this elderly couple what they were eating. Was it good? Could he try a bite? Totally outrageous though very polite. They had no idea who he was. Nor did I, except for those negro streets at dawn and that eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry.

He's dead now. I stay away from Naropa, though I just drove past it today. Madame Levy knew them all, Burroughs, Ginsberg, the lot. She tells me Corso was the real poet. How would I know? I was just 15. Just starting out.

And that's how hypertext works, pretty much.