Andy Carvin & NPR crew get kicked out of a public place for taking pictures with a weird (but way cool) camera.
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If you’re busy thinking business is war, you may miss the fact that you still haven’t been killed on the job.
That’s one line from Rebuilding the software industry, one word at a time, written more than seven years ago for Kuro5hin, which is still, commendably, around. Just ran across it again now. Hadn’t read it in years. Holds up pretty well.
I’ve long believed that the crossover from the Industrial Age to the Information Age will be marked by an awakening to the need by customers to control their own selves, rather than to remain subordinated to the controlling interests of companies. Same thing with citizens and governments.
Cluetrain, for me at least, was about that.
So now user freedom is at issue again, this time in the context of “social networking”, which in the current popular sense happens almost entirely inside company walled gardens. Some companies are larger than others, and some gardens have openings in their hedges for “federation” of user data, at the latter’s grace. But your data is still theirs, pretty much. That’s how it plays in the media, and probably in the minds of most of the companies involved as well.
So I just wrote about where I think this is going, in Who controls your data, over at Linux Journal. See what ya think.
PaidContent.org reviews the announcement by CBS of “a new media player desktop app that brings together song personalization and recommendation for users, with a broad, contexual canvas for marketers to reach listeners.”
It goes on,
| The new media player, called Play.It, groups all stations in the CBS Radio network together, providing a wide choice of formats for users and advertisers. The player features large space for contextual ads that displays marketers’ slides, along with banner ads that are synched with the content coming out of the player. |
Imagine a car radio that only played one owner’s stations and nobody else’s. (Oh, we already have those. They’re called Sirius and XM.)
Then there’s this:
| The deal that CBS and AOL Radio announced last month is key to CBS Radio achieving its goal of being the “number one internet radio station.” Goodman claimed that will be the case when the unified AOL/CBS network launches next month. That led into further promises of the much talked about integration with Last.fm, which CBS bought last May for $280 million. Lastly, Goodman previewed a new internet radio ad program Called the i5 - with a logo designed like an official Interstate Highway sign - that promises seamless cross-network, cross-platform deals. |
Fred Wilson unpacks this a bit. A sample:
| As my friend David Goodman explained, when the next Eliot Spitzer moment happens, you can go from the wonderful WNEW stream to 1010 WINS to get the news and then go back, all in a single state of the art flash player. |
He also tweets “These guys have nailed it”.
No, they haven’t. It’s a closed system from a closed-minded company. As of today WNEW doesn’t have an open live stream, via .mp3 or anything else. They have their own live player you can only use on their site. WINS has no live stream at all, near as I can tell (correction: it has one just like WNEW, that’s a player that runs only in a browser window), though it does have podcasts.
Here’s an exercise. If you have iTunes (which most of you probably do), click on Radio under Library. Count how many live streams they have there. “Alternative” has 146. “Public” has 94. “College radio” has 37. And you can add whatever you like with the “open stream” command. Go to a station like KRCL and you’ll find a bunch of choices that in many browsers will automatically open iTunes or the player of your choice. Chances are most or all of them don’t bother you with ads.
All the stations in the iTunes directory, and countless more, already comprise a wide-open radio dial controlled by no one company.
I don’t care how pretty CBS/AOL make the UI, or how big the back-end deals are. If it’s just another silo’d sluice for advertising and mass-appeal “content” from a single source and its partners, it’s not radio. And it’s not fulfilling the promise of the Web, which is direct interaction between any two parties, where anybody can produce, consume or both.
A real open market supports transaction, conversation and relationship between anybody and everybody, on terms any party can assert and any party can accept or reject. It’s not “your choice of silo” alone. It has business models other than just advertising. And at is base are open standards for interaction.
There will be far more business in an open world with many kinds of radios, from many sources, playing anything by anybody for anybody, than there will be in yet another closed system by yet another bunch of big boys trying to turn the Web into a 1980s-style online service with a Web 2.0 paint job and all the advertising you can stand.
This CBS thing is a silo. Sez Fred,
| And that flash player can be launched whenever you visit a CBS radio station’s website, whenever you play an AOL radio station, and whenever you play a custom station you or your friends create using the new CBS digital radio network |
We can do better.
In fact, we will do exactly that. Stay tuned.
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.
Bill Moyers on Rev. Wright (via Dave):
| Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions, or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. |
| Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t. |
| Which means it is all about race, isn’t it? Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said “beware the terrible simplifiers”. |
Well, there were stories at their times about Fallwell, Robertson and McCain & Hagee. They weren’t as big as Obama and Wright, but they were still stories.
Indeed, we need honest conversation sabout race. I thought Barack Obama’s speech on the subject right after the Wright mess first broke was an excellent opener for lots of conversations, many of which are still going on.
We need honest conversations about gender too. A couple days ago my wife caught an interview on NPR with a voter in North Carolina who regretted that the choice among democratic presidential candidates had come down to a black man and a woman — and that he’d prefer the former over the latter. Of course, that was just one voter, but still: what does that say? Other things being equal, is sexism a bigger handicap to a female candidate than race is to a black candidate? Before I heard that, I hadn’t considered the possibility. Nor the possibility that voters in the U.S. might be less favoring of women candidates than voters in Israel, the U.K., Germany and India, all of which have elected women as heads of state. Something more to think and talk about, if we can possibly get past the personalities at hand.
The Wright-Obama story, however, isn’t just about race. It’s about stories. It’s about the reason we need to “beware the terrible simplifiers”. Because simplification is what journalists do.
Even the best reporters don’t just communicate facts. They organize those facts into stories. That’s what they’re assigned to write, or to show on TV, or report on the radio, and that’s what they do. And they do it because stories are by nature interesting. They are, I believe, the base format of human interest. Here’s how I described that format in an earlier post:
| 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. |
In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger asks, Where are Obama’s Friends? The story, in Henninger’s words: “supporters who let Barack Obama hang out to dry”. (He doesn’t mention Bill Moyers, who certainly qualifies now.)
We need to remember that all stories are simplifications. Sometimes they are terrible, and sometimes not. But still, they always veer toward the simple, because that’s what’s most interesting.
Back on December 11, 2005 — long before there were blogs, but not long after I learned to write in HTML — I posted Microsoft + Netscape: Why the Press Needs to Snap Out of its War-Coverage Trance. (It was one of the many articles I failed to sell to a magazine, but still managed to post on the Web.) The bottom lines:
| The Web is a product of relationships, not of victors and victims. Not one dime Netscape makes is at Microsoft’s expense. And Netscape won’t bleed to death if Microsoft produces a worthy browser. The Web as we know it won’t be the same in six weeks, much less six months or six years. As a “breed of life,” it is original, crazy and already immense. It is not like anything. To describe it with cheap-shot war and sports metaphors is worse than wrong — it is bad journalism. |
Actually, it’s typical journalism. More than a dozen years later, it’s a lesson I’m still learning.
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.
Rush Limbaugh drives me nuts, because he’s sometimes at least a little bit right about some things. Of course he’s a shameless partisan hack — yet with just enough humor and warmth that you can’t help but stay tuned.
Anyway, here’s a transcript of Rush’s show yesterday. It’s one in which he’s feeding on Rev. Wright’s exposed flesh, no less than — as Dave correctly points out here — the rest of Washington’s shark tank. Stories like this (with character and struggle out the wazoo) are too juicy to ignore.
Of course Rush’s teeth are all over Obama as well. Though mostly he’s working to submerge and drown the best of Obama under the worst of Wright.
Andrew Sullivan finds some stuff to agree with, in the midst of Rush’s several-hour chew-fest on Obama. But Andrew also points back toward the high road that Barack needs to find again, if the candidate doesn’t want to hand the game over to Hillary, for her to hand over to John McCain (which is the way to bet now in any case, if you’re just following the odds). Sez Andrew:
| Obama is a mixture in this, as in so many things, a complicated mixture. My view is it is that very mixture, that very embodiment of American complexity that makes Obama such a next-generation candidate. |
| It is no wonder the some of the old guard have mixed feelings about his ascendancy; or that Wright, at this point, might feel jealousy and the erosion of his worldview. And that’s why Obama needs to spell out again his own vision of a post-racial America that is not a non-racial America. Instead of seeking to play out the clock, he needs to seize the narrative again, before it irreparably seizes him. |
Good luck with that. He’ll need a lot of it.
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.
In Linux Journal, Is government open source code we can patch? And in the ProjectVRM blog, VRM is user-driven.
Phil Hughes on Bob Frankson, applied in Estelí, Nicaragua:
| In social-political terms, it means looking for a local solution and then growing that solution to connect to other resources. It seems like something that could be done, would be good for Nicaragua/Nicaraguan communities and would even appeal to some organizations looking to make grants. Much like the grants for the sewer and water projects in Estelí, this is infrastructure. Up-front costs are much larger than operating costs so it doesn’t build that dependency cycle. |
| Am I crazy? |
Nope.
Phil is in a great position to build infrastructure from the edge in. Also to see The Problem of centralization for the purpose only of creating artificial scarcities and charging for them. If we’re going to start working around connectivity compromised by value-subtracting business models, towns like Phil’s are good places to start. (Also to start leading incumbent carriers toward a future where they are part of a new ecosystem that’s much larger than the one they’ll need to quit trying to control.)
By the way, Phil is the friend who started (and for most of its history published) Linux Journal and hired me on there in the late ’90s. It was Phil who showed me (without meaning to, which might be the best way) that the software industry was slowly but surely turning in to the construction industry.
And that’s exacty the model we need to follow as we buid this thing back out, from the edge in.
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.
Shots from the I Can Haz Case Study? session at ROFLCON. The show continues today. I’ll be there.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking to ROFL, check out (some of) the many videos linked to by Ethan Zuckerman 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.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger’s book from several years back, makes its point in the now-famous Ray Ozzie memo explaining Microsoft’s sex change (from a software to a Web company).
Among the many memes I’ve failed to launch, among the most worthy is the World Live Web. The term isn’t mine. I got it from Allen in 2003 or so, and totally saw the sense in it. So, for much of the last three years I’ve suggested that the split that really matters is not the generational one between Web 1.x and Web 2.x, but the functional one between the static and the live. But I was starting to loop on the topic, so I pretty much dropped it. (Well, not completely. Just mostly.)
Now, however, comes Seana Mulcahy, who writes, Searls posted some compelling info over three years ago now. Typically in our business I think three years ago is beyond old news. However, this has a shelf life and applies to folks just starting to question it and explore it.
And here’s Denise Shiffman, who writes,
| By 2006 The New York Times had already used Web 3.0 to refer to the Web that offers meaning - where the sum of knowledge and behavior can be accessed (of course this is of primary importance to performance marketers). But the one I like best is used by industry pundit Doc Searls: Live Web, which is meant as an all encompassing term to refer to 2.0, 3.0 and everything in between. |
| Marketing 2.0 is defined by the open, collaborative, social, virtual, user-generated, mobile environment of the Live Web. |
Well, actually that’s not what I meant, but … whatever. (See Denise’s comment below.)
Hey, who knows? Maybe there’s Live in it yet.
I just made a few changes to Understanding Infrastructure, which I trust will improve it. See what you think.
While I haven’t been blogging much in the last few weeks, and I haven’t also been in the hospital or otherwise slowed down, I’ve been writing for Linux Journal and the Berkman Center. Some of the Linux Journal stuff is what I write every month for issues that appear three months in the future. For example, yesterday I finished being late for the July issue deadline. Some of what I write is for LJ goes straight to the website, which has been improving steadily lately (quite aside from my own contributions). The latest of those is called Understanding Infrastructure. It’s close to four thousand words, and has been in the works for about a month now.
Infrastructure has been an interest of mine for some time. I think it’s one of the world’s most overused yet least understood concepts. And I have an immodest fantasy about correcting that.
Not alone, though. A bunch of other people I hang and talk with have similar ideas. This latest piece is grist for our collective mill. Maybe yours too.
It’s not perfect. In the words of Mark Twain, if I’d had more time I could have made it much shorter. But I needed to get it out there, so there it is.
The Berkman Center pieces are also kinda big, and will show up between now and Berkman@10.
A quick plug for the talk to be given today at noon by Lawrence Lessig at UCSB, as part of the 2008 CITS Distinguished Lecture Series.
Larry packed the house in the huge Ames Courtroom at Harvard a week ago today (photos here). He gave his customary outstanding performance, and I expect him to do the same today. His title is “Changing Congress: Lessons Learned by a Copyright Activist”.
So, a shout-out to my fellow Santa Barbarians from your ex-pat Lessig Advance Team: skip lunch and go to the Multicultural Center Theater for one of the best free events you can attend this year. Here’s a map of the campus. More details (inlcuding the RSVP) at this Facebook page.
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.
Thinking it over, seems to me that blogging has for the most part become flogging, but that trying to rebadge the former as the latter is a job for Sysiphus (about whom Camus says some interesting stuff here).
A while back Dave Winer said he would quit blogging one of these days. At the time I thought that would be a bad idea, but lately I’ve come to sympathize with it, in part for the reason Seth Finkelstein gives here. Blogging today ain’t what it was when Dave started it, and when I followed in his footsteps. The kind of writing we both try to do — what I once called “making and changing minds” (including our own) — is an ever more narrowing slice of the whole, even if the amount of it is still going up.
So I want something new. Something for which the making of money is at most a secondary or lower priority. Not sure what that should be, but I am sure, if it ever happens, it won’t be called blogging.
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, headlines the New York Times. “They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop”, it begins. It’s about blogging for bucks. Marc Orchant and Russell Shaw, both of whom died recently, and Om Malik, who recently survived a heart attack, serve as instructive examples of “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment”.
Mike Arrington “says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen…This is not sustainable’.”
The piece goes on:
One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.
To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.
Since this system does not feature the ‘chinese wall’ between editorial and advertising that has long been a fixture of principled mainstream journalism — or rather because writing, publishing and advertising are much more intimately mashed up in this new system than it was in the old one — I suggest a distinction here: one between blogging and flogging.
I brought that up on The Gang on Friday and got as nowhere as I did when I put up the post at the last link. So far it has no comments at all.
Still, I think distinctions matter. There is a difference in kind between writing to produce understanding and writing to produce money, even when they overlap. There are matters of purpose to consider, and how one drives (or even corrupts) the other.
Two additional points.
One is about chilling out. Blogging doesn’t need to be a race. Really.
The other is about scoops. They’re overrated. Winning in too many cases is a badge of self-satisfaction one pins on oneself. I submit that’s true even if Memeorandum or Digg pins it on you first. In the larger scheme of things, even if the larger scheme is making money, it doesn’t matter as much as it might seem at the time.
What really matters is … Well, you decide.
Ben Laurie points to stpeter’s invite to moosh together Jabber/XMPP, OpenID, Oauth and the Web. Sounds tasty to me.
Listening to, and blogging, Lessig live from the Ames Courtroom here at Harvard, as part of the Berkman@10 celebration. Lessig was here at the founding. Some public notes from his talk…
There are two and a half doctors for every drug representative.
Story: He disqualified himself as a geek by asking a question about law at a geek conference.
Question: Is government just stupid?
The government often gets the easy cases wrong. Such as. There is a consensus among public policy makers that any copyright term change should be prospective only. But governments always extend terms. An easy case the gov gets wrong.
Nutrition… The sugar lobby urged the government to get the Food Nutrition Board to say no more than 25% of your caloric intake from sugar, while the WHO said 10%.
Global warming… There is a consensus that it’s real and we need to work on it. 1000 peer reviewed articles over a period of time. None disagreed. But junk science did, and the government, by doing as little as possible, got it wrong.
This leeds geeks to a position of hopelessness and disengagement. Most think government is a waste of time.
The problem is not stupidity. The system of influence by lobbyists and campaign fundraising that radically effects access, attention and understanding, weakening the government’s ability to get it right.
If money distorts, then pubic financing of elections would stop it. That’s one of Lessig’s theses. He also thinks the right should like public financing because it would result in smaller geovernment. Many on the right were against deregulating cablecos and telcos because deregulating them would remove them as sources of campaign financing.
So. Need a netroots campaign that is not DC centered. That’s why Creative Commons was born.
Change Congress wants a simple way for citizens to signal what they want.
Next is wikified tools for an army of collaborators to suss out who is for reform.
Fund reform after that. Take the problem you’re trying to solve, and make it manageable, digestable and segmentable.
These aren’t new ideas. Just a new opportunity.
Argument: Only if the outside makes a demand will the inside change.
Bribery in congress was not illegal until 1853.
Jefferson expected expected bribery to win.
The top 1% protect themselves from the bottom 99%.
“We do nothing as this happens.” This is exactly what Larry said to the geeks in his first Free Culture speech, by the way.
Criticism: people care more about substance rather than process.
Comparing the current problem to alcoholism. It’s the first problem. We can address no problems sensibly until we face this first problem. Until we change congress.
People tell them they’re happy about this project, but that he will fail.
Yet even certain failure teaches. It’s not excuse not to do something.
We, the most wealthy, secure and articulate people in this polity must be the first to work on this.
These corruptions are promulgated by the most privileged.
Now he’s asking us to “join me here.” The moment is straight out of Billy Graham. We should recall the success of the technique.
Introducing Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee…
| “You have witnessed an important moment in American History.” |
| He was once the youngest congressman in America. “Sadly this is no longer true.” |
| “We’ve got to change Congress.” Impressed that a man like Lessig would “risk his career and reputation to do the right thing.” |
| Rep. Graham is for Senator Obama, by the way. No surprise there. A main point of Lessig’s is that Change is more than a slogan. It’s not an empty phrase or a campaign slogan. |
Lessig again: Congresspeople spend hours a day telemarketing. Looking for money.
“Congresspeople have an extraordinary job… they get to do the right thing.” Geeks need to push them to do this.
“If it’s my movement it fails.”
It’s still early. No board. No structure yet.
Note to selves: a lot of what Larry wants here is what Britt Blaser and friends are working on.
By the way, Larry will be speaking a week from today, at noon, at UCSB’s Multicultural Center Theater, courtesy of the Center for Information Technology and Society (with which I am also affiliated) there. I can’t recommend it too highly. Larry’s talks are a great show, as well as a call to commitment that’s likely to be as strong and appealing as any you’ll experience in your life.
[Later…] Here’s a picture gallery from the talk.
More than a year ago I suggested to folks from Frontline that they put out their shows on BitTorrent, serving as the Alpha Seed. I’m pretty sure Dave Winer (at the same conference) said the same thing. Maybe I got the idea (like so many others) from Dave.
I also remember thinking, if not saying, that BitTorrent distro was inevitable. The economics of transmission map nicely to the sociology of the show. The market is a conversation among seeds. This is radically different from the transmitter-based system we have now.
So now comes news from Michael O’Connor Clarke that the CBC is quietly releasing one of their most popular shows on BitTorrent. And that it’s DRM free. As it ought to be.
Read the whole post. Follow the links. There lies the future.
Here in the U.S. the new challenge is for the entities we call stations to find roles and relevancies other than distribution of network shows.
The only answer, I believe, is the “One Fond Hope” I appended to the Ten Prophesies I uttered on a public media panel (and in this post at Linux Journal) exactly one year after delivering the BitTorrent distro advice to the Frontline folks (and to the rest of public media folks attending my closing talk there).
CBC can go with BitTorrent because they’re not defined as just a collection of stations. That is, they have stations, and they produce and distribute; but they are not tied to any one band or medium for distribution. When AM radio became too retro, they went about dumping it (including CBL/740, on which I used to listen to stories late at night when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey).
It’s different here in the U.S., where stations run the show. Literally. They still can, but they’ll have to become far more involved with their local and regional communities — which need no longer be defined by the reach of signals from transmitters. Because the new transmitters, in many cases, will be the listeners and viewers.
The word is TEOTWAWKI. Stands for The End Of The World As We Know It. Just heard it for the first time.
Hmmm… How about SOTWAWWLITB? That’s for Start Of The World As We Would Like It To Be.
Had a long and deep conversation with Ryan Janssen last week, which he blogged here. I think it’s the first time that somebody has taken a biographical angle on understanding where I’m coming from on various topics, and it’s been interesting to continue the conversation with Ryan trough several copy edits on personal historical items.
What’s made it especially interesting is that Ryan really works at understanding what he’s interested in. Lately he’s been diving deep into user-centric identity systems (Intro, parts 1, 2 and 3): Open ID, identity cards (parts 1, 2), XRI/XDI, iNames (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), each from a “tomorrow’s internet” angle. He’s not at it to get his opinion out there, or to advance his personal “brand”. He really wants to engage and learn.
My favorite of Steven Covey’s Seven habits of highly effective people is number 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. Come to think of it, Ryan is practicing all of them. To me what he’s doing with identity — publicly scaffolding his own understanding of a subject, as part of a collective barn-raising — is blogging at its best.
Eight hours ago I was on the ground in Boston. Now I’m in a hotel room overlooking the an intersection in San Bernardino. It took five hours flat to get from Boston to L.A., and the balance to pick up a rental car and laze my way back eastward to the hotel, to set myself up in the room, post a reply to a comment over at Linux Journal, take a call, and start writing this.
The whole way west I looked out the window. It was smooth and mostly clear from coast to coast. Since I flew United, I could listen to cockpit chatter on Channel 9, and groove on how routinized aviation has turned the miraculous into the mundane. I’ve flown this route many times, almost always shooting pictures (some of them quite good, actually). Every flight I learn more, and use more of what I’ve learned about the land below.
I know when Lake Huron, Comb Ridge, Cane Valley, the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley are coming up. I know how geologically new they all are, in spite of the ages of the rock that comprises them.
It boggles me that they always tell passengers to lower their window shades so others can watch some movie, when outside the window is a movie our ancestors would have paid limbs to see.
Anyway, I just don’t want to take life’s graces for granted. And flying, for me at least, is a big one.
That’s my sniglet for the tendency of a printer to pass extra sheets through without printing on them.
Carter F. Smith: To Protect and to Twitter. Two examples.
Surprised I hadn’t seen this movie, which is right out of Cluetrain and comes from Microsoft, of all peoples. Thanks to Keith Hopper for turning me on to it.
Tonight here at Harvard, Lisa Stone, founder of BlogHer, is speaking on What Women Want: How Candidates and Companies Hurt and Help Themselves with Women Today. Can’t wait. In fact, I’ll be introducing her. It’s put on by the Berkman Center as part of the Berkman @ 10 series.
Hope some of ya’ll can make it. It’s timely and important, and (unrelated to either of those qualities) I may be blogging a bit of it here as well.
(For those who don’t get the headline, it’s a play off the title of this movie.)
Some lines form her talk…
| Please stop marketing to women, and start talking with women. |
| Don’t separate women out as moms, or singles, or a monolithic bloc… |
In respect to the presidential political campaigns, Blogher members are saying “Don’t just put up a site… come talk to us.” The unwillingness of all three major campaigns to engage in dialog with Blogher’s rather huge constituency is a theme of Lisa’s talk.
Listening to some of the successes of Blogher, I’m impressed. Lisa was just asked a tough question by a pro journalist about employees with benefits, and Lisa said Blogher has 23 of them, in addition to editors paid to blog, and revenue sharing with contributors… That’s in addition to 11 million “uniques” per month.
Advice for startups, from Caterina Fake: people first, terms second, valuation third.
If you’re going to be in the advertising business, either as a site or as a service that puts ads on sites, at least make sure that the damn server gets the ads on the pages.
Now that our home is served by a Verizon FiOS connection that gives us 20Mb both upstream and down (and a big high five to Verizon for being the first in symmetry as well as speed), it’s getting easier to tell where the bottlenecks occur. And it’s usually not in the pipes. It’s in the ad servers.
Right now this topozone page (one that shows WUMB’s transmitter location on a top map) is holding back on text (specifically, lat/lon info) while the browser says “Transferring data from ad.thewheelof.com…” It’s been a few minutes, and I doubt that the data is coming.
Most sites with ads do a good job. Here’s Weather.com for 02138. Loads fast enough.
But I’ll bet the time that it takes to serve advertising is a tie-breaker for many sites. I still think Technorati is a better live Web search service than Google Blogsearch, but it takes time, even on a fast connection, to serve up all those display ads on Technorati (which bears an income production burden that Google Blogsearch presumably lacks). To see how much faster Technorati is without the display ads, here’s the same search at s.technorati.com.
Here’s a bet. As more people get faster connections, tolerance for time- and space-sucking advertising is going to go down.
And eventually the advertising-pays-for-everything bubble will pop.
The question at AlwaysOn: Is Facebook Growing Up? I dunno. And mostly I don’t care. I hope so, anyway. Meanwhile, much of the text under that question is some quoted stuff I said elsewhere that somehow relates. A sample:
| On the customer side, once individuals become equipped with tools of independence and engagement, nature’s course will become even more strange — not just for big companies, but for economists who are accustomed to regarding markets as environments where all that matters is what vendors do, and that the only thing they do that matters is compete for “consumers”, who value price above all. |
| But even the economists will come to realize that, eventually, relationship matters most. This will take time. |
Ryan Janssen has been doing a remarkable job of following and making sense of various user-centric identity systems. If that’s your cup of curioiusity as well, check ‘em out.
Steve Gillmor has a new blog, with NewsGang, at eWeek.
Not sure I linked to his last post at the last blog, but I’m doing it now. We’re talking about it on NewsGang, even as we blog.
Here are the slides from the Cluetrain @ 10 talk I gave at There’s a New Conversation, in New York last month. I don’t do slides as speakers’ notes, so they tend to explain themselves. Click here to start. Here a video of the talk. (Also mentioned in Clueship, below. This is more grist for the comment mill there.)
Having fun with PicLens. It’s a free (as in beer) FireFox plug-in. Check it out.
Are “welcome screens” actually welcome? By anybody?
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.)
Life in the Vast Lane — What lives past the Web 2.0 bubble is my EOF essay in the February Linux Journal. One sample:
| In the long run, there’s going to be a lot more money in helping demand find supply than in helping supply find (or create) demand — simply because the efficiencies involved in helping money-in-hand find places to go exceed the guesswork that defines advertising at its core. That even goes for Google, which introduced the radical notion of accountability, but still involves mountains of wasted placements (by countless Linux servers pushing gazillions of tiny text ads into the margins of blogs and search results). I’m not saying that advertising ends, by the way, just that its fate is to become part of an informational ecosystem that supports the buying intentions of customers at least as well as it supports the selling intentions of vendors. |
The challenge, of course, is to build out the latter.
What do plastic, wood, limestone, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food and most of our electric service have in common? They are all products of death.
Even the world’s banded iron formations, which date from two to three billion years in age, are generally thought to be products of life’s first bloom in ancient oceans, which precipitated ferric ooze from irons which had saturated the seas from our world’s most formative times. As John McPhee put it in Annals of the Former World, “The earth would not go through that experience twice.” (See a longer quote here.)
Death produces building and burning materials in an abundance that seems limitless, at least from standpoint of humans in the here and now. In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Nansen G. Saleri says The World Has Plenty of Oil. “As a matter of context, the globe has consumed only one out of a grand total of 12 to 16 trillion barrels underground”, he says, concluding,
| The world is not running out of oil anytime soon. A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior alternatives. The overused observation that “the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stones” may in fact find its match. |
| The solutions to global energy needs require an intelligent integration of environmental, geopolitical and technical perspectives each with its own subsets of complexity. On one of these — the oil supply component — the news is positive. Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century. |
| Technology matters. The benefits of scientific advancement observable in the production of better mobile phones, TVs and life-extending pharmaceuticals will not, somehow, bypass the extraction of usable oil resources. To argue otherwise distracts from a focused debate on what the correct energy-policy priorities should be, both for the United States and the world community at large. |
Thanks to technology, the .8 trillion tons of coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin now contribute 40% of the coal used in U.S. power plants. About half the nation’s electricity is produced by these plants, at rates that can consume a 1.5 mile long train of coal in just 8 hours. In Uncommon Carriers, McPhee says Powder River coal at current rates will last about 200 years.
Well, then what? Will more technology help out? Surely. But at some point we must take a long view that recognizes the earth’s resources as rare stuff that nature takes millions of years to produce, and in many cases does that only once, or we find ourselves in a pickle that even technology can’t solve.
As I fly in my window seat from place to place, especially on routes that take me over arctic, near-arctic and formerly arctic locations, I see more and more of what geologists call The Picture — a four-dimensional portfolio of scenes from current and former worlds. In the arc of seashores that include Long Island, Block Island, Martha’s Vinyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod, I see a ridge of debris scraped off half a continent and dropped at its terminus by the vast lobe of an ice cap that began its retreat only 15,000 years ago — only a few moments before the geologic present. At that time the Great Lakes were still in the future, their basins covered by ice that did not depart from their northern edges until about 7,000 years ago, or 5,000 B.C. Most of Canada was still under ice while civilization was born in the middle east and the first calendars got going. Fly over that region often enough and the lakes start to look like puddles of melted ice. Which is exactly what they are. Same with most of the ponds around Boston. Rewind a few thousand years and those ponds are holes under hills of ice.
As Canada thaws, one can see human activity spark and spread across barren lands, as more resources are raided from the exposed earth. While this is obviously and necessarily industrious from a strictly human perspective, one can also easily see from an extra-human perspective that our species is flat-out pestilential. We treat nature’s goods as “products” or “resources” that are free for the taking. And free they are. But each at some point becomes scarce, then rare to the verge of absence. We may have nothing to do with the elimination of many. All species come and go, after all. But on this planet, from its own one-eyed perspective, our species clearly takes far more than it gives, and with little regard for the consequences. We know, as Whitman put it, the amplitude of time. And we assume in its fullness that all will work out.
I’ve always been both an optimist and a realist. I’m an optimist for at least the short run, by which I mean the next few dozen years. But I’m a pessimist for our civilization — or even our species. All civilizations fall. None believes, at its height, that theirs will fall. But every one does. Same goes for species, all of which are nature’s experiments. Why should we be any different?
Adjacent Social Objects is the latest idea from Rajesh Setty. ASOs (my initialism, not his) are objects that are not directly related to your product or service but are close. He explains,
| Our own example is a site called All About Steak (which is a site that’s all about steak - recipes, grilling tips etc.) which was built in partnership with Kansas City Steaks. All About Steak is an adjacent social object for Kansas City Steaks. You can’t make people talk about steaks but may be people will talk about a discovery engine for steaks? |
The concept of a “social object” is explained by Seth Godin in this interview sourced by Rajesh. Although the first source appears to be Hugh MacLeod. (Later: Was just told it’s Jyri Engestrom.)
Learned about Silobreaker yesterday from Yochai. It’s an interesting new search engine. Lots of stuff to dive down into. It’s very flashy (in both senses of the word) and clever. And it’s a mind candy store for those who, like myself, combine an appetite for information with easy distractability and a suckerness for visual presentations.
For example, check out Silobreaker’s Network search results for Yochai Benkler. Or choose any topic you like. If it lets you.
My main complaint about it, so far, is one I have for pretty much everything that thinks it knows what I want when it doesn’t. From Kristofer Mansson, Silobreaker CEO, on the company blog:
| …information overload will still be a problem and users will continue to ask for quicker and better ways of finding more relevant search results than what traditional search engines have been offering so far. Silobreaker was developed to meet exactly such growing user demand and the service brings meaning to news content through sense-making analytics and graphical search results. |
| Ultimately, it’s the value and relevance of the search result that matter and our goal is very simple; to deliver insight as a service. |
Here’s the thing. Most of the time I want to find my way to exactly what I want, and arrive at my own insights, thank you. What I need for that are tools that let me filter and drill down any way I like.
My problem from the beginning with all search engines is that they’re not tool-makers. While I want a box of tools with which I can make what I want, they’re like a construction company that constantly makes things for me, guessing at what I might want in the end.
For example, let’s say I want to find nothing but references to Yochai Benkler in blogs written in 2005. Google’s Advanced Search will let me narrow results through eight stretches of time going back to the last year. Not what I want. Google Blogsearch will let me do that, but only for blogs. (I dunno, but maybe it can only be done for blogs.)
My point is that I want search engines to act more like databases and less like AI. But we’ve been having these things doing educated guesswork for so long that we can hardly imagine anything else. In that respect Silobreaker is a welcome alternative.
What do the rest of ya’ll think about it?
We’d hardly yearn for Net Neutrality laws if Comcast and other carriers truly understood that the Net is more than an interactive TV channel with troublesome users.
Unfortunately there are technical as well as busines and political reasons why they fail to grok the Net. A big one is DOCSIS, which is the standard framework inside which cable companies funnel Net traffic. DOCSIS all but requires that they think of the Net as just another TV channel. Because that’s how DOCSIS frames the Net. It’s something delivered over analog channels inside a coaxial cable. Carriers can “bond” channels to widen the bandwidth, but they’re still dealing with radio waves going down a coaxial pipe on one or more channels and back up on others. Asymmetry is built in, simply because the return upstream path is, by design, on lower frequency channels with less carrying capacity. It’s also useless to debate with a cable comapny the need (or lack of it) for QoS (Quality of Service), because QoS has been part of DOCSIS since 1999.
Fiber deployments have different capabilities and restrictions, although most of those are modeled on cable TV, for good business reasons. Verizon’s fiber (FiOS) system, for example, is not designed primarily for Internet users, but for couch potatoes. Those tubers are abundant and low-hanging (or ground-dw