The

Rise &

Fall

of the Website

BrooWaha
How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.

How those that resisted change to interconnectivity and fluid alliances, from a market to a network, doomed themselves.
By Pamela Olson

Dedicated To
Ariel Vardi, 'DigiDave' David Cohn, 'That Man' Bill Friday, Usually Insane But Not Dependably Always So El G, That Lady Morgana, Hurricane' Dean Walker, Julian Gallo, Garry Crystal, Craig B., Lynn Desilva-Johnson, Glenn Truitt, Steven Lane, Lion King Ed Attanasio, Jen And Tonic, Mean' Mike Duffau, AmyO, Rose, and all the Original Broosters.

The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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Copyright 2009 - 2012 by Pamela Olson All rights reserved. All wrongs revenged. Its a story. Semblance to anyone is not intended nor should be inferred. Savvy, mate?
Doc Sererinsen's There Is A Girl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjG0S6dc-sY

A graduate of College of Marin then Sonoma State University, in the middle of The American Wine Country, California USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way, Pamela Olson is A Marin County Volunteer of the Year, founding board member North Bay Multimedia Association, Home Designer, Raconteur, Gardener, Time Traveler, Swimmer, Veteran, Friend, Real Estate Authority, Ballroom Dancer, Mama, Color Junkie, Bon vivant, Professor, Author, Wife, and Landlord Extraordinaire aka opinionated.

May all your storms be weathered, and all that is good get better.

The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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I am known for not allowing an unconventional idea to pass me by. That often takes me outside boundaries and into to uncharted territories. Such as AltaVista until March 25, 2004 had the ability to find pages to any given Web page. At the Search Box input link then the URL of the Web page youre interested in. The power in that knowledge is it allows you and me to reconstruct the network behind the URL youre interested in, and two, determine that URLs hubs. You or I study this detailed digital record of links to understand, among many things, collaborations, because when it comes to networks, size does not always matter. Ariel Vardis BrooWaha clearly showed that. Ariel Vardi started BrooWaha, a Citizens Journalism website in 2006. In October 2009, chuckling all the way to the bank, Ariel Vardi sold BrooWaha to his new partners Tony Berkman & Tonys Merry Band of Partners, soon to become known as The Wrecking Crew and anti-Free Speechers and The Cease and Desisters. (Open and read these three links as well as http://bloggers.com/topics/broowaha+expats and http://expatspost.com/expats-post/dean-walkerwants-expats-posting/) According to Tony Tong Berkman, he and His Merry Band of Partners paid $15,000. That being John, Tony Mouthpiece & Senior Yapper Alan Handwerger and his 57 Socks, Angie Alaniz, Tom Bates, and Enforcer Tom Lewis. Ariel Vardis BrooWaha, and Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners BrooWaha, were horses of very different colors. Failing to understand that, Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners soon had BrooWaha up for sale. Who said slavery still isnt thriving? Sylvia - Pillow Talk Americans want peace, and have never been above direct democracy to get it. Networks are people and neighborhoods also. At the network micro and macroeconomic level, Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners made fundamental mistakes. One was the failure to understand the consequences of networks interconnectedness and interdependencies. Failing to understand this basic business issue that should have been previously covered in their Business Plan, Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners exposed themselves to the risks of interdependencies without benefiting from interconnectedness advantages. Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners disdain was and remains palatable as networks are people and neighborhoods also. Quicksilver Messenger Service - Fresh Air How weird is this gonna get? Cause there are some things you cant unsee. Hotmails recognition of the scale-free structure of the internet, that hubs spread products, services and ideas, only intensified Hotmails growth rate to astronomical success. Had Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners exploited the power of networks, as so many others have already figured out, like BrooWaha inventor Ariel Vardi for one, things would be different, but they didnt. Viral marketing works on the same concept as a computer virus, hence the The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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name. Computer viruses exploit the structure underneath the internet, which is a scale-free network with power-laws and clustering. That means a computer virus or a message or story can go viral, circle Earth using exactly the same routes, in less than 24 hours. Because there is no Critical Threshold, the likelihood of the virus or a message or storys success on the internet is immensely improved. A classic example is Hotmail. Hotmail eliminated all adoption thresholds experience. Thats Basic Going Viral. Hotmails recognition of the scalefree structure of the internet, that hubs spread products, services and ideas, only intensified Hotmails growth rate to astronomical success. Hotmail decisively demonstrated the robust power of people networks, and vulnerability to those who do not respect the people networks and the hubs they create. Hubs can make a profitable or deadly difference. There is flip side of a successful marketing campaign when a hub makes a deadly difference. One Gatan Dugas didnt know that he would be traced as the hub of a virus with no vaccination or cure that has to date slowly and painfully killed 20 million people. A virus on one successful marketing campaign utilizing a scale-free network. It is a terrifying example of the power of network hubs in our mobile, connected and interdependent Network Society. Frank Sinatra - The Best Is Yet To Come I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train. The focus must be on the dynamics, the hum, along the links. Bin Laden and his followers did not invent networks. Terrorists do not need nor want a military organization. That means there is never a military win for The Clearly Misnamed War on Terror. Bin Laden and his followers, like others, inhabit a desire for links to their beliefs. That bringing a desire to life is the pre-requisite of the formation of self-organized webs. Self-organized webs exploit flexibility and have robust tolerance to internal failures. Nodes and links are the skeleton architecture of complexity. There are universal organizing principles behind these systems. You must understand complexity. The focus must be on the dynamics, the hum, along the links. Why? Its because all networks obey rigid laws. Laws that determine their topology, structure and ability to function. The only ways to cripple, collapse or stop the actual network is by critical fragmentation, aka removal of enough hubs, and cascading internal failures, such as interference or removal of its resources. That means there is never a win for The War on Terror, as a node, usually anonymous, just self-organizes elsewhere. Back to Ariel Vardi and his BrooWaha dream of an interactive online "citizen newspaper," who wanted to "create an unbiased, reliable source of local and global news written by a large community of amateur writers and journalists." So BrooWaha started up in LA by Israeli / Parisian Ariel Vardi. In true citizen newspaper form, Ariel Vardi gave FBLA the scoop himself at http://www.nowpublic.com/new_kid_on_the_block_is_broowaha_the_answer_to_las_newspaper _woes_0. The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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On January 8, 2008, then came BrooWahas new editor David Cohn, DigiDaves Journalism is a Process, Not a Product @ http://blog.digidave.org/2008/01/broowaha-where-im-the-new-editor. DigiDave David Cohn proudly wrote Broowaha is a space to experiment. I do believe the future of citizen journalism is in networked reporting groups of people working together on larger investigations. Broowaha is already a vibrant community with writers across the world (literally from Los Angeles to Paris). Right now Broowaha writers are centered in LA, SF, NY, Miami and other cities around the country. I hope that we can tap into stories even simple stories like "the dying 1950s diners" and report on them in cities across the country. So if you believe in citizen journalism, want to start writing/reporting about issues or events in your neighborhood check out Broowaha. That was BrooWaha editor David DigiDave Cohns proud words then. And DigiDave had good reason to be proud of them. To understand why BrooWaha tanked under Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners, but grew under Ariel Vardi and David DigiDave Cohn, the lessons of February 5, 1997 to October 27, 1997, are useful. A Thai company, Somprason Land, Ltd., the Thai government, Michel Camdessus, International Monetary Fund Managing Director, the Thai government let Thailands largest finance company go bankrupt, and on to October 27, 1997, the Dow Jones spectacularly tanked. The failure of one node is seldom detrimental, unlike the failure of a hub. The breakdown of several nodes like what happened here can and does set off a domino of failures that can shake or destroy a whole system. Which happened here. It happened due to the natural consequences of connectedness and interdependency. It happened again with the mortgage fraud for the same reasons and even worse results, foreclosure fraud. BrooWaha under Ariel Vardis sharp design and his and DigiDaves hands off operations was clear allegiance to network laws. All the network laws. Scale-free, obeys powerlaws, performance unchanged by random removal of nodes unless it turns out it was a critical node, vulnerability of its hubs. Ariel Vardi demonstrated the strength and ubiquity of network thinking. Ariel Vardi took what normally would be a node hoping to grow up to be a hub, and cleverly linked it to other nodes hoping to grow up to be hubs. He then further cleverly linked to his whole known as BrooWaha. BrooWahas city editions were the nodes hoping to grow up to be hubs. Los Angeles BrooWaha, San Francisco BrooWaha, New York BrooWaha, and BrooWaha did just that. They grew into hubs. Links are incoming. Links are outgoing. Incoming links improve visibility of the Web page linked to. Links quantify various interactions. The weight of the links captures the value of the interaction. Links make everyone long-term stable partners not competitors. Link stability is vital. Stable links mean you have the ability to focus on something else instead of them, the connection. Lyle Lovett Shes No Lady The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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Ooh, I don't wanna see you be no fool What I'm teachin' you tonight Boy, you'll never learn it in school, oh, no. Those that resist this change to interconnectivity and fluid alliances, from a market to a network, are doomed. BrooWaha tanked under Corporate Model Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners. The failure of one node is seldom detrimental, unlike the failure of a hub. The breakdown of several nodes can and does set off a domino of failures that can shake or destroy a whole system. The breakdown of one hub or several hubs can and will set off a domino of failures that shake if lucky or destroy if unlucky a whole system. Corporate Model Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners, probably inadvertently through their ignorance and hubris, immediately removed their city edition hubs. That was a deadly blow in itself to any network. Nevertheless, Corporate Model Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners then kicked the probably unknown to them dead BrooWaha corpse. Hard to believe, but Corporate Model Tony Berkman & His Merry Partners, then, probably also inadvertently through their ignorance and hubris, immediately removed critical nodes. Chris Isaak - You Owe Me Some Kind Of Love One persons cult is another persons mainstream. The only ways to cripple, collapse or stop the actual network is by critical fragmentation, aka removal of enough hubs, which happened immediately at BrooWaha, and cascading internal failures, such as interference or removal of its resources, resources like contributors and content removed here, without writer permission or previous knowledge with articles changed from what they were submitted as, and free speech interfered with. Dead. Dead, dead, dead. Did I say dead? The Corporate Model was best suited for production, mass production of goods, then services were later added. The value is no longer in the goods and services. The value now is in the ideas, information and cross-fertilization of them. That puts the value of the underlying networks for ideas and information as All Important to The Age of Information. Those that resist this change to interconnectivity and fluid alliances, from a market to a network, are doomed. Walter W. Powell wrote, in markets the standard strategy is to drive the hardest possible bargain on the immediate exchange. In networks, the preferred option is to The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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create indebtedness and reliance over the long haul. Like those lifelong relationships you forged in school. According to Tony Berkman himself, in Sep 09 he (and his merry band of partners) then paid $15,000 for BrooWaha. I sure hope Ariel Vardi's chuckling with delight each time at that!

I miss Broo and the Old, Classic, Original, First, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3,...Broo. It was a moment in time that I thought was special. Special as there were actually organic and dynamically alive moments where these various personalities would actually read what another said, commented intelligently on it, and continued a civil discourse. And there is a cool record to refer back to. Writer Ursula K. LeGuinn had a workshop http://www.amazon.com/Steering-Craft-ExercisesDiscussions-Navigator/dp/0933377460 and she was pleasantly surprised at how many people were at it who were writing and wanting to improve their writing, even see their craft improved with critiques of their writing and others' writing. Unless we rise above the lowest common denominator, giving a cr.. is not on ones mind though, is it? As for whats on my mind I consider, briefly, very briefly, Tong Berkman Gang Member, Senior Berkman Mouthpiece & Yapper, and Sock Queen Extraordinaire Alan Handwerger. Whats Ganger Alan Handwerger's pov? What does SBM & Y & SQE Alan Handwerger know about BrooWaha? Why does Yapper Alan Handwerger even care about an invented character? Why does he even care about BrooWaha's characters? Socked Alan Handwerger's obsessed. He's not The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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the first to be so. He'll probably not be the last. The veracity of the internet to you is no different than reading or listening to any other type of media. Everyone's (yes, that's a weasel word) got a story, everyone's got a bias, and some people lie, misrepresent some of the time. They lie and misrepresent for their own reasons. 99.9% of the time the lies, misrepresents are all completely harmless in their outcome. Personal home pages are online multimedia texts that address the question, Who Am I to This World? Since the Web is, amongst other things, a global publishing system, such pages make public the personal if chosen or the made up avatar or the mash up avatar. At the same time they can be seen as making for example personal the public, since home page authors engage in bricolage, adopting and adapting borrowed material from the public domain of the Web in the process of fashioning personal and public identities. In such sites, what are visibly under construction are not only the pages but also the authors themselves. Alan Handwerger is indeed an adroit expert in his worlds on socks. While Ganger Alan Handwerger is obsessing over a character, most of you are out getting high, educated, enlightened, intoxicated, and laid. And that's probably what Yapper Alan Handwerger is really obsessing about! lol :-) Btw, Socked Alan Handwerger the Coward has never asked Morgana anything, ever. You also thinks if when someone as Ganger Alan Handwerger says these comments Socked Alan Handwerger means says these comments the devils brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the community, creates misery and poverty, or topples the righteous into degradation, hopelessness, shame, despair, and helplessness, than you are certainly against these comments :-) :-) :-) But when someone as SBM Alan Handwerger says these comments Yapper Alan Handwerger means the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale consumed when good people get together, puts a song into ones heart and laughter on their lips and in the air, with warm glows of contentment, puts a youthful spring into ones gait, magnifies joy, happiness and enables forgetting, if only for a little while, than you are certainly for these comments. This is my stand on that. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise. Then, theres the pov of, Who cares what theyre saying? Its that theyre talking that matters. Do you even care someones talking bad about this character, Morgana now Morganas POV? I The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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then think, again very briefly :-) Quickly on the heels of that question came the answer. Nope. Next -- then theres another pov as urbane Bill Fridays classmate said, F... em if they dont like me. That classmate of Bill Friday is the one and only kick-ass screenwriter and director Quentin Tarantino. But then there's pov as in James Madisons. In the Federalist Papers, he successfully argued the United States Constitution creates a protective balance of power among factions that rise in any society including a virtual one. You cherish freedom. I cherish freedom. Free speech, even insipid free speech over a minor character such as Morganas POV, is okay by Morganas POV and the one who created her. Got that silly Yapper Alan Handwerger? Its okay. Next Morgana then Morganas POV is a created character on the internet in some places her creator placed her but increasingly in others her creator hadnt. No different that the use of other characters used by people for centuries. People do have reasonable differences. Why? Its because our ignorance, hubris, naivets, and selfishness sometimes prompt us into decisions that have conflicting ambitions. Use of a character is a time-honored tradition used to live with differences. Does this mean Morganas POV creator is now a fabler because one of their characters has something to attract others to make such banal comment about a minor character? Thats also ok by me http://www.globalclimatescam.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/creationhands.jpg. Again, thats okay. Next -- then theres the pov of chronic cynicism. Thats deadly. Yapper Alan Handwerger has it. World-weary is not what you ever want to be. It is human nature to be social, to connect. Chronic cynics are lonely, alienated and self-destructive more often then they arent. With chronic cynicism as ones pov, a fixation is on character assassination, rather that on socialization, and defining and addressing issues. Socked Alan Handwerger's character The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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assassination of a created character, here BrooWaha and its characters, has some really palatable irony to it. Chris Isaak - You Owe Me Some Kind Of Love One persons cult is another persons mainstream.

BrooWaha under Ariel Vardi and DigiDave was BrooWaha rather than the FauxBroo it became under Blog Catalog's Tony Berkman because Ariel Vardi and David Cohn's focus was on the dynamics; the people and community hum along the links.

Read Pamela Olson's Tales From The Broo That Man Those Men at http://www.scribd.com/doc/58593144/That-ManThose-Men?in_collection=3675160

The Rise & Fall of the Website BrooWaha How weird is this gonna get? 'Cause there are some things you cant unsee.
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