Tapping In to the Conversation

I do not know where this idea came from, that was banging around in my head when I woke at 3:30 this morning.  I think that it was partly a subconscious reflection of a very interesting Daniel Hecht mystery (Bones of the Barbary Coast) that I finished last night.  It may also partly be subconscious efforts to find a way to chisel away 15 minutes of my 1 hour presentation to fit the schedule of today’s opening general session of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education conference.  It could have something to do with waking up in a very elegant hotel room in Mystic, Connecticut. 

Don’t know!

But I had the idea of searching the blogosphere for the number of blog entries that include the word love and the word hate — in the 10 most used blogging languages, as per Dave Sifry’s April 2007 State of the Live Web.  The results were interesting, though in no way conclusive, as I am not a linguist and must allow that there may be ten ways of saying hate in Arabic and 90 ways of saying love.  Plus Spanish and Portuguese have the same word for love, as do Spanish and Italian the same word for hate.

The findings were so doubtful, that I’ve left out the language titles.  But for the sake of my early morning blogging, they aren’t important.  I think what’s important is that I was able to awake, at 3:30 in the morning, in the town of Mystic, a town that (regardless of the 1,437,000 occurrences on the Web) doesn’t even exist in any incorporated way, tap into an immense global conversation and attempt to make this analysis of value.

I guess that my question of the school board members today will be, are the students in your school learning to be a part of this global conversation, a valuable mixing of people, cultures, and economies?  and is it with love that they are part of this conversation? or is it with hate?

Or is the important thing that I shouldn’t even be up at this time of the morning. 😉