Future

Had a great time mixing it up with the BlogTalkRadio folks a couple nights ago, talking Cluetrain after 10 years. Here’s the show. Big thanks to Allan Hoving for lining up and co-hosting it with Janet Fouts and Jim Love. Janet tweeted it live. Afterwards Jim put up a very interesting follow-up post, in the midst of which is this:

The message in Cluetrain is as fresh today as it was 10 years ago. ” We are not clicks or eyeballs, we are people ….deal with it.”

For those of you who missed it, the book started as a website, with 95 Theses splashed on a web page, in tribute, homage or just a scandalous rip off of Martin Luther’s famous set of 95 Theses.  If you don’t know about the original, shame on you.  Martin Luther was the renegade priest who started the Protestant Reformation by nailing 95 Theses to the door of a church.  Equally important but often ignored, he translated the bible from latin to the language of the people (in his case, German) and opened it up for all to read.  He also got married — remember he was a priest.  To some he was a heretic.  To others, he was a reformer who democratized an autocratic organization.

Whatever you think of him, he changed history.  Not on his own.  He didn’t invent the movable type that made it possible to print those bibles and distribute them widely.  He wasn’t the only figure questioning the institution — there was, at the time, a growing movement that were dissatisfied with what they felt was corruption and a lack of integrity in the church at the time.  It related to practices like the selling of indulgences — the ability to buy your way out of sin.  A number of people saw the church as a decaying, archaic and for some, even a corrupt institution.  They’d lost faith in it — literally.

Luther had the courage to say what he did.  In a world where the Catholic church was all powerful, this took a lot of guts.  But that doesn’t explain the power of what he accomplished.  No, he hit the zeitgeist of his era, he was a man of courage at the right place in history.  His ideas took off like a brush fire and the world was never the same.

It’s important to note, however, that this is the view from 500 years later.  It’s all compressed now and we can look back and see Luther’s document as a turning point.

The older I get, the earlier it seems. It’s funny that we chose 95 theses because that worked for Luther, but basically that’s why. (We also called it a manifesto because that worked for Marx. Karl, not Groucho, though the latter was much funnier. I also went to a Lutheran high school. Coincidence?) I don’t think any of us was taking the long-term perspective, though. We just wanted to say what we thought was true and nobody else seemed to be talking about.

But I’m thinking now that it will take many more years. Perhaps decades, before some of what we said will sink in the rest of the way.

Some marketers got it. Jim is clearly one of them. The Cluetrain Manifesto is required reading in the course he teaches. But the future is unevenly distributed. As David Weinberger likes to say, it’s lumpy. Cluetrain’s subtitle is “The End of Business as Usual.” I think that end will take a long time. We’re trying to hasten it with VRM, but that will take awhile too.

The short of it is that Business as Usual is insulting to customers. Take for example the form of Business as Usual that Bob Frankston (more about him here) calls the regulatorium. You get one of those when a big business category and its regulators become captive of each other.  For example, it was in revolt against a tea market regulatorium that citizens of the Massachusetts colony threw the East India Tea Company’s tea in the harbor. The colonists succesfully revolted against England, but customers still haven’t had a proper revolt against the belief by many companies that captive customers are more valuable than free ones. If Mona Shaw and her hammer are the best we can do, we’ve hardly begun.

The liberating impulse is independence, just as it was in 1773. Thanks to the Net, free customers are more valuable than captive ones. To themselves, to sellers, to the economy. We won’t learn that until we become fully equipped, as customers, to act on our independence.

At the end of the show Jim said he thought liberation would be a group thing. Customers getting power in aggregate. While I don’t disagree, I believe it is essential to equip individual customers with tools of both independence and engagememt. By that I mean tools that are as personal as wallets and purses, and just as handy and easy to use. We don’t have those yet.

But we will. And once we do, things will change radically. Count on it.

The dark and gathering sameness of the world. An excerpt:

Nobody knows anything. Excerpts:

Just something to cheer you up on a Sunday.

The older I get, the earlier it seems.

So many gone things once looked like final stages: AM radio, nuclear bombs, FM, stereo, FM stereo, TV, color TV, quadrophonic sound, answer machines, PCs, online services, bulletin boards, home PBXes, newsgroups, instant messaging, cell phones, HD, browsing, pirate radio, free wi-fi, friending, tweeting.

Yeah, some of those aren’t gone yet, but don’t count on their staying around. Not in their current forms.

Three conditions have been profoundly increased by technology during my brief (62.2 year) lifetime: connectivity, autonomy and abundance. Those have been provided respectively by the Net, personal computing, and data processing and storage. I can now connect with anybody or anything pretty much anywhere I go, as an autonomous actor rather than a captive dependent on some company’s silo or walled garden. I can also access, accumulate and put to use many kinds of information of relevance to myself and my world.

Some creepy dependencies are still involved, such as the ones I have with ISPs and phone companies. But I believe even those will become substitutable services in the long run, much as the best “cloud” services are also becoming substitutable utilities.

I haven’t said that all this is a Good Thing. In fact I’m not sure it is. Meaning I’m not sure it has been good for us, or our world, that we have drifted so far from the hunting and gathering animals we were when we diasporized out of Africa during the last Ice Age. Perhaps we have adapted well without evolving at all. Think about it.

We are, if nothing else (and yes, we are much else) a pestilence on the planet. Few creatures other than rats and microbes are more widespread, or have done more to eat and alter the Earth’s contents and its living dependents. Sure, I’m enjoying it too. But at some point the party ends. When it does, what do we go home to?

Anyway, this all comes to mind while reading Nick Carr’s The eternal conference call. His bottom lines are killer:

It’s the latest among Nick’s Realtime Chronicles. As always, strong stuff.

For years I’ve been watching my old pal Britt Blaser work to improve the means by which citizens manage their elected politicians, and otherwise improve governance in our democracy.

Now comes Diane Francis, veteran columnist for the National Post in Canada (but yes, she’s an American), summarizing the good that should come from Britt’s latest: iVote4U, and its trial run toward the elections in New York coming up in just a few days. New York’s Digitized Dems Can Take Over City Council Sept. 15, says the headline. In addition to the Drupal sites of the last two links, there is a Facebook app as well.

The idea, sez Britt, is “to give voters a way to manage their politicians as easily as they manage their iTunes”. If you’re a New Yorker who plans to vote next week, give it a whirl. If enough of you do, you might begin to see what we call Government Relationship Management (or GRM) at work.

iVote4U pioneers as a fourth party service.Follow that link for more on what I mean by that; or check out Joe Andrieu’s series on user driven services. If we want government that is truly of, by and for the people, we need tools that give meaning to those prepositions. Especially the first two. Britt has dedicated his life to providing those tools. Give them a try.

You don’t need to be a Democrat, by the way. These tools should work equally well for voters of all political bendings.

Why do mature redwood trees have trunks that rise two hundred feet before branches commence, live for centuries and have bark that’s a foot thick? Because they are adapted to fire.

Why does the silver-green chaparral that covers California’s hills and mountains burn so easily? Because it’s supposed to.

Why, other than its color, is the California Poppy such an appropriate flower for the Golden State? Because it is adapted to both fire and earthquakes. Says Wikipedia, “It grows well in disturbed areas and often recolonizes after fires”.

Of course, so do we. That’s why it’s not weird to find humans colonizing hillsides and other “disturbed areas” of California. Case in point: I am writing this in a house sited on an former landslide, not far from the perimeters of two wildfires that claimed hundreds of other houses in the past few months.

Every spot on Earth is temporary, but California is a special example. As permanence goes, California is a house of cards.

For example, take a look at some of the animations here, prepared by geologists at UCSB. Watch as a sheet of crust the size of a continent gets shoved under the western edge of North America. Debris that piled up in the trench where that happened is what we now call the Bay Area. Submerged crust that melted, rose and hardened under North America — and was just recently exposed — we now call the Sierras. Take a look at the last 20 million years of Southern California history. It’s a wreck that’s still going on. One section of that wreck is a bend along the boundary between plates of crust. Mountains pile up along that bend, like snow in front of a plow. The biggest of these ranges we call the San Gabriels. Those are on fire right now. Add up all the Southern California wildfires over the last twenty years and you’ll get a territory exceeding that of several smaller states.

My point is perspective. The human one is so brief that it can hardly take in the full scope of What’s Going On, or what our lives contribute to it. In a geological context, what we contribute are carbon and fossils. We do that by dying. Other planets have geologies as well, but none have marble, limestone, coal or oil. Those are all produced by dead plants and animals. It would be hard to make heat on Mars because — as far as we know — there is no dead stuff to burn.

Humans love to make structures and produce heat, which means we have an unusually strong appetite for dead stuff. Even cement and steel require dead stuff in their making.

If you fly a lot, as I do, you start to notice black lines on the landscape. These are coal trains that move like ant trails from mines in the West to power plants all over the country. The largest of these mines are in Wyoming, more than 50% of which has coal to burn. This coal consists of dead stuff that has been buried for dozens of millions of years, and took at least as long to form. In Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee says the largest power plant in Georgia, Plant Sherer, “burns nearly thirteen hundred coal trains a year—two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming.”

Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you’re not human.

From any scope wider than our own, we are a pestilential species. Since the human diaspora began spreading out of Africa only a few thousand generations ago, we have chewed our way through land and species at a rate without equal in the history of the Earth, which began 4.567 billion years ago, or more than a third of the way back to the start of the Universe. We are distinguished by our intelligence, our powers of speech and expression, our ability to use tools and to build things, our ability to learn and teach, and our diversity (no two of us, even twins, are exactly alike). There are 6.781 billion of us now. Few of us will live more than a hundred years, and fewer still will have more than a few decades to contribute more than carbon to the world.

Among the many recent developments in civilization, two stand out. One is a widespread realization that the effects of human activity on the planet are non-trivial. The other is a growing ability to connect with each other and communicate over any distance at very little cost. What will we do with this knowledge, and the ability to share it? Will we follow the model of civilizations that waste the places where they live? Or will we prove to be creatures who can change their nature and stop doing that?

The former is the way to bet. The latter is the way to go.

Bonus read: John McPhee’s The Control of Nature. A third of it is called “Los Angeles vs. The San Gabriel Mountains.” While it is mostly about “debris flows” — slow motion landslides — that happen during winter rains, the important part for today’s discussion involves a primary condition for those flows: mountain slopes denuded of vegetation by fires. This means you can count on many mudslides this coming winter.

A couple days ago I responded to a posting on an email list. What I wrote struck a few chords, so I thought I’d repeat it here, with just a few edits, and then add a few additional thoughts as well. Here goes.

Reading _____’s references to ancient electrical power science brings to mind my own technical background, most of which is now also antique. Yet that background still informs of my understanding of the world, and my curiosities about What’s Going On Now, and What We Can Do Next. In fact I suspect that it is because I know so much about old technology that I am bullish about framing What We Can Do Next on both solid modern science and maximal liberation from technically obsolete legal and technical frameworks — even though I struggle as hard as the next geek to escape those.

(Autobiographical digression begins here. If you’re not into geeky stuff, skip.)

As a kid growing up in the 1950s and early ’60s I was obsessed with electricity and radio. I studied electronics and RF transmission and reception, was a ham radio operator, and put an inordinate amount of time into studying how antennas worked and electromagnetic waves propagated. From my home in New Jersey’s blue collar suburbs, I would ride my bike down to visit the transmitters of New York AM stations in the stinky tidewaters flanking the Turnpike, Routes 46 and 17, Paterson Plank Road and the Belleville Pike. (Nobody called them “Meadowlands” until many acres of them were paved in the ’70s to support a sports complex by that name.) I loved hanging with the old guys who manned those transmitters, and who were glad to take me out on the gangways to show how readings were made, how phasing worked (sinusoidal synchronization again), how a night transmitter had to address a dummy load before somebody manually switched from day to night power levels and directional arrays. After I learned to drive, my idea of a fun trip was to visit FM and TV transmitters on the tops of buildings and mountains. (Hell, I still do that.) Thus I came to understand skywaves and groundwaves, soil and salt water conductivity, ground systems, directional arrays and the inverse square law, all in the context of practical applications that required no shortage of engineering vernacular and black art.

I also obsessed on the reception end. In spite of living within sight of nearly every New York AM transmitter (WABC’s tower was close that we could hear its audio in our kitchen toaster), I logged more than 800 AM stations on my 40s-vintage Hammarlund HQ-129x receiver, which is still in storage at my sister’s place. That’s about 8 stations per channel. I came to understand how two-hop skywave reflection off the E layer of the ionosphere favored flat land or open water midway between transmission and reception points . This, I figured, is why I got KSL from Salt Lake City so well, but WOAI from San Antonio hardly at all. (Both were “clear channel” stations in the literal sense — nothing else in North America was on their channels at night, when the ionosphere becomes reflective of signals on the AM band.) Midpoint for the latter lay within the topographical corrugations of the southern Apalachians. Many years later I found this theory supported by listening in Hawaii to AM stations from Western North America, on an ordinary car radio. I’m still not sure why I found those skywave signals fading and distorting (from multiple reflections in the very uneven ionosphere) far less than those over land. I am sure, however, that most of this hardly matters at all to current RF and digital communication science. After I moved to North Carolina, I used Sporadic E reflections to log more than 1200 FM stations, mostly from 800 to 1200 miles away, plus nearly every Channel 3 and 6 (locally, 2,4 and 5 were occupied) in that same range. All those TV signals are now off the air. (Low-band VHF TV — channels 2 to 6 — are not used for digital signals in the U.S.) My knowledge of this old stuff is now mostly of nostalgia value; but seeking it has left me with a continuing curiosity about the physical world and our infrastructural additions to it. This is why much of what looks like photography is actually research. For example, this and this. What you’re looking at there are pictures taken in service to geology and archaeology.

(End of autobiographical digression.)

Speaking of which, I am also busy lately studying the history of copyright, royalties and the music business — mostly so ProjectVRM can avoid banging into any of those. This research amounts to legal and regulatory archaeology. Three preliminary findings stand out, and I would like to share them.

First, regulatory capture is real, and nearly impossible to escape. The best you can do is keep it from spreading. Most regulations protect last week from yesterday, and are driven by the last century’s leading industries. Little if any regulatory lawmaking by established industries — especially if they feel their revenue bases threatened, clears room for future development. Rather, it prevents future development, even for the threatened parties who might need it most. Thus the bulk of conversation and debate, even among the most progressive and original participants, takes place within the bounds of still-captive markets. This is why it is nearly impossible to talk about Net-supportive infrastructure development without employing the conceptual scaffolding of telecom and cablecom. We can rationalize this, for example, by saying that demand for telephone and cable (or satellite TV) services is real and persists, but the deeper and more important fact is that it is very difficult for any of us to exit the framing of those businesses and still make sense.

Second, infrastructure is plastic. The term “infrastructure” suggests physicality of the sturdiest kind, but in fact all of it is doomed to alteration, obsolescence and replacement. Some of it (Roman roads, for example) may last for centuries, but most of it is obsolete in a matter of decades, if not sooner. Consider over-the-air (OTA) TV. It is already a fossil. Numbered channels persist as station brands; but today very few of those stations transmit on their branded analog channels, and most of them are viewed over cable or satellite connections anyway. There are no reasons other than legacy regulatory ones to maintain the fiction that TV station locality is a matter of transmitter siting and signal range. Viewing of OTA TV signals is headed fast toward zero. It doesn’t help that digital signals play hard-to-get, and that the gear required for getting it sucks rocks. Nor does it help that cable and satellite providers that have gone out of their way to exclude OTA receiving circuitry from their latest gear, mostly force subscribing to channels that used to be free. As a result ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS are now a premium pay TV package. (For an example of how screwed this is, see here.) Among the biggest fossils are thousands of TV towers, some more than 2000 feet high, maintained to continue reifying the concept of “coverage,” and to legitimize “must carry” rules for cable. After live audio stream playing on mobile devices becomes cheap and easy, watch AM and FM radio transmission fossilize in exactly the same ways. (By the way, if you want to do something green and good for the environment, lobby for taking down some of these towers, which are expensive to maintain and hazards to anything that flies. Start with this list here. Note the “UHF/VHF transmission” column. Nearly all these towers were built for analog transmission and many are already abandoned. This one, for example.)

Third, “infrastructure” is a relatively new term and vaguely understood outside arcane uses within various industries. It drifted from military to everyday use in the 1970s, and is still not a field in itself. Try looking for an authoritative reference book on the general subject of infrastructure. There isn’t one. Yet digital technology requires that we challenge the physical anchoring of infrastructure as a concept. Are bits infrastructural? How about the means for arranging and moving them? The Internet (the most widespread means for moving bits) is defined fundamentally by its suite of protocols, not by the physical media over which data travels, even though there are capacity and performance dependencies on the latter. Again, we are in captured territory here. Only in conceptual jails can we sensibly debate whether something is an “information service” or a “telecommunication service”. And yet most of us who care about the internet and infrasructure do exactly that.

That last one is big. Maybe too big. I’ve written often about how hard it is to frame our understanding of the Net. Now I’m beginning to think we should admit that the Internet itself, as concept, is too limiting, and not much less antique than telecom or “power grid”.

“The Internet” is not a thing. It’s a finger pointing in the direction of a thing that isn’t. It is the name we give to the sense of place we get when we go “on” a mesh of unseen connections to interact with other entitites. Even the term “cloud“, labeling a utility data service, betrays the vagueness of our regard toward The Net.

I’ve been on the phone a lot lately with Erik Cecil, a veteran telecom attorney who has been thinking out loud about how networks are something other than the physical paths we reduce them to. He regards network mostly in its verb form: as what we do with our freedom — to enhance our intelligence, our wealth, our productivity, and the rest of what we do as contributors to civilization. To network we need technologies that enable what we do in maximal ways.  This, he says, requires that we re-think all our public utilities — energy, water, communications, transportation, military/security and law, to name a few — within the context of networking as something we do rather than something we have. (Think also of Jonathan Zittrain’s elevation of generativity as a supportive quality of open technology and standards. As verbs here, network and generate might not be too far apart.)

The social production side of this is well covered in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, but the full challenge of what Erik talks about is to re-think all infrastructure outside all old boxes, including the one we call The Internet.

As we do that, it is essential that we look to employ the innovative capacities of businesses old and new. This is a hat tip in the general direction of ISPs, and to the concerns often expressed by Richard Bennett and Brett Glass: that new Internet regulation may already be antique and unnecessary, and that small ISPs (a WISP in Brett’s case) should be the best connections of high-minded thinkers like yours truly (and others named above) to the real world where rubber meets road.

There is a bigger picture here. We can’t have only some of us painting it.

Allan Gregory (a 3rd year law student and my summer intern at the Berkman Center) and I have spent a lot of time this summer looking at the history of copyright and royalties, mostly in respect to music. What I’ve noticed in the course of this work is how much commercial interests of one kind or another (and in some cases we’re talking about a single party with a legitimate beef who had been screwed over one too many times — Victor Herbert, for example) push law and enforcement across new lines that quickly harden. The free space on the far sides of those lines ratchets downward with each advance of creators armed by the law as rights-holders. At a certain point, it disappears.

To see how extreme this can get, visit here, or Bemuso.com, which does an amazing job making sense of the music business in the U.K., which restricts music usage far more than anything like it in the U.S. For example,

Steve Finnigan, Chief Constable in Lancashire, England seems to have gotten himself in trouble with the Performing Right Society (PRS). Apparently there’s been music playing in police stations where people can hear it, and someone at the PRS noticed that no one has paid any licensing fees for it. The PRS is responsible for collecting performance royalties on behalf of composers and publishers in the UK.

In addition to the music that allegedly plays in 34 separate police stations, they’re also being accused of allowing employees to listen to it in gyms and at office parties. They’ve even gone so far as to use unlicensed music for entertaining the public when they get put on hold while calling in.

Since Lancashire Constabulary’s head of legal services, Niamh Noone, instructed officers not to discuss what was being played with PRS representatives, the agency decided to take them to court in order to collect back royalties they believe are owed and arrange for proper licensing so that future royalties may be collected in a more timely manner.

And you thought the RIAA was prickly.

Meanwhile on the publishing front, the Associated Press has been moving is a similarly restrictive direction for some time. The organization’s latest efforts are being covered like a blanket by Zachary M. Seward at the Nieman Journalism Lab. His latest post, Who, really, is The Associated Press accusing of copyright infringement? looks in depth at what the AP has been saying and doing, both in public and in secret. The word “bellicose” stands out in its first paragraph.

It’s an outstanding series. If you care about journalism, free speech, Free Culture, fair use and other values that transcend the AP’s parochial interests, it’s required reading.

While you do, remember that the AP is primarily an association of newspapers, formed early in the Industrial Age, and very much a creature of it. They are also, like many other associations representing originators of work about which usage rights are ambiguous, in essence a big legal department: quick to litigate and slow to comprehend the larger and changing contexts in which it now finds itself. Litigators are soldiers, not peacemakers. They don’t much care for olive branches (such as the one I extended last month).

Still, they’re not entirely unfriendly. Writes Zachary,

The AP would like to encourage use of its content — even full content — under terms that might not be so different from the APIs released by The New York Times and NPR. (Then again, it might be very different. The AP thus far hasn’t said what restrictions it will attach to its APIs.) I asked Kasi for an example, and he said that a mobile developer who wanted to include the AP’s articles or videos in an iPhone application could do so, probably without paying for access. Addressing the hypothetical developer, he said, “If this becomes a runaway success, I want to be part of this kind of business arrangement with you. In the meantime, if you want to experiment, go at it.”

In other words, “soon as there’s money in it, we want a piece of it”. In fact my proposal is for exactly that. Except it won’t be on their terms. It will be on ours, as fellow participants in what Zachary calls “the web’s circulatory system”.

In that system, Fee Culture is arteriosclerotic.

For the form of life we call business, we are at a boundary between eras. For biological forms of life, the most recent of these is the K-T boundary between the  Mesozoic and the Cenozoic Eras. The Mezozoic Era ended when Earth was struck by an object that left a crater 110 miles wide and a world-wide layer of iridium-rich crud. Below that layer lies the Age of Dinosaurs, completed. Above that layer accumulate the fossils of life forms that survived the change, and took advantage of it. Notable among these is a branch of theropod dinosaurs we call birds.

In business we have the I-I boundary: the one between the Industrial and Information ages (which Alvin Toffler first observed in The Third Wave, published in 1980).  Below that boundary we find a communications environment dominated by telecom and cablecom. Above it we find a radically different communications environment that still supports voice and video, but as just two among an endless variety of other applications. We call that environment the Internet.

At this moment in history most of us know the Internet as a tertiary service of telephone and cable companies, which still make most of their money selling telephone service and cable TV. Since those are highly regulated businesses, the Internet is subject to degrees of regulatory capture. Some of that capture is legal, but much of it is conceptual, for example when we see the Internet as a grace of telecom and cablecom — rather than as something that subsumes and obsoletes both of those Industrial Age frames.

Such is the risk with “broadband” — a term inherited by the Internet from both telecom and cablecom, and which is a subject of interest for both Congress and the FCC. In April of this year the FCC announced the development of a national broadband plan, subtitled “Seeks Public Input on Plan to Ensure Every American has Access to Broadband Capability”. In July the commission announced that Harvard’s Berkman Center would conduct “an independent review of broadband studies” to assist the FCC. Then yesterday the center put up a notice that it “is looking for a smart, effective fellow to join our broadband research team”. (This is more than close to home for me, since I am a fellow at Berkman. So I need to say that the broadband studies review is not my project — mine is this one — and that I am not speaking for the Berkman Center here, or even in my capacity as a fellow.)

The challenge here for everybody is to frame our understanding of the Net, and of research concerning the Net, in terms that are as native to the Net as possible, and not just those inherited from the Industrial Age businesses to which it presents both threats and promise — the former more obvioius than the latter. This will be very hard, because the Internet conversation is still mostly a telecom and cablecom conversation. (It’s also an entertainment industry conversation, to the degree that streaming and sharing of audio and video files are captive to regulations driven by the recording and movie industries.)

This is the case especially for legislators and regulators, too few of which are technologists. Some years ago Michael Powell, addressing folks pushing for network neutrality legislation, said that he had met with nearly every member of Congress during his tour of duty as FCC chairman, and that he could report that nearly all of them knew very little about two subjects. “One is technology, and the other is economics,” he said. “Now proceed.”

Here is what I am hoping for, as we proceed both within this study and beyond it to a greater understanding of the Internet and the new Age it brings on:

• That “broadband” comes to mean the full scope of the Internet’s capabilities, and not just data speeds.
• That we develop a native understanding of what the Internet really is, including the realization that what we know of it today is just an early iteration.
• That telecom and cablecom companies not only see the writing on the wall for their old business models, but embrace other advantages of incumbency, including countless new uses and businesses that can flourish in an environment of wide-open and minimally encumbered connectivity — which they have a privileged ability to facilitate.
• That the Net’s capacities are not only those provided from the inside out by “backbone” and other big “carriers”, but from the outside in by individuals, small and mid-size businesses (including other Internet service providers, such as WISPs) and municipalities.

That last item is important because carriers are the theropods of our time. To survive, and thrive, they need to adapt. The hardest challenge for them is to recognize that the money they leave on the shrinking Industrial Age table is peanuts next to the money that will appear on the Information Age table they are in a privileged position to help build.

In Align the interests of: 1. Users and 2. Investors., Dave make a radical yet sensible case for users becoming investors. It’s very consistent with what we’re learning from Scoble plus FriendFeed turning into Friendfeed minus Scoble, which Dave wrote about in Scoble, your blog still loves you, and to which I added a comment that included this:

The problem with living in most VC-funded company environments isn’t just that they keep us from living elsewhere (which is bad enough to begin with). It’s that the environments are like houses built to flip. The main idea isn’t to build a great house, but to sell it. It was a lesson I unpacked here in 2001:

Dave take this another step by suggesting that any company whose first loyalty is not to its customers or users is a risky prospect. And that user ownership is a good fix. I agree.

It’s not that we have to blow up everything that came before. It’s that we need to build a new kind of enterprise: founding a People’s Software Company whose first act is to IPO and pool the financial resources of users who believe there is a gap in what Silicon Valley is providing using their old models for corporate structure.

This is definitely in alignment with what we’ve been thinking about and working on with ProjectVRM. And, as with the project Dave wants us to think about here, it’s hard to see the need if you’re looking at the world from the vendor’s side of the demand/supply relationship.

Yesterday Jim Sinur posted Escaping the Zombie Zoo with Better Customer Facing Processes, in which he writes,

What Jim wants is VRM — a way he can manage vendors, rather than just have them managing him. Vendors should adapt to his needs and processes, rather than the reverse, which is what he complains about earlier in his post, and that we all live through every time we have to whip out a loyalty card to interact with some vendor in a lame, exclusive and non-user-driven way.

After Jon Garfunkel replied with a pointer to ProjectVRM, Jim asked, “Which vendors are supporting this or is it a grass roots movement?”

What Dave proposes is one way to remove that distinction.

In the mid-1990s, when I couldn’t find anybody to publish my essays (I didn’t want to cover what I still call “vendor sports”, which eliminated most of the tech magazine market ), I followed Dave Winer’s footsteps and published my own on the Web. One was The Web and the New Reality, written in raw HTML with formatting borrowed from Netscape’s white papers of the time, complete with all-caps H2 headlines and first letters enlarged with +3 font sizes. Funny how mannered that looks now. Like the skull-and-wings on 18th century headstones.

I stumbled over The Web and the New Reality when I went trudging through the nether pages of Google search results, hoping to find more about the disagreements between Jefferson and Franklin over patents and copyrights. I still haven’t found exactly what I was looking for (though Chapter 2 of James Boyle’s The Public Domain gets me off to an excellent start), but did pause to note in my now-ancient essay a list of prophesies that hold up pretty well, especially since the scope of some embraces futures that still aren’t here but also haven’t been disproven in the years that have already passed. It is certainly utopian, and in that mood outlines some of the ideas we expanded in The Cluetrain Manifesto four (and now fourteen) years later. Here is how it begins:

Reality 2.0

The import of the Internet is so obvious and extreme that it actually defies valuation: witness the stock market, which values Netscape so far above that company’s real assets and earnings that its P/E ratio verges on the infinite.

Whatever we’re driving toward, it is very different from anchoring certainties that have grounded us for generations, if not for the duration of our species. It seems we are on the cusp of a new and radically different reality. Let’s call it Reality 2.0.

The label has a millenial quality, and a technical one as well. If Reality 2.0 is Reality 2.000, this month we’re in Reality 1.995.12.

With only a few revisions left before Reality 2.0 arrives, we’re in a good position to start seeing what awaits. Here are just a few of the things this writer is starting to see…

1. As more customers come into direct contact with suppliers, markets for suppliers will change from target populations to conversations.
2. Travel, ticket, advertising and PR agencies will all find new ways to add value, or they will be subtracted from market relationships that no longer require them.
3. Within companies, marketing communications will change from peripheral activities to core competencies.New media will flourish on the Web, and old media will learn to live with the Web and take advantage of it.
4. Retail space will complement cyber space. Customer and technical service will change dramatically, as 800 numbers yield to URLs and hard copy documents yield to soft copy versions of the same thing… but in browsable, searchable forms.
5. Shipping services of all kinds will bloom. So will fulfillment services. So will ticket and entertainment sales services.
6. The web’s search engines will become the new yellow pages for the whole world. Your fingers will still do the walking, but they won’t get stained with ink. Same goes for the white pages. Also the blue ones.
7. The scope of the first person plural will enlarge to include the whole world. “We” may mean everybody on the globe, or any coherent group that inhabits it, regardless of location. Each of us will swing from group to group like monkeys through trees.
8. National borders will change from barricades and toll booths into speed bumps and welcome mats.
9. The game will be over for what teacher John Taylor Gatto labels “the narcotic we call television.” Also for the industrial relic of compulsory education. Both will be as dead as the mainframe business. In other words: still trucking, but not as the anchoring norms they used to be.
10. Big Business will become as anachronistic as Big Government, because institutional mass will lose leverage without losing inertia.Domination will fail where partnering succeeds, simply because partners with positive sums will combine to outproduce winners and losers with zero sums.
11. Right will make might.
12. And might will be mighty different.

The last two sections, titled How It All Adds Up and The Plus Paradigm, are the ones that see a future in which the economics of abundance plainly outperform those of scarcity.

If Paul Saffo is right when he says we overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long, my out-there prophesies might still be safe. But in our current short run I remain impressed at how little some of our institutions — especially those of journalism — grok how abundance works.

Last week I sat on two panels at the huge 92nd Annual Convention of the Association for Education inJournalism and Mass Communication in Boston. While much of what was talked about there was clueful in the extreme, there was no shortage of top-down stuff like “corporate strategies and consumer responses” — and very little push-back against the apparent decision by many newspapers and magazines to turn like a flock of fish toward the “strategy” of locking their “content” behind paywalls. Again. They clearly aren’t following Chris Anderson’s advice or example.

On the whole Google used to ignore the paywalled stuff, because it couldn’t be indexed, but now the pubs are leaving teasers out there (or maybe Google now has ways of searching archives anyway), and the result for the reader is clunking into registration and subscription doors that are all different and all annoying — especially when one is already a subscriber to the publication in question and can’t remember the login/password required (as is the case for me with The New Yorker, among other pubs).

So the “plus paradigm” ain’t here yet. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to make it happen anyway. There are worse goals than taking care of Jefferson’s unfinished business.

Well, the first try at the other blog failed. Let’s see if I unscrewed what I lost at this blog. Yep. Did. Backups are a good thing to have.

Okay, just imported all my categories. That was cool too. I think I’ll stop pressing my luck now. It’s good just to have the outliner working again.

If this appears, then I’ve got my OPML editor running again.

It does. YAAAAY.

Next step: adding editing for the ProjectVRM blog.

I dunno why the New York Times appeared on my doorstep this morning, along with our usual Boston Globe (Sox lost, plus other news) — while our Wall Street Journal did not. (Was it a promo? There was no response envelope or anything. And none of the neighbors gets a paper at all, so it wasn’t a stray, I’m pretty sure.) Anyway, while I was paging through the Times over breakfast, I was thinking, “It’s good, but I’m not missing much here–” when I hit Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace, by Patricia Cohen, on the front page of the Arts section. It’s about MediaCloud, a Berkman Center project, and features quotage from Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler…

(pictured above at last year’s Berkman@10).

The home page of MediaCloud explains,

The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.

This is a cool thing. It also raises the same question that is asked far too often in other contexts: Why doesn’t Google do that? Here’s the short answer: Because the money’s not there. For Google, the money is in advertising.

Plain enough, but let’s go deeper.

It’s an interesting fact that Google’s index covers the present, but not the past. When somebody updates their home page, Google doesn’t remember the old one, except in cache, which gets wiped out after a period of time. It doesn’t remember the one before that, or the one before that. If it did it might look, at least conceptually, like Apple’s Time Machine:

If Google were a time machine, you could not only see what happened in the past, but do research against it. You could search for what’s changed. Not on Google’s terms, as you can, say, with Google Trends, but on your own, with an infinite variety of queries.

I don’t know if Google archives everything. I suspect not. I think they archive search and traffic histories (or they wouldn’t be able to do stuff like this), and other metadata. (Mabye a Googler can fill us in here.)

I do know that Technorati keeps (or used to keep) an archive of all blogs (or everything with an RSS feed). This was made possible by the nature of blogging, which is part of the Live Web. It comes time-stamped, and with the assumption that past posts will accumulate in a self-archiving way. Every blog has a virtual directory path that goes domainname/year/month/day/post. Stuff on the Static Web of sites (a real estate term) were self-replacing and didn’t keep archives on the Web. Not by design, anyway.

I used to be on the Technorati advisory board and talked with the company quite a bit about what to do with those archives. I thought there should be money to be found through making them searchable in some way, but I never got anywhere with that.

If there isn’t an advertising play, or a traffic-attraction play (same thing in most cases), what’s the point? So goes the common thinking about site monetization. And Google is in the middle of that.

So this got me to thinking about research vs. advertising.

If research wants to look back through time (and usually it does), it needs data from the past. That means the past has to be kept as a source. This is what MediaCloud does. For research on news topics, it does one of the may things I had hoped Technorati would do.

Advertising cares only about the future. It wants you to buy something, or to know about something so you can act on it at some future time.

So, while research’s time scope tends to start in present and look back, advertising’s time scope tends to start in the present and look forward.

To be fair, I commend Google for all the stuff it does that is not advertising-related or -supported, and it’s plenty. And I commend Technorati for keeping archives, just in case some business model does finally show up.

But in the meantime I’m also wondering if advertising doesn’t have some influence on our sense of how much the past matters. And my preliminary response is, Yes, it does. It’s an accessory to forgetfulness. (Except, of course, to the degree it drives us to remember — through “branding” and other techniques — the name of a company or product.)

Just something to think about. And maybe research as well. If you can find the data.

It helps to recognize that the Associated Press is exactly what its name denotes: an association of presses. Specifically, newspapers. Fifteen hundred of them. Needless to say, newspapers are having a hard time. (Hell, I gave them some, myself, yesterday.) So we might cut them a little slack for getting kinda testy and paranoid.

Reading the AP’s paranoid jive brings to mind Jim Clark on stage at the first (only?) Netscape conference. Asked by an audience member why he said stuff about Microsoft that might have a “polarizing effect”, Jim rose out of his chair and yelled at the questioner, “THEY’RE TRYING TO KILL US. THAT HAS A POLARIZING EFFECT!” I sometimes think that’s the way the AP feels toward bloggers. Hey, when you’re being eaten alive, everything looks like a pirhana.

But last week the AP, probably without intending it, did something cool. You can read about it in “Associated Press to build news registry to protect content“, a press release that manages to half-conceal some constructive open source possibilities within a pile of prose that seems mostly to be about locking down content and tracking down violators of AP usage policies. Ars Technica unpacks some of the possibilities. Good piece.

Over in Linux Journal I just posted AP Launches Open Source Ascribenation Project, in which I look at how the AP’s “tracking and tagging” technology, which is open source, can help lay the foundations for a journalistic world where everybody gets credit for what they contribute to the greater sphere of news and comment — and can get paid for it too, easily — if readers feel like doing that.

The process of giving credit where due we call ascribenation, and the system by which readers (or listeners, or viewers) choose to pay for it we call EmanciPay.

Regardless of what we call it, that’s where we’re going to end up. The system that began when the AP was formed in 1846 isn’t going to go away, but it will have to adapt. And adopt. It’s good to see it doing the latter. The former will be harder. But it has to be done.

I’d say more here, but I already said it over there.

“Saving newspapers” is beginning to look like saving caterpillars. Or worse, like caterpillars saving themselves. That’s was the message I got from Rick Edmonds’ API Report to Exec Summit: Paid Content Is the Future for News Web Sites, in Poynter, back in early June. In The Nichepaper Manifesto Umair Haque points toward a possible future butterfly stage for newspapers. Sez Umair,  “Nichepapers aren’t a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution.”

He gives examples: Talking Points Memo. Huffington Post. Perez Hilton. Business Insider. He’s careful to say that these may not be the first or the best but are “avenues that radical innovators are already exploring to reconceive news for the 21st century.”

These, however, are limited as news sites, and not the best models of future nichepapers. Yes, they’re interesting and in some cases valuable sources of information; but they all also have axes to grind. In this sense they’re more like the old model (papers always had axes too) than the new one(s).

To help think about where news is going, let’s talk about one cause of serious news: wildfires. In Southern California we have lots of wildfires. They flare up quickly, then threaten to wipe out dozens, hundreds or thousands of homes, and too often do exactly that. Look up San Diego Fire, Day Fire, Gap Fire, Tea Fire, Jesusita Fire. The results paint a mosaic, or perhaps even a pointillist, picture of news sourced, reported, and re-reported by many different people, organizations and means. These are each portraits of an emerging ecosystem within  which newspapers must adapt of die.

Umair says, “In the 21st century, it’s time, again for newspapers to learn how to profit with stakeholders — instead of extracting profits from them. The 21st century’s great challenge isn’t selling the same old “product” better: it’s learning to make radically better stuff in the first place.”

Exactly. And that “making” will be as radically different as crawling and flying.

In his comment to my last post about the sale of WQXR to WNYC (and in his own blog post here), Sean Reiser makes an important point:

One of the unique things about the QXR was it’s relationship with the Times. The Times owned QXR before the FCC regulations prohibiting newspapers ownership of a radio station were enacted. Because of this relationship, QXR’s newsroom was located in the NY Times building and news gathering resources were shared. In a precursor to newspaper reporters doing podcasts, Times columnists and arts reporters would often appear on the air doing segments.

It’s true. The Times selling WQXR seems a bit like the New Yorker dropping poetry, or GE (née RCA) closing the Rainbow Room. (Which has already happened… how many times?) To cultured veteran New Yorkers, the Times selling WQXR seems more like a partial lobotomy than a heavy heirloom being thrown off a sinking ship.

For much of the history of both, great newspapers owned great radio stations. The Times had WQXR. The Chicago Tribune had (and still has) WGN (yes, “World’s Greatest Newspaper”). The Washington Post had WTOP. (In fact, the Post got back into the radio game with Washington Post Radio, on WTOP’s legacy 50,000-watt signal at 1500 AM. That lasted from 2006-2008.). Trust me, the list is long.

The problem is, both newspapers and radio stations are suffering. Most newspapers are partially (or, in a few cases — such as this one — totally) lobotomized versions of their former selves. Commercial radio’s golden age passed decades ago. WQXR, its beloved classical format, and its staff, have been on life support for years. Most other cities have lost their legacy commercial classical stations (e.g. WFMR in Milwaukee), or lucked out to various degrees when the call letters and formats were saved by moving to lesser signals, sometimes on the market’s outskirts (e.g. WCRB in Boston). In most of the best cases classical formats were saved by moving to noncommercial channels and becomimg public radio stations. In Los Angeles, KUSC took over for KFAC (grabbing the latter’s record library) and KOGO/K-Mozart. In Raleigh, WCPE took over for WUNC and WDBS. In Washington, WETA took over for WGMS. Not all of these moves were pretty, but all of them kept classical music alive on their cities’ FM bands.

In some cases, however, “saved’ is an understatement. KUSC, for example, has a bigger signal footprint and far more to offer, than KFAC and its commercial successors did. In addition to a first-rate signal in Los Angeles, KUSC is carried on full-size stations in Palm Springs, Thousand Oaks, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo — giving it stong coverage of more population than any other station in Los Angeles, including the city’s substantial AM stations. KUSC also runs HD programs on the same channels, has an excellent live stream on the Web, and is highly involved in Southern California’s cultural life.

I bring that up because the substantial advantages of public radio over commercial radio — especially for classical music — are largely ignored amidst all the hand-wringing (thick with completely wrong assumptions) by those who lament the loss  — or threatened loss — of a cultural landmark such as WQXR. So I thought I’d list some of the advantages of public radio in the classical music game.

1. No commercials. Sure, public radio has its pitches for funding, but those tend to be during fund drives rather than between every music set.
2. More room for coverage growth. The rules for signals in the noncommercial end of the band (from 88 to 92) are far more flexible than those in the commercial band. And noncommercial signals in the commercial band (such as WQXR’s new one at 105.9) can much more easily be augmented by translators at the fringes of their coverage areas — and beyond. Commercial stations can only use translators within their coverage areas. Noncommercial stations can stick them anywhere in the whole country. If WNYC wants to be aggressive about it, you might end up hearing WQXR in Maine and Montana. (And you can bet it’ll be on the Public Radio Player, meaning you can get it wherever there’s a cell signal.)
3. Life in a buyer’s market. Noncommercial radio stations are taking advantage of bargain prices for commercial stations. That’s what KUSC did when it bought what’s now KESC on 99.7FM in San Luis Obispo. It’s what KCLU did when it bought 1340AM in Santa Barbara.
4. Creative and resourceful engineering. While commercial radio continues to cheap out while advertising revenues slump away, noncommercial radio is pioneering all over the place. They’re doing it with HD Radio, with webcasting (including multiple streams for many stations), with boosters and translators, with RDS — to name just a few. This is why I have no doubt that WNYC will expand WQXR’s reach even if they can’t crank up the power on the Empire State Building transmitter.
5. Direct Listener Involvement. Commercial radio has had a huge disadvantage for the duration: its customers and its consumers are different populations. As businesses, commercial radio stations are primarily accountable to advertisers, not to listeners. Public radio is directly accoutable to its listeners, because those are also its customers. As public stations make greater use of the Web, and of the growing roster of tools available for listener engagement (including tools on the listeners’ side, such as those we are developing at ProjectVRM), this advantage over commercial radio will only grow. This means WQXR’s listeners have more more opportunity to contribute positively to the station’s growth than they ever had when it was a commercial station. (Or if, like WCRB, it lived on as a lesser commercial station.) So, if you’re a loyal WQXR listener, send a few bucks to WNYC. Tell them thanks for saving the station, and tell them what you’d like them to do with the station as well.

I could add more points (and maybe I will later), but that should suffice for now. I need to crash and then get up early for a quick round trip to northern Vermont this morning. Meanwhile, hope that helps.

I understand Zappos selling out to Amazon (even the Amazon logo, which leads from A to Z, makes sense of it) but the news still depresses me. Zappos is a cause as well as a brand. That cause is relationship. As Wikipedia (currently) puts it,

Zappos uses a loyalty business model and relationship marketing. The primary sources of the company’s rapid growth have been repeat customers and numerous word of mouth recommendations.^[4][5] In 2005, the chairman reported that 60% of customers were repeat buyers.^[5]

Think about the word “company.” At Dictionary.com, the noun is said to mean these things:

1. a number of individuals assembled or associated together; group of people.
2. a guest or guests: We’re having company for dinner.
3. an assemblage of persons for social purposes.
4. companionship; fellowship; association: I always enjoy her company.
5. one’s usual companions: I don’t like the company he keeps.
6. society collectively.
7. a number of persons united or incorporated for joint action, esp. for business: a publishing company; a dance company.
8. (initial capital letter) the members of a firm not specifically named in the firm’s title: George Higgins and Company.

And that’s before we get down to military, governmental and other meanings.

Note that the business meanings start at #7. Note the convivial qualities of all the numbered meanings. Zappos has that convivial nature, more than any other big company retailing clothing online. You get the sense that you can relate to these people, because they seem to have a reason for being that goes beyond being the cheapest and most convenient means for choosing goods, paying for them, and having them shipped to you. That’s Amazon’s business. It’s different.

So I’m sure there is synergy there. But synergy alone does not a great acquisition make.

I wonder, now that (as the press release says) “Amazon will provide Zappos employees with $40 million in cash and restricted stock units” — in addition to whatever stockholding Zappos employees get in the form of Amazon stock (the sum of all shareholders and options is 10 million Amazon shares) — if Zappos’ soul and mission will survive the acquisition.

I also wonder what kind of hit the whole subject of relationship, which is so highly potentiated (read: absent, though it shouldn’t be), will take.

Tony Hsieh’s letter to employees (about 100 of them, it says) is reassuring, as is the Jeff Bezos video.

Hope it works out.

[Later...] Alexander Haislip has a financial angle on the deal.

Edward Rosten and I have been having an interesting dialog in the comment section of my last post, which was mostly about WNYC buying WQXR from the New York Times (which has owned it forever) for $11.5 million — and moving QXR’s classical programming up New York’s FM dial from 96.3 to 105.9, where the maximum transmission wattage is far less than allowed on the old frequency.

There has been much hand-wringing and prognosticating over the whole thing. What Would You Do With the New WQXR? is a post on the NYTimes site that is followed by a great many comments. Says Edward, “Post #58, I can assure you, is representative of ‘input’ from people who’ve given ANY thought to how the proposed changes will play out. (’Power to the people’ has yielded to ‘power to the 24/7 classical music station, whatever its name!’)”

So here’s a summary of my own thinking about why this was a good move by WNYC.

1. $11.5 million is a bargain for any FM signal radiating from the center of Manhattan, even in these depressed economic times.
2. There will be a 24/7 classical station in New York called WQXR. It will continue to play much, if not most, of the music its current audience likes. It will also employ some of the same people and air some of the same programs. Doing even a subset of this is to buck the tide that is drowning classical stations everywhere in the U.S.
3. The signal on 105.9 will pack less punch than the old one on 96.3. The new one is 610 watts while the old one was 6000 watts, from the same antenna on the Empire State Building. The difference, however, is smaller than the wattage would indicate. On FM, height matters more than wattage, and those are the same. And signal strength increases as the square root of the wattage. This means that the new signal will be about a third the power of the old one, rather than one tenth. Either way, it’s still plenty of signal for the boroughs, southern Westchester, Jersey counties bordering the Hudson, and Nassau County. Not bad, considering.
4. WQXR will now be a noncommercial station owned by the top public station in the top metro market in the country. There are many upsides here that are not available to commercial stations — least of all one owned by a struggling newspaper. These include…
5. No commercials, beyond the usual noncommercial radio pitches for listener support. For an example of an alternative outcome — having a legacy station and its call letters shunted to a secondary signal while remaining commercial — check out WCRB, Boston’s equivalent of WQXR. The Wikipedia entrty provides copious (and depressing) background. What they don’t say is that WCRB plays lots of commercials, in spite of a commercial free sections of its schedule. (I’d suggest checking out WCRB’s live stream, but they’ve discontinued it.)
6. The opportunity for listeners to support the station directly, and involve themselves in the station’s missions. In the past one could support WQXR only by buying a car or a mattress from an advertiser. Now you can put some money where your ears are.
7. WQXR can use translators to enlarge its signal, and bring it to places outside its local coverage area. Translators are low power stations radiating the same audio on a different channel from the original signal. WQXR currently has translators on 96.7 in Asbury Park and 103.7 in Poughkeepsie. Now here’s the cool deal: While commercial stations can only use translators to fill in holes in their home coverage areas, noncommercial stations can put translators anywhere they please. Of course, these have to be on unoccupied channels, and most channels are occupied in most places. There are two ways WNYC can go here. One is to buy up, swap or otherwise deal for existing translators. (There is lots of horse-trading going on in any case between public broadcasters and religious ones. The latter have been much more resourceful about maximizing coverage and spreading translators everywhere.) The other is to find open spots where translators can be wedged in. Anywhere in the country.
8. The Internet is a wide-open frontier. I listen to WNYC’s classical stream (also carried on the air over the station’s HD service on FM) here in Santa Barbara. I also listen to many other stations (including a dozen or more classical ones) here as well. I use either my iPhone or our home Sonos system. Those are my radios, and they sound fine. There are no limits to the number of Internet channels WNYC/WQXR can choose to put out there. For models of station/stream proliferation (and brand extension) see what KCRW and Minnesota Public Radio do. This multi-million-dollar move by WNYC serves notice that it plans to be one of the country’s public super-stations.

I could go on, but you get the point. The opportunities for WQXR as a WNYC property are far wider than the New York Times would dream of contemplating. I advise loyal listeners of both stations to get behind the effort with cash and helpful input, rather than complaints about signal differences and what WNYC might do with WQXR. Hey, WQXR will be a public station soon. That should give you more influence than ever before.

Heard this morning on WNYC that the New York Times has unloaded its remaining broadcasting asset, which consists of the channel and facilities of WQXR, which has been a classical music landmark for as long as it’s been around. (One way or another, since 1929. Wikipedia tells the long story well.) The story on WNYC’s website says WQXR will become “part of” WNYC. I assume that means it will become non-commercial.

According to Bloomberg, the deal goes like this:

• “Univision will pay Times Co. $33.5 million to swap broadcasting licenses and shift its WCAA broadcast to 96.3 FM from 105.9 FM, which will become WQXR… WCAA will get 96.3 FM’s stronger signal.”
• “WNYC will pay Times Co. $11.5 million for 105.9 FM’s license and equipment and the WQXR call letters.”

WQXR was for a long time an AM/FM operation. The AM was on 1560, with a 50,000 watt signal out of a four-tower facility in Maspeth, Queens. The FM was for many years atop the Chanin Building, where it still maintains an auxilliary antenna. I have shots of the old and new antennas here and here. In 2007 the Times Co. unloaded its AM station, then (and still) called WQEW, to Walt Disney Co. for $40 million. It’s now Radio Disney, a kids’ station.

Since the 60s WQXR has shared a master antenna atop the Empire State Building with most of New York’s other FMs. This was their status in 1967. Wikipedia has a good rundown of what’s up there today. Scott Fybush also has a comprehensive report from 2003.

An open question is whether WQXR will remain a beacon on the dial. While other signals on the Empire State Building master antennas run 5000 to 6000 watts, the one on 105.9 is just 610 watts. According to WQXR’s  Web site, the station and has an audience of nearly 800,000 weekly listeners. How many of those will lose the signal? Coverage maps from radio-locator.com for 96.3 and 105.9 are here and here.

For the fully obsessed, here is a current rundown of everything on FM hanging off the Empire State Building, or within 1km of it.

Meanwhile, says here WBCN in Boston, a progressive rock radio landmark, is also getting yanked. You’ll still hear it on the Web, or if you are among the appoximately five owners of an “HD” radio receiver and close enough to WBCN’s transmiter on Boston’s Prudential Building in the Back Bay. Meanwhile Boston will get more of the usual: talk sports and “Hot AC” music. (To me “Hot AC” always sounded like an climate control oxymoron, while “adult contemporary” sounded like a euphemism for pornographic furniture.)

How Teenagers Consume Media: the report that shook the City carries approximately no news for anybody who watches the changing tastes and habits of teenagers. What makes it special is that it was authored by a fifteen-year old intern at Morgan Stanley in London, and then published by the company.

It says teens like big TVs, dislike intrusive advertising, find a fun side to viral marketing, blow off Twitter, ignore all but the free tabloid newspapers, watch anime on YouTube and so on.

All these are momentary arrangements of patterns on the surface of a growing ocean of bits. (For why it grows, see Kevin Kelly.) What’s most productive to contemplate, I think, is how we will learn to thrive in a vast and growing bit-commons whilst (to borrow a favorite preposition of this teen) trying to make money in the midst.

Which brings me to Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: the Future of a Radical Price. Malcolm Gladwell dissed it in The New Yorker, while Seth Godin said Malcolm is Wrong and Virginia Postrel gives it a mixed review in The New York Times. But I’m holding off for the simple reason that I haven’t finished reading it. When I do finish, what I’ll write won’t be a review, but something more along the lines of what I wrote in Linux Journal (here’s Part I and Part II, totaling more than 10,000 words) as a follow-on to Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. Stay tuned for that. As with those last two items, it’ll go in Linux Journal.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt Somebody

I wish to discuss an idea here. It’s an idea about celebrity, and it follows an event that has become a black hole in nearly all media: the death of Michael Jackson.

According to Don Norman, a black hole topic is one that is essentially undiscussable: “Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape.”

Michael Jackson was more than a celebrity. He was a first-rank contributor to pop music and pop culture. He was also far more weird than anybody else at the same rank, changing his face so radically that he no longer appeared to belong to his original race and gender. This fact alone made his death at 50 unsurprising yet very interesting.

Most of us can’t help falling into conversational black holes. But we can help getting sucked into celebrity obsession.

Unless, of course, we’re making money at it. This is the path down which People Magazine went when it morphed from a spun-off section of Time Magazine into a tabloid. More recently Huffington Post has done the same thing. But that’s the supply side. What about demand?

I submit that obsessing about celebrity is unhealthy for the single reason that it is also unproductive. Celebrity is to mentality as smoking is to food. (I originally wrote “chewing gum” there, but I think smoking is the better analogy.) It is an unhealthy waste of time. And time is a measure of life. We are born with an unknown sum of time, and have to spend all of it. “Saving” time is a rhetorical trick. So is “losing” it. Our lives are spent, one end to the other. What matters most is how we choose to spend it.

The Net maximizes the endlessness of choice about how we spend our time. It also maximizes many kinds of productiveness. Nearly all the code we are using, right now, to do stuff on the Net, was written by many collaborators across many distances. Some were obsessing about what they were producing. Others were just working away. Either way, they chose to be productive. To contribute. To work on what works.

The Net itself is an idea so protean and varied that there is little agreement about what it actually is. Yet it is endlessly improvable, as are the goods and services it supports.

This improvable millieu presents us with choices that become more stark as the millieu itself grows. We can make useful contributions — preferably in ways nobody else can. Or we can coast.

Obsessing about celebrity is a form of coasting. And I suggest that we’ll see a growing distance between coasting and producing.

Apple has the best taste in the world. It also has the tightest sphincter. This isn’t much of a problem as long as they keep it in their pants, for example by scaring employees away from saying anything about anything that has even the slightest chance of bringing down the Wrath of Steve or his factota. (How many bloggers does Apple have?)  But they drop trow every time they squeeze down—you know, like China—on an iPhone application they think might be “objectionable”.

I see by Jack Schofield that they’ve done it again, but this time they pissed off (or on) the wrong candidate: an app (from Exact Magic) that flows RSS feeds form the EFF. Sez Corynne McSherry in an EFF post, “… this morning Apple rejected the app. Why? Because it claims EFF’s content runs afoul of the iTune’s App Store’s policy against ‘objectionable’ content. Apparently, Apple objects to a blog post that linked to a ‘Downfall‘ parody video created by EFF Board Chairman Brad Templeton.”

Brad’s a funny guy. (He created rec.humor.funny back in the Net’s precambrian age.) He has also forgotten more about the Internet than most of us will ever learn. Check out The Internet: What is it really for? It was accurate and prophetic out the wazoo. Brad wrote it 1994, while Apple was busy failing to ape AOL with a walled garden called eWorld.

Apple’s App Store is an eWorld that succeeded. A nice big walled garden. Problem is, censorship isn’t good gardening. It is, says Corynne, “not just anti-competitive, discriminatory, censorial, and arbitrary, but downright absurd.” Or, as my very tasteful wife puts it, unattractive.

Also kinda prickly, if you pick on a porcupine like the EFF. Hence, to contine with Corynne’s post,

iPhone owners who don’t want Apple playing the role of language police for their software should have the freedom to go elsewhere. This is precisely why EFF has asked the Copyright Office to grant an exemption to the DMCA for jailbreaking iPhones. It’s none of Apple’s business if I want an app on my phone that lets me read EFF’s RSS feed, use Sling Player over 3G, or read the Kama Sutra.

Not surprisingly this followed, on the same post:

UPDATE: Apparently, Apple has changed its mind and has now approved the EFF Updates app. This despite the fact that the very same material is still linked in various EFF posts (including this one!). Just one more example of the arbitrary nature of Apple’s app approval process.

There’s a limit to how long (much less well, or poorly) Apple can keep sphinctering App Store choices. I’m betting it’ll stop when the iPhone gets serious competition from equally appealing phones that can run applications that come from anywhere, rather than just from some controlling BigCo’s walled garden.

The Cluetrain Manifesto wasn’t the biggest nonfiction book to come along in early 2000. That would be Who Moved My Cheese. I never read that, but I did read what was probably the second-biggest: Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Like Cheese, Tipping is about change. Unpacking one chapter in the book, Malcolm writes, “I think that word of mouth is something created by three very rare and special psychological types, whom I call Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.” It was no accident that at least three of Cluetrain’s four authors combined all three of those types. I also think that those characteristics are not so rare among effective folks in the tech world. Many come to mind: Kevin Kelly, Stuart Brand, Dave Winer, Chris Anderson, Jerry Michalski, Esther Dyson, Tim O’Reilly, Steve Gillmor, Kevins Marks and Werbach, Craig Burton, Clay Shirky, Bruce Sterling… the list, as I think  about it, is quite long. You can drive word of mouth with fewer than all three of those natures, of course. And success in an industry depends on people who are good at many other things. It’s just interesting to me that there are so many in the tech world who are good at those three — and are so confident that they can get things moving.

All this comes to mind when I read Eric Norlin’s Cluetrain at 10 post. It tells the story of how his own life tipped a series of times: when he connected (at some effort) with Chris Locke after Cluetrain came out, when he connected with Ev Williams and the Blogger folks (that’s the same Ev now behind Twitter), when I connected him with Andre Durand of Ping Identity (where Eric was the first employee), and when he helped start Digital ID World, which led to Defrag: Eric’s own conference (he does Glue too).

In his post Eric thanks us. And here I’ll thank Eric too, for connecting me to more people, and good stuff, than I can begin to list.

Ten years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto was a website that had been up for a couple of months — long enough to create a stir and get its four authors a book deal. By early June we had begun work on the book, which would wrap in August and come out in January. So at the moment we’re past the website’s anniversary and shy of the book’s.

That’s close enough for 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which will hit the streets this month. The new book, which arrived at my house yesterday, is the same as the original (we didn’t change a word). but with the addition of a new introduction by David Weinberger, four new chapters by each of the four authors (Chris Locke and Rick Levine, in addition to Dr. Weinberger and myself), and one each by Dan Gillmor, Jake McKee and JP Rangaswami.

A lot has happened in the last decade. A lot hasn’t happened too. To reflect on both, the Berkman Center will host a conversation called Cluetrain at 10: So How’s Utopia Working Out for Ya? at Harvard Law School.

David Weinberger and I will be joined by Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor and author of The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. “JZ” was a student at HLS when he co-founded the Berkman Center eleven years ago. David and I are both fellows at the center as well. The three of us will talk for a bit and then the rest of it will be open to the floor, both in the room and out on the IRC (and other backchannels), since the conversation will be webcast as well. It starts at 6:00 pm East Coast time.

Meet/meat space is the Austin East Classroom of Austin Hall at Harvard Law School. It’s free and open to everybody. Since it’s a classroom and expected to fill up, an RSVP is requested. To do that, go here.

When we went looking for an apartment here a couple years ago, we had two primary considerations in addition to the usual ones: walking distance from a Red Line subway stop, and fiber-based Internet access. The latter is easy to spot if you know what to look for, starting with too many wires on the poles. After that you look for large loops among the wires. That means the wiring contains glass, which breaks if the loops are too small. The apartment we chose has other charms, but for me the best one is a choice between three high speed Internet services: Comcast, Verizon FiOS and RCN. Although Comcast comes via coaxial cable, it’s a HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) system, and competes fairly well against fiber all the way to the home. That’s what Verizon FiOS and RCN provide.

We chose Verizon FiOS, which gives us 20Mb symmetrical service for about $60/month. The 25 feet between the Optical Network Terminal box and my router is ironically provided by old Comcast cable TV co-ax. (Hey, if Comcast wants my business, they can beat Verizon’s offering.)

My point is that we live where we do because there is competition among Internet service providers. While I think competition could be a lot better than it is, each of those three companies still offer far more than what you’ll find pretty much everywhere in the U.S. where there is little or no competition at all.

The playing field in the skies above sidewalks is not pretty. Poles draped with six kinds of wiring (in our case electrical, phone, cable, cable, fiber, fiber — I just counted) are not attractive. At the point the poles become ugly beyond endurance, I expect that the homeowners will pay to bury the services. By the grace of local regulators, all they’ll bury will be electrical service and bundles of conduit, mostly for fiber. And they won’t bury them deep, because fiber isn’t bothered by proximity to electrical currents. In the old days (which is still today in most fiber-less places), minimum separations are required between electrical, cable and phone wiring — the latter two being copper. In Santa Barbara (our perma-home), service trenching has to be the depth of a grave to maintain those separations. There’s no fiber yet offered in Santa Barbara. At our house there the only carrier to provide “high” speed is the cable company, and it’s a fraction of what we get over fiber here near Boston.

All this comes to mind after reading D.C. Court Upholds Ban on MDU Contracts: FCC prevents new exclusive contracts and nullifies existing ones, by John Eggerton in Broadcasting & Cable.  It begins, “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Monday upheld an FCC decision banning exclusive contracts between cable companies and the owners of apartments and other multiple-dwelling units (MDU).”

The rest of the piece is framed by the long-standing antipathy between cable and telephone companies (cable lost this one), each as providers of cable TV. For example,

Not surprisingly, Verizon praised the decision. It also saw it as a win for larger issues of access to programming:

“This ruling is a big win for millions of consumers living in apartments and condominiums who want nothing more than to enjoy the full benefits of video competition,” said Michael Glover, Verizon senior VP, deputy general counsel, in a statement. “In upholding the ban on new and existing exclusive access deals, the Court’s decision also confirms the FCC’s authority to address other barriers to more meaningful competitive choice and video competition, such as the cable companies’ refusal to provide competitors with access to regional sports programming.”

Which makes sense at a time in history when TV viewing still comprises a larger wad of demand than Internet use. This will change as more and more production, distribution and consumption moves to the Internet, and as demand increases for more Internet access by more different kinds of devices — especially mobile ones.

Already a growing percentage of my own Internet use, especially on the road, uses cellular connectivity rather than wi-fi (thanks to high charges for crappy connectivity at most hotels). Sprint is my mobile Internet provider. They have my business because they do a better job of getting me what I want: an “air card” that works on Linux and Mac laptops, and not just on Windows ones). Verizon wanted to charge me for my air card (Sprint’s was free with the deal, which was also cheaper), and AT&T’s gear messed up my laptops and didn’t work very well anyway.

In both cases — home and road — there is competition.

While I can think of many reforms I’d like to see around Internet connectivity (among citizens, regulators and regulatees), anything that fosters competition in the meantime is a Good Thing.

So I’m walking across the Harvard campus, going from one Berkman office to another, listening to KCLU from Santa Barbara on my iPhone. The guest on the show is Berkman’s own John Palfrey. I think, that’s cool… what’s the show? The tuner doesn’t tell me, because (I assume) KCLU doesn’t provide that data along with the audio stream.

To find out, I just sat down on a bench, popped open the laptop and started looking around. KCLU’s site says what’s on now is OnPoint. That’s because the time on the scuedule block says 9:00am. It’s currently 10:45am, Pacific. The next show block on the schedule is Fresh Air at 11:00am. John isn’t listed as an OnPoint guest, so… what is the show he’s on?

I wait until the interview with John ends, and then I learn that the show is Here & Now, which KCLU says comes on at 2pm. Here & Now has the JP segment listed. Says this:

More Countries Use Internet Censorship
Listen
We’ve heard about countries like China, Iran and North Korea censoring websites. But our guest, John Palfrey of Harvard’s Berman Center for Internet and Society says the practice is becoming more widespread—more than three dozen countries do extensive censoring, even France, Australia and the U.S. engage in some type of censorship.

Now it’s 11:00am Pacific, and KCLU brings on Science Friday. Also at variance from the schedule.

I’m not sure how to fix the problem of not including show data in a stream (or, if included, getting it displayed on software tuners), though I am sure it’s fixable. More importantly, I am convinced of the  need of listeners to know what they’re hearing, to bookmark it, and to find out more about it later. At the very least they should be able to find the answer to the “What was that?” question — without spending fifteen minutes surfing around a browser on a laptop.

Being able to know what you’re hearing would also inform decisions about, say, how much money you’d like to throw at the station or a program, if you’d like to do that. That’s what EmanciPay (which I wrote about yesterday) would help do.

Anyway, that’s why we’re working on Listen Log, as a variety of Media Logging. Input welcome.

WebTV was way ahead of its time and exactly backwards. The idea was to put the Web on TV. In the prevailing media framework of the time, this made complete sense. TV had been around since the Forties, and nearly everybody devoted many hours of their daily lives to it. The Web was brand new then. And, since the Web used a tube like TV did, it only made sense to make the Web work on TV, rather than vice versa.

Microsoft bought WebTV for $.425 billion in April 1997. It was the most Microsoft had ever spent on an acquisition, and a stunning sum to spend on what was clearly a speculative play. But Microsoft clearly thought it was skating to where the puck was going.

Not long after that I heard from Dave Feinleib, an executive at Microsoft. Dave wanted to know if I would be interested in writing a chapter for a book he was putting together on the convergence of the Web and television. What brought him to my door was that I was the only writer he found who claimed the Web would eat TV, rather than vice versa. Everybody else was saying that history was going the other way — including Microsoft itself, with its enormous bet.

Dave was an outstanding editor, and did a great job pulling his book together. Originally he wanted it to be published by somebody other than Microsoft, but that didn’t work out. If I’m not mistaken (and Dave, if you’re out there somewhere, correct me), his choices of title also didn’t make it. The title finally chosen was a kiss of death: The Inside Story of Interactive TV and (in much larger type) WebTV for Windows. (Cool: You can still get it at Amazon, so death in this case is only slightly exaggerated.)

It was a good book, and an important historic document. At least for me. Much of what I later contributed to The Cluetrain Manifesto I prototyped in my chapter of Dave’s book. My title was “The Message Is Not the Medium.”

Amazingly, I just found a draft of the chapter, which I assumed had been long gone in an old disk crash or something. Begging the indulgence of Dave and Microsoft, I’ll quote from it wholesale. Remember that this was written in 1998, at the very height of the dot-com bubble.

About the conversational nature of markets:

So what we have here are two metaphors for a marketplace: 1) a battlefield; and 2) a conversation. Which is the better metaphor for the Web market? One is zero-sum and the other is positive-sum. One is physical and the other is virtual. One uses OR logic, and the other uses AND logic.

It’s no contest. The conversation metaphor describes a world exploding with positive new sums. The battlefield metaphor insults that world by denying those sums. It works fine when we’re talking about battles for shelf space in grocery stores; but when we’re talking about the Web, battlefield metaphors ignore the most important developments.

There are two other advantages to the conversation metaphor. First, it works as a synonym. Substitute the word “conversation” for  “market” and this fact becomes clear. The bookselling conversation and the bookselling market are the same. Second, conversations are the fundamental connections human beings make with each other. We may love or hate one another, but unless we’re in conversation, not much happens between us. Societies grow around conversations. That includes the business societies we call markets…

About the Web as a marketplace:

Today the Web remains an extraordinarily useful way to publish, archive, research and connect all kinds of information. No medium better serves curious or inventive minds.

While commerce may not have been the first priority of the Web’s prime movers, their medium has quickly proven to be the most commercial medium ever created. It invites every business in the Yellow Pages either to sell on the Web or to support their existing business by using the Web to publish useful information and invite dialog with customers and other involved parties. In fact, by serving as both an ultimate yellow page directory and an endless spread of real estate for stores and businesses, the Web demonstrates extreme synergy between the publishing and retailing metaphors, along with their underlying conceptual systems.

So, in simple terms, the Web efficiently serves two fundamental human needs:

1.    The need to know; and
2.    The need to buy.

While it also serves as a fine way to ship messages to eyeballs, we should pause to observe that the message market is a conversation that takes place entirely on the supply side of TV’s shipping system. In the advertising market, media sell space or time to companies that advertise. Not to consumers. The consumers get messages for free, whether they want them or not.

What happens when consumers can speak back — not just to the media, but to the companies who pay for the media? In the past we never faced that question. Now we do. And the Web will answer with a new division of labor between advertising and the rest of commerce. That division will further expose the limits of both the advertising and entertainment metaphors.

On Sales vs. Advertsing, and how the Web does more for the former than the latter:

“Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all  it is.” — Fairfax Cone

Fairfax “Fax” Cone founded one of the world’s top advertising agencies, Foote, Cone & Belding, and ran it for forty years. A no-nonsense guy from Chicago, Cone knew exactly what advertising was and wasn’t about. With this simple definition — what you do when you can’t go see somebody — he drew a clear line between advertising and sales. Today, thirty years after he retired, we can draw the same line between TV and the Web, and divide the labors accordingly.

On one side we have television, the best medium ever created for advertising. On the other side we have the Web, the best medium ever created for sales.

The Web, like the telephone, is a much better tool for sales than for promotion. It’s what you do when you can go see somebody: a way to inform customers and for them to inform you. The range of benefits is incalculable. You can learn from each other, confer in groups, have visually informed phone conversations, or sell directly with no sales people at all.

In other words, you can do business. All kinds of business. As with the phone, it’s hard to imagine any business you can’t do, or can’t help do, with the Web.

So we have a choice. See or be seen: see with the Web, or be seen on TV. Talk with people or talk at them. Converse with them, or send them messages.

Once we divide these labors, advertising on the Web will make no more sense than advertising on the phone does today. It will be just as unwelcome, just as intrusive, just as rude and just as useless.

The Web will call forth — from both vendors and customers — a new kind of marketing: one that seeks to enlarge the conversations we call business, not to assault potential customers with messages they don’t want. This will expose Web advertising — and most other advertising — as the spam it is, and invite the development of something that serves supply without insulting demand, and establishes market conversations equally needed by both.

This new marketing conversation will embrace what Rob McDaniel  calls a “divine awful truth”  — a truth whose veracity is exceeded only by its deniability. When that truth becomes clear, we will recognize most advertising as an ugly art form  that only dumb funding can justify, and damn it for the sin of unwelcome supply in the absence of demand.

That truth is this: There is no demand for messages. And there never was.

In fact, most advertising has negative demand, especially on TV. It actually subtracts value. To get an idea just how negative TV advertising is, imagine what would happen if the mute buttons on remote controls delivered we-don’t-want-to-hear-this messages back to advertisers. When that feedback finally gets through, the $180+ billion/year advertising market will fall like a bad soufflé.

It will fall because the Web will bring two developments advertising has never seen before, and has always feared:  1) direct feedback; and 2) accountability. These will expose another divine awful truth: most advertising doesn’t work.

In the safety of absent alternatives, advertising people have always admitted as much. There’s an old expression in the business that goes, “I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” (And let’s face it, “half” is exceedingly generous.)

With the Web, you can know. Add the Web to TV, and you can measure waste on the tube too.

Use the Web wisely, and you don’t have to settle for any waste at all.

About advertising’s fatal flaw:

Television is two businesses: 1) an entertainment delivery service; and 2) an advertising delivery service. They involve two very different conversations. The first is huge and includes everybody. The second is narrow and only includes advertisers and broadcasters.

TV’s entertainment producers are program sources such as production companies, network entertainment divisions, and the programming sides of TV stations. These are also the vendors of the programs they produce. Their customers and distributors are the networks and TV stations, who give away the product for free to their consumers, the viewers.

In TV’s advertising business, the advertising is produced by the advertisers themselves, or by their agencies. But in this market conversation, advertisers paly the customer role. They buy time from the networks and the stations, which serve as both vendors and distributors. Again, viewers consume the product for free.

In the past, the difference between these conversations didn’t matter much, because consumers were not part of TV’s money-for-goods market conversation.  Instead, consumers were part of the conversation around the product TV gives away: programming.

In the economics of television, however, programming is just bait. It’s very attractive bait, of course; but it’s on the cost side of the balance sheet, not the revenue side. TV’s $45+ billion revenues come from advertising, not programming. And the sources of programming make most of their money from their customers: networks, syndicators and stations. Not from viewers.

Broadcasters, however, are accustomed to believing that their audience is deeply involved in their business, and often speak of demographics (e.g. men 25-54) as “markets.” But there is no market conversation here, because the relationship — such as it is — is restricted to terms set by what the supply side requires, which are ratings numbers and impersonal information such as demographic breakouts and lifestyle characterizations. This may be useful information, but it lacks the authenticity of real market demand, expressed in hard cash. In fact, very few viewers are engaged in conversations with the stations and networks they watch. It’s a one-way, one-to-many distribution system. TV’s consumers are important only in aggregate, not as individuals. They are many, not one. And, as Reese Jones told us earlier, there is no such thing as a many-to-one conversation. At best there is only a perception of one. Big difference.

So, without a cash voice, audience members can only consume. Their role is to take the bait. If the advertisements work, of course, they’ll take the hook as well. But the advertising business is still a conversation that does not include its consumers..

So we get supply without demand, which isn’t a bad definition of advertising.

Now let’s look at the Web.

Here, the customer and consumer are the same. He or she can buy the advertisers’ goods directly from the advertiser, and enjoy two-way one-to-one market conversations that don’t involve the intervention either of TV as a medium or of one-way messages intended as bait. He or she can also buy entertainment directly from program sources, which in this relationship vend as well as produce. The distribution role of TV stations and networks is unnecessary, or at least peripheral. In other words, the Web disintermediates TV, plus other media.

So the real threat to TV isn’t just that the Web makes advertising accountable. It’s that it makes business more efficient. In fact the Web serves as both a medium for business and as a necessary accessory to it, much like the telephone. No medium since the telephone does a better job of getting vendors and customers together, and of fostering the word-of-mouth that even advertisers admit is the best advertising.

The Web is an unprecedented clue-exchange system. And when companies get enough clues about how poorly their advertising actually works, they’ll drop it like a bad transmission, or change it so much we can’t call it advertising any more.

We may have a blood bath. Killing ad budgets is a snap. Advertising is protected by no government agencies, and encouraged by no tax incentives. It’s just an expense, a line item, overhead. You can waste it with a phone call and almost nobody will get fired, aside from a few marketing communications (”marcom”) types and their expensive ad agencies.

About TV’s fatal flaw:

Few would argue that TV is a good thing. Hand-wringing over TV’s awfulness is a huge nonbusiness. TV Free America counts four thousand studies of TV’s effects on children. The TVFA also says 49% of Americans think they watch too much TV, and 73% of American parents think they should limit their kid’s TV watching.

And, as the tobacco industry will tell you, smoking is an “adult custom” and “a simple matter of personal choice.”

Then let’s admit it: TV is a drug. So why do we take it when we clearly know it’s bad for our brains?

Six reasons: 1) because it’s free; 2) because it’s everywhere; 3) because it’s narcotic; 4) because we enjoy it; 5) because it’s the one thing we can all talk about without getting too personal; and 6) because it’s been with us for half a century.

Television isn’t just part of our culture; it is our culture. As Howard Beale tells his audience, “You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube.” And we do business like the tube, too. It’s standard.

Howard Beale had it right: television is a tube. Let’s look at it one more time, from our point of view.

What we see is a one-way freight forwarding system, from producers to consumers. Networks and stations “put out,” “send out” and “deliver” programs through “channels” on “signals” that an “audience” of “viewers” “receive,” or “get” through this “tube.” We “consume” those products by “watching” them, often intending to “vege out” in the process.

Note that this activity is bovine at best, vegetative at worst and narcotic in any case. To put it mildly, there is no room in this metaphor for interactivity. And let’s face it, when most people watch TV, the only thing they want to interact with is the refrigerator.

Metaphorically speaking, it doesn’t matter that TV contains plenty of engaging and stimulating content, any more than it matters that life in many ways isn’t a journey. TV is a tube. It goes from them to us. We just sit here and consume it like fish in a tank, staring at glass.

Of course we’re not really like that. We’re conscious when we watch TV.

Well, of course we are. So are lots of people. But that’s not how the concept works, and its not what the system values. TV’s delivery-system metaphors reduce viewing to an effect — a noise at the end of the trough. And they reduce programming to container cargo. “Content,” for example, is a tubular noun that comes straight out of the TV conversation. What retailers would demean their goods with such a value-subtracting label?   Does Macy’s sell “content?” With TV, the label is accurate. The product is value-free, since consumers don’t pay a damn thing for it.

There is a positive side to the entertainment conversation, of course. Writers, producers, directors and stars all put out “shows” to entertain an “audience.” Here the underlying metaphor is theater. By this conceptual metaphor, TV is a stage.  But the negotiable market value of this conversation is provided entirely by its customers: the TV stations and networks. The audience, however, pays nothing for the product. Its customers use it as advertising bait. This isolates the show-biz conversation and its value. You might say that TV actually subtracts value from its own product, by giving it away.

And, the story of TV’s death foretold:

In the long run (which may not be very long), the Web conversation will win for the simple reason that it supports and nurtures direct conversations, and therefore grows business at a much faster rate. It also has conceptual metaphors that do a better job of supporting commerce.

Drugs have their uses. But it’s better to bet on the nurtured market than on the drugged one.

Trees don’t grow to the sky. TV’s $45 billion business may be the biggest redwood in the advertising forest, but in a few more years we’ll be counting its rings. “Propaganda ends where dialog begins,” Jacques Ellul says.

The Web is about dialog. The fact that it supports entertainment, and does a great job of it, does nothing to change that fact. What the Web brings to the entertainment business (and every business), for the first time, is dialog like nobody has ever seen before. Now everybody can get into the entertainment conversation. Or the conversations that comprise any other market you can name. Embracing that is the safest bet in the world. Betting on the old illusion machine, however popular it may be at the moment, is risky to say the least…

TV is just chewing gum for the eyes. — Fred Allen

This may look like a long shot, but I’m going to bet that the first fifty years of TV will be the only fifty years. We’ll look back on it the way we now look back on radio’s golden age. It was something communal and friendly that brought the family together. It was a way we could be silent together. Something of complete unimportance we could all talk about.

And, to be fair, TV has always had a very high quantity of Good Stuff. But it also had a much higher quantity of drugs. Fred Allen was being kind when he called it “chewing gum for the eyes.” It was much worse. It made us stupid. It started us on real drugs like cannabis and cocaine. It taught us that guns solve problems and that violence is ordinary. It disconnected us from our families and communities and plugged us into a system that treated us as a product to be fattened and led around blind, like cattle.

Convergence between the Web and TV is inevitable. But it will happen on the terms of the metaphors that make sense of it, such as publishing and retailing. There is plenty of room in these metaphors — especially retailing — for ordering and shipping entertainment freight. The Web is a perfect way to enable the direct-demand market for video goods that the television industry was never equipped to provide, because it could never embrace the concept. They were in the eyeballs-for-advertisers business. Their job was to give away entertainment, not to charge for it.

So what will we get? Gum on the computer screen, or choice on the tube?

It’ll be no contest, especially when the form starts funding itself.

Bet on Web/TV, not TV/Web.

Looking back on all that, I wince at how hyperbolic some of it was (like, there really is some demand for some messages), but I’m still plased with what I got right, which is that the Web eats TV. Which brings me to the precipitating post, YouTube is Huge and About to Get Even Bigger, by Jennifer Van Grove in Mashable. Sez Jennifer,

According to YouTube, the hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute has been growing astronomically since mid-2007, when it was just a measly six hours per minute. Then, in “January of this year, it became 15 hours of video uploaded every minute, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week.”

Now, just a few months later and we’ve hit the 20 hour per minute milestone, which means that for every second in time about 33 minutes of video make it to YouTube, and that for any given day 28,800 hours of video are uploaded in total…

Even though YouTube () is seeing such massive upload numbers, and we think that speaks to the strength of their community, they still have monetization challenges that are only exacerbated by the rising bandwidth costs required to support such an enormous load. Bandwidth costs are already proving to be the bane of YouTube’s existence, possibly resulting in $470 million in loses for this year alone.

So while YouTube’s outwardly celebrating that we’re dumping 20 hours of video on their servers every minute, we think they should count their blessings with a little more realism since, based on previous patterns, this number, along with bandwidth costs, will only continue to rise.

“Rise” is too weak a verb. What we have here is something of an artesian flood, a continent of blooming volcanoes.

In the old top-down world of broadcasting, all we had were a few thousand big transmitters, each with limited reach, stretched and widened by cable and satellite TV. (Remember that what we call “cable” began as CATV: Community Antenna TeleVision.) It is over these legacy systems, plus the upgraded phone system, that most of us are connected to the Internet today.

In the legacy TV world, transmitters are obsolete to the verge of pointlessness. So are “channels.” So are the “networks” that are now just distributors for TV shows. All that matters is “content,” as they say. And that’s moving online, huge-time.

Tomorrow’s shows  won’t be coming only from big-time program producers.  We’ll be getting them from each other as well. We already see that with YouTube, but in relatively low-def resolutions. Still, it’s a start. At the end of the next growth stage we’ll be producing out own damn shows, and at resolutions higher than cable can bear. So will the incumbent producers, of course, but they won’t be taking the lead in pushing for wider bandwidth. That’s an easy call because they’re not taking the lead right now, and they should be. Instead they’ve left it up to us: the “viewers” who are now becoming producers and reproducers.

Already you can get a camcorder that will shoot 1080p video for well under a $grand. That’s more resolution than you’ll get from cable or satellite, with a few pay-per-view exceptions. Combine the sphinctered nature of cable and satellite TV bandwidth with the carriers’ need to compete by carrying more and more channels, and what you get is stuff that’s “HD” in name only. While the resolution might be 720p or 1080i, the amount of actual data carried on each channel is minimal or worse, resulting in skies that look plaid and skin that looks damaged. All of whch means that the best thing you can see — today — on your new 1080p screen comes from your new 1080p camcorder. (Unless you pay bux deluxe for a Blu-Ray player, which not many of us are doing.) So: how long before ordinary folks are producing their own high-def movies, in large numbers? How long before that pounds out the walls of pipes all over the place?

Even if that takes awhile, we have to face facts. We’re going to need the bandwidth. Storage and processing we’ve got covered, because that’s at the edges, where there’s not much standing in the way of growth and enterprise. In the middle we’ve got a world wide bandwidth challenge.

The phone and cable companies can’t give it to us — at least not the way they’re currently set up. Even the best of the carrier breed — Verizon FiOS, which I’m using right now, and appreciating a great deal — is set up as a top-grade cable TV system that also delivers Internet. Not as a fat data pipe between any two points, which is what we’ll need.

Pause for a moment and recall this scene from the movie “Jaws”. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Roy Scheider says.

TV on the Net is the shark in this story. The Quinn role is being played by the carriers right now. They need to be smarter than what we’ve seen so far. So do the rest of us.

Thanks to Keith McArthur for clueing me in on Cluetrainplus10, in which folks comment on each of Cluetrain’s 95 theses, on roughly the 10th anniversary of the day Cluetrain went up on the Web. (It was around this time in 1999.)

The only thesis I clearly remember writing was the first, “Markets are conversations.” That one was unpacked in a book chapter, and Chris Locke has taken that assignment for this exercise. Most of the other theses are also taken, so I chose one of the later ones, copied and pasted here:

71. Your tired notions of “the market” make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere. Doc Searls @dsearls

Ten years later, that disconect is still there. Back when we wrote Cluetrain, we dwelled on the distance between what David Weinberger called “Fort Business” and the human beings both inside and outside the company. Today there is much more conversation happening across those lines (in both literal and metaphorical senses of the word), and everybody seems to be getting “social” out the wazoo. But the same old Fort/Human split is there. Worse, it’s growing, as businesses get more silo’d than ever — even (and especially) on the Net.

For evidence, look no farther than two of the most annoying developments in the history of business: 1) loyalty cards; and 2) the outsourcing of customer service to customers themselves.

Never mind the inefficiencies and outright stupidities involved in loyalty programs (for example, giving you a coupon discounting the next purchase of the thing you just bought — now for too much). Just look at the conceits involved. Every one of these programs acts as if “belonging” to a vendor is a desirable state — that customers are actually okay with being “acquired”, “locked-in” and “owned” like slaves.

Meanwhile, “customer service” has been automated to a degree that is beyond moronic. If you ever reach a Tier One agent, you’ll engage in a conversation with a script in human form:

“Hello, my name is Scott. How are you today?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Thank you for asking. I’m fine. How can I help you today?”

“My X is F’d.”

“I’m sorry you’re having that problem.”

Right. They always ask how you are, always thank you for asking how they are, and are always sorry you have a problem.

They even do that chant in chat sessions. Last week I had a four chat sessions in a row with four agents of Charter Communications, the cable company that provides internet service at my brother-in-law’s house. This took place on a laptop in the crawl space under his house. All the chats were 99% unhelpful and in some ways were comically absurd. The real message that ran through the whole exchange was, You figure it out.

Last week in the New York Times, Steve Lohr wrote Customer Service? Ask a Volunteer. It tells the story of how customers, working as voluntary symbiotes in large vendor ecosystems, take up much of the support burden. If any of the good work of the volunteers finds its way into product improvement, it will provide good examples of what Eric von Hippel calls Democratizing Innovation. But most companies remain Fort Clueless on the matter. Sez one commenter on a Slashdot thread,

Both these annoyances — loyalty cards and customer support outsourced to customers — are exacerbated by the Net. Loyalty cards are modeled to some degree on one of the worst flaws of the Web: that you have to sign in to something before you make a purchase. This is a bug, not a feature. And the Web makes it almost too easy for companies to direct customers away from the front door. They can say  “Just go to our Website. Everything you need is there.” Could be, but where? Even in 2009, finding good information on most company websites is a discouraging prospect. And the last thing you’ll find is a phone number that gets you to a human being, even if you’re prepared to pay for the help.

So the “elsewhere” we talked about in Cluetrain’s 71st thesis is out-of-luck-ville. Because we’re still stuck in a threshold state: between a world where sellers make all the rules, and a world where customers are self-equipped to overcome or obsolete those rules — by providing new ones that work the same for many vendors, and provide benefits for both sides.

This whole issue is front-burner for me right now. One reason is that I’m finally getting down (after three years) to unpacking The Intention Economy into a whole book, subtitled “What happens when customers get real power” (or something close to that). The other is that this past week has been one in which my wife and I spent perhaps half of our waking lives on the phone or the Web, navigating labyrinthine call center mazes, yelling at useless websites, and talking with tech support personnel who were 99% useless.

A Tier 2 Verizon person actually gave my wife detailed instructions on how to circumvent certain call center problems in the future, including an unpublished number that is sure to change — and stressing the importance of knowing how to work the company’s insane “system”. And that’s just one system. Every vendor of anything that requires service has its own system. Or many of them.

These problems cannot be solved by the companies themselves. Companies make silos. It’s as simple as that. Left to their own devices, that’s what they do. Over and over and over again.

The Internet Protocol solved the multiple network problem. We’re all on one Net now. Email protocols solved the multiple email system problem. We don’t have to ask which company silo somebody belongs to before we send email to them. But we still have multiple IM systems. The IETF approved Jabber’s XMPP protocol years ago, but Jabber has been only partially adopted. If you want to IM with somebody, you need to know if they’re on Skype or AIM or Yahoo or MSN. Far as I know, only Google uses XMPP as its IM protocol.

Meanwhile text more every day than they IM. This is because texting’s SMS protocol is universally used, both by all phone systems and by Twitter.

The fact that Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo all retain proprietary IM systems says that they still prefer to silo network uses and users, even after all these decades. They are, in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, “demented with the mania of owning things.”

Sobriety can only come from the customer side. As first parties in their own relationships and transactions, they are in the best position to sort out the growing silo-ization problems of second and third parties (vendors and their assistants).

Once customers become equipped with ways of managing their interactions with multiple vendors, we’ll see business growing around buyers rather than sellers. These are what we’re starting to call fourth party services: ones that Joe Andrieu calls user driven services. Here are his series of posts so far on the topic:

1. The Great Reconfiguration
2. Introducing User Driven Services
3. User Driven Services: Impulse from the User
4. User Driven Services: 2. Control

(He has eight more on the way. Stay tuned.)

Once these are in place, marketers will face a reciprocal force rather than a subordinated one. Three reasons: 1) because customer choices will far exceed the silo’d few provided by vendors acting like slave-owners; 2) customers will have help from a new and growing business category and 3) because customers are where the money comes from. Customers also know far more about how they want to spend their money than marketers do.

What follows will be a collapse of the guesswork economy that has comprised most of marketing and advertising for the duration. This is an economy that we were trying to blow up with Cluetrain ten years ago. It’s what I hope the next Cluetrain edition will help do, once it comes out this summer.

Meanwhile, work continues.

New England is full of ruins. Woods everywhere are veined with stone walls, relics of an agrarian age that ended when the industrial one began. Shipping canals, which were thick with horse-drawn cargo when the Thoreau brothers rowed past them up the Concord & Merrimack Rivers, were abandoned once railroads did the same job better. Mills along canals and rivers have long since been torn down or turned into museums, stores or condos. Bypassed by cars and trucks on highways, old railroad beds have lost their easements or turned into bike trails.

So now what happens to radio and TV — two more old industries with landmarks on landscapes? I visited the subject to some degree over in Linux Journal yesterday, with What if they gave a DTV transition and nobody came? Here I want to go farther, and look at an industry we know is going to die — and to start doing it well before the end arrives.

AM radio, which operates on such low frequencies that signals are radiated by entire broadcast towers, are built as single or multi-tower “arrays” sitting on buried conductors: “ground systems” that can take up more space in soil than their towers occupy in the air above. Most of these facilities were built between the 20s and 80s. Since then scarce land and environmental restrictions have slowed their spread. I would add that available frequencies are also scarce, but that hasn’t stopped the FCC from easing rules, over and over, turning the band at night (when signals bounce off the sky to reach hundreds of miles from their transmitters) into wall-to-wall hash.

FM radio has only been around in a serious way since the 1950s. Operating on a VHF band, where the antennas themselves don’t need to be large (as they do on AM), FM does best when radiated from altitude, meaning the tops of mountains, buildings and high towers. Some of the latter grow to the legal limit of 2000 feet.

With its VHF and UHF signals, television also requires transmission from altitude. When you see a very high tower standing on landscape, or a bristle of short towers atop mountains and skyscrapers, you’re looking at sources of TV, FM or both. A huge percentage of the world’s tallest masts (a category that includes buildings and towers) stand in the U.S., and many are the full 2000-foot height. Most were built for TV stations. (Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of these. Also of tower collapses — a remarkably long list.)

The first set of these to go the way of ship canals is low-band VHF TV. That is, channels 2-6. After June 12, no antenna broadcasting on those channels in the U.S. will continue to operate. Most high-band VHF TV channels — ones operating on channels 7-13 — will also be abandoned, though a few will continue to transmit digital signals. All stations that formerly occupied channels 2-6 will move to a UHF channel (14 to 50).

Old analog TV transmitters are mostly worthless and can’t be re-purposed. (Here’s an excellent piece on that subject, from The Current.)

What I’m wondering about are the towers. The Current’s story suggests that they’re too expensive to take down (not worth enough in scrap), and that most will be re-purposed in any case.

I don’t think so.

It might be easy enough to re-purpose a few former Channel 2 or Channel 4 towers. But what happens when AM and FM transmission is obsoleted by webcasting? This hasn’t happened yet. There are many architectural and UI challenges, plus the added legal burden of copyright restrictions, which are much tougher on music broadcast on the Web than on the air (at least in the U.S.) But the end will come. The brightest writing on the wall right now is the Public Radio Tuner, a project of CPB and several public radio organizations. Last I heard (disclosure: I’m involved in the project), downloads of the free tuner for iPhone were past 1.6 million. This and other tuners, on the iPhone and other portable devices, will account for more and more listening, especially as more cell phone data plans take the ceilings off data consumption — as AT&T has already done for the iPhone.

Some have suggested that TV and FM towers can be re-purposed for cellular use, and to some degree that’s true. But cellular coverage requires many sites at low elevations, rather than a few at high elevations. As one Cisco guy told me, “they might be able to lease out the bottom 200 feet” of a tower.

Still, ends always come, and The End is in sight for over-the-air radio as well as TV. Then what?

Bonus linkage: Scott Fybush’s amazing series of visits to broadcast towers, over many years; and a few of my own photos of transmitting sites, many shot from altitude. Also the blog and tweets of George Clark, both of which led to this digression.

Don Marti in Do Not Feed the Troll: “The latest trend in the IT Media is trolling as business model. In the old days, trolling was a hobby. How many users of newsgroup or other forum could you draw into a pointless argument? But when a participant in an argument is either (1) visiting a comment form and seeing an ad, or (2) linking in to a blog post and giving you some Google Juice, then trolling becomes a business.”

That post is close to two years old. Meanwhile, shameless plays for traffic and obsessions with “popularity” of a mostly numeric form are more common than ever, given that more means serve the same ends, faster than ever.

Is anything other than vanity improved by that? I mean, besides checking accounts marginally enlarged by Adsense residues that remain where Google Juice has flowed? I mean, anything that matters: that adds substance to the world in some way.

Could it be that Twitter has become the gin cart of our time – not in all cases, but in enough to constitute a kind of methadone for TV addicts? Just a thought.

My point, however, isn’t about TV or Twitter, or SEO, or obsessive posting for its own sake. It’s about being constructive. Because I think life is a constant series of choices. Either we put our shoulder to a wheel, or we just take a ride. Either we build something, or we just occupy a space.

There are more ways than ever to be constructive in the world. Also more ways to loaf. The trick is to know when the latter is not the former.

[Later...] An example. I just learned that Chrysler has sold what’s left of its ass to Fiat. Wikipedia doesn’t mention that yet in its entry on Chrysler. I could go into Wikipedia and (perhaps) be the first to update it with this new info. Or I could make an intstructive post on my own blog, about how there are other Wikipedians, far more qualified (and obsessive) than I, ready to make those edits, and to do a much better job of it. Or, I could do neither. So, I posted. Was it worthwhile? Or should I have gone back to writing the book, or doing other Things That Matter? Not sure, actually.

I’m listening right now to On Point*, where the topic is Pushing E-Health Records. The only case against electronic health records (EHR, aka electronic medical recordsk, or EMR) is risk of compromised privacy. Exposure goes up. The friction involved in grabbing electronic medical records is lower than that involved in grabbing paper ones, especially with the Internet connecting damn near everything.

Here’s the problem with privacy in the Internet Age (which we are now in, with no hope of ever getting out, unless we live the connectionless life): the Net is a big copy machine. It’s amazing how a fact so simple escapes attention until a first-rate metaphorist such as Kevin Kelly comes along to expound on what ought to be obvious:

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can’t erase something once it’s flowed on the internet.

We’re not going to fix that. The copying nature of the Net is a feature, not a bug. We can fight some of it with crypto between trusting parties. But until we find ways to make that easy, the exposure is there. And, as long as it is, we’re going to have people who say risk of exposure overrides other concerns, such as the fact that dozens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone die every year of bad health care record keeping and communications — in other words, of bad data.

Still, if we want good medical care, we need EHR. That much is plain. The question is, How?

The answer will not be an information silo, or a set of silos. We have too many of those already. That’s the problem we have now — both on paper and in electronic formats (as I discovered last year in one of my own medical adventures).

The patient needs to be the point of integration for his or her own data, and the point of origination about what gets done with it. Even if the patient’s primary care physician serves as a trusted originator of medical decisions, the patient needs to anchor the vector of his or her own care, for the simple reason that the patient is the one constant as he or she moves through various medical specialties and systems.

The patient needs to be the platform. Not Google, or Microsoft, or your HMO, or the VA, or some kieretsu involving Big Pharma, Big Software Companies and Big Equipment Makers.

This requires classic VRM: tools of independence and engagement. That is, tools that enable the patient to be independent of any health care provider, yet better able to engage any provider.

In other words, while the answer needs to be systematic, it does not need to be A Big System (which I fear both BigCos and BigGovs whish to provide).

The answer needs to come from geeks who know how to eliminate big problems with simple solutions. For example,

• Consider how the Internet Protocol solved the problem of multiple networks that didn’t get along.
• Consider how email protocols such as SMTP, POP3 and IMAP solved the problem of multiple email systems that didn’t get along.
• Consider how the XMPP protocol solves the problem of multiple instant messaging systems that don’t get along.

We need new ways of organizing our own health care data, and communicating that data selectively to trusted health care providers through open and standard protocols (that may or may not already exist… I don’t know).

I wanted to get those thoughts down because there’s a bunch of stuff going on around health care right now (including two conferences in Boston), detailed to some degree in Health Care Relationship Management, over at the ProjectVRM blog.

* On WBUR, a Boston station I pick up here in Santa Barbara over my Public Radio Tuner.

One of the geeks here at the Berkman Center walked into a room recently and started poking his index finger down on a newspaper that was laying on the table, as if expecting it to do something electronic. “This isn’t working,” he said.

So true, in so many ways.

Take for example the Boston Globe, New England’s landmark newspaper, and one to which we have subscribed since we got here in 2007. Like nearly all newspapers, the Globe is in Big Trouble. Here’s the opening paragraph from today’s bad news story:

The New York Times Co., which has threatened to shutter The Boston Globe, is seeking deep concessions from the Globe’s largest union that could include pay cuts of up to 20 percent, the elimination of seniority rules and lifetime job guarantees, and millions of dollars in cuts in company contributions to retirement and healthcare plans.

The Times may own the Globe in a legal sense, but in a much broader way the Globe also belongs to the people of Boston and New England. Everybody in New England benefits from the Globe, even if they don’t read or subscribe to it. It was in this sense that Scott Lehigh’s column yesterday was titled, Readers, have a say in saving your paper. Here’s the long gist:

We’re suffering from a double whammy: A bad recession and a self-defeating business model. Troubled times have sent advertising revenues plummeting. Meanwhile, we’re selling the paper with one hand and giving it away on Boston.com with the other. That’s never made any sense – the more so since website ads aren’t anywhere near the revenue-generator that print ads are.

…I also doubt we’ll be able to maintain the kind of quality newspaper and website readers expect unless we start charging online visitors who don’t subscribe to the paper.

Newspapers, eyeing several earlier failed experiments, including one by the New York Times, are skittish. That approach has worked for the Wall Street Journal, however. And as someone long wary about giving away our product on the Web even as we sell it in print, I think it’s time to try.

So back to my question: What does the Globe mean to you?

Would you pay to read the paper online? Seven-day home delivery currently costs $9.25 a week in the Boston area. Would it be worth $10 or $12 a month to read Globe content on Boston.com? Another idea under discussion in the news industry is micropayments. You’d give a credit card number once, and then be charged a small amount – a nickel, say – for each story you clicked on. Which would you prefer, a subscription or micropayments?

Some think charging for Web content will only deter readers, while keeping links to our website from appearing on other sites. Any payment system must be voluntary, they say. I’m dubious. But tell me, if we nagged you incessantly – ah, make that, politely prompted you at frequent intervals – would you make a voluntary payment of some sort?

Finally, can you think of better ways to have online readers pay for Globe offerings?

Yes, I can. It’s the fifth item in the series of posts below:

1. Newspapers 2.0 (October 5, 2006)
2. Still at Newspapers 1.x (August 15, 2007)
3. Toward a new ecology of journalism (September 12, 2007)
4. Earth to Newspapers: Abandon Fort Business. (September 19, 2007)
5. PayChoice: a new business model for newspapers (February 5, 2009)

PayChoice will be an easy way for listeners to pay stations for public radio programming. It is in the early stages of development, aimed toward appearing later this year in the Public Radio Tuner on iPhones. At last report, downloads of the tuner were moving past 1.5 million, so far.

We could do PayChoice for newspapers as well.

Informing PayChoice on the Public Radio Tuner will be a Listen Log, which is one form of Media Logging. We can do a Read Log as well, at least for the electronic versions of newspapers. Among the many things I’d like the log to perform is what I call ascribenation. That is, the ability to ascribe credit to sources — and to pay them as well. Among other things, this addresses the Associated Press’ concerns about ‘misappropriation’ of its role as the first source for many stories for which it goes uncredited.

Jon Garfunkel also has a good idea worth considering. It’s called PaperTrust.

The bottom line here is that a lot of good people are working on solutions. These solutions are not the same old stuff in new wrappers. They’re original ideas, some of which the papers will have no control over.

But they can help. They can tune in to tech development efforts like the ones I descibe here, and welcome their geeks’ participation in them. They can write and post linky text. (The Globe is better than some in this respect, but still link-averse on the whole.) They can finish following the other recommendations they’ll find here (the first of which isn’t too far from what Scott would like to do).

And, it might still be impossible to save the paper.

The question comes down to living without advertising. Can it be done? If so, how? I guarantee that the answer to those questions will come from the outside. From geeks, mostly.

In response to Can Journals Live on Subscriptions, Mimi Hui asked a number of questions, which I would rather answer here, where more people are likely to read them. Here goes…

Mimi: …it’s largely infrastructure, and not editorial, that is costly.

This is true, and much overlooked in debates on the topic.

Mimi: …what exactly do you like about The Globe? Meaning, if it is purely for the content, which is arguably generated by the writers, would you still love it as much if their content was not aggregated by The Globe as a brand?

First, I don’t think of what I read in the Globe as “content.” Instead I’m with John Perry Barlow, who said, “I didn’t start hearing about ‘content’ until the container business started going away”. I’m a writer. I write posts, editorials, tweets, emails, columns, essays and books. (Or parts of some… but just wait.) Those all have a worth that exceeds their sum of pixels or ink. To me “content” suggests a pure commodity — or worse, packing material.

Second, I don’t think of the Globe as a “brand.” Nor, I suspect, does anybody on the editorial side of the paper. The word “brand” was borrowed from the cattle industry, and I never liked it, even when I worked for many years in the advertising industry. I have a relationship with the Globe. The paper is part of my life. So are my wife, kids and friends. I don’t consider any of them “brands” either.

Mimi: Why can’t a publishing house eliminate all of the physical portions and switch to a pure digital play?

First, printing on paper costs more to produce and distribute, but advertising on paper makes more money. Many publications will cease printing on paper when the cost outweighs the income. But there will be existential costs to doing that. The Washington Post is a newspaper, not just a news site.

Mimi: Perhaps one question to ask is, is it possible to trim infrastructure in such a way as to provide valuable content to readers in a cost competitive way? And if so, what are methods for readers to discover the same content in a time efficient way?

Well, this is already being done. Writing online has none of the space limitations of writing on paper, and is far cheaper. And discovery systems improve every day.

But it’s still very early in the course of the Internet revolution.

This was put in context for me by a participant in a  breakout session at an event this past weekend. He said something like, “Here’s the idea. We’ll cut down forests in Ontario, turn them in to giant rolls of paper, use barrels of ink to print news articles and advertisements onto that paper, and hire people to drive around and deliver the results to people’s doorsteps, fresh every day — but only once a day. Whaddaya think?”

Such an idea is absurd, but only in fully modern context. Equally absurd are other institutions central to our civilization, including television, telephone and automobile industries.

In fact we are only at the beginning of a great transition caused by the presence of the Internet in our midst. Here’s how Clay Shirky describes some of what happened during the last Great Disruption, and what it teaches us during the current one:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today.

While there is much that can be done on the supply side, I think there is much left to be done on the demand side. We need much better tools for expressing demand, and for crediting sources of the editorial goods that enlarge our minds and help us inform others.

Meanwhile, the breakage continues.

It’s fun to fact-check a futurist when plenty of future has already gone by. Here’s some of what Alvin Toffler wrote thirty years ago in The Third Wave:

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaging in buiding a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the Meaning of the Thrid Wave.

Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating the earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing gthem with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before. The First Wave of change — the agricultural revioution — took thouseands of years to play itself out. The Second Wave — the rise of industrial civilization — took a mere three hundred years. Thoday history is even more accelerative, and it is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades. We who happen to share the planet at this explosive moment, will therefore feel the full impact of the Third Wave in our own lifetimes.

Tearing our families apart, rocking out economy, paralyzing our political systems, shattering our values, the Third Wave affects everyone. It challenges all the old power relatinships, and privilege and prerogatives of the endangered elites of today, and provides the backdrop against which the key power struggles of tomorrow will be fought.

Much in this emerging civilization contradicts the old traditoinal industrial civilization. It is, at one and the same time, highly technical and anti-industrial.

The third wave brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most factory assembly lines obsolete, on new, non-nuclear familes, on a novel institution that might be called the “electronic cottage”; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, behyond the concentration of energy, money and power.

This new civilization, as it challenges the old, will topple bureaucracies, reduce the role of the nation-state, and give rise to semiautonomous economies in a postimperialist world. It requires governments that are simpler, more effective, yet more democratic than any we know today. It is a civilization with its own distinctive world outlook, its own ways of dealing with time, space, logic and causality.

Above all… Third Wave civilization begins to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the “prosumer” economics of tomorrrow. For this reason, amongh many, it could– with some intelligent help from us — turn out to be the first truly humane civiization in recorded history.

When I first re-read this (before I re-typed it from these Amazon scans), I thought some of what Toffler said was hooey. Factory assembly lines are hardly obsolete, except here in the U.S., perhaps. There are plenty left in the world — especially in China, which now thrives with a capitalist system run by what’s still called the Communist Party. (Shades of Animal Farm, written by Orwell in 1945.) Human nature and politics-as-usual will probably never change.

As for families, they were already well-torn in the Industrial Age. My late former father-in-law, the historian Hiram Hilty, once told me that “family values” could hardly be more ironic in the U.S., which was settled and populated by people who left home (many of them involuntarily), and now have the most transient population on Earth. Our families are so loosely knit that moving away to distant locations is more the norm than the exception. Accoring to Dr. Hilty, the most common record of young men in the post-Civil War South — in census surveys, family bibles and church enrollment lists — is two words: “Went west.”

Yet we all tend to overestimate historic changes in the short term and underestimate in the long. At this Toffler was no exception. Look at what the Internet has done, and many of his predictions seem spot-on or close enough.

But I know one area where the Third Wave is still waiting to crest. Toffler again:

The Second Wave, like some nuclear chain reaction, violently spit apart two aspects of our lives that had always, until then, been one. In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches, and even our sexual seves.

At one level, the industrial revolution created a marvelously integrated social system with its own distinctive technologies, its own social institutions, and its own information channels — all plugged tightly into each other. Yet another level, it ripped apart the underlying unity of socieity, creating a way of life filled with economic tension, social conflict and psychological malaise. Only if we understand how this invisible wedge has shaped our lives thoughout the Second Wave era can we apreciate the full impact of the Third Wave that is beginning to reshape us today.

The two halves of human life that the Second Wave split apart were production and consumption. We are accustomed, for example, to think of ourselves as producers or consumers. This wasn’t always true. Until the industrial revolution, the vast bulk of all the food, goods, and services produced by the human race was consumed by the producers themselves. their families or a tiny elite who managed to scrape off the surplus for their own use….

The Second Wave viloently changed this situation. Instead of essentially self-suffieicnt people and communities, it created for the first time in history a situation in which the overwhelming bulk of all food, goods and services was destined for sale, barter or exchange. it virtually wiped out of existence good produced for one’s own consumption — for use by the actual producer and his or her family — and created a civilization in which almost no one, not even a farmer, ws self-sufficient any longer…

In short, industrialism broke the union of production and consumption, an split the producer from the consumer. the fused economy of the First Wave was transformed into the split economy of the Second Wave.

That economy is still split.

We noticed that in 1999, when we cited Toffler in Chapter Four of The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The advent of the Industrial Age did more than just enable industry to produce products much more efficiently. Management’s approach to production and its workers was quickly echoed in its approach to the market and its customers. The economies of scale they were gaining in the factory demanded economies of scale in the market. By the time it was over we had forgotten the one true meaning of the market, and replaced it with industrial substitutes.

In The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler wrote that the rise of industry drove an “invisible wedge” between production and consumption, a fact Friedrich Engels had noticed over one hundred years earlier. As production was ramped up to unheard-of rates, the clay pot of craftwork was broken into shards of repetitive tasks that maximized efficiency by minimizing difference: interchangeable workers creating interchangeable products.

In the market, consumption also needed to be ramped up — not just to absorb the increased production of goods, but also to promote people’s willingness to buy the one-size-fits-all products that rolled off mass-production lines. And management wasted little time noticing the parallels in efficiencies they could achieve all along the production-consumption chain. If products and workers were interchangeable, then interchangeable consumers began to look pretty good too.

The goal was simple. Customers had to be convinced to desire the same thing, the same Model-T in any color, so long as it’s black. And if workers could be better organized through the repetitive nature of their tasks, so customers were more easily defined by the collective nature of their tastes. Just as management developed a new organizational model to enhance economies of scale in production, it developed the techniques of mass marketing to do the same for consumption.

So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” Power swung so decisively to the supply side that “market” became a verb: something you do to customers.

In the twentieth century, the rise of mass communications media enhanced industry’s ability to address even larger markets with no loss of shoe leather, and mass marketing truly came into its own. With larger markets came larger rewards, and larger rewards had to be protected. More bureaucracy, more hierarchy, and more command and control meant the customer who looked you in the eye was promptly escorted out of the building by security.

The product of mass marketing was the message, delivered in as many forms as there were media and in as many guises as there were marketers to invent them. Delivered locally, shipped globally, repeated inescapably, the business of marketing devoted itself to delivering the message. Unfortunately, the customer never wanted to take delivery.

Well, maybe 1% did — or whatever percentage actually responded to any given ad. Still, the points are valid. We still live in a world where mass production is the norm, and so is treating customers like cattle.

A couple days ago a friend pointed to Customer UNinterupted, which pitches “Next-generation strategies for owning the customer experience across all channels.” Raise your hand if you wish to have your experience “owned” by anybody. Even the people who wrote that pitch don’t want their experienced “owned”. But they could easily write it because they still have that wedge in their heads. There is no corpus calossum between their inner producer and consumer.

But I’m still optimistic. Mass media are falling apart. All all of us on the Net are in position to be producers as well as consumers. We can produce information — real intelligence — that improves markets. Many of us are already doing that. A few of us are engaged in development efforts that will equip individuals with tools both of independence and engagement.

In fact, I think we should soon be in a good position to turn the old system around, and to “own the seller experience.” That is, to tell sellers how we wish to be treated, and to have our demands respected.

The fact that we’ll arrive, money in hand, will help.

Bonus link.

Kathy Moran has a great line — “Blogging about productivity began to feel like drinking about alcoholism” — that somehow comes to mind as I point to The Free Beer Economy, which I just put up at Linux Journal, in advance of SXSW, where I’ll moderate a panel titled Rebuilding the World with Free Everything. The panel will happen next Tuesday, right after the keynote conversation between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson, whose book Free: The Future of a Radical Price is due out this summer, and who will join our panel as well.

The gist:

So we have an ecosystem of abundant code and scarce imagination about how to make money on top of it. If that imagination were not scarce, we wouldn’t need Nicholas Carr to explain utilities in clouds with The Big Switch, or Jeff Jarvis to explain how big companies get clues, in What Would Google Do?

More to the point for us blogging folk, I’ll add Dave’s How I made over $2 million with this blog.

His point: He made money because of it. As I have with mine. Neither one of us, more than coincidentally, has advertising on our blogs. Neither one of us burdens our blogs with a “business model”. Nor do we feel a need to hire some outfit to do SEO for us. Good blogs are self-optimizing. That can go for their leverage on income as well, even without cost to one’s integrity.

As with so much on the Net, it’s still early. Much future is left to unfurl. The millipede has many more shoes to drop. So there is much fun left to be had, and much money to be made, even in a crap economy.

But hey, I’m an optimist. What else can I say?

Look forward to seeing many of ya’ll in Austin. I fly down tomorrow, back on Wednesday.

[Later...] I tweeted a pointer to the post earlier, and did something I’ve never done before, which was ask people to digg the piece. It’s kind of an experiment. Curious to see how it goes.

I’ve only had one post dugg to a high level before. It was fun for the few hours it lasted, but I’m not sure it did anything substantive (other than drive traffic to Linux Journal, which was more than agreeable). What I mean is, I’m not sure it drove a conversation about its subject. Hence, the next experiment. Applied heuristics, you might say.

I’ve been wondering, What happens to Dubai in a worldwide depresion? Smashing Telly says goodbye. Fun writing. A sample:

Modern Marketing:

I heard recently that a station in a big market was taking over one in a smaller market just for the purpose of taking the smaller one down. Why? My guess is, once over-the-air goes digital, transmitters are just pro formalities. Nobody will be watching “TV” anyway. “Stations” will just be branded sources still wedged inside the old cable TV “must-carry” regulatorium. So if an ABC station goes off the air in City B, and there’s still an NBC station in City A nearby, cable must carry the NBC station from City A. Something like that. In any case, the motives are also economic. Running transmitters pushing a million watts of signal (the maximum allowed on UHF) toward the horizon isn’t cheap.

Pretty soon the “TV” you buy will be an Internet file and stream tuner and recorder, with “must-carry” set-top-box features, so it can still get cable, satellite and over-the-air TV “channels.” In the world that makes, old-fashioned TV will look as antique as the telegraph.

This LA Times editorial says,

To this Santa Barbarian, who loves views of the sea, the oil platforms have their charms. They protrude from the planar Pacific like little square islands with christmas lights. And, as infrastructural studies, they’re rather interesting. It turns out that they’re also welcome offshore habitats, as are scuttled or wrecked metal boats.

Which are worse — oil platforms, or the hills of Los Angeles prickling with pump jacks? Pick your poison. Both bargains are Faustian.

The environmental damage risked, much less caused, by offshore drilling, is not a large part of the whole. Lost in most arguments about drilling in Southern California is the fact that up to hundreds of barrels of crude seep into the ocean constantly there, most of it right by UCSB. It stains the water with long streaks of gray-blue oil, much of it spreading from methane — natural gas — bubblings, some of which are trapped and captured by underwater contraptions. Also lost is the fact that offshore drilling on the West Coast contributes a trivial sum to U.S. energy independence.

Civilization is an open laboratory of trade-offs, with a time horizon that is never geological — and human only to the degree that it considers the wants of the living.

I think the best energy bargains are ones involving sun and wind. But there’s not enough of either to satisfy the energy appetites of a human population that has swelled to many billions. So we must continue to eat the Earth until its dead stuffings fail to sustain us.

After that? Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then too. Maybe some successor species will mine our cemeteries.

I’m pretty good at getting buzz when I want it. The irony of running ProjectVRM, however, is that I don’t want much of that. Not yet, anyway. About a year ago I did promote it a bit, got a lot of great response, and also spent a lot of time debugging bad understandings of what VRM is and what’s going on with it.

Since then I’ve kept a pretty low profile with it, and encouraged others to do the same. That way we get fewer people showing up, but a better chance that they’re the right people.

But still, the buzz is out there. And, since it’s a new and as yet unproven idea, it attracts detractors as well. Here’s one that lays out “four fallacies” of VRM, all based on wrong understandings of what it is, and what its roles will be. So, I just tried to debug those understandings with this post here.

As I said there, I urge folks to hold off on their judgement until we’ve got working code and actual stuff that does what VRM is supposed to do. Trust me, it’ll come.

Changes at Whitehouse.gov are the top item on Techmeme.

My tweets watching The Event:

Say Amen. about 2 hours ago from web
search isn’t working too well at http://whitehouse.gov about 2 hours ago from web
Speech text: http://tinyurl.com/9wlgax about 2 hours ago from web
This may be the greatest speech ever given about the United States. about 3 hours ago from web
“We are willing to extend a hand if you will unclench your fist.” What is this form of homiletics called? “This, then that…” about 3 hours ago from web
“the lines of tribe will soon dissolve…” whoa. about 3 hours ago from web
“We reject as false the distinction between our safety and our ideals.” Another great one-liner. about 3 hours ago from web
“the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” Well put. Hope it’s even partly true. about 3 hours ago from web
Wow. Check out http://whitehouse.gov. Change has come. Here’s the blog: http://tinyurl.com/6tdmhy about 3 hours ago from web
World’s greatest orator flubs the oath. O well. It’s cool. Roberts didn’t look like a teleprompter, I guess. about 3 hours ago from web
My attorney, to my right, says “It’s the end of an error.” about 3 hours ago from web
We’ll all remember where we were for this. The place is Together. about 3 hours ago from web
Those people have faith. Which he called “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” In this case, next 8 years. about 3 hours ago from web
The view up the mall… Stunning. about 3 hours ago from web

Not sure if that beats blogging it, but it sure was easier.

And I’m still glowing, three hours later.

[Later...] Apparently I topped the retweet radar list for a moment there. And Twitter itself peaked without pique.

My pal Erik Cecil, one of the smartest and most energetic attorneys I’ve ever known (as well as a deeply insightful dude), is now at home on the blogging range as well as the foothills of the Front Range, where he and his large family (including large dogs) live. Welcome him abroad.

JP Rangaswami: There’s a big Because Effect coming along in music. Artists are going to make more money because of music rather than with music, although they will continue to make money with music.

The path to that may just start here.

Barack Obama wants to wait on the DTV shift currently scheduled for 17 February. On the grounds that it’ll be a mess, this is a good idea. But nothing can make it a better idea. It’s not that the train has left the station. It’s that the new OTA (over the air) Oz is mostly built-out and it’s going to fail. Not totally, but in enough ways to bring huge piles of opprobrium down on the FCC, which has been rationalizing this thing for years.

I explain why in What happens when TV’s mainframe era ends next February?. Most VHF stations moving to UHF will have sharply reduced coverage. The converter shortage is just a red herring. The real problem is signals that won’t be there.

Most cable customers won’t be affected. But even cable offerings are based on over-the-air coverage assumptions. Those may stay the same, but the facts of coverage will not. In most cases coverage will shrink.

FCC maps (more here and here) paint an optimistic picture. But they are based on assumptions that are also overly optimistic, to say the least. Wilimington, NC was chosen as a demonstration market. Bad idea. One of the biggest stations there, WECT, suffers huge losses of coverage.

Anyway, it’s gonna be FUBAR in any case.

Most books come and go. Others stay — meaning that you’re likely to find them in most bookstores. Big ones, anyway. Quotable books have staying power. Especially the quotable ones that express unattainable ideals.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, it turns out, is one of those. The book hit the streets in January 2000, just in time, somebody said, to cause the dot-com crash. (I’d like to say we intended that, but if it were true I would have sold my dot-com stocks, which I didn’t. Instead I waited until their purpose in selling was reduction on captial gains for selling a house. This was back when houses could still be sold.)

I’m a born optimist, so I did expect Cluetrain to sell well. I just didn’t expect it to keep selling ten years after we first nailed up its 95 Theses on the Web. Nor did I expect writers to keep writing about it. But they have. And they do. More, it seems, than ever.

The most remarkable of the current crop is Alex Hillman’s Cluetrain-A-Day 2009, at his blog, Dangerously Awesome. His latest unpacks Thesis #5, People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice. (Context: this thesis follows #3 Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice and #4 Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.) In the post Alex answers a question that too often flummoxes me: “Name one good example of Cluetrain’s lessons put to work.” Alex offers Zappos:

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) is the proverbial “Tweeting CEO”. Beyond Tony himself being extraordinarily accessible and candid about his life and his business on Twitter, he’s gone one step further. He’s encouraged his employees to tweet, too. And not just about business stuff, but about whatever they want. Whatever they are thinking. Whatever they are doing. It’s up to them.

But Zappos didn’t stop there.

Zappos built a website that consumes all of their employees’ tweets and republishes them. A megaphone for the collective voice of Zappos employees, in real time, for anyone to read.

But Zappos didn’t stop there.

Zappos also runs a blog network within their company, with contributions from the CEO and COO, all the way through the depths of the company. These blogs share not just company news, but insights, event announcements, musings, and more. They rarely link back into their product catalog. Instead, Zappos uses these opportunities to provide value, and establish natual dialogue between their customers and their employees.

Why? Because people are interested in other people. We recognize the human voice in others, and identify with them. Companies are not human, so we humans do not identify with their voice. But if the voices within the company, the human voices, are allowed to shine, customers can once again identify with “the company”.

Rather than have an ivory tower with now windows or doors, Zappos purposely put not just one human face on their company, but hundreds (435 at the date of writing this). What are the odds of calling in an order or customer service request to Zappos and getting a twittering CSR? Reasonably high. And that’s the Zappos way. Tony explains that Zappos culture, the collective voice of Zappos, is Zappos brand.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. More importantly, I wouldn‘t have, because I’m not engaged with the marketing market the way Alex is. He’s reforming it from the inside. I left the field a long time ago. Now I cheer star performers like Alex from the stands.

Nine years ago most responses to Cluetrain were of the thumbs up or down sort. Few offered constructive follow-ups, mostly because what one could do was pretty limited. We knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore, but Oz wasn’t built out. There weren’t even witches or munchkins. Just a scattering of yellow bricks and a wide-open landscape. Nevada without Las Vegas.

Blogs were around, but still new. In fact, Dave Winer urged me mightily to start a blog during the whole summer of ‘99 when we were busy writing the book. But I didn’t relent until that Fall, when he literally sat me down and got me going with what became this blog here. Ev Williams started Blogger around that time too. Twitter (another Ev creation… lightning does sometimes strike twice, or more) came along much later. That’s why we have truly constructive Cluetrain-sourcing posts like this one by Michael Stephens, who thinks out loud, and eloquently, about libraries in an age when they are surrounded and suffused by the Net and a growing box of tools in the hands of readers.

Now here’s a fired reporter for (and now against) the Danville Register & Bee, sourcing Cluetrain in a schooling of the paper’s management.

And here’s Mirek Sopek , who blogs as the CEO of a business, saying,

This book is compulsory reading for all sales people in my company ….

See the citation:

“Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others.

The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes. “

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991

Exactly. That’s why it’s so hard to change, or even to understand change when it happens anyway. For example, many of us can say we support “Net Neutrality”, but it’s almost impossible to talk aobut it without bringing in the faming and language of telcos. Laudable as Net Neutrality may be, few of us have ever experienced it. (Most “broadband” — a telco term — is not “neutral”. It is skewed to favor some uses and discourage others.) Imagine talking about the Net in, say, 1985. “Um, it’s like AOL or Compuserve, but nobody owns it, everybody can use it and anybody can improve it.” Or consider Richard Stallman’s persistent need to explain free-as-in-freedom vs. “free-as-in-beer.” Some concepts take time to sink in, mostly because they require successful implementation, and then understanding of that success on its own terms. In the meantime, it’s explained in terms other than its own. Such is the case with both free software and Net Neutrality. In time both will be both established and well understood. (Though, speaking for myself, I think free software was better explained in the first place than Net Neutrality, but … whatever.)

Anyway, it’s all one big learning process. We educate each other.

I was just listening to this Utah Couchcast, for example. At the beginning one of the hosts suggests that Cluetrain is cyclical, coming along in booms — because Cluetrain was written during a boom. But this made me think about what seems to be a surge of recent interest in Cluetrain during a bust cycle. When we look back at Cluetrain’s success as a book, most of it came during the dot-com crash of 2000-2001.

Which brings us to the long view — something older people tend to have. (And that’s coming to include Cluetrain’s authors, two of whom have hit their sixties.) Cluetrain was diagnostic rather than prescriptive. This was intentional. One reason was time: we needed to get the book out on a tight deadline. Another was the plain and sad fact that the tools required for the revolution were not there. Some, such as blogging, were beginning to appear. But even there, syndication (another innovation by Dave) was not yet part of it. Nor was podcasting. Nor was “the cloud” of back-end services now only beginning to become widely used.

Cluetrain gets a lot of credit today for ushering in “social” stuff. That’s cool, but let’s face it: today’s “social” tools are still crude. All are miles away from whatever end states they’ll eventually reach, probably by evolving so far that they barely resemble the ancestors we use today.

All this, by the way, is a not-quick-enough brain dump as I work on a longer Cluetrain piece for print publication. Right now Google Blogsearch finds more than 50,000 results for a “cluetrain” search. Many, like the ones cited above, are too damned interesting. Collectively, they know far more about the subject than its authors, mostly because so many folks are putting Cluetrain to use somehow. In real estate, for example.

I could go on, but I have actual work to do.

So now my dream app is ready on the iPhone. It’s just the beginning of What It Will Be, but it’s highly useful. If you have an iPhone, go there and check it out. It’s free.

As you see here, I’m involved, through the Berkman Center, which is collaborating with PRX, which is working under a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Major props go to the PRX developers, who have been working very very hard on this thing. Some of the most diligent heads-down programming I’ve seen.

An interesting thing. In the old days, when an app came out, in any form, on nearly any platform, there was this assumption that it was a Done Thing, and should be critiqued on those grounds. Not the case here. This is a work in progress, and the process is open. In the long run, we should see much more opened up as well.

Paranthetically, I think right now we’re looking at some cognitive dissonance between the Static Web and the Live Web, when the latter seems to look like the former. You have a website, or an app. These seem to be static things, even when they’re live. An app like the Public Radio Tuner is more of a live than a static thing. But it’s easy, as a user, to relate to it as a static thing. Because at any one time it does have more static qualities than live ones. Imagine a house you can remodel easily and often, and at low cost and inconvenience. That’s kind of what we have here. A cross between product and process — that looks the former even when it’s doing the latter. Anyway…

Though this grant is for an iTunes app, work is sure to go on to other platforms as well — such as Android. So, rather than criticize this app for coming out first on the iPhone, please provide feedback and guidance for next steps beyond this first effort (and join me in giving the developers a high five for delivering a functional app in a remarkably short time). And in the reviews section at iTunes, provide honest and constructive reviews. At this stage I’m sure they’ll be good. (Some of the bad reviews were on the very first version released, which has since been replaced.)

To VRM followers and community members, VRM is very much on the agenda, and we’re thinking and working hard on what the VRM pieces of this will be, and how they’ll work. This may be the first piece of work where VRM components appear, and we want to do them right. Also bear in mind that this is the first step on a long, interesting and fruitful path. Or many paths. Interest and guidance is welcome there too.

“…when everyone sees Opportunity; they are only seeing the reflection. True Opportunity appears at the market bottom, not at the top.” — Peter Rip on The Coming Venture Capital Boom. Via Tim O’Reilly.

JD Lasica at Social Media has put up a list of front-line 2009 conferences.

For what it’s worth, I’ll be attending fewer of those kinds of conferences this next year, while I get more heads-down with VRM and Linux Journal work. The current calendar includes several VRM-related conferences (plus the usual IIWs), Public Media ‘09, Supernova, LinuxWorld, OSCON, Reboot and Lift. When VRM takes off, it will become a topic of other conferences as well — and that alone should push me past another 100,000 miles on United next year.

That’s actually small potatoes compared to what many other business travelers compile, especially ones who travel frequently across oceans. I flew to Europe four times last year, from Boston to London, Paris and Amsterdam (hubbing through Frankfurt, Zürich, Warsaw, Chicago and Washington). That seems like a lot, and it is; but I’m guessing that two trips from anywhere in the U.S. to anywhere in Asia would yield the same sum of miles, or more.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make travel better with VRM: by providing passengers with the tools required to improve airline service. I might have more to say about that in the next few days, or after we get back to Boston from our very pleasant family vacation in Santa Barbara. (Which is just a  paradise right now.)

Bonus link to an old but still relevant Conor Cahill post, plus the comment I just appended to it (currently pending approval):

I realize this is an old thread, but it comes up at the top of a search for United Global Services, so it’s still current in that respect.

I’ve been 1K for three years running, and flew at least two full-fare business class flights overseas from the U.S. in 2008. I’m also rather publicly a United flier, with over a dozen thousand photos taken from the windows of United planes. (Plus thousands of photos tagged United, UAL and United Airlines.)

Before that I was a Premier or Executive Premier flier on United, going back to the early 90s.

But in the current economy no clients are funding business class flying for the near future, and my total miles with United are still a bit short of a million. So I figure if I reach GS, this will have to be the year for it. Otherwise, ain’t gonna happen.

By the way, my experience with United has included nothing bad in all the time I’ve been with them. My only persistent complaint is an odd one: I don’t want upgrades to business or first class if it’s not to a window seat. I’ve been offered several upgrades this past year to aisle seats and have turned them all down. (I accepted one that did go to a window seats.) One time this past year I was upgraded to an aisle seat and it annoyed me badly because the seat I gave up in economy had a windwow. Yet I still managed to shoot this set in a hurry while the woman with the window seat next to me was asleep.

Video 1.0 is TV, low-def camcorders, VCRs, analog and HDTV as it now stands: in the form of “HD” that’s much prettier than SD but is still packed with artifacts because it flows through pipes (both wired and wireless) that limit how good it can look, and that flow only in one way: from producer to consumer. It’s everything we’ve seen up until now.

Video 2.0 is vividly described by Simon Aspinall of Cisco, who rocked Telco 2.0 last month with a vision of what TV over telecom can become. It’s also unpacked nicely in Video will be nearly 90% of Consumer IP traffic ty 2012, in the Telco 2.0 blog. Note the “to”. This is still TV. In Video 2.0, TV still predominates, even if there are a zillion “channels” and much of it is widening the sphincters of the cell phone system.

Video 3.0 is two way. Or many-way. It’s with, not just to. And its “def” is truly high, and not compromised by current channel-defined bandwidth constraints. This is what will disrupt both telecom and cablecom in a huge way, unless they get on the side of all producers — including the people they now call consumers. The opportunities here are enormous. I think telcos are especially advantaged in this sense: telephony is naturally two-way, and has been ever since the 1880s. Now is the time to think about how we return to that in a big way. Telcos may be getting hammered flat right now, but there’s a groundswell underneath there. Just watch.

There’s a good chance that the best picture you can put on your HD screen doesn’t come from your cable or satellite TV company, but from your new HD camcorder. As time and markets march on, that chance will only get larger. That’s because the there is a trade-off between the number of channels carried and the quality of each channel. That quality compression shows up as “artifacts” in the picture itself. Gradations of shading and color, such as in a blue or gray sky, turn to a mosaic of blocks. (In this shot, I show how grass on a football field has pimples.) Carriers compete more by the number of channels they carry than by the quality of each channel.(There are exceptions to this, but on the whole that’s what we’ve got.) Meanwhile your camcorder quality only goes up.

And as camcorder quality goes up, more of us will be producing rather than consuming our video. More importantly, we will be co-producing that video with other people. We will be producers as well as consumers. This is already the case, but the results that appear on YouTube are purposely compressed to a low quality compared to HDTV. In time the demand for better will prevail. When that happens we’ll need upstream as well as downstream capacity.

So here’s a piece in Broadband Reports that shows how carriers can be out of touch with the future, even as they increase the capacities of their offerings. An excerpt:

In upgraded markets, Comcast is not only upgrading existing speed tiers ($42.95 “Performance” 6Mbps/1Mbps and $52.95 “Performance Plus” 8Mbps/2Mbps tiers became 12Mbps/2Mbps and 16Mbps/2Mbps), but is adding two new tiers to the mix ($62.95 “Ultra” 22Mbps/5Mbps and the aforementioned $139.95 “Extreme 50″ 50Mbps/10Mbps).

One recurring theme we’ve seen in our forums is that the new speeds have many users downgrading. In both forum threads and polls, many customers on Comcast’s 16Mbps/2Mbps tier say they’re downgrading to their 12Mbps/2Mbps tier — apparently because they don’t think an additional 4Mbps downstream is worth $10. Customers used to be willing to pay the additional $10 for double the upstream speed, but there’s no longer an upstream difference between the tiers.

That last line is the kicker. Comcast apparently still thinks that downstream is all that really matters. It isn’t. For anybody producing a lot of photography or video, upstream not only matters more, but supports activities where the user can see the difference.

In fact there isn’t a lot of perceived difference between 12Mbps and 16Mbps on the downstream side. Either is fast enough for a YouTube video. But on the upstream side, you can see the difference. In my case, that difference appears in the progress bars for pictures I upload to Flickr.

A few months ago I upgraded my Verizon FiOS service from 20/5Mbps to 20/20Mbps. The difference was obvious as soon as it went in. The difference will be a lot more obvious to a lot more people once those people start sharing, mashing up and co-producing higher-definition videos.

Just watch.

After Murad Ahmed wrote Citizen journalists told to stop using Twitter to update on Bombay attacks in TimesOnline, and David Stephenson blogged a similar concern, Bruce Schneier responded with Communications During Terrorist Attacks are Not Bad. Specifically,

I’m sure there was wrong information coming across Twitter during recent California fires as well. But whenever bad things happen — whether caused by bad luck or bad people — good will and good people out-care and out-perform the bad.

The best mainstream media piece I’ve read yet about this topic is Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks, by Brian Setzer and Noam Cohen in the New York Times. The first four grafs:

Actually, a new medium. And a new methodology. And a new way to invest the best, far more than the worst, in human nature.

What if every product category, every business, is a bubble — and some just last longer?

We know the newspaper business was a bubble. It lasted over a century, but here we are, at the end of it. Papers will still be around, for the same reason that railroads and mainframe computers are still around. But they’ll never be what they were in their golden decades.

Television will follow. That golden age is coming to an end as well. Same with radio. These will also persist, in somewhat different forms. But the golden age is over.

I’m thinking now that we’re seeing the same thing with cars.

A few days ago I took in my old Volkswagen Passat to get the water pump replaced. Turns out lots of other stuff was worn out or broken and needed fixing too. The final bill came to around $5000, which is what I paid for the thing three years ago.

For a minute I thought about getting a new car. They’re cheaper than ever, with lots of good deals, and guarantees that would relieve me of the need to pay much for upkeep. But I decided to fix the old car instead, becuase it’s good enough. Spending $5k is better than spending $20k, especially if I don’t have to borrow the difference.

The mechanic told me his business is booming. Most car owners have awakened to the fact that cars are cars, and most of what we do with them is just drive from place to place. New cars purchases are impelled mostly by advertising and fantasy. Drive a lot of rental cars and you get hip to the obvious: the differences between cars, especially fairly new ones, isn’t large. After a few years they all plateau at a certain level of partial suckage and stay that way for the duration. You forget the quiet cabin and tight handling that turned you on in the first place. You care less about its color than just being able to find it in the parking lot. You know the noise in the heater is some rocks your kid put down the vents and won’t ever get fixed.

Now, what happens if an absence of new car fantasy prevails for the duration? What if the whole automobile business has jumped the shark, and the problem isn’t just Detroit’s?

Even if it hasn’t now, the business will falter eventually. They all do. Disruptions happen. Trees do not grow to the sky. That’s Nature’s nature, in business as well as the wilderness.

Bonus link.

Four knowing and provocative posts by Steve Lewis:

One quotable line: States are administrative inheritances from a past age and are increasingly obsolete as clusters of interests or self-identification. Applies to countries as well.

Read on.

Terry Heaton calls Keystream’s SmartAds “the dumbest idea I’ve heard in years”. What’s “smart” about SmartAds is that they appear in “blank” spaces in online videos. Those blue skies over the ocean? The wide green fairway of a golf course? The wall beside your sweetheart’s smile? Slap an ad in there. Same idea as billboards by highways, only worse, because it’s rationalized as a “dramatic improvement in user experience”. Robin Wauters at Techcrunch doesn’t like it either, and says so in Keystream Unveils SmartAd, Wants To Turn Watching Videos Into A Painful Experience.

It’s one thing to come up with a sucky advertising idea, but to fail so spectacularly at PR is two-fer of fatal dimensions.

One quibble with Robin, who writes, Obviously, there is a need to open the advertising spigot when it comes to Web videos, but this is not the way to do it. It’s 2008. Isn’t it time we thought past advertising, toward revenue models based on serving customers, rather than guessing at them?

Advertising even at its best is still guesswork. That’s the “pain point” we should be trying to relieve, and where ideas should show up that VCs can fund. Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss.

(This post began as a response to this comment by Julian Bond, in response to this post about Mad Men. When it got too long I decided to move it here.)

Smoking and drinking were standard back then. “Widespread” doesn’t cover it. They were nearly universal.

It’s easy to forget that Industry won WWII, and that the military-industrial complex crossed the whole society. All young men served in the military, either voluntarily or via the draft. Industry and its companion, Science, ruled. And — to an unhealthy degree — the former drove the latter.

Tobacco was an leading agricultural product, and cigarette manufacture was a leading industry that drove consumption through advertising so thick and ubiquitous — on TV and radio, in magazines, newspapers and on billboards — that for most people the only choice was which brand to smoke.

I remember thinking, as a child, that lighting sticks on fire and breathing the smoke was absurd and unhealthy on its face — and later being the only one of my high school friends who didn’t smoke. But I was weird. Common sense then was pro-smoking.

Drinking and driving was only a little harder to rationalize. I remember statistics that said one in twenty-five drivers at night in the U.S. were drunk.

Industry and Science also together decided, among other things, that –

• Breast feeding was bad for babies, and “formula” was better. Thank you, Nestle.
• Children at birth should be taken from their mothers and stored in nurseries.
• All boys should all be circumcised at birth. So much for the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”
• Tonsilitis” was a disease, and every severely sore throat should be treated surgically, involving removal of adenoids from the nose as well.
• Intestinal infections were likely to be appendicitis, so the appendix had to go too.
• Education is a manufacturing process, the purpose of which is to fill the empty vessels of childrens’ heads with curricula approved by the State.
• Childrens’ intelligence — their most unique and human quality — was a fixed quantity (a “quotient”) that could be measured, as if by a dipstick,  with IQ tests, so herds of students  could be sorted into bell curves to better manage their progress through systems that regarded them — with the acquiescence of themselves and their parents — as “products” of their education.

I could go on. For what it’s worth, I have my appendix, but lack tonsils, adenoids, spleen and foreskin, all of which were considered “vestigial” or otherwise bad by the medical fashions at the times of their removal. My known IQ scores have a range of 80 points. If my parents hadn’t believed in me, my low IQ and standardized test scores in the 8th grade would have shunted me to a “vocational-technical” high school to learn wood shop, auto mechanics or some other “trade”. I shall always be grateful for that.

Mad Men is close to home for me in another way: I was long in the advertising business too, though a generation after Mad Men’s time, well after the “creative” revolution of the mid- to late 60s. It was one of the great periods in my life, but I’ve moved on. Similarly, I had a hard time watching the Sopranos, because I grew up in New Jersey, knew people like those, and was not entertained.

I think drugs and self-abuse are rituals of youth rationalized in their time by a sense of exemption from the due invoice we call aging. How long before fewer people are being tatooed than those having tattoos removed? I’m giving it 20 years.

Video Is Dominating Internet Traffic, Pushing Prices Up says the headline of a piece by Saul Hansell in the New York Times. Its first three subheads say, File sharing has been usurped by legitimate video services, The very heaviest users drive up network costs and Unlimited data plans may have a limited life.

This is the wrong framing, by the wrong mentality. We’re not far from the day when most of us are “heavy users”, and when voice telephony (which has a relatively low data rate) is just one among countless data applications. It’s already that on laptops and many handheld devices (including mobiles using the likes of Fring).

In time the bulk of radio and television listening and viewing will move from analog to digital, and from broadcast bands to broadband. Some will be live, some will be stored and forwarded. Much will be mashed. Upstream needs will match downstream needs, especially for the millions who now producing as well as consuming video. Some top-down few-to-many asymmetries will persist, but many more any-to-any uses will arise, requiring symmetrical connectivity.

There are services besides raw bandwidth that can help with this — services that assist in mash-ups, that work with customers’ social graphs, that provide actual professional services (instead of higher-priced tiers that do nothing more than punish customers for saying they’re a business … a shakedown racket that should have died along with Ma Bell). There should emerge services that answer to customer-driven choices and preferences, that help demand drive supply, that support service needs in marketplaces opened by easy connectivity and fat capacity.

Carriers need to recognize that in the long run they are privileged to be in the Internet business, rather than cursed by something that undermines their old business models. They need to break out of their “triple-play” mentality and realize that on the Net there are an infinite number of “plays’, especially if those aren’t excluded by connections optimized for television or telephony, or subordinated to those other purposes.

Three things need to happen here.

But they shouldn’t wait for #3.

It finally occurs to me to turn on the TV. I’ve been listening to NPR and CNN on the laptop, with the htoel room’s flat screen blank in the corner. BBC Channel 3 is following the man we call #barackobama to the stage in Chicago.

Now Obama is speaking. We are and always will be the United States of America. With nature waving the flag behind him. Hard to blog what follows. Too choked up.

An amazing speech, as excellent as he has led us to expect. And to keep expecting.

Not a call to unite, or a command. Just an assertion spoken on coins in our pockets. e pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

0400GMT, 4am London time, seconds after the polls close on the West Coast and Hawaii (and not a vote yet reported from any of those reliably blue states) CNN calls Barack Obama the winner. On the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the NAACP, four months past the 232nd birthday of a country whose first fifteen presidents could have owned slaves, forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, an African American is being elected President of the United States.

George Will, conservative columnist and historian from Chicago, just quoted King (I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land…) in a warm and humble voice.

His quote is from King’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. It’s about history:

I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn’t stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

But I wouldn’t stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But I wouldn’t stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”

And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.

I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.

And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.

Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the salves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

After silencing the boos, John McCain gives a concesson speech for the ages. In the end McCain — a man who has given more for his country than any presidential candidate in history — expresses the kind of grace that is the true source of honor: kindness, generosity, modesty, self-sacrifice. Country First, indeed.

He talks about promise. About how Americans never quit. He places a bookend to the history that has passed since King’s speech, given in Memphis the day before being shot dead there. King’s last paragraph begins,

… I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.

And here we are.

Rich Sands posts Cluetrain Derailed? I respond here.

FORWARD WITH FIBER: An Infrastructure Investment Plan for the New Administration is my second essay at the Publius Project. The first was FRAMING THE NET.

This one is a bold proposal: putting $300 billion into bringing fiber to every possible premise in America. Unlike other proposals of this sort, this one goes out of its way to embrace rather than to exclude the phone and cable companies. It challenges them to look past “triple play”, toward supporting an infinitude of businesses and opportunities that will open up when we all break free of telecom’s regulatory boat-anchors and conceptual blinders, and start thinking about wide open connectivity and capacity as a new frontier: the 21st Century equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase. And about as cheap.

Against all the ways it might not work — expectations of government incompetence and industry provincialism correctly run high — the idea is easy to dismiss as naive. But I still think it’s worth considering.

The problem isn’t what’s wrong with the current system. It’s what’s not right with it yet. That’s where we need to start looking for solutions. And that’s the direction I’m pointing here.

After reading this comment by Jonathan MacDonald, I followed the linktrail from here to here, where dwells one of the most remarkable testimonials I’ve ever seen. One short clip:

Competitors had absolutely no idea what the secret sauce was because they were not able to see the hundreds of thousands of micro-interactions and conversations happening between staff, customers and suppliers.

Other retailers wrote vitriolic letters to the trade magazines claiming that the ‘internet’ was ‘the enemy’ and hundreds of them got into debate about ‘how to stop this online threat’.

I was centrally placed as one of these ‘new media rebels’ and even fuelled the fire by extolling the virtues of online in all trade publications whenever possible. Right in their faces.

Brilliant.

We were able to be completely disruptive and for a while we pretty much had the online market to ourselves.

After I had won the ‘Best UK Salesperson’ award in 2002 I was voted to be the Chairman of the entire UK Retail Industry Committee.

I wrote a short book called ‘Survival Guide for the 21st Century Retailer’.

And this:

By applying the principles found within the copy of the Cluetrain, especially the 95 theses (quoted from time to time in this volume), I was able to establish an almost un-beatable business. It was a business of the people. They guided the progress and determined the way they wanted it to be.

To compete, one had to not just take on our brilliant team of paid experts but the 100k+ customers who were constantly advocating our services. To hundreds and thousands of others.

We were on a path toward some form of Communication Ideal that allowed business to self-perpetuate by itself.

Our ‘marketing’ was the environment customers co-created and our ‘advertising’ was conversation.

Other retailers took out full-page adverts. We fired up a coffee machine, created forum boards and sparked up discussion.

Other retailers invested heavily to fight the trend of computers. We let customers create their own websites on our servers.

Purchases happened when purchasers wanted them to. We didn’t ask for it – people didn’t ask for it – we mutually agreed to transactions.

Clue 57 from Cluetrain states: “Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner”.

From the way people walked through the shop (on or offline) to the way they wanted to order goods – we were not solely in control. We shared control with the customers and the customers allowed us to share control with them.

And that was just in the first chapter. The story goes on, with downs (following the above) and ups.

Hope Jonathan can make it to the VRM Hub event on 3 November in London. I’ll be there, along with many others still riding the Cluetrain.

Bonus link. Another. Another.

ISPs are pressed to become child porn cops is a new MSNBC piece by Bill Dedman and Bob Sullivan. It begins,

New technologies and changes in U.S. law are adding to pressures to turn Internet service providers into cops examining all Internet traffic for child pornography.

One new tool, being marketed in the U.S. by an Australian company, offers to check every file passing through an Internet provider’s network — every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search — to see if it matches a list of illegal images.

The company caught the attention of New York’s attorney general*, who has been pressing Internet companies to block child porn. He forwarded the proposal to one of those companies, AOL, for discussion by an industry task force that is looking for ways to fight child porn. A copy of the company’s proposal was also obtained by msnbc.com…

But such monitoring just became easier with a law approved unanimously by the Congress and signed on Monday by President Bush. A section of that law written by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain gives Internet service providers access to lists of child porn files, which previously had been closely held by law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Although the law says it doesn’t require any monitoring, it doesn’t forbid it either. And the law ratchets up the pressure, making it a felony for ISPs to fail to report any “actual knowledge” of child pornography.

*That would be Andrew Cuomo.

(An appeal to journalists everywhere: When you refer to a piece legislation, whether proposed or passed, please link to the @#$% thing.)

So I looked around, and believe that the legislation in question is S.1738, described by Thomas as A bill to require the Department of Justice to develop and implement a National Strategy Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction, to improve the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, to increase resources for regional computer forensic labs, and to make other improvements to increase the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute child predators.

It was sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden and co-sponsored by 60 others, not including John McCain. But Thomas says S.519, A bill to modernize and expand the reporting requirements relating to child pornography, to expand cooperation in combating child pornography, and for other purposes, is a related bill (there are two others), and was sponsored by McCain. About that bill it says, Latest Major Action: 2/7/2007 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Note: For further action, see S.1738, which became Public Law 110-401 on 10/13/2008.

So I’ve read the text, and I see two things there. One is this Task Force business (which to me says “gather the wrong people for a noble purpose, and task them with creating a technical mandate that may not get funded, and if it does will be a huge kluge that does far less than it’s supposed to do while complicating everything it touches”). The other is a wiretapping bill for the Internet. I get that from Section 103, which says one Task Force purpose is “increasing the investigative capabilities of state and local law enforcement officers in the detection and investigation of child exploitation crimes facilitated by the Internet and the apprehension of offenders”. Hence the move by Andrew Cuomo in New York.

This is one more slippery slope at the bottom of which the Internet is just another breed of telecom service, subject to ever-expanding telecom regulation, all for Good Cause.

And we’ll see more of this, as long as we continue framing the Net as just another breed of telecom.

The Net is too new, too protean, too essential and too economically vital for it to be lashed — even by legislation that attempts to protect its virtues — to telecom law that was born in 1934 and comprises a conceptual box from which there is no escape.

Hat tips to Alex Goldman and Karl Bode.

Bonus wisdom from Richard Bennett: “The Internet is indeed the most light-regulated network going, and it’s the only one in a constant state of improvement. Inappropriate regulation – treating the Internet like a telecom network – is the only way to put an end to that cycle.”

It isn’t adveristing itself. It’s the way it’s too often done.

I almost never click on an ad, for three reasons. First is that I almost never find what I’m looking for. Second is that I don’t want to waste the advertiser’s money on a bad click-through. Third is that I’m tired of looking at so much waste of pixels, rods, cones, cycles and patience.

So, about two minutes ago I wanted to find what the sales tax is for Cambrige, MA. So I looked up sales tax cambridge, ma. At the top of the results was this sponsored link:

The first few search results didn’t look promising, so I decided to take my chances on the ad.

Wasted my time. Salestax.com redirects to a tax.cchgroup.com page that’s headed by “CorpSystem® Sales Tax Solutions, Compliance without a burden”, plus piles of sales info about CCH group products and soluitons, but nothing obvious about what I’m interested in: the advertised “Rates for specific addresses & zip codes”.

I’m not going to waste more time digging into this, or looking for other examples of the same. My point is that this is baiting and switching, and it’s not a unusual example. It’s also one more reason why I believe the advertising bubble is due to burst. There’s a limit to how much abuse, misleading and general wrong-ness we’ll put up with. This has been tested for the duration, but at some point the failures become intolerable.

And those failures are not just of performance on the sell side.

What we need is for demand to find supply, not just for supply to “drive” demand. We’re not cattle, and we don’t like being herded, even if it’s by friendly chutes like Google’s. This was true before online advertising went nuts, and it will be true after the chutes get trampled.

Two stories.

From 17 May 1999, The CRTC will not regulate the Internet.

From four days ago, CRTC to review new media broadcasting in February, and CRTC to examine broadcasting in the new media environment. (Both the same story.)

David Warren responds with Time to Say Goodbye. Sez he,

The CRTC already has powers of regulation over broadcasting content that are offensive to a free people; powers that go far beyond the simple and once-necessary task of apportioning finite broadcasting bandwidth.

Advances in technology have made it less and less necessary to impose rationing on the airwaves. We have got beyond the “rabbit ears” age. Digital technology for cable and satellite have moved far beyond this, and the Internet itself becomes capable of delivering a range of material unimagined only a generation ago. Nor is telephony what it was in past generations. The CRTC is a fossil relic from an antediluvian era.

By all means keep its archives in a museum, so that our children’s children may some day see how charmingly primitive our technology once was — in the “CReTaCeous” period of our national life, when such big blundering bureaucratic behemoths as this superannuated regulator roamed the electronic plains. But it is time now for the CRTC to become extinct.

We must demand this media censor be closed — not downsized, but permanently erased from our public life. If any remaining bandwidth tasks can be identified, they should be transferred to the secretarial pool in some corner of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The problem for the CRTC is that it does seem to frame the Net in terms of broadcast. The FCC here in the U.S. does something similar, only by framing the Net in terms of telecom. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s of the “if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” variety. Both frame the Net in terms of what they know best.

The problem is that the Net is not well defined. Go to Google and look up “The Internet is”. It’s all over the place. In Framing the Net I visited some of the reasons. But we need to go deeper and wider than the FCC or any ideological (or even rhetorical) corner can alone provide.

It’s so early. We’re so far from what the Net will be.

I was thinking this morning that it’s a shame that the term “cyberspace” has become passé. John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace said that we were creating a whole new world with the Net. This seemed true. In any case the essay changed my life. It was one of the documents that convinced me that the Net isn’t just a game-changer for everything it touches, but a subject of transcendent importance, so unique, so unlike anything that preceded it, that it wasn’t like anything. All metaphors are wrong, of course. That’s what makes them metaphors. They’re meaningful, but not accurate. Unlike simile, metaphor doesn’t say this is like that. It says this is that. Time is money. Life is travel. The Net is place. Or space. Or pipes. Or a service. I liked cyberspace because denoted a new kind of space, one with its own nature, its own new rules.

Could it be we’re all both right and wrong about it? If so, wouldn’t it be better not to regulate it as a breed of broadcast, or telecom, or whatever?

Anyway, I’m out of time here. Just wanted to dump this out of my brain while it was rattling around in there.

Steve Lewis writes, Obama’s “Homeostasis”: It must be the Roedjak! — a deep and wonderful detour from the usual punditry about a candidate’s temperament, informed by Steve’s years working in Indonesia, as well as his exposure to many countries and cultures unfamiliar to most Americans. I hope Steve doesn’t mind my lifting most of his post to repeat here. Dig:

So far, Obama’s seeming detachment has been exploited by his opponents as proof that “we don’t know who he his” or as a sign of his supposed smugness and intellectual superiority.  And, for, quite a number of Democrats Obama’s politeness and fixed smile are an unsettling suggestion of a lack of the politically requisite instinct to go for the jugular.  I would suggest something quite different and far more positive … namely, that Obama knows how to eat Roedjak.

Roedjak is an Indonesian fruit salad, slices of not yet fully ripened tropical fruits served with a sauce of sweet thick soy ketjap, tamarind paste, crushed chili papers, and a dash of dried dessicated shrimp.  Roedjak’s harmonic fusion of superficially contradictory tastes is more than culinary.  Roedjak restores equilibrium even while exciting the senses.  Preparing and eating Roedjak is a tonic during moments of personal emotional turmoil; domestic disagreements and work conflicts are calmed by sharing Roedjak when tensions to escalate. On the symbolic level, Roedjak embodies all that is positive of the values and social mores of southeast Asia.

Political commentators — other than those Republican cranks who have accused Obama of having attended fundementalist Muslim Koranic schools — have overlooked the “Indonesian” facet of the Democratic presidential candidate, his formative years on the island of Java, and his being a member of a family with Indonesian connections as well as Kansan and Kenyan ones.

In Java, outward emotional evenness and display of respect are inherent to the workings of families and of villages.  Frontal confrontations are avoided and adversaries are given room to retreat.  Such stances are central to the the stylized conventions of Java’s traditional complexly hierarchical society and to the realities of domestic, social, and political life on an overpopulated agrarian island and in crowded mega-cities such as Jakarta.

On the surface, Java is devoutly Muslim but Javanese Islam rests on older strata of Hindu and Buddhist culture.  The characters of the Buddha and of the heroes of the Bhagavad Gita still resonate as strongly as those of the Prophet Mohammed and Ali.  In Java, one learns that displays of restraint are incumbent on leaders and are signs of strength in people at all levels of society.

And so, for the sake of the US and the world, I’d rather see the American presidency in the hands of a Roedjak eater than a heart-beat away from the rule of an eater of mooseburgers.  Join me for a mango, anyone?

I dunno if Roedjak explains Obama, but I do like getting an interesting new angle on an exceptional man.

In Defense of Piracy is Lessig’s latest, in The Wall Street Journal. Some bottom lines:

Specifically, deregulate amateur remix, deregulate “the copy“, simplify, restore efficiency, and decriminalize Gen-X. Under “simplify”, he says, “Tax-code complexity regulating income is bad enough; tax-code complexity regulating speech is a First Amendment nightmare.”

All helpful reform fodder for the new Congress and Administration.

Banning Copyright Infringers from the Internet : a View from Europe is the subject of a luncheon talk at the Berkman Center, going on right now. (Webcast live.) At issue is a new French regulation that would block copyright infringers from using the Net (as if this were enforceable). It’s an EU hot potato right now. Of course the proposal is completely wacky, as Professor Jacques de Werra is busy making clear, though very fairly and thoroughly.

Here’s Cory on the matter.

I’m tellin’ ya, when all you’ve got is a slammer, everyone looks like a prisoner.

Is there anything more phallic than a skyskraper? Other than, like, the Real Thing?

Anyway, Sky News reports plans in Dubai to build a skyscraper more than 1km in height. A kilometer is 3281 feet or so. That’s a lot taller than the .818 km (2,684 ft) Burj Dubai, currently around 707m high, and the record-holder.

The builder is Nakheel, he same outfit that makes palm-shaped islands and such. The site at that link has annoying music and nothing about The Plan, but I’m sure it’ll show up.

They say it’ll take ten years to build. Those of us who watched the World Trade Center go up (from ‘65-74) recall a similar time frame.

You don’t have to wonder what The Point is. That’s what they’re building.

I was just standing on line at a Starbucks where the entire conversation, involving everybody in the line, was about their iPhones. Two topics: operations and applications. Operations was about managing battery life and connectivity by manipulating settings. Applications was about everything: Who has what and recommends what.

The lesson: this is a data device: a hand-held apps-runner. The apps can be anything. What matters most is what gets used most. Maps and navigation appeared to be a big one. We are now blue dots on the surface of Google’s World.

For now. Perspective: The iPhone is a window into The Future, even if (as am I ) you are creeped out by one company controlling everything. The iPhone is a prototype.

I really want to see what can be done with an Android.

Bonus fun.

In his comment here, Mike Warot encourages me — and the rest of us — to watch this video by Karl Denninger, whose blog is here.

I did. It’s good. But I’m not sure Denninger is right. Or all-right, let’s say. Just somewhat.

Here’s the problem as I currently see it. (And I’m no economist. This is just me, one citizen trying to make sense of something that I’ve hardly paid attention to in the past. So take this with an acre of salt if you like.)

Yes, the system is rigged and corrupt. Yes, the Fed and Treasury have been messing up for decades. (As Kevin Phillips will tell you.) Yes, federal power has gone over the top here. Whoever heard of the Office of Thrift Supervision before it swooped in and sold WaMu to JP Morgan Chase? At least there’s some common sense involved with banking, and “trift” (a term that now feels euphemistic in a statist way, like “corrections”). Banking got sucked into runaway shell games, in which empty vessels multiplied and divided, as whole institutions with MBA-packed buildings grew to manage and manipulate them. Solidity and liquidity were both replaced by gasseosity — but in sectors of Xtreme Arcana that nobody outside fully understood. Thus we’ve had inflation for years, and have put off facing it, because it was hidden and the System seemed to be working.

Meanwhile the whole country became infected with the sickness of making money only for its own sake, backed by little resembling work or manufacture — a trend we’ve been seeing since the Carter administration.

The “free market” in finance has always been rigged by its Alpha beasts, its lobbied legislators and its regulators, to favor growth. But lost in this long round has been elementary horse sense about what’s actually valuable, what actually produces goods and services, what’s free and what’s not. Growth in this long round has had many costs, and we’re not even close to visiting all of them.

Perhaps it’s in our nature, with economic evidence going back to tulip bulbs. But I think it goes deeper than that. Our species pestilential and rapacious on a scale the planet has never seen before. It can rationalize chewing irreplaceable valuables out of the ground and seas, using them up and spreading its wastes everywhere. This cost-blind nature — is made manifest in a financial system that best rewards games built on games that are almost nothing but rationalizations — worse, of a sort that only its rationalizers can understand. The financial sector has become a casino in which the highest rollers have bought the house and rigged every game to pay off by splitting winnings to bet on other rigged games, while the rest of us say “Great!”, because we’re in there playing too: betting on worthless stocks, buying overpriced houses on easy credit with negative equities, running up credit card bills while thinking nothing of paying monthly interest rates north of 20%.

This “free market” was a free-for-all in which even its hands-off regulators participated. All while the country went from being the world’s leading manufacturer and creditor to the world’s leading out-sourcer and debtor — with the load now running into the dozens of trillions of dollars. Remember that we voted for the people who presided over that.

It’s tempting to blame and punish, but that isn’t what we need now. What we need is for credit to keep moving while the financial sector gradually shrinks to sane dimensions, with value that rises from 1/1 relationships between reality and perception — or at least a fair chance that good ideas will turn into good business. (I don’t want to throw smart investor babies out with the dumb investor bathwater.)

I don’t know if this $.7 trillion bill will do that. I do have a strong hunch about what will happen if it doesn’t. Or if we do nothing and let nature take its course. The entire financial sector will collapse, and the government won’t be able to print enough money to pay off its own and everybody else’s creditors, starting with China. Businesses of all kinds will close, and all but a few public utilities will cease to run smoothly. With weak manufacturing, absent small farming and other graces of traditional functioning societies, we’ll fall into a depression as bad or worse than the Great one. Cities will fail and crime will go rampant. And we’ll bore our grandchildren with stories of what it was like to hike ten miles through the snow to work at the only shit jobs that were left.

I believe this is what Warren Buffett also sees when he compares the current crisis to Pearl Harbor. I believe Buffett because he got wealthy by being sensible and prudent, and very much not of a type with those that have made a mess of the financial system.

Or so it seems to me on a Sunday morning just short of the precipice.

Oh, and I don’t hear either candidate talking about what’s really going on here. Nor do I expect them to.

Dave supports the bail-out, which many are calling the Splurge. At this point, so do I. That puts me in the company of Warren Buffett and detaches me from Kevin Phillips, who says (below) that it won’t work. Elsewhere Kevin says it just cuts off one tentacle of an octopus. Maybe he’s right. From this report, it appears that McCain and some Republicans agree.

I trust Buffett. His wealth is a red herring here. What matters are his insight, intelligence, and ability to perform for stockholders — qualifications that are beyond dispute. Buffett knows better than anybody how the system works, how it’s broken — and (surely) how to make money on the upswing that inevitably follows the current collapse.

If Obama and Bush are together on this, so be it. Hey, maybe tonight we’ll have a real debate between Splurge (Obama/Bush/Buffett) and Purge (McCain/Phillips). Doesn’t look like it, but if both men are in command of their facts and ideas, it would help the country.

[Later...] Cool: looks like the debate will happen. More from the NYTimes.

A little prep from Sara Silverman.

The other day I was sitting in the company of leaders in one industrial category. (I won’t say which because it’s beside the point I want to make.) A question arose: Why are there so few visitors to our websites? Millions use their services, yet few bother with visiting their sites, except every once in awhile.

The answer, I suggested, was that their sites were buildings. They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit. They were necessary and sufficient for the old Static Web, but lacked sufficiency for the Live one.

The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.

The Live Web isn’t just built. It grows, adapts and changes. It’s an environment where we text and post and author and update and tweet and syndicate and subscribe and notify and feed and — and yell and fart and say wise things and set off alarms and keep each other scared, safe or both. It’s verbs to the Static Web’s nouns. It is, in a biological word that has since gone technical, generative. And thus it calls Whitman to mind:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess
the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…
there are many millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books.

You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me.
You shall listen to all sides and filter them for yourself…

I have heard what the talkers were talking.
The talk of the beginning and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance…
Always substance and increase,
Always a knit of identity… always distinction…
always a breed of life.

This is what I see when I look at Twitter Search. It’s what I see in my aggregator, in FriendFeed, in Technorati and Google Blogsearch (and in feeds for keyword searches of both), in IM and Skype, in the growing dozens of live apps — for weather, sports, radio and rivers of news — on my phone. And when I watch myself and others mash and mix those together, and pipe one into another.

And I say all this knowing that most of what I mentioned in that last paragraph will be old hat next week, if not next month or next year. C’est la vie.

Speaking of this week, I just discovered Google InQuotes via one or more of the Tweeters that I follow. And it struck me that the reason Microsoft has trouble keeping up with Google is as simple as Live vs. Static. Google gets the Live Web. Microsoft doesn’t. Not yet, anyway. It’s comfortable in the static. It’s cautious. It doesn’t splurge on give-aways because it doesn’t know that life is one long give-away in any case. We’re born with an unknown sum of time to spend and we’ve got to dump it all in the duration. That’s why now is what matters most. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, John Lennon said. The game of business is the game of life.

Years ago somebody said that everybody else was playing hockey while Bill Gates was playing chess. I think now the game has changed. I think now the game isn’t a game. It’s just life. The Web is alive. It’s a constantly changing and growing environment comprised of living and static things. Meanwhile what Dr. Weinberger said long ago still applies: …companies so lobotomized that they can’t speak in a recognizably human voice build sites that smell like death.

I don’t think Microsoft is dead, or even acting like it. Nor do I think Google is unusually alive. Just that Google is especially adapted to The Live Web while Microsoft seems anchored in the static. As are most other companies and institutions, frankly. Nothing special about Microsoft there. Just something illustrative. A helpful contrast. Perhaps it will help Microsoft too.

If you want to participate in the Live Web, you can’t just act like it. You have to jump in and do it. Here’s the most important thing I’ve noticed so far: it’s not just about competition. It’s about support and cooperation. Even political and business enemies help each other out by keeping each other informed. There may be pay-offs in scarcity plays, but the bigger ones emerge when intelligence and good information are shared, right now. And archived where they can be found again later. All that old stuff is still nourishment.

Veteran readers know I’ve been talking about The Live Web for years. (And credit goes to my son Allen for coming up with the insight in the first place, more than five years ago.) I think Live vs. Static is a much more useful distinction than versions. (Web 1.0, 2.0, etc.) Hey, who knows? Maybe it’ll finally catch. It seemed to in the room where I brought it up.

By the way, a special thanks to Robert Scoble, Laura Fitton, and the audience at our panel at BlogWorld Expo for schooling me about this (whether they knew it or not). I got clues galore out of that, and I thank the whole room for them. (Hope the video goes up soon. You’ll see how it went down. Good stuff.)

Bonus link.

Chris Carfi: The customer really is in going to be in control. Deal with it.

Sitting in a bar raised above the gambling floor at the MGM Grand, killing some fizzy water on ice while clearing time for my room to be cleaned. The bar is comfortable, with thick carpeting and heavy drapes pulled back to view rows of machines where patrons pour coins into slots. I haven’t heard the sound of coins pouring into trays yet. Do they still have that? I wouldn’t know. I hate to gamble on anything that’s not only stacked against me, but where I don’t control at least some of the odds. And I don’t get the thrill either. But hey, that’s me.

I also don’t get the appeal of cigarette smoke. I grew up at a time when smoking was standard. My father was a heavy smoker, and I’m sure our house and car stank of it, but I don’t remember. I do remember hating it, and vowing that I would never take up the habit. (And I never did.) Meanwhile I lived with it, as do all people in cultures such as this casino, where smoking is the rule rather than the exception. Back home in Boston and California, I live and work in places where smoking is exceptional, exiled to the outdoors or to “designated smoking areas”. That’s why I picked out my own little “designated nonsmoking area” in a corner of this bar, as far as I can get from other patrons, about half of which are either smoking or have packs and lighters parked next to their drinks.

I think in the long run smoking will become a fringe practice. Even in Europe and Asia, where smoking is still standard, the percentages of people who smoke will come down, both for the obvious reasons and because in the long run rationalizations tend to fail. Think of smoking as a bubble that will eventually burst and crash.

We’re only beginning to face the problems exposed by the failures of giant financial institutions such FreddieMac, FannieMae, Bear Stearns and AIG — and government bail-outs backed by the continuing ability to borrow from China and other creditor nations. Of which we used to be the biggest. Quite the opposite now.

If you’re looking for a far-sighted bubble-burster, Kevin Phillips is your man. He launched his career as a Senior Strategist for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. There he led Nixon’s successful “southern strategy” and followed that with The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969. In that book he not only predicted forty years of future, but named the Sun Belt as well. His latest book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, which Tim Rutten in the LA Times calls “a rhetorical shot across the bow of the current presidential campaign, which Phillips convincingly argues is failing to address the causes and implications of our current distress”.

Here he is on Chris Lydon’s Open Source program, on May 8 of this year:

About “financialization”, he says,

Not that Phillips thinks the Democrats are any better. About Paul Krugman, for example, he says,

As for Obama, he says “I don’t think he’s raised enough of these issues to have a mandate… They’re not acting now like people who understand that there’s a problem.”

He also adds, “That clearly goes for the Republicans. It’s hard to believe McCain. His economic program is almost a non-program.” That’s on top of George W. Bush: “I don’t want to do another number on George W. after American Dynasty, but he’s the wrong person at the wrong time andin the wrong place — and unqualified essentially for having been president of the United States during these eight years.

I could go on, but a bunch of smokers just parked at the tables on either side of me, and I’m sure my room is done now. Meanwhile, go check out that podcast.

In response to my last political post, the subject of High Road vs. Low Road was brought up. One comment suggested that I thought Obama’s was the former while McCain’s was the latter. In fact I was suggesting that both roads were tactics used by both candidates, and that I feared the election would be won and lost, as it usually is, by fighting along the low road to election day.

My current favorite reporting about road-taking comes from the St. Petersburg Times, which keeps up with both campaigns via the Politifact.com Truth-o-Meter. To each statement by each candidate and their campaigns (including emailings by candidates and parties), they sort statements into True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and Pants on Fire. Currently those3 sort out this way :

Some of the rulings are generous. For example, they found Sarah Palin’s claim that she put the state’s jet up for sale on eBay is true, even though it wasn’t sold on eBay.

As H.L. Mencken said, Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar. (More good quotes — all correct — here.*)

For what it’s worth, I favor Obama for two main reasons. One is that I’d rather see the country run on the ethics of empathy rather than those of fear. The other is that McCain and Palin are both warriors at heart (McCain was ready for war with Iraq right after 9/11, and Palin preached that the Iraq war was part of God’s “plan”) — and we’ve had eight bad years of that already.

I also think Obama is more likely to nominate top-notch non-ideological judges and to reform government in general. Also that he is less likely to screw up the Internet, which is the single best thing the world has going for itself. Finally, that he’ll restore the faith of the rest of the world in the sanity of the U.S. electorate and its government.

As for the economy, I think McCain understands the private sector — and the good it does — far better than Obama. If I were voting by my economically consevative and Libertarian sympathies alone, I’d favor McCain. But this election isn’t about that. This election is about throwing the old bums out and trying some new ones.

Back to the War Issue.

A few decades back Penelope Maunsell said of a former employer that “His management style was to find a problem and intensify it”. Same goes for politicians. There are exceptions, but that’s close to a rule.

I don’t doubt that John McCain is a first-rate military man. His experiences as a prisoner of war obviously strenghtened his character and equipped him with a high degree of sympathy for those suffering injustice, as well as for members of the armed forces. But John McCain shared with George W. Bush the urge to solve the problem of terrorism with the use of force, and lots of it. I don’t doubt that this response was exactly what Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders were looking for.

Even if the Surge is working (and I’m inclined to agree that, on the whole, it is), that does not excuse McCain from having supported the Iraq War in the first place. That war has not only killed countless thousands (beyond the counted thousands of our own casualties), but put the country terribly in debt, weakened our military positions elsewhere, and diminished our reputation throughout the world. It was strategically wrong, in a huge way. McCain’s bad judgement on this count alone is reason enough not to elect him.

[Later...] Calvin Dodge points to RedState’s take on FactCheck.org’s take on Palin’s acceptance address.

“We need solar power as cheap as paint, and a way to store it.” Overheard in conversation today. Just wanted to get it down.

Marc Canter and family stopped by a couple days ago, and everybody had a lot of fun. Naturally we talked shop as well. In the midst Marc shared a one-liner that I love: “Open is the new black”.

Which brings me to Google Earth. I have more than 22 thousand photos on Flickr. Of those, more than 6.5 thousand are tagged “aerial”. If I had the time or energy I’d go back and give another few thousand the same tag.

Yet, far as I know, I can’t add any of these to Google Earth — at least not in the way that Panoramio shots get added. Panoramio is a cool service, but its feature set is small compared to Flickr’s, and less appealing to me as both a photographer and a geology and geography freak. I’d much rather upload shots to Flickr than to place them on Google Earth (or any mapping service) using open APIs.

Yet, far as I know, I can’t (with Google Earth, that is). That’s how it looked the last time I tried to make a go of it. (Also, Google Earth doesn’t like aerial photos, which also isn’t helpful, especially in places where its own resolution is low.)

Anyway, I’m not here to carp about Google Earth, which is one of the most amazing and helpful programs ever. I’m here to carp about exclusivities. Services such as these should be maximally mashable. By favoring Panoramio over Flickr (and other services like it), Google does neither Panoramio nor Google Earth any favors. In fact it isolates both from competitive pressures that would lead to improvements in their own code and in the marketplace.

Adam Fields and Barry Welford have convinced me to try making a habit of searching with Clusty. No time to put together a research-driven case, but so far I find myself liking the results.

That said, I’ve felt from the beginning that search has always been something of a kluge required by the absence of a real directory for the Web — one to which anybody can add anything in a durably findable way. That’s why I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of XRI/XDI since I first heard about it.

Someday somebody is going to base a deeply cool and useful product or service on XRI/XDI standards — an invention that mothers necessity for the standard. Just watch.

Just so I don’t lose them…

• A Podcast of Prophesy on the death of TV-as-we-know it on Feb 17, 2009. Background
• Clips shot by Christian Einfelt in 2004, toward his Digital Tipping Point documentary-in-progress: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. They’re all from one long interview with Christain, and they’re all in this corner of the Internet Archive.

I was 4.5 years younger when that interview was shot, at a Linux Desktop Summit near San Diego. I haven’t watched more than a few of the clips, but I doubt I’d change much if anything of what I said back then. I was talking about what was happening to the software industry over a long period of time. Those trends were clear to me then and clearer to me now.

So, if you want to save yourself thousands in consulting fees, or millions you might risk wasting on proprietary lock-ins, give them a look.

A wise warning from Shelley Powers:

The trick for carriers is not to protect doomed business models, but to pursue benefits to incumbency other than trapping and milking customers the usual way.

The Net is a sea of bits: a rising tide that lifts all but the boats that defy its nature. The carriers have enormous advantages here, and not just in billing out the usual scarcities, or leveraging the lame assumptions all carriers, cable included, inherit from the late Ma Bell.

For example, I have Verizon FiOS at my apartment in Boston. I get 20Mb of symmetrical service for about $65 a month. On top of that they offer some premium services, only one of which I want: offsite backup. I’d try to get it, but there’s no link to the service on that page; just a promo. So I’ll give up on that for the moment (I’m in Santa Barbara anyway) while I point to the Verizon FiOS Internet for Business pricing page. Here the prices start at levels much higher than home pricing. What’s the difference? I can see reasons for charging a bit more, but why that much? How much business does this kind of Old Skool captive-market tiering prevent rather than encourage?

For that matter, why should my Internet service take a back seat to television, which soaks up most of my actual fiber-to-the-home bandwidth. Says here that’s 2.4Gb downstream and 1.4Gb upstream. Most of the downstream is devoted to live TV that I don’t watch. Most of the upstream is wasted.

Think about what could be done with that capacity. Don’t think about any business that now exists, much less of protecting it. Just think about what new uses and businesses could grow in those wide-open spaces. Think about how those new businesses would justify even more fiber-to-the-home build-out by Verizon and everybody else.

During the long drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara yesterday we looked forward to vegging on the couch and taking in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, recorded earlier but presented in prime time by NBC on its local affiliates.

With our nice Sony flat screen, fed by our top-end Dish Network receiver, we figured to be watching the show in high-def. But Dish wasn’t obliging. Seems that getting the locals up in HD is a bit of a chore. Dish doesn’t publish a schedule for that, but DirecTV does. Here’s the list of 150 markets where DirecTV will be introducing local HD channels to the whole HD line-up, gradually, month by month. Santa Barbara’s not on it. Being the number 200-something market, we’re pretty far down the priority list. Since DirecTV and Dish compete pretty much across the board, I’m sure Dish will be just as slow at getting those to us.

To Dish’s credit, my call for help got escalated to a high-level support person who was far more helpful than the first person I talked to. He said that a steady fiber-optic link had to be established between each local affiliate and Dish’s uplink center near Denver. This takes time, and accounts for the hold-up.

Turns out CNBC and USA have a lot of Olympics coverage too; but not, apparently, of the opening ceremonies. Not that I could tell, anyway.

Some of the time we can get HDTV over the air from San Diego and Tijuana, which are more tan 200 miles away, across the open Pacific. But last night (only a few hours ago as I write this) only the ABC signal came in. NBC is the Olympics network, and the San Diego NBC affiliate, KNSD, wasn’t there. (Over-the-air (OTA) digital transmission is kinda binary. You get it or you don’t.)

Our “local” NBC affiliate is KSBY from San Luis Obispo. Its low-def signal on Channel 6 is a long way off in any case, and at the end of its journey here slams into the 4000-foot high Santa Ynez mountains. The station’s HD signal, on UHF channel 15, might as well be coming from Alaska, since UHF signals don’t travel nearly as well as VHF (channels 2-13).

So we settled for KSBY’s low-def picture, which reaches us by a route that leaps mountains by running a 50,000 mile route from San Luis Obispo to Denver to a satellite over the equator and then down to us here in Santa Barbara.

It’s all actually a pretty messy system, considering.

And I’m expecting it to get a lot messier after next February 17th.

Here’s a photo tour of another Channel 6 transmitter site, also doomed to go dark in February.

During the long drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara yesterday we looked forward to vegging on the couch and taking in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, recorded earlier but presented in prime time by NBC on its local affiliates.

With our nice Sony flat screen, fed by our top-end Dish Network receiver, we figured to be watching the show in high-def. But Dish wasn’t obliging. Seems that getting the locals up in HD is a bit of a chore. Dish doesn’t publish a schedule for that, but DirecTV does. Here’s the list of 150 markets where DirecTV will be introducing local HD channels to the whole HD line-up, gradually, month by month. Santa Barbara’s not on it. Being the number 200-something market, we’re pretty far down the priority list. Since DirecTV and Dish compete pretty much across the board, I’m sure Dish will be just as slow at getting those to us.

To Dish’s credit, my call for help got escalated to a high-level support person who was far more helpful than the first person I talked to. He said that a steady fiber-optic link had to be established between each local affiliate and Dish’s uplink center near Denver. This takes time, and accounts for the hold-up.

Turns out CNBC and USA have a lot of Olympics coverage too; but not, apparently, of the opening ceremonies. Not that I could tell, anyway.

Some of the time we can get HDTV over the air from San Diego and Tijuana, which are more tan 200 miles away, across the open Pacific. But last night (only a few hours ago as I write this) only the ABC signal came in. NBC is the Olympics network, and the San Diego NBC affiliate, KNSD, wasn’t there. (Over-the-air (OTA) digital transmission is kinda binary. You get it or you don’t.)

Our “local” NBC affiliate is KSBY from San Luis Obispo. Its low-def signal on Channel 6 is a long way off in any case, and at the end of its journey here slams into the 4000-foot high Santa Ynez mountains. The station’s HD signal, on UHF channel 15, might as well be coming from Alaska, since UHF signals don’t travel nearly as well as VHF (channels 2-13).

So we settled for KSBY’s low-def picture, which reaches us by a route that leaps mountains by running a 50,000 mile route from San Luis Obispo to Denver to a satellite over the equator and then down to us here in Santa Barbara.

It’s all actually a pretty messy system, considering.

And I’m expecting it to get a lot messier after next February 17th.

Here’s a photo tour of another Channel 6 transmitter site, also doomed to go dark in February.

My Wikipedia entry is once again the stub it was. The threatening stuff at the top of the page is gone. The deletion debate page is now archived. At the top it says,

I’m not sure what “clear case of snow” means. Is it that there were twelve votes to keep the entry and none for deletion? Or is it wikipedia-speak for something else? No matter. I’m glad the entry was saved, and grateful to the folks who helped save it — both on that page and in comments elsewhere. Much appreciated.

I used to think I should do more writing and editing in Wikipedia; to put my shoulder to the vast wheel of a project from which I draw many benefits and contribute almost nothing. I know lots of well-sourced material I could bring to many subjects, and I could help with copy editing on many more. In fact I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but editing poorly-written articles on Wikipedia. So could lots of other people.

I hate to say it, but there are more highly leveraged things I can do. Most of those involve writing as well — writing that’s mine and not anybody else’s. I turned sixty-one last week. While I have just as much energy and drive as I’ve ever had, I also know that I’m ratcheting down the short end of life’s stick. I need to do more of something I’ve always sucked at: investing my time wisely and deliberately, even as I continue to enjoy spelunking down the digressive tunnels of my insatiable curiousity about damn near everything. As digressive intellectual tunnels go, Wikipedia has no rivals in the online world. Among those digressions is figuring out how Wikipedia works, and how to participate in a fully engaged and meaningul way. I feel like I need to be a lawyer to figure out all the rules.

So here’s what I’ve learned and now need to put to work.

First, I need to write newspaper op-eds. Here’s a good one by Dan Gillmor that ran the other day in the San Francisco Chronicle. And here’s another, by David Weinberger, in the Boston Globe. I should follow their lead.

Second, I should start writing books. For real. Since Cluetrain came out, Chris Locke and David Weinberger have put out two books apiece. Me: none. I’ve been accumulating text toward The Giant Zero, which is about the Net and its infrastructure (which I believe is inadequately understood — by everybody, including myself). I’m part of an offline community that’s working toward establishing a think tank or an academic center (like Berkman and CITS) we’re calling the Internet Infrastructure Institute. A lot of the writing is excellent fodder toward that book. My corpus of writing for Linux Journal contains more than enough material to gather into a book. There’s also the history quietly being made by the VRM community as we work toward giving customers far more power in the marketplace (among other good things).

So the will and the ways are there. I just need to make the time and use it wisely. Advice is welcome, because I’m sub-optimal at both.

Do any of ya’ll have an HD radio? If so, whaddaya think?

If not, what are the chances you’ll ever get one?

Bonus link.

I woke up with the song “Sixteen Candles” running through my mind. I didn’t get the dyslexic pun until I realized that I turn sixty-one today. Technically, I’ve got several more hours at sixty, since I’m writing this at 6:22, and I was born at about 11am (at Christ Hospital in Jersey City).

In an unrelated matter, last night I attended an Obama gathering in Boston that was enjoyable except to the degree that three followers of Lyndon LaRouche kept bending conversation sideways toward their own ideological vectors.

When the evening was ending, I stood outside talking with one of the three (who had been told to leave by one of the meeting’s organizers). At first I thought we could have a conversation, but it wasn’t possible. The guy was not only convinced absolutely of his own (and presumably LaRouche’s) rightness, but resolutely paranoid. (Later he gave me a small pile of LaRouche literature. Not surprisingly, it was thick with paranoia.)

Aside from the nature of his opinions, I found it sad that a mind so young was so completely closed.

I remember realizing, at about age sixteen or younger, that I would never know everything, and that I should always stay curious about the world and open to facts that challenge my opinions. One might think that this would get harder as one gets older, but it doesn’t. It gets easier.

We need our opinions, our certitudes, our belief systems. Can’t get along without them. But even belief systems need new information. Being right is overrated. Being open is essential if we wish to grow as human beings. At any age.

Opening the Cellwaves.

Since last Wednesday I’ve been on the road, mostly hanging out at my aunt’s house in Maine. She’s way back in the woods, with a satellite Net connection that features a minimum of 7% packet loss (and >1 sec latencies), plus cell service that’s spotty at best. I was there to do other things anyway, mainly enjoying visits with the extended family and celebrating my father’s 100th birthday. (Much enjoyable time was spent there scanning very old photos of my father and his ancestors’ family members.)

Anyway, I’m back in Cambridge now, getting back to work on many things at once.

On the health front, it’s important to report that I’m fine now. Fifteen pounds lighter and feeling better than I’ve felt in a long time. People keep asking, so I thought blogging about it would help.

Missing Code Challenge is my latest at Linux Journal. One excerpt:

Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books, via Kevin Kelly:

Kevin, continues, riffing off other Freeman insights from the same piece:

His bottom line:

After reading this, I wonder whether caring and generosity come into play here. Becuase those are not reckoned with the logic of exchange and transaction employed by most economic arguments. What we do for love tends not to involve exchange. The purest forms of love are what we do without expectation or desire for payback. This is the kind of love we give our spouses, our children, our good friends. As St. Paul said (and says again and again at countless weddings), love does not “seek its own interests”. It does not boast. It is “patient and kind”.

There is a morality to exhange, to cost/benefit/risk-threshold economics. This is the morality of accounting, by which we repay debts and owe favors. It is the morality of fairness, of rules in sports and business contract. It is the morality of Lady Justice, holding her scales.

But the morality of accounting is different than the morality of love, which is found most abundantly in relationship. Wise teachers, religious and otherwise, have been inveighing for the duration on behalf of a larger kind of love, in which we give to strangers, or even enemies, what we give to those we know and care about. It is embodied in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, in the atheist Kurt Vonegut’s “You’ve got to be kind!” — and, most appropriately to the topic a hand, Hafez’ famous passage:

Urgings to extend selfless love to the world — to extend one’s relationship beyond the scope of the familiar and the desired — have fallen on deaf ears for the whole of human existence.

Though not entirely, or we wouldn’t have religion. It’s there in the “compassion and mercy” of karuna, the “universal love” of Mohism, the “giving without expecting to take” (via Rabbi Dressler) of Judaism. And, as Freeman points out, in environmentalism.

Is selfless love by definition religious? That might be one reason Freeman assigns environmentalism to the “high moral ground”.

Either way, we need it. The environment itself provides a long and endless record of vast changes and stunning catastrophes. Twenty thousand years ago, the northern ice cap sat like a large white hat on the Earth. Snow dumped on its middle pressed its bulk edgeward, like dough spreading under a roller. The ice picked up and crushed mountains, scraping the shattered remains across landscapes, carving grooves and lakes and fjords. At its edges were dumped the rocks and soil that today bear the names Long Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. The hills of Boston and the islands in its bay are mostly drumlins left by the glacier. Likewise all the inland ponds began as melted landlocked icebergs.

The Great Lakes are puddles left by the same ice cap, revealed as that cap shrank, between 14,000 and 9,000 years ago. The cap is still shrinking, revealing more of Canada every year. While what’s left of it may be melting faster than expected, we’re dealing with a trend that’s been going on for longer than humans have been walking on the Americas, which began in what is essentially the geologic present.

Human despoilation of the planet is a catastrophe that happens to coincide with the end of an ice age. Regardless of what or whom we blame, Antactica will continue to shrink, Greenland will continue to melt, and the seas will continue to rise. Compared to what’s coming, Katrina was just a hint.

As the police chief said to the captain in Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”.

Noah Brier has an interesting post titled Metcalfe’s Plateau, which he describes as –

In it he cites a variety of sourses, including quotage from Bob Metcalfe, Paul Saffo and Clay Shirky’s A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. Here’s that excerpt:

Good stuff. I responded with a comment that is currently in moderation, while Noah (we hope) figures out it’s not spam. (And he’s right: having to do that is a big value-subtract.) Meanwhile, I thought I’d go ahead and post my comment here. It goes –

And with that I’m outa here. Should be landing at Logan around midnight, and in Cambridge for most of the rest of the month.

What happens after TV’s mainframe era ends next February? That’s the question I pose in a long essay by that title (and at that link) in Linux Journal.

It’s makes a case that runs counter to all the propaganda you’re hearing about the “digital switchover” scheduled for television next February 17.

TV as we know it will end then. It’s worse than it appears. For TV, at least. For those already liberated, a growing new world awaits. For those still hanging on the old transmitter-based teat, it’ll be an unpleasant weaning.

Here is a Fox News video* that tours the Gap Fire area from the air. It’s clearly submitted by an amateur using a helicopter, judging from the monolog, flavored with casual explitives. To those (like me) familiar with the landscape, the video does an excellent job of showing how “perimeter” is a mileading notion. The fire is in many places at once. Wish that Fox or the shooter gave us a time/date for the footage. (Maybe they do and I miss it.) Seems to be from yesterday morning.

A lot of commenters on Edhat take exception to Santa Barbara’s decision to go ahead with the city’s fireworks on the waterfront. I don’t. It looks right now like the fire’s moving away from the city, which means plenty of work for firefighters keeping the rest of us safe to enjoy the holiday. Huge kudos to them for some of the hardest and most dangerous work that humans can do.

* I lost the direct link. The link to the video was in a narrow banner atop this story on Fox News, which I found via an Edhat comment. The banner is gone, and I can’t find anything through searches on the Fox site. I can still see the video, which comes up in a separate window, but copying the URL doesn’t seem to work. The URL I see is not what copies. Instead it’s the story that no longer has the banner with the link in it. (I hate this too-clever video crap on sites like this. Not to mention the lame search as well.) If anybody else has luck, let us know in the comments below. It really is an interesting video.

 [Note.. Somehow I killed this post, but managed to find the HTML in cache somewhere and restore it. I can't get the comments over, but I can point to them here and here. Meanwhile, my apologies. — Doc]

Here’s the latest MODIS-based map of the fire, which you can obtain as well, staring on this page:

Here is the latest Google Earth image, with .kmz data from ActiveFireMaps.fs.fed.us:

To their credit, KTMS/990am and 1490am are covering the Gap Fire live, between national Fox newscasts. (Though they just broke into one to cover a press conference live. They’re talking about maps and other resources, but with no references to where those might be on the Web. Also Edison “had a harrowing time” getting power back up.)

Other items from the press conference:

• The Gap Fire is the top priority fire in California, because of its threats to populated areas.
• West Camino Cielo (which runs along the ridge) is a workable fire break, should the fire start heading North. The fire so far has been on the south, or city, side of the ridge. If it jumps the ridge, it will be bad on the north side, where the Santa Ynez valley spreads below. This is the valley that starred in the movie “Sideways”.
• Goleta 4th of July fireworks and other events canceled for tomorrow. Can’t find the city website, but the guy on the press conference says it refers to other sites anyway. He also said that the city’s new Reverse 911 system is ready, though new and untried. He’s also begging people to stay away from viewing the fire from Cathedral Oaks Road (the main drag below the mountains where the fire is burning).

Now KTMS is breaking away. Says 2400 acres have burned so far. KTMS has no live stream, far as I can tell.

The News-Press‘ radio station, KZSB/1290, can be heard via Windows Media from a link on the home page of the newspaper. But while KTMS and KCSB were covering the fire live, KZSB was airing an interview with a guy who’s pushing for offshore oil drilling. For what it’s worth, it was a major oil spill from an offshore platform here in Santa Barbara in 1969 that gave birth to lots of protective legislation, as well as Earth Day and much of the environmental protection movement that has peristed ever since. Odd choice, odd timing. KZSB may be the only news station in the whole country lacking a website. Sad.

For up-to-date fire maps from a national perspective, with satellite coverage by MODIS, go here. More:

• MODIS Active Fire Map (national, choose a regional map from here)
• MODIS California-Nevada map. The .jpg, the .pdf. Note that you can get a .kmz file at the MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program, and open it in Google Earth to produce visuals like the second image below.
• Active Fire Map viewer. It’s interactive, but not too intuitive. Check-box the layers you want, draw a box around the area you want to see. Zoom in, zoom out.
• InciWeb’s site for the Gap Fire.
• County of Santa Barbara’s home page. Has current information, but no direct links to any. New info on the home page wipes out the old. It’s a site, not a blog. Static Web, not Live Web, alas.
• For live coverage on the Web, check frequently with KCSB. The stream selection is here.

Tag: sbgapfire.

As a Free Range Customer, I’m following Uncle Dave’s lead and starting up at Identi.ca. Follow me there as dsearls, same as my Twitter handle. We’ll see how it goes.

Since moving to the Boston area for the school year, we have done appoximately zero astronomy. Now that we’re back in Santa Barbara, it’s fun to pick up where we left off.

Last night I sat outside with The Kid, just like we did for most evenings of his first ten years on Earth and re-acquianted ourselves with the ranking stars and constellations. Boötes, Hercules and Corona were high overhead. The Big Dipper was about as high as it gets at our vantage at 34° north. It was a bit hazy and lights from the city blanked out the Milky Way, but objects brighter than the third magnitude were visible, and two of those were the TRMM and Genesis II. We’d seen TRMM (NASA’s Tropical Rainforest Measuring Mission) many times before, but the Genesis was new to us. Turns out it’s a commercial venture by Bigelow Aerospace, and was launched only recently, in June 2007. Among its payloads are “Fly your stuff” and a bingo game you can play from the ground. Really. More here.

I’d forgotten how it is, dealing with Cox High Speed Internet here in Santa Barbara. We got spoiled with Verizon FiOS in Boston. It’s never down. Customer support is solid. And the data rates rock: 15-20Mb/s, symmetrical, for about the same as we’re paying here.

But here we are, back in town for as much of the Summer as we can take in. Everything is beautiful, except for the Net.

First, I’m paying the “premium” rate for the best they can get me. After a long talk with customer service and tech support in San Diego on Friday afternoon, they repeated to me what they’ve told me before: while they offer up to 12Mbps download speeds elsewhere, and plan for more — and while I’m paying for 10Mbps on the download side in order to get 1Mbps on the upload side, my area is only provisioned for 5-6Mbps down. And that, in fact, Santa Barbara is on the bottom of Cox’s list of areas to upgrade. No change there. We heard that two years ago. Santa Barbara is hind tit for Cox.

Second, outages. These happen now and then with Cox, always without warning. Nothing on the website. No emails saying when it’s going to happen.

So one happened today. Fortunately I have a borrowed Sprint EvDO card here. (My Verizon one won’t work on my newer laptops.) I just checked and it gets 1.096Mps down, 533Kbps up. Not bad, considering. Anyway, I used that connection to get on the Cox service website and eventually found a chat interface. I wanted to copy and paste the text, but the interface doesn’t allow that. So I took a series of screen shots and put together the whole dialog as a .jpg, leaving out the personal info that it asked for. Speaks for itself:

Obviously, Edward is doing the best he can, given the narrow and stilted pro formalities he is required to utter. I’m not knocking him. Heck, I’m glad he’s there, and I really do think he’s sorry for the inconvenience. But really, why not notify people that you’re doing work in the area, which is what a “planned outage” involves? Why not send out an email that says something like, “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we’ll be upgrading service in your area starting at 1pm Monday afternoon. We’ll work to minimize downtime. Thanks for your patience.” I notice that’s what universities do when they have planned outages. Why not do the same?

And why use a chat client that won’t let the user copy anything? One can guess, but one wouldn’t be kind.

The thing is, Internet service is secondary for Cox. They’re a Cable TV company first, and an Internet Service Provider second or third (after telephony).

There have to be better ways. A small group of us have been working on that here in Santa Barbara for several years. Given the troubles that municipal “broadband” has run into elsewhere in the U.S., it’s probably just as well that we’ve taken it slow.

Meanwhile, here’s an interview I did with Bob Frankston in May. Lots of grist for many mills there.

Here’s what’s essential, and too often lost in arguments over “Net Neutrality”: companies like Cox need to find benefits to incumbency other than the traditional monopoly/duopoly ones. Here’s one: beat Amazon and Google in the offsite storage and compute businesses. Or partner with them to deliver more and better utility Web services.

Essential guidance for that: Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch.

[Later...] A guy with a hard hat, a tool bucket and a long bright orange ladder just came down from the pole behind our house and told us we should be getting much higher speeds as soon as they finish working on something back up the street. Good to know.

Maarten is going into Day 10 of chemo. Writes Lori,

Lots coming from here, big guy. I’m out and getting better. You should be too.

I’m almost old. Sixty-one next month. But old enough for the wear to do more than show. It’s performing now. The trick to longevity at this point is to dodge the complete failure of any one of many systems that are all wearing down. Aging is fatal, and the number of single points of failure is not small. Combined ones multiply that number.

It seems like ten years ago that I was thirty. Life is short at its longest, and it goes fast, especially if you’re having fun.

Which brings me to my point. Almost.

It’s a matter of genetic luck that I’m not a drinker. A little beer and wine, but that’s about all my body can take before it says No More. Been that way since I was young. Drugs have also always been unpleasant for me. Smoking didn’t appeal in any case, but my father’s addiction to it — and the discomfort it caused the rest of us, for example when sharing a room or riding in a car — made me determined never to do it. And all those are reasons I’m alive today.

The other people in this ward, the one I’ll leave after I scarf one last free meal — don’t look so good. It’s a cardiac ward. When I walk past the nurses’ station I look at the screen of EKGs etching their green pulsed lines, one for each patient. None look good, or they wouldn’t be here. Alarms go off all the time. The patients look terrible. Even if they’re not old, they look it. One more reason I want to get out of here is to stop hogging a room that a needy patient could fill.

So I was talking to one of the nurses. What brought most of these patients here? Smoking and drinking, was the short answer. Reminded me of what a doctor friend told me many years ago. “Without tobacco and alcohol, you could close half the hospitals.”

We can’t get rid of stuff that’ll kill us in the long run. But we can choose not to indulge them.

This last week a lot of people have told me that stuff I say is important to them. Sometimes I’m called “influential”. If I can influence one young person to quit smoking or drinking heavily — for the duration — I’ll be happy.

If you’re lucky you’ll all be as old as the folks here some day. And if you’re smart, chances are you won’t be laying in a place like this.

I still have three of these, my MRI says. So, for the first time, I’m watching The Last Lecture, with absolute intentions not to give my own Last Anything for another few decades. Highly recommended, by the way.

People have been asking, so here’s the update.

I’m due to start “clear liquids” in the morning. I was allowed to start tonight, but decided against it because if something goes wrong I’m not sure the slim night crew can handle it. (Not a knock on this hospital, just the Way Things Are in the hospital biz.) I have been off food since a week ago yesterday (starting with prep for the procedure that put me here last Saturday). One more night won’t hurt. Also, for what it’s worth, I have not received “food in bags”, but rather various other fluids. The bag closest to me says “5% DEXTROSE and 0.9% SODIUM CLORIDE”. Stuff like that. Yum.

We seem to be past the blown vein problem (blew four in 24 hours, filling my hands and arms with stuff). Both my hands are still puffed up and my right arm is down to about 1.5x the volume of the left.

I have little pain. This is the key, and an important goal. I’m otherwise pretty wasted and very anemic, mostly because I’m already a little anemic in any case and all these fluids have only thinned my blood out more.

My pancreatic enzymes, liver chemicals and other indicators are back in the normal range. For me. I’m not normal, but it’ll do.

And I’m looking to get out of here on Sunday morning. And taking Suzi’s advice as well, I hope. Her blog, A Pain in the Pancreas, is a big help.

Bonus link: Wierd Al’s Pancreas.

Also a warm shout-out and a big hug for my partner in recovery, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, who is now deep in the Tunnel of Chemo. I’m gonna get through this thing a lot sooner. (Though we still don’t know what the “cystic lesions” on my pancreas are. And won’t for another month or more, since I doubt I could tolerate another endoscopy without repeating the last week. Not soon, anyway.)

Here’s a URL, from Live Maps, that goes http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=qtd9g08ttwy7&style=b&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=23698570&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1.

Twitter does a nice job of shrinking URLs to tinyurls, but chokes on that one.

Digression… For what it’s worth, that’s the WABC/770 transmitter in Lodi, NJ. The signal it produces looks like this. I grew up a few blocks north of there. The signal came in on every TV channel when you turned the volume down, and even when the TV was off. That was the old MusicRadio WABC, which dominated Top 40 in New Yawk from the early 60s through the 70s. By day you could get it far up the Hudson, all the way out Long Island, all the way down the Jersey Shore, and nearly to Baltimore. And at all the summer camps out on the lakes in the mountains of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Nothing like that now. The old beast is just another AM talker.

A sure sign I’m getting better: craving food. My wife mentioned taquitos a few minutes ago and my mouth watered immediately. I wanted to walk over to Jose’s right then, barefoot in my hospital gown.

We won’t start until tomorrow, my GI doctor told me yesterday, no matter how good I felt. That’s cool. What’s one more wait after eight days of starvation?

Not everything has gone perfectly. I’ve had three IVs “infiltrate”, and my right arm is still swollen to odd dimensions, filled with fluid that should have gone in a vein. But I slept last night without drugs, which was cool, and I’m clearly on the mend. Can’t wait to gtf outa here.

Finally ready to listen to a little radio. I gotta say that it’s pretty freaking hard to beat WERS. “Music for the independent mind.” Yes indeed. I’m not familiar with most of the music they play, but I like a helluva lot, especially since I’m sure I’m 3x the age of many of its programmers and listeners.

Right now it’s Yo La Tengo with “Take Care”. Take care not to hurt yourself. Be ready to ask for help. Thanks for that. Right now it helps. Before that it was Thao with “Bag of Hammers”. David Bowie’s outstanding “THV 15” ran before that. Was that Dr. John on piano? Before that Coldplay with “Speed of Sound”. Now it’s Gnarls Barkley: “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul”. They’ve been playing that one a few times. Deservedly. And now, for geezers like me, Van Morrison with “Caravan“. Radio. Turn it up. So you know. Radio. Takes me back. Keeps me up. From the Moodance album. 1970. Also The Last Waltz. Gives me chills. Progressive rock stations loved to play that song, mostly because it spoke from original dream of radio. What it was, and what it will be again, better than ever. Thanks to WERS for holding the flame high.

Man, this goes on. Now it’s Leonard Cohen with So Long, Marianne”. Another perfect oldie. Followed by Cat Power, “Aretha, Sing One For Me”.

[At this point I got a call from Steve Gillmor, and we recorded a brief impromptu podcast. I'm fading now, and heading for bed. Night, all.]

I have three bags hanging from a rolling pole next to my bed here at the hospital. These Y down do a pair of IV needles, one in each arm. The two big bags are for hydration. The third? I dunno. (The nurse just told me it’s magnesium.) Since visiting Amsterdam two Wednesdays ago, I’ve shed a lot of liquid, to be polite about it. Now I can’t take in any liquid, or food, at all, which is one way they calm my innards and stop my pancreas from freaking out, which is what it did yesterday morning as a delayed reaction to the endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (aka ERCP) exam I had here at the hospital the day before.

One in twenty endoscopic probings of a pancreas results in pancreatitis, and it was my misfortune to hit the bulls eye. I woke up with Xtreme hunger-type pain in my belly yesterday, without the hunger. Nausea came later, and a visit to the emergency room not long after that. Now I’ll be here until the pain stops and hunger returns. Those are the Good Signs. So far, not even close. In fact, the pain remains bad enough that morphine doesn’t do the full job. It just reduces the pain to a point where I can do some of this. Which I’m doing between working on some writing assignments. We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, the good news is that This Too Shall Pass. (Better it than me.)

Alas, I shall miss Supernova, and perhaps more than that. We’ll see. I still hve high hopes of flying west midweek or so, although that seems mighty ambitious from where I sit (actually recline) right now.

I didn’t really know Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald before this last week, except by emails and a delightful interview he did with me at LeWeb3 in December. But I fell in love with the guy after he and his associates brought me to Amsterdam to talk at Mobile Monday and do a couple consulting gigs there (which he set up for me). Besides being a smart guy and a great host, Maarten is just a good dude and a true mensch. Gracious, caring, upbeat and much more. You can see it in these two photosets from MoMo. Maarten, his family and whole social network made my visit to Amsterdam a joy from start to finish. It’s a great city anyway, but it’s lucky to be graced with folks as good as this whole bunch.

On Wednesday, the day I flew home, Maarten went to the doctor to check out a coughing problem. Turns out he had a tumor, bigger than his heart, right in front of it. Since then he’s not been far from my own heart, as well as my mind.

I wasn’t going to write about it, because I didn’t know how private Maarten wanted to be. But it turns out he’s both tweeting and blogging what he calls his new journey. So is his wife, Lori. So we’re together with him on this thing. Such is the nature of what Twitter calls following.

He’ll find out more about the tumor tomorrow. I’m praying hard it’ll just be an oddball thing they can cut out and be done with.

Frank Paynter writes,

Well, politically I’m a registered independent, though I do have some libertarian sympthies, to the degree that I like business and think we make too many laws and have too many regulations. But I’ve also called myself a “defective pacifist” and have come out squarely for Barack Obama. Also, I’m not aware of having an “ilk”, and I don’t like being accused of having one. But, whatever.

I don’t think I have any areas of disagreement with Frank here. What’s more, I haven’t been silent about it. Look up searls media iraq war and you’ll find plenty.

Among those items is some recent pointage to a talk Forrest Sawyer gave at UCSB last year. I think I reported on it at the time, but I can’t find it. Still, I do appreciate being prodded, because Forrest’s talk is one of the best indictments I’ve yet heard of mainstream media capitulation to the Bush administration’s railroading of the nation, and the world, into a war that was flat-out wrong and dumb to begin with. Forrest also does a great job of stressing the importance of other streams besides the main one. So go watch it. One quote…

(I might be off by a word or two there. Transcibing from YouTube is no bargain.)

Also, for what it’s worth, at ProjectVRM we also have some ideas for Frank’s “sustainability piece”. I can’t imagine anything more reforming of media than giving it an easy non-advertising-based business model driven by listeners, viewers and readers — in alliance with journalists and artists on the supply side — rather than ever-more-targeted advertising.

I also recommend hanging at NCMR2008 while it’s still going on. Great conference. Wish I were there.

I don’t begrudge anybody going after advertising money. And I don’t have anything against advertising itself. For many products and services advertising will remain the best way for supply and demand to get acquainted.

But advertising also involves guesswork and waste, and always will. It is also, by its shout-to-the-world nature, not a “conversation”.

This is why I’m uncomfortable with the notions of “conversational media” and “conversational marketing”. Especially when Cluetrain gets used to justify it. Such is the case with the awful current entry for Conversational Marketing in Wikipedia. It begins, “Conversational (or Conversation) Marketing arose as a current buzzword after the [ClueTrain Manifesto], which starts ‘All Markets Are Conversations’.

First, it’s Cluetrain, not ClueTrain. Second, it begins “People of Earth…” Third, it’s true that the first of its 95 Theses says “Markets are conversations” (no “All”, no headline-type caps); but the next 94 unpack that point, along with a few more, none of which are justifications for advertising. In fact, we mention advertising only once, at #74, which says, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” (Even if that’s not true, it’s what the thing says, so at least get that much right.) Fourth, a phrase is not a word, even if the phrase buzzes.

I could go on, but why bother. I just hope the Wikipedians delete or bury the whole topic until its promoters start thinking and stop buzzing.

Anyway, this all comes up because I’m thinking about what to talk about tomorrow night at There’s a New Conversation in Palo Alto. (Details here.) The event is one in a series occasioned by the upcoming 10th anniversary of Cluetrain’s publishing on the Web; but I’m not much interested in talking about that. Instead I’d rather talk about what’s going to happen after we finish throwing both media and marketing out the window.

Both will live, of course. But not the way they’ve lived in the periods that began with their common usage and can’t end soon enough.

More to a piont, I’d like to explore what happens after buyer reach exceeds seller grasp. Because that will happen. And when it does neither media nor marketing will be able to live in their old halls of mirrors. Even with Wikipedia’s help.

I’ve now passed 20,000 shots on Flickr. When doing that few things please me more than finding out that one of them now illustrates its subject on Wikipedia. (Where I remain a stub, by the way. I don’t mind. Wikipedia entries about living folks are too often wrong.)

Here’s another. I know there are more, but not how to find them.

But that’s not the point, which is that the primary source of media now is each other. We’re rebuilding everything back up from Layer Zero. That’s us.

I may be alone in thinking that Microsoft’s offers for Yahoo were all mistakes. All were too much to pay for a company that would be hollow on Day Two. But don’t get the idea that I care all that much. I don’t.

On the Gillmor Gang (where I am also a participant at the moment) Dan Farber just called online advertising “the most efficient way to make money in the world right now”. That might be true. But advertising itself is a bubble in the long run, because it’s guesswork even at its best, and making it better and better only improves a system that has been flawed fundamentally from the start, because it proceeds only from the sell side, and still involves enormous waste (of server cycles, of bandwidth, of pixels, rods, cones and patience).

Advertising is a big churning system by which sellers hunt down buyers, rather than the reverse. It pollutes the media environment and theatens to corrupt the producers it pays.

I could go on. Or I could just point to Bill Hicks’ wisdom on the matter. Bill goes way over the top in that routine, but he’s talking to your soul, not to your wallet. It’s important to pull them apart once in awhile.

Yes, I know some advertising is good. A lot of it, in fact. But I’m not talking about that advertising. I’m talking about the 99+ percent of it that’s wasted.

I’m sure few at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook (or TechCrunch, or pretty much anywhere that makes money from advertising) agrees with much if anything of I just said. And I’d rather not argue it, because I don’t have evidence to prove my points. There still is no system by which demand takes the lead in driving (and not just finding) supply. But I believe that’ll happen eventually. And when it does, advertising will fall. Advertising is not a tree that grows to the sky, no matter how fast the Google redwood is gaining altitude.

But… I might be wrong. I dunno. It happens.

Mike Arrington just said on the Gang that he is “outraged” by something I said. I forget what it was. Some of the above, I guess.

Anyway, I don’t know what will happen to Yahoo or Microsoft. I am sure Google will still grow like crazy as long as advertising money flows from other media to the Web. But that’s not the whole story. What Google’s doing with Web services, with Android, with the Summer of Code, with Earth, Maps, Talk, Gmail, Docs… are mostly Net-friendly, cross-platform (including Linux) innovative and positive. They’re far from perfect, but not as far as Microsoft and Yahoo. That’s an advantage, if you’re into vendor sports. Which I’m not. (Well, a little, but not much.)

Who’s buying whom, who’s committing suicide by saying yes or no to acquisition offers, or the rest of the Stuff that’s front and center right now, kinda bores me. I care far more about the independence and empowerment of individual users, and of independent developers working to make a world where free markets are not “your choice of walled garden”. We don’t have that world yet. One walled gardener succeeding or failing to buy another doesn’t move us any closer.

What gets us closer will come from the edge. It’ll move under the feet of clashing giants.

So John Cass started this thing, asking five questions about the Cluetrain Manifesto. The latest answers come from Jason Falls. In addition to his own, Jason points to Valeria Maltoni, Richard Binhammer, Michael Walsh, Phil Gomes, Mack Collier — and John Cass.

I’ll save my own answers for the next There’s a New Conversation event, in Palo Alto, on 29 May. Here’s a video of my talk at the last one. The next will be different, though. Times change.

Papers are endangered. But I’m not sure the same is true about the collection, editing and printing of news. Or of journalism at its best (as well as its worst, which will always abound).

Marc (Andreessen, not Canter — from down here it’s so easy to confuse these tall guys) has started a serial posting on the subject of newspapers. It led me to revisit my advice for newspapers, which I first offered in ten-point form a little over a year ago.

It’s gratifying to see many papers following advice in numbers 1 through 6…

But still coming up short on the last three:

So I just went to the other Marc’s site, and whoa! Dig the title of his latest post: How to build the mesh – #4: the Live Web. Way(s) to go!

Here’s where I wrote about The Live Web in 2005. Marc does a nice job of bringing the whole thing up to date. In that piece I give credit to my son Allen for coming up with the term in the first place, back in 2003 as I recall.

Hope it finally catches on.

And a hat tip to Chip Hoagland for getting me started on this.

Here’s the link, and here’s the text:

Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.

And here’s Bart Stevens’ blog post with photographic proof as well.

Big thanks to Joerg, Martin and all the folks at Kuppinger Cole for hosting VRM 2008 and for welcoming all the participants from the VRM crew to EIC2008.

We have many more events coming up. In addition to regularly (and irregularly) scheduled ones in the U.K and elsewhere in Europe (need to get everything on the wiki), we have the VRM sessions at the next IIW, plus the first VRMW (VRM Workshop, unless we come up with a better name for it) at Harvard on 9-10 July. Mark your calendars.

After brunch at Johnny D’s yesterday, we caught the Forbes Flyers — a rope jumping team of high schoolers from Torrington, CT — putting on an amazing demonstration of skill and enthusiasm, outside the Davis stop on the Red Line in Somerville. Turned out they were there to help promote Jump!, a movie showing that afternoon, and this evening, right next door at the Somerville Theater, as part of Boston’s Independent Film Festival.

I’m trying to put up one of the short videos I shot with my little Canon still camera, and it hasn’t appeared yet. Check here to see it it’s showed up. Meanwhile, here are a couple of Forbes Flyers’ own from their collection on YouTube.

So, after going to a museum at MIT for about an hour or so, we returned and caught the movie, and with it an enthusiasm both for the sport and the Xtremely Fine Job that Helen Wood Scheer, Scott B. Morgan and crew did putting the movie together. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, on any subject.

It’s showing again tonight at 7:30, and next in San Francisco (Wednesday), Santa Cruz and Charleston. Check this page for details. Also the Jump! movie blog.

At ROFLCON, this time for more than a few minutes. Observations…

I can’t post a question using the question tool.

I’m at a panel on fame, and I don’t know any of the panelists. (They are, in fact, moot of 4chan, Randall Munroe, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. They are arranged according to size: moot, Randall, Ryan.)

I am >2x the age of 90% of the people here. I may be 2x the age of ANY of the people here. (Not true, but it seems that way.) Worse, I’m dressed to “go out” to some place nice later, so it’s like I’m in costume.

A sport here: being first finding the too-few power outlets. (That’s the headline reference, btw. Figger it out.)

Neo-Cantabrigian observation: MIT does wi-fi right, while Harvard does power outlets right. At MIT, it’s a snap to get out on the Net through the wi-fi cloud, but there are too few power outlets, and some of them have no power. At Harvard, there are power outlets for everybody in all the classrooms (at least at the Law School, to which most of my experience is so far confined), and getting out on the Net requires a blood sample. From your computer.)

Great question from the floor… “At what time have you been most afraid of what you’ve created?” Answer: “Right now.” At which point Anonymous Thinker — a guy dressed in a suit and a fedora with a black stocking pulled over his head — just made a bunch of noise from the back of the room. Near as I can tell. I’m in the mid-front, and can’t turn my head that far. Still, funny.

Best question on the Question Tool: “SUDO MAKE NEW QUESTION.” Top vote-getter: “What is your zombie defence plan?”

Unrelated but depressing: The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

I don’t have the whole fotoset up yet, but it’ll be here.

Randall just called blogs a “four letter word”. Blogs are very outre here.

To get (and stay) in shape, I’ve been spending more time off-grid. Less blogging and twittering, more time communing with nature. Some of that time I’m not indulging my curiousities. Or at least I’m resisting them. No electronics, for example. It was on one of those walks that I became curious about the story of infrastructure, past and present. What were these metal plates doing in the ground? Why were they there? Why were there so many of them? What were their different purposes? Which ones were remnants of services or companies no longer in existence? Which ones had found new uses? Why do so many carry the signatures of companies and utilities long dead?

I started on the Minuteman Bikeway, which passes close to our home not far from Harvard, where I’m headquartered these days. With a minimal slope, it’s perfect for active but low-stress strolling or biking. And it connects a lot of interesting historic sites. At one end is the Alewife “T” stop on the Red Line subway. At the other is something in Belmont I haven’t reached yet, because I usually go only as far as Lexington. Most of the stretch runs through Arlington, which combines the former villages of West Cambridge and Menotony. This is roughly the path along which the British soldiers retreated from Lexington on April 19, 1775, losing men (mostly boys, actually) and killing colonials of many ages. Thus started the Revolutionary War.

The Middlesex Central Railroad was born in 1846 and died in 1982. Part of it was better known as the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad. It began as a vein of commerce, carrying goods from mills and ponds along its path. The Earth was colder in the early days of the railroad, and the winters were longer. Ice cut from Spy Pond was shipped all over the world from docks in Boston. This past winter the pond was thick enough to support skating for about three days.

But I’ve become more interested in the infrastructure story. So, over the last couple weeks, as Spring breaks out along the trail, I’ve been shooting pictures, mostly of stuff on the ground, before it gets haired over with vegetation, in faith that patterns will start making sense to me. I’ve also shot a lot around Cambridge, Boston and other places, but haven’t put those up yet. Right now I’m adding descriptions to the photos in this set here.

This is part of a long-term project, methinks. We’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in following the same threads, tell me in the comments below.

See this. Then this.

I’m not sure what the second one is. Did “admin” rip off Simon Collister’s original post by posting it again? Was it for commercial reasons? Does it violate Simon’s Creative Commons 2.5 license?

The site of the reposting, Lalalia, is a “Virtual City”, described as An open system project, based on volunteers, to build a “virtual real democracy” based on the permanent votes of the “Lalaians” (the citizens of the virtual city Lalaia).

Is Simon part of that? If so, I guess it’s cool, being cross-posted. if not…

I don’t know. Can’t tell. Doesn’t smell right to me. But then, my nose is old and my blogging teeth are long.

Whatever. Seems strange to me. Is it?

A ways back, on one of Steve Gillmor’s podcasts, I said that the Democratic nomination was Obama’s unless he “stepped in it” before the convention.

“Gotcha” politics being what it is, Obama’s recent remarks — a few dumb words among amongst zillions of smart and/or safe utterances he’s made in the course of a campaign — qualify.

Naturally, they’re being spun (in some ways correctly) as “damaging”. But there is a difference between real damage (of the kind that would reveal that Obama — or anyone — is too flawed in a critical way to trust as president), and the kind of superficial embarrasment that gets buzzed far out of proportion to its actual importance. Andrew Sullivan, a conservative who favors Obama for reasons I find heartening, sees the difference, and puts it this way:

Later he adds,

Here’s how The Onion put it. And they’re right.

Sitting is hard for me. First, there’s the fear that I’m colonizing clots in my legs. That fear should recede when I know my IHR (a clotting measure) is between 2 and 3. Last tested it was 1, which is normal. Not good enough. Second, my chest still hurts, along with my lower back (which is an unrelated pre-existing issue, and still annoying). Standing up works. So do walking and bike riding.

Exercise is kind of orthoganal to blogging, but so what. Moving around keeps me alive, which is a prerequisite for everything else. So I’m following an active course for now, interrupted by brief visits to the laptop. Most of those are devoted to Real Work rather than to blogging. Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway) I’m backlogged on a lot of work.

In the next few days I’ll have a stand-up desk, along with a much more body-friendly chair than I’m using now. Meanwhile, I’m jiggering the above and other lifestyle changes. Many good new practices and attitudes have been recommended by friends and readers, and believe me, I’m following more than a few of them.

Hope I won’t get too boring as I report on those rather than the usual here.

A few hours ago, as I was getting ready to get the kid to bed, the pain in my chest returned. Concerned that another blood clot might be involved, I imposed on Nicco to give me another ride over to the hospital, where at length a fresh CAT scan showed the same clot in the same place. Nothing new.

Still, they told me I did the Right Thing. Guess so.

Left me even more wasted though. As Nicco put it in the car on the way back, I’m probably not as “good” as I feel. (Which is okay, aside from the chest pains.)

Anyway, now it’s 3am and maybe I can finally (well, for tonight anyway… that adverb creeps me) get some sleep.

I’m getting so many calls that I’ve started hitting “ignore” half the time, which makes me feel like a freaking call center. I can’t take your call right now, I’m inaudibly saying. But your call is important to me. So please listen closely to the following options, because my menu has changed.

That menu in my own life now includes walking as well as working, talking and eating, which used to fight over the top rungs on my priority ladder. Well, other exercise should be up there too, and it will be. But walking comes first.

They didn’t find a source of blood clots in my legs, but when one ends up in your lungs, a leg is where one usually begins. You get them there by sitting. Being a passenger in a commercial airplane is often blamed, and I’m certainly guilty of being plenty of that. But I’ve sat longer in stretches at my desk than I’ve sat on transcontinental airplane flights. The line “I’m a desk potato” is one of the first my wife heard me speak. And it’s no less true now than it was way back then.

So, post-clot, I’ve developed an aversion to sitting, if not an outright fear. And my natural hyperactivity urges me toward the road and the path rather than the office and the desk. That way lies survival. But not much work. Because to go walking is to snowplow already overdue work off into the future.

So I do the one to have a future, and the other in the future the first helps make possible. At sixty with a clot in one’s lung that still hurts, these are the kinds of thoughts the mind mulls.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll return to the old normal. Instead I need to make a new one that keeps me alive longer, and still allows me to do just as much work, only better.

I’ll be thinking about how on the walk I’m about to take.

I’m back home now. I feel fine, except for the fact that I’m quite the bleeder. Just before I was discharged, a nurse removed a … whatever they call it… one of those things they keep in a vein, so they can swap bottles of fluids that drip into you. And put a cushion of absorbent material over the wound, held down with a tight bandage. As I was wrapping up the power cord for my laptop, I noticed that blood was dripping on the floor. It was mine, coming from the puncture on the back of my hand. We stopped it with fresh dressing, but it was interesting to watch spilled blood that dried faster than it clotted. That was wierd.

Anyway, other than that, I’m cool. Or so I’m telling myself, anyway. Very eager to press on with work.

Meanwhile, I’m going to get some good rest tonight, take it easy for the next few days, and count my blessings. That the clot went to my lungs rather than my heart or my head means I won at a kind of scary roulette.

Thanks to everybody who has written, called, texted and posted their best wishes. All of it helped, tremendously.

The short of it is that I’m in a hospital with a blood clot in my right lung.

The long of it is that I don’t have other blood clots, that I’m on blood thinners for awhile, and I’ll be fine. I might make it out by this afternoon, and I’ll even be able to get back to work by tomorrow and make VRM2008 and EIC2008 in Munich two weeks from now.

Meanwhile I’m having an educational tour of the health care system at Harvard and Cambridge. Very impressive, and reassuring.

This thing started with pain under my left shoulder blade on Saturday night that I assumed was a stretched muscle or something skeleto-muscular. It was uncomfortable but not debilitating. The next couple of days it spread to various places around my chest, so that breathing became a bit difficult at times, just because it was painful. Still, I felt otherwise okay. I didn’t suspect heart problems because just a few months ago I had a bunch of heart tests and came off looking quite good.

Then yesterday I had trouble finding a comfortable sitting position, because the pain, especially at the bottom back left of my rib cage, became too intense every time I breathed in.

So I called the health care center at Harvard Law School. The folks there were concerned just because “You’re sixty and have chest pains. That’s warning enough. Can you get in here, or should we send an ambulance?” I got in there, accompanied by the good Dr. Weinberger. The doctor there listened to my lungs, said things weren’t quite right — one of my lungs wasn’t moving air as well as the other — and ordered an ambulance.

Long story short, a CAT scan showed a “mid-size” blood clot in my right lung, plus the other stuff I said in the first two paragraphs. The only remaining mystery is the source of the blood clot, which additional tests they hope will eventually show. (Though they might not find out. If it came from a leg, there’s no remaining sign of one there now. Meanwhile, they need to eliminate other possibilities, including cancer somewhere, though they say the chance of that is low.)

Anyway, the warning sign I should have observed was the presence of chest pain that was clearly not the result of minor injury (such as stretching). When I pressed on pain locations, nothing happened, yet breathing normally was painful at those locations. Shoulda been a give-away that it was deeper than muscle or skeleton, meaning lungs.

Interesting discovery: pain from blood clots in lungs does not necessarily occur at the location of the clot. It can show up anywhere around the chest. That’s why it hurts in the lower left back side of my ribcage even thought he clot is in the upper part of my right lung.

I feel good enough to work here, though it’s not easy with tubes hooked up to one or both of my arms, at different times. So far this post has been interrupted more times than I can count, mostly with tests and other visits from medical folk. (Since this is a teaching hospital, I am a subject of sustained curiosity.) That’s why, even though I started writing this post around 6:30am, it’s now 9:43.

So I think I’ll just read some of the stuff that Nicco brought over (along with much more…the man is an ace), and hope that all this testing & stuff gets done enough for me to get out of here soon.

The Glass Roots Revolution. A sample:

Andrew Sullivan: What I Got Wrong About Iraq. A sample:

At its best, war is a lesser evil. I said that in 2002, and got quoted by Glenn Reynolds as well. It was all part of a larger discussion that involved Nick Denton, Dave Winer and others.

Still, I hesitate to say that ‘we’ were right and ‘they’ were wrong. There is too much we don’t know and can’t ever know. We can’t go back and conduct a controlled study of futures, one with and one without the Iraq war.

The side I still feel most comfortable taking is the one against war itself. That it’s a lesser evil doesn’t make it good.

Some times we have no choice. That clearly was the case for WWII. Most times we do have a choice. Iraq was one of those. And we made the wrong one.

But knowing that now doesn’t help show a path of right choices toward ending the war, ending terror, ending hatred and distrust of The Other.

Still, failure teaches. It gives lessons.

Andrew Sullivan again:

There is a generational battle of sorts going on here too. Andrew is post-boomer. So is Marc Andreessen, who gave this as one of his reasons for supporting Barack Obama:

Today we have a boomer president who is one of those who did not learn any lessons from America’s failure in Vietnam: how we entered the war on delusional and trumped-up premises, how our conventional means lost to the unconventional ones, how we failed to understand the culture and language of the war’s theater, how millions died for no good reason, how the nature of a vast and bureaucratized national security apparatus is too devoid of imagination to do anything on this scale without failing.

That void still exists. If General Petreus and his strategy succeed in Iraq (and we’re a long way from finding out), it will be due to imagination and resourcefulness that are devalued by practice in any large bureaucracy.

Recognizing this does not require having lived through the Sixties, or being obsessed with that time. It does require some perspective. In regards to Iraq, we finally have some of that.

I’ve always liked cars. Never owned a great one, unless you count an ‘85 Camry that ran forever with the fewest possible repairs. I did have a hand in my wife’s purchase of a ‘92 Infiniti Q45a — a fabulous piece of work, sadly dulled by the maker in subsequent models. It was sadly repair-prone and finally croaked somewhere north of 200k miles, when the active suspension gave out. Still, for quite a few years it was an exceedingly pleasing car to drive.

These days my aging eyes and slower reflexes caution me against car fantasies that would be too pricey in any case. But I still harbor wishes for a car market not dominated by inefficient manufacturers of cookie-cutter vehicles, but rather populated by an infinite variety of designs that combine the best of invention, engineering, light manufacture and customer input on design — a value constellation rather than a value chain.

One such maker is Iconic Motors. The brightest star in its constellation is Claudio Ballard, an inventor whose obsession with automotive perfection is matched by his commitment to small, high-quality U.S. manufacturers. Together they’re producing the GTR:

Its a beautiful thing, and so hot it’s scary. It packs more than 800 horses in body that barely outweighs a Miata. It will rocket you past 200 miles per hour, and carve around curves on a suspension that’s as close to Formula One as you’ll find off a speedway.

They’re only producing a hundred of them in their first run. They are also interested in input as well as interest from fellow enthusiasts. This is the open source part of the story, and one of the big reasons I’m interested in it. (Besides having gotten to know Claudio over the past few months.) To get that ball rolling they’re hosting a reception at 7pm tomorrow night at the New York Auto Show. Wish I could be there, but I can’t.

They don’t have a link up yet, but will soon. I’ll add it here, soon as they do.

Not content to just make the future, sometimes Dave also predicts it. Congrats to the big guy for winning $2k with his forecast.

In this comment to this post, John Quimby writes,

The people “vetting” our election haven’t been “vetted” themselves.

Try this thought on for size…

The reporters we knew and admired when we were young were educated in journalism and many of them served in the Army covering WWII. They invented broadcast news and had combat experience with average American soldiers all over the world. That experience gave them a keen sense of official BS and they weren’t afraid of the risks it took to get the story and send some truth home. They felt they owed it to the humble people they served to get it right. They knew how to tell a story.

See where I’m going?

While you’re following John’s thoughts about storytellers and stories (and please do: it’s a good thread), a few thoughts about the nature of the latter, and what any journalist, regardless of reputation and talent, will have a hard time telling.

In this post about journalism, I wrote,

The basic job of newspaper reporters is to write stories. In simplest terms, stories are interesting arrangements of facts. What makes stories interesting are: 1) protagonists (persons, groups, teams, “issues” or causes); 2) a struggle, problem or conflict of some sort; and 3) movement forward (hopefully, by not necessarily, toward a conclusion). Whether or not you agree with that formulation, what cannot be denied is the imperative. Stories are made to be interesting. It is not just coincidental that this is a purpose they share with advertising.

The story in WWII (John’s example, above) was a simple one. There were good guys (us, the Allies) and bad guys (the Axis powers). Countless war stories — good ones — came out of WWII. Those stories — along with stories about The Depression that preceded The War — were the prevailing narratives around dinner tables for kids growing up in the Fifties, when broadcast journalism was maturing under the influence of Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow and other exemplars. Wars won by everybody working together, and suffering through hardships, as happened with WWII, had many positive effects on the country and its citizens. Our fathers’ experiences in “the service” (as they called it then) during WWII made instant friends of countless strangers who had similar experiences. People meeting for the first time, regardless of class and race differences, often found common bonds in the ritual of exchanging data about membership and service in various military branches, divisions, boats, and battle fronts.

Our parents’ sacrifices gave them great moral authority — and of a kind that none of the succeeding generations would achieve again. Tom Brokaw was right to call our parents The Greatest Generation. They rose to the challenge, but they were also cast in the role.

Same with journalistic veterans of the same war.

Not only have we lost that whole generation of WWII journalists, plus many (or most) of the best of those that followed as well. Meanwhile, there is more journalism than ever, and much of it is good. Just harder to find, or to follow, in the midst of so much other stuff. Many more needles, much bigger haystack.

But the bigger problem is the lack of a single narrative, much less a heroic one. Worse, there is a narrative that needs to be woven, yet has few if any weavers, because it is not a happy one. That narrative is the inevitable decline of Pax Americana, and of our country’s ability to lead the world in the manner to which it has becomed accustomed, and which is proving ever more delusional.

This new narrative is required not only because the U.S.’s percentages of the global economy and populations are shrinking, and not only because its recent president(s) had foreign policy failures, but because what’s “super” about U.S. superpower — a near-limitless ability to make high-technology war, backed by a fighting force of finite size with few allies — is an anachronism. And it would still be an anachronism if most of the world didn’t already consider our approach to foreign relations tragic and absurd.

I’m not sure the people of any Great Nation are ever ready to face the fact that the height of their military and economic powers has passed. Or that the leadership they most need to assert is no longer only a military and economic one. But I am sure that we need leadership — journalistic as well as political — that is anchored in our true and enduring strengths as a people and as a polity.

The U.S. still stands best, and most credibly, for essential values the rest of the world desperately needs to respect: freedom, liberty, democracy, suffrage of women and minorities, and rule of law, to name just a few. The high value we place on eduction, on caring for others, on self-sacrifice, on economic well-being, on the worth of individuals, on respect for land and resources — the list goes on — are also ready-built platforms for leadership in the world.

I don’t know how to frame that new leadership narrative, much less express it. The best advice I’ve seen so far comes from George Lakoff and The Rockridge Institute; but we’re in a partisan season, and they’re naturally taking sides, lately on behalf of Barack Obama.

I believe Obama is in the best position to craft this new narrative, that his aspriational rhetoric has the best chance of transcending the partisan boundaries that divide us. But right now each remaining candidate’s focus is on beating each other rather than facing the challenge of changing our role in the world.

Obama and his people need to fight for the next nine months, and it’s likely that his rhetoric, no matter how well-expressed, will be mocked for its emptiness and the lack of track in his relatively short career. That mockery will get air time becaus we won’t be able to get out of sports and war journalism — and politics — until the election is over.

That’s when Then What? begins. I’m hoping the new president is good at telling the new story that needs to be told. But I’m not holding my breath. (Or my blather, or you wouldn’t be reading this.)

Larry Lessig: After lots of thinking and advice, I have decided it does not make sense for the Change Congress movement for me to a run for Congress in CA12. He is still out, of course, to Change Congress.

So here’s the concept: the end-to-end nature of the Internet is not about “access for consumers”. It’s about creating a World of Ends in which all of us are at zero functional distance from each other — or close enough. That’s why I can listen in on the hearing right now from London, and IM and IRC with people all over the world. Right now, in real-enough time.

The Internet is the universal communications utility that connects us all. As a utility it will, in the long run, come to resemble roads and water systems — in the sense that all of us can connect to it, and to each other over it. The questions that matter most are the ones with answers that get us to this end state.

Right now they’re talking about competition. Two years ago at F2C, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell said that, as a former antitrust lawyer, he favored the “rule of threes” — that is, you tend to get productive compeitition when there are at least three competitors in a marketplace.

We have that at our home near Cambridge. We have Verizon FiOS, RCN and Comcast, all on the poles. The first two bring fiber to the home, and the third has a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) system, that brings coax to the home. Near as I can tell, the only one of those three bothering to compete for the Internet customer is Verizon, although its offering is hardly optimized. No “20 up, 20 down”, as I just heard somebody brag about in the ‘cast. (Was that Tom Tauke from Verizon? Think so.) We get 20 down, 5 up. Right now, if I want non-crippled service (one where I can run a server, for example, with my own IP addresses), I have to pay “business” rates, which are, in the phone company tradition, and without respect to whatever the actual costs are, a multiple of what I pay as a household — a consumer.

All three are going after TV customers primarily — trying to horn into each other’s cable TV business — and treating Internet as gravy on TV and phone service. That makes sense for providers of all three services, on a national basis, but not at the local level, where there is enormous room for innovation and real competition.

Message to Verizon and the rest: the Internet is not about “consumer choice”. We produce as well as consume. We need to be able to run our own servers. We need to be able to exercize supply as well as demand. We need symmetricality, not just neutrality.

It is essential not to frame the Net in FCC terms, or even in communications policy and law terms, which date back to the 1934 act, and beyond that to railroads. Or at least not those alone. The Net is a place, not just a shipping system for “content”, to which “the consumer” should have “access”.

Lot of back and forth about whether or not Comcast blocked BitTorrent. FWIW, I think that::: a) Comcast is still mostly right about the best efforts it makes, but is still weaseling a little bit; b) Comcast’s opponents are looking to paint its kettle black; and c) Talking about it soaks up too much time that would be better spent debating other subjects.

Tag: fccboston08.

I saw the end of the Debate last night on CNN, and fell asleep on the hotel room bed while Anderson Cooper and his coterie of opinionators blabbed about how both contestants performed. When I woke up a few minutes ago, seven hours later, it was still going on. I switched over to ESPN and saw another bunch of opinionators doing the same thing, only the subject was basketball. Only the content was different. The format was the same. So were the metaphors. Sports and war.

Yet what I saw, when Hillary said — with grace and apparent sincerity — that it was “an honor” to be running against Barack Obama, and that “Whatever happens, we’re going to be fine”, was the beginning of a concession. It was hedged, for sure. She clearly still wants to win Ohio and Texas. But the writing is on the wall, and it says Barack Obama is not only going to be the Democratic candidate, but the next President of the United States as well.

The change won’t just be symbolic. It will be substantive. One thing that’s so appealing about Obama is that his candidacy subordinates race, subordinates the differences that have divided us for so long. It doesn’t trivialize them, but it does put them in the category of Stuff We Can Move Past, because we have work to do.

I think Dave’s analysis is correct. And he’s right to call the challenge United States 2.0. Maybe we can see our way to something wonderful, instead of a continued struggle. For Dave that’s a new Democratic government. I’m looking for a government that’s energized around facing three very different but overlapping problems.

First, that the U.S. is no longer the only superpower — and that superpower itself will no longer be defined by military might of the conventional sort. War will be different. Might will be different. Ending our worst problems in Iraq will only be the start of it. We need a new relationship with the rest of the world, and better models for understanding the problems there. (I suggest that Barack consult Thomas. P.M. Barnett for help with that.)

Second, that the U.S. must restore both its moral and technical stature, both of which have slipped badly in the last few years.

Third, that seas will rise as ice continues to melt in the Earth’s polar regions, and that this requires far more than “fighting global warming”. If we wish to avoid famine, war over shrinking lands and a global ecological breakdown, we need to think decades and even centuries ahead. Our species has never done that. Instead it has eaten the planet’s resources like a plague of locusts. That will have to change, or nature’s human experiment will fail.

All three require leadership of a sort we have not seen since Reagan. I hope Barack Obama is up for it. Because it’s going to be a very hard job.

I’ll be on a panel later today at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles. The subject is Technology and Trends: What’s Around the Bend? I got started answering that question with this list at Linux Journal.

So it’s coming up on tomorrow, when we’ll be revisiting Cluetrain at There’s a New Conversation, at SAP’s place on Morton Street in New York. Some topics I expect we’ll discuss…

• wtf did we mean, if anything, with ‘markets are conversations’?
• wtf did we mean (and who were we talking to) when we said “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it”? And how are we dealing?
• What’s better since Cluetrain went up? What’s worse?
• What’s unfinished, or unbegun?
• To what extents has cluetrain been co-opted? Or just opted?
• Is social networking part of it? For that matter, is social networking either?

I’ll add to those as The Time approaches. Feel free to add yours in the comments below.

And see some of ya there.

There’s a New Conversation is happening next week in New Yawk (my home skyline, though I’m from Jersey… you know, where New Yawk teams play). Wednesday, 1PM at the SAP Customer Center, 95 Morton Street. It costs money, but less than some cheap seats at professional ball games.

It’s a Cluetrain follow-up. Occasioned by the fact that it’s coming up on ten years since David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and I started the conversation that ended up as the website and a book that still sells well.

Odd that Cluetrain is now marketing canon in many circles — and that “conversation marketing” is hot stuff — yet so much of the execution is no less bullshit than what we ranted against back at the turn of the Millennium.

What will we talk about? As they say where I grew up, Hey, you tell me. And the rest of us. I have ideas, but let’s start with yours. Put ‘em in the comments below.

It’s a huge stretch to think about society, and about business, from the perspective of the independently empowered individual. In business, and even in government, we are so accustomed to thinking about people as dependents, and to seeing their abilities in terms of what we as institutions allow, that it’s difficult to switch our perspective around — and think about companies, and organizations, existing at our grace, and building their services on what we bring to the collective table.

Until I read this piece by Adriana Lukas this morning I hadn’t fully realized how the ubiquitous use of the word content, which I’ve griped about for years (and which Adriana quotes) frames our understanding of markets, and media, in ways that place presumed control in the hands of “providers” other than ourselves. Even UGC — “User Generated Content” — is not seen as ours, but as freight for media companies to forward for their own purposes. As John Perry Barlow put it a few years back, “I didn’t start hearing about ‘content’ until the container business felt threatened”.

Media is where the madness is maintained. And that madness will persist for as long as we continue to assume that business is shipping, and that our worth is measured as freight for The Media’s container cargo business.

But rather than gripe some more, Adriana offers a useful way of framing the full worth of individuals, the creative goods they produce, and what they bring to both social and business relationships: the concept of the person as the platform:

Content is media industry term. The number of people talking about content grows every day as they assume roles that before only media could perform. With more tools and ways of distributing, photos, videos, writings, cartoons etc. are being ‘liberated’ from the channel world. Alas, often sliding into the platform and silo world. As far as I am concerned there are only two platforms – the individual user and the web.

That gives us something interesting to work with as we continue exploring how this changes everything.

Public Broadcasters Opt for CC is the encouraging title for an informative and linky post by Michelle Thorne at icommons.org.

By subsuming all electronic media, and by placing every recording and playback device at zero functional distance from each other, the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder.

Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods. It’s also why they’re thinking hard and long about the role their online transmissions and archives play in a world without physical borders. That’s what Michelle’s article is about.

After visiting positive moves made by a number of institutions, Michelle’s final paragraph makes clear that the challenge is only beginning to be met:

She could easily have put depressing links behind every one of those “howevers”. If I had more time, I’d do it myself.

Still, it’s good to see movement in a positive direction. I’ll be looking to see more when I attend the IMA’s Public Media 08 conference in Los Angeles next month.

I went skiing with The Kid today. What mattered more, however, was that we talked about Martin Luther King, at some length, on the good Doctor’s holiday.

The Kid’s toughest question: Why was he killed? It didn’t end there. He also wanted to know why Gandhi, JFK, RFK, MLK and Benazir Bhutto were all killed. (We didn’t even bring up Jesus, Rabin, Sadat or any of countless others.) Why did people hate them so much that they wanted to kill them? Why does wanting peace attract so much violence? What is it about non-violence that makes other people violent?

I had answers, but I don’t think they were good enough, so I won’t bother sharing them, because I don’t think The Kid found them good enough either.

What I could tell him, with enough information and conviction to hold his attention and keep the good questions* coming, was that the assassination of Martin Luther King is the worst single thing that happened to our country in my lifetime. An incalculable sum of hope, optimism and progress died when Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968. It wasn’t just the anger and riots that followed. It was the absolute absence of the leadership Dr. King had provided, and without which our understanding of so many subjects — chief among them the worth and power of non-violence — was diminished. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two months later increased that dispair to a sum beyond measure. Almost forty years later, I don’t think we’ve healed from those wounds.

These words haunt me…

… because I know that final word will not come in my lifetime. Worse, I fear it may never come, because those that lead through unarmed truth and unconditional love are also likely to be killed for teaching both. Our species needs their leadership. But our species retains, for all its love of Love, a monstrous ability to rationalize its worst deeds. Martin Luther King knew that. And we only knew him for 39 years.

Delmore Schwartz comes to mind:

* You know what people mean when they say “That’s a good question?” That they don’t have an answer.

That’s a question I raise and answer in the affirmative with What open code developers can teach PR, over at Linux Journal, following up on this post from several days ago. Some key points:

Hope it helps.

Simon Collister in The death of spin has been greatly exaggerated:

Right on.

In that post Simon sources this post by Wendy McAuliffe in Liberate Media. Among other things she says,

Some thoughts.

First, amen to the algorithm point. That’s a great clue that will help with my third point, below.

Second, politics has always been about control. So, in a different way, has democracy. Substitute democracy for politics in Wendy’s second point and I’ll agree with it.

Third, the online world has both social media and social habitats. They are different, even when they overlap. Twitter is a social medium. Facebook is a social habitat. Twitter is a new breed of Web site/service that grew out of blogging. Facebook is a walled garden: a place you have to go to be social in the ways it facilitates and permits. In this respect Facebook is AOL 2.0. By calling both “social media” we blur distinctions that are necessary for making sense of highly varied progress (or movement in less positive directions) in the online world. We need a Linnean taxonomy here. And we don’t have one. Yet. For those so inclined, that’s an assignment.

Fourth, the “audience” isn’t any more. And nobody needs to get over that fact more than PR, which wouldn’t exist without the demand for spin. What we wrote about PR in The Cluetrain Manifesto is barely less true today than it was in 1999. If PR wishes to remain relevant in an environment where networked markets get smarter faster than those that would spin them, the profession needs to define and satisfy a market for something other than spin. Good luck with that.

I’ve never been a Hillary fan, mostly because it seemed that nothing she said wasn’t calculated. But when she choked up a couple days ago, for the first time I heard her get real. And likable. Last night after her victory in New Hampshire, she said “I found my voice”. There was nothing fake about it.

The Republican winner, John McCain, has always been known for his “staight talk”. I think that was the difference with voters as well.

Look up the word “voice” in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Then look up the word “compan”, to bring up both “companies” and “company”. Substitute the word “candidates” or “candidate”. Or do the same for government, or legislators, or parties.

Don’t just listen to what the candidates are saying. Or even how they say it. Listen to their voices. And bet accordingly.

I watch little television, so I’ve felt comfortable ignoring the writers strike, which has been going on since November.

But it’s hard to escape the strike’s effects while hanging out in Southern California, where writers of movies and TV shows are essential to what they call The Industry here.

Not surprisingly, a search for a bracing perspective on the matter took me to Articulation and Activism: In Praise of Screenwriters … and “Hackwriters” Too — a post last month by my old friend and colleague Stephen Lewis at his blog Hak Pak Sak. His core points:

Steve has also been active in ProjectVRM, and his post moves me to point out that VRM should, among other things, create business models that facilitate “willingness to pay” for writing and other “content” in the open marketplace where the users of that content have wide-open choices over what to pay for creative goods and how to relate to creators. Our job is to create that “how”. Hollywood won’t, and perhaps can’t. Certainly not without our help, anyway.

That “how” needs to lower the friction involved in “willingess to pay” in the direction of zero. That is, the cost in time and effort required to pay must move toward zero until the willingness to pay exceeds the same value. This challenge first faced us with Napster, and nearly all “solutions” from the supply side since then have ranged from harmful to inadequate.

The will to pay fair sums for perceived value needs to be melded with technology that facilitates 1) working relationships (on an elective basis for both supply and demand), and 2) efficient transaction. Neither can be scaffolded on the old supply-controlled systems that feel threatened by the Net. Nor can it be built on an artist-by-artist or distributor-by-distributor basis, because that will just result in countless narrowly-focused and incompatible CRM (customer relationship management) systems, such as those we see today with public broadcasting, where CRM systems restrict listeners and viewers to paying for freely available creative goods only through hundreds of different channels comprised of stations that mostly comprehend relationship only in terms of “membership”.

Nor can it be built only inside some large company’s walled garden. The most free markets will be built on the most free customers — and the most creative and resourceful suppliers and intermediators.

VRM systems need to leverage the freedom and facilitate the independence of individuals, and their ability to make their own choices. They must enable passive consumers to become active customers. It must help demand find and drive supply at least as well as supply drives and creates demand. A healthy market ecosystem with have both. Not just the latter.

The markets that arise from independent and enabled customers will be incalculably varied and large. And some of the largest potential facilitators of those markets — especially those without stakes in the old distro systems — are in an ideal position to help out here, and to break free of their own old failing or hidebound business models. (Hear that, phone companies? Retailers? Banks and credit card companies?) This is the Intention Economy I wrote about almost two years ago. We’ve made progress in that direction (especially around identity), but we still have a long way to go.

More at How VRM can help CRM get past DRM and some other links I don’t have time to find right now. Gotta pack and leave for CES in Las Vegas. [Later... here's one.]

To understand the matter of Scoble vs. Facebook, you need to understand the matter of Neo vs. Matrix.

I explain in Dependence vs. Independence. That’s the choice. Over in Linux Journal.

[Later...] Much more in the comments below both that post and this one.

This story by Dennis Howlett, on how Twitter spread and processed news of the Bhutto assasination, casts light on the continuing birth of The Live Web.

We also saw it a couple months back with coverage of the California fires near San Diego.

And it’s still early. It’s important to remember that. Everything on the Web is still just a prototype.

This is the first slide from Turning the Tables: What happens when the users are really in charge — the talk I gave at LeWeb3 in Paris a couple weeks ago. The predictions are somewhat long-term. I’ll have some just for 2008 up soon at Linux Journal.

All the LeWeb3 videos are up now, by the way. Mine among them, I assume. Haven’t checked. (Hey, it’s Christmas. I wouldn’t be posting anything if I wasn’t sitting in a basement waiting to pull clothes from a dryer.)

Actual dialog:

Thanks to Marc Canter for his 24 who mattered in 2007. Of course there were countless more. But Marc has been mattering every year. So, a toast to the big guy for staying equally smart, enthused, insightful and effective for a helluva long time. Rock on, dude.

To understand journalism, you need to know the nature of The Story. Every story has three elements: 1) a character, 2) a problem, and 3) movement toward resolution. The character could be a person, a cause, a ball club — doesn’t matter, as long as the reader (or the viewer, or the listener) can identify with it (or him, or her, or them). The problem is what keeps us reading forward, turning the pages, or staying tuned in. It’s what keeps things interesting. And the motion has to vector toward resolution, even if the conclusion is far off in the future.

Sports are pure story fodder. Teams and players are your characters, the games and the procession of opponents are the problem (and the problems within the problem), and there is always movement toward resolution. Even after resolution, new problems, often with new characters within the team’s own character, are being queue’d up.

There are lots of important developments, however, that do not conform to the story format, so they go unreported. One example is murder in places where sudden and senseless death is common. Such has been the case in Los Angeles for many decades. It was, after all, the very point of Chinatown.

Well, L.A. is no Chinatown for Jill Leovy, who has been blogging otherwise uncovered homicides around the city for most of the last year. Her blog is one of the LA Times’s, and it is itself the subject of Life After Death, a Times story about a reporter reporting stories that fail to fit in the Times’ own limited number of pages. Leovy’s own story is an interesting one…

… as are the stories she crafts and her blog hosts:

Stories are the basic format of human interest. The LA Times’ many blogs provide ways to surface more stories, in more ways, for more readers who might find some of those stories meaningful. Or effective, if a larger purpose is involved. Clearly The Homicide Report is far more than an accessory to the coroner’s office. Its own story is Leovy’s mission to expose and reduce the plague of death that continues to afflict her city:

As for the rest of the LA Times’ blogs, it’s getting harder to tell where the paper ends and the blogging begins — unless all you read is the paper and never go online, in which case you miss more and more of what the paper is becoming.

Supporting that observation are Tony Pierce’s take on his first day as blog editor at the paper, and departed assistant editorial page editor Matt Welch’s blast at an especially pontifical piece by Tim Rutten, the Times’ media columnist. Rutten (whom I’ve always liked, for what it’s worth) is moving on too, as he explains in this piece about turnover at the top of the Times’ parent company.

Companies are ways of organizing work and resources. They are also teams on missions to solve problems. How the ones we call ‘papers’ adapt to a world where more can be written online than off, and for more readers, is the top evolutionary challenge for the institution we call journalism, and therefore its most important story.

The principles of practice are the same. The enviornment is not. Nor are the opportunities, which are far more abundant, if less obviously remunerative. (Not all journalists can live alongside the advertising river. Nor should they.) Which means there will continue to be a struggle between missions like Leovy’s and the need for paychecks.

Los Angeles Magazine has a long and excellent piece by RJ Smith on the News-Press mess in Santa Barbara. It’s about two subjects. One is the meltdown at the paper itself — a story that’s now a year and a half old, with no sign of ever ending. The other is the question of whether a newspaper — especially one that has long been a bedrock civic institution — is a public trust. The News-Press, sadly, is not. It only looks like one. Via Craig Smith.

Stephen Wellman has a nice rundown of Mark Anderson’s predictions for 2008 (most of which I agree with — in some cases enthusiastically —, though it’ll take more than a year for many of them to pan out). What’s also cool is that Stephen includes a pointer back to Mark’s predictions for 2007, some of which were right on.

Links to the audio and video of the predictive talk are here.

David Isenberg has announced the next F2C: Freedom to Connect, which will happen on March 31 and April 1 of next year, in Washington, DC. The theme is “The NetHeads come to Washington”. The new term “NetHeads” is counterposed to the old term “BellHeads”, which referred to folks whose world view was framed by the old Bell System, which was the U.S. telephone monopoly until 1984. The successors to that system broadly include the telcos and cablecos through which nearly all U.S. customers connect to the Net.

F2C is for what David calls “the creators of the future of the Internet”, and will be “a meeting of people engaged with Internet connectivity and all that it enables, including vendors, customers, regulators, legislators, analysts, financiers, citizens and co-creators”. The theme is “how universal connectivity and the plunging capital requirements of information production are changing our fundamental economic and social assumptions”.

F2C one of my favorite events. I’ll be going. If you care about the future of the Net, and how it is regulated (and de-regulated) in the U.S., I highly recommend it.

Should Brands Join or Build Their Own Social Network? is the question Jeremiah Owyang raised yesterday on Twitter and in facebook. If you’re a facebook member, you can participate. I am a member, but I’d rather not. At least, not there.

All due respect (and I respect Jeremiah a great deal), I’d rather talk outside the facewall.

Forgive me for being an old fart, but today’s “social networks” look to me like yesterday’s online services. Remember AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and the rest? Facebook to me is just AOL done right. Or done over, better. But it’s still a walled garden. It’s still somebody’s private space. Me, I’d rather take it outside, where the conversation is free and open to anybody.

So here’s what I think.

First, I’m not sure a “brand” can get social at all. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry in the first place, and will never escape that legacy, now matter how much lipstick we put on the branding iron.

Second, the notion of “brands” either “building” or “joining” social networks strikes me as inherently promotional in either case, and therefore compromised as a “social” effort. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t join a social network any brand built, and I wouldn’t want any brand trying to join one I built. But that’s just me. Your socializing may vary. (And, by the way, if I wear a t-shirt with some company’s name on it, that doesn’t mean I belong to that company’s “network”. All it means for sure is that I’m wearing a t-shirt that was clean that morning. It might mean I like that company or organization. At most it means I have some kind of loyalty — although in the cases of sports teams and schools, the loyalty and sense of affiliation is not to a “brand”, unless you insist on looking at everything in commercial terms, one of which “brand” is. My main points here are that, a) there may be less to expressions of apparent loyalty than it may appear, and b) the social qualities of affection, affiliation or belonging mostly don’t derive from “branding” in the sense that Procter & Gamble began popularizing the term back in the 1930s.)

Third, I’m not sure social networks are “built” in any case. Seems to me they’re more organic than structural. Maybe I’m getting too academic here, but I don’t think so. Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. When I think about my social networks — and I have many — I don’t see them as things, or places. I see them as collections of people I know. The best collections of those for me aren’t on facebook or LinkedIn. They’re in my IM buddy list and my email address book. Even if I can extend those two lists into a “social graph” (a term that drives me up a wall), and somehow federate them into these mostly-commercial things we call “social networks” on the Web, I don’t see those “networks” as structures. I see them as people. Huge difference. Critical difference.

Fourth, the thing companies need to do most is stop being all “strategic” about how their people communicate. Stop running all speech through official orifices. Some businesses have highly regulated speech, to be sure. Pharmaceuticals come to mind. But most companies would benefit from having their employees talk about what they do. Yet there are still too many companies where employees can’t say a damn thing without clearing it somehow. And in too many companies employees give up because the company’s communications policy is modeled on a fort, complete with firewalls that would put the average dictatorship to shame. If a company wants to get social, they should let their employees talk. And trust them.

Bottom line: companies aren’t people. If you like talking about your work, and doing that helps your company, the “social network” mission is accomplished. Simple as that.

One last thing. I’m not saying facebook or LinkedIn are bad. They can be useful for many things, and their leaders deserve kudos for the successes they’ve earned. Still it creeps me out when people treat facebook as “The Web, only better”. It ain’t the Web and it ain’t better. It’s a new, interesting and widespread set of experiments, mostly in technology and business. I’m interested in seeing where it goes. But I’m not drinking the kool-aid.

What’s meta about life transcends what’s meta about electronics. Or what’s meta about online social networks or anything that’s less real than life itself. That’s the point made here. From MemoireVive, recorded at LeWeb3 in Paris on Wednesday. And thanks to Joe Andrieu for the pointage.

The folks from ninemillion.org are on stage now at LeWeb3. Great cause by, and for, some great people.

Heading shortly to Logan for a pair of Lufthansa flights that will land me in Paris by dawn tomorrow there. (Still yesterday, here, which is still today… reminds me of the old Bob & Ray soap opera parody: Today is Yesterday Tomorrow.) The cause is LeWeb3., where I’ll speak on Wednesday and listen the rest of the time. See ya there, if not sooner.

[Later...] Arrived in Frankfurt. Actually the time given above referred to the first leg, just completed. The Paris flight out of here is at 0840. Meanwhile I’m paying 18¢/minute for “roaming” on T-Mobile’s network, for which I already pay $29/month. I learned on the last trip that there are many T-Mobiles, and my deal is with just the U.S. one. Still, if your many carriers force customers to pay for “roaming” between them, at least give your carriers different names. Maybe D-Mobile and B-Mobile and U-Mobile. Meanwhile, paying this fee makes them all all F-Mobile to me.

A couple years ago a former high U.S. govenrment official — one whose job required meeting with nearly every member of Congress — made the best argument I have yet heard against any regulation of the Net. Or of anything technical. Though not veratim, this is essentially what he said: I can tell you that there are two things nearly every congressperson does not understand. One is economics. The other is technology. Now proceed.

That line comes to mind when I read House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites, by Declan McCullagh in CNet. It begins,

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

In a follow-up post which includes an email dialog between Declan and one of the bill’s defenders, Declan added,

So what exactly does the SAFE Act do? It doesn’t mandate ongoing network surveillance. What it does require is that anyone providing Internet access who learns about the transmission or storage of information about illegal image must (a) register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax number with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s “CyberTipline” and (b) “make a report” to the CyberTipline that (c) must include any information about the person or Internet address behind the suspect activity and (d) the illegal images themselves. (Note that some reporting requirements already apply to Internet access providers under current law.)

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. It also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in unlawfully “lascivious” poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a “drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting.”

So, would this be obscene to a Phillies fan? How about a Mets fan? Can we even tell if the subject is a minor? It’s not like you can count the rings.

By the way, I’m looking for hard data on how much Net traffic, including search requests, is for junk, porn or both. I’ve heard many different numbers, including some that say the percentage of porn search requests alone is north of 70%. But I dunno.

For a sample, however, watch the scroll at weblogs.com. Then imagine how much filtering you have to do if you’re Technorati or Google Blogsearch.

Chris Carfi explains Facebook’s Beacon changes. One frame:

Bonus quote, from Alec Muffett (at Facebook garage in London last week): “To be told that Facebook is a ’social utility’ which exists purely as a space to attract advertising revenue was both a) a stark truth and b) deeply, deeply upsetting.”

By the way, I do have hope for Facebook. It’s a young company. Nothing they do now is the last thing they’ll do. My hope is that they’ll realize that the relationships that matter most are with users rather than advertisers, and that if they want to beat Google at its own game, they’ll work toward obsoleting advertising by helping demand find supply, rather than vice versa.

Steve Gillmor is the Jean-Luc Godard of podcasting.

Heading into a heavy travel schedule. IIW in California, biz in Toronto, LeWeb3… So expect light blogging.

Meanwhile a few loose links on the outbound…

Tony Pierce is now blogging for the LA Times. So there’s hope. For the Times.

Twitter is paying my rent, Marshall Kirkpatrick says. Specifically,

I don’t mean they’ve hired me as a consultant, though I would love that, I mean Twitter is great for news discovery. Read on for my thoughts on how you can use Twitter more effectively, but keep in mind that communication has its own inherent value – I swear that’s what I like best about Twitter!

How is it paying my rent though? Earlier this week I was remarking (on Twitter) about how many of my recent story leads came from Twitter. I counted and at that time 5 of my last 11 stories were based on news I learned first from my friends on Twitter. It was amazing.

This is a perfect example of a because effect, which is what happens when you make more money because of something than with something. We first talked about this back at Bloggercon 3. Some retrospective on that here and here.

But gradually it’s going to dawn on people that not everything needs a “business model”. And that far more money is made because of the Net, blogging, Linux, IM, and even businesses such as cellular telephony, than is made with any of those things.

So many comments, so little time. I have to run to a bus in the rain shortly. So I’ll respond to just one: Don Dodge’s.

Yes, it’s true that “consumers sometimes forget the bargain they made in exchange for the free services”.

But it’s also true that almost nobody reads Facebook’s “Terms of Service“, much less anybody else’s. Not long ago I posted about the terms for Verizon and AT&T services. Each was over 10,000 words long and boiled down to “We can cut you off at any time for any reason we like and you have no recourse.”

All these ToSes are asymmetrical to a degree that verges on slavery. What’s the point of even looking at them? If we want the services, we do the deal. If the service is free, all the better. That these bargains are faustain has been known for the duration.

Do we have to continue to make them? The answer is yes, as long as we deal with the devil from a position of near-absolute weakness.

That weakness was more than learned — it was institutionalized — in the Industrial Age. That was a long period of business history during which we came to think that markets are all about What Big Companies Do, and that a “free” market is “Your choice of walled garden”. I wrote about this in Go from Hell, back in September. Here’s the section that pertains most to the Facebook Matter at hand:

Alvin Toffler explored this irony in The Third Wave, published in 1980, where he said:

(The Industrial Age) violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always been one… production and consumption… In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches … it ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating a way of life filled with economic tension.

I wrote about that split, that tension, in Listen up, back in 1998 — eighteen years after The Third Wave and nine years before now.

David Weinberger and I also wrote about it a year later, in this chapter of Cluetrain. We called it “The Axe in Our Heads”:

Ironically, many of us spend our days wielding axes ourselves. In our private lives we defend ourselves from the marketing messages out to get us, our defenses made stronger for having spent the day at work trying to drive axes into our customers’ heads. We do both because the axe is already there, the metaphorical embodiment of that wedge Toffler wrote about — the one that divides our jobs from our lives. On the supply side is the producer; on the demand side is the consumer. In the caste system of industry, it is bad form for the two to exchange more than pleasantries.

Thus the system is quietly maintained, and our silence goes unnoticed beneath the noise of marketing-as-usual. No exchange between seller and buyer, no banter, no conversation. And hold the handshakes.

When you have the combined weight of two hundred years of history and a trillion-dollar tide of marketing pressing down on the axe in your head, you can bet it’s wedged in there pretty good. What’s remarkable is that now there’s a force potent enough to actually start loosening it.

Here’s the voice of a spokesperson from the world of TV itself, Howard Beale, the anchorman in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network who announced that he would commit suicide because “I just ran out of bullshit.” Of course, he had to go insane before he could at last utter this truth and pull the axe from his own head.

We’re all still Howard Beales today. We haven’t run out of bullshit, and there’s no less cause for anger than there was when Network, The Third Wave and Cluetrain each came out. The Information Age is here, but its future is not just (as William Gibson put it) unevenly distributed. Large parts of it aren’t here at all. The largest of those is actual empowerment of customers — in ways that are native to customers, rather than privileges granted by vendors. The difference is huge.

That’s why yelling doesn’t work. What we need instead is to make tools that work for us, and not just for them. We need to invent tools that give each of us independence from vendor control, and better ways of telling vendors what we want, when we want it, and how we want to relate — on our terms and not just on theirs. As Neo said to the Architect, “The problem is choice”. That problem will be with us as long as that axe is in our heads.

Thank Facebook for starting to pull that axe out. As Dan Blank shows, and Jason Calacanis says,

All of this comes up because Facebook has done three things that are at once extremely innovative, extremely rude, extremely helpful, and extremely disconcerting:

1. They are collecting and republishing user data on a level not before seen by users.

2. They are allowing advertisers to use this data to reach these users.

3. They are not giving this information–information that has put their value at $15 billion–back to their users.

Depending on who you are, or what your goals are at a particular time, you might find extreme pleasure or discomfort in each of these.

What matters is the first point. (Forgive me, but the others are red herrings, even if you’re an entrepreneur hoping to make money on the advertising gravy train.) Facebook crossed a line here. They lured us into a vast stockyard, and then began to monetize us in ways that violated our quaint notion that we are not in fact cattle.

Treating users of free services like cattle is as old as TV, radio and billboards. It may be as old as people painting in caves with charcoal and spit. The difference now isn’t in Facebook’s manners, which are no different than those of NBC or the New York Times. The difference isn’t even that this time it’s personal. That’s been a holy grail for advertising since the beginning as well. Facebook is reaching for a golden ring here, and I’m inclined to forgive them for doing that.

The main difference is that we’re not powerless any more. That was the core message of this line from Cluetrain:

If we want our reach to truly exceed Facebook’s grasp, we can’t just tell Facebook to stop grasping. We have do deals on our terms and not just theirs. We have to have real relationships and not just systems on the sell side built only to “manage” us, mostly by minimizing human contact.

Perhaps most of all, we need to come up with systems that help demand find supply, rather than just ones that help supply find (or “create”) demand. That means we need alternatives to the outmoded and inefficient system of guesswork we call advertising.

That doesn’t mean we make advertising go away. But it does mean that we find new paths between demand and supply. and it does mean that find ways to get unwanted advertising out of our face.

[Later...] Alan Patrick sees a tipping point.

So I’ve been reading Dave Winer, Ethan Zuckerman, Jeff Jarvis, David Wienberger and Wendy Seltzer, all of whom have problems with what Facebook is doing with its members’ data.

Dave in particular is looking for action:

There are thorny issues here, but we want these companies to give up control of our information, and we don’t want them to be overly scared of public opinion as they do it.

And this is hardly the most important giving up of control. Most important, I want them to give me control of my data.

 created a petition for us to sign. It reads, “Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites–or let companies use my name to endorse their products–without my explicit permission.”

At this point the voice of Jim Morrison rises from my subconscious, announcing the opening stanza from Soft Parade in the homiletic voice of a preacher from a pulpit:

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

Morrison screams that last line, in manner later perfected by the also-late Sam Kinison. My own version: Stop petitioning Facebook and Google to solve our problems for us. They’re not creating those problems alone. We’re been allowing them to create those problems in the first place, and we’ve been doing that for too long. Time to come up with some new rules of engagement — ones that work for us as well as them.

Dave, Scott Rafer and others rightly call on MoveOn.org to get back to its original mission and stay out of tech territory. But MoveOn has something right in its last four words: without my explicit permission. Question: How do we exercise that permission? By what protocols? What tools? What policies? What agreements?

Dave provides the answer:

So before we overly politicize the leading edge of technology, let’s get together on what actually does and doesn’t serve the user’s interest.

I want Netflix and Yahoo to give me an XML version of my movie ratings, for me to decide what to do with. I’ve been asking for this for a couple of years, I still don’t have it. This is information I created. I want to keep a copy. I want to make sure that Netflix knows about all my Yahoo ratings and vice versa. I’d like to give a copy to Facebook (assuming they agree to not disclose it) and maybe to Amazon, so they can recommend products I might want to purchase (again keeping it to themselves). I want to begin a negotiation with various vendors, where I give them something of value, and they give me back something of value. Permalink to this paragraph

The leaders of Silicon Valley begrudgingly gave up their view of us as couch potatoes, now they think of us as generators of content they can put ads on (and pay us nothing). We still need to work on that respect thing.

The boldface in the first paragraph is mine. Because that’s what we need to do. It’s not enough to petition the likes of Facebook to give us our data. We need to create the rules by which our data can be used. When we sign on as “members” of some company’s “social network”, they need to sign our terms as well. From the start.

For too long we’ve lived with “relationship management” that’s asymmetrical and one-way. Creating the grounds for symmetrical relationships cannot be the job of Facebook, Google, Microsoft or any big company. They can’t do it, and they won’t. We can’t petition those lords with prayer, blogs, or anything else. (Well, we can, but it won’t be enough.)

We need to create our own new rules — ones that protect our privacy while making us better members of the social and business systems we create together. I say “better” because that’s what we’re bound to be when we cease being eyeballs and start acting like whole human beings.

This very topic, by the way, is at the heart of VRM.

By the way, a great place to start doing the work Dave calls for here is the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, the week after next. These workshops are among the most constructive (un)conferences I’ve ever been to, and I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the organizers. Good work always happens there, in three days of serious barn-raising.

Look forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.

In response to my piece in Linux Journal yesterday, Antonio Rodriguez, proprietor of Tabblo, has come up with an excellent workaround for photographers dealing with the asymmetry of today’s Net and the problem of uploading over and over again to multiple photo sites:

I’d like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn’t Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc’s VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.

You listening lazy web?

Better yet, are you listening, carriers?

All the last-mile companies — Comcast, Cox, AT&T, RCN, Time-Warner, Verizon and the rest — are continuing to make all their money on “triple play” and other monopoly rents. They can do better than that. The Net may be a World of Ends in an ideal sense, but in reality there are physical-world issues that put proximal services at a real advantage. Same goes for proximal real estate.

The carriers have already let Akamai school them once. I suppose you could throw in Amazon’s Web Services (notably EC2 and S3, which provide big back-end compute and storage, cheap) as well. Companies such as Digisense leverage Amazon’s S3 back end to provide workarounds of carrier last-mile slow-upstream asymmetries. (Disclosure: I’ve consulted Digisense.) Rather than being a problem to be worked around, the carriers could become the solution. Or at least support solutions provided by more agile companies that could serve as partners or customers.

There are enormous benefits to carrier incumbency that go beyond extending decades-old cable TV and century-old telephone company business models. There are countless potential service businesses that can be either created or supported by the carriers, and their suppliers as well. (That’s you, Cisco.) Antonio just described one of them.

Here at my apartment near Boston I’m lucky to have a choice of three different carriers: Comcast, RCN and Verizon. I use Verizon because it provides 20Mb downstream and 5Mb upstream — much higher speeds, especially on upstream, than either of its rivals — and comes pretty damn close to delivering exactly that:

The HDTV we get is also pretty good, though the user interface and choice of set-top boxes fall far short of what we’ve experienced for years in Santa Barbara with Dish Network. (Still, they’re new at this. I’m willing to cut them some slack.)

Anyway, we pay a little over $100/month for TV, phone and Net as a “triple play”. Of that, the Net is about half the total. But what if we want more, such as an IP address or two, so se can set up our own Web servers? Well, we need to get Verizon FiOS for business for that. There the lowest price is about $100, for a two-year commitment for “Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps”. That’s twice the cost for much lower speeds, both ways, than I get now. The closest business offer to what I have now is “Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps”, and that’s $389.99/month for one year and $404.99/month for two years.

This kind of pricing prevents far more business than it supports. It’s the old telco mentality at work: the one that says, “Businesses can afford to pay more, so we’ll charge more”.

Verizon and its competitors need to start seeing their primary advantages in three places: 1) existing customer relationships; 2) proximity to customers of buildable and rentable service-platform real estate; and 3) providing the connectivity that allows business to grow around #1 and #2.

So consider this a friendly and construcive shout-out to CZ and others at Verizon, from the other side of the carrier/customer fence. You guys are making some good moves, technically. Now let’s see you make a few that support the Web’s and the Net’s business and social ecosystems, and not just those of Hollywood and Ma Bell’s ghost.

Alex Iskold headlines, Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters), and begins,

When Google and others ganged up on Facebook a few weeks ago, to many of us, Open Social looked like a marketing move. The news came suspiciously close to Facebook’s ad platform announcement and after a close look, the API looked very raw. Most participants just announced their support without having any concrete implementation.

Yet, Open Social is not a fluke and neither it is an accident. It is an important step in the evolution of social and open web, a step that we have seen taken before in other circumstances. It is called commoditization. By creating an exchange of gadgets and social information Google and Co. declared that the era of social silos is over. In this post we look at the details of the open social API, discuss its adoption and look into the future of the social web.

He goes on to give details.

I still think Open Social is also a marketing move. The timing alone was too propitious for it not to be. But still, even if Google is zigging to Facebook’s zag, it’s potentially a good zig, if Alex is right.

[Later...] Dave says it’s not true.

Over in Linux Journal: Let’s keep photography and mapping mashable. A sample:

Now, in an ideal world — that is, one where the Net is truly symmetrical, peer-to-peer and end-to-end — I would rather do the federating myself, from my own photo archive, with my own APIs. That way I could federate selected photos to Flickr, Tabblo, Panoramio and whomever else I please. In fact, that would probably make things easier for everybody. But that’s a VRM (vendor relationship management) grace we don’t enjoy yet. In the absence of that, we need more open APIs between services such as these, so customers’ photos can be shared at the vendor-to-vendor level.

To get the context, ya need to read the whole thing. But you get the idea.

The shot above, of Kettle Point on Lake Huron, is one of many in a series taken in a line running from Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario, across Michigan looking north toward Saginaw (and its Bay), Grand Rapids, various towns on the Grand River, and then the shore of Lake Michigan, all while flying from Boston to Chicago on the way to Atlanta last week.

The woods near Kettle Point, and up the coast into Pinery Park, comprise the largest oak savanna in North America, left unspoiled because the sandy land beneath was bad for farming. The lines running through them are the remains of old shorlines. I won’t say “ancient”, because they aren’t. They’re markers of the rising land and shrinking size of the lake, which is actually a puddle left by the melting glacier that comprised an ice cap that recently came south as far as Long Island and Cape Cod, which were both built along its southern boundary of dirt and rock the glacier had carried there. In fact all the Great Lakes, and nearly every Lake in Canada, is but a dozen thousand years old, at its most elderly edge (this one here).

Kinda puts global warming in perspective. You could stand at any one of those lines at any time in the past 12,000 years, and speak of global warming as a progressive fact.

By the way, fall colors stand out in many of these pictures, if you look closely for them.

The piece is titled,

And it begins,

In my midst are soldiers who have been shot, blown up, burned, and rehabilitated. Whether they chose to return to Iraq or not, I don’t know. In any case they’re here at Camp Anaconda, and unless I see them in the shower I can’t tell them apart from the nonwounded. Likewise, it’s not until I walk a mile with a guy named Eric that I notice the merry-go-round action of his hip.

Eric and I enter the dining tent together. Traffic is one-way through the crowded tent, where food is arranged buffet-style. Our mainline choices are horse cock or triangle fish. Side dish options include raw onion, mayonnaise, grits, and fresh cantaloupe.

I get my cantaloupe and sit next to Eric, such that our arms touch from shoulder to elbow. Eric’s arm feels shrunken and insular. Later Eric tells me that his arm was shot off and reattached, but for the time being we don’t talk. We just eat, wounded or not, like everybody else.

Several paragraphs later, it says,

To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue
of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.

Hmmm…

Anyway, I found the Believer though this post by JP, who says,

You see, I’m with Doc. I believe in VRM. I believe that in the 21st century, product-driven advertising is fundamentally flawed. Personal recommendations, whether direct or via collaborative filtering, count for a lot more. Recommendations from people I know and trust, recommendations that scale now that I have the tools and the technology to discover the recommendations and act on them.

So I enjoy reading magazines that have no ads in them. Magazines printed on good paper, with loving care taken on format and layout. Magazines that cover a range of subjects, enticing me into finding out more about things I know little about. Magazines that have copyright-free content. Magazines like the Believer.

So the Believer may have copyright-free content (is there such a thing? I dunno…), but it’s still mostly locked behind a subscription wall.

Which is my excuse to say that I’d like to see VRM make it possible for the Believer to expose their content and get paid for it anyway, because it wants to be in relationship with its readers — one that involves readers paying for the goods as part of that relationship.

Because I also believe that writers (and publishers, broadcasters, and artists of every sort) who give their goods away yet need to be paid for their work, are more likely to be paid by those with whom they enjoy a degree of relationship.

In short, I believe that relationship pays — or can, once we put together the protocols, tools and other stuff to make it happen.

Two links. EveryOSsucks, by the DeadTrolls. And The World is a Better Place Now, by Antonio Rodriguez. No agreement, yet both are right.

Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, looks back from 2500. A sample:

By the way, Sir Arthur turns 90 on 16 December.

I ran into Jeremie Miller yesterday in an elevator here at the hotel where Defrag is happening in Denver. I last spoke to Jeremie while working on a story/interview with him for Linux Journal. Atlas: Hoisting a New World of Search is now up, and things have been moving along on the Atlas project, now titled Search Wikia.

Jeremie is the father of Jabber and its protocol, XMPP. I see he’ll be among those talking this morning. He’s always sensible and provocative at the same time. Looking forward to what he says. As for where he wants to take search, here’s an excerpt from one of his blog posts that I used in the piece I wrote as well:

By coincidence last night I had a chance to talk with JC Herz about a range of topics that broadly revolve around what I’m beginning think is The Same Thing, though I’m not sure what that Thing is yet. Meanwhile JC will be speaking here as well today, on Visualization of Social Intelligence. Visualization is not a strength of search as we’ve come to know it. (Though I’m glad Technorati has brought its results-over-time chart back. Here’s the one for defrag conference.) So I’m imagining possibilities here.

Yesterday afternoon’s rapid round of mini-keynotes, by Dick Hardt, Esther Dyson, myself and Ross Mayfield (in that order) brought suggestions afterwards that we had attempted to talk about the same basic thing, which was people. At lest we all seemed to be coming at tech from the people perspective. There was, however, no collusion at all. Just coincidence, or something like it. For in-depth reports on this and other Defrag Stuff, look here, here, and here.

The high point for me, by the way, came early with David Weinberger’s opening talk, about what’s implicit, rather than explicit. David’s an outstanding speaker, and this was the best of his best. Deep, moving and just amazing. The first remark from the audience was from a woman who said “I didn’t expect to cry at a tech conference keynote”.

David outlines his talk here, concluding,

Is there a thread that connects between all that he and the rest of us said, and are saying, especialy about search? I think so.

Meanwhile, here’s JP on the a rare convergence.

Here’s what I saw when I looked out my Denver hotel window this morning. That’s venus and the moon, in a conjunction, high in the eastern sky. If you live on the West Coast and it’s clear, you can see the same thing right now (5:20am), and into the morning light.

Same for folks in Hawaii and the Pacific.

The configuration will change by the time dawn reaches Australia and eastern Asia, but will still be impressive, methinks.

An interesting exercise: with the moon so close to Venus, you have a guidepost to finding Venus in braod daylight, just by looking for it to the north of the moon.

By the way, sorry the shot’s a bit smeared. It was a five-second hand-held exercize and the best I could do with no time to spare.

I was was trying to find an old Bill Gates quote when I ran across an early DaveNet titled Bill Gates vs The Internet. In it Dave wrote,

He wrote that on October 18. 1994. This was before Netscape, before Amazon, before eBay and waaaay before Google.

Yesterday Dave wrote two equally precient and important posts: A bit about Open Social and Think about all the frees and opens and what they reveal. In the first he says,

And in the second he looks at all the “Open _____” and “Free _____” mantras, then adds,

Free Users.

Here’s my corollary to both: When we have free users, we won’t ask companies to “let me control” my data. Instead, we’ll ask “What data of mine will I let this or that company use.”

Think about what it means to be a “user”, and what a “user” is.

Because companies are users too.

The idea behind this challenge isn’t to put the shoe on the other foot, but to put proper shoes on both feet.

We need real relationships here. Not the kind where one party has the exclusive power to “let” the other party have rights, data or anything else. Not the kind where one party has to beg the other party for their freedom. Not the kind where “Customer Relationship Management” consists of “capturing”, “managing” and “owning” customers as if they were cattle.

We will never have truly free and open markets — ones with choices for customers among large suppliers that go beyond “Which rancher’s fenced land shall I graze in?” — until users on both the demand and the supply sides are truly free. And that will only happen when both sides have the tools to express their freedom and independence, when both can assert the terms by which they are willing to relate — for the good of themselvess and each other.

We have those tools on the sellers’ side. We lack them on the buyers’ side. Correcting that is what ProjectVRM is all about.

Bonus link from Britt Blaser, with a bonus quote: Where there’s folk, there’s fire.

Dana Blankenhorn: Dump the Silo Model. His gist (quoted in the long because by shortening it I risk leaving out his full thrust and the importance of it.

Good place to start. The key, in making the political as well as the business arguments, is to show how regarding the bits as free (as in freedom, not as in beer, by the way) will be good for the larger economy, including the carriers who will be asked (or told) to leave money on the table.

We need to show the benefits to incumbency that are not those of monopolists. What are those? If we can’t answer that question, we won’t be able to sell it.

What does the Microsoft “partnership” with Facebook mean for users? I just posted that question, and angles toward some answers, over at Linux Journal. In part the post also addresses Jeremiah Owyang’s post, How Microsoft got their Passport afterall. Jeremiah’s right to worry about What Microsoft is Up To here. He also has a good question about what the Microsoft-Facebook partnership means for Google.

I believe, however, that the solutions that matter most aren’t going to come from big companies. They’ll come from independent developers working at companies large and small — including Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Also from users themselves, who now play roles as producers as well as consumers. (In fact, much of the open source movement is about the demand side supplying itself — “scratching one’s own itch” and all that.)

That’s why I conclude my post with an invitation for Facebook developers to attend the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View on December 3-5. The IIW workshops — going on since early 2005 — are among the most productive I’ve ever been to. Great work comes out of them, every time. And we’re going to need it now, becaused we’re sharing enormous amounts of personal and social information online through Facebook and other “social networks”. What’s done with that data should be our concern, and not just the concern of those who make or spend money “targeting” us with better message rifles.

Over at Linux Journal, I just posted Maybe UCANN school ICANN on whois. It begins,

The subject is equally geeky, wonky and important. You might wanna check it out.

Dave:

Exactly. Here’s another nugget:

It’s not so much a power shift from supply to demand, but the increased ability of everybody to supply (not “generate”) products, opinions, ideas, whatever. This is much bigger than Silicon Valley, or anybody into Big Supply, can imagine. Even after living on the Net all these years.

I know there are exceptions. But the rules stand.

Here’s the problem. For me, anyway.

I believe the Net is an open place. Same with the Web.

I also believe private walled gardens on the Web are fine things. Nothing wrong with them.

My problem is when the former starts looking and acting like the latter. And that’s why I’m already tired of Facebook. The “friend request” list (top item to the left there) is one I’ve whittled down from a much higher number. If I could gang-whittle them, I might be more interested, but the routine still involves declining to check off which of many different ways I met somebody (”both owned the same dog”, “set up by a mutual ex-boss” or whatever), and other time-sucks. Not to mention that the site takes many seconds to load, or to bring up email, or whatever. At least for me.

The big challenge for Facebook, as it has been for AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and everybody else who ever ran a walled garden, is to make their “platform” something that sits on the Net and the Web, not something that substitutes for it. Facebook’s mail, for example, is a substitute. If there’s a way I could get Facebook mail with my IMAP or POP client, I’d rather do that. (Can you, by the way? I doubt it, but I dunno.)

Anyway, lif’e’s too short, and this list of stuff is too long. If you’re waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation,or a burp or any of that other stuff, don’t hold your breath. Or take offense. I’ve got, forgive me, better things to do.

Too back you can’t resign a game in baseball the way you can in chess. Because that would be the merciful way to end to Game 7 of the ALCS. (Why don’t they call it the “penant race” any more?). The Sox are up 11-2 at the bottom of the 8th. They’re at home and the crowd is going nuts right now, right after Kevin Youkilis cracks a two-run homer off a giant Coke bottle high over the outfield. That was a homer you knew was coming, just like you did with J.D. Drew’s grand slam yesterday. It was Destiny. Only worse: for Cleveland, outscored 30-5 after going up 3 games to 1 in the series. Down but not out, the Sox began pounding the crap out of the ball. It didn’t even matter that some of their pitching sucked. They had the bats, and they were using them.

But will they beat the Rockies, which are on the hottest baseball streak in years?

I say, Sox in Six.

[Later...] Three great catches to end the game in the top of the 9th. Boston is heaven. The Sox are going to the Mountains. And the Mountains are coming to Boston. Should be a rocking series.

Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now.

Unless, of course, it’s been fed out through syndication and picked up by a news reader or feed search engine (e.g. Google Blogsearch or Technorati) that’s paying attention to how long ago something got posted.

Note that feeding is not cycling. Rivers don’t flow in circles.

News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.

But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.

There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.

This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.

Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.

To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.

A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver — if not many of them. Most papers will copy other papers, of course. But one paper will start the trend, take the lead, and break the ice that’s damned up their purpose in static sites and tombed archives.

One of them will see that there’s a Live Web as well as a static one. And that the Live Frontier is where the action is, and will be.

I’m betting they’ll follow the New York Times, just like they always do.

If that happens the Times will, as it has done before, follow Dave Winer, who has been showing them how with NYTimesriver for years.

As usual, Dave has been taking the Times, and all of journalism, to school. (Not that they want to go, but he’s taking them anyway.) His latest post is A new view of NY Times news, and it’s a great demonstration of open source development out here in the everyday world. The dude isn’t just talking about the cheap-as-water billion-dollar idea that will save the industry’s ass. He’s actually doing the work of making it happen. He’s thinking out loud and demonstrating his thinking, right where everybody can see it and put it to use.

I was just wondering if the term “river” has even come up at the ONA (Online News Association) conference in Toronto this week. Let’s see…

A search for ona and toronto on Technorati brings up 29 results. When I add river or newsriver the results go to zero in each case. When I search for ona and toronto on Google Blogsearch, I find 3,215 results, which narrow down to 440 (all spam blogs, or splogs) when I add river, and zero when I substitute newsriver.

Let’s see what they say a year from now at the next ONA. I’m betting that newsriver will be one of the top topics at the show.

On the Q side, the TechPresident folks have just launched 10Questions.com, with help from the The New York Times Editorial Board, MSNBC and a total of 40 sponsors. Fun to see that the first video question was posted by my old pal Ruby Sinreich. :

On the answer side, here are the editors:

Meanwhile, I can’t resist pointing to the Onion News Network (ONN) video story, Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters. Hard to believe it’s not true. Maybe 10Questions can turn that around.

Michael Wolff, arch-quotable media scourge, has started a new medium of his own: Newser.com. He explains why, and much more, in his latest Vanity Fair piece: Is This The End of News? Excerpts —

The trick is getting the algorithm right, he says. Or says his techies say. But finally, it’s personal:

I know the feeling. Here’s another: Everything we invent is just a prototype for the next mistake. And that’s okay. The best we can do is leave the world a little better than we found it. All of us found it full of information only other people know. My youngest kid, at age two or less, grabbed me by the finger one day and pulled me outside. “Papa,” he said, “show me something”. Translated to the adult: “I’ve been here about six hundred days or so. You’ve been here forever. You know what all this stuff is. I don’t. Fill me in.”

News is how we fill each other in. The need for that will never go away.

shirts here… through airport security. Fun otherwise.

I’m an optimist… The newspaper will not be around in twenty years. Let’s say ‘taps’ and move on. Just said by Drew Clark at the luncheon talk at the Berkman Center. It was a toss-off line, but along a very constructive vector. Uncontained by legacy systems like the print one that both supports and shackles the newspaper industry, Drew and his fellow travelers are breaking important trails.

More… there are different sorts of front pages out there… RSS is a sort of front page… Journalism has a very bright future; just a different one than it’s had…

“I saw your dad playing basketball yesterday,” a girl in my kid’s school told him yesterday. “It was weird”, she said.

Got some good hang-time this afternoon with William New of Intellectual Property Watch. William lives in Geneva and watches the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at close range, along with issues such as open access and intellectual property policy around the world.

Anyway, at one point I asked him if the term wiposuction had ever been used. It was the first he’d heard of it. In fact, it was the first Google had heard of it as well. Be interesting to see how it does there. Also how fast Google and Technorati index it. I’m posting this at 11:05:16pm EDST.

Five minutes later. Nothing yet on either. Ten minutes later. Still nothing.

Half an hour. Still nothing.

For what it’s worth, I’m checking on “time to index” here. Neither is doing so good. It’s been close an hour now and I’m going to bed.

Woops, one last check on Google itself (not the presumably feed-fed Live Web-searching Google Blogsearch) yielded one result, but not for this post. It was for this here, which found it first. Feh.

As for Yahoo, its defaulted results include everything for “liposuction”. You can filter just for “wiposuction”, and it;ll give you a pile of results that include “wiposuction” as a misspelling of “liposuction” in scammy websites for the latter. No links to any of that because I don’t want to get your eyes dirty.

Night.

[Time passes...] Okay, it’s now 23 hours and 25 minutes later. Google Blogsearch now has the item indexed, saying it was posted 23 hours ago. Technorati has it too, and says “1 day ago”. No clear winner there.

Last night the kid and I drove back down to You-Do-It in Needham and picked up some thin RG-59u coaxial cable to run under the edge of the rug from one side of the living room to the other. Your standard fat black TV cable (the very stuff known as “cable”) would never do it; but it comes in thin versions too. Since both my wife and our landlady don’t want to see any wires, we had to get something we could hide. You-Do-It has approximately everything electronic, including what we needed to get his job done.

So anyway, hiding some cable under the rug made it possible for us to see watch TV in the standard way, for the first time since taking the apartment here near Boston. Our cable company is Verizon FiOS, which brings the signal to the outside of the house on fiber optic cable but runs the last sixty feet with standard co-ax.

At the far end of the cable is a Verizon set-top box (STB) made by Motorola. The “TV” consists of an LCD computer screen and a set of cheap powered speakers. We receive no signals over the air, or even over the cable. Instead TV has become nothing more than an application. “Channels” are nothing more than data streams.

Our channel line-up from Verizon is smaller than what we get from Dish Network on our setup back home. No HBO or Showtime, for example. The picture quality appears to be about the same, although in both cases the quality appears to be limited at the source. Much, or perhaps most, of the HD programming really isn’t. Some of it is plain old NTSC (low-definition) television. Some of it is HD but in a smaller area, surrounded by a large black frame. The user interface is a bit fancier than Dish’s, and appears to be faster, but if you hold down an arrow to scroll up and down the Guide, some of the lines change while others do not, which makes fast scrolling almost pointless. Dish also has star-type reviews (four being max) for its movies, while Verizon does not. Dish’s info from the guide is also better, I think. Hard to tell, without having them side-by-side. The music selection on Dish is also far better, since it also includes Sirius. The kid, who likes oldies, was especially annoyed that the category “gold” covers all of the fifties and sixties, while the service has a separate channel for each of the next three decades.

For some reason “Channel not available” shows up with disturbing frequency. Or so it seemed on our first evening with it, lasting about 20 minutes. The main missing one last night was WGBH, our top local PBS station.

The main reason I’m posting this is to pass along what the kid said after we did a scan from one end of the “dial” to the other.

“There’s nothing on”, he said. And walked away.

What would “something” be?

“Oh, you know. Like on YouTube”.

Brad Kava, my old buddy who was for many years a radio and music writer for the Mercury-News, writes,

Brad also has this appeal for Tawn Mastrey, a friend and who will die without a liver donation. She doesn’t need a whole one. Livers regenerate. A piece of one will do. (I didn’t know that.) More:

In respect to the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for IP-enabled services, Susan Crawford writes

IP in this case refers to Internet Protocol, not Intellectual Property. Although, where the FCC is concerned, the distinction may be a fine one.

Meanwhile, Sprint Presses for Cheaper Access to Broadband Lines, in the Washington Post, tells a story too rarely revealed: that the biggest carriers are playing the scarcity game with the Internet’s backbones.

Of course, that’s their business and their right.

The big question is why they can’t think like Amazon, which loosed S3 and EC2 on the world as pure utilities. S3 is storage. EC2 is computation. Both cost who-knows-what to build. $Billions? Certainly in the many $millions. In any case Amazon serves them up as if they were oil and gas pipelines. And, because they are pure utilities, and affordable for anybody (with no distinction between “consumers” and “businesses”), they are a tide that lifts many boats of all kinds. Especially business.

Now think about it… If computing were regulated like communications, and Web services were deployed like telco and cableco services, Amazon and its competitors would live like zoo animals in the FCC’s regulatory habitat — and we’d all be paying top dollar for scarce centralized computing and storage services, probably run on behalf of “partners” in the “content” cartel. You, the customer, would be a mere consumer, producing nothing more than money exctracted from countless “billing events”. As for your business, your work, your power to produce in a networked world… Forget about it. There wouldn’t be that world. Just another few-to-many top-down distribution system for stuff you consume.

Instead of Web 2.O, we’d have TV 2.0. Which, come to think of it, is about what we get with “HD” TV.

If the carriers woke up, they’d look at the enormous ecosystem growing around Amazon’s utilities, and realize that the usage restrictions on the “last mile” and monopoly pricing of “backhaul” are preventing far more business than either enable — businesses that the carriers could also serve in ways that leverage benefits of incumbency other than squeezing maximized dollars out of minimized choice. Oh, and they’d find more ways to pay down the debt the took on when they built out their infrastructures in the first place.

But that’s not the way to bet. Instead, the better bet is more regulation, more favoritism, more ways for carriers to put a free market paint job on a captive market offering, while they work overtime to shove the Internet genie back in the pre-1984 bottle.

I’ve got more coming on this over at Linux Journal. But I’m also kinda under the weather and have a plane to catch soon. In any case, I’ll get it up as soon as I can.

My favorite recent Edhat is Gate B, posted August 31st. It begins,

Today’s is good too, though I can’t find the link to it. Here’s an excerpt:

So I had coffee on Thursday with Peter Sklar, the chief hat-wearer of Edhat. We talked about what news is, and about whether what we still call newspaper journalism should be strictly built around our old notions of news as “content” that gets authored by authorities and distributed by media. Peter’s an authority on a lot of stuff (he’s a technologist with an advanced math degree, for example); but that’s not what makes Edhat work. It’s something much more personal and engaging than that. There is nothing else quite like Edhat. It is not the product of pro formalities. It’s a labor of love to some degree, but the love flows back in asymmetrical abundance. And that’s the important part.

I was at a cocktail party last night, at the opening of the Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival, talking with Peter and his wife, when mayor Marty Blum came up and joined the conversation. It was clear she loves Edhat, as do many other people in town, most of whom don’t know who Peter is because he’s a shy guy and prefers to let the invisible Ed take the lead. I thought to myself, Why does Marty love Edhat? Is that just because the News-Press pounds Marty like tough meat every chance they get? Is it because Edhat provides a reliably positive (as well as delightfully ironic) source of interesting items about Santa Barbara? Both those might be true, but there’s a special relationship there, and not just for Marty.

The word “loyalty” doesn’t cover what goes on between readers and Edhat. It’s something more. I’d say the same goes for columnists with the Independent, the Daily Sound and various blogs, including (perhaps especially) Craig Smith’s. In a way this is no different than what Herb Caen had going at the San Francisco Chronicle for a thousand years, and that Barney Brantingham had for forty-six years at the News-Press and now enjoys at the Independent. (As does Starshine Roshell and other relocated members of the News-Press diaspora.) These are not just columnists, but writers who depend utterly on their readers.

So, one more question for Peter, the other panelists, and readers at the panel: Is this kind of highly personal engagement with readers the foundation we need for the future of newspapers (or whatever succeeds them)? To unpack that a bit, columnists have always been an essential but secondary ingredient in the newspaper recipe. Is it possible that they are now the primary ingredient?

Back in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe coined the term “New Journalism”, and applied it to engaged writers like himself, who waded deeply into a subject and in some cases became primary figures in the stories they wrote about. (The most extreme example was Hunter S. Thompson, who branded his new form gonzo.)

Could it be that New Journalism is finally arriving?

The Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival started last night with an award presentation to local author T. Coraghessan Boyle, and continues tomorrow with, among other things, a panel titled What’s Next for Newspapers. On the panel will be: Jeramy Gordon, editor and publisher of of the Santa Barbara Daily Sound; Matt Kettman, senior editor of The Independent; Jerry Roberts, author of Never Let Them See You Cry and former managing and executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Barbara News Press, respectively; Peter Sklar, publisher of Edhat; and Craig Smith, columnist, law professor and author of Craig Smith’s Blog. I’m the moderator.

A few questions running through my mind…

Be interesting to see how it goes. Hope to see some of ya’ll there.

Joe Andrieu is on a roll. Or in a role. Four links before I hit the road:

Consider those bonus links to lots of other stuff.

David Brooks in the New York Times:

I was talking with a Republican friend a couple days ago. He thought Hillary was the next Kerry: a candidate of the party establishment — unbeatable in the primaries, and beatable in the general election. He thinks the most interesting candidate on the Democratic side (and one he would consider voting for) would be Obama. And that Obama might be the one Democrat who could beat the Republican candidtate. But the Clinton establishment won’t let that happen.

I agree.

Netroots are important and interesting, but so far they are patches of grass. Maybe parkland. But not whole prairies. Nothing wrong with that. Just nothing right enough to move the middle. Yet.

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the electorate wants nothing but Bushes and Clintons running the country from 1988 to 2012 or 2016.

If the Dems want to win, Obama is the candidate to do it. But he’ll be the veep candidate, and I’m betting Clinton/Obama will lose to Thompson/ or Romney/.

If the Republicans run Rudy/, the Democrat will win.

But I’m just one root, out here on the Net.

First assignment: John Perry Barlow’s Death From Above, written in March 1995.

Second assignment: Cory Doctorow’s Somebody Has To Die, posted three days ago.

JPB:

CD:

Not sure biznicide is the only option here, but it’s important to note that it’s seriously under consideration.

David Isenberg observes that OneWebDay and Yom Kippur coincide this year, making OWD “the second oldest Important World-Wide Observation”. David Weinberger urges us to “go celebrate the Web while we still have one that’s distinguishable from cable TV”. I wrote my celebration here, where I explain (among probably too many other things) where my nickname came from. (Yes, I’m a David too. Coincidence?)

In 1999, “portals” were all the rage and advertising was going to pay for everything. In 2007, “social networks” are all the rage and advertising is paying for everything. Almost.

Thought: We have the same problem with Facebook today that we’ve had with broadcast media for the duration: their customers are their advertisers, not their users; and in fact they sell the latter to the former.

Questions: Where is the financial leverage in your social network? How does it work?

Questions: What is your relationship with your social network provider? How does that work?

From Kaliya:

I got a jump on OneWebDay with an autobiographical post at Linux Journal. In the spirit of (in this case, unintentionally) disclosive autobiography, I posted it yesterday in the mistaken belief that yesterday was actually OneWebDay, and not just the day on which the Berkman Center devoted its customary Luncheon to OneWebDay. So, rather than yank the piece and park it until Saturday, I left it there with an asterisk and a footnote explaining what I just explained here.

I just got this email from The New York Times:

Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,

We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.

The Times’s Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers.

Why the change?

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion – as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

We thank you for your support of TimesSelect, and hope you continue to enjoy The New York Times in all its electronic and print forms.

The spin here is that times have changed while The Times has not. This is worse than misleading. It’s delusional. Yes, “the Web has evolved”. But it had already evolved to a state where charging for archival editorial was a bad idea, long before Times Select was created. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloggers and smart publishing professionals had the clues, and kindly passed them along to the Times, which chose instead to remain insular and clueless.

Is it still? Follow the money. The “evolution” that matters here is the rise in the advertising money river, which now flows away from traditional media and into the Google Sea. As that river rises past flood stage, newspapers stand in its midst, guarding their precious “content” within dungeons behind paywalls, peering down from the parapets as the flood fills the moats and washes the foundations away.

For insight into the mentality behind paywall maintenance, read this, from David Weinberger’s Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy chapter in The Cluetrain Manifesto (written more than eight years ago):

Inside Fort Business

Somewhere along the line, we confused going to work with building a fort.

Strip away the financial jibber-jabber and the management corpo-speak, and here’s our fundamental image of business:

• It’s in an imposing office building that towers over the landscape.
• Inside is everything we need.
• And that’s good because the outside is dangerous. We are under siege by our competitors, and even by our partners and customers. Thank God for the thick, high walls!
• The king rules. If we have a wise king, we prosper.
• The king has a court. The dukes, viscounts, and other subluminaries each receive their authority from the king. (The king even countenances an official fool. Within limits.)
• We each have our role, our place. If we each do the job assigned to us by the king’s minions, our fort will beat all those other stinking forts.
• And then we will have succeeded — or, thinking it’s the same thing, we will say we have “won.” We get to dance a stupid jig while chanting “Number one! Number one!”

This fort is, at its heart, a place apart. We report there every morning and spend the next eight, ten, or twelve hours inaccessible to the “real” world. The portcullis drops not only to keep out our enemies, but to separate us from distractions such as our families. As the drawbridge goes up behind us, we become businesspeople, different enough from our normal selves that when we first bring our children to the office, they’ve been known to hide under our desk, crying.

Within this world, the Web looks like a medium that exists to allow Fort Business to publish online marketing materials and make credit card sales easier than ever. Officially, this point of view is known as “denial.”

The Web isn’t primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It’s a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love, and play. In fact, the Web world is bigger than the business world and is swallowing the business world whole. The vague rumblings you’re hearing are the sounds of digestion.

The change is so profound that it’s not merely a negation of the current situation. You can’t just put a big “not” in front of Fort Business and say, “Ah, the walls are coming down.” No, the true opposite of a fort isn’t an unwalled city.

It’s a conversation.

As anybody who has ever tried to get a letter to the editor of the Times can tell you, the paper is not conversational. And hell, maybe it shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t mean it can’t, or shouldn’t, at least listen.

It’s time for the Times (and other papers) to put their ears, rather than just their walls, to the ground.

[Later...] Rob Paterson nails it on the subject of both relationships and what’s really scarce. Good stuff.

I managed to irk pretty much everybody with my post Citizen journal breaks a heroic story. Shelley Powers and David Kearns both took issue with the “citizen journalism” concept. Shelley said it doesn’t work, and David pleaded “for the demise of that horrible ‘citizen journalist’ meme”. Liz Straus, who pointed me to the story in the first place, said “Aw Doc, why the focus on citizen journalism and not the focus — as David point’s out — on the oral history that’s been happening since time began?” More than one comment gave David Armano a hard time for apparently preferring to report via Twitter and blog, rather than through mainstream news media. David himself weighed in with good answers to his critics, and added, “This isn’t real journalism and I don’t think anyone would claim it to be (I wouldn’t). It just demonstrates that the average person can tell a story from there perspective. I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.”

But is it?

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, Linus’s Law says. But we have to do better than just de-bugging posts like David Armano’s and mine. The mainstream media never had enough eyeballs, or time, to do a job that was even close to ideal. And now, as advertising money and eyeballs both flood over the banks of mainstream media and out through the surrounding jungle of blogs, twitters, cell calls, text messages and countless other outlets for information, we clearly need to think afresh about re-institutionalizing the means by which we get trustworthy news to each other, and how we then debug and interpret it along the way.

We’ve not only hardly started to build the new (or renewed) institutions we require; we barely have a common understanding for what we’re doing in the meantime. “Citizen journalism” sounds right to some, “horrible” to others. Blogs are journals in the literal sense, but few carry the same breed of responsibility long ferried by major newspapers and magazines. (Although fate may put bloggers in that position from time to time.) While we debate whether or not new media authors practice “real journalism”, the need to report What’s Going On not only persists, but has more means than ever.

This is why I’ve lamented the dying not only of local newspapers, but of full-service local radio in most smaller U.S. cities, and the failure thus far of everybody (bloggers, public radio, you name it) to fill the void. Old acts are failing and new acts are not fully together.

Earlier this year Dan Gillmor and JD Lasica put together five basic Principles of Citizen Journalism (accuracy, thoroughness, transparency, fairness, independence) that should refresh veteran journalists while educating rookie ones. We also need new institutions where these kinds of principles can be practiced. And new practices where these principles can be institutionalized.

If you’re looking for a good cross-section of possibilities here, check out JLab and the Knight-Batten awards, which are given to worthy efforts in constructive journalistic directions.

While all these are good, the larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.

This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of “impressions” to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.

The holy grail for advertisers isn’t advertising at all, because it’s not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it’s the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It’s also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers — on customers’ terms and not just on vendors’ alone. This is VRM: Vendor Relationship Management. It not only relieves many sellers of the need to advertise — or to advertise heavily — but also allows CRM (Customer Relatinship Management) to actually relate, and not just to capture and control.

As VRM grows, advertising will shrink to the the perimeters defined by “no other way”. It’s hard to say how large those perimeters will be, or how much journalism will continue to thrive inside of them; but the sum will likely be less than advertising supports today.

The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this. Today I have fellowships at two major universities, plus consulting and speaking work, all of which I enjoy because of blogging. The money involved far exceeds what I might have made from advertising on my blogs. (For what it’s worth, I have never made a dime of advertising money by blogging, nor have I sought any.)

On the with effects side — money made with journalism, rather than because of it — perhaps the new institutions of journalism will become more accountable as journalism’s consumers pay its producers directly. I don’t know how we’ll get to that, but it will necessarily involve VRM, and I would love to help build it.

One sure thing: a primary building material for the future institutions of journalism will be the work of amateurs sort, the best of which will honor that adjective’s original meaning: one who loves a subject, but does not require payment for obsessing constructively about it. Again, the old system does not go away, but grows to include both the old and the new.

Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.

David Weinberger is having second thoughts about agreeing with my first thoughts about Facebook’s recent decisions about minimally exposing member profiles to search engines (or whatever it is they’re doing). Specifically,

Having read and thought more, I find myself agreeing more with Gene and less with myself. I also like Larry Borsato’s post. I agree with Gene that FB has done a good job of walking users through the process, so I’m now in the “Get over it” phase of grieving over privacy.

I’d still rather that FB kept even my participation in FB private unless I say so, and the broadcasting of this info to search engines makes FB feel less like a private garden where I can hang out with my friends. But, I think I over-reacted.

Me too.

But rather than grieving over what BigCos do with our privacy, or getting straight exactly what Facebook is up to, I’d prefer to create tools that give us — each of us, natively — selective disclosure policies that we can pass along to the membership organizations of the world.

We’re so used to living in vendor habitats that we can barely imagine having real power and control in our relationships with them — for their good as well as our own. Selective disclosure has always been a basic tenet of VRM; but just to make sure it’s clear, I’ve added a sentence to that effect here in the about section of the ProjectVRM wiki.

On the way to the airport this morning, my wife and I were talking about one of the big easily-defaulted misunderstandings of the VRM concept: that power for people only comes in numbers, in aggregation. The problem is with the word “only”. Power needs to start with the individual. In a pure VRM context, it’s about my relationship with FaceBook, or Peets Coffee, or United Airlines, or the corner cleaners.

My wife made it clear in a conversation we had on the way to the airport this morning. That’s why I made what she said the headline for  this post.

We’re expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily, Phillip Fung says on the company blog. He adds,

The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we’re not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.

Translation: If you’re a FaceBook member, your ass is now online.

Yes, you can opt out:

As always, if you do not want your public search listing to be visible to people searching from outside of Facebook, you can control that from the Search Privacy page. Please note that you will only appear in searches outside Facebook when your search settings are set to “Everyone”.

But this is a significant shift. The walled garden called Facebook is declaring itself a public space where suddenly all its members have name badges visible by default to the world.

Seems to me this is not what its members bargained for when they joined up. But I’m 60. The bargain at 18 or 35 might be very different.

Yet, I submit, the bargains we make with commercially-based social silos like FaceBook are by nature Faustian, whether or not it’s cool with us that FaceBook creates fresh exposures of our identity data to search engine users — including, of course, countless marketing data harvesters and spammers who will soon be sending us crap with subject lines containing bait from FaceBook profiles (even if they’re minimized).

Anonymity should be the default in the way we face the open world — the one where search engines crawl public sites and data. When we become members of organizations, we by default should assume that data about us will be made available on a selectively permitted basis arrived at by mutual discretion, between the member and the organization. That isn’t happening here. FaceBook is unilaterally deciding to expose its members to who-knows-what, in addition to friends looking for friends. Giving members opt-out is lame, retro and and a breach of faith.

What we call “online social networks” mostly are not. They are private walled gardens that exist for reasons that are far more commercial than social. We need to remember that.

Corporate logos are blemishes on cultural artifacts. — Dave Rogers

Amen.

Fenway is still clean. Pretty sure about Yankee and Shea Stadiums. Where else? Just wondering.

Timothy Noah in Slate: “Superficially, If I Did It is chiefly an indictment of Nicole’s character and only incidentally the story of her murder.”

What’s plugged into the power strip.

The cutting edge, one year later.

Stephen Lewis: Libraries vs. the Internet: Researching the Peloponnesian War, the British Library’s “Turning the Pages” Project, and a Brilliantly Aesthetic Weblog.

Reuters says CNN is dropping it.

What’s down with Flickr? It’s been “having hiccups”, the server says, most of the day. Must be bad if it’s taking this long.

Alex Fletcher: “Inter lock-in as the new vendor lock-in and the freedom of choice.”

Josh Bancroft: “I have granted the people in my network authority – authorship – to form, inform, and shape me. They have write permissions to my brain. That is so true. chmod 775 mybrain.”

Sean at Craphammer: “…today, consumer to consumer transactions are changing the world. Consumers are transacting serious business across country borders in ways that just didn’t happen before.” Which means they aren’t just consumers anymore. We need to deep-six that word except when using it in its confined literal sense — as the reciprocal to producer. When consumers produce, when they intermediate, when they converse and exercise influence beyond cash-for-goods, they are a very different breed. I’m not sure “prosumer” cuts it. And “customer” is just as confining. Gotta think up a neologism here.

Town of Limon, Colorado. Gateway to elsewhere. We stopped there to eat at a Wendys. Friendly, but too many flies. The downtown was sad. More bars than stores, it seemed. But a helluva high school football team.

Andrew Sullivan (actually, Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch — thanks to Susan Kitchens for pointing that out):

…what Mr. Gonzales evidently fails to understand is that he has diminished our collective American dream, alas. He diminished it by dismissing the Geneva Conventions as “quaint”, by allowing a horrific torture policy to take root, by his banana-republic like late night visits to John Ashcroft’s hospital room, by ignoring Congressional subpoenas, by authorizing illegal wiretapping programs, by firing qualified United States attorneys in an apparent putsch, and on and on.

Still, I will confess to a measure of sympathy for the man. Much like Harriet Miers, he was so supremely underqualified for his position, so spectacularly beyond his depth, that he should never have been put in such a difficult position. Instead Bush’s bovine obsessiveness with loyalty–basic competence be damned– has focused the brutal kleig-lights of international opprobrium on old friends like Harriet and Alberto. Like Brownie, say, they will become key examples in the history books of the rampant cronyism and incompetence of this Administration.

The Zaca Fire is mostly contained, but the closure area remains huge. Edhat points to an animation of the fire’s progress.

Between our Sirius satellite radio receiver, the MP3 player, breaks for public radio and talking to each other, I didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in exploring the high soil conductivities that make AM radio so anomalously advantaged in the plains states. But I did notice that KOA/850 from Denver carried halfway across Kansas by day, and WNAX was audible across all of Kansas, from one end to the other — from Colby to Kansas City and beyond that well into Missouri — with just 5000 watts on 570am from Yankton, South Dakota. (The max power on U.S. and Canadian AM stations is 50000 watts.)

Long disatance AM is no big deal at night, when stations bounce off the ionosphere. But in the day AM stations need to carry along the ground. In most places the ground conductivity is low. In the entire East, much of the midwest, and nearly all mountainous areas, ground conductivity is very low. The lowest of the low are around Atlanta and in Long Island. But in some prairie regions, parts of Texas and Oklahoma, and in flat places near San Franciso and California’s Central Valley, the ground conductivity is remarkably high. For that reason a 5000-watt station at the bottom of the dial (like WNAX/570 and KFYR/550 in Bismark) can go hundreds of miles along the ground. My mother grew up listening to both WNAX and KFYR in Napoleon, North Dakota, which was near neither station. WNAX is helped also by having a full half-wave antenna, which on 570KHz is around 900 feet high. So it’s using an unusually efficient radiator. Most stations at that end of the dial use shorter towers. Signals at those frequencies carry so well that going for the full antenna length would bring diminishing returns. (On AM, the whole tower is the antenna.) And by now they’re all grandfathered with whatever facilities they put up way back when. AM stations require a lot of real estate, so the costs are now, in most cases, prohibitive.

Still, while listening to these effectively huge stations, while driving across the plains, I realized why talk radio — especially the right wing sort — sank roots here. Though I gotta say it was great that WNAX was highly focused (at least when I listened) on “the markets” for agricultural commodities. Made me think the country’s agricultural base was somehow still intact.

On valuing freedom more than cushy jail cells is my latest at Linux Journal: a last post before hitting the road from Santa Barbara, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The post is an example of teaching best what we most need to learn, I guess.

In any case, I’ve gotten a few lessons on lock-in through the last few days. Thought I’d pass some on.

We leave in about ten minutes. See ya down the road.

One of my biggest rarely-fulfilled fantasies is visiting amazing places I’ve seen from the sky. Starting this Saturday we may do some of that. Or maybe not. Depends on how much we hurry on our road trip from Santa Barbara, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we plan on living for the next year.

(No, we’re not moving there. We are committed Santa Barbarians, and we just moved into our new house here a few months ago. But in order to make the most of my Berkman fellowship, and to step on the gas for ProjectVRM, I need to be there. It should also help my Linux Journal work to be in the company of many talented geeks as well.)

Anyway, as it happened my last flight back from Boston vectored south, across Tulsa, and followed Interstate 40 through the Texas panhandle, across Albequerque, the Painted Desert of Arizona and the volcano-dotted deserts of Southern California on the way into Los Angeles.

I shot a lot of that from the air, as you can see in the photosets behind the pictures in this post. If we take I-40 it’ll be interesting to see how some of the same places look from the ground.

Anyway, in the meantime I’m spending most of my time packing and trying not to drop too many balls on the floor. So expect continued light blogging.

The Zaca Fire will grow past 200,000 acres today. That makes it the third largest wildfire in California history. It has not only surpassed last year’s Day Fire (map), but is running into the Day Fire’s burned perimeter on its east flank.

The danger now appears to be mostly passed here in Santa Barbara; but the fire continues to spread in Ventura County.

The picture above is one I took from downtown two days ago. It looks like this pretty much every day that the wind isn’t blowing in this direction, in which case we can’t see anything.

Photos of the Day Fire itself. Photos I’ve tagged dayfire.

Stephen Lewis has an excellent blog post on the declining U.S. dollar. Says Steve, It is an odd state of affairs when the US dollar is closer in value to the currency of a small and corrupt Balkan republic than it is to the common currency of its major economic rival, the European Union. He goes on to examine important points in the histories of the U.S. and Bulgarian economies, with vectors heading in crossing directions. One sample:

A decade ago, an American ambassador to Bulgaria confided in me that US government was quite pleased with Bulgaria’s new gangster capitalists, adding, quite approvingly no less, that “… they are really no different from our own robber barons.” I would disagree. Many of America’s 19th century robber baron industrialists left behind not only the scars of their depredations but also the full infrastructure on which late-19th and early-20th century economies were based on — railroads, steel mills, oil refineries, etc.

He asks,

As the dollar sinks closer to the Bulgarian Lev, the US might consider learning from Bulgaria’s recent experiences. One could almost think the unthinkable: Might the US benefit from having the IMF set up a board to oversee its currency? Might the US benefit from membership candidacy in the EU and the consequent eligibility for proper inspection and maintenance of its physical infrastructure and for bringing its social welfare, income distribution, medical care, and quality of life up to European standards, standards that owe much to America’s Marshall Plan?

It’s a serious question. Ever since the first Nixon administration the U.S. has been in the grip of an economic belief system that dismisses the need for infrastructure investment, and ignores the vast “because effects” of that investment. Even the Republican party’s fondness for thrift has held no sway in recent years.

What would the benefits have been, for example, if the U.S. had invested in infrastructure what Steve calls the near-incomprehensible waste and corruption of the four-year-long debt-financed war in Iraq? The mind boggles.

We need to re-frame the public conversation about infrastructure. However we do that, we need to give full respect to its benefits. Or face driving off some failed bridge on our highway to hell.

I haven’t posted much on the Zaca Fire since I got back. One reason is that — for the moment, at least — civilization seems less threatened, even as the wilderness behind us burns away. The other is that I have a lot to say about it, and work with other locals to do on it, that I’m just not ready for, since neglected deadlines for other real-world obligations loom.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not watching. In fact, we don’t have much choice.

Yesterday, for example, was an orange day. All day long the sun was filtered though clouds of ash from the fire. I took a few pictures, naturally. The set is at the link here and behind the picture above.

And if you want to follow progress with the fire on the Live Web, check out the Zaca Fire news river that David Sifry put together in the midst of other pressing matters. “Be of service” has always been his motto. Came through here, too.

Skype is down. Worldwide. If Skype is your phone company, you get an interesting experience in a certain kind of absolute dependency — one we’re still all trying to work out.

So consider this practice for when the same thing happens to services provided by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Flickr or any other central point of Crit-One failure affecting millions.

I’m late weighing in on the New York Times’ reported decision to drop Times Select. But not on calling it a bad idea in the first place. Nor on offering alternative ways of looking at both problems and opportunities for newspapers in a networked world.

Rather than just point to what I’ve already said (in my now-mothballed old blog), I’ll just repeat it here:

Speaking of news rivers, David Sifry has just created one for the Zaca Fire. Much appreciated.

The graphic on the left is from a Vonage test of the connection at a friend’s house near Boston. Comcast cable is her provider. The test was on her computer, which is connected directly to the cable modem. I thought that test result was exceedingly lopsided and Old Skool in respect to upstream performance, so I conducted a different test on the same connection with the same computer. The result: 11958Kbps down and 358Kbps up.

Comcast can do better than that. I suspect the only reason they’re not is because they’d need to “bind” some number of channels that would otherwise carry television. Whatever’s going on, it’s clear that the Net is just gravy on TV. Feh.

The Santa Barbara County Fire Department has put out a Red Flag Alert:

As of 2:00 pm, August 13, 2007, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, in conjunction with other fire agencies in the county, has declared a county-wide “RED FLAG ALERT”. This alert will be in effect until 9:00 pm on August 15th, 2007, when it will be reassessed. This “RED FLAG ALERT” is being declared based on the change in weather conditions towards a warmer period coupled with low relative humidities and predicted Sundowner winds in the South coast Area.

Inciweb says the alert is “a reminder to local residents to be fire safe”.

Well, the main problem for the whole South Coast is actually the high degree of fire safety that has actually been sustained for a record length of time. Our last big wild fire was Painted Cave, in 1990 — seventeen years ago. Going back in time, fires were five, six, two, six, five, one and nine years earlier.

That means we’ve been lulled into a degree of lassitude about the likelihood of wildfires. Yes, fire prevention, fighting and supresion have all improved. but the fact remains that Santa Barbara is sandwiched between the sea and mountains, literally, of what firefighters call “fuel”. If a fire comes down the mountain, pushed by “sundowner” or Santa Ana winds, we’re going to see dozens, hundreds or thousands of homes burned within hours.

I was witness to the Oakland fire of 1990, which killed 26 people and burned over 3000 homes in a matter of hours. At one point houses were exploding at a rate of one every four seconds. We had friends who lost both homes and neighbots there. I also toured the area not long afterward as a board member of a local Red Cross chapter. It was a life-changing experience. I saw cars melted to metal puddles. Home sites where even chimneys were gone, their bricks and rocks exploded by heat exceeding that of steel mill blast furnaces.

To help us understand what all of us face but relatively few of us have experienced, I’ll point to an excellent series on Santa Barbara Wildfires at Santa Barbara Outdoors. Here’s the list, with links to each:

SANTA BARBARA WILDFIRES

• Prologue
• Fire on the Hills
• Refugio Fire—1955
• Coyote Fire—1964
• Wellman Fire—1966
• Romero Fire—1971
• Sycamore Fire—1977
• Eagle Fire—1979
• Wheeler Fire—1985
• Painted Cave Fire—1990

I said here that we need a full-service public radio station to do what our existing public and commercial stations do not appear to be in a position to do, should an Oakland-grade fire come down the mountains and into town.

That will take awhile to make happen. Meanwhile, what will we do to inform ourselves if a fire like that comes next week, next month or even next year?

I have some thoughts about that, which I’ve been getting ready to publish in a post at Linux Journal. Look for that on Thursday, after I’m back in town. (I’ve been in Boston and Baltimore for the past several weeks.)

Tags: fire, zacafire, wildfire.

Brian Solis on Deleting Users, Audience, and Messages from PR and Social Media:

Attention PR and practicing Social Media professionals, step away from using “messages” to target “users” and “audience.” They are no longer filling the theaters, stadiums, and auditoriums to hear from marketers… 

… please, don’t call them “users” or your target “audience,” because they are also the people formerly known as the audience.

Hard to believe it’s more than nine years since I wrote this.

Let’s say you have to go to the hospital, and among your problems is an inability to use  your writing hand. What do you do when they hand you a clipboard and tell you to fill out your relevant health care history?

That and other questions are partly answered in Health Care Relationship Management, over at the ProjectVRM blog.

In the VRM blog: In Web 3.0, the best wall-less gardens will win.

Here’s another: Love is the ultimate lock-in.

Earn and respect your customers’ love, and the rest is gravy. Including the kind you can put in the bank.

I’m in one of the yellow areas in the dopper radar map above. My wife and kid are in a rental car in a dark red area, driving into BWI for a flight home that I suspect may be delayed. Meanwhile power is out at my daughter’s family’s house. I’m sitting in a chair on the front porch, enjoying the thunderstorm, connected to the Net by EvDO on the cell system. It’s an old neighborhood, so the yard and road are shaded by large old oak, maple and elm trees. The rain drips twice in front of the porch, once from the sky onto the house and trees, and once from the leaves onto the ground. I don’t see much lightning, but the thunder is a low, almost constant rumble, tumbling across the sky, as if vast boulders were rolling around on an invisble metal ceiling. Tire treads from cars rolling by make long kissing sounds on wet pavement. These too have doppler effects, rising in tone on approach and dropping as they depart. There is an urgency to driving I don’t share here on the porch. We are in two different Newtonian states: bodies in motion and bodies at rest. Observation by drivers is mandatory, but only through narrow cones of relevance, one constantly oncoming, the other receding in rear-view mirrors. Observation by trees and porch-sitters is optional. Which makes this post an indulgence.

I have Linux Journal work to do. That’s fun too, watching from afar what’s happening at Linux World Expo in San Francisco. The Net too is a natural environment: a true public marketplace of the ancient type — a noisy place where people gather to do business and make culture. Yet even as we enlarge this place more every day, it seems we understand it less. The Net, for all its finite and fully revealed complexities, is no less mysterious the rest of Creation. Life is nothing if not extravagant and original and mysterious at its original core — on the Net no less than ground soaked by rain.

Recently at Harvard we had a meeting where the subject of the Internet as a “public good” was discussed. For all the excellent thought and conversation we shared, it seemed to me we failed, unavoidably to grip a fundamental question from which all answers must be gounded. Namely, What is the Net?

We have knowledge of this no less than we have knowledge of life. We know it, we experience it, yet we cannot explain the origins of its origins, which are neither chicken nor egg. Whitman writes,

The press of my foot to the earth
springs a hundred affections.
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.
They are not original with me.
If they are not yours as much as mine
they are nothing or next to nothing.
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing.
If they are not the riddle and the undying of the riddle
they are nothing.
If they are not just as close as they are distant
they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows
wherever the land is and the water is.
This is the common air that bathes the globe.

Is the Net no less a globe than the one on which we walk? I wonder.

We made the Net. We are its gods. Yet our voices are not those of burning bushes. They are the buzz of the public marketplace. Is this place — where you and I are now — any less holy, or even primeval, than a forest floor? I suggest it isn’t, because at its core is a fecund nothingness: a zero-distance void between you and I and each of us who choose to connect on it. The working distance between you and I right now is less than between myself and the family inside this house — a fact that slightly bothers me. Yet, when I shut the lid on this laptop, the distance between you and I will return to the finite: no less close than that between readers and the authors of books. Now the proximal is returned to advantage: I will step inside a door to visit a baby just a few days old: a full self where a year ago there was none. When he becomes conscious of his own original mysteries, what will he see?

Here’s what Whitman saw:

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me.
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing,
the vapor from the nostrils of death.
I know I was even there.
I waited unseen and always.
And slept while God carried me
through the lethargic mist.
And took my time.

Long I was hugged close. Long and long.
Infinite have been the preparations for me.
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing
like cheerful boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings.
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother
generations guided me.
My embryo has never been torpid.
Nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb.
The long slow strata piled to rest it on.
Vast vegetables gave it substance.
Monstrous animals transported it in their mouths
and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employed
to complete and delight me.
Now I stand on this spot with my soul.

I know that I have the best of time and space.
And that I was never measured, and never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey.
My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes
and a staff cut from the wood.

Each man and woman of you I lead upon a knoll.
My left hand hooks you about the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes and continents,
and a plain public road.

Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born
and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine,
and let us hasten forth.

Humans are traveling animals. More than upright walkers, we are runners. I have read that a healthy young adult, or a small pack of them, can run almost indefinitely, and surely exhausted many a meal. The human diaspora spread out of Africa like a stain across everywhere on water and land, all in in the span of a few dozen millennia. Now our shouldered duds are laptops and cell phones, and no longer just staffs cut from wood. Is this bad? I suggest it is no less natural. We are less “digital natives” than beings that extend their senses and powers by making tools and then making things from those tools that further extend their senses and powers. By powers of indwelling our vehicles become extensions of our greater selves. It is not for lack of fact that drivers speak of “my fender” and fliers speak of “my wings”. We are skilled at being far more than our fleshy sleves. And we lean toward movement, always hastening down the public road.

Whitman concludes,

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me.
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any
on the shadowed wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the desk.

I depart as air.
I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow
from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
And filtre and fiber your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another
I stop some where waiting for you.

Here, for example. Wherever this is.

Terry Heaton, TV consultant extraordinaire, writes:

I just moved into a house, and the nice fellow from Verizon came yesterday and installed FIOS, which is the new 800-pound gorilla in this whole TV/Internet thing. Everything’s available on-demand. There’s a button you push that shrinks the screen and reveals real time weather and traffic information, provided by some distant company (why not a local media company?).

Everything is IP-driven, so the system is two-way without a phone line. Viewing metrics won’t be based on panels or algorithms or statistical analysis or any formula-based guesswork.

If you can do it online, you can do it on your TV. Widget development has just begun. The thing is absolutely amazing, and Verizon makes everything customer-friendly. (BTW, My internet is lightning fast, although not up to what’s advertised.) I mean, I hate to sound like a commercial, but you cannot imagine the difference until you have it. I’ve been writing about Fiber To The Home (FTTH) for years, and it lives up to its potential.

I have never been more convinced that the business model of television is at serious risk and that broadcasters who continue to believe that their real competition is the guy across town (see Steve’s excellent piece below) are on a one-way path to the tar pits. It is not a time for same-old, same-old, and reaching for revenue in a multi-platform delivery paradigm alone is not going to produce enough revenue growth to offset losses to our incumbent businesses.

Local information is rapidly becoming commoditized, and that’s our core competency. You can’t scale a content business in such an environment; the economics have to come from elsewhere. This is path two of our Simulpath™ strategy for local media.

He also points to Jeff Jarvis, responding to this report, which says online advertising will be bigger than newspaper advertising by 2011:

The report also says that our total media usage is declining, though what’s interesting to me is that part of this, they say, comes from efficiency and that’s an important concept in the morphing of media: The internet exposes the inefficiencies of old media for both “consumers” and advertisers. The internet makes direct connections. Note also in the report that we are taking in less ad-supported media because there is more media without ads and also, again, because we can connect directly to information around advertising.

The vector here is not toward more advertising online. It’s toward less advertising overall, and a less “mediated” world.

This is a world where The Media will only be part of the mediated picture. Consumers will always be legion, but with producers and intermediaries becoming legion as well, what makes the rest of the picture? The short answer is anything. This should be good for the economy, as well as civilization, even as it threatens every institution that ever called itself “media”.

What inflates the Web 2.0 bubble is not the technologies and practices it encompasses, but the belief by businesses old and new that advertising will sustain everybody as a “business model” (a term which, along with “content”, became buzzvogue during the Web 1.0 bubble). Free money is a huge reality distortion field, but that’s how too much business looks right now from downstream in the tidal flow of advertising money from many old media to one big new one.

But, to mix metaphors, trees do not grow to the sky.

Advertising has always been woefully inefficient. Improving targeting and making advertising accountable by counting click-throughs does not solve the problem that advertising has always been an exercise in guesswork. At some point the guessing ends — not by absolute improvements in targeting, but by the creation of new methods by which demand finds supply. These methods will be anchored in better tools for customers, and better means for sellers and intermediaries to satisfy demand by connecting to better-equipped customers.

The Net revolution has always been about radically improving the connections between demand and supply, and about equipping profusions on both sides of the relationship — while reducing intermediary costs and frictions in the direction of zero.

As a term for describing this development, “commoditization” is a misleading failure. Roles are changing far more than “content” — a term which itself misleads by reducing the informing of people to deliverable commodities. People still need to inform other people. More ways to do that will emerge. There will be business models there. Supply and demand will find each other. We need to figure out how to make new and better money with new and better roles. Advertising will still be part of that picture, but it won’t fund the whole thing.

Living in coastal California can dull one’s Eastern edge, forged in the heat of summer, sharpened by abrasive seasons, the recurrent swelters and chills of true summers and winters.

I’ve always been, as my old business partner David Hodskins correctly put it, comfort-imperative. Maybe that’s one reason I stayed so long on the California coast after David took our company there from North Carolilna for good business reasons: there was only one Silicon Valley, and that’s where we belonged. Temperate conditions certainly helped draw me to Santa Barbara, although I would have gone and stayed anywhere my wife liked.

Once my work life moved to the Net, I could live anywhere with a good connection. For a combination of that and perfect weather Santa Barbara was far more suitable than anywhere else. The dream home we left in Woodside had “IDSL” that was barely better than dial-up, though it did come with sixteen IP addresses and no port blockages — a grace I still miss. Connectivity was much better in Santa Barbara, although it’s better elsewhere now.

For the last couple weeks we’ve been getting ready for a year or more in Boston, where I’ll base myself at the Berkman Center, and where we’ll be within driving and short-range flying distance to Baltimore, where half our kids and our only grandchild live — he was born here four days ago. That’s why I’m in Baltimore right now, sitting on the front porch of that kid’s house at 2am, listening to crickets loud as factory noise while swatting insects away from the light of my laptop screen. It’s 78° outside, weather.com says. But it also says the humidity is 90%, a number Santa Barbara hasn’t experienced since the Pleistocene. It’s been hot every day we’ve been in Boston and Baltimore. The forecast for today is for 98°. Nothing new there, for Baltimore or for me.

I was born and raised in New Jersey and New York, in homes and schools with no air conditioning. By the time my parents finally put a room AC in their house, I was off to boarding school, where there was none. When I went to college in North Carolina, there wasn’t any there, either. None of the family cars had working AC when I was growing up. Nor did any of the cars I owned, from the time I grew up until I bought my first and only new car, a 1985 Toyota Camry. I turned 38 in that model year. Except for one double-wide in the woods north of Chapel Hill, none of my homes in North Carolina had AC, either. We just stuck fans in the windows, and everywhere else we could.

Our summer place in South Jersey not only had no AC when my father and uncle built it, but had no electricity or indoor plumbing either. Those came later, but never any AC. The living area of our home in the pine woods was a kitchen with a big round oak table and walls comprised of salvaged screen windows with hinged glass ones on the outside. My job every morning was to go out and open the glass ones, if they weren’t open already to let the air through.

The forest was a canopy of pine and scrub oak, with a floor of blueberries and huckleberries, which tasted sweeter than any you ever bought in a store. The berry bushes were perfect cover for hide-and seek, and the trees were perfect for building elevated child housing and hanging hammocks in clearings. My aunt and grandmother lived at the other end of a winding trail through the woods, every foot of which I still remember like it was yesterday. A second trail branched off to my great aunt and uncle’s house. Summers were filled with visiting relatives and daily drives to the beach, where we kids would play in the sand and surf while the adults fished or sat under beach umbrellas.

There was no sunblock in those days, just “suntan lotion” that made you smell sweet and look sweaty. We rarely put it on. Instead we just browned in the sun.

On the way home we’d stop at a roadside farm market and pick up tomatoes and corn picked fresh from the fields. I’ll die believing no species of fruit or vegetable tastes better than fresh New Jersey corn or tomatoes. We had a table with a porcelain top, outside our kitchen, where we’d shuck corn after we got home. Inside Mom chopped tomatoes into chunks to marinate in olive oil with garlic and other spices. Odd that my memories of dinner involve no meat other than the steamed clams or boiled crabs (caught by ourselves, in Barnegat Bay), served in abundance when large numbers of guests came over, which was pretty often.

It’s funny to think, as I sit here fresh into my sixties, that none of my memories of those summers involves weather-related discomfort. Yes, we knew it was hot, but it hardly made more sense to note heat than the recurrence of light and dark. Weather worth noting usually involved rain: summer thunderstorms or the edges of stray hurricanes, late in the season.

So I’m thinking that now, in the middle of a summer night on a Baltimore porch, soaked in sweat, that I’m getting my edge back. If you’re not actually burning or freezing, heat and cold are just sensations. You can call them discomfort if you like, but they’re a small price to pay for experiencing nature’s cyclic perfections.

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[Later...] Cool write-up at the Berkman Center on the moves here, with nice credits to Dave for his help.

Exploring the Harvard Weblogs environment, I just ran across a question from Phillip Greenspun about his Solar Magnitude Forum. The subject is dear to my mind, along with aviation and photography, two more of Phillip’s deep interests. The bottom line: This would be a good Computer Science master’s degree project. If you are interested in our help, please contact us via email.

Dave explains more of what’s going on with the old blog.

People have been asking why I didn’t just keep trucking on the path I was on. There are several answers, but they all come down to dead ends that could easily be seen.

Ideally I’d blog at searls.com, a domain I own. I have a blog there, at http://doc.searls.com. Like this, it’s a Wordpress blog. I started it when I thought I’d be a podcaster. The thing quickly got overrun with comment spam, and I had trouble figuring out how to administrate Wordpress. At this piont it’s moribund. To make things work again I’ll need to install a newer version of Wordpress — something that’s beyond the scope of my interest and ability (I’m less technical than you might think). And the techie who installed the first version isn’t available except on an occasional basis.

Since I’m a Berkman fellow at Harvard, and the blogs here are well-supported, and they’ll continue to be supported after my fellowship is over — and since Harvard has been around since 1636 — it seemed like a good choice.

Right now I’m busy with summer and family matters (good ones), but in a week or few I’ll get the rest of the kinks worked out. I don’t plan to keep the generic template, but instead to bring back the general look and feel of the old blog. Not sure I’ll use the same old picture of myself, though. I haven’t looked like that in a long time. (Though I might if I started wearing glasses again and shaved back everything but the mustache. There’s still al decade of wear & tear between that picture and reality.) I also plan to add a buncha stuff in the sidebar(s). We’ll see. Recommendations welcome.

By the way, I’ll also keep blogging at Linux Journal, where I’ve been an editor for far longer than I’ve been a blogger. As for IT Garage, a sister blog of Linux Journal, I’m not sure. It was meant as a community blog, and didn’t work out that way. Recommendations welcome there, too.

So we’re taking an apartment for the next year, near Cambridge, Mass. As it happens, there is an abundance of fiber (ftth) and copper to homes there, including ours. The three competing suppliers are Verizon FiOS, RCL and Comcast.

For the customer interested only in maximal Internet service (such as yours truly), rather than a “triple play” including phone and television, the offerings are confusing to the verge of opacity.

Here’s Comcast’s come-on:

…. followed by four plans, the best of which (Internet-wise) is “High-Speed Internet for Non-Comcast Cable Customers”, which offers no details beyond the above, until you click on “See all features”. There you find Or, for just $10 more per month, you can enjoy our top-speed connection, 8 Mbps/768 Kbps, and enjoy download speeds up to 142 times faster than 56K dial-up and four times as fast as 1.5Mbps DSL. It’s so unbelievably fast, you’ll wonder how you ever surfed the Web without it. Our 8Mbps/768Kbps service is also ideal for gamers. You’ll get the Comcast Game Invasion package, which includes free membership to the IGN Founder’s Club, a $119 annual value.

So their top speed is 8 Mbps/768 Kbps. That’s for $67.95. I see by the other offers that the monthly fee is about $50 for TV customers.

No doubt the medium is copper co-ax, though they don’t say that.

As a non-TV customer of Cox Cable in Santa Barbara I’m paying $60 for 10 Mbps/1Mpbs. The downstream isn’t provisioned yet, so I’m getting about 6/1. Still, what I want most is the upstream speed, plus the least possible crippling of pure Internet service. With Cox, all the crippling I get are port 80 (web server) and port 25 (outbound mail) blockages, plus no IP addresses. I have to buy a business account for that, but at much higher prices. Not worth it.

Next is RCN. Here the delivery is via fiber. Speeds are “Up to 1.5Mbps, 5Mbps, 10Mbps or 20Mbps* download speeds”. Nothing about upload. To find out what they offered on the upload side, I stopped by the RCN office on Massachusetts Avenue. After about a five minute dialog the customer service agent revealed that the best they can do is 2Mbps on the upstream side. Nothing on the site gives a price. Just a number to call. In their office the agent told me the price is $50. She knew nothing about port blockages, but she did know they offered no business services and nothing faster than 2Mb upstream. The capacity of fiber, of course, is a thousand times that or more.

After qualifying my address with Verizon FiOS and finding that I qualify, I read this in the fine print:

That’s just one paragraph among five at the bottom of the page.