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No 2 SOPA

January 18, 2012 in Art, Business, Events, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Law, Life, Links, News, Past, Politics, problems | 18 comments

Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet.

I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors degregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the “content” business a hollow victory for the ages.

I also said this:

SOPA is a test for principle for members of Congress. If you wish to save the Internet, vote against it. If you wish to fight Big Government, vote against it. If you wish to protect friends in the “content” production and distribution business at extreme cost to every other business in the world, vote for it. If you care more about a few businesses you can name and nothing about all the rest of them — which will be whiplashed by the unintended consequences of a bill that limits what can be done on the Internet while not comprehending the Internet at all — vote for it.

This is the pro-business case. There are other cases, but I don’t see many people making the pure business one, so that’s why I took the business angle.

The best summary case I’ve read since then is this one from the EFF.

The best detailed legal case (for and against) is A close look at the Stop Online Piracy Act bill, by Jonathan @Zittrain. The original, from early December, is here.

Not finally, here are a pile of links from Zemanta:

Oh, and the U.S. Supreme Court just make it cool for any former copyright holder to pull their free’d works out of the public domain. The vote was 6-2, with Kagan recused and Breyer and Alito dissenting. Lyle Denniston in the SCOTUS blog:

In a historic ruling on Congress’s power to give authors and composers monopoly power over their creations, the Supreme Court on Tuesday broadly upheld the national legislature’s authority to withdraw works from the public domain and put them back under a copyright shield.   While the ruling at several points stressed that it was a narrow embrace of Congress’s authority simply to harmonize U.S. law with the practice of other nations, the decision’s treatment of works that had entered the public domain in the U.S. was a far more sweeping outcome.

No one, the Court said flatly, obtains any personal right under the Constitution to copy or perform a work just because it has come out from under earlier copyright protection, so no one can object if copyright is later restored.  Any legal rights that exist belong only to the author or composer, the ruling said.  If anyone wants to resume the use or performance of a work after it regains copyright, they must pay for the privilege, the decision made clear.

IMHO, the U.S. has become devoutly propertarian, even at the expense of opportunity to create fresh property from borrowed and remixed works in the public domain. One more way the public domain, and its friendliness to markets, is widely misunderstood.

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The journey was the reward

October 5, 2011 in Business, News, Past, Personal, Quote, Technology | 24 comments

I was in the midst of late edits on The Intention Economy this afternoon, wondering if I should refer to Steve Jobs in the past tense. I didn’t want to, but I knew he’d be gone by the time the book comes out next April, if he wasn’t gone already. So I decided to make the changes, and stopped cold before the first one. I just couldn’t go there.

Then the bad news came a few minutes ago, through an AP notification on my iPhone. Tonight we all have to go there.

Thirteen years, one month and one day ago, I wrote an email to Dave Winer, in response to a DaveNet post on Steve’s decision to kill off Apple’s clones. (Dave had also posted notes from an interview with Steve himself.) Dave published the email. Here’s the part that matters:

So Steve Jobs just shot the cloners in the head, indirectly doing the same to the growing percentage of Mac users who prefered cloned Mac systems to Apple’s own. So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.

It was a nasty move, but bless his ass: Steve’s art has always been first class, and priced accordingly. There was nothing ordinary about it. The Mac “ecosystem” Steve talks about is one that rises from that Art, not from market demand or other more obvious forces. And that art has no more to do with developers, customers and users than Van Gogh’s has to do with Sotheby’s, Christie’s and art collectors.

See, Steve is an elitist and an innovator, and damn good at both. His greatest achievements are novel works of beauty and style. The Apple I and II were Works of Woz; but Lisa, Macintosh, NeXT and Pixar were all Works of Jobs. Regardless of their market impact (which in the cases of Lisa and NeXT were disappointing), all four were remarkable artistic achievements. They were also inventions intended to mother necessity — and reasonably so. That’s how all radical innovations work. (Less forward marketers, including Bill Gates, wait for necessity to mother invention, and the best of those invent and implement beautifully, even though that beauty is rarely appreciated.)

To Steve, clones are the drag of the ordinary on the innovative. All that crap about cloners not sharing the cost of R&D is just rationalization. Steve puts enormous value on the engines of innovation. Killing off the cloners just eliminates a drag on his own R&D, as well as a way to reposition Apple as something closer to what he would have made the company if he had been in charge through the intervening years.

The simple fact is that Apple always was Steve’s company, even when he wasn’t there. The force that allowed Apple to survive more than a decade of bad leadership, cluelessness and constant mistakes was the legacy of Steve’s original Art. That legacy was not just an OS that was 10 years ahead of the rest of the world, but a Cause that induced a righteousness of purpose centered around a will to innovate — to perpetuate the original artistic achievements. And in Steve’s absence Apple did some righeous innovation too. Eventually, though, the flywheels lost mass and the engine wore out.

In the end, by when too many of the innovative spirts first animated by Steve had moved on to WebTV and Microsoft, all that remained was that righteousness, and Apple looked and worked like what it was: a church wracked by petty politics and a pointless yet deeply felt spirituality.

Now Steve is back, and gradually renovating his old company. He’ll do it his way, and it will once again express his Art.

These things I can guarantee about whatever Apple makes from this point forward:

  1. It will be original.
  2. It will be innovative.
  3. It will be exclusive.
  4. It will be expensive.
  5. It’s aesthetics will be impeccable.
  6. The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal. The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt.
  7. The influence of fellow business artisans such as Larry Ellison (and even Larry’s nemesis, Bill Gates) will be significant, though secondary at best to Steve’s own muse.

Turns out Steve’s muse was the best in the history of business. No one-hit wonders. We’re talking about world-changing stuff. Again and again and again.

Watch this clip from Robert X. Cringeley’s “Triumph of the Nerds” public TV special, filmed back when Steve was still running NeXT. This one too. Then look at what Steve did after coming back. Not just the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Pixar and the laptops we see with glowing apples all over the place. Look at the Apple Stores. I’ve been told that Apple Stores are top-grossing retail shops in every mall they occupy. Even if that’s not true, it’s believable.

I’ve also been told that Apple Stores were Steve’s idea. I don’t know if that’s true either, but it makes sense, because they succeeded where nearly every other attempt at the same thing failed. To get there, Steve and Apple had to look past the smoking corpses of Gateway, Circuit City, Computerland, Radio Shack and all the other computer stores that had failed, and do something very different and much better. And they did.

I was wrong about one thing in my list above. I don’t think Steve regarded customers and users with contempt, except in the sense that he believed he knew better than they did. As an elitist, he also knew that calling the smartest and most employable Apple users “geniuses” was great bait for employment serving customers at Apple Stores.

There is no shortage of quotes by and about Steve Jobs tonight. But the best quote is the one he uttered so long ago I can’t find a source for it (maybe one of ya’ll can): The journey is the reward.

His first hit, the Apple II, was “The computer for the rest of us.” So now is his legacy.

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Truly public radio

September 6, 2011 in Broadcasting, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, Links, News, Photography, Places, problems, radio, Technology, Travel, weather | 3 comments

Rochester, Vermont

My favorite town in Vermont is Rochester. I like to stop there going both ways while driving my kid to summer camp, which means I do that up to four times per summer. It’s one of those postcard-perfect places, rich in history, gracing a lush valley along the White River, deep in the Green Mountains, with a park and a bandstand, pretty white churches and charm to the brim.

My last stop there was on August 20, when I shot the picture above in the front yard of Sandy’s Books & Bakery, after having lunch in the Rochester Cafe across the street. Not shown are the 200+ cyclists (motor and pedal) who had just come through town on the Last Mile Ride to raise funds for the Gifford Medical Center‘s end-of-life care.

After Hurricane Irene came through, one might have wondered if Rochester itself might need the Center’s services. Rochester was one of more than a dozen Vermont towns that were isolated when all its main roads were washed out. This series of photos from The Republican tells just part of the story. The town’s website is devoted entirely to The Situation. Here’s a copy-and-paste of its main text:

Relief For Rochester

Among the town’s losses was a large section of Woodlawn Cemetery, much of which was carved away when a gentle brook turned into a hydraulic mine. Reports Mark Davis of Valley News,

Rochester also suffered a different kind of nightmare. A gentle downtown brook swelled into a torrent and ripped through Woodlawn Cemetery, unearthing about 25 caskets and strewing their remains throughout downtown.

Many of the graves were about 30 years old, and none of the burials was recent.Yesterday, those remains were still outside, covered by blue tarps.

Scattered bones on both sides of Route 100 were marked by small red flags.

“We can’t do anything for these poor people except pick it up,” said Randolph resident Tom Harty, a former state trooper and funeral home director who is leading the effort to recover the remains.

It was more than 48 hours before officials in Rochester — which was cut off from surrounding towns until Tuesday — could turn their attention to the problem: For a time, an open casket lay in the middle of Route 100, the town’s main thoroughfare, the remains plainly visible.

I found that article, like so much else about Vermont, on VPR News, one of Vermont Public Radio‘s many services. When the going gets tough, the tough use radio. During and after natural disasters, radio is the go-to medium. And no radio service covers or serves Vermont better than VPR. The station has five full-size stations covering most of the state, with gaps filled in by five more low-power translators. (VPR also has six classical stations, with their own six translators.) When I drive around the state it’s the single radio source I can get pretty much everywhere. I doubt any other station or network comes close. Ground conductivity in Vermont is extremely low, so AM waves don’t go far, and there aren’t any big stations in Vermont on AM anyway. And no FM station is bigger, or has as many signals, as VPR.

One big reason VPR does so much, so well, is that it serves its customers, which are its listeners. That’s Marketing 101, but it’s also unique to noncommercial radio in the U.S. Commercial radio’s customers are its advertisers.

VPR’s services only begin with what it does on the air. Reporting is boffo too. Here’s VPR’s report on Rochester last Thursday, in several audio forms, as well as by transcription on that Web page. They use the Web exceptionally well, including a thick stream of tweets at @vprnet.

I don’t doubt there are many other media doing great jobs in Vermont. And at the local level I’m sure some stations, papers and online media do as good a job as VPR does state-wide.

But VPR is the one I follow elsewhere as well as in Vermont, and I want to do is make sure it gets the high five it deserves. If you have others (or corrections to the above), tell me in the comments below.

Some additional links:

Remembering Hurricane Bob

August 26, 2011 in Geography, News, Places, Strange stuff, weather | 2 comments

Got an interesting email from sister Jan, retired Commander with the U.S. Navy, who was stationed in Newport when hit in 1991. With her permission, here it is:

It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I rode out the direct hit Bob made on Newport.  As I recall, Bob had flirted with the entire East Coast, waving at Miami to Cape May while eluding the weathermen who wanted the story in their backyard.  When it turned ENE away from  NJ and the I-95 corridor the story died out.  That was on Friday evening.  The Weather Channel, and Cable, were still young; so if the networks didn’t see a story, most of us didn’t hear the story because to them  there was no story.

Sunday afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave Mom in Providence, we heard on the radio that Bob was coming back toward NE, and Cape Cod looked like it might be in the cross-hairs.  By the 6 PM news, we were in the larger target area, and the run on supplies had started.  Since I lived in a huge 150-year-old mansion (at the highest point in town) I told everyone to come on over, and we’d ride it out there.  By 5 AM monday, we knew that Block Island, the Narragansett Bay and Newport would probably be at ground zero.

Funny, the day of Bob was downright weird.  The storm was tight — there wasn’t a breath of wind at 9 AM. We were stressed waiting, but around noon we were hearing that Block Island was probably going to get a direct hit, and so would we.  And boy, did we ever.  All my New Jersey memories of hurricanes were that they came at night.  But because Bob came through in the middle of the day, I think the experience was very memorable, and a lot more impressive and nerve-wracking. As I remember …

  • 21 people and a cocker spaniel at my place, eating everything in our cumulative kitchens that might spoil.  Wired from adrenaline and drinking gallons of coffee.
  • When the eye went over, everyone, including the dog, fell asleep for at least 5 minutes.  It was the flower fields outside Oz all over again. Pressure change, we were told. Happened to a lot of folks. But talk about weird.
  • We watched the 15′ of top of a pine tree zip down Old Beach Rd. like a cruise missile at an altitude of 20′ max.
  • We watched  the huge 100+ yr. flowering chestnuts whipping in the wind, flinging their spiky nuts like mini-balls all over the place. Some were later found embedded in the stucco of the house.  (Later in the fall, the tops of those trees were celebrating a false spring while the lower part were fully autumn.
  • After the eye went by (came in directly over the house — we saw blue — the storm petered out quickly and we went out to walk around.  There wasn’t a spot of pavement to see – everything was covered in leaves and limbs and debris.
  • No power, of course, but the outage was everywhere.  Restoration was in an ever decreasing circle and my place was last. Eight days after the storm, the radio said all power was restored with the exception of the Rhode Island Ave/Old Beach Rd. intersection.  That was me.
  • They had to use snowplows in some cases to clear the streets and for the rest of Aug and Sept the streets of Newport were like country lanes — lovely packed leaf and twig crush for a roadbed.
  • The collected debris was piled in the parking lot on the beach at the bottom of Memorial Boulevard, and it was about 20′ high and 40′ wide, running the full 1000′ length of the lot.  After waiting for what seemed like weeks for the right off-shore winds, they started the burning and it seemed to go on forever.
  • Someone forgot to cash in, so we never saw an I Survived Bob tee shirt.

Could be Newport will be in the cross-hairs again with . That’s what one model currently predicts, but the others all vector in west of there. (Here’s a current map.)

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Obama’s circular firing squad

August 21, 2011 in News, Politics | 41 comments

I normally avoid talking politics here, but it’s hard to stay quiet while partisans on the left help with the demolition project that partisans on the right started the moment Barack Obama arrived in the White House.

One example: Hillary Told You So in The Daily Beast. Here’s how it begins:

At a New York political event last week, Republican and Democratic office-holders were all bemoaning President Obama’s handling of the debt-ceiling crisiswhen someone said, “Hillary would have been a better president.”

“Every single person nodded, including the Republicans,” reported one observer.

At a luncheon in the members’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, a 64-year-old African-American from the Bronx was complaining about Obama’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the implacable hostility of congressional Republicans when an 80-year-old lawyer chimed in about the president’s unwillingness to stand up to his opponents. “I want to see blood on the floor,” she said grimly.

A 61-year-old white woman at the table nodded. “He never understood about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’” she said.

Another is Obama in the Valley, by Charles Blow in the New York Times. Concludes he,

The country needs the president to rise to this crisis in word, spirit and deed. We need him to reach out of his nature and into the nation’s need. We are on the precipice. There’s growing concern that we may slip into a second, more painful recession. There is little optimism that the housing crisis will loosen its grip on the economy anytime soon. The unspeakable truth is that we may well be on the leading edge of a prolonged period of national stagnation, if not decline.

A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy. At this moment, we need less valley and more mountaintop.

Oh please.

He’s not Moses, and that’s not his job. He’s the President. He presides. He doesn’t rule. We gave him an awful job, and he’s doing it with dignity, sobriety, intelligence, and a variety of other personal and administrative virtues that were absent or compromised in the prior two administrations.

On November 8, 2008, The Onion ran Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job. It was prophesy:

In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.

A goof with truth.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a right-wing conspiracy (which there is). The right wing doesn’t need a conspiracy while it remains what it became in the age of Fox News and talk radio: an uncompromising partisan bloc devoted utterly to defeating its political opponents, as a Prime Directive. The GOP is hardly unified in all its positions, but as a partisan bloc all its guns have been aimed since 2008 at President Obama, and they haven’t stopped firing. Meanwhile folks on the left have convened a circular firing squad, with their Main Man in the middle.

If Hillary had won, she’d be there now too, because she’d be disappointing the left just as much as Obama is. She’d have to, because she’d be President, and not just a candidate.

The Republicans have also hated Hillary far longer than they’ve hated Obama, and for all the same reasons: she’s a tax & spend Liberal who prefers Big Hands-on Government to the smaller Hands-off kind (that lives as an ideal in the collective Republican mind, even though we’ve haven’t had it in anybody’s living memory, or maybe ever). It wouldn’t matter if she was “tougher.” Her opposition would be just as uncooperative, hostile and determined to drive her from office. Absolute unity and intransigence on Core Principles is the GOP’s chemo for the body politic: it will kill off the cancer of leftism before it kills the country.

So the Republicans are succeeding, with help from Democratic outlets like Daily Beast and HuffPo, whose constituencies are tiny fractions of populations that Murdoch outlets and their amen corners on talk radio preach to every day.

Not saying folks on the left should shut up about Obama; just that they should look at the hand he was dealt in the first place, plus what the guy is up against and what his job is. Pleasing his core on the left isn’t Job One, or even Job Ten. Running a country that risks devolving into misery and chaos is Job One.

Personally, I don’t think anybody can do it, because our system is rigged against it. (And, for what it’s worth, I’m a registered Independent whose usual inclination is to vote for None of the Above.)

Anyway, if you want to help the country, go after Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. Because that’s who you’ll get in 2012 if Obama loses.

 

 

On the short good life George Desdunes

August 7, 2011 in Life, News, Past, School | 8 comments

I didn’t know George DesdunesGeorge Desdunes, though now I wish I’d had the privilege. He was a friend of acquaintances who sent out emails in March to lists of people who might want to know he had died and to provide details about his funeral. Those emails were among many others I barely noticed at the time. This afternoon I ran across those emails again while looking for something else, and I became curious. The emails said nothing about who he was and why he died, so I looked him up.

Turns out George was a nineteen-year old sophomore at Cornell when he died during a fraternity hazing event. The university has since rescinded recognition of the fraternity, and George’s mother has sued the fraternity for $25 million, naming twenty fraternity members in the lawsuit. According to that last story, in The Cornell Daily Sun,

Desdunes participated in a mock kidnapping before his death, court documents state. He and another SAE brother were taken to the townhouse apartments on North Campus by several pledge members, and they had their hands and feet tied with zip ties and duct tape. The two were quizzed about “fraternity information and lore,” and when they answered incorrectly they did exercises or were given drinks, such as flavored syrup or vodka, the documents state.

After his death, authorities discovered Desdunes’ blood alcohol level was 0.35, according to court documents related to the criminal charges. However, Andres’ lawsuit states that her son’s blood alcohol level was 0.409. By comparison, the legal limit to drive in New York State is 0.08.

By all accounts (here’s one) George was the kind of kid anybody would like to have as a son, a friend, a mentor: smart, caring, friendly, a good student and athlete… the list goes on. (My second-degree acquaintance with him comes through the camp he attended for a number of years before serving as a counsellor in the last summer of his life.)

One reason I went to a college without fraternities was that I had already endured enough hazing at the boarding school I attended as a teenager. While I know fraternities can be a lot of fun, and that they yield lifelong friendships and support networks, I also believe they formalize social exclusion and (in some cases) cruelty rationalized by tradition.

All I said in the last sentence is arguable, of course; but that’s not what I’m after here.

What I’m after is remembering something more than the story of a young man who died for no good reason (plus a number of bad ones). What I want us to remember is the moral philosophy of Kurt Vonnegut, the author and soldier who survived the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of War during WWII (and whose forced labor required pulling burned bodies from the smoking rubble). Vonnegut summarized that philosophy in just two words: “be kind.”*

Being kind is not at the core of most academic curricula at the college level, much less of fraternity hazing ceremonies. But among our many contradictory human natures, no moral imperative is more essential to our well being, and to the persistence of all that is good in the world.

Kindness is a grace without which George would not have become the good guy he was. That he died for lack of it is less important than what he had of it, and what the rest of us still need to enjoy, and to practice.

* Kurt Vonnegut’s full dictum (from God Bless You Mister Rosewater, his funniest book) is “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” Elsewhere, however, he boils it down to those last two words.

 

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Free ways

July 16, 2011 in Events, infrastructure, News, Strange stuff, Travel | 6 comments

The first time I heard the term “Sepulveda pass,” I thought it was a medical procedure. I mean, 405I was still new to The Coast, and sepulveda sounded like one of those oddball body parts, like uvula or something. (Not speaking of which, I no longer have an uvula. No idea why. It used to be there, but now it’s gone. Strange.)

Anyway, Carmageddon is going on right now, and the Sepulveda pass, a section of the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles, is shut down. My fave links on the matter so far are here, here and here. One of which is that to which Tony Pierce points.

It’ll all be over on Monday. When it comes to fixing freeways, L.A. doesn’t fuck around. No ‘fence, but the Bay Area does.

We had a controlled study of the difference with a pair of earthquakes. In 1989 the Loma Prieta quake dropped a hunk of freeway (called the Cypress Structure) in Oakland, plus a piece of the Bay Bridge. It also damaged several freeways in San Francisco, including the Embarcadero Freeway and the 101-280 interchange. So, what did they do? They got rid of the Embarcadero and the Cypress Structure, took more than a few days to fix the Bay Bridge… and then took years to fix the 101-280 interchange. Years. Lots of them. Meanwhile, when the Northridge quake dropped a hunk of the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles, they got the thing back up in a month or something. (If I have time later I’ll add the links. Right now I’m in Florence, where traffic is Cuissinart of pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, bicycles and stubby busses. Kind of like the rest of urban Italy, only with a higher ratio of tourists to everything else.)

By the way, the best video you’ll ever see about The 405 is called 405, and was done in 2000 by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt, who also stars in it. The whole thing is just three minutes long, and it’s perfect. Especially right now. Dig.

Keep North Carolina’s broadband market free

May 17, 2011 in Business, Family, Future, Geography, infrastructure, Law, News, North Carolina, Past, Personal, Politics, problems, Technology | 33 comments

While arguments over network neutrality have steadily misdirected attention toward Washington, phone and cable companies have quietly lobbied one state after another to throttle back or forbid cities, towns and small commercial and non-commercial entities from building out broadband facilities. This Community Broadband Preemption Map, from Community Broadband Networks, tells you how successful they’ve been so far: Broadband Preemption Map Now they’re the verge of succeeding in North Carolina too.

This issue isn’t just close to home for me. I lived in North Carolina for nearly two decades, and I have more blood relatives there than in any other state. (Not to mention countless friends.) Not one of them tells me how great their broadband is. More than a few complain about it. And I can guarantee that the complaints won’t stop once the Governor signs the misleadingly-named ”Level Playing Field/Local Gov’t Competition act” (H129), which the cable industry has already been lobbied through the assembly.

The “free market” the phone and cable companies claim to operate in, and which they mostly occupy as a duopoly, is in fact a regulatory zoo where the biggest animals run the place. Neither half of the phone/cable duopoly has ever experienced anything close to a truly free market; but they sure know how to thrive in the highly regulated one they have — at the federal, state and local levels. Here’s Ars on the matter:

Let’s be even clearer about what is at stake in this fight. Muni networks are providing locally based broadband infrastructures that leave cable and telco ISPs in the dust. Nearby Chattanooga, Tennessee’scity owned EPB Fiber Optics service now advertises 1,000Mbps. Wilson, North Carolina is home to the Greenlight Community Network, which offers pay TV, phone service, and as much as 100Mbps Internet to subscribers (the more typical package goes at 20Mbps). Several other North Carolina cities have followed suit, launching their own networks. In comparison, Time Warner’s Road Runner plan advertises “blazing speeds” of 15Mbps max to Wilson area consumers. When asked why the cable company didn’t offer more competitive throughput rates, its spokesperson told a technology newsletter back in 2009 that TWC didn’t think anyone around there wanted faster service. When it comes to price per megabyte, GigaOm recently crunched some numbers and found out that North Carolina cities hold an amazing 7 of 10 spots on the “most expensive broadband in the US” list.

And here’s what Wally Bowen and Tim Karr say in the News & Observer:

North Carolina has a long tradition of self-help and self-reliance, from founding the nation’s first public university to building Research Triangle Park. Befitting the state’s rural heritage, North Carolinians routinely take self-help measures to foster economic growth and provide essential local services such as drinking water and electric power. Statesville built the state’s first municipal power system in 1889, and over the years 50 North Carolina cities and towns followed suit. In 1936, the state’s first rural electric cooperative was launched in Tarboro to serve Edgecombe and Martin counties. Today, 26 nonprofit electric networks serve more than 2.5 million North Carolinians in 93 counties. Strangely, this self-help tradition is under attack. The General Assembly just passed a bill to restrict municipalities from building and operating broadband Internet systems to attract industry and create local jobs. Although pushed by the cable and telephone lobby, similar bills were defeated in previous legislative sessions. But the influx of freshmen legislators and new leadership in both houses created an opening for the dubiously titled “Level Playing Field” bill (HB 129).

No one disputes the importance of broadband access for economic growth and job creation. That’s why five cities – Wilson, Salisbury, Morganton, Davidson and Mooresville – invoked their self-help traditions to build and operate broadband systems after years of neglect from for-profit providers, which focus their investments in more affluent and densely populated areas. Not coincidentally, all five cities own and operate their own power systems or have ties to nonprofit electric cooperatives. (While the bill does not outlaw these five municipal networks, it restricts their expansion and requires them to make annual tax payments to the state as if they were for-profit companies.) How does a state that values independence, self-reliance and economic prosperity allow absentee-owned corporations to pass a law essentially granting two industries – cable and telephone – the power to dictate North Carolina’s broadband future? This question will be moot if Gov. Beverly Perdue exercises her veto power and sends this bill where it belongs: to the dustbin of history.

We don’t need more laws restricting anything around Internet infrastructure build-outs in the U.S. That’s the simple argument here.

We need the phone and cable companies to improve what they can, and we need to encourage and thank them for their good work. (As I sometimes do with Verizon FiOS, over which I am connected here in Massachusetts.)

We also need to recognize that the Internet is a utility and not just the third act (after phone and TV) in the “triple play” that phone and cable companies sell. The Net is more like roads, water, electricity and gas than like TV or telephony (both of which it subsumes). It’s not just about “content” delivered from Hollywood to “consumers,” or about a better way to do metered calls on the old Ma Bell model. It’s about everything you can possibly do with a connection to the rest of the world. The fatter that connection, the more you can do, and the more business can do.

Cities and regions blessed with fat pipes to the Internet are ports on the ocean of bits that now comprise the networked world. If citizens can’t get phone and cable companies to build out those ports, it’s perfectly legitimate for those citizens to do it themselves. That’s what municipal broadband build out is about, pure and simple. Would it be better to privatize those utilities eventually? Maybe. But in the meantime let’s not hamstring the only outlet for enterprise these citizens have found.

Here’s a simple fact for Governor Perdue to ponder: In the U.S. today, the leading innovators in Internet build-out are cities, not phone and cable companies. Look at Chatanooga and Lafayette — two red state cities that are doing an outstanding job of building infrastructure that attracts and supports new businesses of all kinds. Both are doing what no phone or cable companies seems able or willing to do. And both are succeeding in spite of massive opposition by those same incumbent duopolists.

The Internet is a rising tide that lifts all economic boats. At this stage in U.S. history, this fact seems to be fully motivating to enterprises mostly at the local level, and mostly in small cities. (Hi, Brett.) Their customers here are citizens who have direct and personal relationships with their cities and with actual or potential providers there, including the cities themselves. They want and need a level of Internet capacity that phone and cable companies (for whatever reason) are not yet giving them. These small cities provide good examples of The Market at work.

It isn’t government that’s competing with cable and phone companies here. Its people. Citizens.

No, these new build-outs are not perfect. None are, or can be. Often they’re messy. But nothing about them requires intervention by the state. Especially so early in whatever game this will end up being.

I urge friends, relatives and readers in North Carolina to Call Governor Perdue at (800) 662-7952, and to send her emails at  governor.office at nc.gov. Tell her to veto this bill, and to keep North Carolina from turning pink or red on the map above. Tell her to keep the market for broadband as free as it’s been from the beginning.

Bonus link.

[Later, as the last hour approaches...]

Larry Lesig has published an open letter to Governor Perdue, Here is most of it:

Dear Governor Perdue:

On your desk is a bill passed by the overwhelmingly Republican North Carolina legislature to ban local communities from building or supporting community broadband networks. (H.129). By midnight tonight, you must decide whether to veto that bill, and force the legislature to take a second look.

North Carolina is an overwhelmingly rural state. Relative to the communities it competes with around the globe, it has among the slowest and most expensive Internet service. No economy will thrive in the 21st century without fast, cheap broadband, linking citizens, and enabling businesses to compete. And thus many communities throughout your state have contracted with private businesses to build their own community broadband networks.

These networks have been extraordinarily effective. The prices they offer North Carolinians is a fraction of the comparable cost of commercial network providers. The speed they offer is also much much faster.

This single picture, prepared by the Institute for Local Self Reliance, says it all: The yellow and green dots represent the download (x-axis) and upload (y-axis) speeds provided by two community networks in North Carolina. Their size represents their price. As you can see, community networks provide faster, cheaper service than their commercial competitors. And they provide much faster service overall.

2011-05-20-broadbandgraph.png

 

Local competition in broadband service benefits the citizens who have demanded it. For that reason, community after community in North Carolina have passed resolutions asking you to give them the chance to provide the Internet service that the national quasi-monopolies have not. It is why businesses from across the nation have opposed the bill, and business leaders from your state, including Red Hat VP Michael Tiemann, have called upon you to veto the bill.

Commercial broadband providers are not happy with this new competition, however. After spending millions in lobbying and campaign contributions in North Carolina, they convinced your legislature to override the will of local North Carolina communities, and ban these faster, cheaper broadband networks. Rather than compete with better service, and better prices, they secured a government-granted protection against competition. And now, unless you veto H. 129, that protection against competition will become law.

Opponents of community broadband argue that it is “unfair” for broadband companies to have to compete against community-supported networks. But the same might be said of companies that would like to provide private roads. Or private fire protection. Or private police protection. Or private street lights. These companies too would face real competition from communities that choose to provide these services themselves. But no one would say that we should close down public fire departments just to be “fair” to potential private first-responders.

The reason is obvious to economists and scholars of telecommunications policy. As, for example, Professor Brett Frischmann argues, the Internet is essential infrastructure for the 21st century. And communities that rely solely upon private companies to provide public infrastructure will always have second-rate, or inferior, service.

In other nations around the world, strong rules forcing networks to compete guarantee faster, cheaper Internet than the private market alone would. Yet our FCC has abdicated its responsibility to create the conditions under which true private broadband competition might flourish in the United States. Instead, the United States has become a broadband backwater, out-competed not only by nations such as Japan and Korea, but also Britain, Germany and even France. According to a study by the Harvard Berkman Center completed last year, we rank 19th among OECD countries in combined prices for next generation Internet, and 19th for average advertised speeds. Overall, we rank below every major democratic competitor — including Spain — and just above Italy.

In a world in which FCC commissioners retire from the commission and take jobs with the companies they regulate (as Commissioner Baker has announced that she will do, by joining Comcast as a lobbyist, and as former FCC Chairman Powell has done, becoming a cable industry lobbyist), it is perhaps not surprising that these networks are protected from real competition.

But whether surprising or not, the real heroes in this story are the local communities that have chosen not to wait for federal regulators to wake up, and who have decided to create competition of their own. No community bans private networks. No community is unfairly subsidizing public service. Instead, local North Carolina communities are simply contracting to build 21st-century technology, so that citizens throughout the state can have 21st-century broadband at a price they can afford.

As an academic who has studied this question for more than a decade, I join many in believing that H.129 is terrible public policy…

Be a different kind of Democrat, Governor Perdue. I know you’ve received thousands of comments from citizens of North Carolina asking you to veto H.129. I know that given the size of the Republican majority in the legislature, it would be hard for your veto to be sustained.

But if you took this position of principle, regardless of whether or not you will ultimately prevail, you would inspire hundreds of thousands to join with you in a fight that is critical to the economic future of not just North Carolina, but the nation. And you would have shown Republicans and Democrats alike that it is possible for a leader to stand up against endless corporate campaign cash.

There is no defeat in standing for what you believe in. So stand with the majority of North Carolina’s citizens, and affirm the right of communities to provide not just the infrastructure of yesterday — schools, roads, public lighting, public police forces, and fire departments — but also the infrastructure of tomorrow — by driving competition to provide the 21st century’s information superhighway.

With respect,

Lawrence Lessig

To contact the governor, you can email her. If you’re from North Carolina, this link will take you to a tool to call the governor’s office. You can follow this fight on Twitter at @communitynets
You can follow similar fights on Twitter by searching #rootstrikers.

Well put, as usual. Hope it works.

KDFC wounded, KUSF killed (almost)

January 19, 2011 in Art, Broadcasting, Business, Future, music, News, Past, problems, radio | 26 comments

This week the Bay Area loses two of its radio landmarks. On 102.1fm, , which has been broadcasting classical music since 1946, will be replaced by a simulcast of (“K-FOX”), a classic rock station in San Jose. And on 90.3 fm, KUSF, which has been one of the most active and community-involved free-form college radio stations in history, has gone silent. When the signal on 90.3 comes back on the air, it will carry the KDFC call letters and classical music programming. Meanwhile the old KUSF will continue in some form online. The new KDFC will also broadcast on 89.9, which is the former home of , a station licensed to .

This graphic, combined from three coverage maps at Radio-Locator.com, shows the before-and-after situation. One red line is KDFC’s old primary coverage area on 102.1. The other two are its new primary coverage areas on 90.3 and 89.9:

(More about signals below at *)

Since the 90.3 signal is tiny, and the 89.9 signal is far away, KDFC will be losing a great deal of coverage. Neither of the new signals serves the Peninsula, the South Bay or the East Bay beyond Berkely and Oakland. KUSF needs to start over online. On the FM band, it’s dead.

What happened was a three-way deal between , the and the . Entercom is the one of the largest owners of broadcast properties in the country, and an aggressive buyer of broadcast properties. So is USC, which has expanded its classical network from in Los Angeles to five stations spread from Morro Bay to Palm Springs. USF, like many universities, held a broadcast license that had monetary value on the open market while producing no income for the university itself.

According to Radio Ink and other sources, here’s how the deal went down:

  1. USF sold the 90.3 frequency to USC for $3.8 million.
  2. USC also bought KNDL for $2.8 million.
  3. Entercom, which owns KDFC, bought KUFX from the Clear Channel Aloha Trust, and will simulcast KUFX (still as “K-FOX”) over KDFC’s old 102.1 facility. Entercom will also give KDFC’s call letters and record collection to “A new San Francisco-based nonprofit.”

The press releases:

While it’s nice that KDFC has stayed alive, its move to much weaker signals is a far bigger loss for Bay Area classical music listeners than losses suffered by listeners when New York’s WQXR and Boston’s WCRB made similar moves. WQXR stayed on the air with a smaller signal from the same antenna, and WCRB moved to a same-size transmitter a couple dozen miles from the center of town, but most listeners could still get the stations. KDFC’s new facilities only cover a fraction of the population reached by the old signal. Essentially the new station covers San Francisco, and that’s it. More about coverage below*.

KDFC’s listenership is not small. The raw numbers are actually outstanding. According to Radio-Info.com (which leverages Arbitron), KDFC had 632,000 listeners in the most recent ratings period (December 2010), a notch above news-talk leader KGO (624,100). KDFC’s 3.2 average quarter hour (AQH) share was tied for #8 in the market, one notch above “sports giant” KNBR, which scored a 2.8. (KGO was #1 overall for most of the last six decades, and KNBR is an AM powerhouse that covers at least half of California by day and the whole West at night.) In fact, KDFC had better overall numbers than any other Entercom station in the Bay Area.

The problem for Entercom was the format. It’s hard to sell advertising for classical music stations, which have less inventory to offer (sports, news and popular music stations carry many more minutes of advertising per hour), and serve an older audience as well.

Judging from the KDFC statement on its website The Classical Public Radio Network () will hold the license, even though it closed down a few years ago, sort of. It also says,

The new KDFC has already begun to look for new signals to offer reception in the South Bay and the entire Bay Area for our around-the-clock classical programming.

We are happy to let you know Dianne Nicolini, Hoyt Smith, Rik Malone, and Ray White will continue as your on-air hosts, and KDFC’s partnerships with the Bay Area arts and culture community will continue to grow and thrive.

KDFC is the last major commercial classical station in America to make the transition to public radio. This move ensures that classical radio is sustainable for our community into the future. Since 1947, Bay Area classical fans have shown their passionate support for KDFC. Now more than ever, we’re grateful for that support as we begin the new era of Classical KDFC. Comments can be made to  comments at myclassical.org, or by phoning 415-546-8710. If you’d like to send a check as a Founder for the Future of KDFC, please send a check to:

The Classical Public Radio Network, 201 Third Street, 12th floor, San Francisco, CA 94103.

It’s signed by Bill Leuth, Vice President, KDFC. Bill and the other names he mentions are Bay Area classical radio institutions as well.

As for KUSF, maybe going online will be a form of liberation. As signals go, 90.3 barely covered San Francisco. The Internet covers the world. And Internet radio is growing fast. Aribitron now includes online streams in its ratings, which it wouldn’t do that if those streams were not signifiant. In San Francisco, KNBR’s stream had more than 50,000 listeners in November. In Los Angeles, KROQ’s stream had 67,900 listeners in December. Many more people every day are listening to radio on phones and other portable devices. Even Howard Stern, when he renewed with Sirius in December, said the future of satellite listening isn’t over satellite — it’s over the Internet. (Which Jeff Jarvis and I both told him, back when he was still making up his mind. Latelr Howard kindly gave a hat tip to Jeff on the air.)

And hey, KDFC can benefit from the same thing.

Here’s more from The Bay Citizen and the San Francisco Chronicle. And a rescue mission report at SF Weekly… And here’s the audio from a KQED Forum program on the matter. It says that KUSF is slated to become “an online-only training station for students.] Here’s a San Francisco Chronicle story on a gathering at USF at which “almost 500 backers” of KUSF came to confront Stephen A. Privett, the University President. The part that matters:

Privett said he made the decision because the station, dominated by outside volunteers, “was of minimal benefit to my students.”

“This was not a crass business decision about dollars,” Privett said. “This was about ensuring our programs involve our students. … Our primary mission is to our students, it is not to the community at large.”

Privett said some of the $3.75 million would be used to fund the student-led online station, with the rest going to other unspecified educational projects.

Well, “student-led” suggests that the community might still be involved.

For frequent updates follow @KUSF. and at SaveKUSF on Facebook. Feelings are not weak on this matter. KUSF is much loved by its community.

On January 20, I put up a new post suggesting that the KUSF community go for 87.7fm. I think it’s available.

It also amazes me (it’s still January 20) that this post and the next one have not yet received a single comment. Meanwhile my earlier post about Flickr now has 86 comments, and even the highly arcane Geology by Plane has 6. Could it be that the total number of people who care just isn’t that large? Not saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s an isolated one. So far 3,384 people say they like SaveKUSF on Facebook. But liking and doing are way different. As I suggest here, the best bet for doing isn’t trying to make a university turn down $3.8 million for something they clearly wish to unload. It’s to start something new.

* Signal stuff, for the technical:

How should we pronounce 2011?

January 11, 2011 in Journalism, Life, News | 19 comments

Is it “twenty eleven” or “two thousand eleven”?

I’m hearing more of the former, I think. By that I mean “twenty eleven” is more commonly used than was “twenty ten,” an the “thousand” thing is wearing off.

Sooner or later it will have to. I doubt we’ll be saying “two thousand thirty two” when 2032 rolls around. “Thousand” persisted through the ’00s (the “aughts”), but is getting a bit stale now that we’ve turned the caledar up to eleven.

I haven’t bothered to check, but is one more correct than the other? Does the AP have a position on this, for example? Just wondering.

News at the speed of death

January 8, 2011 in News | 16 comments

Five minutes ago the AP pushed a report onto my phone that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot. So I went to the AP’s news site. Nothing there. Then to Google News. Nothing yet. Then to Twitter, where it was the second-top story. The top item there was this one, from @KRNV, passing along an NPR report that Ms. Giffords had died.

Her Wikipedia entry already includes the date of her passing: today. Here’s that edit.

She was doing a “Congress on your corner” at a grocery store. Her last tweet (from @rep_giffords) was an invitation to the event. (Or so I read. It doesn’t come up right now.)

Her husband, Mark. E. Kelly, is a Desert Storm veteran who has survived trips to space as an astronaut, and is slated to command the upcoming final Space Shuttle flight. Turns out being a congressperson doing her job in a public marketplace proved more hazardous.

They have two kids, who now join their dad in a living hell.

Of course the comments under news postings are full of assumptions. Nothing yet about the other victims, that I can find. Correction: between the last refresh and this one, NPR now says six have died.

Arizona Public Media’s KUAZ has regular programming.

The TV station sourced most on Twitter has the unlikely name KGUN. It still hasn’t reported on its website that anybody was killed.

I’m listening now to KQTH/104-1The Truth, where the callers and the host are making sure not to blame right wing talk radio, and the second amendment. (Guns don’t kill people, wackos kill people, is the spin.) One caller just said that Rep. Giffords is still alive and in surgery.

The other local news station, Fox-affiliated KNST/790, is playing a TV station’s audio. They are saying a Fox source says she is still alive and in critical condition. They note that she is a Jewish gun-owning wife of an astronaut. They also just say that Gawker reports that the shooter was young and male, and said nothing while shooting or being held down. And four are dead, including one child, and one aide. Puma County Sherriff’s department will have a news conference at 1:30 local time in Tuscon. (Moved to 2pm later.)

KQTH has call-ins. The current caller knows one of the people who was shot, but not killed. He didn’t like Giffords’ politics, “but…” Others are calling for the perpetrator “getting what he deserves.” The host is quick, correctly, to put down callers who speculate on motivation. “I’m not going down this path of tyrannical governments and arming citizens…” The host is actually doing a good job. The caller now is a woman who knows Rep. Giffords, and has nice things to say about her. She’s also saying the perp must be mentally ill.

Are there no non-right wing and/or Fox affiliated news/talk stations in Arizona? Just asking.

Listening to the press conference live now. (2:06pm Tucson time) As I get it… one dead: a nine-year old girl. Rep. Giffords was shot through the head (“through the brain” and “through and through” with “one bullet”), but was responding to commands before she went into surgery. She is out of surgery now and in the ICU.

An AP report on my phone says a federal judge was fatally shot in the attack.

KQTH’s host Jon Justice (the station morning guy came in to handle the shift after the shooting) said that the Sherriff of Pima County blamed right-wing talk radio, and called that irresponsible. Justice (the host, not the noun) is right about that.

The alleged perp, according to KNST, is Jared Loughner, who has a YouTube channel and a MySpace page, which has just been taken down. His final words were “Goodbye friends.” A Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/3o8ajp

Business Insider on Loughner. Has one of his videos, which makes no sense. Something about “accurate information of a new currency.” Says he, “In conclusion, my ambition – is for informing literate dreamers about a new currency; in a few days, you know I’m conscience dreaming! Thank you!” Oh-kay.

KNST says two are dead: the judge and the child. KQTH says just one is dead. They’re at the “Where were you and what were you doing when it happened” stage.

The one obvious media gaffe, at least from where I sit, so far, is NPR’s report that Rep. Giffords was dead. I don’t blame that on their politics (which some are). AP might be wrong about the judge, too, if he’s alive.

The judge is John McCarthy Roll. He was nominated by George Bush on the recommendation of John McCain, for what that’s worth. A bio.

KQHT’s news department says the suspect for sure is Jared Loughner, 22 years old. He’s the guy in custody. The station reports that Loughner was tackled and held down by citizens, until police arrived.

A blah, somewhat religious statement from John McCain.

KNST (@790knst) is saying the judge is indeed dead. Editing of his Wikipedia page is currently halted for new and unregistered users. Many updates today.

Andrew Sullivan and his readers, live-blogging.

Now President Obama is speaking. “At least five people lost their lives.” Among them Judge Roll and a girl “barely nine years old.” Gabby Giffords is a friend of the President’s. “a tragedy for Arizona and for the country.”

That’s it. Brief. KQHT: “We got some information from the President… that contradicts the information we got about 20 minutes ago from UMC.” (That’s the University Medical Center.)

MSNBC video from the archives: Gabrielle Giffords says “Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.” And yet so far it doesn’t look like the perp was a tool of the Mama Griz. Interesting: Judge Roll had death threats, two years ago, almost certainly unrelated as well.

I gotta get back to work. Been following this while walking around, exercising indoors between sit-down writing sessions.

Parting thought… Interesting that I can’t name a canonical single-source on this thing, except maybe the local radio stations. I can only find tweets for one of those, and they’re kinda low-volume. I believe this is a good thing. The old media still matter, and the new media do too — and both are provisional. Neither will be the same six months or a year from now.

[Later...] In the evening, working in the kitchen, I listened to CNN over Sirius satellite radio. The audio stream was basically the TV one. I’d say the work was excellent. They had an extensive interview with a doctor who barely missed getting shot, helped subdue the gunman, and did his best to treat the wounded. One of the things the doctor said stuck with me. If you don’t feel the pulse of a gunshot victim, the chance of reviving that victim is small, especially if emergency medical help and equipment don’t come quickly — which was the case here.

[Later still, Sunday evening...] Late in the early stages of what will be a long and crazy game, I like what Dan Gillmor says about #slownews. Still, in the meantime, items:

  • The 9-year old girl killed in the assault was Christina Taylor Green. She was born on 9/11/2001 (yes, that 9/11), and was what they called then “faces of hope” baby. (Firedog Lake) Her grandpa was former Mets and Yankees manager Dallas Green. (NY Daily News)
  • Ages of the dead victims are 9, 30, 63, 76, 76 and 79. (myFoxPhoenix, NY Times)
  • In a tweet on 4 November, @SarahPalinUSA wrote, “Remember months ago ‘bullseye’ icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats? We won 18 out of 20 (90% success rate;T’aint bad). And one of the other two was just shot in the head.
  • An ad for Jesse Kelly, Gabrielle Giffords’ opponent in the most recent congressional race, once ran an ad that read, “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully a automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” (Daily Beast)
  • Keith Olberman, whom I usually consider an insufferable gasbag, says agreeable stuff (at least to me) in his latest rant. In it he owns his own overboard remarks of the past.

I’d like to think this will change things, but I doubt that’s the best way to bet. Still, as Dan counsels, it’s best to wait and see.

Stuck without Gerry Rafferty

January 4, 2011 in Life, music, News | 4 comments

Just learned that Gerry Rafferty has died. Chronic alcoholism, apparently. I liked his music. Good lyrics, catchy tunes.. He was big in progressive/album radio when I worked and hung out there. I suppose he’s best known for the Raphael Ravenscroft solo saxaphone choruses in the song “Baker Street” (for which Ravenscroft was paid £27 with a check that bounced*); but what always stood out for me, at least with Rafferty’s hits, was his use of the second person voice. “Stuck in the middle with you“, “Star” and “Baker Street” were all complaints addressed to somebody with whom Rafferty had a problem. I suppose those people have outlived him. He was only 63: same age as me.

*Bonus link.

The Internet doesn’t do this

December 20, 2010 in Berkman, Blogging, News, Places, problems | 8 comments

The above, in order (1,2,3) is what I went through this morning when I searched for “emancipay” on Twitter.

Not knocking Twitter here. I am knocking the fact that we haven’t come up with the open Internet-based (rather than silo-based) way of microblogging.

Yet.

But that’s what I’m hanging out in New York talking to folks about today. That’s a tease. Stay tuned.

[Later...] Okay, tease over. I was on Rebooting the News. I’d say and link more, but the connectivity situation here at the hotel is sub-minimal. Maybe tomorrow.

What does cognitive science say about privacy and the Net?

December 6, 2010 in Ideas, MIT, News, Research, Science, Technology, VRM | 9 comments

Here’s what one dictionary says:

World English Dictionary
privacy (ˈpraɪvəsɪ, ˈprɪvəsɪ) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]
— n
1. the condition of being private or withdrawn; seclusion
2. the condition of being secret; secrecy
3. philosophy the condition of being necessarily restricted to a single person

Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009

I especially like that last one: restricted to a single person. In the VRM community this has been our focus in general. Our perspective is anchored with the individual human being. That’s our point of departure. Our approach to privacy, and to everything else, starts with the individual. This is why we prefer user-driven to user-centric, for example. The former assumes human agency, which is one’s ability to act and have effects in the world. The latter assumes exterior agency. It’s about the user, but not by the user. (Adriana Lukas unpacks some differences here.)

But this is a post about privacy, which is a highly popular topic right now. It’s also the subject of a workshop at MIT this week, to which some friends and colleagues are going. So talk about the topic is one thing that makes it front-burner for me right now. The other thing is that it’s also the subject of a chapter in the book I’m writing.

My argument is that privacy is personal. That’s how we understand it because that’s how we experience it. Our minds are embodied, and we experience privacy through our bodies in the world. We are born with the ability to grab, to hold, to make and wear clothing, to build structures that give us boundaries and spaces within which we can isolate what are our concerns alone.

Privacy requires containment, and concept of a container is one of our most basic, and embodied. Here’s George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh:

Our bodies are containers that take in air and nutrients and emit wastes. We constantly orient our bodies with respect to containers—rooms, beds, buildings. We spend an inordinate amount of time putting things in and taking things out of containers. We also project abstract containers onto areas in space, when we understand a swarm of bees being in the garden. Similarly every time we see something move, or move ourselves, we comprehend that movement i terms of a source-path-goal schema and reason accordingly.

I don’t think privacy itself is a container, but I do think the container provides a conceptual metaphor by which we think and talk about privacy. I also think that the virtual world of the Net and the Web—the one I call the Giant Zero—is one in which containment is very hard to conceive, much less build out, especially for ourselves. So much of what we experience in cyberspace is at odds with the familiar world of physical things, actions and spaces. In the absence of well-established (i.e. embodied) understandings about the cyber world, there are too many ways for organizations and institutions to take advantage of what we don’t yet know, or can too easily ignore. (This is the subject, for example, of the Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series.)

That’s where I am now: thinking about containers and privacy, but not with enough help from scholarly works. That’s why I’m looking for some help. One problem I have is that the word privacy appears on every Web page that has a privacy policy. There are too many false radar images in every search. Advanced searching helps, but I can’t find a way to set the filter narrowly enough. And my diggings so far into cognitive science haven’t yet brought up privacy as a focus of concern. Privacy shows up in stuff on ethics, politics, law and other topics, but is not a subject in itself — especially in respect to our embodied selves in this cyber world we’re making.

So, if anybody can point me to anything on the topic, I would dig it very much. Meanwhile, here’s a hunk of something I wrote about privacy back in September:

Take any one of these meanings, or understandings, and be assured that it is ignored or violated in practice by large parts of today’s online advertising business—for one simple reason (I got from long ago): Individuals have no independent status on the Web. Instead we have dependent status. Our relationships (and we have many) are all defined by the entities with which we choose to relate via the Web. All those dependencies are silo’d in the systems of sellers, schools, churches, government agencies, social media, associations, whatever. You name it. You have to deal with all of them separately, on their terms, and in their spaces. Those spaces are not your spaces. (Even if they’re in a place called . Isn’t it weird to have somebody else using the first person possessive pronoun for you? It will be interesting to see how retro that will seem after it goes out of fashion.)

What I’m saying here is that, on the Web, we do all our privacy-trading in contexts that are not out in the open marketplace, much less in our own private spaces (by any of the above definitions). They’re all in closed private spaces owned by the other party—where none of the rules, none of the terms of engagement, are yours. In other words, these places can’t be private, in the sense that you control them. You don’t. And in nearly all cases (at least here in the U.S.), your “agreements” with these silos are contracts of adhesion that you can’t break or change, but the other party can—and often does.

These contexts have been so normative, for so long, that we can hardly imagine anything else, even though we have that “else” out here in the physical world. We live and sleep and travel and get along in the physical world with a well-developed understanding of what’s mine, what’s yours, what’s ours, and what’s none of those. That’s because we have an equally well-developed understanding of bounded spaces. These differ by culture. In her wonderful book , Polly Platt writes about how French —comfortable distances from others—are smaller than those of Americans. The French feel more comfortable getting close, and bump into each other more in streets, while Americans tend to want more personal space, and spread out far more when they sit. Whether she’s right about that or not, we actually have personal spaces on Earth. We don’t on the Web, and in Web’d spaces provided by others. (The Net includes more than the Web, but let’s not get into that here. The Web is big enough.)

So one reason that privacy trading is so normative is that dependency requires it. We have to trade it, if that’s what the sites we use want, regardless of how they use whatever we trade away.

The only way we can get past this problem (and it is a very real one) is to create personal spaces on the Web. Ones that we own and control. Ones where we set the terms of engagement. Ones where we decide what’s private and what’s not.

For a bonus link, here’s a paper by Oshani Seneviratne that was accepted for the privacy workshop this week. It raises the subject of accountability and proposes an approach that I like.

Obama’s About page, in a podcast

November 17, 2010 in News, Politics, radio | Comments closed

If you can park your politics (whatever it might be) long enough to listen with an open mind to a one-hour podcast, please dig Reading Obama’s Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils, an interview by Chris Lydon of James T. Kloppenberg, chair of the Department of History at Harvard, author of “A Nation Arguing with Its Conscience” in Harvard Magazine, and a forthcoming biography, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition.

Chris is one of the first (and best) podcasters, as well as a notable on many other grounds. (Bonus link.) He blogs and ‘casts at Radio Open Source. Subscribe here.

IQ and Caste

November 13, 2010 in Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, problems, Quote, School | 11 comments

Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins,

Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with lower IQs usually retire to bed sooner after nightfall.

Let’s stop right there and ask a few questions:

  • Does each of us actually have a “quotient” — a sum — of intelligence?
  • Is intelligence actually measurable as a sum?
  • Do you believe you have an IQ? Do you know what it is?
  • Would you be willing to share your IQ scores? Why? Or why not?

I took many IQ tests during my years in school. And since my mother taught in the public school I attended through the 9th grade, she had access to all my records. Between those and others I’ve seen, my known IQ scores have an eighty point range: from quite smart to quite dumb. Those scores are among the many facts that convinced me long ago that IQ testing is meant mostly for one thing: ranking people. It’s made to privilege some, to keep privileges from others, and to move the rest as a herd through school or some other system. It legitimizes the arbitrary sorting of human beings into castes based on poor measures of one quality that makes each of us very human, and therefore also very different from every other human being. In a cruel way, it seeks to measure the immeasurable, and to sort us out accordingly.

IQ testing became popular in an age when eugenics was still taken seriously: when it was assumed by privileged populations that races and ethnic groups differed by intelligence and other measures. Today we go out of our way to avoid that kind of thinking, at the official level. But the proclivity persists. Assuming that people have an IQ — intelligence measured as if by a thermometer — is still more than common, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. That’s what we see in reports like the quoted one above.

So here’s my advice to anybody writing about the topic: recognize that IQ is a one-time score on a test, not a true measure of the very human and highly arcane personal quality we call intelligence. Don’t say “Those with higher IQs.” Say “Those with higher IQ scores.” The difference is between humanity and that which seeks to replace it with a number. It should help to think about the harms caused by the latter.

The World Live Library

November 13, 2010 in Books, history, infrastructure, News, Past, Photography, Places, Research, Travel | 3 comments

My great uncle Jack Dwyer worked in the shipping and steamship business through the first half of the last century. He also took a lot of pictures, including my favorite family photo of all time. (I’m the kid with the beer.) I was going through a bunch of these on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed the name of a ship launched in Biloxi, in 1919. It was the Elizabeth Ruth. Look closely and you can see the ship is wooden. In fact it was one of the last of the masted schooners on which Biloxi specialized.

Thanks to Google Books and the Library of the University of Michigan, we have an account of the Elizabeth Ruth’s launch, in March 1917, in Volume 35 of The Rudder, edited by Thomas Fleming Day (in a day when using full names was still as current as sails on ships). Writes Day, “The Mississippi Shipping Corporation, at Biloxi, put out Elizabeth Ruth, of the Schooner type, one of the prettiest little vessels ever built in the United States, of 1400 tons cargo capacity.”

So I wondered whatever happened to the Elizabeth Ruth. And I quickly found out. From Papers Past, we have this account:

Sez the About page:

Papers Past contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1945 and includes 61 publications from all regions of New Zealand.

New Zealand. I just love that. Here I am, wanting to know what may have happened to a minor ship, built and launched from a minor port on one continent ninety-two years ago — that I have just learned about from a book scanned in Michigan and probably not cracked open in the library stacks there except to get scanned — and I get the answer from a scanned strip of equally old print, kindly curated by  archivists half a world away.

That just rocks. Hats off to librarians, archivists and their technical facilitators everywhere, doing the good work of opening up history and letting the world have at it.

Bonus link. Another.

Way to die

October 31, 2010 in Life, News, Photography | 3 comments

I just learned by Dave that Chris Gulker died on Wednesday. (Somehow I missed the news at first pass.) I barely knew Chris, I knew enough to get that he was terrific guy, citizen, friend, photographer, blogger and much more. I don’t think it’s possible to die more consciously and graciously than Chris did. Dave’s right that it’s wrong not to read Chris’s obituary in a mainstream paper. But there are plenty of good ones out there* where it matters most. Start with Scott Rosenberg’s.

*And thank you, IceRocket, for still doing great blog search. It matters. Everybody, please do read the list of goodbyes that come up in a search for Chris.

Food for re-thought

October 28, 2010 in history, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, News, Politics, Science | 4 comments

The summary paragraph of a great column by Tom Friedman:

A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers.

Here’s a link to Rising Above the Storm, the study Tom cites. There is a free download routine that requires giving ID information, though what you say is up to you.

Tags: ,

KCET’s brave move

October 12, 2010 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Journalism, News, Technology | 18 comments

I just learned by Craig Smith that KCET, the flagship PBS TV station in Los Angeles, is “going rogue.” Specifically, Craig says, “KCET will be dropping its PBS affiliation at the end of the year. That means if you live in Santa Barbara and want to watch the PBS NewsHour, Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Antiques Roadshow or even Sesame Street, you may be out of luck starting at the beginning of next year.”

KCET is a Los Angeles station that puts no signal at all into Santa Barbara (except though a translator on Gibraltar Peak). But it’s the nearest PBS affiliate and is therefore on the local cable system (Cox), thanks to must-carry rules.

Here’s the LA Times story. Here’s another one. Both rake KCET over the coals. They’re abandoning viewers, paying their general manager too much, yada yada.

As all those pieces point out, KCET isn’t the only source of PBS programming in the LA area. KOCE, licensed to Huntington Beach in Orange County, is another long-time PBS affiliate and promises to at least help pick up the slack. And it’s in a good position to do that. Where KOCE used to radiate from a local site in Orange County, it now also broadcasts from Mt. Wilson, which overlooks Los Angeles and is home to nearly all the area’s TV and FM stations. In fact, KOCE is actually putting out a signal that maxes at one million watts, while KCET is currently at 190,000 watts with a construction permit for 106,000 watts. This means that technically, at least, KOCE is now a bigger station. At 162,000 watts, so isKLCS, another PBS station in Los Angeles.

At least one of those others is sure to show up on cable systems in outlying areas such as Santa Barbara, bringing familiar shows to PBS audiences there. (The bihg question for KOCE is whether it can still be an Orange County station, and not morph into National/Southern California one.)

But the real story here is the death of TV as we knew it, and the birth of whatever follows.

Relatively few people actually watch TV from antennas any more. KCET, KOCE and KLCS are cable stations now. That means they’re just data streams with channel numbers, arriving at flat screens served by cable systems required to carry them.

What makes a TV station local is now content and culture, not transmitter location and power. In fact, a station won’t even need a “channel” or “channels” after the next digital transition is done. That’s the transition from cable to Internet, at the end of which all video will be either a data stream or a file transfer, as with a podcast.

All that keeps cable coherent today is the continuing perception, substantiated only by combination of regulation and set-top box design, that “TV” still exists, and choices there are limited to “channels” and program schedules. All of those are anachronisms. Living fossils. And very doomed.

KCET bailed on PBS because it didn’t want to pay whatever it took to stay affiliated with that program source. This means KCET has some faith — or at least a good idea — that Whatever Comes Next will be good enough for lots of people to watch. If we’re lucky, what’s liberated will also be liberating.

I sure hope so. Dumping PBS was a brave move by KCET. They deserve congratulations for it.

[Later...] Please read John Proffitt’s comment below. He lays out a scenario so likely yet easily denied that it has the ring of prophesy. TV is still TV, and KCET and its competitors are all TV stations. The next digital transition for the likes of KCET will indeed give us more more kinds of Ken Burns. The one that follows will bring us whatever we bring ourselves. Yes, there will still be big heads and long tails, but the game won’t be a closed one, or assume a sphinctered distribution system (which TV still is—and will still be if everything still has to run through regulated BigCos). More in my own responses and others that follow in the comments.

For bonus links, check out what KETC (not a typo and no relation), the landmark PBS station in St. Louis has been up to lately. There is lots of co-thinking out loud, including this stuff, facilitated by Robert Paterson—

(For some reason the text here keeps reverting to an earlier version, then back to a later one, each time I edit it. Very strange. In fact, I just discovered that half this post disappeared somehow. I just restored it from Google search cache. I hope.)

On trees that don’t grow to the sky

October 12, 2010 in Business, News, Past | 5 comments

You could build a shallow history of computing by looking only at which company looked like it was taking over the world at any given moment. First there was IBM, then Microsoft, then Google, and now there’s Facebook. None of them ever did take over the world, and no one company ever will.

It was with that perspective in mind that I wrote Waving Goodbye to Facebook in the August issue of Linux Journal, which is now on the Web. The pull-grafs:

Responding in his own Newsweek blog, Barrett Sheridan called Zuckerberg’s plans a “Play to Take Over the Entire Internet“. In TechCrunch, MG Siegler’s headline read, “I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet“. Whether or not Facebook is that ambitious, it won’t succeed at anything other than enlarging itself. The limits to that are those of any private architecture. It can get big, but not bigger than the planet. What Facebook has built is The Great Indoors. A lot of people like going there, just like a lot of people like going to shopping malls. But Facebook is a building, not geology.

The Web is geology. It is a wide open public space on which private and public structures can be built in boundless variety. Linux is probably the most widely used building material below and within those structures. Calculating its value is pointless, because — as Eric S. Raymond made clear long ago — Linux has use value more than sale value. As useful stuff, its leverage is boundless and therefore incalculable. It will also last as long as it remains useful.

The same cannot be said of Facebook, whose value is quite calculable, and which will thrive only as long as its revenue model and its investors’ patience holds out. Both of those will be shortened by the dissatisfaction of users, which Facebook has been risking increasingly over the years.

Of course, Facebook has little choice in that matter. To rephrase The Social Network‘s poster copy, you can’t make a billion friends without making a few million enemies. And, of course, following Facebook right now is kinda necessary. A few links I just moved here from tabs on my browser:

But then there is this, by Paul Boutin in the New York Times‘ Gadgetwise blog: Facebook Now Lets You Take Your Data With You. Thanks, Mark.

The Business Movie

October 9, 2010 in Business, Call center hell, Life, News, Technology | 10 comments

Went to see The Social Network last night, and thought it was terrific. Even though most of the scenes set at Harvard and Silicon Valley were shot elsewhere, the versimilitude was high. And,while it was strange to see the recent past treated as history, the story actually works, and carries truth, even if it doesn’t ring true for the living subjects of the story. (I’ve haven’t met any of the movie’s characters, but I thought Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of the Sean Parker character was drawn straight from Jason Calacanis.)

The story that matters, at least to me, is about the making of a Silicon Valley success. In The Business-Movie Business, The New Yorker‘s James Surowiecki unpacks Hollywood’s small and mostly poor assortment of movies about business. His summary statement is “Movies’ mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.” Here’s how he puts “The Social Network” in that context:

Watching “Wall Street,” you’d think that business is a Hollywood obsession. But it’s really Hollywood’s biggest blind spot.

For that reason, the fall’s most important business film—indeed, the most important business film in ages—is not the second “Wall Street” but, rather, “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s film about Facebook. The film represents a rare attempt to take business seriously, and to interrogate the blend of insight, ruthlessness, creativity, and hubris required to start a successful company. Hollywood has made good films about money, loyalty, trust, and organization before—but most of them have been about gangsters. “The Social Network” suggests that it could also start making good films about businesspeople who don’t carry guns.

Henry Blodget’s blog post title sums up his own take: No Wonder Everyone Loves The Facebook Movie: It’s The American Dream. He begins,

True, it paints Harvard as a stuffy cartoon-scape. True, it treats women as as video-game props, sex tools, and platforms for coke-snorting. And, true, Mark Zuckerberg’s character comes off as a bit of an asshole. (But based on the other evidence I’ve seen, this would seem to be a fair representation of the reality at the time. And, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s writing and Jesse Eisenberg’s delivery, even the assholishness is charming.)

But all this is secondary to the main message of the movie, which is a celebration of what makes a vibrant corner of our economy–and our country–great.

What’s the Facebook movie really about?

It’s about a college sophomore who says “fuck you” to authority, follows his passion, and creates something great. In so doing, he works ridiculously hard, inspires his colleagues, blows past the comfortable establishment, and becomes rich beyond belief.

In other words, the Facebook movie is the latest incarnation of the American Dream.

Ah, but we wake up from our dreams. And Hollywood knows how to make that movie too.

Mark Zuckerberg is clearly an extremely bright and prescient dude, and Facebook could hardly be a bigger success story. But that story isn’t over. In fact, it’s just begun.

(An aside… Both The New Yorker and BusinessInsider, from which I lifted the quotes above, do something I hate. They give me more than I intend to copy, putting on my clipboard a “Read more” and the URL of the piece. So, when I paste the passage, I get bonus jive. Sometimes this is handy, but it smacks of pure promotion, and its annoying.)

Cookies for Kiddies

September 18, 2010 in Business, Ideas, Life, News, Technology, VRM | 6 comments

Back on July 31 I posted The Data Bubble in response to the first of The Wall Street Journal‘s landmark series of articles and Web postings on the topic of unwelcome (and, to their targets, mostly unknown) user tracking.

A couple days ago I began to get concerned about how much time had passed since the last posting, on August 12. So I tweeted, Hey @whattheyknow, is your Wall Street Journal series done? If not, when are we going to see more entries? Last I saw was >1 month ago.

Then yesterday @WhatTheyKnow tweeted back, @dsearls: Ask and ye shall receive: http://on.wsj.com/9DTpdP. Nice!

The piece is titled On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking, by Steve Stecklow, and it’s a good one indeed. To start,

The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.

The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.

Should we call cookies for kids “candy”? Hey, why not?

Once again we see the beginning of the end of fettered user tracking. Such as right here:

Many kids’ sites are heavily dependent on advertising, which likely explains the presence of so many tracking tools. Research has shown children influence hundreds of billions of dollars in annual family purchases.

Google Inc. placed the most tracking files overall on the 50 sites examined. A Google spokesman said “a small proportion” of the files may be used to determine computer users’ interests. He also said Google doesn’t include “topics solely of interest to children” in its profiles.

Still, Google’s Ads Preferences page displays what Google has determined about web users’ interests. There, Google accurately identified a dozen pastimes of 10-year-old Jenna Maas—including pets, photography, “virtual worlds” and “online goodies” such as little animated graphics to decorate a website.

“It is a real eye opener,” said Jenna’s mother, Kate Maas, a schoolteacher in Charleston, S.C., viewing that data.

Jenna, now in fifth grade, said: “I don’t like everyone knowing what I’m doing and stuff.”

A Google spokesman said its preference lists are “based on anonymous browser activity. We don’t know if it’s one user or four using a particular browser, or who those users are.” He said users can adjust the privacy settings on their browser or use the Ads Preferences page to limit data collection.

I went and checked my own Ads Preferences page (http://www.google.com/ads/preferences) and found that I had opted out of Google’s interest-based advertising sometime in the past. I barely remember doing that, but I’m not surprised I did. On the whole I think most people would opt to turn that kind of stuff off, just to get a small measure of shelter amidst the advertising blizzard that the commercial Web has become.

Finding Google’s opt-out control box without a flashlight, however, is a bit of a chore. Worse, Google is just one company. The average user has to deal with dozens or hundreds of other (forgive me) cookie monsters, each with its own opt-out/in control boxes (or lack of them). And I suspect that most of those others are far less disclosing about their practices (and respectful of users) than Google is.

(But I have no research to back that up—yet. If anybody does, please let me have it. There’s a whole chapter in a book I’m writing that’s all about this kind of stuff.)

Meanwhile, says the Journal,

Parents hoping to let their kids use the Internet, while protecting them from snooping, are in a bind. That’s because many sites put the onus on visitors to figure out how data companies use the information they collect.

Exactly. And what are we to do? Depend on the site owners and their partners? Not in the absence of help, that’s for sure. The Journal again:

Gaiaonline.com—where teens hang out together in a virtual world—says in its privacy policy that it “cannot control the activities” of other companies that install tracking files on its users’ computers. It suggests that users consult the privacy policies of 11 different companies.

In a statement, gaiaonline.com said, “It is standard industry practice that advertisers and ad networks are bound by their own privacy policy, which is why we recommend that our users review those.” The Journal’s examination found that gaiaonline.com installed 131 tracking files from third parties, such as ad networks.

An executive at a company that installed several of those 131 files, eXelate Media Ltd., said in an email that his firm wasn’t collecting or selling teen-related data. “We currently are not specifically capturing or promoting any ‘teen’ oriented segments for marketing purposes,” wrote Mark S. Zagorski, eXelate’s chief revenue officer.

But the Journal found that eXelate was offering data for sale on 5.9 million people it described as “Age: 13-17.” In a later interview, Mr. Zagorski confirmed eXelate was selling teen data. He said it was a small part of its business and didn’t include personal details such as names.

BlueKai Inc., which auctions data on Internet users, also said it wasn’t offering for sale data on minors. “We are not selling data on kids,” chief executive Omar Tawakol wrote in an email. “Let there be no doubt on what we do.”

However, another data-collecting company, Lotame Solutions Inc., told the Journal that it was selling what it labeled “teeny bopper” data on kids age 13 to 19 via BlueKai’s auctions. “If you log into BlueKai, you’ll see ‘teeny boppers’ available for sale,” said Eric L. Porres, Lotame’s chief marketing officer.

Mr. Tawakol of BlueKai later confirmed the “teeny bopper” data had been for sale on BlueKai’s exchange but no one had ever bought it. He said as a result of the Journal’s inquiries, BlueKai had removed it.

The FTC is reviewing the only federal law that limits data collection about kids, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa. That law requires sites aimed at children under 13 to obtain parental permission before collecting, using or disclosing a child’s “personal information” such as name, home or email address, and phone and Social Security number. The law also applies to general-audience sites that knowingly collect personal information from kids.

So we have pots and kettles calling each other black while copping out of responsibility in any case—and then, naturally, turning toward government for help.

My own advice: let’s not be so fast with that. Let’s continue to expose bad practices, but let’s also fix the problem on the users’ end. Because what we really need here are tools by which individuals (including parents) can issue their own global preferences, their own terms of engagement,  their own controls, and their own ends of relationships with companies that serve them.

These tools need to be be based on open standards, code and protocols, and independent of any seller. Where they require trusted intermediaries, those parties should be substitutable, so individuals are not locked in again.

And guess what? We’re working on those. Here’s what I wrote last month in Cooperation vs. Coercion:

What we need now is for vendors to discover that free customers are more valuable than captive ones. For that we need to equip customers with better ways to enjoy and express their freedom, including ways of engaging that work consistently for many vendors, rather than in as many different ways ways as there are vendors — which is the “system” (that isn’t) we have now.

There are lots of VRM development efforts working on both the customer and vendor sides of this challenge. In this post I want to draw attention to the symbols that represent those two sides, which we call r-buttons, two of which appear [in the example below]. Yours is the left one. The vendor’s is the right one. They face each other like magnets, and are open on the facing ends.

These are designed to support what Steve Gillmor calls gestures, which he started talking about back in 2005 or so. I paid some respect to gestures (though I didn’t yet understand what he meant) in The Intention Economy, a piece I wrote for Linux Journal in 2006. (That same title is also the one for book I’m writing for Harvard Business Press. The subtitle is What happens when customers get real power.) On the sell side, in a browser environment, the vendor puts some RDFa in its HTML that says “We welcome free customers.” That can mean many things, but the most important is this: Free customers bring their own means of engagement. It also means they bring their own terms of engagement.

Being open to free customers doesn’t mean that a vendor has to accept the customer’s terms. It does mean that the vendor doesn’t believe it has to provide all those terms itself, through the currently defaulted contracts of adhesion that most of us click “accept” for, almost daily. We have those because from the dawn of e-commerce sellers have assumed that they alone have full responsibility for relationships with customers. Maybe now that dawn has passed, we can get some daylight on other ways of getting along in a free and open marketplace.

The gesture shown here —

— is the vendor (in this case the public radio station KQED, which I’m just using as an example here) expressing openness to the user, through that RDFa code in its HTML. Without that code, the right-side r-button would be gray. The red color on the left side shows that the user has his or her own code for engagement, ready to go. (I unpack some of this stuff here.)

Putting in that RDFa would be trivial for a CRM system. Or even for a CMS (content management system). Next step: (I have Craig Burton leading me on this… he’s on the phone with me right now…) RESTful APIs for customer data. Check slide 69 here. Also slides 98 and 99. And 122, 124, 133 and 153.

If I’m not mistaken, a little bit of RDFa can populate a pop-down menu on the site’s side that might look like this:

All the lower stuff is typical “here are our social links” jive. The important new one is that item at the top. It’s the new place for “legal” (the symbol is one side of a “scale of justice”) but it doesn’t say “these are our non-negotiable terms of service (or privacy policies, or other contracts of adhesion). Just by appearing there it says “We’re open to what you bring to the table. Click here to see how.” This in turn opens the door to a whole new way for buyers and sellers to relate: one that doesn’t need to start with the buyer (or the user) just “accepting” terms he or she doesn’t bother to read because they give all advantages to the seller and are not negotiable. Instead it is an open door like one in a store. Much can be implicit, casual and free of obligation. No new law is required here. Just new practice. This worked for Creative Commons (which neither offered nor required new copyright law), and it can work for r-commerce (a term I just made up). As with Creative Commons, what happens behind that symbol can be machine, lawyer or human-readable. You don’t have to click on it. If your policy as a buyer is that you don’t want to to be tracked by advertisers, you can specify that, and the site can hear and respond to it. The system is, as Renee Lloyd puts it, the difference between a handcuff and a handshake.

Giving customers means for showing up in the marketplace with their own terms of engagement is a core job right now for VRM. Being ready to deal with customers who bring their own terms is equally important for CRM. What I wrote here goes into some of the progress being made for both. Much more is going on as well. (I’m writing about this stuff because these are the development projects I’m involved with personally. There are many others.)

You can check out some of those others here.

Bonus link: Tracking the Companies that Track You Online. That’s a Fresh Air interview by Dave Davies of Julia Anguin, senior technology editor of The Wall Street Journal and the lead reporter on the What They Know series.

Keeping relationship humanized

September 17, 2010 in Business, Call center hell, News, problems, VRM | 13 comments

Ten years ago this month, on the morning after I gave this speech in Lucerne, my wife and I were walking through the restaurant at our hotel across the lake when a friendly American gentleman having breakfast buttonholed me to say he liked what I said in my talk. I thanked him and asked if he’d be at the conference again that day. He said yes, and that it would be nice to talk later.

Turns out he was the first speaker that morning. His name was , and he was the CEO of Wal-Mart. Later at lunch, which consisted of boxed food you could take out to tables by the lake, he came over to the table where my wife and I were sitting and asked if he could join us. I said sure, and we got to talking. One of the questions I asked him was why K-Mart had failed while Wal-Mart succeeded. He compressed his reply to one word: coupons. K-Mart had hooked its customers on coupons and couldn’t get them un-hooked. This tended to produce too many of the wrong kinds of customers, buying for the wrong reasons. Way too much of K-Mart’s overhead went into printing what was in essence a kind of currency — one that reduced the value of both the merchandise and the motives for buying it. By contrast Wal-Mart kept to old Sam Walton’s original guidelines, which minimized advertising and promotion, and simply promising “everyday low prices.” This saved money and helped build loyalty.

Lee’s lesson comes to mind when I read  at the . It’s too hard to compress the story, so here it is:

There’s a fascinating essay on Facebook just now from the owner of the lovely , about how Groupon nearly bankrupted her business.

The coffeeshop proprietor, Jessie Burke, was shocked at how much money the daily deals site charged to run the promotion. Groupon sold consumers a $13 Posie’s credit for $6, and then sought to keep the entire $6. Eventually, Posie’s and Groupon agreed on a 50% cut: Groupon would get $3 and Posie’s would get $3. Groupon’s $3 was almost pure profit,  but the cafe had to use its remaining $3 to cover the costs of $13 worth of cookies and coffee.

Is it any surprise the promotion was a smash? Over 1,000 customers used the promotion, but the cost imposed by those customers resulted in disastrous losses:

After three months of Groupons coming through the door, I started to see the results really hurting us financially. There came a time when we literally couldn’t not make payroll because at that point in time we had lost nearly $8,000 with our Groupon campaign. We literally had to take $8,000 out of our personal savings to cover payroll and rent that month. It was sickening, especially after our sales had been rising.

The losses would have been worthwhile if the Groupon customers had become loyal, profitable patrons but many only cared about a discount, not about what made the cafe special:

Over the six months that the Groupon is valid, we met many, many wonderful new customers, and were so happy to have them join the Posies family. At the same time we met many, many terrible Groupon customers… customers that didn’t follow the Groupon rules and used multiple Groupons for single transactions, and argued with you about it with disgusted looks on their faces or who tipped based on what they owed.

And here is Jessie Burke’s original post on the matter, at Posie’s blog.

To be fair, the bad customers were neither “Groupons” (as Jessie calls them) nor “Groupon customers” (since they didn’t buy anything from Groupon — in fact Posie’s was the real Groupon customer). They were coupon shoppers. Promotion hunters. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Most of us play that role some of the time. The problem for Posie’s is one of the oldest in retailing: promotions are good for causing traffic, but lousy for causing loyalty. And making constant promotion part of your business changes your business, literally by cheapening it.

What’s clear about Posie’s is that it’s a business built on human contact, on conversation and relationship. Not just on transactions — and least of all on discounted ones.

Relationship is personal. Even at the biggest companies, success and failure ride on personal behavior, and personal connections. “Trust breaks down first over money,” David Hodskins (my business partner of many years and a very wise dude) observes. Throwing coupons into a personal relationships, especially business ones, is a recipe for trouble.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, businesses large and small have also looked at individual relationships with customers as a kind of cost — one that can be reduced or eliminated, often by avoiding or de-humanizing conversations with customers. Promotions like Posie’s with Groupon are just one example of how cheapening gimmicks can actually damage a business that depends on personal relationships between a company’s people and its customers. There are many more examples, especially at larger companies, which too often turn customer support conversations into reverse : making humans sound like machines.

Making relationships work has always been both the foundation and the frontier of business. Ideally, technology should help relationships. And to some degree it does. Telephony and other “social” technologies certainly do help us stay in touch. But there are many other technologies, and uses — including some in the “social” space — that prevent or pervert relationships.

Earlier today, when I went looking for Bermuda tweeters, I went down the list of nearly (and now more than) 500 followers of @BDASun (the Bermuda Sun newspaper). A large percentage of followers are just there to promote something. On a day like today, when a hurricane is bearing down on that tiny country, you can tell the wheat from the chaff. The wheat is dealing with the hurricane (or stays quietly hunkered down). The chaff just promotes.

This has me wondering how much of “social media” today is devoted to being social in the old-fashioned literal sense, and how much is about marketing and promotion. Because I think there is a huge split between the two: a split as sharp as the one between Posie’s good and bad customers.

Igor vs. Bermuda

September 17, 2010 in Geology, News, Places | 5 comments

Hurricane Igor

It’s a safe bet that most people don’t know where Bermuda is. Here’s the answer: In the middle of the ocean, close to nothing. It’s not like the Bahamas, or the islands of the Caribbean, which are arranged in chains, or near to a continent. Instead Bermuda pokes above the Atlantic eight hundred fifty miles straight east of Charleston and the same distance south of Halifax. Its nearest neighbor is Cape Hatteras, still close to seven hundred miles away. So there is no land nearby to protect Bermuda, or to which its residents can run for safety.

Bermuda is also tiny, with a land mass is 20.6 square miles. That’s about 4.5 miles square. You could fit two Bermudas in one San Francisco, with room to spare. Its highest point is Town Hill, at about 250 feet above sea level.

Hurricanes usually circle around Bermuda, attacking Caribbean islands or land along the the Gulf or the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. But Hurricane Igor is different. Hurricane Igor is aimed for Bermuda. (Here’s a great looping animation from the National Hurricane Center, showing Igor’s path. And here’s another, with layers you can turn on and off.)

Since what remains of U.S. mainstream media generally don’t give a shit about the rest of the world — especially when the subject is hurricanes (see this Onion story for more on that) — Bermuda remains downgraded as an Area of Interest. Until, of course, it’s obliterated. You know, like Haiti or New Orleans.

But Bermuda is still there, and it does have media, including tweeters and bloggers. (Well, it’s kinda short on bloggers. Look up Bermuda bloggers on Google or Bing and the top results are pretty depressing. At least there’s Global Voices: Bermuda, where I just learned about Bermuda Blog. And there are others I’m sure to hear about, soon as this is posted.)

There’s the Bermua Sun (@BDASun), The Royal Gazette, BermudaNews (@bermudanews.com), Bermuda Online, .bm emergency tweeters (@edenrichardson, @BermudaDCoffice, @smexpress, @Blonde_In_Bda, @CollieBuddz, @FairmontHam, @JImCantore, @letonnerre @shaeyd @jessicanrowe, @amonteleone, @piecesofsleep…) And, of course, everything that shows up in a search for #bermuda, #igor or both.

I can’t find a single radio or TV station in Bermuda that streams on the Web, other than ZBMradio, which doesn’t seem to be working (at that link, which goes to the stream). But here are the Twitter search results for streaming bermuda.

The last major hurricane to strike Bermuda was Fabian, in 2003. That one killed eight and caused $355 million (2010 USD) in damage. Not bad, considering peak sustained winds of 145mph. (See Roland’s comment, below.)

Meanwhile, heres the action plan, via the BDA Sun. I’ll add more below as news comes in.

The Wikileaks Story

July 28, 2010 in Journalism, News, problems | 2 comments

… is about Wikileaks. Not the war. But not oddly.

All stories have three elements:

1) A character. A protagonist. The main human subject. Sometimes it’s a cause, but it requires personification. In sports it’s a player or a team. In war it’s a side. In novels it’s a character or a cast of them. I npolitics it’s a party or some other Us. (And there is always a Them. Opponents define characters.)

2) A problem. That is, a situation that cannot be easily resolved. Something that keeps us tuned in, or turning the pages.

3) Movement toward resolution. Even if the situation gets worse, you have some reason to maintain interest. If your team is up 20 points and there’s less than a minute left, the story is over. If the main character dies, or disappears, we tune out. If the whole situation if FUBAR beyond understanding, we also tune out.

So, in no time at all, Wikileaks’ 91,000+ documents, which apparently (so far) contain no story-making news other than the leaks themselves, has become a story about Wikileaks. Thus we have Air Leaks from Wikileaks Balloon, in the Washington Post.

The character is Julian Assange, who is, if nothing else, a very odd and therefore interesting dude. As Michael Wolff asks in the next link, “Who plays Julian Assange in the movie?”

The problem is Dealing with Wikileaks itself. This is a problem for big-J Journalism, which loves to talk about itself. (Hey, it’s a character too.)

There is no obvious resolution, which is why the air leaks out of the balloon. Wikileaks is what it is: a source. Nothing happening here, move along.

Meanwhile the war remains no less FUBAR than it was before the leaks sprung. Just like health care. Just like the financial meltdown. They’re all what Bill Safire used to call MEGOs. The letters stood for “My Eyes Glaze Over.” These were, he said (something like), “Subjects too important not to cover but too complex or dull to care about.”

But there will be movies. Count on it.

Sad news

July 23, 2010 in Journalism, News, radio | 4 comments

The strangest thing about Dan Schorr dying is that he isn’t here to explain it on NPR. I always liked Schorr’s take on things, even when I didn’t agree with him. When was his last commentary? Haven’t found that yet. Didn’t seem like long ago.

He was 93. We should all live so long, and well.

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Purple Reign Ends

July 8, 2010 in Art, Fun, music, News | 4 comments

Prince, to the Mirror:

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

Dr. Weinberger responds:

Breaking News: The Internet Declares Prince to be Completely Over

Now we can party like it’s 2010.

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Sourcing Persephone

July 4, 2010 in Blogging, Health, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, Live Web, News, Past, problems | 12 comments

We are what we do.

We are more than that, of course, but it helps to have answers to the questions “What do you do?” and “What have you done?”

Among many other notable things l did was survive breast cancer. It was a subject that came up often during the year we shared as fellows at the Berkman Center. It may not have been a defining thing, but it helped build her already strong character. Persephone also said she knew that her personal war with the disease might not be over. The risks for survivors are always there.

So it was not just by awful chance that Persephone showed up at a Berkman event this Spring wearing a turban. She was on chemo, she said, but optimistic. Thin and frail, she was still pressing on with work, carrying the same good humor, toughness, intelligence and determination.

The next time I saw her, in early June, she looked worse. Then, on June 24, Ethan Zuckerman sent an email to Berkman friends, letting us know that Persephone’s health was diminishing quickly, and that she “probably will not live through July.” He also said that she had moved to a hospice, but was doing well enough to read email and accept a few visitors — and that he had hoped to visit her on July 6. Just five days later, Ethan wrote to say that Persephone had died the night before. I had been working in slow motion on an email to her — thinking, I guess, that Ethan’s July 6 date was an appointment she would keep. This post began as that email.

Persephone is gone, but her work isn’t, and that’s what I want to talk about. It’s a subject I wanted to bring up with her, and one I’m sure all her friends care about. We all should.

What I want to talk about is not “carrying on” the work of the deceased in the usual way that eulogizers do. What I’m talking about is keeping Persephone’s public archives in a published, accessible and easily found state. I fear that if we don’t make an effort to do that — for everybody — that we’ll lose them.

The Web went commercial in 1995, and has only become more so since. Today it is a boundless live public marketplace, searched mostly through one company’s engine, which continues to adapt accordingly. While Google’s original mission (“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) persists, its commercial imperatives cannot help but subordinate its noncommercial ones.

In my own case I’m finding it harder and harder to use Google (or any search engine) to find my own archived work, even if there are links to it. The Live Web, which I first wrote about in 2005, has come to be known as the “real time” Web, which is associated with Twitter and Facebook as well as Google. What’s live, what’s real time, is now. Not then.

Today almost no time passes between the publishing of anything and its indexing by Google. This is good, but it is also aligned with commercial imperatives that emphasize the present and dismiss the past. No seller has an interest in publishing last week’s offerings, much less last year’s or last decade’s. What would be the point?

It would help if there were competition among search engines, or more specialized ones, but there’s not much hope for that. Bing’s business model is the same as Google’s. And the original Live Web search engines — Technorati, PubSub, Blogpulse, among others — are gone or moved on to other missions. Perhaps ironically, Technorati maintained an archive of all blogging for half a decade. But I’ve been told that’s gone. is still there, but re-cast as a news engine. Only persists as a straightforward Live Web engine, sustained, I suppose, by Mark Cuban‘s largesse. (For which I thank him. IceRocket is outstanding.)

For archives we have two things, it seems. One is search engines concerned mostly about the here and now, and the other is Archive.org. The latter does an amazing job, but finding stuff there is a chore if you don’t start with a domain name.

Meanwhile I have no idea how long tweets last, and no expectation that Twitter (or anybody other than a few individuals) will maintain them for the long term. Nor do I have a sense of how long anything will (or should) last inside Facebook, Linkedin or any other commercial walled garden.

To be fair, everything on the Web is rented, starting with domain names. I “own” , only for as long as I keep paying a domain registrar for the rights to use it. Will it stay around after I’m gone? For how long? All of us rent our servers, even if we own them, simply because they use electricity, take up space and need to be maintained. Who will do that after their paid-for purposes expire? Why? And again, for how long?

Persephone worked for years at Internews.org. I assume her work there will last as long as the organization does. Here’s the Google cache of her Key Staff bio. Her tweets as (her last was June 9th) will persist as long as Twitter doesn’t bother to get rid of them, I suppose. Here’s a Google search for her name. Here’s her Berkman alum page. Here’s her Linkedin. Here are her Delicious bookmarks. More to the point of this post, here’s her Media Re:public blog, with many links out to other sources, including her own. Here’s the Media Re:public report she led. And here’s an Internews search for Persephone, which has five pages of results.

All of this urges us toward a topic and cause that was close to Persephone’s mind and heart: journalism. If we’re serious about practicing journalism on the Web, we need to preserve it at least as well as we publish it.

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Reputation vs. Branding

May 14, 2010 in Art, Business, News, Sports | 35 comments

Branding has jumped the shark. The meme is stale. Worn out. Post-peak. If branding were a show on Fox, it would be cancelled next week.

I can witness this trend by watching links going to three posts I made last month:

The latest to point this direction is People Aren’t Brands, by one of these guys here (I see no byline) in UKSN, the UK Sports Network. After pointing generously to the second of the posts above, they say,

In the current business world, brands aren’t human beings. They should be, and any social media practitioner worth her salt will be working damn hard with their clients to try and make them more so, but as it stands they are companies, corporate vehicles which are not set up to deal with human error…the kind we are all susceptible to, especially some high profile celebs.

Well, all due respect (and UKSN deserve plenty), brands aren’t people. True, it’s good to humanize companies, turn them inside out, tear down the walls of Fort Business, and otherwise cut out the pro forma BS that tends more commonly to bottle up a company’s humanity than to celebrate and leverage it. But doing that isn’t branding. It’s just good sense.

True, branding is a helpful way to align a company’s distinctions with its identity, or to make it more attractive, memorable and stuff like that. But it matters far less than a well-earned reputation. Consider these statements:

  • Nike has a reputation for making good shoes.
  • Apple has a reputation for making artful technology.
  • Toyota has a reputation for making reliable cars.

Now let’s re-phrase those using the word “brand” instead of “reputation.”

  • The Nike brand makes good shoes
  • Apple is the brand for artful technology.
  • Toyota is the reliable car brand.

Two points there. First, it’s hard to re-phrase reputation as brand, no matter how you put it. Second, branding is not positioning. By that I mean it would be easier to make positioning statements about any of those companies than to make a branding statement.

That’s because brands are nothing but statements. At best they are a well-known and trusted badge, name or both. At worst they’re a paint job, a claim, a rationalization or an aspiration. Branding can help a reputation, but it can’t make one. Real work does that. Accomplishment over time does that.

Consider for a moment the value of Toyota’s reputation as a maker of reliable cars. This reputation was earned over at least five decades. Millions of people have had good experiences with reliable Toyota cars and trucks. That reputation has kept Toyota’s head above water through the trials of the last year, when an endless string of bad news stories about sudden acceleration and other faults have been streaming through the news media. In the tug between bad news and good reputation, branding was a no-show.

Judged by the standards of real branding companies (such as Procter & Gamble, which invented and named the practice), Toyota’s branding work has been mediocre at best. It has created cars with confusing names (Corolla, Corona, Carina, Celica, Crown, Cresta, Cressida) and weird hard-to-pronounce names (Camry, Yaris), and has produced relatively little memorable advertising, considering the size of the company and the quality of its cars. Worse, those Toyotathon ads by local dealers, which ran until the Daily Show’s Toyotathon of Death segment buried them for good, were among the most persistent and annoying pitches of all time. In fact, Toyota dealers in general had relatively bad reputations. The one thing Toyota did well was make reliable cars. Toyota’s reputation persists because it was earned, not just claimed.

Branding is jumping the shark now because, on the whole, the Net favors reality over bullshit. Saying stuff may get more attention than doing stuff, at least in the short run. But doing stuff is what makes the world work.

The hard thing for social media folks is that they’re still working the Saying Stuff beat while  Doing Stuff is what matters most. Getting companies to do different stuff, or to do the same stuff differently, is hard. Getting companies to do either of those things for long enough to earn a reputation for it is harder still.

But, good luck with that.

Meanwhile here’s how UKSN (in its People Aren’t Brands post) advises companies aligning with sports figures:

Corporates need to let go of the term ‘brand’ and all the connotations it brings when they are working with celebrities. When they hire the celeb, they think that person is now representative of the brand…something which humans can’t do! They can be themselves and if the company is comfortable with whom they are and what they stand for as a human being…then there is value to be derived by association. Expecting the person to fit into the perceived brand of a company is a recipe for (potential) disaster.

All good advice. What makes branding especially difficult in the sports world is that celebrity itself, and the fashions surrounding it, are part of the game. Sports figures endorse, and are endorsed by, “corporates,” and both benefit from each other. This morning I heard that money offered by teams shouldn’t have that much influence on which team LeBron James signs up with next (so long as they’re all within a few million dollars of each other), because he’ll make far more from his corporate affiliations. This is a set of considerations where UKSN knows far more than I do, and where branding of the old P&G sort still matters a great deal.

Sports is a special case. So are fashion and celebrity, and how all three of those overlap.

In most of society, however — including most of the business world — who you are and what you do matter more than how you look and how famous you become. Because who you are and what you do are what make the world a better place. And not just something to talk about.

[Late addition...] Tom Ford with Tina Brown on marketing and branding. Great clip.

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Manners vs. Mores

May 12, 2010 in Art, Blogging, history, Journalism, News, Photography, Politics, problems | 27 comments

Until her Supreme Court nomination turned Elena Kagan into big-time news fodder, there was not an abundance of great pictures of her to be found on the Web. Among the better ones to be found were a couple I had posted on Flickr a couple years ago, when she was still Dean of Harvard Law School. Here’s one. Here’s another.

The second of those (cropped a bit) was put up on Wikimedia Commons, and for awhile accompanied her Wikipedia entry, and continues to be used in a number of places.

Both shots have a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 license, meaning anybody can use it, and should also give me credit for having shot it. And both shots have appeared since then in many publications. Some, like Wikipedia, do a good job of following the license. Some, for example Outside the Beltway — in this piece stirring the shit about Ms. Kagan while accusing CBS and other news organizations of bad journalistic practices — do not.

None of that is troubling, or even very interesting. Instead what prompts this post is a comment under one of the two photos, from an entity called TEA PARTY LEADER. It’s a diatribe that verges on hate speech, but (in my amateur judgment) doesn’t quite cross the line. The question for me, when I saw the comment, was Should I kill it?

My photo pile on Flickr isn’t a public space. It welcomes comments to the degree that it simply allows them. It has no rules (of my own or defaulted by Flickr) regarding comments, beyond the ability Flickr provides for editing or deleting them.

I asked fellow Berkman Fellows list for their thoughts, and those went both ways. Some said the space is mine to manage, and if somebody is rudely spamming the premises I should feel free to delete their icky work. Others said doing so indeed would violate free speech principles, even if I would be within my rights in doing so. I was also probed with questions about whether I would delete the comment if its positions were more agreeable to me — though with manners just as rude.

I’ve been inclined from the start toward leaving it up, and that’s where I’m staying. But in the meantime I thought I’d pass along the same questions.

What would you do, and why?

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TTT vs. The News Cycle

May 8, 2010 in Blogging, Journalism, News | 4 comments

In the old days the “news cycle” was the interval between the news media’s pumpings: the paper’s daily print run, the TV station’s morning and evening news programs.

Now that cycle is as short as the TTT: Time To Tweet.

Consider yesterday.

Sitting in an idle subway car at the Alewife station, from which all southbound MBTA Red Line trains commence, twenty minutes passed while I became increasingly late for a lunch date near the Central station, normally about twelve minutes away. Finally the awful PA system started squawking something to passengers about a “police action” at the Harvard station (three down from Alewife, one short of Central) and something else about “delays” and “southbound.” Once it became clear that trains wouldn’t go, I called my wife and got a ride to my lunch.

In the meantime I tweeted What was the “police action” at that kept southbound trains from going through Harvard Square today? #mbta

The first tweet back from @universalhub (Adam Griffin) said @dsearls Bank robber cheaped out and tried to escape on the T rather than hiring a proper getaway car.http://bit.ly/aedzdX

That last link unpacks a story by Adam in UniversalHub (the website) titled Week’s best reason for delays on the Red Line. The central paragraph:

MBTA Transit Police report a Harvard Square bank robbery suspect tried to make good his escape on the Red Line (they don’t say in which direction). He was quickly nabbed, but the station had to be shut to allow for evidence collection.

The linked report is this:

On Friday 7th May 2010, @MBTAPoliceTPSA2 said:

reply

Sorry for delays and inconvenience on Red Line in Cambridge. Bank robbery tried to make escape using Red Line train. He was arrested without incident, but left behind a sea of evidence that had to be properly collected for prosecution purposes. On behalf of Cambridge and Transit Police Departments, and the MBTA, thank you for your patience and understanding today during this public safety incident.

And we thank you too, @MBTAPoliceTPSA2 and @universalhub. Impressive.

The Boston Globe had a story this morning on it. Maybe the TV and radio stations did to. If so I missed it.

Re-draw your own conclusions.

A happy beginning to the new WQXR story

April 26, 2010 in Business, history, music, News, Places, radio | 9 comments

Last July I explained Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station. One hundred and twelve comments followed, the last posted in January of this year. Far as I know, that’s a record for this blog.

Background: when WQXR, which had been New York City’s landmark classical music station since the Roosevelt Hoover administration, was sold by the New York Times to WNYC, it went through two huge changes. First, it went up the dial from 96.3 to 105.9, while dropping to about 1/10th the wattage of its old signal. Second, it changed from a commercial station to a noncommercial one. Those opposed to the moves predicted failure on both accounts.

Instead, WQXR is a success. It’s ratings briefly tanked during the transition last October, then bounced back to their old levels:

Since then WQXR has run neck-and-neck with its parent’s main station, WNYC-FM (which has a signal identical to the old WQXR, coming from the same master antenna on the Empire State Building):

(Source for both: Radio-Info.com. Click on the images for details.)

Those three columns are for January, February and March of this year. The February number, 834,400, was reportedly tops in all of public radio. That’s what Elizabeth Jensen wrote in yesterday’s Classical Music’s Comeback, on Public Radio, in the New York Times. She says WQXR is a financial as well as a ratings success, and typical of successful transitions by other classical stations from commercial to noncommercial business models, in some cases with lesser signals as well.

So, all ends well that starts well.

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The teachings of failure

April 25, 2010 in Future, history, infrastructure, News, Past, problems | 14 comments

We’ve seen this movie: the one where a big company takes over a whole market ecosystem. There was IBM with mainframes, Microsoft with operating systems, Apple with pocket music players (and now apps for phones and tablets).

But there’s another movie too. That’s the one where the big company fails. IBM did that with PCs. (They started the ball rolling, but no longer even make the things.) Apple did it with PDAs, when the Newton flopped. And Microsoft, even in its glory days, failed at a lot of things.

One big one was directories. All but lost in the sands of time is Netscape’s lone victory over a Microsoft move to make everybody in the world use Active Directory. That story was told by Craig Burton in an Interview I did for the late Websmith (later merged into Linux Journal) fourteen years ago this month.

Another was identity, and single sign-on. Microsoft tried that with Hailstorm, and flopped.

And now comes Facebook with social graphs, which Barrett Sheridan calls a Play to Take Over the Entire Internet, and Mark Zuckerberg (two links back) says is the “next version of Facebook Platform,” which he says “puts people at the center of the web.”

Right. Sez Mark,

We think that the future of the web will be filled with personalized experiences. We’ve worked with three pre-selected partners—Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora—to give you a glimpse of this future, which you can access without having to login again or click to connect. For example, now if you’re logged into Facebook and go to Pandora for the first time, it can immediately start playing songs from bands you’ve liked across the web. And as you’re playing music, it can show you friends who also like the same songs as you, and then you can click to see other music they like.

We look forward to a future where all experiences are this easy and personalized, and we’re happy today to take the next important step to get there.

Of course, then we no longer have the Web. We have the Union of Soviet Social Graph Vendors.

This will fail, of course. Commercial containers for the Web (social or otherwise) are limited. They have rules. They are the Great Indoors, which can neither control nor compete with the Great Outdoors which is the Web itself.

But discovering this plain fact will take some time. Or, more to the point, waste it. The hard way.

As usual, Dave Winer nails the diagnostics, with Will this loop ever end? Sez Dave,

Facebook is hot now, but history has shown that being a hotbed doesn’t scale. That eventually these companies have to tap into the general talent pool and they end up achieving the same level of mediocrity as the previous dominant one. It happened to IBM, the minicomputer companies, IBM again, Microsoft, now it’s Google’s turn, and soon it will be Facebook’s.

Let’s go back to Microsoft and Hailstorm. It’s important to remember the hysteria surrounding that move. Many thought that this was The End. Here is what I wrote at the time on my blog. I just copied and pasted the html below (from Google’s cache, while the archive was offline…  somehow the bold-faced search terms give it a little extra punch, so I’m leaving them in)…

Trojan Storm

The storm has arrived, and the peerage is weighing in with its reactions.

When I first read about Hailstorm, it scared the shit out of me. (As it also did to Joel Spolsky, who gives us a fine tech-level explanation of exactly why.)

But at a deeper level — the social level where the Net connects us — I have complete faith in forces more powerful than any monopoly’s wet dream. And that’s the Net.

The Net is ours. Not Microsoft’s. Hailstorm is heavy weather, but the Net is geology. Our geology. It’s us, not just me (pun intended).

Computing isn’t personal any more. It’s social. Microsoft understands that, but it’s not where they come from. Where they come from is the desktop. Always have, always will. It’s not for nothing they’re called Microsoft.

With Hailstorm, Microsoft is doing a beautiful job of being itself. As always, they’re draping users in bountiful benefits, whether those users want them or not). That’s just what Microsoft does. They can’t help it. They come from the desktop, just like Apple comes from art and Nordstrom comes from shoes.

And they sound very convincing, because they’re busy advocating the user. You can’t go wrong there, can you?

O yeah. You always go wrong when you characterize competent human beings as weak and helpless — and then tell them your stuff is their only hope. That’s exactly what Microsoft does in the very first line of Building the User-centric Experience:

    Users are definitely not in control of the technology that surrounds them.  Asked to adapt to the differences between the way they interact with local programs and sites on the web, asked to cope with doing things completely differently on their cell phone, their PC, and any other device they have, users are generally frustrated and confused.

Like moths in a lampshade. How sad. And whose fault is that?

    If you want to enter a friend’s new phone number into your PC, you use a keyboard and a piece of software like Microsoft Outlook to do it using a particular sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks.  But to enter that same information into your Palm Pilot, you need to learn a completely new interface – right down to relearning how to draw the letters of the alphabet!

Oh! It’s Palm’s fault! That OS is so hard to use. Not easy like Outlook, which is so encrusted with options that few users ever figure the damn thing out. (To say the least of it.) The insults continue:

    This environment, in which users are forced to adapt to technology instead of technology adapting to users, creates significant restrictions on how effective any application or Web site can be, and ultimately hinders the acceptance and adoption of not only the technologies themselves, but also the real-world products and services that might be best offered to a user in the context of the things they do online.

The environment we’re talking about here is called a market. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s full of choices that don’t agree with each other. But it’s the natural habitat for business. It’s also networked to the gills. That network is where users live. Not just Windows. Not just .Net, whatever it becomes.

The Trojan Storm here isn’t Windows or even .Net. It’s Internet Explorer.

The Net is ours, indeed. But most of us interact with it through a Microsoft browser. That browser is about to get a lot fatter. That’s the only way to interpret this:

    HailStorm services are oriented around people, instead of around a specific device, application, service, or network.  They put the user in control of their own data and information, protecting personal information and making user consent the basis for who can access it, what they can do with it, and for how long they have that permission.

It’s time for us to stop acting like an audience and start acting like a market. For that we need to do three things:

  1. Work with the hackers to make Mozilla the best possible alternative to Internet Explorer — and fast.
  2. Start paying more attention and respect to other developers who are working together to make the Net something that works better for all of us (and that includes interested developers inside Microsoft — it’s a big company).
  3. Expose Hailstorm for what it is: yet another attempt by Microsoft to collapse the Net into its own service framework. And to say this won’t work because the Net’s context is bigger than any vendor, no matter how privileged they are with “critical mass.”

It’s important to remember that this is not just about Microsoft’s napoleonic corporate personality, which is equally real and beside the point, making it the biggest red herring in business history.

It’s about building out the Net’s infrastructure. .Net doesn’t do it. Hailstorm doesn’t do it. Java doesn’t do it. No “solution” controlled by one vendor will do it.

You can’t privatize what only works because it’s public. Microsoft hasn’t learned that lesson yet. Let’s help them.

And we did. Mozilla succeeded, and so have other browsers. Identity still isn’t a solved problem and may never be — at least not in the simple way one gets when the Eye of Sauron rules the world. But the very fact that good people are working on identity and related problems out in the open is endlessly encouraging.

Speaking of which, the 10th Internet Identity Workshop is happening in Mountain View next month. Micrtosoft is a sponsor, as are many other companies and organizations, some of which (Information Card Foundation, Open ID Foundation) grew directly or indirectly out of IIW conversations. In fact, Microsoft’s good identity work (started by Kim Cameron and colleagues there) would not have happened without Hailstorm’s failure.

If Facebook and Twitter are smart (and listen to their elders), they’ll skip the loop. Burn the movie. Get Net- and Web-compliant. Because that’s where nature will takes us in the long run anyway. Let’s not keep making that run longer than it needs to be.

March Madness and Radio’s Future

April 6, 2010 in Business, infrastructure, Live Web, News, Places, radio, Sports, Technology | 4 comments

March Madness for me this year was a double treat. First, my team, the Duke Blue Devils, won the championship. (Though my heart went out to Butler, which came within inches of winning at the buzzer on a half-court shot.) Second, I got to follow the Devils, and North Carolina Basketball in general, on . I did this over on my iPhone. I listened in my pocket as I cooked in the kitchen, rode on my bike, and walked to the bus and the train. I dug and in the mornings, the PackMan in the afternoon, and hyper-local features such as the Duke Basketball show from the Washington Duke Inn, on Duke’s campus).

I loved hearing old familiars like , and Duke play-by-play announcer , who started as a sales guy at WDNC in 1975, not long after I left that same job. In those days WDNC was a struggling Top 40 station, still owned by the Durham Herald-Sun newspapers, still with studios in the paper’s building, and still carrying CBS news (its lone connection to a glorious past). Since then WDNC has bounced through a number of formats, and currently thrives in the overlap of , and empires. Its FM counterpart is WCMC/99.9, which didn’t exist when I left town in 1985. Currently known as “620 The Buzz” (the FM is “The Fan”), it was until recently The Bull. (In fact, if you go to http://wdnc.com, it re-directs to http://www.620thebull.com/, which is a blank page. Somebody needs to get a second re-direct going there.)

A confession. Not long after Bob Harris took over play-by-play for Duke games, he often had Mike Krzyzewski, then Duke’s rookie basketball coach, as a guest. I wasn’t a fan of Coach K. His predecessor, Bill Foster, was gregarious, emotional and easy for fans to love, Krzyzewski seemed cold and a bit nasty. He rarely smiled and had coaching style that appeared to consisted entirely of barking at officials. I once said of him, “There’s nothing about that guy that a blow-dry and a sense of humor wouldn’t cure.” While it wasn’t quite a nickname for Coach K, it stuck, and I heard it repeated often. Today, of course, Krzyzewski is an institution, and much loved by everybody who knows him, especially his players.

Anyway, the most interesting irony to me, as I listen to WDNC here in Cambridge, Mass, is that it has long been the custom in radio to obsess about signals and coverage — since you can’t listen to what you can’t get. Among souls who still do this I know few who are more devoted, even still, than I am. (The very best is Scott Fybush, by the way. I love his site visits.)

As a kid growing up in New Jersey I would ride my bike down to visit the transmitters of New York’s AM stations, whose towers bristled from swamps on the flanks of the Hackensack river: WABC, WINS, WMGM/WHN, WOV/WADO, WMCA, WNEW, WHOM…

I’d talk with the guys who manned the transmitters (they were always guys, and they were often old), logging readings and walking out to the towers to make sure all was well. I became a ham radio operator around that time, and continued to fancy myself something of an engineer, though technically I wasn’t. Still, I jumped at the opportunity to take shifts maintaining WDNC’s transmitter as a side job when I worked there. The whole plant was about the same age as me (at the time, 27), and spread across about ten acres at the end of a dirt road on the northwest side of town. It was 5000 watts by day and 1000 watts by night, with directional patterns produced by its three towers. The shot above is from Bing’s excellent “bird’s eye” view of the site. (Why doesn’t Microsoft make more of this? Google has nothing like it, and it totally rocks.) And it’s much nicer now than it was then. At that time the fields had turned to high brush, and I needed to ride a lawnmower out to the towers on a bumpy path, so I wouldn’t get ticks. (One could pick up — I’m not kidding, hundreds of ticks by walking out there.)

What fascinated me most about the facility was the engineering files, which included details on the transmission patterns and coverage maps showing how waves interacted with conductive ground to produce signal intensities that didn’t look as much like the signal pattern as one might expect. AM coverage depends on ground conductivity. In North Carolina (and the East in general) the ground conductivity is poor; but at the bottom end of the AM dial the waves are longer and travel farther along the ground in any case. WDNC was at 620, so its signal was many times the size of a signal at the top end of the dial with the same wattage.

Now I can go online and see WDNC’s daytime pattern here and its nighttime pattern here — both at . I can see the coverage they produce at . Here’s a mash-up of patterns (left) and coverage (right):

Which is all well and cool. Playing with this stuff is catnip for me. But it’s also meaningless, once radio moves off AM and FM and onto the Net, where in the long run it makes much more sense.

What we’re dealing with, in the images I show here, is exceedingly antique stuff. The basics of AM broadcast engineering were set in the 1920s and 1930s. FM dates from the 1940s and 1950s. Recent improvements to both (through IBOC — In Band On Channel) are largely proprietary, and uptake on the receiving end borders on pathetic. None of the technologies employed are interactive, much less Net-native. They soak billions of watts off the world’s power grids. AM stations occupy large areas of real estate. FM and TV stations use frequencies that require high elevations, provided by tall towers, buildings or mountains, offering hazards to aviation and bird migration. Not to mention that lots of the biggest towers tend to fall down. In 1989 a pair of 2000-foot TV/FM towers near Raleigh (serving the same areas outlined above) collapsed in the same ice storm.

Three problems stand in the way of building out radio on the Net.

First is the mobile phone system that carries it. When I listen to WDNC on my iPhone, I don’t care how much data I use. AT&T has no data limit for the iPhone or the iPad. Other carriers need to have similar deals. To my knowledge they don’t — at least not in the U.S. (Sprint used to, and after my problems with Sprint last year I doubt I’ll use its system much for media again son.) Still, even AT&T regards subordinates mobile data to mobile telephony. This gets more retro every day. In the long run, we’ll have a mobile data system that includes mobile telephony but is not defined by it (and its infuriating billing systems). These also need to be better integrated with wi-fi from all sources (and not just the carriers’ own). These days most wi-fi access points are “secure,” making them useless as part of a larger system. But that can change.

Second is revising the rules restricting music streamed and podcast over the Net. Copyright law, especially as established by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, screwed the hell out of music broadcasting and podcasting. Today we have some of the former and little of the latter (except for “podsafe” music, which includes approximately nothing that’s been popular over the last 80 years). Fixing this won’t be easy, but it needs to be done.

Third is revising the means by which stations make money, and rules about where advertising can be carried. For the former we need a much better system for listeners to pay broadcasters on a voluntary basis, for both commercial and noncommercial stations. (This is why at ProjectVRM we are working on EmanciPay, for example.) For advertising, there are currently restrictions on much national advertising, which is why the majority of ads I hear on WDNC (and other commercial stations that do streaming) are public service announcements from the Ad Council. Listening to these, over and over and over and over, accelerates the listeners own aging process.

Networks and stations also need to realize that more and more online listeners aren’t tuning in to Web pages. They’re tuning directly to streams using applications on mobile devices. The folks on WDNC do a good job of using Twitter, Facebook and other familiar “social media,” but they don’t seem to have a clue that it’s a heck of a lot easier to listen to mobile radio on something that’s actually like a radio — namely a smartphone — than on a computer. Search for “radio” in Apple’s app store and you’ll get hundreds of results. The Public Radio Player, there on the left, has had over 2.5 million downloads so far. Hopefully the iPad will help. Check out Pandora’s latest.

Anyway, a big thanks to the folks at WDNC/TheBuzz for a great season of Duke, Carolina and ACC basketball coverage — especially for a listener stuck here in New England, where pro sports dominate. (Not that I don’t love those too. I just need my college basketball fix.) Props to @TZarzour and @WRALsportsFan too.

Beyond the iPad

April 2, 2010 in Business, Fun, Future, Gear, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Live Web, News, Technology, VRM | 40 comments

I was just interviewed for a BBC television feature that will run around the same time the iPad is launched. I’ll be a talking head, basically. For what it’s worth, here’s what I provided as background for where I’d be coming from in the interview:

  1. The iPad will arrive in the market with an advantage no other completely new computing device for the mass market has ever enjoyed: the ability to run a 100,000-app portfolio that’s already developed, in this case for the iPhone. Unless the iPad is an outright lemon, this alone should assure its success.
  2. The iPad will launch a category within which it will be far from the only player. Apple’s feudal market-control methods (all developers and customers are trapped within its walled garden) will encourage competitors that lack the same limitations. We should expect other hardware companies to launch pads running on open source operating systems, especially Android and Symbian. (Disclosure: I consult Symbian.) These can support much larger markets than Apple’s closed and private platforms alone will allow.
  3. The first versions of unique hardware designs tend to be imperfect and get old fast. Such was the case with the first iPods and iPhones, and will surely be the case with the first iPads as well. The ones being introduced next week will seem antique one year from now.
  4. Warning to competitors: copying Apple is always a bad idea. The company is an example only of itself. There is only one Steve Jobs, and nobody else can do what he does. Fortunately, he only does what he can control. The rest of the market will be out of his control, and it will be a lot bigger than what fits inside Apple’s beautiful garden.

I covered some of that, and added a few things, which I’ll enlarge with a quick brain dump:

  1. The iPad brings to market a whole new form factor that has a number of major use advantages over smartphones, laptops and netbooks, the largest of which is this: it fits in a purse or any small bag — where it doesn’t act just like any of those other devices. (Aside from running all those iPhone apps.) It’s easy and welcoming to use — and its uses are not subordinated, by form, to computing or telephony. It’s an accessory to your own intentions. This is an advantage that gets lost amidst all the talk about how it’s little more than a new display system for “content.”
  2. My own fantasy for tablets is interactivity with the everyday world. Take retailing for example. Let’s say you syndicate your shopping list, but only to trusted retailers, perhaps through a fourth party (one that works to carry out your intentions, rather than sellers’ — though it can help you engage with them). You go into Target and it gives you a map of the store, where the goods you want are, and what’s in stock, what’s not, and how to get what’s mising, if they’re in a position to help you with that. You can turn their promotions on or off, and you can choose, using your own personal terms of service, what data to share with them, what data not to, and conditions of that data’s use. Then you can go to Costco, the tire store, and the university library and do the same. I know it’s hard to imagine a world in which customers don’t have to belong to loyalty programs and submit to coercive and opaque terms of data use, but it will happen, and it has a much better chance of happening faster if customers are independent and have their own tools for engagement. Which are being built. Check out what Phil Windley says here about one approach.
  3. Apple works vertically. Android, Symbian, Linux and other open OSes, with the open hardware they support, work horizonally. There is a limit to how high Apple can build its walled garden, nice as it will surely be. There is no limit to how wide everybody else can make the rest of the marketplace. For help imagining this, see Dave Winer’s iPad as a Coral Reef.
  4. Content is not king, wrote Andrew Oldyzko in 2001. And he’s right. Naturally big publishers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Condé Nast, the Book People) think so. Their fantasy is the iPad as a hand-held newsstand (where, as with real-world newsstands, you have to pay for the goods). Same goes for the TV and movie people, who see the iPad as a replacement for their old distribution systems (also for pay). No doubt these are Very Big Deals. But how the rest of us use iPads (and other tablets) is a much bigger deal. Have you thought about how you’ll blog, or whatever comes next, on an iPad? Or on any tablet? Does it only have to be in a browser? What about using a tablet as a production device, and not just an instrument of consumption? I don’t think Apple has put much thought into this, but others will, outside Apple’s walled garden. You should too. That’s because we’re at a juncture here. A fork in the road. Do we want the Internet to be broadcasting 2.0 — run by a few content companies and their allied distributors? Or do we want it to be the wide open marketplace it was meant to be in the first place, and is good for everybody? (This is where you should pause and read what Cory Doctorow and Dave Winer say about it.)
  5. We’re going to see a huge strain on the mobile data system as iPads and other tablets flood the world. Here too it will matter whether the mobile phone companies want to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, or just conduits for their broadcasting and content production partners. (Or worse, old fashioned phone companies, treating and billing data in the same awful ways they bill voice.) There’s more money in the former than the latter, but the latter are their easy pickings. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

I also deal with all this in a longer post that will go up elsewhere. I’ll point to it here when it comes up. Meanwhile, dig this post by Dave Winer and this one by Jeff Jarvis.

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Borg’s Woods News

April 2, 2010 in Geology, history, Life, News, Past, Places, Science | 6 comments

I just learned by Eric Martindale’s comment to my Borg’s Woods post in February that the March 13 storm knocked down many of the trees in the old growth urban forest that was our neighborhood playground when I was a kid. For more here’s a post in the NJUrbanForest blog, and here are some pictures as well.

Storms are as much a part of nature as old growth forests, even when the former reduces the latter. Sad to read, however, that mosquito abatement has involved the draining of the woods’ pond, where generations of kids learned to skate in a beautiful setting.

For perspective perhaps it is helpful to note that the boggy parts of Borg’s Woods are among the few vernal remnants of glacial Lake Hackensack, which pooled over most of the Hackensack River watershed when the last ice age began to end around 15,000 years ago. The lake lasted several millennia, then drained around 11,500 years ago, when the terminal moraine near Perth Amboy broke. Back then the sea was still far outside the current borders of New York and New Jersey. Only when the rest of the ice cap melted did the oceans reach their current level — which, as we know, is still rising.

Remembering Jack Jensen

March 29, 2010 in News, Sports | 1 comment

I just learned that Jack Jensen died yesterday, at age 71. I knew Jack a bit when I was a student at Guilford College in the late ’60s. (Class of ’69, to be precise.) Jack wasn’t much older than the rest of us then. When I was a freshman, Jack was a 26-year old assistant basketball coach under Jerry Steele. My involvement with athletics then consisted of running the scoreboard for the football team (sitting next to Carl Scheer, who did the play-by-play for the radio) and playing pick-up basketball in the college’s only gym when the team wasn’t practicing. After Jerry left (the year after I graduated), Jack took over as head coach. In 1973 he did what Jerry came close to doing: winning the NAIA national tournament, with a team that included World B. Free (who then went by his given name, Lloyd) and M.L. Carr. I remember what Jack said about the victory to Sports Illustrated at the time. While not verbatim, it was basically this: “We give the ball to Lloyd.” No BS about it.

Jack went on to coach Guilford basketball for 29 years, and was still coaching the golf team — which he led to three national titles — when he died, after returning from a golf tournament

From the email sent out by the college:

The most decorated coach in Guilford’s history, Jack was enshrined in the NAIA, North Carolina, Guilford County, Guilford College and Wake Forest University Sports Halls of Fame, as well as the Golf Coaches Association of America Hall of Fame. He was only the second person to coach two different sports to NAIA national titles. In 2009, Guilford‚s main basketball floor in the Ragan-Brown Field House was renamed Jack Jensen Court.

From Allen Johnson of the Greensboro News & Record: “He richly deserves the title legend.”

By all accounts he was an even better guy than the ace I remember. My best to his family, friends, and the thousands of others who knew him better than I did.

[Later...] More about Jack’s death (of a heart attack, on the phone, at the wheel of his car — but with no others hurt), funeral plans and more, here, here, here, here and here.

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On power, balance, shifting and disruption

March 27, 2010 in Future, Ideas, News, Politics, problems | 7 comments

What is this stuff we call power?

This question came to mind when I read about Digital Power and Its Discontents, a conference coming up on 21 April at Georgetown. In it (says that link) they will be “exploring the ways digital technologies disrupt the balance of power between and among states, their citizens and the private sector.” Rebecca MacKinnon, Micah Sifry, Brendan Greeley and other folks I know and like are listed as panelists and moderators.

The title and description raised a number of questions for me. Is power always a sum of something? Does disruption always subtract power from whatever it disrupts? What is “digital power” and how is it applied? What makes private and public “sectors”? Are they really that separate? Why does the possessive pronoun “their” apply to citizens?

The word balance calls to mind something like the image on the left. You have a sum of X in one place, and it’s balanced by a sum of Y in another. For many subjects involving power the metaphor applies. There is a given sum of gold in the world, for example. But does power always pile up in ways that a scale suggests? Does it pile at all?

Whatever digital power is, it has been growing over the last few decades, and continues to grow. It also serves everybody — regardless of the labels we give it. Some of us use that power better than others, but it’s still available in any case. (No, not evenly, but still available, if you want it and are motivated to use it.)

For that conference, and for the rest of us in the meantime, I invite considering this: The entity with the most power to gain is the individual (or, as they put it in wonky circles, citizens). I believe there is much to be discontented about, in both the public and the private sectors. I also believe that each of us is steadily acquiring more power, as individuals, to influence both government and business — and in ways that are constructive, even when they disrupt whatever the status quos are.  Giving individuals more power is the job ProjectVRM and its development communities have taken up. But it will happen anyway.

It’s tempting to focus on what Big Bad Government and Big Bad Companies are doing. They hog spotlights they deserve in any case. But digital technology makes many other places no less deserving of spotlights. Our ability to learn, to inform and to act, will only grow. If we’re busy being discontented with others who have more power at the moment, we’ll get less done. And we’ll miss out on a lot of the fun.

Building the Information Squeezeway

March 8, 2010 in Business, Gear, history, Ideas, infrastructure, News, Places, Technology | 21 comments

Some encouraging words here about Verizon’s expected 4G data rates:

After testing in the Boston and Seattle areas, the provider estimates that a real connection on a populated network should average between 5Mbps to 12Mbps in download rates and between 2Mbps to 5Mbps for uploads. Actual, achievable peak speeds in these areas float between 40-50Mbps downstream and 20-25Mbps upstream.The speed is significantly less than the theoretical 100Mbps promised by Long Term Evolution (LTE), the chosen standard, but would still give Verizon one of the fastest cellular networks in North America.

No mention of metering or data caps, of course.

Remember, these are phone companies. They love to meter stuff. Its what they know. They can hardly imagine anything else. They are billing machines with networks attached.

In addition to the metering problems Brett Glass details here, there is the simple question of whether carriers can meter data at all. Data ain’t minutes. And metering discourages both usage and countless businesses other than the phone companies’ own. I have long believed that phone and cable companies will see far more business for themselves if they open up their networks to possibilities other than those optimized for the relocation of television from air to pipes.

Data capping is problematic too. How can the customer tell how close they are to a cap? And how much does fearing overage discourage legitimate uses? And what about the accounting? My own problems with Sprint on this topic don’t give me any confidence that the carriers know how gracefully to impose data usage caps.

There’s a lot of wool in current advertising on these topics too. During the Academy Awards last night, Comcast had a great ad for Xfinity, its new high-speed service, promoted entirely as an entertainment pump. By which I mean that it was an impressive piece of promotion. But there was no mention of upstream speeds (downstream teaser: 100Mb/s). Or other limitations. Or how they might favor NBC (should they buy it) over other content sources. (Which, of course, they will.)

Sprint‘s CEO was in an another ad, promoting the company’s “unlimited text, unlimited Web and unlimited calling…” Right. Says right here in a link-proof pop-up titled “Important 4G coverage and plan information”, that 4G is unlimited, but 3G (what most customers, including I, still have) is limited to “5GB/300MB off-network roaming per month.” They do list “select cities” where 4G is available. Here’s Raleigh. I didn’t find New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston on the list. I recall Amarillo. Can’t find it now, and the navigation irritates me too much to look.

Anyway, I worry that what we’ll get is phone and cable company sausage in Internet casing. And that, on the political side, the carriers will succeed in their campaign to clothe themselves as the “free market” fighting “government takeovers” while working the old regulatory capture game, to keep everybody else from playing.

So five, ten years from now, all the rest of the independent ISPs and WISPs will be gone. So will backbone players other than carriers and Google.  We’ll be gaga about our ability to watch pay-per-view on our fourth-generation iPads with 3-d glasses. And we won’t miss the countless new and improved businesses that never happened because they were essentially outlawed by regulators and their captors.

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The market for explainables

March 8, 2010 in Business, Health, Journalism, News, Politics | 8 comments

News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at SXSW is where and how Jay Rosen lays out his current thinking on new agendas for whatever journalism will become after we’re done with the current transition.

He has long been concerned with how explanation is “under-emphasized in the modern newsroom” and offers excellent examples of how explaining should work, as well as ideas about how to institutionalize it. For example, “The goal is to surface the hidden demand for explanation and create a kind of user-driven assignment desk for the explainer genre, which is itself under-developed in pro journalism”. He adds, “Are there other ways to surface this kind of demand?”

I’d call attention to the imperatives of stories, and the role that might be played by new sets of well-explained facts that can help frame or re-frame a story.

See, stories are what assignment editors want. They’re also what readers want. And stories are different to some degree from the current vogue-word narrative. They do overlap, but they are different.

A few months back I visited the subject of story in What’s right with Wikipedia? — a piece I wrote in response to a What’s Wrong With Wikipedia story that had run in the Wall Steet Journal. I don’t know if that story was part of the WSJ’s GOP-aligned “What’s Wrong With Everything Liberals Do” narrative, but in any case I felt the matter needed explaining. Some Wikipedians did a good job of showing how there wasn’t much of a story there (read the piece to see how). For my part, I felt the need to explain what stories are actually about, which is problems, or struggles. Said I,

Three elements make stories interesting: 1) a protagonist we know, or is at least interesting; 2) a struggle of some kind; and 3) movement (or possible movement) toward a resolution. Struggle is at the heart of a story. There has to be a problem (what to do with Afghanistan), a conflict (a game between good teams, going to the final seconds), a mystery (wtf was Tiger Woods’ accident all about?), a wealth of complications (Brad and Angelina), a crazy success (the iPhone), failings of the mighty (Nixon and Watergate). The Journal‘s Wikipedia story is of the Mighty Falling variety.

In his piece Jay mentions what a good Job the Giant Pool of Money episode of This American Life did of bringing sense to the country’s financial crisis. This gave rise to the PlanetMoney podcast, which is also terrific at explaining things. PlanetMoney feeds some of its best stuff to NPR’s news flow as well. One good example is Accidents of History Created U.S. Health System, which made it clear how we got to our wacky employer-supported health insurance system. Go listen to it and see if you don’t have a much better grasp on the challenge, if not of the solutions, currently on the table.

My point here, or one of them, is that the real story isn’t Obama vs. Intransigent Republicans (the Dems’ narrative) or Sensible Americans against Government Takeover (the Reps narrartive), but that we’ve got a health care system that burdens employers almost exclusively, rather than individuals, government (save for VA, Medicare and Medicaid), or other institutions. It’s an open quetion whether or not that’s screwed up, but at least it’s a question that ought to be at the center of the table, or the “debate” that been both boring and appalling.

This is consistent with what Matt Thompson says in The three key parts of news stories you usually don’t get, # 2 of which is WHAT WE MISS (1): The longstanding facts. But we also miss seeing the role that longstanding overlooked facts might play amongst the three story elements: protagonist, problem and movement. Take the problem of employer responsibility as a structural premise for health care. By itself, the problem just sits there. We need a protagonist and a sense that the story has movement. In the absence of either, we look for other defaults. Thus we cast Obama and his opponents as the protagonists, or to get into characterization as the issue if the topic gets logjammed, which it has been for awhile. So we hear about problems with the president’s charactrer. He’s not leading. Or … whatever. You can fill in the blanks

Meanwhile, we live in a world where employers are almost nothing like they were when the current health care system solidified at the end of World War II. In many towns (Santa Barbara, for example) the (or at least a) leading employer is “self”. Tried to get insurance for your self-employed butt lately? How about if you’re older than a child and have a medical history that’s other than perfect? Scary shit. Does the Obama plan make things better for you? According to this story in CNN, “Health insurance exchanges would be created to make it easier for small businesses, the self-employed and unemployed to pool resources and purchase less expensive coverage.” Hmm. “Easier” doesn’t sound like much relief. But doing nothing doesn’t sound good either.

So the easy thing is to go back to covering the compromise bill’s chances in Congress, and the politics surrounding it. That at least makes some kind of sense. We have all our story elements in place. It’s all politics from here on. Bring in the sports and war metaphors and let automated processes carry the rest. Don’t dig, just dine. The sausage-machine rocks on.

As Matt says, “… rarely do we acknowledge what we’re pursuing. When our questions make it into the coverage at all, they have to appear in the mouths of our sources, resulting in paltry, contorted pieces like this one, from the AP. Or they’re attributed to no one, weaseled into a headline that says only, ‘[Such-and-such] raises questions.’ Whose questions? Not ours, certainly.”

I also wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree (or down the wrong hole) when we obsess about “curation” of news — a favorite topic of mainstream media preservationists. Maybe what we need is to see explainers as advocates of our curiosity about the deep questions, or deep facts, such that they might become unavoidable in news coverage.

This, of course, begs the creation of whole new institutions. Which is the job that Jay has taken up here. Let’s help him out with it.

[Later...] An additional thought: statistics aren’t stories.

I remember hearing about what were later called the killing fields of Cambodia, after refugees reported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were murdering what eventually became more than a million people. Hughes Rudd delivered the story one on the CBS Morning News, as I recall between items on the Superbowl and Patty Hearst. He said that perhaps half a million people were already dead. But the story wasn’t a story. It was an item. It wasn’t until Sydney Shamberg ran “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” in the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine that the story got real. It got human. It had a protagonist. It became a movie.

I thought about this when I noticed there were exactly no comments following my Gendercide post. Here’s the fact that matters: countless baby girls are being killed, right now. But that’s not a story. Not yet. Not even with help from The Economist. I think the job here isn’t just to get more facts, or even to get the right name and the right face. The story needs its Dith Pran, and doesn’t have her yet. (Or, if it does, news hasn’t spread.)

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Gendercide

March 8, 2010 in News | 1 comment

The worldwide war on baby girls, in the current (March 4) Economist, is one of the most disturbing stories I’ve read in years. In some parts of the world, millions of baby girls being prevented, aborted or killed at birth.

And I thought this was bad enough.

Deliberate Explosive Devices

March 4, 2010 in Art, Future, history, Life, News, Places, Politics, problems, Technology | 10 comments

After visiting the Titan Missle Museum in Arizona, Matt Blaze wrote, How did we keep from blowing ourselves up for all those years?

Good question.

Take a listen the next time you hear somebody say “Good question.” It means they don’t have the answer. Maybe it also means the best questions are unanswerable.

But maybe we also need to keep asking them anyway, for exactly that reason. This was a lesson I got a long time ago, and reported in 2005, in this post here:

About ten years ago I took a few days off to chill in silence at the New Camaldoli Monastery in Big Sur. One of the values the White Monks of the monastery share with Quakers in Sunday meeting is confinement of speech to that which “improves on the silence”. (Or, in the case of the monks, fails to insult the contemplative virtues of silence.) It was there that I had an amazing conversation with Father John Powell, who told me that any strictly literalist interpretation of Christ’s teachings “insulted the mystery” toward which those teachings pointed — and which it was the purpose of contemplative living to explore. “Christ spoke in paradox”, he said. Also metaphor, which itself is thick with paradox. Jesus knew, Father Powell said, that we understand one thing best in terms of another which (paradoxically) is literally different yet meaningfully similar.

For example, George Lakoff explains that we understand time in terms of money (we “save”, “waste” and “spend” it) and life in terms of travel (we “arrive”, “depart”, “fall off the wagon” or “get stuck in a rut”). For what it’s worth, George is Jewish. Like Jesus.

The greatest mystery of life, Father Powell explained, isn’t death. It’s life. “Life is exceptional”, he said. For all the fecundity of nature, it is surrounded by death. Far as we can tell, everything we see when we look to the heavens is dead as a gravestone. Yet it inspires the living. “Life”, he said, sounding like an old rabbi, “is the mystery”.

I was a kid in the fifties, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were busy not talking to each other while planting thousands of nuclear-tipped ICBMs  in the ground, pointed at each other’s countries. They were also sending thousands of additional warheads to sea in nuclear submarines. Every warhead was ready obliterate whole cities in enemy territory. Our house was five miles from Manhattan. We had frequent air raid drills, and learned how to “duck and cover” in the likely event of sudden incineration. Like many other kids in those days, I wished to enjoy as much of life as I could before World War III, which would last only a few hours, after which some other species would need to take over.

I was no math whiz; but I was an authority on adults and their failings. I could look at the number of missles involved, guess at all the things that could go wrong, and make a pretty good bet that something, sooner or later, would. I wasn’t sure we would die, but I was sure the chances were close to even.

In his new book The Dead Hand, Washington Post reporter David E. Hoffman explains exactly how close we came:

At 12:15 A.M., Petrov was startled. Across the top of the room was a thin, silent panel. Most of the time no one even noticed it. But suddenly it lit up, in red letters: LAUNCH.

A siren wailed. On the big map with the North Pole, a light at one of the American missile bases was illuminated. Everyone was riveted to the map. The electronic panels showed a missile launch. The board said “high reliability.” This had never happened before. The operators at the consoles on the main oor jumped up, out of their chairs. They turned and looked up at Petrov, behind the glass. He was the commander on duty. He stood, too, so they could see him. He started to give orders. He wasn’t sure what was happening. He ordered them to sit down and start checking the system. He had to know whether this was real, or a glitch. The full check would take ten minutes, but if this was a real missile attack, they could not wait ten minutes to nd out. Was the satellite holding steady? Was the computer functioning properly?…

The phone was still in his hand, the duty ofcer still on the line, when Petrov was jolted again, two minutes later.

The panel ashed: another missile launched! Then a third, a fourth and a fth. Now, the system had gone into overdrive. The additional signals had triggered a new warning. The red letters on the panel began to ash MISSILE ATTACK, and an electronic blip was sent automatically to the higher levels of the military. Petrov was frightened. His legs felt paralyzed. He had to think fast…

Petrov made a decision. He knew the system had glitches in the past; there was no visual sighting of a missile through the telescope; the satellites were in the correct position. There was nothing from the radar stations to verify an incoming missile, although it was probably too early for the radars to see anything.

He told the duty ofcer again: this is a false alarm.

The message went up the chain.

How many other events were there like that? On both sides?

I think there lurks in human nature a death wish — for others, even more than for ourselves. We rationalize nothing better, or with more effect, than killing each other. Especially the other. Fill in the blank. The other tribe, the other country, the other culture, the other religion, whatever.  “I’ve seen the future,” Leonard Cohen sings. “It is murder.” (You can read the lyrics here, but I like the video version.)

Yet we also don’t. The answer to Matt’s question — How did we keep from blowing ourselves up for all those years? —is lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov, and others like him, unnamed. Petrov had the brains and the balls to say “No” to doing the crazy thing that only looked sane because a big institution was doing it.

We’re still crazy. You and I may not be, but we are.

War is a force that gives us meaning, Chris Hedges says. You can read his book by that title, (required reading from a highly decorated and deeply insightful former war correspondent). You can also watch the lecture he gave on the topic at UCSB in 2004. The mystery will be diminished by his answer, but not solved.

Still, every dose of sanity helps.

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New England on Spin Cycle

February 25, 2010 in News, Places, problems, Science, weather | 1 comment

noreaster

That’s what the radar shows right now. Outside the winds range from strong to scary. The rain is steady and horizontal. The storm rotates counterclockwise. If it had an eye, it would be on Boston.

New York, as you see, is getting snow. This illustrates this winter’s weird weather pattern. Mid-Atlantic states get buried in snow and ice while New England is South Carolina. We had a couple of snowstorms this winter, but none of the big ones the states south and west of here got. Mostly we’ve had rain. Lots of it. I’m sure most of the ski areas are watching their seasons wash away.

But somehow planes are landing and taking off at Logan. No delays, it says (and shows) here. Can’t be fun in those planes, though.

By the way, Intellicast.com rocks. Highly recommended for weather freaks. Not the best UI, but great images.

[Next morning...] Clear now in Boston, but an awful time to be flying into JFK or PHL:

aviation_jfk-phl

Of the latter it says here, “Philadelphia Intl (KPHL) is currently experiencing inbound flights delayed at their origin an average of 3 hours 23 minutes due to snow and ice. (all delays).” And this new update for JFK:

John F Kennedy Intl (KJFK) is currently experiencing:

  • all inbound flights being held at their origin until friday at 09:15a EST due to snow and ice
  • inbound flights delayed at their origin an average of 5 hours 43 minutes due to snow and ice

(all delays)

All that is from FlightAware, another great site that can use some UI improvements. (Such as linkability to map sections.) Highly recommended if you want to track, say, inbound flights of persons you need to pick up at the airport.

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What you see is what they buy

February 25, 2010 in Events, Fun, News, Politics | 3 comments

sunlight_repdata

Brilliant of the Sunlight Foundation to show who pays each elected speaker, in text next to them as they’re speaking at the Heath Care Summit. Dig it here, live.

Via @mathowie.

[Later...] In the interest of fairness, here’s a Democrat, and his major backers:

sunlight_repdata2

(I’ve cropped and moved the video image a bit so browsers won’t shrink the numbers too much.)

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Winter Weathering

February 10, 2010 in Geology, Life, News, Places, Travel | 1 comment

weathermap

The mudslides we feared in Southern California didn’t materialize when I posted about the topic on January 21st. Now they are feared again, as a new wave of winter rainstorms passes through. Some slides have already happened. More will. Count on it. (And if you’re at serious risk, really please do GTFO.)

Meanwhile, back here in Boston, a winter snowstorm is headed our way, after treating D.C., Maryland and the surrounding regions to another heavy layer of snow, atop the deepest in memory, which hasn’t had a chance to melt. (One relative there went for many hours without power, looking out on a scene where his car appeared only as a low hill in snow through which only trees and houses protruded.)  We’ve mostly been spared this winter, as have the ski areas to the north. Those will probably be spared again, since this storm is expected to do its heaviest dumping south of here. Bummer, that.

On Friday we fly back to Santa Barbara for The Kid’s winter school break. There are mudslide risks there too, though not as severe as in Los Angeles. (Our hills are mostly rock. L.A.’s are mostly dirt. Think of L.A.’s hills as sponges — because that’s what they are. Place a dry sponge on a steep incline, drip water on it, and see what happens when it fills.)

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll miss the rain there, and get treated to some of those sunsets we’ve been missing. Hope so.

[Later...] I just got a call from my wife, awakened at 3:3oam in California by a call from the school here. A snow day has been declared. Doesn’t look like it yet, though. There are details in the clouds, like scales on a mackerel. But, as we can see from the radar, it’s coming.

[Later still...] It’s now 2:30 in the afternoon, not long before school gets out, and there has been approximately no snow at all. Just a mix of light flakes and drizzle. Good, I guess.

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Up the creek without an iPaddle

January 28, 2010 in Art, Gear, News, Quote, Technology | 29 comments

In response to Dave‘s Reading tea leaves in advance of Apple’s announcements, I added this comment:

Steve loves to uncork constipated categories with the world’s slickest laxative. So I’m guessing this new box will expand Apple’s retail shelf space to include newspapers, journals and books as well as sound recordings, movies and TV shows. It will be the best showcase “content” ever had, and will be a wholly owned proprietary channel. A year from now, half the people on planes will be watching these things.

It would be cool if it also helped any of us to become movie producers, and to share and mash up our own HD creations. But I think Steve is more interested in hacking Hollywood (entertainment) and New York (publishing).

I’ve thought for years that Apple’s real enemy is Sony. Or vice versa. But Sony got lame, becoming a Hollywood company with an equipment maker on the side. So think instead of the old Sony — the inventive one that owned the high-gloss/high-margin end of the entertainment gear business, the Sony of Walkmen and Trinitrons. That’s the vacuum Apple’s filling. Only, unlike Sony, Apple won’t have 50,000 SKUs to throw like spaghetti at the market’s wall. They’ll have the fewest number of SKUs possible. And will continue to invent or expand whole new categories with each.

And there will be something missing to piss people off too. Maybe it’ll be absent ports (like you said). Maybe it’s no multi-tasking, or skimpy memory, or bad battery life, or an unholy deal with some “partner.”

Whatever it is, the verities persist. Meaning items 1 through 6 from this 1997 document still apply:

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/stories/DocSea…

At that last link I wrote,

These things I can guarantee about whatever Apple makes from this point forward:

  1. It will be original.
  2. It will be innovative.
  3. It will be exclusive.
  4. It will be expensive.
  5. It’s aesthetics will be impeccable.
  6. The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal. The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt.

So now the iPad has been announced, Steve has left the building, and the commentariat is weighing in.

The absence of multi-tasking might be the biggest bummer. (Makes me wonder if mono-tasking is a Jobsian “feature”, kinda like the one-button mouse.) Adam Frucci of Gizmodo lists mono-tasking among eight things that suck” about the iPad, including no cameras, no HDMI out, no Flash, 3×4 (rather than wide) screen and a “Big, Ugly Bezel”. (That last one is off base, methinks. You need the wide bezel so you can hold the device without your hot fingertips doing wrong things with the touchscreen.)

Elswehere at Gizmodo, Joel Johnson says “PCs will be around as expert devices for the long haul, but it’s clear that Apple, coasting on the deserved success of the iPhone, sees simple, closed internet devices as the future of computing. (Or at the very least, portable computing.) And for the average consumer, it could be.”

The Engadgeteers mostly panned it. Unimaginative… underwhelming… one of Apple’s biggest misses.

MG Sigler at Techcrunch says, “The thing is beautiful and fast. Really fast. If you’ll excuse my hyperbole, it felt like I was holding the future. But is it a must-have?” Then answers,

Most people won’t yet, but as long as Apple has its base that will buy and use the iPad, they have plenty of time for either themselves or third-party developers to create the killer uses that make the iPad a must-have product for a broader range of people. We already saw that happen with the App Store and the iPhone/iPod touch. And at $499 (for the low-end version), there will be no shortage of people willing to splurge on the device just to see what all the fuss is about. They’ll get hooked too.

That’s getting close, but it’s not quite there.

First, the base Apple wants is consumers. Literally. We’re talking newspaper and magazine readers, buyers and users of cameras and camcorders, and (especially) TV and movie watchers. To some degree these people produce (mostly home video and photos), but to a greater degree they are still potatoes that metablolize “content”. This thing is priced like a television, with many improvements on the original. Call it Apple’s Trinitron. They are, like I said, after Sony’s abandoned position here, without the burden of a zillion SKUs.

Second, there will be a mountain of apps for this thing, and more than a few killer ones.

What depressed me, though I expected it, was the big pile of what are clearly verticalized Apple apps, which I am sure enjoy privileged positions in the iPad’s app portfolio, no matter how big that gets. It’s full of customer lock-in. I’m a photographer, and the only use for iPhoto I have is getting shots off the iPhone. Apple’s calendar on the iPhone and computer (iCal) is, while useful, still lame. Maybe it’ll be better on the iPad, but I doubt it. And the hugely sphinctered iTunes/Store system also remains irritating, though I understand why Apple does it.

What you have to appreciate, even admire, is how well Apple plays the vertical game. It’s really amazing.

What you also have to appreciate is how much we also need the horizontal one. The iPad needs an open alternative, soon. There should be for the iPad what Google’s Nexus One is for the iPhone.

I got a ride home tonight from Bob Frankston, who was guided by a Nexus One, serving as a better GPS than my dashboard’s Garmin. Earlier in the evening Bob used the Nexus One to do a bunch of other stuff the iPhone doesn’t do as well, if at all. More importantly, he didn’t need to get his apps only from Google’s (or anybody’s) “store”. And if somebody else wants to make a better Android phone than this one, they can. And Google, I’m sure, hopes they do. That’s because Google is playing a horizontal game here, broadening the new market that Apple pioneered with its highly vertical iPhone.

So a big lesson here is that the market’s ecosystem includes both the vertical silos and the horizontal landscapes on which those silos stand, and where all kinds of other things can grow. Joel may be right that “the average consumer” will have no trouble being locked inside Apple’s silo of “simple, closed Internet devices”. But there are plenty of other people who are neither average nor content with that prospect. There are also plenty of developers who prefer independence to dependence, and a free market to a captive one.

Captivity has its charms, and an argument can be made that tech categories are best pioneered by companies like Apple and Sony, which succeed both by inventing new stuff that primes the pump of demand, and by locking both developers and customers inside their silos. But truly free markets are not restricted to choices among silos, no matter how cushy the accomodations may be. Nor are they restricted to the non-choice of just one silo, as is currently the case with the iPad. Free markets are wide open spaces where anybody can make — and buy — anything.

There’s more to fear from heights than widths.

Bonus link: Dave weighs in. This is just a jumbo Oreo cookie.

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GTFO

January 21, 2010 in Geology, Life, News, Past, Photography, Places, problems, Travel | 7 comments

Anybody who refuses to leave a mudslide evacuation area needs to watch this video:

It’s a live recording of the slide that killed ten people in LaConchita, California, on January 10, 2005. We know people who knew people who were killed in that slide. The story of the Wallet family is especially tragic. Jimmy Wallet was walking back from a corner store with some ice cream for his family when the mudslide in the video above destroyed his house before his eyes, burying his wife and three little daughters. Only he and his teenage daughter, who was out with friends, lived. Six others also died.

And this wasn’t  an especially big slide — or the first to strike that little community. Here’s one from five years earlier. That killed people too.

I’ve been listening to KNX, which has been reporting on the heavy weather in Southern California, and I’m amazed to hear that a large percentage (40%, I think the reporter said) of evacuees are waiting it out.

Here’s the deal, folks: mudslides are inevitable. If you live below a steep hill or mountain slope in a part of Southern California that’s getting heavy rain, and you’re under an evacuation order, get out. Right now (5:45pm Pacific), Acton. La Crescenta, La Cañada-Flintridge, Glendale, Tujunga Foothill and Sierra Madre all have a total of nearly 2000 homes under evacuation order. (So says the official speaking at a news conference on KNX right now.)

Yesterday I shared some of what John McPhee wrote in The Control of Nature about a mudslide (in Glendale — in the same area under evacuation orders now. Here is the whole passage, courtesy of  this page on Los Angeles provided by United States Geological Survey:

In Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains, it is not always clear which side is losing. For example, the Genofiles, Bob and Jackie, can claim to have lost and won. They live on an acre of ground so high that they look across their pool and past the trunks of big pines at an aerial view over Glendale and across Los Angeles to the Pacific bays. The setting, in cool dry air, is serene and Mediterranean. It has not been everlastingly serene.

On a February night some years ago, the Genofiles were awakened by a crash of thunder — lightning striking the mountain front. Ordinarily, in their quiet neighborhood, only the creek beside them was likely to make much sound, dropping steeply out of Shields Canyon on its way to the Los Angeles River. The creek, like every component of all the river systems across the city from mountains to ocean, had not been left to nature. Its banks were concrete. Its bed was concrete. When boulders were running there, they sounded like a rolling freight. On a night like this, the boulders should have been running. The creek should have been a torrent. its unnatural sound was unnaturally absent. There was, and had been, a lot of rain.

The Genofiles had two teen-age children, whose rooms were on the uphill side of the one-story house. The window in Scott’s room looked straight up Pine Cone Road, a cul-de-sac, which, with hundreds like it, defined the northern limit of the city, the confrontation of the urban and the wild. Los Angeles is overmatched on one side by the Pacific Ocean and on the other by very high mountains. With respect to these principal boundaries, Los Angeles is done sprawling. The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic youth, are rising as rapidly as any range on Earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city. Shedding, spalling, self-destructing, they are disintegrating at a rate that is also among the fastest in the world. The phalanxed communities of Los Angeles have pushed themselves hard against these mountains, an aggression that requires a deep defense budget to contend with the results. Kimberlee Genofile called to her mother, who joined her in Scott’s room as they looked up the street. From its high turnaround, Pine Cone Road plunges downhill like a ski run, bending left and then right and then left and then right in steep christiania turns for half a mile above a three-hundred-foot straight-away that aims directly at the Genofiles’ house. Not far below the turnaround, Shields Creek passes under the street, and there a kink in its concrete profile had been plugged by a six-foot boulder. Hence the silence of the creek. The water was not spreading over the street. It descended in heavy sheets. As the young Genofiles and their mother glimpsed it in the all but total darkness, the scene was suddenly illuminated by a blue electrical flash. In the blue light they saw a massive blackness, moving. It was not a landslide, not a mudslide, not a rock avalanche; nor by any means was it the front of a conventional flood. In Jackie’s words, “It was just one big black thing coming at us, rolling, rolling with a lot of water in front of it, pushing the water, this big black thing. It was just one big black hill coming toward us.”

In geology, it would be known as a debris flow. Debris flows amass in stream valleys and more or less resemble fresh concrete. They consist of water mixed with a good deal of solid material, most of which is above sand size. Some of it is Chevrolet size. Boulders bigger than cars ride long distances in debris flows. Boulders grouped like fish eggs pour downhill in debris flows. The dark material coming toward the Genofiles was not only full of boulders; it was so full of automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins. On its way down Pine Cone Road, it plucked up cars from driveways and the street. When it crashed into the Genofiles’ house, the shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds. A door burst open. Mud and boulders poured into the hall. We’re going to go, Jackie thought. Oh, my God, what a hell of a way for the four of us to die together.

The parents’ bedroom was on the far side of the house. Bob Genofile was in there kicking through white satin draperies at the paneled glass, smashing it to provide an outlet for water, when the three others ran in to join him. The walls of the house neither moved nor shook. As a general contractor, Bob had built dams, department stores, hospitals, six schools, seven churches, and this house. It was made of concrete block with steel reinforcement, 16 inches on center. His wife had said it was stronger than any dam in California. His crew had called it “the fort.” In those days, 20 years before, the Genofiles’ acre was close by the edge of the mountain brush, but a developer had come along since then and knocked down thousands of trees and put Pine Cone Road up the slope. Now Bob Genofile was thinking, I hope the roof holds. I hope the roof is strong enough to hold. Debris was flowing over it. He told Scott to shut the bedroom door. No sooner was the door closed that it was battered down and fell into the room. Mud, rock, water poured in. It pushed everybody against the far wall. “Jump on the bed,” Bob said. The bed began to rise. Kneeling on it — on a gold velvet spread — they could soon press their palms against the ceiling. The bed also moved toward the glass wall. The two teen-agers got off, to try to control the motion, and were pinned between the bed’s brass railing and the wall. Boulders went up against the railing, pressed it into their legs, and held them fast. Bob dived into the muck to try to move the boulders, but he failed. The debris flow, entering through windows as well as doors, continued to rise. Escape was still possible for the parents but not for the children. The parents looked at each other and did not stir. Each reached for and held one of the children. Their mother felt suddenly resigned, sure that her son and daughter would die and she and her husband would quickly follow. The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. A din of rocks kept banging against them. The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal, endlessly blinking. The house had filled up in six minutes, and the mud stopped rising near the children’s chins.”

Note that these flows don’t happen only when it’s still raining. Here’s one that happened along the Hayward Fault, in Fremont, that I remember watching from across the South Bay when we lived in Emerald Hills, California, in the late Nineties. It moved slowly and didn’t take out any houses; but it almost did, and was dramatic to watch. It wasn’t raining at the time. The mountainside was saturated with water from earlier rains, and chose its own time to give.

In terms of Geology, California is new. If you were to run a short video of the last few hundred thousand years in Southern California, you’d see a riot of mountains forming, sliding sideways and collapsing. If you were to do the same for the mountains of Arkansas or North Carolina, you’d see almost nothing happening.

Living anywhere is a game of russian roulette with nature: a bet that grand geologic or weather events will not occur within our brief lifespans. In communities like La Conchita, and others placed below dirt sure to move, there are many more bullets in the chambers.

But denial is a powerful force. When I first moved to Santa Barbara, and drove past La Conchita on Highway 1, I was astounded that anybody would chance to build there, because big landslides had obviously happened already, and more were sure to come. Since the mudslide of 2005, many people continue to live in La Conchita, and insist that the county “fix” the mountain above them — even though geologists have studied the region closely and said this:

The 1995 and 2005 landslides in the 200-m high sea cliff above the community of La Conchita, California, are known to be part of a reactivated Holocene prehistoric landslide. We propose that the prehistoric Holocene slide is part of a much larger, several hundred million cubic meter late Pleistocene slide complex composed of upper slumps and lower flows, informally termed as the Rincon Mountain megaslide.

On the positive side, rain on SoCal’s low elevations in winter means snow on the high peaks. If the air clears, Los Angeles will be flanked by white alps. I guarantee great skiing on Mt. Baldy when this thing is over. Provided there isn’t a debris flow blocking the road going up there.

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What’s wrong with this picture?

January 18, 2010 in Art, Business, Journalism, News | 1 comment

Why is Steve Jobs taller than Eric Schmidt in this picture? 0114_mz_cover

I’ve met both guys, and I’m sure Eric is taller than Steve. But maybe I’m wrong.

I’m having trouble (must be my night for that) finding believable height information on either of them. (WikiAnswers says Steve is 6’2″, which seems high to me. Still can’t find anything on Eric.)

The reason I bring this up is that photographs and illustrations tell their own stories.

Ever notice how photos in sports stories always show the winner making a great move or looking happy and the loser making a lame move or looking all dejected? The story is often more complicated than that, but this is how default journalistic story-telling goes. You match the photo to the story. It’s an illustration. A picture to match the thousand words.

This  picture, on the cover of this week’s issue of BusinessWeek, shows several things at once: how Apple currently has more stature than Google in the phone business. How these two former colleagues (Eric was for years on Apple’s board) are now competitors. Maybe there’s some back to back stuff.

Anyway, it’s a story. Vendor sports, of course.

Just saying. Maybe there’s some fodder here for Jay & Dave at NYU.

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Can we have some first sources, please?

January 18, 2010 in Blogging, Journalism, News, problems | 15 comments

One of the things that drives me nuts about stories on the Web is absent links to first sources.

Two examples: this piece by Nate anderson in Ars Technica and this one by Greg Sandoval in BX.BusinessWeek Cnet.* Both report on briefs filed by the MPAA and the RIAA with the FCC. Both quote from the briefs, but neither links to those briefs. Why? Were the available only on paper? I dunno, but I suspect not. (Later… Eric Bangeman says in comments below that the Ars piece had links from the start. These are, as Brian Hayashi also notes below, at the end of the piece, under “Further reading”. I didn’t see them. My apologies for missing them, and for bringing Ars in on this rant. Eric also pointed out that Greg’s piece was published by Cnet. My error in missing that too, even though that’s a bit more excusable.*)

I’ve tried finding the originals, and can’t. The FCC has a pile of search tools, including an advanced one that allows searching for exact phrases. But when I search phrases quoted by those article’s authors, nothing comes up. And when I search Google and Bing for the same, I get nothing but those two articles and others quoting them.

Could be these filings were at the FCC’s OpenInternet.gov, which seems to have no search facility (that I can find, anyway). The agency’s IdeaScale might be the place. It does have  a search facility, but when I try to dig down there — for example by looking for the phrase “protected against theft and unauthorized”, I can’t find anything. Not the phrase, not the RIAA, not the MPAA.

I like Ars. I like BX. I like Cnet.I also like Nate‘s and Greg‘s writing. I’m just tired of having to re-dig what’s already been dug, such as I had to do — and failed — when I put together the last piece I put up. (Where, by the way, I quoted Nate at length.) This isn’t about them. It’s about everybody writing on the Web.

Consider this a gentle request to journalists of all kinds: Help the rest of us out here. Give us links to your sources. Makes life a lot easier for everybody.

Thanks.

[Later...] @connectme (Brian Hayashi) came through with the MPAA filing after I posted a request on Twitter. Also with the RIAA one. Brian also noted that links are now in the Ars piece. I now see them, down in “Further reading” at the bottom. Were there there from the start and I missed them? (Yes, Eric Bangeman says, in his comment below.) If so, my apologies. (I’d still rather see the links in the text than at the bottom.)

Thanks, Brian! Thanks, Eric.

* This is an error I’ll own (like all the others above), but it brings up another gripe about which I suspect little can be done: publishers republishing stuff in ways that makes original publishers unclear. Below is a windowshot of Greg’s piece that shows the problem. Cnet.com is way down near the right end of the URL: out of sight in this case. The BX banner appears to be an ad. But the favicon in the location bar also says BX. I suppose this is “branding” at work, but at a certain point, which we’ve passed here, it gets crazy.

bx_mistake

How the Internet becomes the Content-o-net

January 18, 2010 in Art, Business, Future, infrastructure, Journalism, music, News, Places, Politics, problems, Technology | 18 comments

The Cinternet is Donnie Hao Dong’s name for the Chinese Internet. Donnie studies and teaches law in China and is also a fellow here at Harvard’s Berkman Center. As Donnie sees (and draws) it, the Cinternet is an increasingly restricted subset of the real thing:

map[19]

He calls this drawing a “map of encirclement.” That last noun has a special meaning he explains this way:

“The Wars of (anti-)Encirclement Compaign” were a series battles between China Communist Party and the KMT‘s Nanjing Gorvernment in 1930s. At the time the CCP established a government in south-central China (mostly in Jiang Xi Province). The KMT’s army tried five times to attack and encircle the territory of CCP’s regime. And The CCP’s Red Army was almost defeated in the Fifth Encirclement War in 1934. The Long March followed the war and rescued CCP and its army.

Encirclement is more than censorship. It’s a war strategy, and China has been at war with the Internet from the start.

But while China’s war is conscious, efforts by other countries to encircle the Net are not. To see what I mean by that, read Rebecca MacKinnon‘s Are China’s demands for Internet ‘self-discipline’ spreading to the West? Her short answer is yes. Her long answer is covered in these paragprahs:

To operate in China, Google’s local search engine, Google.cn, had to meet these “self-discipline” requirements. When users typed words or phrases for sensitive subjects into the box and clicked “search,” Google.cn was responsible for making sure that the results didn’t include forbidden content.

It’s much easier to force intermediary communications and Internet companies such as Google to police themselves and their users than the alternatives: sending cops after everybody who attempts a risque or politically sensitive search, getting parents and teachers to do their jobs, or chasing down the origin of every offending link. Or re-considering the logic and purpose of your entire system.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don’t know.

In its bombshell announcement on Jan. 12, Google cited massive cyber attacks against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists as the most urgent reason for re-evaluating its presence in China. However, the Chinese government’s demands for ever-increasing levels of censorship contributed to a toxic and unsustainable business environment.

Remember that phrase: intermediary liability. It’s a form of encirclement. Rebecca again:

Meanwhile in the Western democratic world, the idea of strengthening intermediary liability is becoming increasingly popular in government agencies and parliaments. From France to Italy to the United Kingdom, the idea of holding carriers and services liable for what their customers do is seen as the cheapest and easiest solution to the law enforcement and social problems that have gotten tougher in the digital age — from child porn to copyright protection to cyber-bullying and libel.

I’m not equating Western democracy with Chinese authoritarianism — that would be ludicrous. However, I am concerned about the direction we’re taking without considering the full global context of free expression and censorship.

The Obama administration is negotiating a trade agreement with 34 other countries — the text of which it refuses to make public, citing national security concerns — that according to leaked reports would include increased liability for content hosting companies and service providers. The goal is to combat the global piracy of movies and music.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight crime or enforce the law. Of course we should, assuming that the laws reflect the consent of the governed. But let’s make sure that we don’t throw the baby of democracy and free speech out with the bathwater, as we do the necessary work of adjusting legal systems and economies to the Internet age.

Next, What Big Content wants from net neutrality (hint: protection), by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica. According to Nate, more than ten thousand comments were filed on the subject of net neutrality with the FCC, and among these were some from the RIAA and the MPAA. These, he said, “argued that the FCC should encourage ISPs to adopt ‘graduated response’ rules aimed at reducing online copyright infringement”, and that they “also reveal a content-centric view of the world in which Americans will not ‘obtain the true benefits that broadband can provide’ unless ‘copyrighted content [is] protected against theft and unauthorized online distribution’”. He continues,

What could graduated response possibly have to do with network neutrality? The movie and music businesses have seized on language in the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that refuses to extend “neutrality” to “unlawful content.” The gist of the MPAA and RIAA briefs is that network neutrality’s final rules must allow for—and in fact should encourage—ISPs to take an active anti-infringement role as part of “reasonable network management.”

Not that the word “infringement” is much in evidence here; both briefs prefer “theft.” The RIAA’s document calls copyright infringement “digital piracy—or better, digital theft,” and then notes that US Supreme Court Justice Breyer said in the Grokster case that online copyright infringement was “garden variety theft.”

To stop that theft, the MPAA and RIAA want to make sure that any new FCC rules allow ISPs to act on their behalf. Copyright owners can certainly act without voluntary ISP assistance, as the RIAA’s lengthy lawsuit campaign against file-swappers showed, but both groups seem to admit that this approach has now been hauled out behind the barn and shot.

According to the RIAA, “Without ISP participation, it is extremely difficult to develop an effective prevention approach.” MPAA says that it can’t tackle the problem alone and it needs “broadband Internet access service providers to cooperate in combating combat theft.”

“No industry can, or should be expected to, compete against free-by-theft distribution of its own products,” the brief adds.

“We thus urge the Commission to adopt rules that not only allow ISPs to address online theft, but actively encourage their efforts to do so,” says the RIAA.

And that’s how we get the American Cinternet. Don’t encircle it yourself. Get the feds to make ISPs into liable intermediaries forced to practice “self discipline” the Chinese way: a “graduated response” that encircles the Net, reducing it to something less: a spigot of filtered “content” that Hollywood approves. Television 2.0, coming up.

Maybe somebody can draw us the Content-o-net.

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Hanging with Haiti

January 13, 2010 in Geology, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, Live Web, News, Places, problems | 6 comments

I posted a lot today, but nothing matters more — or has been more on the front of my mind — than Haiti. What hell that such an already troubled country should be hit by an earthquake so bad, and so close to its most dense population centers.

So, as I try to get my head around the situation, here’s a list of links, in the order that I visit them:

I’ll add more as time goes on.

Also please read the comments below. The three (so far) from Andrew Leyden are excellent.

Don’t forget

January 7, 2010 in News, Science | Comments closed

Reuters: Cellphones may protect brain from Alzheimer’s. Specifically,

  After long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves such as those used in cell phones, mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s performed as well on memory and thinking skill tests as healthy mice, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Your species may vary.

Liberating the Net from Telephony

December 2, 2009 in Business, Future, infrastructure, News, Politics, problems, Science, Technology | 9 comments

Yesterday the FCC released a public notice seeking comment on the “transition from circuit switched network to all-IP network.” (Here’s the .pdf. Here’s the .txt version.) Translation: from the phone system to the Internet.

This is huge. Really. Freaking. Huge.

Or maybe not. Could be it’s all just posturing or worse. But I don’t think so. Or I hope not.

Either way, it matters. For better and worse, the Internet reposes in legal as well as technical infrastructures.

The money text:

The intent of this Public Notice is to set the stage for the Commission to consider whether to issue a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) relating to the appropriate policy framework to facilitate and respond to the market-led transition in technology and services, from the circuit switched PSTN system to an IP-based communications world.

In the spirit of understanding the scope and breadth of the policy issues associated with this transition, we seek public comment to identify the relevant policy questions that an NOI on this topic should raise in order to assist the Commission in considering how best to monitor and plan for this transition.

In identifying the appropriate areas of inquiry, we seek to understand which policies and regulatory structures may facilitate, and which may hinder, the efficient migration to an all IP world. In addition, we seek to identify and understand what aspects of traditional policy frameworks are important to consider, address, and possibly modify in an effort to protect the public interest in an all-IP world.

The italics are mine.

There is a high degree of presumption here. I mean, are we really migrating to an all-IP world? All? Most of us still watch plenty of television. And, in the immortal words of Wierd Al Yankovic, we all have cell phones. Neither TV nor cellular telephony are even close to an “all-IP world.” IP might be involved, but … there is some distance to cover here. And not much motivation by phone companies to make the move.

Still, we can see it happening. Your smartphone today is a data device that happens to run a lot of applications, which include both telephony and television. Yet the bill you get for using your phone (no matter how smart it is) comes from a phone company. The underlying infrastucture, including 3G, is largely a phone system. It handles data, and it’s mostly digital, but it is not fundamentally a data system. It’s a phone system built for billing by the minute. Or even the second.

Can we change phone systems into all-IP data systems? I would hope so.

But before I go any deeper, I want to plug my panel tomorrow morning (8:30am Pacific) at Supernova (#sn09). The title is Telecom as Software. Any questions you want me to ask, or topics you want me to cover, put them below.

What’s right with Wikipedia?

November 30, 2009 in Blogging, infrastructure, Journalism, News, problems, radio | 11 comments

“I make my living off the Evening News
Just give me something: something I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry.
— Don Henley, “Dirty Laundry”

Look up “Wikipedia loses” (with the quotes) and you get 20,800 results. Look up “Wikipedia has lost” and you get 56,900. (Or at least that’s what I got this morning.) Most of those results tell a story, which is what news reports do. “What’s the story?” may be the most common question asked of reporters by their managing editors. As humans, we are interested in stories — even if they’re contrived, which is what we have with all “reality” television shows.

Lately Wikipedia itself is the subject of a story about losing editors. The coverage snowball apparently started rolling with Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages, by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler in The Wall Street Journal. It begins,

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet — the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia …

That’s all you get without paying. Still, it’s enough.

Three elements make stories interesting: 1) a protagonist we know, or is at least interesting; 2) a struggle of some kind; and 3) movement (or possible movement) toward a resolution. Struggle is at the heart of a story. There has to be a problem (what to do with Afghanistan), a conflict (a game between good teams, going to the final seconds), a mystery (wtf was Tiger Woods’ accident all about?), a wealth of complications (Brad and Angelina), a crazy success (the iPhone), failings of the mighty (Nixon and Watergate). The Journal‘s Wikipedia story is of the Mighty Falling variety.

The Journal’s source is Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis, a doctoral thesis by José Phillipe Ortega of Universidad Rey San Carlos in Madrid. (The graphic at the top of this post is one among many from the study.) In Wikipedia’s Volunteer Story, Erik Moeller and Erik Zachte of the Wikimedia Foundation write,

First, it’s important to note that Dr. Ortega’s study of editing patterns defines as an editor anyone who has made a single edit, however experimental. This results in a total count of three million editors across all languages.  In our own analytics, we choose to define editors as people who have made at least 5 edits. By our narrower definition, just under a million people can be counted as editors across all languages combined.  Both numbers include both active and inactive editors.  It’s not yet clear how the patterns observed in Dr. Ortega’s analysis could change if focused only on editors who have moved past initial experimentation.

Even more importantly, the findings reported by the Wall Street Journal are not a measure of the number of people participating in a given month. Rather, they come from the part of Dr. Ortega’s research that attempts to measure when individual Wikipedia volunteers start editing, and when they stop. Because it’s impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving: Dr. Ortega qualifies as the editor’s “log-off date” the last time they contributed. This is a snapshot in time and doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future, nor does it reflect the actual number of active editors in that month.

Dr. Ortega supplements this research with data about the actual participation (number of changes, number of editors) in the different language editions of our projects. His findings regarding actual participation are generally consistent with our own, as well as those of other researchers such as Xerox PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition research group.

What do those numbers show?  Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak 2.5 years ago, and has remained stable since then. (See WikiStats data for all Wikipedia languages combined.) On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000. (See WikiStats data for the English Wikipedia.) Many other Wikipedia language editions saw a rise in the number of editors in the same time period. As a result the overall number of editors on all projects combined has been stable at a high level over recent years. We’re continuing to work with Dr. Ortega to specifically better understand the long-term trend in editor retention, and whether this trend may result in a decrease of the number of editors in the future.

They add details that amount to not much of a story, if you consider all the factors involved, including the maturity of Wikipedia itself.

As it happens I’m an editor of Wikipedia, at least by the organization’s own definitions. I’ve made fourteen contributions, starting with one in April 2006, and ending, for the moment, with one I made this morning. Most involve a subject I know something about: radio. In particular, radio stations, and rules around broadcast engineering. The one this morning involved edits to the WQXR-FM entry. The edits took a lot longer than I intended — about an hour, total — and were less extensive than I would have made, had I given the job more time and had I been more adept at editing references and citations. (It’s pretty freaking complicated.) The preview method of copy editing is also time consuming as well as endlessly iterative. It was sobering to see how many times I needed to go back and forth between edits and previews before I felt comfortable that I had contributed accurate and well-written copy.

In fact, as I look back over my fourteen editing efforts, I can see that most of them were to some degree experimental. I wanted to see if I had what it took to be a dedicated Wikipedia editor, because I regard that as a High Calling. The answer so far is a qualified no. I’ll continue to help where I can. But on the whole my time is better spent doing other things, some of which also have leverage with Wikipedia, but not of the sort that Dr. Ortega measured in his study.

For example, photography.

As of today you can find 113 photos on Wikimedia Commons that I shot. Most of these have also found use in Wikipedia. (Click “Check Usage” at the top of any shot to see how it’s been used, and where.) I didn’t put any of these shots in Wikimedia Commons, nor have I put any of them in Wikipedia. Other people did all of that. To the limited degree I can bother to tell, I don’t know anybody who has done any of that work. All I do is upload shots to my Flickr site, caption and tag them as completely as time allows, and let nature take its course. I have confidence that at least some of the shots I take will be useful. And the labor involved on my part is low.

I also spent about half an hour looking through Dr. Ortega’s study. My take-away is that Wikipedia has reached a kind of maturity, and that the fall-off in participation is no big deal. This is not to say that Wikipedia doesn’t have problems. It has plenty. But I see most of those as features rather than as bugs, even if they sometimes manifest, at least superficially, as the latter. That’s not much of a story, but it’s a hell of an accomplishment.

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The Infrastructure Dynamic

November 25, 2009 in Business, infrastructure, Life, News, Politics, problems, Science, Technology | 13 comments

I just posted Rupert Murdoch vs. The Web, over at Linux Journal. In it I suggest that the Murdoch story (played mostly as Bing vs Google) is a red herring, and that the real challenge is to free the Web and ourselves from dependencies from giant companies I liken to volcanoes:

We’re Pompeians, Krakatoans, Montserratans, building cities and tilling farms on the slopes of active volcanoes. Always suckers for stories, we’d rather take sides in wars between competing volcanoes than build civilization on more flat and solid ground where there’s room enough for everybody.

Google and Bing are both volcanoes. Both grace the Web’s landscape with lots of fresh and fertile ground. They are good to have in many ways. But they are not the Earth below. They are not what gives us gravity.

I think one problem here is a disconnect between belief systems about markets, and the stories that arise from them.

One system believes a free market is Your Choice of Captor. In this camp I put both the make-it/take-it mentality (where “winners” are rewarded and “losers” punished) of the Wall Street Journal (which a few months ago looked upon the regulated duopolies for Internet access as the “free market” at work) and those who see business (or corporations, or capitalism, or all three) as a problem and look to government — another monopoly — for remedy from these evils in the marketplace. In other words, I lump both the left and the right in here, along with the conflicts between them.

The other system sees markets as settings for human activity: the locations, both real and virtual, where people and their organizations meet to do business, make culture, and build civilization. Here I put nearly everybody who contributed the structural agreements that made the Internet possible, and who truly understand what it is and how it works, even if they can’t all agree on what metaphors to use for it. I also include all who have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the free and open code bases with which we are building out our networked world. While political beliefs among members of this system may sort somewhere along the right-vs.-left axis, what they do to build the world is orthogonal to that axis. That’s one big reason why that work escapes notice.

The distinction I see here aligns well with Virginia Postrel‘s contrast between “stasists” and “dynamists”. The difference is that much of what gets done to make the networked world (and to support its dynamism) isn’t “dynamic” in the active and dramatic sense of the word — except in its second-order effects. For example, SMTP and IMAP are not dynamic. (Being mannerly technical agreements, protocols don’t do that.) But on those protocols (and related ones) email happened, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

With that distinction in mind, I suggest that too much oxygen suckage is wasted on “wars” between the stasists (some of whom are also into the superficially dynamistic attention-suck of vendor sports — here’s an oldie but goodie that still makes my point), and not enough on constructive work done by geeks and entrepreneurs who quietly build the original and useful stuff that serves as solid infrastructure on which countless public goods (including wealth creation beyond measure) can be generated.

We have the same problem in most net neutrality arguments. The right hates it, the left loves it. One looks to protect the “free market” of phone and cable companies (currently a Your-Choice-of-Captor system) while the other looks to government (meet your new captor) for relief. When in fact the whole thing has happened all along within what Bob Frankston calls The Regultorium.

The primary dynamism of the Internet — what gave us the Net in the first place, and what holds the most promise in the long run — doesn’t just come from those parties, and can’t be found in the arguments they’re having. It comes from low-box-office geekery that supports enormous new business opportunities (along with many public benefits, with or without business).

It’ll take time to see this, I guess. Just hope we don’t drown in lava in the meantime.

Bonus red herring: A lot of news really isn’t.

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WGBH and public radio’s future

November 25, 2009 in Art, Berkman, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Live Web, music, News, Past, problems, radio | 16 comments

@robpatrob (Robert Paterson) asks (responding to this tweet and this post) “Why would GBH line up against BUR? Why have a war between 2 Pub stations in same city?” (In this tweet and this one, Dan Kennedy asks pretty much the same thing.)

The short answer is, Because it wouldn’t be a war. Boston is the world’s largest college town. There are already a pile of home-grown radio-ready program-filling goods here, if one bothers to dig and develop. The standard NPR line-up could also use a challenge from other producers. WGBH is already doing that in the mornings by putting The Takeaway up against Morning Edition. That succeeds for me because now I have more choices. I can jump back and forth between those two (which I do, and Howard Stern as well).

The longer answer is that it gives GBH a start on the inevitable replacement of signal-based radio by multiple streams and podcast line-ups. WGBH has an exemplary record as a producer of televsion programming, but it’s not setting the pace in other media, including radio. The story is apparent in the first four paragraphs of its About page (which is sure to change):

WGBH is PBS’s single largest producer of content for television (prime-time and children’s programs) and the Web. Some of your favorite series and websites — Nova, Masterpiece, Frontline, Antiques Roadshow, Curious George, Arthur, and The Victory Garden, to name a few — are produced here in our Boston studios.

WGBH also is a major supplier of programs heard nationally on public radio, including The World. And we’re a pioneer in educational multimedia and in media access technologies for people with hearing or vision loss.

Our community ties run deep. We’re a local public broadcaster serving southern New England, with 11 public television services and three public radio services — and productions (from Greater Boston to Jazz with Eric in the Evening) that reflect the issues and cultural riches of our region. We’re a member station of PBS and an affiliate of both NPR and PRI.

In today’s fast-changing media landscape, we’re making sure you can find our content when and where you choose — on TV, radio, the Web, podcasts, vodcasts, streaming audio and video, iPhone applications, groundbreaking teaching tools, and more. Our reach and impact keep growing.

Note the order: TV first, radio second, the rest of it third. But where WGBH needs to lead in the future is with #3: that last paragraph. Look at WGBH’s annual report. It’s very TV-heavy. Compare its radio productions to those of Chicago Public Radio or WNYC. Very strong in classical music (now moving over to WCRB, at least on the air), and okay-but-not-great in other stuff.

Public TV has already become a ghetto of geezers and kids, while the audience between those extrmes is diffusing across cable TV and other media. An increasingly negligible sum of people watch over-the-air (OTA) TV. Here WGBH lost out too. It’s old signal on Channel 2 was huge, reaching more households than any other in New England. Now it’s just another UHF digital signal — like its own WGBX/44, with no special advantages. Public radio is in better shape, for now, because its band isn’t the ever-growing accordion file that cable TV has become; and because most of it still lives in a regulated protectorate at the bottom fifth of the FM band. It also helps public radio that the rest of both the FM and the AM bands suck so royally. (Only sports and political talk are holding their own. Music programming is losing to file sharing and iPods. All-news stations are yielding to iPhone programs that offer better news, weather and traffic reporting. In Boston WBZ is still a landmark news station, but it has to worry a bit with WGBH going in the same direction.)

So the timing is right. WGBH needs to start sinking new wells into the aquifer of smart, talented and original people and organizations here in the Boston area — and taking the lead in producing great new programming with what they find. I’ll put in another plug for Chris Lydon‘s Open Source, which is currently available only in podcast/Web form. And there is much more, including Cambridge-based PRX‘s enormous portfolio of goods.  (Disclosure: my work with the Berkman Center is partially funded through PRX — and those folks, like Chris, are good friends.)

In the long run what will matter are sources, listeners, and the finite amount of time the latter can devote to the former. Not old-fashioned signals.

P.S. to Dan Kennedy’s tweeted question, “Is there another city in the country where two big-time public radio stations go head-to-head on news? Can’t think of one.” Here are a few (though I’d broaden the answer beyond “news,” since WBUR isn’t just that):

All with qualifications, of course. In some cases you can add in Pacifica (which, even though my hero Larry Josephson once called it a “foghorn for political correctness,” qualifies as competition). Still, my point is that there is room for more than one mostly-talk (or news) public radio station in most well-populated regions. Even in Boston, where WBUR has been king of the hill for many years. Hey, other things being equal (and they never are), the biggest signal still tends to win. And in Boston, WGBH has a bigger signal than WBUR: almost 100,000 watts vs. 12,000 watts. WBUR radiates from a higher elevaiton, but its signal is directional. On AM that means it’s stronger than the listed power in some directions and weaker in others; but on FM it means no more than the listed power in some directions and weaker in others. See the FCC’s relative field polar plot to see how WBUR’s signal is dented in every direction other than a stretch from just west of North to Southeast. In other words, toward all but about a third of its coverage area. To sum up, WGBH has a much punchier signal. I’m sure the GBH people also have this in mind when they think about how they’ll compete with BUR.

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WGBH/WCRB go the way of WNYC/WQXR

November 23, 2009 in News, radio | 19 comments

The longest thread in the history of this blog belongs to Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station, which I posted on July 26, and still has comments this month. The post followed a complex deal by which the New York Times divested its legacy classical music station, WQXR — and by which the station’s format, call letters, record library and some of its personnel survived as a noncommercial outlet of WNYC, on a different channel with a weaker signal. From the comments one might gather that more listeners were unhappy than happy with the deal. My post mostly presented the upside.

Now here in Boston a similar move is underway. WGBH, “Boston’s NPR arts and culture station” will go the way of WNYC-FM, which phased out classical music starting in 2002, eventually shunting it to HD side-channels and Internet streams while populating the FM signal (as well as its AM one) with news and information programming, which tends to be more popular and to attract more money in listener contributions. By saving WQXR, WNYC returned classical music to the airwaves (although the city was still down one classical station, or two if you want to go back to the very late WNCN.) WGBH clearly had the same thing in mind when it bought WCRB, which was already weakened in the Boston metro when it moved from its old local channel (102.5) to its current channel (99.5) in Lowell. (Wikipedia has good background poop on WCRB’s own long saga.) While both WCRB signals have about the same range, the old 102.5 signal radiates from the Boston FM and TV antenna farm in nearby Needham, while the new one on 99.5 comes from a hill overlooking the I-495/I93 intersection, far to the north near the New Hampshire border.

So now WGBH plans to move its classical programming to WCRB, whch will become a non-commercial station (as did WQXR), and to do more news and information programming on its own home signal (89.7), which is grandfathered at 100,000 watts on Great Blue Hill (hence the call letters) in Milton, on the south side of Boston. In terms of wattage alone, WGBH is New England’s most powerful station. (The largest coverage belongs to WHOM/94.9 on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, which puts out 49,000 watts from the highest peak in the Northeast.) As a result WGBH can go head-to-head with WBUR/90.9, which is the incumbent public radio leader in Boston. (I’ve looked at the ratings, and WBUR has kicked WGBH’s butt for years — a fact that I am sure has rankled the latter.)

Still, many listeners are not happy. And not just about losing classical music.

WGBH is doing its best to gloss over the signal loss for classical (and other arts & culture) listeners, especially in the southern reaches of Eastern Massachusetts, where WGBH has a very strong signal and WCRB is mostly absent. To demonstrate, here is a comparison of coverage for WGBH, WCRB and WBUR, calculated by Radio-Locator.com:

gbh-crb-bur

Click on the image for a legible full-size version.

Still, my own take in the WGBH/WCRB case is the same as it was for WNYC/WQXR: this is the best that could be done for classical music on Boston airwaves — and it offers opportunities not possible for WCRB had it remained a commercial station. Go back to that first link if you want to see what those are.

As for me, I expect to be more likely to listen to a ‘GBH-run noncommercial WCRB than I did to the commercial one. First, the commercials were (and, at this writing, still are) annoying. Second, the WCRB repertoire was pretty close to all-hits, rather than the more varied and challenging fare found on WGBH. There should be a happy medium between the two, and I’m sure ‘GBH will work hard to find it.

But I’m privileged to live on the north side of the metro, so I get WCRB just fine. I think it’s a safe bet that more than one half of WGBH’s listening area won’t get a useful signal out of WCRB. And the area within which listeners can get WGBH’s HD stream is a subset of WGBH’s coverage area.

A digressive word about HD radio. I got one recently — a $99 Teac unit — at Costco. The tuner is remarkably good, and it gets most local stations’ HD side-channels. But “tuning” HD is a counter-intuitive chore. You tune in the partent station, wait for the HD symbol to appear, and then tune to the one or two HD channels of the station. It’s a multi-step selection process, with delays along the way. I’d be curious to know if anybody (beside those who pick a channel and stay put) has had a positive experience with tuning it.

For those who want to compare apples with apples, here’s some data:

One last thing. I for one (and I am sure there are many more) would love to hear Chris Lydon return to Boston’s airwaves. He has been a podcasting pioneer with an outstanding show. But coming on a live station would be fabulous.

Hey, how about Larry Josephson too?

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Have a nice daze

October 25, 2009 in Future, Health, infrastructure, News, problems, Quote, Science | 1 comment

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

  The consequence of this is a “plague of sameness” and the loss of a distinct species every ten minutes. Some types of fruits and vegetables have lost 90% of their variants. An entire language disappears every two weeks. “We are not gaining knowledge with every human generation”, Glavin says, “we are losing it”. “All these extinctions are related…and the language of environmentalism is wholly inadequate to the task of describing what is happening…It doesn’t have the words for it”. Wherever he travels, he says, he finds the overwhelming majority of people are troubled by this loss of diversity, but at a loss to know what to do about it.

Nobody knows anything. Excerpts:

  Because of our horrific overpopulation and exhaustion of our planet and its resources, we have entered into a period of chronic, massive, global stress, and it’s made us all crazy, like rats in a lab fighting over the last few scraps of food. We’ve stopped listening to ourselves and started looking for saviours — ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ to show us and tell us what to do.

  The so-called ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ I’ve met are mostly very intelligent people, but they haven’t a clue. They’re buoyed by their own press and by sycophants fighting their way up from the bottom or desperate to believe that someone is in charge, in control, and knows what needs to be done. These ‘leaders’ hang out with other people just like themselves, and their groupthink persuades them that they’re right, they’re important, that what they say and do and decide really matters...

  We have destroyed this planet for future generations and for all-life-on-Earth, and the worst culprits are still doing it, while we sit around stupidly watching them, wondering what to do, waiting for someone, anyone, to save us from us.

  We need to stop listening to these know-nothing, cowardly ‘leaders’. We need to stop paying them. We need to stop working for them. We need to stop investing in them. We need to stop trusting them, and stop believing the nonsense they are telling us. We need to stop voting for them, and paying taxes to finance their backroom deals. We need to stop buying overpriced crap from their fat, mismanaged organizations. We need to send some of them to jail for criminal fraud and the rest out to pasture, and take back our society, our economy, our Earth from these thieves, these self-deluded con men. No more leaders.

Just something to cheer you up on a Sunday.

Liking IceRocket

October 21, 2009 in Blogging, Live Web, News | 3 comments

In The new Technorati: advertiser-friendly, foreigner-free? Ethan Zuckerman unpacks a bit of what remains (“highly-targeted, advertiser friendly content”) and what’s gone (everything but English) at Technorati. (This blog is still there, at #2659 and falling, with an authority of 549. I was informally advising Technorati when they came up with the authority thing, but I don’t remember what it means, exactly.) I know Ethan also used Technorati’s API to do some very interesting research, but with the API gone, that’s out the window too. And all that’s on top of what I reported on the other day.

While better by far now — relatively — Google Blogsearch (re-branded “Google blogs”) isn’t great. Or not as great as it could be. Or was. The index page, which used to be a Google-esque sea of white space, is now awash in with noise and news. It’s fast, and it’s easy to get an RSS or an Atom feed of any search, which is cool. But it seems to suggest, along with Technorati, that the blogosphere is about current news and trivia.

Blogpulse is still there. I always liked its UI, although the results tended to be old. “Today’s Highlights” are downright stale. It reports “Phillies beat Dodgers in Game 1.” Which was days ago. (MLB.com is up to the second. Phillies ahead at the bottom of the 4th in Game 3.)

BlogScope is one I hadn’t paid much attention to before. Need to dig down a bit. The popularity charting is interesting. Little slow. Owned by the University of Toronto. Interesting.

IceRocket still exists. It also has search for Twitter, Web, MySpace, News, Images and Big Buzz search. All of them are fast. And you can subscribe to RSS feeds of results. Easily. No looking around.

Soooo far… Hey, I’m liking IceRocket. Speedy. Nice UI. Nice slices of times. Trends. Feeds. Nothing fancy, nothing bad, lots good. Go check ‘em out.

Underground news

October 18, 2009 in Events, Journalism, Life, News, Places | 7 comments

Three days ago Jonathan MacDonald witnessed an altercation in the London Underground at the Holborn Station, between — as Jonathan reports it — a uniformed Underground staffer an elderly man whose arm had just been released from doors that had closed on it while he was leaving.  The staffer was loud and rude, while the passenger was calm and gentlemanly. Jonathan also recorded the last of the event on video — and blogged the event, video and all.

Next blog post:

Fast forward 24 hours and the story has run as the leader on Sky, BBC, LBC, ITN (see sample news coverage here) and on the front page of the Evening Standard. This followed thousands of Tweets and Re-Tweets (including the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, getting involved), 65,000 video views yesterday alone on YouTube and hundreds of comments on this and many other blogs. Plus, the guard has been suspended and is under investigation.

All I did was see something that shouldn’t be tolerated and used the ammunition we have in our hands – video/blogs/network.

I blog almost every day so this wasn’t any different. The content of this one seemed to grab attention though, and it was this attention that made things spiral. Hence, the main reason this story has flown is due to what happened on camera. We must remember that. It’s not me. I didn’t ‘invent the story’. I just blogged, like I do, and the Twitterverse powered the rest. Although charming to be the focus of the viral activity – I actually had the smallest part.

In that post Jonathan shows, with photos, how the story was played by the mainstream media. His summary:

The Twitterers, Bloggers and commentators were the only people who played this right. The stories were shared and eventually the press picked it up.

What we need is for Industry to learn the key techniques of Involvism that the Twitterers, Bloggers and commentators already implement.

So far there are seventy comments, including pros and cons about what Jonathan (jMac there) did, and his replies.

Most interesting to me about this are the stories being told, because those have always been the stock-in-trade of journalism, especially in newspapers. As I put it here,

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.

Jonathan did his best as a witness. He also had a story to show and tell: the abuse of a passenger. That’s what he reported. As it happened, Jonathan caught the name (Ian) and the face of the Underground staffer, but only the back of the passenger (a man with gray hair in a business jacket carrying a leather bag). There are other stories to be told, of course. Read them in Jonathan’s comment thread

In the old media world, freedom of speech belonged to companies that bought ink by the barrel. In the new media world, it belongs to everybody with a cell phone or a keyboard. Get used to it. Or, as Jonathan did, put it to use.

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Whitman wins

October 11, 2009 in News, Sports | 1 comment

I am the teacher of atheletes.

He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own.

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

— Walt Whitman

That’s what came to mind when I heard that Denver beat New England today. Rookie Broncos coach Josh McDaniels, just 34 and a former offensive coordinator under New England’s Bill Belichick, beat the old man.

Glad I was working and didn’t see either this loss or the Red Sox one. At least the Pats come back to play next week. The Sox are gone until next year.

To win, you need to play

October 9, 2009 in News, Politics | 15 comments

My first reaction to the news this morning aligns almost exactly with Matt Welch’s…

My wife woke me with the ridiculous news that Barack Obama, who has been in office for eight months and achieved no notable peace, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Seriously, what has he done?” I asked.

The short answer is: speak. We didn’t pay much attention on this side of the pond, but Barack Obama’s speeches in Cairo and Berlin were smash hits. The guy is a star. He gives the world hope that the U.S. isn’t fucking nuts after all. This is not a small thing. But there is a huge difference between promise and delivery. Gas alone is not transportation. You gotta drive.

Obama ran (and voted) against the wars in Iran Iraq and Afghanistan. Both continue under his command. He backed off on missle installations in Poland and got warm reciprocal sounds out of the Kremlin, which is … something, I guess. He has led efforts toward peace between Israel and its neighbors, but every U.S. president since the founding of Israel has done that. Or tried. Results so far–on any of this? Nada.

I’m all for giving the guy a chance, but why hang a garland on him when the race has hardly begun?

The generous take is Andrew Sullivan’s: “I seem to be one of the few who sees this as a downpayment on a potential transformative period in world history. History alone can judge that, and history hasn’t happened yet.”

Add one more burden to those the president carries already: proving that the Nobel committe hasn’t jumped the shark. Peace of cake.

Fire seasonings

October 5, 2009 in Geology, Health, Ideas, infrastructure, Life, Live Web, News, Past, Places, problems, Technology | Comments closed

I’m on the East Coast for the rest of the current fire season in California. Which is cool, literally. I miss Santa Barbara, but not the fear of destruction (which I generally don’t have there, but I need my rationalizations). Speaking of which, here’s The Mania of Owning Things, my EOF column for August 2009 issue of Linux Journal. I wrote it during the Jesusita Fire, the second fire-bullet we dodged this year.

The column title refers to the last line of this bit of Whitman:

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals.
They are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

(For some reason most of those lines didn’t make it into the published piece. So, when you look at it, bear in mind that the top text is part of Whitman and none of me.) Some exerpts (from me, not Whitman):

Ambition and industry in the face of inevitable destruction is the job of life…

I believe in ownership—not for economic reasons, but because possession is 9/10ths of the three-year-old. We are all still toddlers in more ways than we’d like to admit—especially when it comes to possessions.

We are grabby animals. We like to own stuff—or at least control it. Where would a three-year-old be without the first-person possessive pronoun? No response is more human than “Mine!” And yet possessions are also burdens. I have a friend whose childhood home was burned twice by the same nutcase. He’s one of the sanest people I know. I can’t say it’s because he has been relieved of archives and other non-negotiables, but it makes a kind of sense to me. I have tons of that stuff, and I’ve thought lately about what it would mean if suddenly they were all cremated. Would that really be all bad? What I’d miss most are old photos that haven’t been scanned and writing that hasn’t been digitized in some way. But is my digital stuff all that safe either?…

I’ve just started backing (it) up “in the cloud”. But how safe is that? Or secure? Companies are temporary. Servers are temporary. Hell, everything is temporary.

When I was young, I acknowledged death as part of the cycle of life. Now I think it’s the other way around. Life is part of the cycle of death. Life generates fuel for death. It’s a carbon-based refinery for lots of interesting and helpful stuff.

Think about it. Marble. Limestone. Travertine. Oil. Gas. Coal. Wood. Linoleum. Cement. Paint. Plastics. Paper. Asphalt. Textiles. Medicines. Even the heat used to smelt iron and shape glass comes mostly from burning fossil fuel. The moon has abundant aluminum ores. But how would you produce the heat required for extraction, or do anything without the combustive assistance of oxygen? Ninety-eight percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is produced by plants. Most of the sources are now dead, their energies devoted to post-living purposes.

The Internet grows by an odd noospheric process: duplication. In “Better Than Free”, Kevin Kelly makes an observation so profound and obvious that you can’t shake it once it sinks in: “The Internet is a copy machine.” As a result, the Net is turning into what Bob Frankston calls a “sea of bits”. This too is an ecosystem of sorts. Is it, like Earth’s ecosystem, a way that death makes use of life? I wonder about that too.

Anyway, the rest is here.

Getting quakes straight

September 30, 2009 in Geology, infrastructure, Journalism, Live Web, News, problems, Science, Technology, Travel | 2 comments

Quakes

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has an excellent Earthquake Center for all the earthquakes in the world, which is very handy at a time when many are happening at once, followed in some cases by tsunamis that cross seas to strike coastlines minutes to hours later.

For example, this list of earthquakes of magnitude 5 and greater shows in red both the 8.0 quake that caused tsunamis in the South Pacific, and the 7.6 quake that devastated western Sumatra and also poses a serious tsunami risk — both just in the last few hours. Tonga alone has seen thirteen aftershocks of 5.0 or greater. The Samoa Islands Region has seen twelve.

Bear in mind that the Loma Prieta Quake in 1989 was around a 7.0, and 5.0 earthquakes have caused thousands of deaths as well.

Most of us are great distances from both regions that were just hit, but we are still in position to help. One way is by getting facts straight, and also to keep fail whales from falling on lines that are bound to be congested. Hope this little bit of pointage helps.

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Same date, new sphere

September 11, 2009 in Events, Life, News, Past | 2 comments

On 9/11/2001 I had already been blogging for nearly two years. It’s interesting to see what I wrote this day, back then. Since my blog then was not on local time, my first four posts were actually the last from the day before. My first 9/11 post was this one.

A declaration of peace was my second post. Longer and more thoughtful posts came on 9/12, 9/13, 9/14, 9/16 and so on.

Kinda sad to see how many links now go nowhere, or to blogs that have since been abandoned. My blogroll on the right side of those pages has a lot of rot in it too.

In August 2007 I moved my blog here. Thanks to Dave Winer, the old blog archives live.

The Net is different too, especially around the Web. Google is the new Microsoft. Facebook is the new AOL. Twitter is the new CB radio. Much of what used to be on TV and in print have moved to the Web in new forms. Much of education too.

One year ago we were in the midst of a financial collapse. That’s ending now, maybe, sort of.

The whole world is in a transitional state, between many old institutions that aren’t yet dead and many new ones that are not yet formed. That includes Facebook and Twitter, by the way.

The attack on the World Trade Center was followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have not ended. In Iraq, which has a working government and a degree of peace, an agreeable end can be imagined. Less so in Afghanistan, which George Will, America’s top conservative columnist, thinks we should now abandon.

Terrorists have not attacked the U.S. directly again. At least not that blatantly, or to the same great effect. Interpret that any way you like.

Bonus link.

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Fire from above

September 10, 2009 in News, Photography, Travel | 1 comment

stationfire_from_above

Above is a picture of the Station Fire, taken from the plane I was riding from Santa Barbara to Denver on Monday afternoon. I believe the water body at the bottom is the San Gabriel Reservoir. It lies in the midst of the San Gabriel Mountains, most of which are in the Angeles National Forest, much of which got burned up in the last two weeks.

I didn’t see this scene myself, since I was seated on the left side of the plane, with a view of the Mojave desert. But I knew the fire was there, below the right side of the plane, which had a perfect view of the burn area. So I handed my camera over to people sitting on the right side, and they made the shots.

The fire has been burning itself out in the back country, which it was doing on Monday when that shot was taken. Current stats: 160,357 acres, 71% contained, 3,647 personnel, containment expected on Tuesday September 15th, 2009, at approximately 6:00 PM. (Yes, they’re that precise.)

Here’s my whole set of Station Fire-related images.

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Naming disasters

September 2, 2009 in Events, News, Past, problems, Science | 13 comments

Why do mainstream broadcasters keep calling that big fire north of Los Angeles “the so-called Station Fire?” You never hear “so-called Hurricane Bill” or “so-called Hurricane Erika”. Why is that?

The main reason is that hurricanes have a much better naming convention. The surnames of hurricanes are first names of humans. The first names of wildfires often make no sense to ordinary folk. Gap, Day and Station don’t call meaning to mind. As I recall the Day Fire was the second to start on Labor Day, 2006. The other fire was called Labor.

With their human names, hurricanes are personified, making them easy to follow and remember. Katrina, Andrew, Hugo and Fran leap from memory a lot quicker than “The Great Hurricane of 1938” — which happened to be a Category 5 monster. It killed hundreds of people and blew out the wind guage at the Blue Hill Observatory when a gust hit 186 miles per hour. If it had been named Lucinda, it would have persisted as one of New England’s greatest weather legends. Instead it’s like, whoa, who knew?

According to this report, fires are named by the people who fight them. I suggest to those same folks that it will be easier to fight a fire with a personified name than a locational one. Why? Fear. Residents are much more likely to get their rears in gear when “Jack” or “Martha” are coming up the canyon than when “Station” is doing the same.

Living on Borrowed Land

September 1, 2009 in Future, Geology, Ideas, infrastructure, Life, News, Past, Photography, Places, problems, Science, Technology | 14 comments

redwoods

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.

zaca

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

calpoppies

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.

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Los Angeles Wildfire Links and Coverage

August 31, 2009 in Journalism, Live Web, News, Places, problems, radio | 13 comments

mtwilsonfire1

Just arrived at my house in Santa Barbara after a long drive down from Monterey. Most of the way I listened to live coverage of the Station Fire on KNX/1070, both through the car radio (KNX has a huge signal that covers the whole southwest at night) and online over my iPhone, which was plugged into the AUX input of the radio in my rented Ford Focus (not a bad car, by the way).

Here’s KNX’s latest story, with a map.

Here is a set of mashed-up fire maps I just created, courtesy of MODIS and the U.S. Forest Service and Google Earth.

On the Live Web…

Lots of grist for (and from) the news mills there.

Among other directions, the fire is moving eastward across Mt. Wilson, which looms over Los Angeles from just north of Pasadena. Mt. Wilson is one among many points along the nearest ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains, most of which lie within the Angeles National Forest. Perhaps more significantly, it is the home to nearly all the transmitters of FM and TV stations serving the Los Angeles metro. Also Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Reports say that firefighters (two of which have died so far) are doing their best to protect the Mt. Wilson facilities, but I wonder how long they’ll stay before driving back down. The only road out to the north is the long and winding Angeles Crest Highway — which is closed and may already be burned — and Mt. Wilson Road itself, which goes west through areas colored in the map above. The LATimes says the firefighters will stay there “no matter what”.

I’ve been to Mt. Wilson a number of times, and have often shot it from the air as well. These now comprise “before” pictures of the mountain.

Here is a Bing “birds eye” view of one section of the top of Mt. Wilson. This shot shows the observatory.

This Google Map shows the parking area where I assume firefighting equipment can keep away from advancing fire.

For what little it’s worth, the five zillion channels I get on my Dish Network TV system have nothing I can find on the fire. The locals here in Santa Barbara are running network shows. CNN and HLN are covering two dead guys. CNN has Larry King interviewing Ted Kennedy, and HLN has junk news coverage of Michael Jackson’s creepy autopsy results. As a news environment, TV is a slo-mo suicide victim.

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JOHO promo

August 21, 2009 in Blogging, Fun, News | 1 comment

David Weinberger‘s latest JOHO is up. He unpacks the highlights here. One among many typically quotable nuggets: Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

Reblogging

August 21, 2009 in Blogging, Business, Ideas, News, VRM | 1 comment

Two new posts over at the ProjectVRM blog: Testing the all-tip system, and Appreciating TipJoy. Oddly, I didn’t know until after I posted the first one that TipJoy was folding.

What Abby and Ivan Kirgin did with TipJoy was great pioneering work that we can all learn from. I know it will help what we’re doing with EmanciPay and other VRM projects.

Quote du jour, and a request

August 20, 2009 in Blogging, News | 1 comment

Alan M. Dershowitz: “If it is immoral to kill an innocent fetus, how could it not be immoral to execute an innocent person?” That’s the bottom line of Dershowitz’ dissent from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in this matter here. I might dig into it if I had more time and interest, but I have neither at the moment. I will, however, respectfully request that the professor (and everybody writing about cases like this) put links in text so readers have handy citational paths back to source documents. Links are a native grace of writing on the Web, and a helpful courtesy as well. Please use them.

Fee Culture vs. Free Culture

August 15, 2009 in Berkman, Future, Ideas, Journalism, News, Politics, problems | 6 comments

Allan Gregory (a 3rd year law student and my summer intern at the ) 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.

Says here your name is Zimmerman.

August 15, 2009 in Art, Events, Life, music, News, Places | 7 comments

Suspicious white man reported in minority neighborhood:

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.

“I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” Woolley said.

I know how he feels.

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LaBrea fire grows

August 15, 2009 in Journalism, News | 2 comments

According to the latest Inciweb report, the LaBrea fire is now at close to 70,000 acres, and 10% contained. And according to the latest from Ray Ford in the Independent, the fire is “almost impossible” to contain.

Here’s the latest from MODIS, wrapped onto Google Earth, showing the fire’s advance in the direction of Santa Maria;

labrea21

Note Tepusquet Peak, which stands out in the view east from Santa Maria. Here’s what the Independent said about the area in 2007:

The canyon of Tepusquet Peak is a very high risk area, Iskow said. Running down from the peak you can see very thick brush heavily covering the canyon, and it’s obvious a fire in that area could quickly lead to trouble. About 200 homes sit in the canyon or at the bottom. The area hasn’t had a fire in about 80 years, which means the brush is ripe fuel for fire.

Says Inciweb,

Structure protection crews worked in the Tepusquet and Pine Canyon areas, and along Foothill Road in Cuyama Valley. Firefighters continue to battle the blaze with all means at their disposal including the best tools, technology and equipment available. Fire behavior conditions are challenging due to a combination of extremely dense, old vegetation, bone dry fuels, and erratic winds. Tonight, firefighters will conduct burnout operations to strengthen the fireline from Rattlesnake Canyon southeast to Horse Canyon. They will hold and mop up fireline along Sierra Madre Road and the northern portion of the Treplett fuel break. They will continue fireline construction and burnout above Cuyama Valley. Structure protection will continue tonight in the Tepusquet and Pine Canyon areas, and along Foothill Road in Cuyama Valley. An evacuation order is in effect for all of Tepusquet Canyon, from Santa Maria Mesa Road to Highway 166, all of Colson and Ruiz Canyons…

If the fire reaches Tepusquet Peak itself, here are some of the facilities at risk:

During the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara, most of the stations on Gibraltar Peak were knocked off the air when their antennas were burned up. The Jesusita Fire burned the back side of the same peak, but I don’t think any stations went off that time.

Here’s KCOY on the fire in Tepesquet Canyon.

The station also has live streaming video from Tepesquet Peak. Windows Media only, however.

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Geology vs. Weather

August 13, 2009 in Art, Blogging, Geology, Ideas, Journalism, Life, Live Web, News, radio | 13 comments

I love this:

despair_socialmedia

… and I hope the good (or evil, depending on your perspective) folks at Despair.com don’t mind my promoting their best t-shirt yet. (If it helps, I just ordered one.)

You’ll notice that blogging isn’t in the diagram (though Despair does feature it in four other purchasable forms). I bring that up because I think there is a difference between the social media in the Venn diagram and blogging, and that difference is akin to that between weather and geology.  The former have an evanescent quality. I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes my point. Not many people expect anybody, including themselves, to revisit old tweets. The four names in the diagram above are also private corporate walled gardens. Blogging itself is not. True, you can blog in a corporate walled garden, but blogging is an independent category. You can move your blog from one platform to another, archives intact. Not easy, but it can be done. More importantly, your blog is yours. That’s why I dig Dave’s Scoble, your blog still loves you post. And why in the comments I said,

FriendFeeds and Facebooks and Microsofts will come and and go. They can be bought and sold, because they’re not human. Robert is human. Companies can’t be charming and lovable. They can, sometimes, for awhile. Ben & Jerrys did. Zappos did. But they got sold. You know, like slaves.

The only publication on Earth that’s all Robert’s is his blog. That’s where his soul is, because he can’t sell it.

It was while pondering the difference between social media and blogging that I posted this tweet today:

Thanks, @dnm54 But I still feel like my posts lately have the impact of snow on water. Too wordy? Not tweety enough? Not sure.

That got some reassuring responses, several playing with the snow-and-water metaphor. That’s one I’ve used often ever since first hearing “Big Ted”, by the Incredble String Band (from their Changing Horses album), played by the great Larry Josephson on his morning show on WBAI, back in the earliest 70s. “Big Ted” was a dead horse, about which the band sang, “He’s gone like snow on the water. Good bye-eeee.”

For a long time I harbored a fantasy about writing a history of radio, titled “Snow on the Water,” because that was its self-erasing quality. It was like unrecorded conversation that way. You get meaning from it, but you don’t remember everything verbatim, for such is the nature of short-term memory. Eight seconds later you might remember what somebody said, but not exactly. Tomorrow you might remember nothing more than having talked to the person.

Now I’m thinking “snow on the water” applies to social media as well. They’re conversational in the literal sense. They’re weather within which tweets fly and fall like flakes, and disappear into the collective unconscious.

On the other hand, blogging is geology. A blog’s posts may be current and timely, and constitute one person’s contribution to conversation around a subject or two, but each post is built to last. It has a “permalink”. Over time posts accumulate like soil deposits. You can dig down through layers of time and find them. What do tweets have? Temp-o-links?

From the beginning I’ve thought of blogging as journalism in the literal sense: Blogs are journals. Yet much of traditional journalism seems to have, on the whole, not much respect for its archives on the Web. Editorial “content” scrolls behind paywalls, doesn’t keep durable URLs, or disappears completely.

Which brings me to this comment by Tom Matrullo, left under this post about advertising. It’s way too deep to leave buried there:

There is no question that advertising requires us to be in the here and now, and not in the there and then, because it seeks to influence our desires and actions. Active repression of time, history, the past is basic to most commerce and commercial speech.

But I’d go further, because this is a large and important topic. Broadcast itself as a medium tends to put the past at a distance, even when it is about the past, because it makes it into spectacle. Something we watch from our NOW, the big now of advertising and current media.

And yet further: no media are more dis-attuned to the past than news media. It is all about the next story. That one last week that was entirely wrong? Ancient history. To be current, in news-speak, is to develop a sort of targeted Alzheimer’s in a certain direction.

Maybe this is one reason why the news media — on the whole, seems to me — have embraced social media of the temporary sort while continuing to put down blogging. Yes, they’ll set up blogs for their writers, but there’s often a second-class quality to those blogs, and the blogs willl get erased after the writer leaves — or even while the writer is still there. Dan Gillmor’s blog at the San Jose Mercury-News disappeared a number of times. Now it’s gone permanently. Dan’s columns are there, if you’re willing to pay $2.95 apiece for them.

It still blows my mind that, on the Web, newspapers give away the news but charge for the olds. Why not charge for the news and give away the olds? That would be in alignment with what they do with the physical paper. People will pay a buck for today’s paper, and nothing for one three days old. In the physical world, old papers are for wrapping fish and house-breaking puppies. If papers gave every old story a true permalink, search engines would find them, could sell advertising on them, and progressively elevate the whole paper’s authority.

I think they don’t do it for two reasons. One is that they’ve always charged for access to “the morgue.” Another is that embalming old papers has always been expensive. For many decades they bound them up like books for storage in libraries. I still have three of these, each for a whole week of New York Times papers from the ’50s and ’60s. The library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill sent them out for recycling in 1975. The whole huge pile was rescued by buddies of mine who ran the recycling operation. The newspaper and the library at the time were modernizing by putting everything on microfilm. At the “Will Newspapers Survive” forum at MIT a couple years ago, I asked the panel (which included Dan Gillmor) about why papers charge for the olds and give away the news. Ellen Foley of the Wisconsin State Joural replied,

Speaking for the nation’s regional papers, one of our biggest problems is that today’s issues are all on microfilm tomorrow, not online. It would cost more than a million dollars to digitize our archives. It’s hard for me to make this argument to our publisher, who is trying to make money and make ends meet.

It’s not in the transcript, but I recall her adding something about how storing archives on disk drives was also expensive. That didn’t sit well with the audience, which knew better.

Anyway, my point is that, on the whole news organizations don’t care much about the past. They care about the present. I think social media tend to do the same thing. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Nor am I trying to elevate blogging into the Pulitzer sphere. (But hey, why not?)  I’m just trying to get my head around What’s Going On.

Here’s my thinking for now. What I write on blogs isn’t just for the short term. I also have the long term in mind. I’m making geology, not weather. Both have their places. The more durable stuff goes here.

Bonus link.

[Later...] Joe Andrieu has a thoughtful response.

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Here we burn again

August 13, 2009 in News, Travel | 2 comments

The country behind Santa Barbara is burning again. This one is the LaBrea fire, east of Santa Maria. It has grown past 36,000 acres and is 10% contained. This is far north of the fire in Santa Barbara earlier this year. Still, it’s a big one.

Here’s a mashup of MODIS data with Google Earth:

labrea_fire11

The view is toward the east. The LaBrea Fire is on the left, on the north side, and the little dots along the coast on the right are visualizations of MODIS data from the height of the Jesusita Fire earlier this year. In the foreground along the coast is Vandenberg Air Force Base, plus lots of sand dunes, advancing southeastward.

Bonus link.

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Thinking past the I-I boundary

August 13, 2009 in Berkman, Business, Cluetrain, Future, infrastructure, News, Past, Politics | 1 comment

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  and the 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.

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Filtering out coffee customers

August 8, 2009 in Business, News | 18 comments

Sez the Wall Street Journal headline, No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users — They Sit for Hours and Don’t Spend Much; Getting the Bum’s Rush in the Big Apple.

Erica Alini, writes, “…in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.” She tells stories about shops kicking customers out, among other things.

But is there really a “laptop backlash?” I’m reminded of Billy Crystal’s stories about his grandfather. Billy never knew what his grandfather sold. All he heard the old man say was, “Ve’re closed!” Telling customers to go away is an old New Yawk tradition. Is it so different at coffee shops?

I dunno. I travel a lot, use laptops in coffee shops a lot, and have never been told to leave, or even felt a hint that I’m abusing a shop’s hospitality.

Hey, if this is true, there might be a market in New York for coffee shops with plenty of wi-fi and outlets, along with space for more customers to park their tushes and get work done. Woudn’t ya think?

Tuning time and place

August 7, 2009 in Business, Fun, Ideas, infrastructure, Live Web, music, News, radio, VRM | 7 comments

In Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio, Jon Udell begins, “I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio”, but doesn’t complain about it. He hacks some solutions. First he swaps time for place:

I’ve just created a new mode for the elmcity calendar aggregator. Now instead of creating a geographical hub, which combines events from Eventful and Upcoming and events from a list of iCalendar feeds — all for one location — you can create a topical hub whose events are governed only by time, not by location.

Then he works on curation:

I spun up a new topical hub in the elmcity aggregator and started experimenting.

That ran into problems from sources. Still it was…

…great for personal use. But I’m looking for the Webjay of Net radio. And I think maybe elmcity topical hubs can help enable that.

So Jon leverages what Tony Karrer described in Second Calendar Curator Joins to Help with List of Free Webinars, and adds,

What Tony showed me is that you can also (optionally) think in terms of meta-curators, curators, feeds, and events. In this example, Tony is himself a curator, but he is also a meta-curator — that is, a collector of curators.

I’d love to see this model evolve in the realm of Net radio. If you want to join the experiment, just use any calendar program to keep track of some of your favorite recurring shows. (Again, it’s very helpful to use one that supports per-event timezones.) Then publish the shows as an iCalendar feed, and send me the URL. As the meta-curator of delicious.com/InternetRadio, as well as the curator of jonu.calendar.live.com/calendar/InternetRadio/index.html, I’ll have two options. If I like most or all of the shows you like, I can add your feed to the hub. If I only like some of the shows you like, I can cherrypick them for my feed. Either way, the aggregated results will be available as XML, as JSON, and as an iCalendar feed that can flow into calendar clients or aggregators.

Naturally there can also be other meta-curators. To become one, designate a Delicious account for the purpose, spin up your own topical hub, and tell me about it.

I really like Jon’s idea. Sometime this weekend I’ll set up what he’s talking abouthere. Or try. I’ve always found Delicious a little too labor-intensive, but then blogging in WordPress’ writing window (as I’m doing now) is a PITA too. (One of these days I’ll get my outliner working again. That’s so much easier for me.)

The new radio dial is a combination of tools and each other’s heads. Given how the Net has eliminated distance as a factor in”reception” (a rapidly antiquifying term), the new frontier is time — how we find it. Or, in radio parlance, how we tune across it to find what we want, and then listen live or off stored files, either in our own devices (podcasting) or in the cloud (on-demand).

As we develop whatever this becomes, we need to avoid the usual traps. For example, there is this tendency for developers — commercial ones, anyway — to believe that the only available paths are –

  1. Making a commodity
  2. Trapping the user

So they do the latter. That’s why we get stuff like the iTunes store, which works with only one brand of mobile devices (Apple’s), and which nearly every other phone maker now, derivatively, wants to copy. (iTunes’ radio tuner, which is nothing more than a directory, works with nothing but itself, near as I can tell. As with most of the iTunes environment, it veers far from Apple’s reputation for ease of use — in addition to being exclusive and non-interoperable.)

What Jon’s doing here is one more among many necessary steps by which control of the marketplace shifts from user-trappers to users themselves.

Speaking of which, there is plenty of user input to the new, improved, and still-improving UI on the Public Radio Player, which now finds programs as well as stations. So, for example, I’m going to be on The Conversation with Ross Reynolds today on KUOW in Seattle, taking about the new 10th Anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The show starts at noon (though my segment comes in a bit later). When I looked up “conversation” on the Player, I found Rick’s show in the list results, and went right there. This goes a long way beyond tuning the way it used to be. But it still has a long way to go.

We’ll get us there.

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An opportunity for the AP

July 29, 2009 in Berkman, Blogging, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, News, problems, VRM | 8 comments

It helps to recognize that the 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 , and the system by which readers (or listeners, or viewers) choose to pay for it we call .

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.

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Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station

July 26, 2009 in Art, Business, Future, infrastructure, Live Web, News, Places, problems, radio, VRM | 113 comments

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.

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From Z to A

July 22, 2009 in Business, Future, News, VRM | 9 comments

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.

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A good man is hard to lose

July 7, 2009 in News, Photography, Places, Quote, VRM | 21 comments

nick_givotovsky

I remember talking to Nick Givotovsky the first time at an early Internet Identity Workshop, when he pulled me aside to share some ideas, and immediately stripped my gears. The guy was as smart as they come, and articulate to an extreme equaled by few. I had to stop him every few sentences to get him to dumb it down a bit, or at least to let me catch up. Many conversations followed, in many settings. Every encounter with Nick was engaging and mind-sharpening.

We became friends — or as close as people get when they’re mutually engaged in a number of projects, and enjoy each other’s company, as well as each other’s minds and hearts. I called him “Nicky G.”

Best I can recall, Nick came to nearly every IIW, plus workshops on VRM, networking and much more. He always contributed, always brought a warm smile and good sense of humor. He was serious, but didn’t take himself too seriously. A rare combination. Also notable was Nick’s mode of engagement. He was always original, often challenging, but never hostile or obstructive. And his mind was always open, always curious, always ready to step up and participate.

As I recall, the last I saw Nick was at the IIW this past May. He left a bit early to get back to his farm in Cornwall, Connecticut. I remember him talking about this old tractor he had, and how much he enjoyed operating it. He died this last Friday after falling off (what I assume is) that tractor. More of the story is here and here. (I share those links there for the record, but they are not pleasant reading.)

Nick’s last post on one of the many lists in which he participated told the story of his older brother’s death. “I think he did it astonishingly ‘right’, if such a thing can be said of dying,” Nick wrote.

Alas, Nick died wrong. And way too young. He was just 44. He leaves his wife and two kids. Plus many shocked and saddened friends.

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El Jacko Santa Barbarbeque

July 3, 2009 in Events, Journalism, Life, News, Places, Travel | 1 comment

One of the best things about living in (or just following) Santa Barbara is reading Nick Welsh’s Angry Poodle Barbeque column each week in the Independent — one of the best free newsweeklies anywhere. This week’s column, El Corazón del Perro, is a classic. One sample:

For those of us without the heart to pursue our own dream, or even the imagination to have one, Jackson provides cold reassurance. If someone so rich, so famous, and so hugely adored could wind up so agonizingly wretched, maybe the moral of the story is that one’s bliss was never meant to be followed.

This, however, isn’t just another knock on the late Jacko. It’s a column about afterdeath effects in Santa Barbara County, which was home to Jackson through his Neverland years:

This past Tuesday, a coterie of key county executives from law enforcement, public works, fire protection, public health, planning, emergency response, and communications spent the better part of the day shuttling from one emergency meeting to the next, trying to figure out what was real and what to do about it. No less than five employees of the Sheriff’s Department spent their day fielding calls from media outlets around the world. Associated Press dispatched a reporter to stake out the County Administration Building all day. By 7 p.m., Tuesday, no actual communication had taken place between county government and the Jackson camp. Instead, Sheriff’s officials relied upon contacts they have with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for whatever vague rumors and rumblings they could get. Somehow through this opaque and osmotic chain of communication, county officials are hoping to persuade the Jackson clan to call it off, if in fact it was they who started something in the first place.

Some in the Sheriff’s Department expressed confidence that the whole thing has been an exceptionally expensive and elaborate fire drill. Personally, I like the idea that the whole thing is a big fake-out, an angry practical joke on the county that prosecuted Jackson. When Paul McCartney’s former wife, Linda McCartney, died several years ago, I remember how rumors were strategically planted that she died in Santa Barbara County. In fact, she did not. The County Coroner complained he spent so much time fielding media calls that he couldn’t get any work done. Cadavers, he said, were piling up in his coolers like firewood. Ultimately, we would discover the whole thing was an elaborate dodge so that the McCartney clan could grieve unmolested by the paparazzi. But not before Santa Barbarans — ever willing to embrace the rich and famous, even if they never lived here — held a solemn and tearful candlelight vigil at the County Courthouse’s Sunken Gardens.

Some of the worries in the piece are stale now (a Neverland funeral appears unlikely), but it’s still a good read.

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Beyond celebrity obsession

June 27, 2009 in Future, Ideas, Life, News | 33 comments

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.

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Apple control freakiness

June 16, 2009 in Art, Blogging, Business, Future, infrastructure, News, problems | 17 comments

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.

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Stations’ identification

May 29, 2009 in Berkman, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, News, problems, Science, VRM | 6 comments

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.

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Jesusita Fire update

May 9, 2009 in Gear, Geology, infrastructure, Life, News, Past, Photography, Places, problems, Science, Travel | 2 comments

jesusita_google_modis10

Where most of my earlier shots in this series were of fire detection and spread across time, the one above (and in the larger linked shot, on Flickr) is of “fire radiative power”. If you look at the whole set, you can get an idea of both intensity and spread across time. Again, these are from MODIS, which is an instrument system on satellites passing more than 700km overhead. Still, it finds stuff, and dates it. That’s why this next shot is very encouraging:

jesusita_google_modis11

It will sure spread some more, but we can see the end coming. Here’s the whole photo set.

And here’s the latest update on exactly what burned (addresses and all) from Matt Kettmann (Contact), Sam Kornell , Chris Meagher (Contact), Ben Preston (Contact), Ethan Stewart (Contact) of the Independent.

They also issue a caution:

The bad news is that the fire still threatens parts of Goleta to the west, the Painted Cave community to the north, and, to the east, parts of Santa Barbara and Montecito, where the evacuation order was just extended once again.

Those Indy folks did — and are still doing — an outstanding job, deserving of whatever rewards are coming their way. Great work by everybody else reporting on the fire as well. Kudos all around.

And great work, of course, by the firefighters. They saved the city. If you’ve ever seen a fire this big and threatening (for example, Oakland, which I did see, and which took out more than 3500 homes), you know how hard it is to stop. Around 80 homes were lost in this one. It could have been many more. If Cheltenham, or the Riviera, had gone up, and the sundowner winds kept blowing, it’s not hard to imagine losing the whole city, since the rain of flaming debris would have caused a true firestorm. From the same Indy report:

“The firefighters must have sat in every single backyard and held it off. The fire reached literally the backyards of every single one of them, but I didn’t see a single house burned up there.”

The mountains won’t be as pretty for a couple of years. But the city will also be safer. That’s the upside. 2:54pm Pacific

Here is a great map that shows all three fires in the last year, as well as good information about the ongoing Jesusita Fire.

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#JesusitaFire postpile for 9 May

May 9, 2009 in Geology, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, News, Photography, Places, problems, Travel | 2 comments

jesusita_google_modis8

(Scroll to the bottom for my latest. Not the latest, just mine.)

The shot above looks west from the eastern flank of the Jesusita fire, above Montecito.  The overlays are MODIS (the dots and squares) and GEOMAC (the red line). I think the GEOMAC data is older, but I’m not sure. Both were downloaded at about 4:42am, Pacific time. The newest detections are red and the oldest are yellow. They are from instruments on satellites and may or may not indicate major fire activity. One during the Tea Fire suggested that the fire had spread far down into the Riviera district and toward town. When I checked the spot, it turned out to have been a fire in part of a small isolated oak tree. No fire had spread to or from there.

Still, the data do show changes in the fire’s approximate perimeter over time. Step through this photoset and you can see how the fire has gone over the past few days.

Sean Trek has a way of seeing MODIS with radiative power.

It looks to me now like the next challenge, after saving lives and homes, is keeping the fire from burning for many more days or weeks across the back country. The trick here is to let the fire take nature’s course while also keeping it away from civilization. It is a significant fact that California’s state tree (the Coast Redwood) and state flower (the California Poppy) are both adapted to fire. One might also make the case that the latter is adapted to earthquakes.

I don’t doubt that if any of the three most recent fires — Gap, Tea and Jesusita — had hit fifty years ago, much of Santa Barbara would have been cremated by this morning. Since we are among more than 30,000 current evacuees, that might  have included our house too. Firefighting and team coordination have vastly improved just since the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, when more than 600 homes were lost. Experience from that fire led to many of the improvements that saved homes this past week. (For a history of Santa Barbara’s wildfires, go to Santa Barbara Outdoors, and read the remarkable series that starts here. It covers the eight fires between 1955 and 1990.)

Life everywhere is a losing game with death. We just hope that the substantive things we do and build will outlive us. In much of California, the chance that our homes will outlive us is smaller than most other places. Some homes lost in the Tea Fire had replaced homes on the same property that had burned in 1964 Coyote Fire and again in the 1977 Sycamore Fire. Among disasters that might befall homes in California, only earthquakes are more certain to occur, and in more places. Hence the higher insurance costs.

But still the graces of living here are exceptionally high. Mild, sunny weather. Clean air. Beautiful mountains and beaches. Wonderful people. Excellent university. So we do.

And every day we should thank the heroic work required of the firefighters who keep the worst of nature at bay. Posted 5:38am, Pacfic.

Meanwhile, I’m glad to see the subtitle in Gretchen Miller’s report in the Independent, Fires Burn In Canyon Near Painted Cave: Favorable Weather Conditions Keep Fire Under Control. From around 10pm last night. 6:20am

The LA Times has a story on the fire, dated 10:28pm last night.

Last night on KCLU before going to sleep I heard that the Gane House at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden was destroyed. This confirms it. 6:28am

A news conference is scheduled for 8am. Just heard that on KNX, which has done an excellent job covering the fire.

Okay, the press conference just ended. KCLU, KNX and KTYD (and, presumably, some or all of its four sister stations) all carried it. KCLU bailed before it was over. So did KNX, though they stuck it out a bit longer. Only KTYD stayed until the end. (Bravo for them.)

The news that matters is that the fire is “contained” along the northern border of Santa Barbara. Thus spake SB Fire Chief Andrew DeMizio (who always starts by spelling his name). He was glad to see “that black line” on the new Incident map. Contained does not mean put out. He had another word for that, but I forget what it was.

The language is interesting. A fire is an “indicent”. Police, fire, Red Cross and other personnel are “assets”. Lifting an evacuation order is “repopulation”. My kid just said, “I thought ‘repopulation’ was what you got after the first population has died”.

Inexcusable, if true: No questions about locations still apparently threatened. (Could be that somebody asked and I didn’t hear it.) Specifically, the only two communities up in the Santa Ynez Mountains, overlooking the city: Painted Cave and Flores Flat. I gathered from the Indy story mentioned above that Painted Cave was okay. But the only way I knew that Flores Flat survived was from a little human interest feature that KNX has been running over and over again: comments by a woman who gave advice about what to take and what to leave behind. She said she had resigned herself to losing her home in Flores Flat, but was surprised to find it had survived. Frankly, I’m amazed that Flores Flat is okay. I’ll bet the firefighters gave special attention to that one. Maybe one of the places where the DC-10 laid down some of its 12000+ gallons of fire retardant was between Flores Flat and the fire.

Flores Flat is far up Gibraltar Road, between Gibraltar Peak (where many of Santa Barbara’s FM stations radiate from, including KCLU and KTYD) and the site farther up the mountain face where hang gliders and paragliders launch toward the city when the winds are right.  From the looks of the map and overlays above, the fire movement was eastward away from Gibraltar, and up and over the crest of the ridge near Montecito Peak to the east and LaCumbre Peak to the west.

The Tea Fire surely created a fire break as well. It burned much of Gibraltar road, and up the face of Gibraltar Peak, where it roasted the antennas of KCLU and many of the other stations there. KTYD and its AM sister KTMS are located a few hundred feet above and behind there, so they survived.  To the west of there are some of the main power lines that supply the city. As I recall those lines are draped quite high, and I suppose survived the fire as it approached Gibraltar road this time. Other high power lines coming into the Goleta side of town were hurt in the Gap Fire last summer, knocking out power for much of the city at the time.

The weather is much better now. Cooler, and moist, with marine layer fog moving in off the Pacific Ocean to the south. Vari0us officials cautioned that this could change, and in fact it probably will. Typical late Spring and Summer weather is early morning fog, burning off as the day goes on. Whether hot “sundowner” winds return is still an open question, but various weather sources suggest that won’t happen. On the other hand, if the fire gets into Paradise Valley on the north side of the ridge, the story might be different. The climate there tends to be much hotter and dryer than on the Santa Barbara side of the mountains. 8:50am

We have friends in Worchester who were going to Santa Barbara to see Katy Perry’s last show, in her home town. That last link is from Noozhawk, which I’ve neglected to follow more closely. The reason is that Santa Barbara is being repopulated with a raft of new and improved media sources growing like a ring of redwood sprouts where a mighty tree has fallen. That tree is the Santa Barbara News-Press, a once fine newspaper that was (and remains) in a much better position to survive than papers in other cities that are owned by stressed public companies or private individuals with shallower pockets. The story of the News-Press’s meltdown is not yet the stuff of legend, only because it’s still going on. Kind of like a fallen tree with a few intact roots, staying alive, but barely. For more on that, just look up Wendy McCaw on Google. Or read Craig Smith. It’s his main beat. A sample:

A major fire in town didn’t stop the Santa Barbara News-Press from doing business as usual. In this case, “business as usual,” meant laying people off.

This time, the unlucky employee was Jued Martinez. He was a digital image technician for the paper, the “go-to-guy for Photoshop issues,” as he put it, working in the camera (pre-press) department for many 15 years.

He announced his own layoff via Twitter around 1:40 Thursday afternoon by saying, “Wow! I’m available for Design work now. Just got laid off from the SBNP. Feel a little better now, not worrying about it.”

To witness how retro and self-destructive the News-Press is, go to their Jesusita Fire Coverage page. Click on a story. Say, this one. You get one sentence. Then you’re told to long in. Subscribers only. Hell, even when we were subscribers, we couldn’t get in there. I’m sure it all disappears or scrolls behind a paywall after a few days in any case. Gone like snow on the water.

Except as a source of fodder about itself, the News-Press plays a self-minimized role in the local news ecology. For getting news on the fire, that includes:

  1. Twitter search for Jesustiafire or Jesusita (@latimesfires uses this search)
  2. Google News search for Jesusita (most recent)
  3. The Independent
  4. Edhat
  5. Noozhawk
  6. City2
  7. KNX
  8. KTYD
  9. KCLU
  10. KCSB

With the radio stations, I mean their streams, not their sites.

I’ll add others later (including stream addresses). Gotta go. Here’s a photo pool in the meantime. 9:33am

And here’s one last photo, courtesy of the only commenter so far on this post:

jesusita_google_modis9

Thanks, nathan. 10:19am

They’re “repopulating” at last. The worst is over. 10:48am

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Waiting for real news

May 7, 2009 in News, Places, problems | 2 comments

No tweets on #jesusitafire OR #santabarbara OR roque OR jesusita in the past three hours. That’s because it’s 5:45am in Santa Barbara right now. Not because nothing is happening. Check this scary image, from 3:25am.

I’m listening to KCLU. They did  good job last night. So did KTYD/99.9, the audio of which was substitued for the usual programing on sister stations KTMS/990 and KIST/1490.

Now it’s 6am, and KCLU only reports that three Ventura County firefighters were injured, some seriously. KTYD is taking a break from music programming to talk about what’s happening. Mostly it’s school closing.

KNX, at 6:05 has a reporter “live from the fire line.” Another at the fire command center. A story about a guy on Palomino Road (where some of our closest friends live) who did something with bush reduction that saved his house and those of neighbors. Doing correct pronunciations, too. “San Row-kee”. “La Coom-bra”. Well done.

Among the local TV stations yesterday, KSBY was the most helpful, because they had a helicopter parked a few hundred feet above the Foothill/San Roque intersection, looking for good video in the burning residential areas, that appeared to run west to east from upper San Roque/Santa Terasita to Tunnel Road. The shots I put up here were mostly from KSBY’s copter.

(Not quite oddly, KSBY is a San Luis Obispo station. SLO is a long drive over and around several mountain ranges. Over the air, KSBY’s signal is already weak where it’s walled off by the Santa Ynez mountains. But it doesn’t matter because almost nobody watches over the air TV in Santa Barbara anyway. There’s only one local English-speaking station (KEYT). If you want more TV, you get cable or satellite. KSBY is a cable station in SB.)

6:15am Pacific. KNX has a guy from Spyglass Ridge, who says all the houses on Holly Road burned, while Spyglass Ridge was spared. The fire jumped over his whole neighborhood. When a fire “jumps” it is usually by dropping burning “debris” at a distance from the fire itself. A the vertical winds in a fire can be high enough to lift burning shingles, bark, hunks of fences and whole flaming bushes, high into the sky, and drop them, still burning, up to half a mile or more away. The Oakland fire in 1991 leaped from Hiller Highlands across Temescal Lake, and two highways — 13 and 24 — to set the Piedmont district on fire. Well over 3000 homes burned in that one. It was easily the most amazing thing I have ever seen. At the height of the fire, a home was blowing up, literally exploding, every four seconds. We had friends who lost houses in that one, and not even the chimneys were standing. The heat at the center of the fire was several times that required for cremation. Cars were reduced to puddles of metal and glass. Once a fire like that gets going, “fighting” it is an optimistic verb.

This is the risk in Santa Barbara. The Cheltenham area, shown on the near side of the smoke in this shot here, is very much like Hiller Highlands and the Upper Broadway sections of Oakland, which burned in that ’91 fire. It’s a neighborhood of closely spaced homes on narrow winding roads, packed with beautiful yet highly flammable forests and landscaping. In other words, the kind of place that can go almost at once, and fast. Santa Barbara’s Riviera district is also like that. So is Barker Hill. And so were some of the regions burned by the Tea Fire.

As of right now, 6:25am, the winds are still calm. But the fire is 0% contained, and burning away on the face of the Santa Ynez mountain range that rises like a wall behind the city to nearly 4000 feet (at La Cumbre Peak). The woods here are dense with what they call “fuel”, and can be an abundant source of burning debris if the winds shift back south toward the civilization and the sea. High winds are expected later today.

So how can we keep up with news?

First, there’s Twitter. At 6:29am, the latest tweet on this search is from 3 hours ago and says

zbasset: #jesusitafire Has anyone been outside to do a visual this morning? How does it look? about 3 hours ago from web

This is actually helpful. So are any other tweets with actual reports, or links to useful information. Most of them are. Kudos to the tweeters.

It’s remarkable to see how far we’ve come since @nateritter started @sandiegofire in 2007. That showed what Twitter can do. In Santa Barbara it did much more in the Gap Fire and the Tea Fire. But now it’s mainstream. Every radio and TV station that wants to play in the clue flow has a Twitter account. The problem is, most of them are clueless in other ways, mostly because they still don’t realize that they are no longer the only lighthouses on the coast. There is an emerging ecosystem of news now, and it’s one in which everybody pariticipates. The result looks and sounds more like a trading floor than a newspaper or a radio or TV dial.

Speaking of which here’s a good list of local radio stations in Santa Barbara.

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Jesusita Fire Watch

May 6, 2009 in News, Places | 14 comments

jesusita_google_modis

We’re in Boston, watching neighborhoods near our own in Santa Barbara, burning as the Jesusita Fire spreads south out of the mountains and into town. KSBY is running a live feed from a helicopter here. The audio is on constantly, so you can hear the pilot talking with the studio when reporters aren’t.

Here are some screen captures and Google Earth views, enhanced by MODIS satellite overlays. MODIS detects heat on the ground from a satellite that passes overhead a few times per day. One of those is above. The MODIS information is from early this afternoon. No new ones have been posted since then, and it’s now 7:50pm. The fire has spread into the middle left part of the shot above. If you go here and mouse over the picture, you’ll see the area that has been burning. The fires are in patches.

Here’s a google map with lots of helpful info.

KCLU radio is running constant coverage. Listen here. Good that they fired up a good new signal on 1340am. Lots of listeners calling in right now. [Later... KTYD is now running nonstop coverage.]

Much of the town is under evacuation orders, including areas that run all the way down to State Street, which is the main drag through the middle of town. Our home is in one of the mandatory evacuation zones. We’re highly evacuated, yet wishing we were there.

The winds are clearly from the west, moving straight east, toward Mission Canyon. In the path is the Cheltenham Road area, which is hill covered with lots of foliage and lots of houses. This is an area very much like the Oakland Hills, where I watched more than 3000 homes burn in 1991.

The last house that burned on TV is west of San Roque Road and Lauro Canyon Reservoir (which appears in some of the footage). I think it’s on Santa Terasita Road, off North Ontare. I’m taking some screen shots and trying to match them with the terrain view on Google Earth. I’ll put those shots up too.

One structure I see burning appears to be on the north side of E. Alamar Avenue, behind the Cheltenham neighborhood. Not sure, though.

I’d say this is surreal, but it’s all too real, and familiar. And scary as shit.

Okay, flames on San Roque Road, above the reservoir. Spyglass Ridge Road. Maybe Palomino Road. It would be nice if the reporter or the pilot would identify the roads they’re looking at. Instead they’re talking about hitting the Elephant Bar after they land.

I also notice that the winds have stopped. There appears to be a lull. The smoke is moving in the vertical direction. This is very good. Hope it lasts.

8:13pm Pacific. Here’s a Twitter stream on the fire. Props to KCSB for that one.

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An early start to the fire season

May 5, 2009 in Journalism, News, problems | 3 comments

Nothing on Inciweb yet on the Jesusita wildland fire above Santa Barbara’s San Roque district, on the slope of the Santa Ynez mountains, very close to town. Meanwhile Twitter is all over it. Or, citizen reporters are all over Twitter. Either way, it’s the Live Web at work.

By the latest report, about 160 acres have burned. In this dry back country, however, fires can spread far and fast. So, we’re concerned.

Here’s a map of the area, with evacuation areas and other details.

Some photos from the LA Times.

The Independent, always strong in fire coverage, has a section devoted to the Jesusita fire.

Here’s Edhat’s running news.

Tweets to follow:@KTMS, @City2, @LATimesFires, @LATimesfires, @SBRedCross, @KTYDFM, @KSBY @edhat, @socalincidents, @NBCLosAngeles, @borisalves, @PlanetSantaBarb, @sbinde

A wall-o-TV-feeds.

Tags: #jesusita #jesusitafire #sbfire #sbfires

Silos End

May 1, 2009 in Business, Events, Fun, Future, Gear, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Past, problems, VRM | 16 comments

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,

There’s a Linksys cable modem I know of that has a recent firmware, and by recent I mean last year or so. Linksys wont release the firmware as they expect only the cable companies to do so. The cable companies only release it to people who bought their cable modems from them directly. So there are thousands of people putting up with bugs because they bought their modem retail and have no legitimate access to the updated firmware.

What if I pulled this firmware from a cable company owned modem and wrote these people a simple installer? Would the company sing my praises then?

The real issue here is that people frequent web boards for support because the paid phone support they get is beyond worthless. Level 1 people just read scripts and level 2 or 3 people cant release firmwares because of moronic policies. No wonder people are helping themselves. These companies should be ashamed of providing service on such a low level, not happy that someone has taken up the slack for them.

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.

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In defense of Craigslist

April 24, 2009 in Blogging, Journalism, Life, News | 16 comments

Here’s a job for the Citizen Media’s long tail: find the fist time anybody used the terms “Craigslist killer”, “Craigslist case” or “Craigslist murder”. What the effort will highlight are two issues for journalism. One is the absence of an engine that allows easy first-date or date-range search. (Unless I’m mistaken about that, which I’d be glad to be. [Later... I am.]) The other is the unfairness of turning the name of a business into an adjective that modifies the noun for a crime — essentially re-branding that business as a criminal accessory.

Why “Craigslist killer”? Well, the easy answer is that the killer apparently targeted victims he found on Craigslist, and that’s interesting. Meaning it’s kind of new and different. Murder goes digital. Hey, you don’t hear about “the phone book killer” or “the newspaper killer,” do you? (Well, actually, Craigslist has been called that too.)

My point here isn’t about how natural and easy it is to name a case “Craigslist murder”, but about what that does to Craigslist. I think it’s unfair, as well as a bummer for Craig Newmark and the rest of the Craigslist folks, even if the label is hard to avoid using.

Meanwhile, I’d love to see better chronological search on Google Blogsearch and Technorati, both of which offer it, at least for syndicated sources.

Dr. Weinberger covers this, and adjacent topics.

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Earth Dawn

April 22, 2009 in Events, News, Past, Photography, Places, Politics, problems, Science, Travel | 1 comment

It all started here.

It all started here. With Platform A: the first of thirty-some oil platforms built in the 1960s off the coast of Southern California. To anybody looking seaward from Santa Barbara, the platforms are nearly as much a fixture of the horizon as the Channel Islands beyond. The three closest, Platforms A, B and C, are just several miles out.

On January 28, 1969, Platform A had a blow-out. As much as 100,000 barrels of oil rose to the surface and spread. Had the oil been carried away from shore, the event might have been small news. But instead it gunked up the coast, ruining Santa Barbara’s harbor for a time, and treating the world to the first of many iconic visuals: tar-covered sea birds.

Long story short, Earth Day followed.

Some pictures from the time.

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Saving the Globe From its World of Hurt

April 9, 2009 in Berkman, Blogging, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, music, News, problems, VRM | 21 comments

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 (later re-named EmanciPay) 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.

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Presidential interest

April 7, 2009 in Art, Business, infrastructure, Life, News, Photography, Politics, Travel | Comments closed

garanti-obamaStephen Lewis has an excellent post from Istanbul on the occasion of President Obama’s visit to Turkey, which was completed this morning.

Steve explains, “Yes, that’s Garanti with an ‘i’ and not a double-’e', as in Garanti Bank, one of the largest banks in Turkey.  For the last two months Garanti Bank has mounted these advertisements on billboards throughout Istanbul — with text offering low interest loans set below an image looking convincingly like Barak Obama and printed in a very Islamic green.  Actually, the face is that of a local actor and Obama look-alike.  The choice of an Obama-like image for the ads might imply a guarantee of stability in a time of instability and a recognition of vox populi rather than the very real and desperate need of the US economy for low-interest capital.”

More of Steve’s thoughtful postings at his alterblog, Hak Pak Sak.

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NYTimes gets on the Cluetrain

March 13, 2009 in Journalism, News, VRM | 3 comments

http://www.nytimesconversations.com/

Very slick. You can’t link to the flashy videos, or I’d point to the one with Padma Lakshmi‘s beautiful bod. T+A, complete with cleavage. Very nice. But very Times? Hey, when your whole industry is being bulldozed off the cliff… whatever works, I guess.

Clearing up

March 11, 2009 in Berkman, News | Comments closed

Media Cloud is a Berkman project that has been in the works for a bit, and has just launched into the public space. More here.

It’s new and the folks there are looking for feedback. Enjoy.

Credit where overdue

March 4, 2009 in News, Past | 5 comments

Putting a bolder face on Google is a New York Times piece about which Reshma Kumar at WebGuild says Marissa Mayer’s Attempt To Put a Bolder Face on Google Falls Flat. One paragraph:

  Google is too busy being drunk on its own cool-aid and telling the same boring stories they’ve been pedaling for the last dozen years over and over again. Maybe some people outside the Valley still buy all this holier than thou start-up slop but it’s become tired. The company is no longer a start-up and these stories are no longer relevant. According to the article, in reviewing resumes she looks at GPAs and SATs and expresses concern over someone getting a C in a course “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.” However, despite the public facade of hiring only A students, Google has many C and D students in its midst.

I doubt I’d call a positive Times piece “falling flat”; but Reshma’s slam isn’t what caught my eye. It’s this stuff about grade point averages. I’d bet that some of Google’s best employees had bad grades in school. If I worked for Google, I’d be one of them. What I did in school has approximately zero relevance to everything I’ve done since. I’d guess that the same is true for lots of other people who have found the professional world a more productive one than the academic. (Or, in my case, have found the academic world far more friendly after 40 years away from it.)

But that’s not what made me want to write this post. Instead it was to give props to Cindy McCaffrey, Marissa Mayer’s predecessor at Google. Cindy ran corporate marketing at Google from the late 90s through the IPO in 2004. As it says here, Cindy’s approach was low-key. Long on substance and short on flash. More importantly, she was geek-friendly. In the early days, when Google was still getting its act together, I would occasionally send a note to Cindy suggesting that her inside geeks at Google needed to talk with outside geeks who were either having problems, or had some good ideas that Google could use. And good stuff would follow. This wasn’t “corporate communications” of the usual sort, but it was helpful all around. Reading these two stories reminded me of that.

Right on

February 27, 2009 in News, problems | 7 comments

John Derbyshire in The American Conservative: Limbaugh and company certainly entertain. But a steady diet of ideological comfort food is no substitute for hearty intellectual fare.

More:

  Taking the conservative project as a whole — limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad — has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

  They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations.

I was raised by, and as, a Republican. I moved left of the whole Democratic party in college (’65-’69, during the Vietnam war, which I opposed absolutely), and stayed there for another decade or more. When I moved to California in 1985 I realized that I had become an Independent, and I’ve registered that way ever since. Voted that way too.

But I never lost my interest in the well-being of the Republican party. What Derbyshire outlines as the “conservative project” sounds right to me. Not fighting abortion and immigration. Not bringing religion into government. Not meddling in people’s lives. Not spending out the wazoo. Not military adventures abroad. Not hating “Liberals” as if they were a disease.

Anyway, good piece. Hope it helps.

Bird traffic, out of control

February 24, 2009 in News, Photography, Places, Travel | 5 comments

Between flights in and out of O’Hare last Saturday, I caught this formation of geese flying overhead. Before Flight 1549, this wouldn’t have worried me.

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PBS should become the NPR of TV

February 21, 2009 in Business, Journalism, News, Places | 18 comments

I’m sitting at #ima09, at one of the last panels: “Future of Public Media News: A Vision and A Plan.” Leonard Witt is speaking right now, and has a killer proposal: turn PBS into a “news powerhouse.” His case is brief and right-on.

Newspapers aren’t the only news organizations that are faltering, he says. Local TV news is crapping out too. As with newspapers, advertising is drying up: going away or moving elsewhere. Nobody talks about it much, but your evening news has been brought to you for many years by car dealers, spending co-op money from Chevy, Toyota and the rest of them. Bottom line: the advertising model is failing too.

Meanwhile, public broadcasting is sitting on — or next to — lots of news gathering and sharing organizations, including local and regional public radio stations, and allied listeners and viewers out the wazoo. Lots of those folks are blogging and tweeting. There is a natural sybiosis between these affiliated individuals (whether or not we call them “members”) and stations. Leonard is talking about how even small staffs — one reporter per TV station, for example — can add up. And (this is critical) without the high overhead of newspapers and other commercial media.

Another thing. PBS — and public television in general — desperately needs to move beyond its good but dull and old-hat stuff. The Discovery Channels (there are six), the National Geographic Channel, the History Channel and lots of other cable channels are eating away at PBS’s viewing shares. PBS, once one of the four major TV networks, now just holds down a few notches on a “dial” that isn’t anymore, and has hundreds of other channels. And this doesn’t even count the Net, which will continue to widen in bandwidth. At some point anybody will be able to stream anything to anybody in reasonably high definintion. When that happens, all that will remain of TV “networks”, “stations” and “channels” will be their antique names. These will matter as “brands”, but their content will matter far more. People will watch what they find interesting, relevant, familiar and reliable. And, in the case of news, sometimes necessary.

So here’s an interesting and opportune coincidence: as commercial TV news continues to tank, PBS and its affiliates can leverage their standing strength in news — one substantiated by their colleagues over on the public radio dial.

PBS’ news work can expand beyond the News Hour, Frontline and Bill Moyers. PBS stations can also go into the news business and appeal to the same people who currently spend a buck or more per day on newspapers — and can spend on other news sources.

We’ve seen what’s happened already with public radio. Stations like WNYC, KPCC, WBUR, KQED and WUNC all jacked up their ratings and income by moving from eclectic to “information” programming, built around morning and evening news programs from NPR. Public radio had advantages — a “dial” of finite width, for example (with one wide end  — 88-92Mhz) carved out just for noncommercial use, plus the homogenization and downscaling of commercial competition. So, while PBS was having its lunch eaten by commercial competition, NPR was eating the lunches of its commercial competitors. (The stations listed above are at or near the top in their local markets’ ratings.)

Can PBS and its affiliates get news teeth? I think they have to. Fortunately, commercial TV news has a very soft underbelly.

Now Susanna Capelbuto from Georgia Public Broadcasting is talking about GPB Radio’s Georgia Gazette. The show does video too (on the Net). How big a stretch is it for the network, or its stations, to do that on TV too — especially since ditital TV stations can now transmit up to four program streams (each called a “station”) at the same time. Yes, the costs of production can be high, but so are the benefits.

I’m sure there will be plenty of resistance, but it’s a damn fine idea. Leonard, during the Q&A, addressing the public TV broadcasters: “You have the gravitas, you have the reputation, you have the name. You have everything you need except the will to do it.” Perhaps not quite verbatim, but close enough. That was right after telling them that the idea is too good, and too opportune, to pass up. If public television does pass it up, commercial broadcasters will get the clues. CNN is already on the case.

[later...] Nice follow-up no the whole event, including endorsement of the above, from Robert Paterson.

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Bye ‘Bai

February 17, 2009 in Future, News, Past, Places, problems, Travel | 7 comments

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

  Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives. Funny shaped towers smatter empty neighborhoods, based on designs with unsubtle, eye-catching envelopes but bland floor plans and churned out by the dozen by anonymous minions in brand name architects offices and signed by the boss, unseen, as they fly through the door. This architecture, a three dimensional solidified version of a synthesized musical jingle, consists of ever more preposterous gimmickry – an underwater, revolving, white leather fuck pad or a marina skyscraper with a product placement name that would normally only appeal to teenage boys, such as the preposterous Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower.

Canada’s Smart Immigrant Pevention Plan Draft

February 14, 2009 in News, Places, problems | 3 comments

Ars: Canadian judge: No warrant needed to see ISP logs? Specifically, “The judge said that there’s ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ when it comes to logs kept by ISPs. Canadians, watch out, because everything you do online could soon be turned into legal fodder, even without a warrant.”

Well, it certainly is, with a warrant. No shortage of those. But still, it’s one more click in the ratchet by which freedom gets squeezed and .

I suggest Gitmo

February 13, 2009 in News | 4 comments

In the NYTimes: Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit. Specifically, for $2.6 million. The sentencing judge has routed five thousand kids to the centers since 2003. The story says the judges are headed for federal prisons. I wonder which ones?

Stimulus Bill Qs

February 12, 2009 in News, problems | 18 comments

I am confused beyond endurance by whatever-the-hell is going on (or went on) with the “final Stimulus Bill”. So maybe some of ya’ll can provide some A’s to the following Qs:

  – Where can one see a copy of the final bill? How about in .html, rather than .pdf form? Earth to Newspapers (and hell, bloggers): Give us some links to some goddam hard facts on this thing. Even the @#$% New York Times story on the Plan’s passage offers no links at all to the bill. Or whatever got passed.

  – What the hell is the NTIA, really, and how is it different from the FCC? I ask because I see it all over the place, and hardly heard about it before this. I’ve read what it says at that last link, and I get the feeling I’m missing a lot. Especially politically.

  – Are there “open network provisions” in there, like Public Knowledge said yesterday? Where? What?

  – Is “open” defined in the bill?

  – How about “broadband”? Here’s a search for “broadband” at ReadTheStimulus.org; but I’m not even sure if it’s for the “final” plan. Or wtf it says, really. Take this, for example. Okay, I just found this. Not sure what to think about it, though.

  – Is the Internet treated as infrastructure in any serious way by this thing? I look up “Internet” at ReadTheStimulus.org and find eleven results. Over half say something like “The secretary shall post on the Internet…”

I like this Washington Post graphic, even though it looks like a map of a boondoggle to me.

My big concern, of course, is with the Internet, which desperately needs to be liberated from the telecom Regulatorium. This “package” isn’t the right place to do that, I’m sure. But liberation needs to be done. Far more economic prosperity will arise form Internet build-out that’s free from regulatory encumberances that date back to the railroad age.

Which brings me to another question.

  – How would you deregulate the Internet? I know lots of folks (myself included, in some ways) who would like to see the Net’s virtues (openness, neutrality, whatever) protected one way or another. My question here is about what we’d get rid of. And not just at the federal level. I mean at the state, county and municipal level as well. What I’d like to see is a wide open field where anybody can get into building out the Net’s physical and wireless infrastructure in any way that does not make our varioius commons tragic.

My short answer to that one is to get rid of the whole concept of “telecom services” and “information services” — and even of “services”, in the laws that govern how we connect.

Which brings me to Freedom to Connect next month in Washington. I’ve been to most of them, and I wouldn’t miss it. The theme this year is “The Emerging Internet Economy”. I submit that more will emerge with less regulation than with more of it — especially if “more” is done inside the old telecom regime.

Bonus link. Comments included.

Just asking

February 10, 2009 in News, Politics, Uncategorized | 6 comments

Has President Obama made a single appointment that says “change”?

Here’s his latest.

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The New York Mash

February 4, 2009 in Blogging, Blogroll, Journalism, News | 3 comments

Just noticed Blogrunner, which looks like a mash of Technorati and Google News. The brief About:

  Blogrunner is a news aggregator from The New York Times that monitors articles and blog posts and tracks news stories as they develop across the Web.

Below that is a link to its blog. Here’s the FAQ.

Drill, Maybe, Drill

February 1, 2009 in Business, Future, Geology, News, Past, Places, Science, Travel | 5 comments

This LA Times editorial says,

…when many of Santa Barbara’s most determined anti-drilling activists teamed up to back a deal that would allow an oil company to drill under state waters off the city’s coast, it was a jaw-dropping moment.
Just as surprising, given the deal’s powerful backing, was its collapse Thursday, when the State Lands Commission rejected it on a 2-1 vote. The failure shows that, despite high oil prices that turned “Drill, baby, drill” into a Republican mantra last year, it remains phenomenally difficult to expand drilling in California...
Under the publicly disclosed terms of the deal, Plains Exploration & Production Co., which owns a platform in federal waters just beyond the three-mile limit controlled by the state, would have drilled several wells from the platform into oil reserves on state property. In return, it would have closed that platform, three others it operates off Santa Barbara and two onshore processing facilities by 2022 and donated 4,000 acres of land for preservation. Over the life of the project, the state would have collected up to $5 billion in tax revenues.
Bizarrely, the company and the environmental groups that were parties to the bargain kept the rest of its terms confidential. It is not unheard of for environmentalists to sell out the public interest for political or financial reasons, and no elected official should ever approve a secret deal that affects public resources. The company finally announced that it would disclose the full agreement during Thursday’s Lands Commission hearing, but that was months too late.

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.

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Updike at rest

January 29, 2009 in Art, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Past | 4 comments

John Updike was a writer of astonishing gifts, discipline and scope. The sum of his work — novels, essays, poetry, criticism — is enormous. Besides his sixty-one books (including 23 novels), for more han half a century he was a reliably frequent byline in The New Yorker. Sourcing the magazine, USA today says Updike contributed “862 pieces, including 154 poems, 170 short stories and 327 book reviews.” His latest book, The Widows of Eastwick, came out last October in hardcover and still graces tables by the front doors of bookstores. I’ve picked it up and read parts of it several times, declining to buy it because I’d rather read its prequel, The Witches of Eastwick, first. I’ll guess I’ve read at least half of his novels, but neither of those two.

I picked Widows up again last night while paying a visit to Kepler’s Bookstore with JP Rangaswami (a book lover of the first water) and Martin Geddes. As usual with books in stores, I opened to several sections at random, just to sample the writing. And, as always with Updike, I could hardly stop, no matter where I turned. His descriptive precision, the forward motion of his dialogue, the troubled yet charming depth of his characters — blew my mind, and made me grateful that he was with us so long. And yet I’m also pissed that he’s gone at just seventy-six years old, and in apparent full vitality before a lung cancer diagnosis in November.

He died in a hospice, not far from where we live in Massacusetts. Both these facts bothered me. A hospice is so anticlimactic, so plotless. (Did he write in those last two months? Did he record his thoughts in full knowledge that he was due to expire soon? He must have. I cannot believe otherwise. He wrote too well and long about death.) And I had always wanted to meet him.

How odd that lung cancer is what got him. The assumption, naturally, is that he was a lifelong smoker, like so many in his generation, especially writers. The picture in his Wikipedia entry, from 1955, when he was twenty-three years old, shows a skinny kid with a thoughtful expression, sitting on a bench, a burned-down cigarette between the fingers of his left hand. In Self Consciousness, a memoir published in 1989, he recalls with amazement that he had been a smoker as a young man, and how he barely remembered what that was like.

And yet he could describe anything, regardless of whether not he had experienced it first-hand. In The Coup and Brazil, he inhabited the minds of casually murderous protagonists utterly unlike himself — or most readers — with a veracity bright as daylight.

Most of Updike’s characters had strong libidos, or so it seems in retrospect. Of all his sexual passages, one line stands out: “Masturbation! Thou saving grace note upon the baffled chord of self.” From A Month of Sundays. (I got that quote here. I remembered it as “… thou grace note on the tortured chord of self.” Not sure which is right.)

The depth of his understanding probed constantly and sometimes creepily toward the absolute. Look at the opening of The Widows of Eastwick. The first paragraph ends with “Wicked methods make weak products. Satan counterfeits creation, yes, but with inferior goods.” And then continues, “Alexandra, the oldest in age, the broadest in body, and the nearest in character to normal, generous-spirited humanity, was the first to become a widow. Her instinct, as with so many a wife suddenly liberated into solitude, was to travel — as if the world at large, by way of flimsy boarding cards and tedious airport delays and the faint but undeniable risk of flight in a time of rising fuel costs, airline bankruptcy, suicidal terrorists, and accumulating metal fatigue, could be compelled to yield the fruitful aggravation of having a mate.”

Strunk and White advise us to put the emphatic words at the ends of sentences, and to make “every word tell.”

Goods. Mate.

Omit needless words, they also advise. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Ah, but Shakespeare was no hack, and Rembrandt was no cartoonist. If the machine does complex work, you build a complex machine. Updike, trained originally as an artist, did that. His books, his stories, his paragraphs, were all machines of precision and force. And yet they were not machines. They were, and remain, living things.

I only have two literary heroes, both Johns. Updike is one. McPhee is another. Both are, or were, about the same age. And fixtures at The New Yorker. I hope to read the rest of both before I rest myself. I’ve read eighteen of McPhee’s twenty-nine books, including all the most recent ten.

As with Updike, I read McPhee partly for the joy of running great writing through my mind, and partly because I always feel improved and enlarged by it.

It’s a small thing, but I still hold a small hope of one day meeting McPhee. Meeting Updike will have to wait, hopefully for as long as possible.

Here’s a collection of brief posts about Updike by other writers, at The New Yorker. Great stuff.

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Toward post-largesse journalism

January 26, 2009 in Blogging, Journalism, News | Comments closed

My sources in Santa Barbara tell me “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times”, a new documentary by Peter Jones, is an amazing piece of work — partly because of its quality as a picture, but especially because of its subject: the brilliant and dysfunctional Otis and Chandler families, who did more to build Los Angeles than Hollywood or even William Mulholland (he of Chinatown and Cadillac Desert).

They did it with a newspaper: The Los Angeles Times.

I’ll leave the details up to Lisa Knox Burns (in Edhat), The Independent, Patrick Goldstein (of the LATimes), Collier Grimm, Kevin Roderick, the California Documentary Project, Nikki Finke, Kristopher Tapley, ThompsonOnHollywood (in Variety) and others.

What matters is that the story of a great newspaper was the story of a family.

So also are the stories of nearly all the great newspapers in the U.S. You can’t visit the subject of daily newspaper journalism without paying respect, if not homage, to the Ochs and Sulzbergers, the Chandlers, the Annenbergs, the Loebs, the McCormicks, the Gannetts, the Grahams, the Knights, the McClatchys, the Storkes.

These people at their best weren’t in it just for the money, or even the influence (though both were serious motivators). They were in it for the good of their cities. They carried out a public service. They ran great civic institutions that served both public and private interests.

Most of those families have sold out or died off. A few remain, but the gig is mostly up. Papers will remain, in some form, but as companions to new civic institutions, also with charters that combine public responsibilities and private ambitions. These institutions are only starting to be built.

Newspaper Families were creatures of the Industrial Age during a peak that lasted so long we might call it a plateau. As that age phases out, and the Information Age phases in, it’s fair to say we won’t be seeing the likes of these families again. Certainly not as a class, or a category.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that we can’t leave the role of these families out of any consideration, much less study, of the Great Institution of Daily Journalism. They were involved.

What does

January 26, 2009 in Ideas, News | 9 comments

– this graphic mean? That we do better under Democrats (Reagan excepted) than Republicans? That the times are reflected in their leaders? Neither? Both?

I gotta say that I’m torn. My inner Libertarian agrees with Peter Schiff, who saw the crash coming, warned everybody about it, says –

  We have an economy that’s based on the same principles as Bernie Madoff’s investments… It’s a Ponzi economy. It’s not real. We don’t save and we don’t produce anything anymore. We simply borrow from the rest of the world, and then we spend it. We’ve had a giant party. We bought all these plasma TVs and iPods. We remodeled our houses and took vacations. But you know what? The bills are coming in.”

He’s right. We partied on easy credit, and we’ve got a helluva hangover. But what about Schiff’s plans? As Fortune puts it (at the last link), those are — Shrink the government radically, cancel all bailouts immediately, take plenty of tough medicine, and let the free market do its job – however harsh it may be for, say, autoworkers in the meantime.

Meanwhile my inner Democrat (fwiw, I’m a registered Independent) can’t dismiss Paul Krugman either. Krugman wants Obama to cancel the tax cuts and spend more. Some dismiss Krugman’s Nobel prize, but I think it makes him worth listening to.

One of my concerns about Big Spending by the feds is what inducements to corruption it produces. Will there be earmarks out the wazoo? Betcha. (Hillary is no longer in a position to produce them, but she was sure good at it. Check progress on that last link here.)

Anyway, just wanted to blab that.

Pixel pi

January 26, 2009 in Berkman, Blogging, News, Photography | 2 comments

Check out David Bergman‘s 1,474-Megapixel GigaPan picture of the 2 gigaperson presidential inauguration last Tuesday. You can all but look in the noses of the people there.

What impresses me most is how many cameras with extremely long lenses were there. Yow. Canon and Nikon were cleaning up.

Hat tip to Sheila Lennon.

Imagine if Barack had Tourette’s

January 26, 2009 in Art, Events, Fun, News, Politics | 1 comment

Filling out this…

yielded this:

Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech
My fellow Americans, today is a fibrous day. You have shown the world that “hope” is not just another word for “chair”, and that “change” is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually annihilate.

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces unavoidable and level challenges like never before. Our economy is spiffy. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for monsters. Our healthcare system is plapulous. If your ulvula is sick and you don’t have insurance, you might as well call a sheet-metal worker. And America’s image overseas is tarnished like a trocar newspaper. But pressing together we can right this ship, and set a course for Kansas.

Finally, I must thank my sideways family, my flatulent campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank munchkins for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of drooling the American people. Without your flaccid efforts, none of this would have been possible.

Post your brilliant speech in our community message forum and it might get featured on Atom.com.

Your flappage may vary.

Hat tip to Adriana Lukas.

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Pressing for respect

January 23, 2009 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News, problems | 7 comments

The Columbia Journalism Review whines,

WhiteHouse.gov presents itself as a kind of social networking portal in which citizens can essentially “friend” the government–and it frames the ensuing dialogue as one that takes place directly between the people and the government. The press, it suggests by way of omission, need not be part of the exchange. One hopes–hey, one even dares to assume–that the conspicuous absence of the press from Obama’s transparency agenda is due to his conclusion that the democratic vitality of the Fourth Estate is so obvious as to render explanation or elucidation of that fact unnecessary.

Chris Anderson (he of Wired?) replies,

I don’t understand: why should “the press” get any special mention on the Obama website? And by “the press” you mean who: Talking Points Memo, the New York Times, Wonkette? The DC Independent Media Center? Or what?
And really, I’m sorry, this is just dumb: “created the impression that its members were, to him, a buzzing nuisance. Instead of the voice of the people.” When has “the press” ever been the “voice of the people,” and by what institutional arrogance does it CONTINUE to give this role to itself? Perhaps the press would be better off it started seeing itself as a particular category of content producers (a noble, unique and important one to be sure) and drop all this voice of the people foolishness. You might make a better argument about why Obama should mention you on his website.

Jay Rosen begins his comments with Please stop beating up on the techno-utopian strawman. It’s not that useful... and then pulls some of the particulars apart, concluding,

The “calm down digital utopians, let CJR sort the rhetoric from reality” tone is very familiar and we don’t really expect you to quit it, even though it would do you a world of good. What I found new and intriguing about this article is the “direct democracy” thing. I think I have this right: just as the United States is not a direct democracy but a republic, where the principle of self-government is modified by the rule of representatives who distill popular sentiment into wise decisions, so it is in the information sphere: “direct” access to information about the executive branch may appeal to a few digital utopians out there (don’t you wish they would calm down?) but it is not what the United States is about; rather, we need representative access, via the skeptical, curious, unhysterical and professional press, which sorts through the information and asks the wise questions. Do I have that right?
Good luck with that concept. May we see it elaborated, please?

I also like Dave Winer’s construcive critique of .

Bonus link. Another. And another. (Could Blackberry have better product placement anywhere? Ever? Yow.)

Spottings

January 22, 2009 in News, Photography | 3 comments

My aerial photo of Giants Stadium, aka The Meadowlands, where both the Giants and the Jets play, made WikiNews Shorts today.

On inspiration

January 22, 2009 in Ideas, News | 5 comments

Of Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric, Gene Koo writes,

  Whatever the accolades for the speech that Obama delivered at his inauguration, it seems it won’t generate a singular sound bite as in JFK’s “Ask not…” or FDR’s “Fear itself” (Many of the major papers picked themes, rather than pluck quotes, although a few took to “hope over fear”). Pundits have hailed Obama as a gifted orator and skilled speechwriter, but generally overlook one aspect of his speaking that distinguishes it from his peers’: its complex structure resists distillation down to a single quotable phrase.

David Weinberger agrees, sort of, about Obama’s Inaugural speech yesterday. His summary:

  …there was nothing I would take out. And there was also, therefore, little I would excerpt in pursuit of a soundbyte.

I thought “Gee, that speech was full of one-liners”… we gather because we have chosen hope over fear…we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals…our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please…The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense…you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you…the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve…know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy…we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist…we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds…we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect…there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task…

Seems to me Obama is the master of both dialectic and rhetoric, wringing the irony out of conflicting sympathies, speaking in veracities that transcend differences and move listeners to new sympathies and fresh actions. So even when one can’t recall one-liners there are phrases that stand out in paragraphs that are models of dialectical and rhetorical perfection. For example,

  As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

In that one the phrase was “whisper though the ages.”

As with many — perhaps most — of us, I come from a family with a rich history of military service. My father fought in World War II. (In fact he had already served and re-enlisted at age 36 — so strong was his sense of a need to serve.) My sister and only sibling is a retired Commander in the U.S. Navy. Three young male relatives served in Iraq. Yet I marched, spoke and protested against the Vietnam war, and war itself. I still think the will to war is a vast flaw in human character. Yet I could not be more moved and proud of the selfless will to risk and sacrifice that characterizes military service, the fealty of soldiers to “meaning in something greater than themselves” and “this spirit that must inhabit us all.”

Even if Obama is pointedly vague, one knows there is Truth in what he says there. There is transcendence.

I am in awe of the fact that this country has elected this man, and yet I feel less led by him than inspired to constructive action. For once we have a political leader who isn’t closing doors for the sake of ideology or factionalism. This is a good and amazing time.

On the other head, The Daily Show take. This too.

Peelings

January 21, 2009 in Art, Events, Journalism, Life, News, Places, Politics, problems, Travel | Comments closed

The Onion on the Inauguration:

Funny shit.

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Happy New Country

January 20, 2009 in Art, Blogging, Events, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Places, Politics | 12 comments

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
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.

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Eight years’ differences

January 18, 2009 in Art, News, Past | Comments closed

In the Atlantic. Tweeted by Werner Vogels.

In the likely event of a water landing

January 18, 2009 in Art, Blogroll, News, Past, Science, Travel | 9 comments

Good, tight story of what happened on . In the International Herald Tribune.

By the way, somewhere in this weekend’s Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor sings a delightful tribute to the crew of flight 1549. Heard it live yesterday. The show is running again today on many public stations. Public Radio Fan has times and stations. If you have an iPhone, catch it on your free Public Radio Tuner.

Speaking of which, our first planned VRM feature for the tuner is a “listen log”, to answer “What was that?” questions and to provide fun data that’s yours (not anybody else’s) to do with what you wish.

If you have other features you’d like, on this tuner or on future ones (not just on the iPhone — that’s just where you’ll see it first), let us know.

New England Blues

January 18, 2009 in Fun, infrastructure, Life, News, Places, problems, Travel | 1 comment

The soft white silence is settling outside on a cold winter mornng. I’m guessing about two inches so far, atop the eight or so that remain from last week’s storm.

The above is from Intellicast, my fave new online weather toy.

Talked to a friend in San Diego last night. He was taking a break from playing tennis. Back home in Santa Barbara, it’s been in the 80s lately. At one point a couple days ago, the temperature difference between there and here was close to 80 degrees.

Still, this is a kind of loveliness I grew up with. There’s still a 10 year old inside me who sees this and wants to go outside, go sledding down the hill, build snow forts and not do a damn thing that isn’t fun.

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Following USA1549

January 16, 2009 in Events, infrastructure, Life, News, Photography, problems, Travel | 3 comments

Afterposts on (more popularly, just )…

Bio of the pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger, aka “Sully”, the captain of flight USA1549 yesterday afternoon. Via TheSmokingGun.

Charles Bremer, pilot and editor for the London Times, on the flight. Includes interesting background, such as why Airbuses can float “in the unlikely event of a water landing”. Expect Boeing planes to be fitted retrofitted soon with the same feature. Hat tip to Andrew Leyden for that one. (Note: This comment says I have my facts wrong here, and offers corrective details. Interesting stuff. Go read it.)

Airbus 320 fact sheet. Includes interesting safety record info.

Sully’s Facebook fan page.

Nice series of photos and a graphic from one commenter on this FlightAware discussion page.

USA1549 down but not out

January 15, 2009 in News | 11 comments

That’s almost as far as it got.

From Twitter search:

From FlightAware:

FLIGHTAWARE BREAKING NEWS

US Airways flight #1549 (an Airbus A320) from New York, NY (LGA) to Charlotte, NC (CLT) crashed into the Hudson River today (January 15, 2009) around 3:30pm EST, less than six minutes after takeoff. The maximum altitude was 3200 feet before the aircraft began a descent into the water.

Plane appears intact. Helicopters and ferries responding. FAA is reporting all passengers are out of the plane, and a secondary search is underway.

Early unconfirmed reports are that the aircraft hit a flock of geese. CNN reports that a pilot of the airliner reported a bird strike to air traffic control after takeoff.

Developing.

Related Links

  • FlightAware Discussion Forums: Airliner Down

    • If FlightAware calls the flight USA1549, that’s how I’m going to call and tag it.

    More as I can write about it, sitting here at a pharmacy in Cambridge. As of now, it appears that all passengers and crew got out alive. Amazing. Some great piloting there. And a sobering lesson in listening to pre-flight safety pitches.

    Reallhy helps that the plane stayed intact (from what we can see). Amazing job landing — actually, ditching — the thing. Wow.

    5pm, on FlightAware:

    USA logo
    USA1549 (web site) (all flights)
    US Airways
    Aircraft Airbus A320 (twin-jet) (A320/Q)
    Origin La Guardia (KLGA)
    Destination Charlotte/Douglas Intl (KCLT)
    Other flights between these airports
    Route BIGGY J75 GVE LYH SUDSY3 (Decode)
    Date Thursday, Jan 15, 2009
    Duration 1 hours 44 minutes
    Progress
    11 minutes left
    1 hour 32 minutes
    Status En Route (No recent position)
    Scheduled Actual/Estimated
    Departure 03:04PM EST 03:26PM EST
    Arrival 04:38PM EST 05:10PM EST
    Speed 455 kts 153 kts
    Altitude 36000 feet descending 300 feet

    Want to get that down before it scrolls away.

    How long before video of the plane landing, shot from a ferry or shore, shows up on the tubes?

    From a FlightAware post, ship number 106 (N106US, Airbus A320-214, delivered August 2, 1999)

    Jumping in the subway now. More later.

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    Too late. Just go ahead with it.

    January 13, 2009 in Business, Events, Future, Gear, infrastructure, News, Places, problems, Science | 15 comments

    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.

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    All of Fame

    January 13, 2009 in News | 2 comments

    So Jim Rice made the hall of fame after fifteen years of falling short in the voting. Here’s more from a report on .

    Rice was a “borderline” candidate, a sub-obvious selection. There are a lot of those. Among those I’ve cared about (and there are few), Brett Butler comes to mind. I cared about Brett because he started his pro career in 1980 with my minor league team, the Durham Bulls. (Yes, that Duham Bulls, years before the movie was made.) He was too good to stay with an A-league (lowest in the farm caste) team, so he skipped AA Hampton and went straight to Richmond and played AAA for a short while before the Atlanta Braves brought him up as a leadoff batter. His career continued for 16 years, with the Indians, Giants, Dodgers and Mets. He was a great fielder and one of those reliable leadoff guys who scatters ten fouls then hits a single. His career batting average was .290, but during his best years he stayed within a few points of .300. (His top year was .311, with the Indians.) He also had 2,375 hits and 558 stolen bases. And he was a quotable guy. One line I remember was, “Jeff Leonard is a good player having a great year. Will Clark is a great baseball player.” It was true, too.

    Anyway, I actually met another borderline player when I was a kid visiting my cousins in North Carolina. I think I was about nine years old when this older guy sits down next to me in my cousins’ back yard and says, “You like baseball?” It was a tough question, because I liked the game, but couldn’t play it for shit. I could hit and run well enough, but in my one summer in Little League I did something to my shoulder that limited my ability to throw the ball a long way.

    “Yes,” I said.

    “What’s your favorite team?”

    “The Dodgers.” Which were still in Brooklyn then. My father was a Dodger fan, and it pissed us both off hugely when they left town. Although the Mets later made up for the loss.

    “What about the Yankees.”

    “I hate the Yankees.”

    “You know who Babe Ruth is?”

    “Sure.”

    “How many home runs did he hit?”

    “Sixty.”

    “Do you know who pitched his 60th home run?”

    “No.”

    “I did.”

    The old dude was Tom Zachary, who in fact had sold the land I was sitting on to my cousins’ family in the early 50s. Tom still lived next door, in fact.

    I guess he wasn’t borderline, since he lost more games than he won. But he had a long and good career, and was a fine source of baseball stories.

    Of course, there’s only one I remember.

    At least he’s in the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.

    Faustian bargaining

    January 12, 2009 in Berkman, Business, infrastructure, News, Places, Politics, problems, Travel | 5 comments

    Lots of folks in China get around the Great Chinese Firewall by using circumvention tools. But at what risk? That’s one of the biggest questions raised by Hal Roberts in this post here.

    Seems the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIFC, which offers this laudable PR…

    1. GIF Offers China-Based Reporters Software to Break Through Internet Blockade(2008-08-02)
    2. Testimony of GIFC in the US Senate Hearing on Global Internet Freedom (2008-05-20)
    3. GIF Defeats Another Wave of Internet Censorship (2007-11-11)
    4. Burmese Found Virtual Underground Railroad to Escape Internet (2007-10-09)

    … is also selling users up who-knows-what rivers. At least that’s what Hal finds when he checks the FAQ at the Edoors Ranking Service, which lets you browse the “top anti-censorship sites”. The FAQ begins,

    Q: Who is the owner of this service?
    A: This service was developed by World’s Gate, Inc. with help from other Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) partners.

    Q: Where did you get the raw data for the analysis?
    A: The raw data came from the server log of GIFC member companies. Right now, data from three of the five tools of GIFC (DynaWeb, GPass, and FirePhoenix) are included for analysis.

    Which sounds okay, so long as the data used is of the aggregate sort. In other words, as long as it’s not personal.

    Alas, there is this smoking gun, pointed right at the heads of DynaWeb, GPass and FirePhoenix users:

    Q: I am interested in more detailed and in-depth visit data. Are they available?
    A: Yes, we can generate custom reports that cover different levels of details for your purposes, based on a fee. But data that can be used to identify a specific user are considered confidential and not shared with third parties unless you pass our strict screening test. Please contact us if you have such a need.

    That means they track browsing data of individual users, and sell it. Hal adds,

    …the data about circumventing users is much more sensitive than the data about most ISP users. These are the histories of users browsing sites that are not only blocked (and therefore mostly sensitive in one way or another) but blocked by an authoritarian country with an active policy and practice of persecuting dissidents. The mere act of anyone, let alone projects proclaiming themselves for internet freedom, storing this data is very bad practice. Any data that is stored can be potentially be shared or stolen. The best way to make sure that dangerous data like this does not get into the wrong hands is not to store it in the first place.

    But these projects are not only storing the data. They are actively offering to sell it. None of the projects has anything like a privacy policy that I can find, and none of them provides any notice anywhere on the site or during the installation process that the project will be tracking and selling user browsing activity.* But all of the sites have deceptive language…

    I’m sure what these companies are after is advertising money from companies wanting to “target” individuals personally. That’s what it smells like to me.

    We live in a time when personalized advertising is legitimized on the supply side. (It has no demand side, other than the media who get paid to place it.) Worse, there’s a kind of gold rush going on. Even in a crapped economy, a torrent of money is flowing into online advertising of all kinds, including the “personalized” sort. No surprise that companies in the business of fighting great evils rationalize the committing of lesser ones. I’m sure they do it it the usual way: It’s just advertsing! And it’s personalized, so it’s good for you!

    Ah, but what happens if one of those advertisers is a front for the Chinese governent, looking for dissidents to jail — or worse? If you’re one of those (or anybody) would you trust the “strict screening test” at Edoors Ranking Service?’

    Me either.

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    Sad news

    January 9, 2009 in News | 1 comment

    Rest in peace Roland Piquepaille is the final post on Roland’s blog. It’s by Larry Digman, who also posted notices for Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant when those two also passed. My sympathies to Larry as well.

    I barely knew Roland. Our paths crossed from time to time. (Such as here.) But he was a fellow journalist and blogger and another temporary visitor to our lush planet. He was two years older than me: just 62.

    My best to his family and friends.

    Getting serious

    January 9, 2009 in Blogging, Ideas, News | 1 comment

    I love Dave Winer’s new apporach to high-substance/reduced noise tweeting. I say more about that in Screw popularity. Just make yourself useful.

    Also, I’m on one short list for Surgeon General.

    Flying higher

    January 5, 2009 in Fun, Life, News, Science, Travel, Uncategorized | 1 comment

    I may be wrong, but I’ll betting that Esther Dyson is already the most frequent flyer on Earth.

    Now she’s looking to fly at higher altitudes.

    Here’s the latest on her Edventure site:

    UPDATE: I’m currently living in Star City outside Moscow, training to be a cosmonaut as backup to Charles Simonyi. His flight launches March 25. For details of my EDventures, see the LINKS for Hpost and FS blog. (I’m cross-posting.)

    And here is her latest at the Flight School blog. Plus an earlier post about committed to blogging as well. Among other things. Read around. Many links to follow.

    Hat tip to Chris Locke.

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    Risingstone

    January 5, 2009 in News, Places, problems, Science, Travel | 2 comments

    Fears over earthquake ‘swarm’ at Yellowstone National Park says TimesOnline. (That’s the London one.) In a report on the same development, David Isenberg begins,

      The local (Cody WY) newspaper says that there’s “no indication the park’s famous caldera is likely to erupt.” But in Honolulu, where the reporters know something about volcanos, the paper tells a different story under the headline, Quake swarm at Yellowstone may signal blast.

    This wouldn’t be a Mount St. Helens. This could be much bigger. More at Yellowstone Caldera, the B Bar Blog, and Time.

    Op-ed vs. Ed

    January 3, 2009 in Blogging, Journalism, News, problems | 10 comments

    The first I heard about Mike Connell and his plane crash was in a tweet that pointed to Rove’s IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify, by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in Truthout. The original is here at Alternet.

    So I went looking for more at Google News. All I got were more blogs. Nearly every item currently on top in a Google News search for “Mike Connell” crash is a blog source. And all of it has a political axe to grind. The Facts are buried in there, but to find them you have to get past writers’ talk radio biases.

    Why aren’t newspapers listed? Two reasons, near as I can guess. One is that the papers’ stories don’t get many inbound links, and fail at PageRank (which I presume plays a role at Google News). The other is that the stories are no longer there for the linking.

    The crash happened near Akron. It also appears from an archive search that the Akron Beacon Journal had some plain-facts coverage of Connell’s plane crash,; but those are archived behind a paywall now. Not helpful. Searching the Cleveland Plain Dealer isn’t any help either.

    Newspaper folks have a legitimate gripe against blogging: that it’s much more of a partisan op-ed practice than a reportorial one. (Hell, I’m op-eding right now.) But papers aren’t doing themselves any favors by continuing to hide one of their best weapons in the war against reader attrition: archives. Also called “morgues”, most of these deep and helpful resources are still “monetized” only by direct payment, and invisible to Google and other search engines.

    Newspaper Archives/Indexes/Morgues is the Library of Congress’ listing of deep newspaper resources. The top item, U.S. News Archives on the Web, is maintained by the excellent Ibiblio.org, and details a depressing picture. Many papers are listed. “Cost” is a column heading, and many have entries such as “Searching is available to all for free, but only registered subscribers can retrieve articles” or “$2.95 per article with multiple-article pricing options available, articles published within the last seven days are available through the site’s search engine for free”. Many also say “free” (or the likes of “free registration is required to access the free archives”). But most still require registration, or are just plain lame.

    But you can find some stuff. Here’s a first report on the Connell crash in the Kentucky Post. Cincinnati.com has this. There I found that Connell ran NewMedia Communications. Its index page (that last link) is now a memorial.

    I’m not going to keep digging, because I have too much else to do. But my long-standing recommendation to papers still stands: open the archives. Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Leave bad money on the table and go for depth and relevance. Those are aces in your hand. And hell, sell advertising in the archives too. You’ll make far more money that way than by shaking down readers for $2.95 per item: a price that prevents far more demand than it satisfies.

    Bonus link, just because Sheila’s first-rate as both a journalist and a blogger.

    Beyond mediation

    December 30, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News | Comments closed

    We are all media now, right? That’s what we, the mediating, tell ourselves. (Or some of us, anyway.) But what if that’s not how we feel about it? What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called “data” or “information” but rather to feed hungry minds? That’s different.

    Michael Polanyi* calls that hunger our heuristic passions:

      Scientists — that is, creative scientists — spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passoin. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem tat I have once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different. I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and discovery.

    Polanyi was a scientist before he took up philosophy. But his lesson applies to all of us who inform purposefully — rather than just mediate — because it recognizes natures of inquiry and influence that far exceed mediation alone. Even The Media aren’t just conduits. Newspapers and magazines have institutional imperatives of the same mind-enlarging sort.

    Back in 2003 I wrote, “Blogging is about making and changing minds… about scaffolding new and better understandings of one subject or another”. Jay Rosen ran with that, adding that blogging “is an inconclusive act”.

    It’s with this in mind that I read through John Bracken‘s rundown of 2008′s Most Influential Writing About Media. Lots of great stuff I missed, or would want to visit again.

    Earlier this morning I answered a call for advice from a friend at a major newspaper. This led me to revisit the “ten helpful clues” I blogged in October 2006, and expanded slightly in March 2007. I’m not sure if this had any influence, but it’s encouraging to seeing nearly all ten suggestions followed, at least to some degree. (I knew the ice had truly thawed when the LA Times hired superblogger Tony Pierce, who now also tweets.)

    Two that stand out as unfinished business: 8) Uncomplicate your websites, and 10) Publish Rivers of News. These two are becoming essential now that Apple will be selling iPhones through Wal-Mart. Nothing from a paper loads faster or says more in less time than a news river. (Here’s more from Dave, whose innovation it is.)

    There are “mobile” versions from some papers. The Washington Post’s, for example, is well suited for mobiles, and may qualify as rivers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the iPhone defaults to http://ww2.ajcmobile.com, which is a much better way to read the paper, even in a full-sized browser, than the paper’s main page, which has the curretly customary spread of clutter — especially advertising. (Although the AJC kindly puts the advertising below front page editorial, rather than crowding editorial within acres of advertising.) My old home-county paper, the Bergen Record, is NorthJersey.com online, and has an awful ad that peels down a corner of the front page to reveal a pitch for VW. This makes me dislike both the site and VW. Color me gone.

    Anyway, I’m still encouraged. Progress is being made. And I have a feeling that the current economic downturn will make it move faster.

    * Forgive me: as an undergrad philosophy major Polanyi was about all we studied — or that I remember, anyway. Classmates Stephen Lewis and Tom Brown stuck with the discipline and remember far more.

    Bonus link.

    Tweet for peace

    December 30, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News | 1 comment

    Sez here Israeli Consulate to host Twitter Press Conference on Gaza. I learned that from Gilad Lotan‘s helpful compilation of perspectives at Global Voices on Israel’s Gaza Operation.

    Management wall

    December 27, 2008 in News, Photography | 9 comments

    I love this video.

    Beyond unhelpful partisanship

    December 22, 2008 in Ideas, News | 5 comments

    A pause, in the midst of the day’s third and longest flight delay, to note that David Weinberger has a wise and helpful piece about the Rick Warren matter at NPR. Dig it.

    The Volcano of Video 3.0

    December 20, 2008 in Future, Ideas, News, Past, problems | 8 comments

    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.

    Energy into Energy

    December 19, 2008 in News, problems | 2 comments

    A friend close to What’s Happening in several industries, plus the Obama Transition Team, tells me all the action is around Energy. It isn’t just that everybody’s Going Green. It’s just recognizing that everything infrastructural we talk about these days, from rebuilding bridges to waste management to the auto industry bailout, involves recognizing that what we’ve been doing since we replaced horses with cars has about run its course, and that it’s actually a Good Thing that the economy is grinding to a near-halt, forcing not only a reassessment of many formerly given assumptions, but that new ideas are springing up where large failures are being buldozed aside.

    It is with this in mind that we should welcome posts such as Transition Team Weighing Blockbuster Housing and Stimulus Proposal, at SolveClimate. See what you think.

    The Splinternet

    December 16, 2008 in Art, Blogging, Business, infrastructure, Life, News, Places, Politics, problems, Travel | 17 comments

    Stephen Lewis has made a decades-long study of both the charms and absurdities of national and ethnic legacies. His most recent essay on the matter, Apple’s iTunes, NPR, Barriers to Giving, and the “Appliancing” of National Boundaries, unpacks the growing distance between the ideals of the Internet and the realities of dysfunctional nationalisms, and the failures of the former to transcend the latter.
    He begins by describing his frustrations at trying to obtain podcasts of This American Life while overseas:

    As it does with its iPhone, Apple “appliances” its services to geopolitical strictures inherited from the pre-Internet age and to a jingoistic concept of national identity quite contrary to the expansive spirit of This American Life and to the “worldwide” as in Worldwide Web. Podcasts of This American Life are available for purchase and download via iTunes only from IP addresses within the boundaries of the United States. Also, even within the US, Apple does not accept for payment credit cards issued by overseas banks. Last, even when listeners from within the US attempts a purchase a credit card issued by a US bank, Apple will not sell them podcasts if their iTunes Stores accounts were originally registered from abroad.

    By jigsawing its services to fit national boundaries, Apple fragments the efficacy and global scope of the internet and denies NPR broader listenership, international impact, and potential revenues. By outsourcing exclusive sales of podcasts of the This American Life to Apple’s iTunes Store, NPR denies the benefits and insights of listenership and the pleasure of contributing to the support of Public Radio to Americans living and working abroad, not to mention citizens of all other countries.

    Meanwhile, you can hear This American Life for free over the Net on hundreds of streams from the U.S. based public radio stations to which NPR wholesales the program for the stations to sell to listeners (who contribute on a voluntary basis), making the restrictions even more strange. Steve continues:

    The Internet — in its role as prime infrastructure for the formation of community and conveyance of the information, entertainment, knowledge and transactions — is intangible and without physical location.  However, the infrastructure that supports it is quite physical, an ad hoc non-purpose-built amalgam of fiber, copper, and wireless  strung together, enabled, and animated by protocols.  By resting on a “borrowed” infrastructure, the Internet has inherited the “gatekeepers” that own and control, charge for, and regulate these legacy elements – telecom operators and service providers, cable TV companies, governmental authorities, etc.).  Such organizations still carve up the world according geopolitical entities and borders defined between the late-eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth and gerrymander services and access accordingly.  Apparently, so does Apple.  Apple’s method of “appliancing” country-by-country reinforces anachronistic borders and undermines the potential of the internet to transcend past divisions.

    Steve also spends a lot of time in Turkey, a country where his own blog (the one I’m quoting here) gets blocked along with every other blog bearing the .wordpress domain name. Lately YouTube and Blogger have also been blocked. (For more on who blocks what, visit the Open Internet Initiative.)

    These sites and services are easy for governments to block because they’re clustered and silo’d. Yet on the Internet these clusters and silos, once big enough, take on the character of countries. In this New York Times piece, Tim Wu says. “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king”. Talk about retro.

    Steve continues,

    This has turned Google, a private company with no accountability to any constituency, into a negotiating partner of national governments whose laws or policies do not  reflect or respect the ethical stance claimed in Google’s own slogan.  Thus, Google now functions on a diplomatic level with the ability and clout to forge country-by-country compromises affecting internet activity and the free flow of information and opinion, Turkey’s YouTube and Blogger ban not least among them.

    Well, Google does have accountability to its customers, most of which are advertisers. Which makes the whole thing even more complicated.

    Meanwhile the promise of the Net continues to be undermined not only by wacky forms of counterproductive protectionism, but by our own faith in “clouds” that can often act more like solids than gasses.

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    Nothing happening here. Move along.

    December 15, 2008 in Business, Journalism, News, Politics, problems | 13 comments

    So the Wall Street Journal runs Google Wants Its Own Fast Track on the Web, by Vinesh Kumar and Christopher Rhoads. It’s dated today, but hit the Web yesterday. Among other things it says,

    Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

    At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same — nobody is supposed to jump the line.

    I declined to post on this yesterday because I suspected that this was simply a matter of edge caching: locating services as close to users as possible, to minimize network latencies and maximize accessibility. Akamai‘s whole business is based on this kind of thing. Much of what we now call the “cloud” — including conveniences provided by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others — are back-end utilities that benefit from relative proximity to users. It’s all part of what Nick Carr calls The Big Switch.

    As Richard Whitt of Google puts it here,

    Edge caching is a common practice used by ISPs and application and content providers in order to improve the end user experience. Companies like Akamai, Limelight, and Amazon’s Cloudfront provide local caching services, and broadband providers typically utilize caching as part of what are known as content distribution networks (CDNs). Google and many other Internet companies also deploy servers of their own around the world.

    By bringing YouTube videos and other content physically closer to end users, site operators can improve page load times for videos and Web pages. In addition, these solutions help broadband providers by minimizing the need to send traffic outside of their networks and reducing congestion on the Internet’s backbones. In fact, caching represents one type of innovative network practice encouraged by the open Internet.

    Google has offered to “colocate” caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities; this reduces the provider’s bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn’t have to be transmitted multiple times. We’ve always said that broadband providers can engage in activities like colocation and caching, so long as they do so on a non-discriminatory basis.

    All of Google’s colocation agreements with ISPs — which we’ve done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache — are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers’ connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.

    But there is a political side to this. The WSJ is playing the Gotcha! game here, “catching” Google jumping “the line” across which its postion on Net Neutrality is compromised. According to Whitt, it’s not.

    Net Neutrality as a topic is complex and politically charged. One can argue with Google’s position on the topic. But I don’t believe one can argue that edge caching deals are a compromise of that position, simply because these deals are nothing new, and do nothing to squeeze other companies out of doing the same kind of thing (so long as Google doesn’t make the deals exclusive, which it says it’s not doing).

    Hat tip to my colleague Steve Schultze, who is on top of this stuff far more than I am.

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    Yo!Yo!

    December 12, 2008 in Blogroll, News, Past | 1 comment

    Lessig returns to Harvard. Local souces confirm. Heres the tweet. Watch the blog for more. (Here it is.) Overheard among the locals: Aslan is on the move.

    Coming to our senseless

    December 7, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    The New Hacker is a nice segment in On The Media featuring wisdom from Chris Soghoian, a fellow Berkman Center fellow. Chris’s main point: by the lights of the Lori Drew decision, you’re a hacker if you violate any terms of service, because that’s essentially what the jury decided.

    TOS (terms of service) are silly messes in any case and need to be unscrewed.

    Speaking of which, Chris has two blog posts worthy of piontage, both along the same unscrewy lines: DMCA exemptions desired to hack iPhones, DVDs and Harvard team: Let consumers hack abandonware. Check ‘em out.

    House cremation revisited

    December 6, 2008 in Events, Journalism, Life, News, Past, Places, problems | Comments closed

    Nothing, I hope, will ever impress me as much as the Oakland firrestorm of October 20, 1991. At its peak a house was blowing up ever four seconds.  Hiller Highlands, a dome of land the looks straight west at San Francisco across the length of the Bay Bridge — one of the most desirable views in the entire world — was obliterated. The fire was so aggressive, so overwhelming, that at least one fire truck had to be abandoned.  The fire lobbed so much burning debris in its path that it leaped over two highways — 24 and 13 — and the Temescal Reservoir, to bring devastation to Oakland’s Piedmont section as well.

    Close to 4000 residences (including houses and apartments) were burned in that one, in an area not much more than a mile across. I was on the Palo Alto Red Cross board at the time, and among those brought in to check out the devastation a day or two after the fire was out. Houses were erased by it. Cars were melted into puddles. Square holes in concrete, with puddles of metal around them, marked where deck timbers had stood. For some of the dead, there was no sign. Heat at the center of the fire passed 6000°, several times that required for cremation.

    I’ve written about this before. I’m writing about it again (and again) because the subject is, well, close to home for me. We were in the evacuation area for the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara last month, and thoughts about how close it came — for the whole city –  still give me chills.  I was reminded again of the devastation by this Gigapan photo from West Mountain Drive. And revisiting this remarkable Google Map by grizzlehizzle. If you want an example of citizen journalism at its best, this is one fine example — from somebody who declines to say who they are, exactly.

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    Principles before politics

    December 3, 2008 in Ideas, News | 6 comments

    Phil Windley, in The Conservative View on Guantanamo: “…a position consistent with basic conservative philosophy would argue for human rights and due process — not against it.”

    It’s good that thoughtful conservatives like Phil are examining what went wrong with an administration that turned out to be conservative in label and loyalty, but not in principle. Looking forward to more of that.

    Bonus Quote, by Thomas Paine, arguing amidst the French Revolution against the execution of King Louis XVI: “An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Via Harry Lewis.

    Long Tail vs. Wrong Tale

    December 2, 2008 in Future, Geology, News | 2 comments

    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,

      This fear is exactly backwards. During a terrorist attack — during any crisis situation, actually — the one thing people can do is exchange information. It helps people, calms people, and actually reduces the thing the terrorists are trying to achieve: terror. Yes, there are specific movie-plot scenarios where certain public pronouncements might help the terrorists, but those are rare. I would much rather err on the side of more information, more openness, and more communication.

    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:

      From his terrace on Colaba Causeway in south Mumbai, Arun Shanbhag saw the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel burn. He saw ambulances leave the Nariman House. And he recorded every move on the Internet.

      Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed — the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons — and uploaded photos to his personal blog.

      Mr. Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until Thursday, but now he knows that is exactly what he was doing. “I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag said in an e-mail message on Saturday morning.

      The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

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

    Toward actually interactive governance

    December 2, 2008 in Ideas, News | 3 comments

    has some principles for (our government-in-waiting). I just signed the petition.

    Mostly I’d like documents to be in .html or .txt, instead of .doc and .pdf, or worse. That would be a great start.

    A black & white flag in the evening sky

    December 1, 2008 in Art, Fun, News, Science | 4 comments

    My son found the perfect way to interrupt my absolute concentration on work this evening: by pointing out that the Moon, Venus and Jupiter were forming a jewel-box of an arrangement in the evening sky. And sure enough, they were. So I took a bunch of shots, of which I kept the two that comprise this set here.

    If you’re in the West, somewhere amidst the Pacific or the Far East this evening, you’ll see it too.

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    Unexpected but inevitable pops

    November 29, 2008 in Future, News, Past | 13 comments

    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.

    Obituaries on hold

    November 26, 2008 in News | 3 comments

    Shel Holtz lists all the techs whose reported deaths are still exaggerated. Hat tip to Zane Safrit.

    The government crash

    November 26, 2008 in News, problems | 8 comments

    The amazing thing about crashes is that you can see them coming. They’re not surprises like earthquakes or meteor impacts. A sure sign of their approach is too much speculative lending, which contributes to the boom that sets up the bust. We saw it in housing in the 70s and 80s, which led to the S&L crisis, and again in the 00s. We’ve seen it over and over in tech, most famously with the dot-com crash.

    Now we’re about to see the U.S. government crash, for the same reason.

    According to Bloomberg (which ought to know),

      The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

      The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

    That’s trillion. With a tr.

    Our debtors won’t be able to pay most of it back. Nor do we expect it to be.

    And we can’t pay it back, unless we print all the money we need, or do the electronic equivalent.

    Which will turn the dollar into the peso. Or worse.

    What comes after that — or even during that — I hate to think about.

    Or so it seems to me, on a cold Wednesday morning. Hope I’m wrong.

    Meanwhile I would like to see more transparency than we’ve seen so far. Lack of it is the other story in the Bloomberg piece. Scary reading.

    Hat tip to Dave for the pointer.

    Rebooting everything

    November 24, 2008 in News | 5 comments

    Things really are going from bad to worse.

    Trees do not grow to the sky.

    True for countries as well as companies.

    Bonus exchange.

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    SourceForce

    November 24, 2008 in Events, Ideas, Journalism, News, Past, Politics | 2 comments

    I just posted The Open Source Force Behind the Obama Campaign over at Linux Journal. I wrote it in August for the November issue, which would come out in time for the election. But it was too long for the magazine, and too off-topic as well. So we shelved it, and planned to put it on the website after the election.

    Originally I was going to update it; but after noodling around with that for awhile, and not quite getting it the way I wanted it, I realized it was more interesting as a piece of history: a snapshot in time. So that’s what I just put up there, adding only an introduction.

    In going through this process, one thing that surpised me was how much I wrote about the Dean Campaign back in ’03-04. Since the Obama Campaign was what Britt Blaser calls “Dean done right”, you could say I had started covering the Obama campaign more than four years ago.

    And maybe I was unintentionally influencing it as well.

    In digging around for old stuff, I ran across Gary Wolf’s How the Internet Invented Howard Dean, in the January ’04 issue of Wired. One sidebar is The Howard Dean Reading List: How a bunch of books about social networking rebooted the Democratic system. Among those six is The Cluetrain Manifesto. So perhaps by that thin thread I can claim grand-paternity to Obama’s success.

    Though not as credibly as, say, David Weinberger, who actually advised the Dean campaign. David, who is quoted in the Wired piece, not only co-wrote Cluetrain, but sole-authored Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which is another book on the Howard Dean reading list.

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    Toward the end of the “social” bubble

    November 20, 2008 in Business, Ideas, News | 1 comment

    In VRM is Personal, I say this…

    “Social” is a bubble. Trust me on this. I urge all consultants on “social ______” (fill in the blank) to make hay while the sun shines. Even as the current depression deepens, lots of companies are starting to realize that this “social” thing is hot stuff and they need to get hip to Twitter and the rest of it. (Just ask the Motrin folks.)

    And it is hot. But much of that heat is relative to its absence in other areas. “Social” has sucked a lot of oxygen out of the online conversational room.

    Meanwhile, here’s the challenge: make the Net personal. Make relationships personal. Equip individuals with tools of independence and engagement. That’s what VRM is about.

    … and go on. Read the rest there.

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    Because I don’t have to do SEO! Yay!

    November 18, 2008 in News, problems, VRM | 3 comments

    This makes me glad I don’t have advertising on this blog.

    Collateral damage?

    November 18, 2008 in News | 5 comments

    Ever notice how many car ads you see on the evening news? On sports broadcasts? (Between the ones for beer and “erectile dysfunction” relief — nice promotional symbiosis there.) How much of that is Detroit money? How much of that money will go away, whether or not Detroit gets bailed out? And will Asian and European car makers spend enough to take up the slack?

    Just wondering.

    In any case, watch for commercial broadcasting to take more hits.

    Tea Fire aftermath

    November 16, 2008 in Blogging, News, Photography, Places, VRM | 11 comments

    Before:

    After:

    I just put up a gallery of shots I took as the sun was going down today, and the evacuation barricades were lifted — at least from some of the Tea Fire burn area.

    The aerial shot above is from the excellent Live Search Maps. If you want to look around, the top shot is in this view here.

    Most of my shots were after the sun went down, so they’re not the best. But they reveal some of what went on at the western edge of the fire perimeter.

    Most of the houses north of Sheffield Reservoir (which is now buried beneath a park) were spared. But many along Gibraltar, El Cielito and West Mountain Road (such as the one above, a beautiful house with a view across a pool and Parma Park) were burned. It wrenched my heart to see residents visiting some of these homes. They weren’t all “mansions”, as the out-of-town media called them. Many were not even especially upscale. But most were beautiful, and all were in a beautiful setting. And they were homes. They contained the lives of their residents. Lives that will have to start over in many ways.

    We know people who lost homes here. Our hearts go out to them.

    One thing that amazed me was how good a job the firefighters did protecting many homes in this area. One official said it would have been reasonable to expect to lose 500 or more homes in a fire like this one.

    I head back to the place our kid calls “alt.home” or “shift_home” in Boston tomorrow. Meanwhile I am appreciating every minute I’m here.

    Meanwhile, here’s a thankful shout-out to the firefighters who did their best to save what they could. Which happens to be the rest of Santa Barbara.

    Bonus pic: Here’s exactly the same area, after the Sycamore Canyon fire in 1977.

    [Later...] I’m on a pit stop at the Starbucks Coffee & Reggae Disco in King City, where the music is so loud that people go outside to talk on their cell phones. Just did that myself.

    It was weird to hit SCAN on the rental car radio and have it stop at 87.7, where KSBY/Channel 6 in San Luis Obispo was running a live press conference on the Tea Fire from Santa Barbara. I stayed with it until the signal gave out around San Ardo. Meanwhile, here’s what I picked up that matters: Homes were lost on the folowing roads:

    • Coyote Road
    • Coyote Circle
    • East Mountain Drive
    • West Mountain Drive
    • El Cielito
    • Gibraltar Road
    • Las Alturas Road
    • Orizaba Road
    • Orizaba Lane
    • Conejo Road
    • Stanwood Road
    • Sycamore Canyon Road
    • Ealand Place (not sure, but I think so)
    • Mt. Calvary Road (including the Monastery and Retreat Center)
    • Westmont Road/Circle Drive (not clear about this, but I believe so)

    They said 210 structures were lost. More than 5000 homes were evacuated across a large area outside the fire perimeter, ours among them.

    Only residents with government-issued IDs will be let into the main burn areas: Mountain Road, Conejo, Coyote, a few others.

    Okay, hitting the road again. Next stop, SFO. Then BOS and back to work.

    [Later...] I’m at SFO now. No time to say more than to look at this map, this City 2.0 summary, and these images and headlines.

    Oh, and look at this. It’s the same scene after the 1977 Sycamore Fire. Some home sites have burned three times: In the 1964 Coyote Fire, the Sycamore Fire, and now the Tea Fire.

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    Santa Barbara Fire update

    November 15, 2008 in Life, News, problems | 5 comments

    Well, the Tea Fire has been upstaged by the Sylmar Fire. (Both links are to LA Times stories. Do LA Times stories still drift behind a paywall after a week? Not sure. If so, I’ll change them to more permanent pages later.) Here’s the latest I’ve heard from KCLU radio…

    • The official toll of burned structures is now 111, although the real number is likely higher than 150.
    • There are still small ground fires to put out along the north side of Mission Ridge Road, and that’s what’s keeping the evacuation roadblocks up.
    • The fire is officially 40% contained.
    • Officials are hoping to lift evacuation notices by the end of the day.

    Noozhawk says the number may be as high as 200. Here’s more.

    I’m heads-down, finishing a major writing assignment, and won’t be revisiting fire matters until later today. Meanwhile it’s clear that the Tea Fire is in the mopping-up stage, as the life-rebuilding stage has barely begun for hundreds of people here.

    A friend just called and said that the barricades are still up, but the cops there also said they expected some areas to be opened within an hour. If you’re in an evacuated area, check with SB County Fire or Montecito Fire.

    Other links: fire.ca.gov on Tea Fire, Edhat news, Noozhawk news, SB Independent news, City 2.0 bulletin board… Here are some pictures of the Westmont campus. Amazed it wasn’t much worse.

    More later. (Including the pictures I just put up.)

    [Later...] Back home. Other parts of town are still barricaded, but ours isn’t. I’m at my desk now, getting to work.

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    What’s Happened vs. What’s Happening

    November 14, 2008 in Events, Journalism, News, Places, problems, Travel | 22 comments

    The fire in Santa Barbara is officially called the Tea Incident, because it started near (or at) a (or the) tea house, on Mountain Road in Montecito. (Here? Ah, no, here.)

    There are lots of good places to see what’s happening. One of the best is this Google Map. KEYT, Edhat, the Independent, Noozhawk and others are helpful. Inciweb has nothing so far, perhaps because the Tea Incident is not yet an official wildfire. It’s usually very helpful once it gets rolling on a fire. And the MODIS maps are great. That’s a screenshot of one, above.

    It’s also a little too interesting that temperatures will be as high as 90° today (unusually hot for here) with strong winds from the northeast. Which will be bad, if any of the fire is still going. Some of it will be, but it’s clear that this is not a rolling conflagration like the Oakland fire in 1990 or the San Diego fire last year. Watching the Montecito and Santa Barbara fire chiefs and Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum in a press conference right now. The phrases “damage assessment” and “mopping up” are being used. Also “narrow window of opportunity” to contain the fire.

    So right now the top thing people want to know is, Which houses have burned down? Can we be exact about what has burned? Saying “over a hundred homes” gives us a quantity of nothing.

    If anybody has something exact — streets and neighborhoods, if not addresses — let us know in the comments below. Meanwhile I’ll be headed out shortly to check things out, or at least to sit at a coffee shop and hang out with concerned and/or evacuated neighbors.

    [Not much later...] The County Sherrif is on now, and giving specifics. The Mount Calvary Retreat House and Monastery is completely distroyed. (A beautiful place, and a terrible loss.) Areas where many homes burned: Las Canoas, East Mountain Drive, Gibraltar Road, Scofield Park. Mostly inside a triangle between Westmont Collage, the East Riviera and St. Mary’s. (By Rattlesnake Canyon.) Over 100 homes lost, but many also saved.

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    Getting past telecom

    November 10, 2008 in Ideas, News | 8 comments

    While unscrewing bad Internet policy probably isn’t top priority for the Administration-in-Waiting, it’s pretty high up there for me, and for quite a few other ‘Net obsessives out there.

    In fact, I heard through the grapevine that the Obama transition team was looking for some Big Input to the Internet policy mill, due today.

    A couple weeks back I floated FORWARD WITH FIBER: An Infrastructure Investment Plan for the New Administration. It’s a kind of Interstate Highway proposal, audacious in two respcts: 1) it proposes spending a few hundred billion on capacious fiber-based infrastructure that reaches everybody, or close enough; 2) It embraces rather than excludes the carriers that are already in the middle of this thing.

    Regardless of what we do, we must liberate the Net (including the carriers) from telecom reguation. It’s too new, too different, and too important to be shackled by the boat-anchors of the 1934 and 1996 telecom acts — and by addenda to those acts, even if they are meant to improve existing law on behalf of the Net.

    The Net needs a Declaration of Independence. John Perry Barlow’s (on the day the ’96 act passed) was inspiring in its day (and still rings true), but now we need something on which new policy can be built: policy that respects not only the freedom and openness of the Net, but of the markets that grow on the Net’s infrastructure.

    The madness of man

    November 8, 2008 in Business, Future, Health, Ideas, Life, News, Past, problems | 8 comments

    (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.

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    Yes in deed

    November 7, 2008 in News | 6 comments

    Phil Windley: no battle plan survives contact with the enemy & no campaign survives contact with governing

    Good point. In the next two months the Obama transition team needs to separate the campaign chaff from the governance wheat, the pandering from the policy. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

    Speaking Truth to Palaver

    November 5, 2008 in Art, News | 5 comments

    The Onion: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress. An excerpt:

      Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change…

      Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama’s victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

    Quite the contrast from last January, when the Onion reported that bullshit would be the most important issue in the election. How time fries.

    The Leader

    November 5, 2008 in Events, Future, Ideas, Life, News, Places, Politics | 13 comments

    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.

    The Mountaintop

    November 5, 2008 in Events, Future, Life, News, Past, Places, Politics, Uncategorized, VRM | 11 comments

    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.

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    Ahead of time

    November 4, 2008 in Blogging, Events, Life, News, Politics | 2 comments

    I hate to sleep through history, but that’s the plan. I’m sitting here in a hotel in London at 10:20pm GMT with a connection too slow for video and barely fast enough for audio. Meaningful results won’t be coming in here until about 3am, which is when I’ll get up and try not to listen too closely while I get some overdue work done. Then at 6am I’ll join some locals and ex-pats at a pub nearby to celebrate the Obama victory.

    I’m expecting by that time the U.S. media will be calling it a landslide, and then exercizing all the superlatives that come with such an unprecedented candidate, campaign, movement and promise.

    And they’ll be right.

    Look at the size of the crowds, the length of the lines. No ‘fence to John McCain, but he’s not making that happen. This is Something Else. This is the movie that’s real. This is the moment. The turning point.

    Enjoy.

    And see ya ’round the bend.

    They oughta know

    November 4, 2008 in Blogging, News | 1 comment

    Fox News:

    A recently released report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion contains a chapter entitled “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter,” which expresses concern over the increasing use of Twitter by political and religious groups, the AFP reported.

    “Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

    “Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the Army report said.

    Here’s Fox’s Tweet feed.

    Hat tip to Tom Watson.

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    What actually happened to Sidekick?

    October 31, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Journalism, Life, News, Past, Places, problems | 1 comment

    Several days ago I posted RIP, Sidekick, which lamented the passing of our favorite section of the Boston Globe. As part of the Globe’s redesign, it got rid of Sidekick and added a new section — a tabloid insert like Sidekick had been — called “G”.

    As I had recalled, Sidekick was localized. After reading Ron Newman’s comment to that post, which asked gently “Are you sure…?” I have to say that I’m not. I just checked with my wife, who said that the things she liked best about the Sidekick were its features and format; and that it was not localized, but addressed all of Boston.

    Yet I still recall some localization. But again, I don’t know.

    A search of Globe archives for “Sidekick” yields results that suggest it was. The first result is titled “News in brief: Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville news in brief“. Most of the stuff that follows, however, is Boston regional, rather than addressed to those of us north of the Charles. Several of the pieces are by Meredith Goldstein, who is still writing for the paper.

    So I’m sending her an email to ask the same question I’ll put to the rest of ya’ll who live around Boston and pay attention to these things: What went away with Sidekick? Or did nothing go away, and can the pieces still be found in G or elsewhere in the paper? Also, What has the Globe done to increase or decrease local coverage? By local I mean regions within the paper’s coverage area. As Ron points out, there is still a “Northwest” section that runs twice per week. I don’t believe that’s changed, but I also don’t know.

    And, as I re-discover (while wiping egg off my face), knowing beats believing: Journalism 101.

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    Conservative rundown

    October 30, 2008 in Ideas, News, Past, Politics | 5 comments

    Interesting to read the “18 conservatives, libertarians, and independent thinkers” gathered bu The American Conservative. The current cover, The Right Choice, begins,

    This election offers particularly dismal prospects for conservatives: the Senate’s most liberal member versus a Republican who combines the worst policies of George W. Bush with an erratic temper and a thinly veiled contempt for the Right. No third-party candidate has been able to break past the margins to mount an insurgent campaign.
    Given these impoverished alternatives, no easy consensus emerges…

    Then, the roster, how they will vote, and some excerpts –

    Peter Brimelow, Nobody:
    I would write in Baldwin, except that most states make that almost as difficult as getting on the ballot and don’t always count write-in votes anyway.
    Oh, and Obama and Whatshisname? I’m indifferent. I don’t think President Obama will dare push an amnesty through because the Republicans would oppose it, whereas enough stupid Republicans will fall in line behind a McCain amnesty to give the Democrats bipartisan cover. But at least a McCain presidency would make it clear even to Republican loyalists what Pat Buchanan concluded in 2000: there is no solution for America but a new party.
    Reid Buckley, McCain:
    Loyalty, I suppose…
    I am plenty mad at the Republican Party and would enjoy watching the entire double-talking leadership and its unctuous apparatus throughout the states fried in oil. I still disagree with maverick McCain plenty on the issues, and every time he says “my friends,” I wince almost as wretchedly as when George W. Bush ends his sentences with that awful moue of his upper lip, producing a smirk which in turn suggests a revolting fullness of self-satisfaction…
    Barack Obama, on the other hand, for all his muddy shifting with the political winds, has made his vision clear, and it is doctrinaire Democratic left-wing socialism and therefore too depressing for words. I hew to the belief that he is also a decent man and probably politically more savvy than John McCain. He may learn. He may be knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus. But I can’t vote for the prospect of Obama’s education. So I vote McCain. Unlike the Beltway snobs (an insular pathology that now defines the East Coast from Bangor, Maine to Key West), I place my trust in Sarah Palin. Dadgummit, by golly, she speaks the American language of the plains and the frontier. I trust it, and her.
    John Patrick Diggins, Obama:
    Republicans have no trouble losing a war and calling it a victory, and some of them are voting for McCain for that reason. Obama, in contrast, is stuck with a war he opposed, and politics may force him to stay the course. Still, I prefer the professor to the warrior. McCain claims he is thinking only about the good of the country, then chooses as his running mate a gun-happy huntress who supported the Alaskan independence movement, which advocates secession from the United States. No wonder she is idolized by those who disdain the very federal government that built the Alaskan Highway. As Orwell observed, those receiving benefits always hate the benefactor.
    Rod Dreher, Nobody:
    As both a conservative and a Republican, I confess that we deserve to lose this year. We have governed badly and have earned the wrath of voters, who will learn in due course how inadequate the nostrums of liberal Democrats are to the crisis of our times. If I cannot in good faith cast a vote against the Bush years by voting for Obama, I can at least do so by withholding my vote from McCain.
    Francis Fukayama, Obama:
    I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.
    Kara Hopkins, McCain:
    When John McCain appears on screen, all vacant grin and Eeyore cadence, I reach for the mute button. I hate his wars. I don’t trust his maverick pose. When he says “my friends,” he doesn’t mean me. But I am voting for him.
    Call it damage control.
    Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Obama:
    Without doubt, my decision to vote for Barack Obama for president began when I watched his televised speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004. Today on the cold page of the computer printout, it loses something. Outside of the electrifying moment of his delivery, the speech contains less than I remembered. But what is there explains the reverberations in so many parts of my inherited mental and moral universe.
    Leonard Liggio, Barr:
    In the presidential contest, the Libertarian Party is the clear choice for opponents of the Paulson plan and the government policies that precipitated the crash.
    Daniel McCarthy, Paul:
    I’m writing in Ron Paul for president and Barry Goldwater Jr. for vice president. Why agonize over whether Barr or Baldwin is the better constitutionalist, when you can cast your ballot for the very best? A vote for Paul is an endorsement of all he has accomplished (and might yet achieve) and a rejection of the often honorable but never effective course of the third parties.
    Scott McConnell, Obama:
    I’m voting for Obama. While he doesn’t inspire me, he does impress. His two-year campaign has been disciplined and intelligent. He has surrounded himself with the mainstream liberal types who staffed the Clinton administration. Like countless social democratic leaders before him, he probably was more left-wing when he was younger. Circumstance and ambition have pushed him to the center. If elected, he will inherit an office burdened with massive financial and foreign-policy problems. Unlike John McCain, he won’t try to bomb his way out of the mess.
    Declan McCullagh, Nobody:
    I am not voting for president in 2008.
    This was not an easy decision, but all the candidates are flawed, at least if you believe in limited government, civil liberties, free markets, and a foreign policy far less bellicose than what we have today.
    Robert A. Pape, Obama:
    I strongly support Barack Obama for president. In the past, I have supported both Republicans and Democrats, choosing the candidate with the leadership qualities and foreign-policy principles most likely to advance the national security of the United States. Of course, we have no crystal balls, but leaders with sound judgment on core policies and courage to look beyond political winds of the moment greatly improve the odds of long-term success. Obama scores uncommonly high on the “judgment-courage” index, qualities that will be needed as our next president seeks to repair the damage from the triple train wreck of our overstretched military, underperforming economy, and floundering international reputation that is now undermining our national security.
    Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Nobody:
    Nonparticipation sends a message that we no longer believe in the racket they have cooked up for us, and we want no part of it.
    You might say that this is ineffective. But what effect does voting have? It gives them what they need most: a mandate. Nonparticipation helps deny that to them. It makes them, just on the margin, a bit more fearful that they are ruling us without our consent. This is all to the good. The government should fear the people. Not voting is a good beginning toward instilling that fear.
    This year especially there is no lesser of two evils. There is socialism or fascism. The true American spirit should guide every voter to have no part of either.
    Gerald J. Russello, Nobody:
    In this election, we face choosing between a “maverick” with a penchant for militarism who has been part of the Washington power structure for over two decades, and an inexperienced figure who wants to save us from ourselves, or, as my friend Gene Healy puts it, “the Messiah vs. the prophet of doom.” The only thing they agree on is that Washington is where the power is. Add to that a supine Congress busy giving away its war-making power to the executive, what’s left of the economy to the Treasury secretary, and the decision over any controversial issue to the courts. It is hard to see why voting for one rather than the other would make any discernible difference.
    Steve Sailer, Connerly:
    Thus, I intend to do in 2008 what I did during the Bush-Kerry whoop-tee-doo: write in the name of a public figure who is actually trying to solve a major, long-term problem, my friend Ward Connerly. Just as Social Security can’t afford too many retirees per worker, America won’t be able to afford its affirmative-action system when the racial ratio of minority beneficiaries per white benefactor reaches excessive levels. As America becomes majority minority (by 2042, by latest Census projection), the cost of affirmative action will become crippling. By helping get government racial preferences banned by voter initiative in California, Washington, and Michigan, Ward has made the future a little less grim.

    Total: Obama, 5; Nobody, 4; McCain, 2; Barr, 1; Paul, 1; Baldwin,1; Connerly, 1.

    Bonus quote, from Andrew Sullivan: “If the GOP decides that Palin is the future of their party, the GOP won’t have a future.”

    Back to real conservatism

    October 28, 2008 in Ideas, News | 17 comments

    Somewhere between Barry Goldwater and Sarah Palin, conservatism changed from a philosophical anchor — what Goldwater called a “conscience” — into a pure partisanship, defined at least as much by what and who it’s against (Liberals, Democrats, Hillary, Obama) as by what it’s for. The latter now includes a list of causes (opposition to abortion and gay marriage, religiously-defined “family values”) that bear no resemblance to Goldwater’s essentially Libertarian philosophy.

    I was raised by Republicans who voted enthusiastically for Goldwater (who lost resoundingly to Lyndon Johnson) in 1964. I read The Conscience of a Conservative (which was published in 1960) as a teenager and felt its influence even as I became an active opponent of the Vietnam War in college (I was in the Class of ’69) and became a hard-core Democrat through my 20s and 30s.

    In the first chapter, of Conscience, Goldwater writes, “for the American Conservative, there is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom. As he surveys the various attitudes and institutions and laws that currently prevail in America, many questions will occur to him, but the Conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?“

    Is that what conservatism is about today? Hard to tell. It’s certainly not from what I hear and see from Rush, Fox News, Dobson, Hewitt and most of Republican broadcasting’s amen corner.

    For those who care to separate the partisan wheat from the philosophical chaff, David Frum’s latest is required reading. In it he points to this Stanley Greenberg poll, which shows how isolated Republican partisanship has become, and how far it has drifted from the mainstream of the American electorate’s sensibilities — the same electorate that gave us Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton (who offended the Right’s moral sensibilities even while he governed as a centrist making plenty of rightward decisions — especially in respect to social welfare and the economy).

    Right after the 1994 “Republican Revolution”, I found myself at a party in San Diego, talking to Milton Friedman. This wasn’t the famous economist, but rather a former speechwriter for Gerald Ford and other notables. He told me that this revolution was doomed to fail in the long run, because it brought together two value systems — one economic and the other religious — that were in conflict.

    What held them together so long was pure partisanship.

    That’s coming to an end. The split has opened. Rush, Hannity and Dobson are proving to be a branch, not a trunk. The roots in Goldwater and William F. Buckley still hold, and the branch is breaking away. For more about that, read Christopher Buckley’s How Limbaugh tried (and failed) to replace my dad. Pretty much nails it.

    I have no idea if I’ll ever vote for a Republican again. Haven’t for a long time. Haven’t voted for all that many Democrats, either. Many of my votes have been for None of the Above, which has often been the Libertarian. (For what it’s worth, I voted for Gore and Kerry, because I thought we needed not to elect George W. Bush. I don’t believe I voted for Clinton either time, but I don’t remember. And I’ll vote for Obama this time, not just for the candidate but to oppose McCain, and especially .) But I’ll be watching to see if the Grand Old Party rediscovers its roots — in personal freedom, minimal government, responsible economic policies and other solid sensibilities.

    Hope it does. After Obama gets elected, we’ll need those people to hold him in check. Not the nyah-sayers on Fox News and AM radio.

    Newspixelers

    October 27, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Ideas, Journalism, News | Comments closed

    Interesting NY Times piece on the emergence of the blog-based op-ed business, courtesy of Ariana Huffington and Tina Brown.

    Paper margins

    October 27, 2008 in Art, Fun, Journalism, News, Politics | Comments closed

    You’d think, from the looks of the endorsement picture, that Barack Obama is gonna sell a lot more newspapers over the next four years. Whether or not, the picture’s not pretty for John McCain, who has clearly lost his “base”:

    Be sure to scroll down. Lots of wonky grist for obsessive mills in there.

    Hat tip to Andrew Leyden.

    Just in case cheaper gas starts looking attractive…

    October 24, 2008 in Geology, News | 11 comments

    OPEC Orders Cut in Oil Production.

    Nettapping for everyone

    October 24, 2008 in Business, Future, infrastructure, News, Politics, problems, Science | 7 comments

    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.”

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    New(s) business models

    October 23, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News, VRM | Comments closed

    Jeff Jarvis‘ New Business Models for News Summit is going on now, live. Wish I were there.

    Samir Arora is on now. I haven’t seen Samir in years. Still, I’ve followed him, and he’s always smart and provocative and has a great nose for business opportunities. For the last few he’s been CEO of Glam.com. At the moment he’s giving proper criticism to the “distribution model,” but also talking about a buncha stuff that’s related to advertising. That’s still supply-side stuff, so I tend to tune out. I’m about the demand side these days.

    Now Tom Evslin is up. Another friend, biz veteran and smart guy. Listen in.

    While you do, read Dave, who has some great ideas about how to embrace and enable amateurs as essential contributors.

    Also check out , where we’ve had a community that’s been (mostly quietly) working on new models for the last two years, and are making headway. More here.

    If you live in the Southwest, check this out

    October 23, 2008 in Events, Fun, infrastructure, News, Places, Science | 2 comments

    The satellite will be launched into orbit tomorrow, October 24, at 19:28:21, or 21 seconds after 7:28pm, Pacific time, from Vandenberg AFB in California. Says here that the rocket will be a Delta II, which puts on a great show. While the launch will be spectacular from nearby viewing locations, it will be visible all over the southwest U.S. and northwest Mexico. More from that last link:

    COSMO-SkyMed, one of the most innovative Earth Observation programmes, is financed by the Ministry for Education, Universities and Scientific Research, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Ministry of Defence.
    The programme involves the launch of a constellation of four satellites, equipped with radar sensors that can operate under any weather conditions and with very short revisiting times.
    COSMO-SkyMed was conceived as a dual use programme intended to meet both civil and defence objectives. The application services that can be derived from COSMO-SkyMed will contribute significantly to the defence of the territory in areas such as fire, landslides, droughts, floods, pollution, earthquakes and subsidence, management of natural resources in agriculture and forestry, as well as monitoring of urban sprawl.

    Guess this is the third in the series.

    In any case, I assume that this one has a polar orbit, which is the only kind of orbit that allows scanning of the whole earth over the course of time. That means it will be launching toward the south. This is good. Even if it’s in that direction, it will still be impressive.

    Here’s a photoset of two launches from Vandenberg AFB, and two launches there, both shot from Santa Barbara. And here’s a video of one of those.

    One cool thing: As the rocket enters space, exhaust is no longer contained by atmosphere, and it expands into something shaped like an elongated light bulb. Then the exhaust drifts in strange and wandering ways, determined by edge-of-space movements in atmosphere, altered by the directions of rocket exhaust, and then space itself, where the exhaust moves win all the directions the rockets shoot (which in most cases is in four directions at once). It’s fun and strange to watch.

    I’m in Boston now, so we’ll miss it here; but if you’re anywhere southwest of Utah, enjoy.

    Hat tip to the SBAU for the heads-up.

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    Cable noose networks

    October 22, 2008 in Journalism, News, Politics, problems | 2 comments

    In this election “cycle” (as the professionals call it… used to be a “season”), the only times I’ve found the cable news networks watchable were during and after the debates. CNN was generally good at that, even though the post-debate punditry got tiresome and I turned it off. But otherwise I haven’t been able to contain the sense that the need to talk, and the need to advocate for a candidate, has made hypocrites of the blathering heads the networks feel obligated to feature.

    It doesn’t even matter if they get caught. They just go on and on and on, and none of the interviewers say, “Didn’t you say the opposite thing a few weeks back?”

    Ah, but for that we have Jon Stewart. Bless the man, his writers, and his clip collectors. Here’s an old Daily Show (from early September). You’d think it might be stale, but it ain’t. The dude nails it.

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    Obama’s temperament and Roedjak

    October 20, 2008 in Art, Future, Health, Ideas, Life, News, Past, Places, Politics, Travel | 6 comments

    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.

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    Political roundup

    October 19, 2008 in News | 6 comments

    Rush: “Would somebody explain to me how it is that you make poor people rich by making rich people poor?”

    Colin Powell endorses Obama.

    Roger L. Simon isn’t impressed, and adds,

      Meanwhile, Obama’s real, quite verifiable and public religious background (and mentor) was not even mentioned by the Secretary of State – namely, the execrable Reverend Wright. That is far more disconcerting than some vague Muslim association (whether by birth or otherwise) and indicates a lack of judgment on Obama’s part that any person of gravitas (like a Colin Powell) should find difficult, almost impossible, to defend. Yet the racist Wright, we all know, was Obama’s chosen minister for twenty years, married him, baptized his children, gave him spiritual guidance and provided the inspiration for his memoirs – even the title of the second one. It’s hard to imagine a closer relationship with a pastor, except perhaps a spousal one.

    Obama polls seem to be post-peaking, even though he has raised more than $.6 billion. David Bernstein says the Democrats should be cautious about declaring an early victory.

    Josh Marshall agrees. “Stripped down to its components McCain’s message to voters is this: ‘Don’t forget. He’s definitely black. And he may be a terrorist.’ That’s the message.” With pals like Michael Savage, pointing to jive like this, kinda seems that way.

    Here’s a transcript of one (the only? dunno) McCain robo-call:

      Hello. I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202-863-8500.

    Garrison Keillor on Sarah Palin:

      It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone’s mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged.

    Virginia Postrel on portraiture and partisanship:

      Partisans demand that magazine portraits glamorize their heroes for the same reason my friend hired a professional photographer. Humans seem hard-wired to assume that good-looking means good and, conversely, to equate physical flaws with character flaws. We may preach that beauty is skin deep, but we’re equally certain that portraits “reveal character.” In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.

    Gain of face

    October 18, 2008 in News | 7 comments

    Just checked in with Facebook…

    That’s 465 items, not including the couple dozen friend requests I accepted yesterday, after checking for the first time in a month or two. It’s sort of metasticized from the last time I expressed my annoyance with Facebook, almost a year ago.

    Maybe in another month I’ll check back again.

    Tags:

    Helping save Andrew’s dad

    October 16, 2008 in Ideas, News | 6 comments

    Andrew Baron’s open letter to James C. Mullen of Biogen begins,

    Mr. Mullen, my name is Andrew Baron and my father Frederick (61 yrs. old), has final stage multiple myeloma has been recommended the drug Tysabri as a last chance effort for life.
    Please read this carefully.
    Last Thursday, his doctors at the Mayo Clinic determined that he may only have about 24-48 hours to live.
    In what can only be defined as a miracle in timing, a few days ago, one of his doctors who has been studying his tumor cells in the lab for years found an antibody with an exact match: Tysabri which is manufactured by your company, Biogen Idec. In the test tube, it attached to the antigens on the surface of the tumor 100%.
    Though the drug has never been used before in this way, and because time is running out, the head of the FDA, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach has granted special approval for use of the drug for this purpose but you have personally decided “no”.
    Lance Armstrong, who you spoke with on Friday, has also pleaded with you to say “yes” to my father, but you personally said “no”.
    President Bill Clinton, Senator John Kerry, Senator John Harkin, Senator Ted Kennedy, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach and others who you spoke with on Friday and again yesterday on Monday have all pleaded with you to say yes”, assuring you that there would be no legal risk and no negative consequences to your company if something went wrong, but you continue to say “no”.

    Andrew’s dad and I are exactly the same age. He’s also a great guy:

    My father is a saint who has given his life and his resources to better humanity. He has spent his entire life seeking to protect the rights of others from harmful death and has spent an enormous amount of money and time in helping to shape our government to protect the rights of people everywhere. He is a philanthropist at heart.
    1. Call Mr. Mullen or anyone at Biogen and ask them to please say yes (or provide a justification for whynot). Speak with anyone in the company in any department that you can find: http://www.biogenidec.com/site/contact.html

    Here’s more on Mr. Mullen, from FastCompany.

    Update.

    Blogging the debate

    October 15, 2008 in News, Politics | 6 comments

    Came in after it started. Picking it up with the question about negative campaigning. McCain nailed Obama to the wall on that one, and Obama is changing the subject. McCain is also coming across much more knowledgeable and direct. And experienced. McCain is also speaking in final draft, while Obama stumbles. Obama is a great public speaker, but a poor extemporizer.

    McCain stepped in it with Ayers and Acorn. Obama gave his best response yet. Ayers and Acorn are red herrings, and they won’t wash.

    Good question: about running mates. Obama gives the first response. All about Biden. It’s a good-enough answer. But not great. He said nothing about Palin. Smooth move. McCain’s response about Palin is better than Obama’s on Biden. Fact is there’s no comparison, but I’m giving this one to McCain, so far. Obama’s follow up is weak. He needs to say what’s wrong with Palin, I think now. He didn’t. Changed the subject to the costs of funding on special needs. Bad move. Now McCain is point by point doing to Joe Biden what Obama should have done to Sarah Palin.

    Question on oil and energy. McCain’s response is strong.

    Just noticed: they’re both left-handed.

    Time for Obama to respond on the energy question. For the first time I see Obama looking into the camera. Taking money from China and giving it to Saudi Arabia again. Too simplistic. But Obama is being emphatic and clear. “We can’t drill our way out of the problem.” He still stumbles over his brain cramps when he’s uttering long sentences. Needs to fix that, if he can.

    Obama: “I believe in free trade.” Really? The rest of his answer says no. But he made a good point about lack of automobile trade reciprocity with Korea.

    Now McCain is nailing Obama on facts, or what sound like facts. The Columbia free trade agreeement, for example. McCain is acting smug and self-satisfied in pointing out that Obama has never traveled “south of the border”. Not sure it works. Obama’s defense against the hits are subject changes. Addressing energy consumption is good by Obama, but sounds blah.

    McCain is now saying that Obama wants “to restrict trade and to raise taxes”. Obama just smiles. A hit with no counterpunch. And a credible one, given Obama’s other responses.

    McCain: Real, but angry. Obama: Cool, but flat.

    Health care is up. Obama talks to the camera. The usual halting pauses. The “Uncommitted Ohio Voters” are giving Obama high marks though, if the green and red lines at the bottom of the CNN screen are to be trusted.

    McCain is giving a fairly strong response. Scoring with men (green line) and tanking with women (red line). Interesting, in a hypnotic way.

    Obama is stronger on the health care question. Detailed, direct. Informative. Slipping when he goes into the McCain plan. “For the first time in history you’ll be taxing people’s health care benefits.” Ouch. But Obama still has those halting pauses, like somebody who has incompletely overcome stuttering. “His clutch is slipping,” my friend Joe (sitting next to me here) just said.

    Andrew Sullivan: “I feel as tired of this as John McCain and Barack Obama look.”

    Roe v. Wade is the current question. McCain is saying he doesn’t have a “litmus test.” Points out that Obama voted against appointing Breyer and Roberts for “ideological” reasons. McCain is sputtering on the abortion question. He has too much history on both sides of this one.

    Obama won’t apply a litmus test, but says he believes Roe v. Wade was “rightly decided.” Obama is much stronger on this question. Obama: “The court needs to stand up when nobody else will.”

    McCain: “We need to change the culture of America.” Going after Obama’s voting in Illinois. Once again McCain is scoring big with undecided Ohio men and the opposite with women. Obama’s defense is detailed and convincing. He opposes late term abortions except where the mother’s life is threatened.

    Question on education, the last one.

    Obama’s right thumb bends in, while his left thumb bends out. Basketball injury? (I ask because I have one of those. With a thumb.) His answer is blah. Good points about students taking on debt. The $4000 credit for tuition in exchange for community service is almost interesting. His point about parental responsibilty is a sop to the Right.

    McCain: “Choice and competition among schools…” Charter schools… Give parents a choice… “Reward these good teachers.” Something about the military. “We need to have…” a roster of blah points.

    Obama: “We agree on charter schools.” zzzzzz.

    It’s weird that CNN has red on the left and blue on the right, even though Obama is positioned on the left side of the screen and McCain on the right.

    McCain: “It’s a system that cries out for accountability.” A subject close to home for me. If it were up to “accountability,” I would have been washed out of high school in the 9th grade, because my grades and scores on standardized tests were bottom-tier. Anyway, whatever.

    McCain’s closing remarks: “America needs a new direction. I have a record of reform…” He looks more tired now. He’s got a few hickups. “I’d be honored and humbled.”

    Obama’s. “Same failed policies and same failed politics.” Yawn. “Our brighter days are still ahead… a new energy policies… It’s not gonna be easy, not gonna be quick… renew a spirit of sacrifice and responsibility… I will work every single day tirelessly… I would ask…” would? Feh. Weak ending by both men.

    Okay. Bottom line: much more even than the earlier ones. I call it a toss-up, with maybe a slight edge to McCain.

    Will it make much difference? I doubt it.

    [Later...] Drezner: “The big winner was Joe the Plumber — the rest of us are screwed.”

    Jay Rosen: “After Gore and Kerry, it became an accepted maxim in politics that you must hit back hard or lose. But this maxim has itself lost.” True. Obama payed rope-a-crank with McCain.

    Mudflats has 805 comments so far.

    Roger L. Simon: “The Obama-McCain debates will not be remembered like Lincoln-Douglas. In fact, I doubt they will be remembered at all.”

    David Bernstein in Volokh: “Obama plays an excellent defense.”

    The Onion: Bush Calls for Panic.

    Okay, off to bed.

    Rex is right

    October 15, 2008 in News, Science | Comments closed

    Older guys are smarter. More.

    The best state-by-state, poll-by-poll rundown

    October 15, 2008 in Ideas, News, Science | Comments closed

    Electoral College Predictions Tool. Dig.

    Creamed wheat

    October 15, 2008 in News, Politics | 3 comments

    A few days ago, in Wheat vs. Chaff, I excerpted Christopher Buckley‘s Sorry, Dad, I’m voting for Obama, and added this:

    What’s happening now is a wheat/chaff divide on the Right. We see the wheat with Chrisopher Buckley, David Brooks, George Will, Kathleen Parker, Andrew Sullivan and other thoughtful conservatives who stand on the rock of principle and refuse to follow errant leaders over a cliff. We see the chaff with Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and other partisans-at-all-cost.

    Now Buckley reports that, as a result of his Obama endorsement, he was in effect fired by the , the magazine founded by his famous dad. Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, says otherwise. Whatever, Christopher’s sharpest points are not about what happened to him, but what’s happened to his party:

    So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.
    While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
    So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

    Maybe, after the electorate creams McCain and what’s left of his party, they can strike the yurt and start building something a bit more spacious again.

    Tweeting the vote

    October 14, 2008 in Ideas, News | Comments closed

    TwitterVoteReport provides a way to live microblog what’s going on in your polling places. The details:

      So, go to twitter and use the hashtag #votereport and tell us:

     
    1. The time of day (9:20 am, 1:12 pm)
    2. The zip code you just voted in (e.g. 10591, 10012)
    3. The issue: Wait (e.g. a waiting time of over [omega] hour) Reg. (e.g. a problem with your registration) Machine (e.g. voting machines are broken or jamming)

    That’s it. In my case it’ll be reporting the putting of an absentee ballot in the mail, but still.

    Following the #marekfire

    October 13, 2008 in News, Places, problems | Comments closed

    Just found out about the Marek Wildfire from Sky News on Twitter. Tag: . Hashtag: #marekfire.

    Got the image above from MODIS. It shows hot spots found by satellite. As we see, the hot spots (all orange dots) are up the Little Tujunga Canyon in the mountains next to Sunland and San Fernando, just above the Foothill Freeway.

    So far the only blog report I see by that tag is Mary Lu’s. (Why does Google Blogsearch still not search for tags?) Others reporting: Firefighter Blog, W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking Site, Wildfire Today and LAist.

    I learned from the CA Santa Ana/Fire thread on a weather forum that it’s also called the “Little T Fire”, I’m sure because it’s in Little Tujunga Canyon.

    Whoa: Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, is also on fire. Here’s a webcam aiming, sort of, at it. Here’s KCBS’s report.

    GEOmac doesn’t seem to have anything about either fire yet. Nor MODIS’ big map. Too small, I guess. But you can download the .kml file that displays the satellite-detected hot spots plotted in Google Earth. (You can do .wms from that same page too, but I’m new to that one.)

    Wheat vs. Chaff

    October 11, 2008 in Events, Ideas, Life, News, Politics, problems | 7 comments

    Christopher Buckley in Sorry, Dad, I’m voting for Obama:

    …I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

    McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

    A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

    But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

    All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

    This is why I thought, early on, that McCain would win, regardless of how well Obama ran his campaign. Christopher continues,

    I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

    But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

    Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

    Well, I’ve tried to read Obama’s books, and “first rate” is not what I’d call them. “Tiresome and quoteproof” is more like it. But still, he’s the best we’ve got running right now, especially since McCain has turned into a cranky bastard.

    There were so many ways that McCain could have whupped Obama’s ass, but they were all on the high road: McCain’s own. For whatever reasons, McCain has done what he said he wouldn’t do, which is go low. The result is a candidate defined not by his own virtues, but by the alleged faults of his opponent. And he’s done a lousy job of it, made worse by Sarah Palin’s plays to the right wing’s scary fringe.

    What’s happening now is a wheat/chaff divide on the Right. We see the wheat with Chrisopher Buckley, David Brooks, George Will, Kathleen Parker, Andrew Sullivan and other thoughtful conservatives who stand on the rock of principle and refuse to follow errant leaders over a cliff. We see the chaff with Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and other partisans-at-all-cost.

    In a speech at UCSB a couple years ago, Christopher Buckley winced when asked about what had happened to his dad‘s party at the hands of George W. Bush and friends. “I think we need some corner time,” Christopher said.

    That time was put off for the next Presidential election. Now that the McCain campaign has turned into a self-defeating tar-fest, that time is finally approaching.

    Everything gets worthless

    October 9, 2008 in Business, Events, Ideas, News, Politics, problems | 1 comment

    That’s where this vector points.

    Unless we Do Something, of course.

    Meanwhile, there’s this source of inspiration:

    Tags: , , , ,

    Post-debate thoughtdown

    October 8, 2008 in News, Politics | 9 comments

    Slept between the last post and this. Just took a shower and sat down at the computer. Here’s my brain dump before I move on to projects where I can make more of a difference.

    1) Both these guys are dull. The McCain of the Straight Talk Express and Dunkin’ Donuts with press buddies is gone, replaced by a cranky old bastard. Obama is Kerry with better speechwriters. The difference is in vector. Obama is young and can learn on the job. He also has a managerial hauteur, substantiated by a campaign that is amazingly well-organized and effective at every level. I don’t doubt that he’ll manage the country well. Not so sure about leading the country, though. He’s no Reagan, but he’s a bit of a Clinton, in the sense that he’s smart, articulate and at least kinda warm up close. To me the most important fact about the debate was that Barack and Michelle stayed and worked the crowd. John and Cindy split. It’s not smart for Elvis to leave the building while the Beatles are still on stage. Not when the audience is voting on both.
    2) Clinton excepted, Republicans since Nixon have been better at connecting with ordinary folks. Nixon’s “moral majority” resonated with the voting majority, and helped create the red state base that still stands. McCain should have been connecting last night, but didn’t do very well at it. Not as well as he should have, anyway. Obama, dry as he is, does come across as empathetic. And he talks empathy better than anybody since Lyndon Johnson.
    3) McCain’s “that one” line was peevish and nasty, and will become a grass roots slogan for Obama. Forgotten will be the point that McCain made, about how the two voted on something. (What was it? I don’t remember, and on that rest my case.)
    4) I cringed every time I heard McCain say “my friends”. It should create warmth, but sounds insincere.
    5) Obama needs to work on his brain cramps. It seemed like there was a moment in every one of his answers when his mind siezed and he lost his flow. I suspect he’s been working on not saying “um” all the time, and not saying “and” when he means “um.” Whatever it is, he needs to get past it. I’m guessing Obama’s younger than Jimmy Carter was when Carter took lessons to overcome a lifelong mumbling problem.
    6) The pandering was predictable, but the gratuitous and misleading simplifications got to me. When Obama talked about “borrowing money from China and giving it to Saudi Arabia,” I wanted to throw something at him. Likewise when McCain talked about “victory” in Iraq when misapplication of that very concept is one reason we got into the mess in the first place. And Obama’s stuff about going after Bin Laden is wacky. Listen to this edition of Fresh Air. It’s an interview with Robert Baer, author of The Devil We Know. In it Baer lays out a calm, rational and constructive approach to Iran and Middle East powers and politics. The reason I bring it up is that it makes sense — yet it fits into neither candidate’s narratives (although it’s in better alignment with Obama’s willingness to “negotiate with enemies”). Also because Baer, a CIA operative for two decades, says Bin Ladin is dead. If tha’s true, it inconveniences both candidates’ narratives.
    7) The best question from Brokaw was about health care: Is it a right, a privilege or a responsibility? McCain said it was a responsibility (of individuals, not government), and talked up free market economics. Obama said it was a right, and talked essentially (seemed to me) about socializing the system. Neither made me feel better, but both revealed extreme differences in where the two come from.

    Obama won, but not by a huge margin. The difference is between future and past. McCain looks like Bush, cont’d. I don’t think he will be, unless he vacates the office and Palin takes over, which is a frightening prospect. Still, that’s what he represents. Obama does represent Change, and something more: purge — the need to flush out the last administration and bring in a new one. I think more people want that than don’t.

    If Obama wins, the best thing he can do is bring in Bill & Hillary as transition team advisors. They learned a lot of stuff the hard way, and Obama’s gonna need all the help he can get.

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    A daft French regulation

    October 7, 2008 in Future, Ideas, News, Places | Comments closed

    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.

    Coming, coming, gone.

    October 6, 2008 in News, Places, Science | 1 comment

    An asteroid is about to burn up over Africa.

    Smartest possible Palin move

    October 6, 2008 in Art, Business, Events, Fun, News, Politics | 1 comment

    Guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.

    Might make up for her running mate’s chickening out on David Letterman.

    Theirs is biggest

    October 5, 2008 in Art, Future, News, Places, Science, Travel | 4 comments

    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.

    Peggy on Palin

    October 4, 2008 in News | 12 comments

    Peggy Noonan in the WSJ:

      She killed. She had him at “Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?” She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy.

      The whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled–they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation.

      As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic “talk over the heads of the media straight to the people,” and it is a long time since I’ve seen it done so well, though so transparently. There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial.

    Remember that Noonan wrote speeches for Reagan and Bush the Elder.

    More:

      Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom. Watch her crowds this weekend. She’s about to get jumpers, the old political name for people who are so excited to see you they start to jump.

      Her triumph comes at an interesting time. The failure of the first bailout bill was an epic repudiation of the Washington leadership class by the American people. Two weeks ago the president of the United States, the speaker of the House, the secretary of the Treasury and the leadership of both parties in Congress came forward and announced that the economy was in crisis and a federal bill to solve it urgently needed. The powers were in agreement, the stars aligned, it was going to happen.

      And then the phones began to ring, from one end of Capitol Hill to the other. And the message in those calls was, essentially: We don’t trust you to fix the problem, we suspect you may have caused it. Go away.

      It was an epic snub, aimed at both parties. And the bill tanked.

      We have simply, as a nation, never had a moment like this, in which the American people voted such a stunning no-confidence in America’s leaders in a time of real and present danger. The fate of the second bill is unclear as I write, but the fact that it has morphed from three pages to roughly 450, and is festooned with favors, will do nothing to allay public suspicions about the trustworthiness of Congress. This, as a background, could not have helped Mr. Biden.

    I think she gives Palin too much credit, and that Palin will be further exposed to discredit over the next month. Still, an interesting read.

    McCain’s lost moment

    October 3, 2008 in Business, Events, Ideas, News, Politics, problems | 8 comments

    So we just passed a bail-out package that’s marginally better than the one voted down on Monday. But it’s still a bail-out package.

    When McCain “suspended” his campaign last week and said he was “going back to Washington” to straighten out this thing, I thought, Uh oh. If he goes back there and truly kicks ass, and sells what Bush can’t, it’ll show he’s a real leader and blow Obama out of the water.

    I thought, What McCain should do is something like Colonel Travis did at the Alamo (or at least in the movies about it). He should have drawn a line in the sand, and challenged his party to do what Bush couldn’t make them do. He should have stood on the steps of the Capitol, in front of the TV cameras and the eyes of an expectant nation, and said “Now is the time to put country first. This is how it is done. Our president and his top advisors, and the leaders of both parties, say this bill needs to be signed. It’s not a perfect bill, but it’s the best we can do got to save our financial system in a brief window of opportunity. I want everybody’s who’s with me to line up behind me, so we can tell the country with one voice that we’re ready to do the right thing.”

    But instead he did approximately nothing.

    Was there a better time to show leadership than with a real crisis and a lame duck president and his own election on the line? And when, as some Republicans claim, Pelosi was trying to sandbag the bill? Can’t think of one.

    Disclaimer: These are a few thoughts of one blogger with a low-grade fever. Redraw your own conclusions.

    Personality vs. Policy

    October 2, 2008 in News, Politics, problems | 25 comments

    Watching the vice presidential debate. Biden is talking policy and numbers, while Palin is talking people and stories. Most of the time I don’t know what Biden’s talking about, other than more or less standard liberal Democratic policies: fairness, tax the rich, windfall profits. I do know what Palin’s talking about, which is getting government out of people’s lives and other tunes from the Reagan song book. Both stumble now and then, but she has the stronger personality and is much more human and plainly spoken. He seems like a Washingtontonian policy wonk. Very blah. She seems like a governor who’s been working hard for her state. Bottom line: so far, she’s kicking his ass.

    Unless she blows up, which now seems unlikely, this will go down as a Palin win, and may turn things around for McCain.

    More notes…

    Both have had their teeth whitened. Biden also appears to have had a facelift and hair plugs. Nothing wrong with that, but hey, we’re watching a hi-def TV screen here.

    Biden is finishing much stronger, and Palin’s folksy stuff is getting annoying. Still, I think, on an emotional level she’s delivering. She knows a tiny fraction of what Biden knows, but she has spunk to spare, and that counts for a lot.

    And her voice gets old.

    Andrew Sullivan: “I think he has now won the debate.”

    I’m not so sure.

    And Gwen Ifill, the moderator, didn’t hold their feet to a fire.

    [Next day...] FactCheck.org says they both lied, repeatedly.

    A diet of raw pork

    October 2, 2008 in Blogging, News | 6 comments

    Mike Taht is actually reading the entire 451 page (yes, as in Fahrenheit) bailout bill (amended and revised), which he calls porkolicious. I read the first few dozen pages, and what sticks out for me is that it gives the Treasury Secretary a whole buncha power, further advancing the concentration of power in the executive branch of the government.

    But, we need it, right?

    And we get a new government, one way or another, in February.

    Being Robert Scoble

    October 2, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News | 9 comments

    Traditional journalism is static. Its basic units are the article, the story, the piece. The new journalism is live. It doesn’t have a basic unit any more than a river or a storm have a basic unit. It’s process, not product. Even these things we call posts, texts, tweets and wikis are less unitary than contributory. They add to a flow, which in turn adds to what we know.

    In 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” and compared managing in business (a subject about which he remains the canonical authority) to leading a jazz band. You surround yourself with skilled folks who only get better at what they do. Drucker lived a long time, but it’s too bad he’s not around to see what the Live Web is doing both for knowledge and the work that increases it constantly.

    To bring this into focus, dig Jeff Jarvis’ Replacing the Article. Specifically, Jeff is looking for a new “unit of coverage” that includes at least three subunitary components: 1) “Curated aggreagtion”, 2) “A blog that treats the story as a process, not a product”, and 3) “A wiki that give us a snapshot of current knowledge”. He’s looking for discussion as well (as he must, else all he’s got is another article, no?). “Where do you think the best – most intelligent and illuminating – discussion is going on?” he asks.

    Problem is, the Live Web is getting more and more flowy and decentralized. The unit Jeff wants may be all of the above and a lot more that isn’t here yet. Somebodies have to go invent them. And they will. When they do, it’ll be in the river, not alongside it.

    I found my way to Jeff’s piece through my FriendFeed, which I visited after scanning Twitter Search; and from Jeff’s post I pivoted off to MoneyMeltDown, Calculated Risk, Monitor Credit Crisis Blog and Inman blog, all off Jeff’s links. None, he says, do the job he wants. “Can anyone point me to a reporter or expert who is using a blog to both report and discover?” he asks?

    Well, there’s Scoble and his FriendFeed top 165 list, about which Paul Boutin says,

    If you follow Robert Scoble at all — and you sort of have to unless your DSL is dead — you know he can’t help overproliferating everything he does. While the entire staff of Vanity Fair takes months to assemble its 100 most powerful list, Fast Company’s token webhead spews 165 names in one pass for his “hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding.” Robert, let me put on my old Condé Nast editor’s hat and redline this back to you: GREAT START, BUT PLS TELL US WHO THE FK THS PPL ARE…

    Jeff’s point exactly. (Aside: I once had lunch with Jeff at a cafeteria in the Condé Nast building, where Jeff worked at the time and that our kid called “The Candy Ass building”.)

    Here’s what’s even more new: Scoble isn’t managing the people who inform him. It’s the other way around. He’s being managed by the jazz in his band. Scobleization is more like what happens in Being John Malkovitch, where all these people take trips down a portal into Malkovitch’s head. Those of us being FriendFed are all being Scobleized, but (as Dame Edna says) in a nice way. That is, we’re being fed knowledge even as we flow with the river as well. Process, not product.

    Yet we aren’t subordinating ourselves to the process, unless all we want to do is SEO and AdSense fishing. We’re increasing the worth of ourselves as the sovereign and independent units we call human beings.

    To be Scobleized is to be human, and to grow. Because that’s what we do at our best.

    The other day I was hanging with Scoble when he said “Isn’t this a great world?” Louis Armstrong, the great jazz player, couldn’t have sung it better.

    Weathering

    October 1, 2008 in Fun, Life, News, Photography, Science, Travel | 1 comment

    Just a pause in the midst to express appreciation for ‘s storm-tracking services, and handy pile of Good Stuff, such as the WunderMap. Their site is far less crapped up with junk than Weather.com.

    Right now we’re getting a late summerlike storm, complete with thunder. Thanks to the map’s animation and storm tracking features, I can see exactly what’s happening, and educate my judgements about whether to walk to the bus or the train — and when.

    Anyway, dig it.

    #polylanguagization

    September 30, 2008 in Blogging, News | 3 comments

    The #4 item on Twitter (behind Bailout, McCain and iPhone) is Selamat Hari Raya. #5 is #atlgas, for gas in Atlanta.

    The 2012 campaign

    September 29, 2008 in Events, News, Politics | 17 comments

    Got an email from my sister Jan the other day. She’s a Navy veteran who knew McCain, along with other notables. She’s also quite astute about politics, and follows it more closely than I do. I asked her if it’s cool to pass the email along, and she said yes, so here goes…

    After seeing the visuals of yesterday’s (Thursday’s) White House meeting, I came to a conclusion: The Republicans need McCain to lose. Not in a landslide, just narrowly; but they really want and need him to lose.

    Why? Well, first of all, because they don’t like him, or Palin. And they don’t think he represents their interests or true conservatism. And they know he is unpredictable and uncontrollable. And old and aging fast in the stress of campaigning, which does not bode well for life in the oval office. So if he dies, there would be Palin, which does not bear thinking about for them: she would set the case for leadership by women and neocons both back a generation and make the GOP the laughing stock of the world.

    But the best reason to want McCain to lose is because they know that whoever wins this election will have four years of no-win:

    • even if the bailout works, the economy will be a mess and hard times will hit everyone (but economic advisors and pundits)
    • recovery of Katrina is still stagnant and the real extent of the Texas coast’s devastation is just coming to light; the new President will have to do the recovery right this time, which will cost billions
    • at the best in Iraq all four years will be an expensive extraction quagmire
    • our military will be struggling with recovering from this war’s damage for at least 4 years, if not the next decade
    • Afghanistan is going to be a very hard war and Pakistan is on the brink of radicalism
    • Iran will be very eager to test the next president;
    • Kim will die and North Korea is a great, and dangerous, unknown that will cost us manpower and money to either keep isolated or help restorePutin will take the opportunity of our distractions to expand Russia’s power and influence and control
    • Labor’s time is up in the UK
    • Chavez will challenge the new president for supremacy in Latin America;
    • Global warming will become more and more visible and action more urgent and because of the delays of the last 8 years, action will be more expensive
    • Social security and medicare will be taxed beyond capabilities because bulk of the baby boomers who will become eligible
    • taxes will have to go up, for some folks anyway
    • because there will be no funds for the new President’s promises or programs, education, health care and infrastructure will not be addressed as aggressively as they should and the people will feel betrayed

    So whoever is elected this time will, at best and with superb leadership, management and luck, avoid a real disaster and might just be able to start us on the road to recovery. But it will be a time of fingers in the dike, not developing a real flood control system, not visibly anyway.

    So in 2012 an opposition candidate will be able to ride in on the white horse of told-you-so and have a good chance of winning.

    And right now there are at least two generations of Republicans in congress, governors mansions and the private sector, just salivating at the thought of 2012. And very willing, almost eager, maybe even praying, for McCain to give them that chance.

    I think she might be right. On the phone she just told me to notice that Rove is quieting down. Check the trend chart here.

    Tags:

    Bail Off

    September 29, 2008 in News | 8 comments

    The bailout was shot down in the house. Redraw your own conclusions. Mine is that it’s a Bad Thing.

    Upsiding

    September 29, 2008 in Ideas, News | 2 comments

    Eric Norlin points (via Howard Linzon) to this piece by Andy Kessler. Eric’s summary: Smile. Think abundance, not scarcity. Get optimistic. I’m an born optimist, so this has an appeal.

    Saint Paul Newman

    September 28, 2008 in Life, News, Past | 6 comments

    Great remembrance of Paul Newman by Manohla Dargis in the NY Times. (I’d like to beg forgiveness for the annoying login required by the Times, but I won’t. It’s just plain wrong for the Times to retain that friction after it’s bothered to open its content anyway.)

    My own favorite Newman moves are later ones: The Verdict, Nobody’s Fool, Empire Falls. As a journalist, I have a special appreciation for Absence of Malice, where the best performance actually belonged to Wilford Brimley, playing himself, essentially. In it Newman is by turns both passionate and, as Dargis puts it, cooler than dry ice.

    He was, finally and enduringly, a good man. You knew that. It came across in his acting and his life. He’s a guy I wish I had known. Sad to see him go.

    Thoughts atop the cliff

    September 28, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Life, News, Past, Politics, problems, Travel, VRM | 13 comments

    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.

    Quote du jour

    September 27, 2008 in News | 5 comments

    James Fallows: After thirty years of meeting and interviewing politicians, I can think of exactly three people who sounded as uninformed and vacant as this. All are now out of office. One was a chronic drunk.

    Bonus link.

    Hate to say it, but…

    September 26, 2008 in Events, News, Politics | 5 comments

    I think McCain won the thing. Not on substance, but on style. McCain sounded like Reagan, and Obama sounded like Kerry. The CNN talking heads seem to be giving the edge to Obama, but I just saw Guiliani on MSNBC, who made it clear that Obama gave the right wing talk machine a pile of fodder for the next week’s shows. Every time Obama said “John is right,” I winced.

    FWIW, I listened to most of it on the radio, so the stuff about McCain never looking at Obama I missed.

    Who nose?

    September 26, 2008 in News | 4 comments

    On the right, Charles Krauthamer:

      Paulson is a lame duck. In four months, he is gone. Paulson is asking for the money not for self-aggrandizement but for the same reason Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the markets are asking for it: to prevent the American economy from going over a cliff.

      Some disdain that assessment as hypothetical. Paulson and Bernanke, who actually peered into the abyss on Black Thursday (September 18), think otherwise. They’re not infallible, but prudence dictates not risking the economy on the opposite bet.

      The stock market dive and the seizing up of the credit markets convinced them that their ad hoc Bear-yes, Lehman-no rescue of investment firms had not only reached a dead end, but was actually making things worse. It had added uncertainty to a situation in which pre-existing uncertainty was already causing panic.

      Hence the need to go below the institutional superstructure to the underlying toxic assets, which Paulson proposes to take off the private sector’s books by having the government buy them for, yes, $700 billion.

      Congress has every duty to be careful with taxpayers’ money and to suggest improvements in the administration plan. But part of Congress’ reaction has nothing to do with improving the proposal and everything to do with assuaging the rage of constituents — even if it jeopardizes the package’s chances of success, either by weakening it or by larding it up with useless complicating provisions designed solely to give the appearance of sticking it to the rich.

      Window dressing such as capping pay packages, which the Bush administration has already caved in to. I’ve got nothing against withholding golden parachutes from failed executives. But artificially capping the pay of people brought in to lead these wobbly companies back to health is a fine way to tell talented executives to look elsewhere for a job. In the demagogic parlance of this election year, it is a prescription for outsourcing our best financial minds to London and Dubai.

      The mob is agitated, but hardly blameless. While the punch bowl — Alan Greenspan’s extremely low post-9/11 interest rates — was being held out, few complained about cheap loans and doubling home values. Now all of the sudden everything is the fault of Wall Street malfeasance.

      I have little doubt that some, if not many, cases of malfeasance will emerge. But what we conveniently neglect is the fact that much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people.

      For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — who in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That’s called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity.

      Were there some predatory lenders? Of course. But only a fool or a demagogue — i.e., a presidential candidate — would suggest that this is a major part of the problem.

      Was there misbehavior on Wall Street? The wheels of justice will grind. But why wait for justice? If a really good catharsis will allow a return of rationality to Capitol Hill — yielding a clean rescue package that will actually save the economy — go for it.

     

    On the former and future right, Kevin Phillips:

      McCain has never been much on economics, but Paulson’s indicated arrangement with the Democrats — financial firms will get to turn in the toxic debt and financial instruments they can’t peddle for reimbursement by an American taxpayer-funded entity — is so bad that if the former Navy pilot grins and accepts it he will look like a wobbler and a Grade A sap. He’s already lost the edge he had coming out of the Republican convention. Barack Obama, by contrast, can get away with being evasive because the Democrats look like they’re accepting a measure principally authored and promoted by Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

      Now for a little bit of background. We’re not just looking at a real estate mess. Over the last quarter century, the total of public and private credit market debt in the United States — most of it, in fact, is private — has more than quintupled from $8 to $48 trillion, the biggest such orgy in world history. Over that period, domestic financial debt – the money borrowed by the financial sector for expansion, consolidation, empire-building, leverage, exotic mortgages, gambling, you name it – swelled from just $1 trillion to some $14 trillion. Employing these economic steroids, the financial sector ballooned itself from 14-15% of what back in the mid-1980s was the Gross National Product to 20-21% in 2004 of the newer Gross Domestic Product calculation. In the meantime, the once-dominant manufacturing sector fell far behind, dropping to just 12% of GDP. In a nutshell, the economy has been hijacked in recent decades by the very groups who now purport to have remedies – Wall Street, from whence Paulson emerged, and the money-bubbling, don’t regulate the dangerous practices Federal Reserve Board, from whence Bernanke comes.

      The public is finally starting to understand what’s been going on in this perverse milieu of Wall Street socialism where private individuals get the profits and the taxpayers underwrite the bail-outs. It has a long history; in Bad Money I have a chart that lists fifteen or so rescues over some 25 years. Finance has now grown into an octopus, with dozens of debt, speculative, credit card, mortgage, interest group and Washington lobby tentacles that will lock onto any new bail-out proposal and turn it into another food supply. Even as the new “legislation” is being drafted, you can bet all the lawyers, lobbyists and big donors are already on the phone to key people in Congress, the White House, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Anybody with a good nose can almost smell the fixes and corruption, and of course, political critics and the public will be told that there’s just no time for debate, no time to go over the details. Don’t pass it tomorrow, pass it yesterday. We can assume that George W. Bush will sign it, possibly with a fleeting smirk.

      Will this bail-out solve the current mess? Of course not. For the last year, Paulson and Bernanke have been Fumble and Bumble. They won’t strike at the roots of the problem – indeed, one could almost say the two men represent those roots — so their rescue gimmicks fail and the crisis extends and deepens.

      Ironically, the best hope for resistance comes not from the left but from free-market elements of the Republican Party. I have not had much good to say about the GOP for years, but recent events may hint at their political and ideological renewal. Sometime back, when Congress passed the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bail-out program, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, ultimately voted against it. He had worked on its early stage, but ultimately voted no because seeing a pay-off to “Wall Street and K Street (the Washington lobbyist corridor)”. Then the Republican National Convention, in a rejection of Bush, Paulson and Bernanke, put an anti-bailout section in its 2008 platform. A few days ago, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, called on the Fed to reject bail-outs and allow the markets to work even if the consequences are “brutal.” And on September 18, a hundred Republican members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Paulson and Bernanke requesting that the two men “refrain from conducting any additional government-financed bail-outs for large financial firms.”

      I suppose there’s a chance that McCain could decide to oppose the administration and truly fight this latest round of Wall Street socialism. Maybe instead of asking George W. Bush to fire SEC Chairman Cox, McCain could come out against Paulson and Bernanke. But the odds are much greater than an embarrassed McCain will flounder toward November defeat.

      That would mean that the anti-bail-out forces in Congress and at the grassroots will take over the national party helm in 2009, and it’s not too late to start right now. If they strike a tough stance in the next few days, they could expose, delay, amend and even block — by any available means — what amounts to a massive mutation and even perversion of the U.S. economy. The leader of the hundred House Republican conservatives, Congressman Jeb Hensarling of Texas, summed it up quite neatly: “Enough is enough. It’s time to bail out the American taxpayers from bail-out mania.” Hopefully, we’re looking at a September battle cry.

     

    Is that what McCain is up to? Jim Manzi says “it’s hard not to credit him for running a tactically ingenious campaign”.

    Palin = Evita?

    September 26, 2008 in News | 2 comments

    That’s what Naomi Wolf says. It sounds alarmist and paranoid, and in line with The End of America, but as creeped out as I already am by what I hear on the radio (e.g. ordinary Americans saying Wall Street should fail just because fat cats need to be blamed… ignorant of their dependence on an at least a minimally healthy financial system), I gotta wonder.

    Do we want to move beyond Bush-Cheney-Rove? Or do we want four more years of that? There’s your choice, America.

    By the weigh…

    September 25, 2008 in Ideas, News | 1 comment

    There will be no debate between McCain and Obama tonight. Odds are there won’t be a debate between Palin and Biden, either. Because either one will burst the McCain/Palin bubble.

    Just my hunches.

    Bonus guess.

    Closer to home

    September 25, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    Now J.P. Morgan is the bank that ate the bank that ate my bank.

    For what little it’s worth at this point, WaMu — Washington Mutual — was a bozo bank. What can you say about a bank that never got its online banking to work right? Plenty, but it’s too late to bother.

    More here.

    A press release and reassuring words from the Office of Thrift Supervision.

    Who’s next?

    Meanwhile, Rome burns.

    Circling the drain

    September 25, 2008 in News | 4 comments

    Before. After. Best comment under the latter:

      Look, there are times when you put country ahead of party. The Republicans did it in 1974 when they told Nixon to get out. The Democrats did it in 1988 when they agreed to drop all the Iran Contra investigations in exchange for Howard Baker agreeing to clean up the mess as Reagan’s new chief of staff. Some Democrats (myself included) felt that Clinton should have resigned.

      Now is a time for Republicans to accept an Obama/Biden presidency and resolve to fight to win seats back in 2010 and the Presidency back in 2012. Despite what the hysterics say, Obama is not a muslim, he is an American centrist on economic and foreign policy matters and center-left on social matters. Biden is the same. Both are competent consensus builders, and even if you don’t agree with their politics, both are the type of people who lead well in emergencies. McCain, perhaps due to an age-related condition, is now completely self-centered and random in behavior, even worse under stress, while Palin could seriously lead America to the apocalypse — she’s that dumb and crazy (in the extreme religious sense*). For the good of America, Republicans, find a way to lose gracefully this fall, regroup, and fight back with some serious leaders. This is what democracy is about.

    Actually, it’s about war. Makes much better television. Also mashups.

    Anyway, like Jay said.

    Bonus kink: The Ice President. Via Steve Garfield.

    * My asterisk. Makes me think of here.

    With friends like these…

    September 22, 2008 in News | 3 comments

    Says Chrisopher Hitchens,

      Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis?

    Maybe because we don’t need an incautious loudmouth as president?

    Should grass roots cut the green?

    September 22, 2008 in News | 14 comments

    I expected the McCain campaign to lie and distort as a matter of course, but (call me naive) I was hoping for better from the Obama campaign — not only because Obama started and stayed on the high road for the most part, but because so much of his support comes from grass roots supporters who have been energized by the prospects of positive change he has been promising from the beginning. No presidential campaign in history has done a better job of engaging voters as participants — especially as sources of funding — than Obama’s.

    But now we’re in politics’ Mud Season, and Obama’s road is as low as McCain’s — or maybe even lower. When I look at FactCheck.org and PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter, I see Obama shifting strategies. Even if he’s still uttering the uplifting aspirational rhetoric that first nourished his grass roots, it now looks like he and Biden now hope to win by out-fibbing their opponents. For examples look here, here, here and here. If I were a source of Obama funding, I’d be pissed at how my money is being spent.

    So I have an idea for a new campaign by the grass roots of the Obama campaign: cut him off until he stops treating the grass roots as a gas well.

    Whaddaya think?

    Bonus link.

    GACL: Google Open Mobile platform

    September 22, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    stands for Gears, Android, Chrome and Linux. At that first link — a new post over at Linux Journal — I suggest that Google’s new browser is “cream on the top of a new mobile software stack” that results in an “open season for developers, and an open market for everybody”. Read the rest here.

    Smoke screening

    September 19, 2008 in Future, News, Past | 3 comments

    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:

      There’s a growing sense in the United States that the Imperial Era is over almost before it started. We’re seeing the weakness that is the United States allowing the financial sector to take over the private economy. That is now the largest portion: 21-22% of the GDP is finance, pushing manufacturing way down. I don’t think that the financial sector is responsible enough, safe enough, broad-minded enough to fill that position. I think what you’ll see happen to the United States is over-financialization: too much debt, too much over expansion and a degree of an implosion that will involve everything from too much debt and collapsing home prices to rising oil prices and the declining dollar. It’s all converging. It’s all trouble. It doesn’t spell the end of the United States, but it does spell the end of the United States as the Total Big Cheeze in the world. And we are going to lose some of the yardsticks that everybody enjoyed for a long time.

    About “financialization”, he says,

      You’re looking at the transformation of the American economy from one that produced things to one that moves money around. But it didn’t happen overnight. One of the major relationships is between the rise of debt and the rise of the debt culture. The debt culture meant rising deficits and “spend now and play and pay later”, the public’s debt tolerance to an extraordinary degree, and this general lackidasicalness of putting a framework around your culture and your economy — they’ve all sort of gone to seed together. And I think that the net outcome of this is a country that is in every way living beyond its means. We used to be the leading world creditor, the leading world manufacturer and the leading world producer of oil. Now we’re the world’s leading debtor, the largest inporter of manufatures and the world’s leading importer of oil. It’s a disastrous transformation. The only part of the economy that has profited is the financial sector, because an awful lot of the transition is toward more debt, more credit, more living on things you can’t afford, more keeping up pretenses, and more ambition around the world with less to back it up. And the consequenses of this in many ways is the George W. Bush administration.

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

      There is a good reason for Paul and the Democrats in general to be upbeat here. Maybe to an extent if things were a lot further advanced in the decay process, you could just flip a leaf and say all of a sudden that we are ferociously concerned about this decay. But they think that liberal policies and the Democratic approach can turn it around. Frankly, I don’t… The Democratic magic is more of the old razmatazz, and government will step in and there’s going to be a Green Deal as well as a New Deal, and we’re going to have five million new jobs for things relating to the Greening of America… The Democrats don’t want to admit that what they di8d for the most part in the two Clinton administrations was for the most part a continuation of the Reagan and first Bush administration — and then was continued and built upon by the second Bush administration. You had a lot of financial deregulation under the Clinton administrations. They repealed Glass-Stiegel, they deregulated credit cards, lots of stuff. They stepped on the gas in terms of private debt. The increase is extraordinary. So I can’t separate out the Clinton years from what preceded them and what came after them. And of course the Democrats need to be able to tell America in this election that … they have the answer. I understand that. But I don’t agree with it.

    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.

    Reflections

    September 19, 2008 in Journalism, News | 6 comments

    Jeff Jarvis:

      Newspapers and newspaper companies are about to die. The last remaining puddles of auto, home, job, and retail advertising are about to be sucked down the drain thanks to the economic crisis and credit is about to be crunched into dust. So any newspaper or news company that has been teetering will fall. If Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and AIG can fall, so can a puny newspaper empire — and there’ll be no taxpayer bailout for them. When this happens, will it be Sam Zell’s fault? Hardly.

      The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves...

      Want to see who’s to blame for the state of your paper? Get a mirror.

    I’m not quite so pessimistic, although I agree about the direction of history’s vector. Meanwhile, in respect to this…

      When the internet came, did you all – every one of you as responsible, smart journalists, on your own – leap to get training in audio and video? Did you immediately hatch new ways to work collaboratively with the vast public of bloggers able and willing to join in local journalism? Not that I saw.

    … credit where due to the LATimes for hiring Tony Pierce to run the paper’s bloggig and blogging-outreach operation. It might be a matter of deck chair rearrangement, but at least it was one good move.

    Same you can believe in

    September 18, 2008 in News, Uncategorized | 6 comments

    Just arrived at LAX, taking a few minutes before flying off to LAV (to which I would like to append oratory) to post a couple of pointers to what I read and heard on the plane.

    First is A Conservative for Obama, by Wick Allison, who actually gave the maximum sum to McCain earlier this year, “…when there was still hope he might come to his senses”. A few grafs:

      Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

      But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts — a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war — led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

      Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

      This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

      …I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

      Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

    The other is this interview with Tom Friedman on Fresh Air. I’m not sure he’ll succeed at making green “the new red, white & blue”, but if you don’t have enough reasons to vote against McCain already, he’ll load you up with a few more good ones.

    Bonus link.

    Thanks for the memory requirements

    September 17, 2008 in Art, News, Photography | 2 comments

    Canon has unveiled the 5D Mark II SLR. Whoa: 21.1 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor; ISO range from 100-6400, and expandable to 25600 (that is, shooting under appoximately no light); 1080p HD video shooting with live view on the back (3″ across), HDMI and USB connectivity…

    Also welcome: a sensor-cleaning system (my 30D is constantly plagued with sensor dust).

    $2700 or so.

    No price yet from Amazon, but you can pre-order it.

    Time to exhale

    September 17, 2008 in News | 4 comments

    Yesterday Calvin Dodge said,

      I look forward to seeing your posts on your disappointment with the Obama campaign’s ads, as well as his attempts to silence people who are reporting on his associations with the radical Left. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for those posts.

    … later mentioning how the “…Obama campaign has urged people to swamp WGN’s switchboard when guests on the Milt Rosenberg show…”

    Looked that one up, and sure enough, here’s Andrew Sullivan — a conservative Obama supporter — telling his man to Leave Fredosso Alone, pointing for sourceage to this piece in Reason about David Fredosso, author of “the lone decent anti-Obama book”, and a scheduled guest on WGN. The Chicago Tribune takes it from there:

      Chicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an “Obama Action Wire” alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.

      Monday night’s target was David Freddoso, who the campaign said was scheduled to be on the station from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Chicago time.

      “The author of the latest anti-Barack hit book is appearing on WGN Radio in the Chicagoland market tonight, and your help is urgently needed to make sure his baseless lies don’t gain credibility,” an e-mail sent Monday evening to Obama supporters reads.

      “David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hate mongering,” the message said. “And WGN apparently thinks this card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine needs a bigger platform for his lies and smears about Barack Obama — on the public airwaves.”

    I’m not familiar with Fredosso. (Look him up if you like.) But there’s a difference between responding to critics and choking them.

    What happened to McCain?

    September 16, 2008 in News, Politics | 33 comments

    John McCain was once — no, for many years — one Republican in Congress that Democrats and independents could like, if not love. Why? Because he was truly bi-partisan. Far more, in fact, than Barack Obama.

    It’s hard to square his campaign with that.

    Is the difference just raw ambition, political hardball, do-anything-to-win? I’m sure that’s true. Still, disappointing. The promise to the counrty of McCain vs. Obama was a campaign based on ideas and ideals. That at last we might rise at least a few inches above the mud. Alas, not this time.

    Smarty pants

    September 13, 2008 in Ideas, News, Travel | Comments closed

    Apple has applied to patent the ‘smart garment’.

    Nick Carr explains:

      Apple views tennis-shoe DRM as a way to head off what it sees as a potential plague of sneaker hacking. “Some people,” the patent application observes, “have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the [iPod-linked] Nike+ shoe and place it at inappropriate locations (shoelaces, for example) or place it on non-Nike+ model shoes.” Oh my God: Geeks are ripping the sensors out of their sneakers and sticking them on their shoelaces! Unleash the shoe nazis!

    Quote du jour

    September 12, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    “What G.E. ought to do is give MSNBC its freedom and the authority to kill its Mama…” — Terry Heaton

    Say ______?

    September 11, 2008 in News, Places, Travel | 2 comments

    Twice in the last half hour, John Wayne Airport asked everybody to observe a minute of silence in honor of the airplane strikes against the World Trade Center exactly seven years ago, to the minute. On the way here I heard on the radio that this is now a regular thing in New York, but it’s the first time I experienced it at an airport.

    I looked around to see what people did after they heard the message, announced following what must hold the record for Most Loud And Annoying Alert Sound (MLAAAS) at any airport on Earth: three long blasts that sound like a brontosaurus bellowing into a bad microphone. The answer was, mostly, nothing different. People in conversation kept talking, to each other or their phones. People behind counters continued to deal with pressing issues. A page for a list of passengers also came on immediately after the call for silence by the PA announcer.

    Is it just how it goes here? Dunno. Just thought it was worth observing.

    Framing wins

    September 11, 2008 in News, Politics | 11 comments

    Here’s an interesting piece on framing by Rickard Linde. I think he and George Lakoff are both right about the expert framing job that the McCain campaign is doing on Obama, and that Republicans since Reagan have done in major elections. Rickard also has some excellent framing advice for the Obama campaign.

    Both Rickard and George, however, are discounting the importance of bullshit. The Onion nailed it months ago. It doesn’t matter if Sarah Palin is unqualified as a presidential candidate (and remember, that’s what she’s running for — sitting on the bench behind an elderly president). She’s a star. A celebrity. That counts in America. A lot.

    Who’s running for VP on Obama’s side? Nobody. Not compared to Palin’s celebrity, name recognition and face time on TV and magazine covers. Suddenly Obama’s got half a ticket.

    I don’t know if the McCain campaign actually intended for this to happen, but the way it looks to me right now, it’ll work. Palin is single-handedly turning Barack Obama into John Kerry: a policy wonk quarantined to the bottom end of the FM dial. It’s amazing to watch.

    Throwing the bums in

    September 6, 2008 in Business, Future, News, Politics | 28 comments

    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 :

    Obama Biden McCain Palin
    True 39 7 25 4
    Mostly True 23 4 19 0
    Half-True 20 4 19 3
    Barely True 12 3 19 0
    False 18 4 22 0
    Pants on Fire 0 2 4 0

    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.

    Tags: , , , , , ,

    Moving along

    September 4, 2008 in Ideas, News, Travel | Comments closed

    From The Long When:

      Either we get green or our layer of the lithosphere wraps early. We have to learn to respect a scope of time that geologists and too few others even begin to conceive. That’s why I love what the Long Now folks are trying to do. Our species has been operating on a free lunch program for the duration. We’re a start-up species, exploiting everything we found when we came here, and giving back approximately nothing. If we don’t come back from lunch pretty soon, lunch is what we’ll be.

    Wrote that 7.5 years ago.

    The Publican Convention

    September 4, 2008 in News | 9 comments

    I love Dave Barry. A couple of random paragraphs:

      The Democrats pounced immediately on the choice of Palin, charging that she is unqualified, especially compared to the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who have a total of nearly 40 years of experience in the U.S. Senate, or, if you subtract Biden, nearly four years of experience.

      But the McCain camp is defending Palin’s résumé, which, aside from being a governor and a mayor, includes being a mom, playing basketball, hunting moose and being runner-up for Miss Alaska 1984. There was some grumbling among Republican insiders that McCain would have been better off choosing somebody with a thicker résumé, such as Mitt Romney, who actually won Miss Alaska 1984.

    But seriously, it’s disappointing to see the GOP present itself as the War Party. The most sensible Republican I heard tonight was Ron Paul, talking to Tavis Smiley on the motel TV. The least sensible was Rudy Giuliani, whose mockery of Obama’s work as a community organizer pissed me off. I was once a community organizer. I wasn’t very good at it, but I developed enormous respect for those who were. It’s good, hard and important work.

    Obama is still doing it. And he’ll need to do a lot more if he’s going to win in November.

    Between now and then it’ll be high road vs. low road. Hate to say I’m betting on the latter.

    It’s the Mind, stupid

    September 1, 2008 in Ideas, News | 3 comments

    George Lakoff:

      …the choice of Sarah Palin as their vice presidential candidate reflects their expert understanding of the political mind and political marketing. Democrats who simply belittle the Palin choice are courting disaster. It must be taken with the utmost seriousness…

      …the Palin nomination changes the game. The initial response has been to try to keep the focus on external realities, the “issues,” and differences on the issues. But the Palin nomination is not basically about external realities and what Democrats call “issues,” but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind — the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes. The Republicans can’t win on realities. Her job is to speak the language of conservatism, activate the conservative view of the world, and use the advantages that conservatives have in dominating political discourse.

    Either it’s nuts or political jujistu of the first water. And even if it’s the former, it could turn into the latter. Obama and the dems can’t wonk their way to victory, even if that’s their nature. (And it is.)

    Power Trip

    September 1, 2008 in Business, Geology, Life, News, Past, Photography, Places, Politics, Travel | Comments closed

    (Note: this post was made mistakenly as a page, and didn’t go up at first. Now it’s here. Thanks to commenters for the help.)

    I’ve flown over these coal in New Mexico and Arizona many times, but never checked to see what was up with them. Or down. Or choose your direction.

    Turns out the one above, a giant W in the Arizona landscape, is the Black Mesa Mine, and it has been mothballed since 2005 when the destination of its coal (via an unusual route), the Mojave power plant, was shut down. The Kayenta Mine is still running, as are the other mines I saw off to the east around the Four Corners areas.

    It’s gonna get gooier

    September 1, 2008 in News, problems | 1 comment

    Steve Lohr in the NYTimes:

      That challenge, legal experts say, is one of several for trademark policy and practice in the Internet age. Instant communication, aggressive business tactics and an unsettled legal environment, they say, mean that trademark disputes on the Internet will increase in number and intensity...

      The new areas of conflict, according to legal experts, include trademark owners trying to assert their rights to stifle online criticism of their products, and to stop trademarked brands from being purchased as keywords in Internet search advertising.

    For example, live mesh.

    Value subtraction

    September 1, 2008 in Business, News, VRM | 8 comments

    , which has amazingly bad PR chops, has done it again. Comcast to Place a Cap on Internet Downloads, headlines the NYTimes story. An excerpt:

      Until now, Comcast had not defined excessive use, but it had contacted customers who were using the heaviest amount of broadband and asked them to curb usage. Most do so willingly, the company said. The ones who do not curb their usage receive a second notice and risk having their accounts terminated.

      Although the 250 gigabyte cap is now specified, users who exceed that amount will not have their access switched off immediately, nor will they be charged for excessive use. Instead, the customers may be contacted by Comcast and notified of the cap. The company did not say how 250 gigabytes was selected.

      According to Comcast, a customer would have to download 62,500 songs or 125 standard-definition movies a month to exceed the caps,

    So then, why bother? Why give customers one more reason not to use Comcast?

    For what it’s worth, at our apartment near Boston I have a choice of Comcast, RCN and Verizon FiOS. I use FiOS because I get 20Mb of symmetrical service from a fiber optic line to the house, minimal technical restriction (they block port 80, but so does everybody) and rock-solid service. Far as I know Verizon doesn’t care how much data moves in either direction from my house. Comcast doesn’t compete with that. At least not yet.

    All they did with this move is give me one more reason not to switch.

    Getting Gustav

    August 31, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News, Places, problems | 5 comments

    A little guide to New Orleans radio & other Hurricane Gustav sources.

    If you’re using a regular over-the-air-type radio, and you’re within 750 miles or so of New Orleans, tune in 870am to hear WWL. It’s one of the original (literal) clear channel stations. In the old days you’d get them from coast to coast at night, but in recent years the FCC has chosen to allow new stations to clutter the AM band at night (when signals skip off the ionosphere). But still, worth a check if you’re within range. WWL also has a hurricane coverage network of other stations in the area.

    If you’re listening over the Net, your station choices are WWL and WIST. Here’s a link to a browser thingie that plays WWL (using Windows Media or Silverlight). Here’s WIST’s audio page. Wish either used .mp3, but this isn’t the right time to complain. Both have excellent local coverage right now, from what I can gather. Lots of listener call-in stuff.

    Here’s AP hurricane video.

    Can’t get Technorati to chart less than 90 days, but this chart shows Gustav action.

    Full Circle‘s Tracking Hurricane Gustav on Social Media.

    Rex Hammock’s Where to go for Gustav information. Includes the Gustav Information Center, Nola.com, Wikipedia’s Gustav entry, GustavWiki.

    I’ll add more as the night goes on.

    American Red Cross Flickr photos. Those with “Hurricane Gustav” tags. All photos with hurricanegustav tags.

    Andy Carvin wants to make the ultimate Gustav mashup map.

    See the comments below for more.

    Amidst the Palin din

    August 30, 2008 in News | 12 comments

    I listened to McCain’s veep selection live on the radio. Struck me as pretty smart, though maybe a little too smart for McCain’s own good. His attacks on Obama’s lack of experience ring kinda hollow after he’s picked a backup president (which is all a veep is, Cheney excepted) with even less experience. Since then I’ve read a few blogs and stuff, and pretty much steered clear of politics while enjoying freedom from media and technology during my last few days at home with family and friends in Santa Barbara. Anyway at this point I’d say my take on Sarah Palin kinda parallels Richard Bennett’s:

      She’s young, good-looking, inexperienced, a bit ideological, and a member of a marginal group; just like Barack Obama, actually. But she’s running for VP, not to be the big dog. She’s not at all embarrassing, not a Katherine Harris, Harriet Miers, or Dan Quayle. All in all, a good contrast to Biden who’s tainted with the scent of corruption.

      This just might work for McCain.

      UPDATE: But seriously, what was McCain thinking? Palin is a nice woman, but there’s no way in hell she should be allowed inside the White House if not on a tour. McCain has effectively conceded the election. Welcome to the Oval Office, President Obama, listen to Sen. Biden carefully and don’t screw too many things up.

    FWIW, she’s got some taint too.

    Also FWIW, I know a lot of Hillary partisans, and if anything the Palin selection helps them rationalize voting for Obama.

    Looking forward to the debate between Palin and Biden.

    Bonus link (hat tip).

    From e-lections to e-vernance

    August 25, 2008 in News | 3 comments

    My first piece about the Obama Convention. (I know that’s a terrible headline, but I’m busy and don’t have time to make it better. And it doesn’t matter anyway.)

    And the world is made more laughable

    August 11, 2008 in Art, News | 1 comment

    Dave Barry is back, covering the Olympics.

    Piques and valleys

    August 10, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    Fun to look at Google’s news archive timelines. Here are some profiles for Obama, JFK, Ubuntu, and Katrina. That should get you started.

    It isn’t like the bits have rotted

    August 9, 2008 in News, problems | 4 comments

    Since CNN bothered to make James Burgett one of its heroes (an honor he richly deserves) why not maintain the video that says so? Why does a video have to “expire”? For that matter why should the rest of the CNN links on that story, other than the one to the ACCRC, go to expired or 404′d CNN locations?

    Bulletin to CNN: I’d gladly pay to see that video (or after seeing it). But on my terms, not yours.

    Olympics in low-def

    August 9, 2008 in Future, News, Past, Places | Comments closed

    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.

    Olympics in low-def

    August 9, 2008 in Future, News, Past, Places | 2 comments

    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.

    And absolute ambition corrupts absolutely

    August 9, 2008 in News | 3 comments

    This is worse than sad news. One winces to read Elizabeth Edwards post about it on DailyKos. It ends,

      I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John’s conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time.

    Celebrity voyeurism is the neon-lit armpit of every culture infected by it, especially when its light and stink surround the wounded. As voters, however, we can breathe a sigh of relief that the country was spared another Bill Clinton: a man whose little head told his big head what to do — at risk to everybody else’s, starting with his own family.

    Greater radio

    August 9, 2008 in Art, News | 1 comment

    Nice to learn that Joe Frank, one of the greatest radio artists of all time, is back. In a way. You can listen in a browser to .wma selections from albums he sells. It would be nice for Joe to make those available as .mp3s as podcasts.

    Maybe when we get this put together we can find a new way for him to make money with his art.

    Preferring BlogWorld to Flogworld

    July 31, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News | 2 comments

    I’ll be at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas in September. Gotta say that I wouldn’t be going if it didn’t coincide with another obligation in town. But since I’ll be there, I’m interested in seeing if a sharper distinction can be made between blogging and flogging. You can see the split by looking Blogworld’s own promotional jive. On the one hand there’s this…

      …if you want to influence decision makers, sell a product or service, if you want to promote yourself as an industry expert, or build your brand using new media…

    And on the other hand there’s the Citizen Journalism Workshop, with a program developed by David Perlmutter, Ph.D. In addition to being the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at Kansas University’s School of Journalism with a distinguished adacemic pedigree — and a blogger — David is busy doing research on a grant from Knight Foundation to “study the relationship between reading blogs and newspapers”.

    Generally speaking, I’ll be a lot more interested in the latter than the former.

    Looking forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.

    [Later...] I just learned that I might be on a panel. You can guess what I’ll be saying. Though I’ll be listening too.

    A unit of what?

    July 31, 2008 in News | 13 comments

    A knol, Knol says, is a “unit of knowledge”. I don’t think so. But I do think Knol is already becoming a den of spam.

    My cursory research, at that link, suggests that the answer is yes. “Anemia“? No results. “Hair“? 12, including several (supposedly) by the top guy at the Beauty Network. “Cancer“? 38, so far, inncluding three in the first page of results for the biggest spam giveaway, Mesothelioma. Search for anything. Watch the results.

    If this is about a fight with Wikipedia, I’d say it’s no contest. But it’s not. It’s about the corrupting influence of pure scammy ambition. Even if Google doesn’t have that, it plays host to plenty. And Knol (born on 23 July) was barely out of the womb before it got infected with it.

    The only antidote, perhaps, is more knols like Bernie DeKoven‘s one on Pointless Games. That’s how I found Knol, by the way. News of its birth had escpaped me.

    Bonus link.

    Cool. Literally.

    July 27, 2008 in Fun, Geology, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Science, Travel | 1 comment

    This shot here (and above) has found a home here as well.

    Opening the Book Cliffs

    July 26, 2008 in Geology, Ideas, Life, News, Past, Photography, problems, Travel | 7 comments

    A few dozen million years ago, in the Eocene — not far back, as geology goes — a large lake covered much of what’s now western Colorado and eastern Utah. A lot of organic muck fell to the bottom, and now that muck is oil. Problem is, it’s locked in shale, and extracting it is no bargain… yet.

    If and when it ever gets to be a bargain, look to see some of The West’s prettiest landscape ripped up.

    Edge-on, the old lake bed presents itself as the Book Cliffs*, which overlook I-70 for a hundred miles. I took some shots of the region when we drove past them last year. And one of those shots now illustrates this post by Brandon Keim in his Wired blog.

    [* My geography and my geology were corrected below in the comments by Ron Schott, a genuine geologist. Brandon Keim wrote about oil shales using my photo. There are oil shales, but not in these Book Cliffs deposits, which are older. The oil shales are in strata above the ones exposed here. Apologies for the errors.]

    What we’re presented with here is a set of costs that can only be rationalized in terms that regard the extraction of all the world’s oil as an economic necessity — and nothing else.

    I hear arguments for mining oil from places like this and a few memorable lines from the Doors’ “When the music’s over” come to mind:

    What have they done to the Earth?
    What have they done to our fair sister?
    Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her.
    Stuck her with knives in the
    Side of the dawn and
    Tied her with fences and
    Dragged her down.

    Great song, by the way. Also the one that foreshadowed the demise of Tony Soprano on the penultimate episode of Tony’s show.

    Is there foreshadowing here too?

    Absolute reform for radio

    July 24, 2008 in Business, Fun, Journalism, News | Comments closed

    The new business of free radio.

    New news flow at Projo

    July 23, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News | 3 comments

    Sheila Lennon on improvements inside the Projo (Providence Journal online) blog mill:

      The most interesting new feature, to me, is the MultiBlog: Whenever a new post, photo or comment publishes to any projo blog, it will simultaneously publish in realtime to Multiblog. You get an eagle’s-eye view of all today’s news there in one chronological stream.

      This was inspired by Dave Winer‘s River of News aggregator…

    I still think the news river is one of the most underutilized Great Ideas.

    But give it time. It’ll hit.

    On the continuing end of TV as usual

    July 22, 2008 in Ideas, News, VRM | 1 comment

    Somewhere back there I said that local TV evening news would be toasted by the inevitable end of subsidies for local TV dealership advertising. Then I was just pointing at the wall. Here’s the writing that’s starting to appear. Hat tip to Terry Heaton for that one.

    Also for this, which points in another direction:

      After years of careful planning, Media General’s NBC affiliate in Raleigh, WNCN-TV, has quietly launched what is one of the most creative and exciting approaches to relevant and hyperlocal information anywhere on the Web. MyNC.com is a highly organized portal featuring user and staff-generated content from even the smallest communities in the area. The site launched earlier this spring with just one neighborhood but has expanded since to include a big chunk of the overall market. There’s no reason it can’t eventually cover the entire state of North Carolina.

      The brainchild of WNCN President and General Manager Barry Leffler, the pioneering idea was funded by Media General in hopes of discovering new business opportunities. It’s one of the few new enterprises I’ve seen coming from a local media company that really hits a business development home run. The site aggregates content from the entire region and isn’t branded as a part of the TV station.

      Content is king when it comes to hyperlocal, and Leffler’s approach was to assign staffers to deal directly with each community to prime the pump and find contributors. These employees are called “Community Content Liaisons,” and they are a key to the success of the entire project.

    Bonus clue: they need to make that a news river, for mobile devices.

    NPR gets Mashable

    July 16, 2008 in Journalism, News, Past | 1 comment

    National Public Radio has announced a new API. The gist:

      …almost everything that you can find on NPR.org that we have the rights to redistribute is available through the API. This includes audio, images, full text, etc. That said, there are elements, series and programs that we could not offer due to rights restrictions.

    Archives go back to ’95. Hat tip to Andy Carvin.

    What changed, exactly?

    July 13, 2008 in News | 8 comments

    Here’s the FISA bill that Barack Obama voted for after saying he wouldn’t. It’s hugely complicated.

    Here’s a Volokh post that says coverage of it has been misleading.

    What isn’t misleading is that he voted for a bill that he said earlier that he would oppose. (TPM has a timeline.) In his last statement he said that the bill had changed.

    How, exactly? What was the tipping point, and why?

    Did he do it to get votes? Surely he should have known that it would cost him the grace and support of his base. And slow his money river as well.

    Did he do it on principle? Obviously two principles were involved. The civil liberties one he espoused last January and the security one that drove his vote six months later. One is a left principle, the other a right. The right one won. No pun intended.

    Obama’s campaign is about getting past partisanship, at least in part. But this vote hardly did that. Instead it pissed off his most fervent partisans.

    I’m also not sure the bill made the country safer, either. But I dunno. As I said, it’s a complicated bill. Maybe one or more of the rest of ya’ll can figger it out.

    Meanwhile, it hurt him, bad. That helps McCain.

    Higher ground

    July 10, 2008 in Future, Ideas, News, Past, Places, problems, Science | 7 comments

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

    There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists–most of whom are not scientists–holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

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

    But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we’ll get that extra day. Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this dimension is a gain. Therefore long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. The linear march of our time intersects the cascading rise and fall of numerous self-amplifying exponential forces. Generations, too, proceed in a linear sequence. They advance steadily one after another while pushed by the compounding cycles of exponential change.
    Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about.

    His bottom line:

    A timeline of where we expect these cost/benefit/risk-thresholds to fall in each sector of our civilization, or a field map of places we can see where our linear lives cross exponential change — either would be very handy to have

    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:

    Even after all this time
    The sun never says to the earth “you owe me”.
    Look what happens with a Love like that!
    — It lights the whole Sky.

    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”.

    Fires, cont’d

    July 9, 2008 in News, Places, Travel | Comments closed

    The Gap Fire is now 55% contained, and making less news, although the latest InciWeb report has this among its remarks: “Critical communication infrastructure such as Broadcast Peak are being assessed for fire protection.

    Broadcast Peak is next to Santa Ynez peak, and the highest point on the possible westward path of the fire. Many TV and FM stations are up there. Much of the green country in the first picture here has recently burned.

    Meanwhile, the fires up in Big Sur also continue. For more on that check out the SurFire2008 blog.

    Firefighter Blog is another very good source.

    I also recommend this podcast of Michael Krasny’s Forum on KQED yesterday. Lots of great stuff about Big Sur and its fire, from people who live and work there — at Esalen, Nepenthe, the Henry Miller Library, among other places.

    Minding the Gap Fire

    July 7, 2008 in Events, Health, Journalism, Life, News, Photography, Places, problems, Travel | 1 comment

    Since I lack a car here, I haven’t gotten out much, and not at all to any place that gave me a vantage on the fire. Until today, that is, when we went to Goleta and I had a chance to pause on Hollister Street by the airport where the Forest Service runs P3 Orion air tankers up to the fire sites to dump bright fire retardant on the landscape. (It’s not bad, by the way. Essentially, it’s fertilizer.) Here’s the photo set. (Also added more maps to this photo set.)

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Closing the Gap

    July 6, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, Life, News, Places, problems | Comments closed

    This is my last full day in Santa Barbara this month (I fly tomorrow, and will be back for most of August), and I’m pleased to see the Gap Fire in what appears to be retreat. The warnings at InciWeb are less dire, evacuation orders have been reduced to warnings, and the latest MODIS Active Fire Map in the series shows new flare-ups only on the northern edge of the burn area, and away from the densely populated areas. Lots of work left to do, but I think this one is on its way to ending.

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Because TV’s death has a deadline

    July 5, 2008 in Business, Events, Future, Gear, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Past, Politics, problems, Science | 10 comments

    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.

    Gap Fire, 2:35, July 5

    July 5, 2008 in Events, Geology, Journalism, Life, News, Places, problems | 1 comment

    InciWeb just updated 8 minutes ago, with this report:

    Fire continued creeping to the north, east, and west with limited movement due to competing wind that kept the fire from making any significant runs. On the south flank significant containment was gained due to the diminishing down canyon winds.

    Fire progression continues on the northeast and northwest perimeters. The west perimeter of the fire has progressed into Tecolote Canyon.

    Just added a bunch more maps to this photo set.

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    I’d put more on Twitter, except it isn’t working for me when I go there. :-(

    Gap Fire 5 July 8:15am

    July 5, 2008 in Events, Health, Journalism, Life, News, Places, problems | 2 comments

    First, kudos again to Edhat‘s news list for not only gathering info from many sources, but for giving equal weight to both professional and amateur sources — and for hosting a great many comments on some of the postings. As an interactive local news service, “Ed” does a fine job. When surfing for the latest on the fire, it’s a good place to start. Others among these are good as well:

    Second, I have been somewhat remiss by not including GeoMAC among sources for following the fire. You can follow maps from multiple sources, as I make screen shots and upload them, here. The latest from MODIS shows new fire activity (red dots, meaning in the last 0 to 12 hours) near highway 154 and on the uphill (north) and west sides of the fire perimeter. Highway 154 (San Marcos Pass) remains open.

    The LA Times this morning has ‘Critical day’ dawns for Goleta fire, enlarged by overnight wind gusts, with a dramatic photo of an air tanker (see last paragraph below) dropping red fire retardant near a house. The summary:

    The blaze, while 24% contained, grew to 8,357 acres. Firefighters plan to concentrate on protecting homes to the east before another night of ‘sundowners.’ At least 2,663 homes have been evacuated.

    Note that there are 97 comments so far to that story.

    KEYT has a summary of evacuation areas as of 5pm yesterday. That story also has a map.

    Note that chapparal wildfires, especially in steep rocky country like this, do not only spread from their edges. They also spread by dropping burning material at distances from source flames, which can have powerful updrafts. This makes fighting these fires very hard on the ground.

    Inciweb’s page for the Gap Fire currently gives its size as 54oo acres, with 1072 personnel working on the fire. Under Fire Behavior, it says,

    Down canyon winds continued through the night pushing the fire front into the north side of Goleta and widening the flanks east and west. Fire also continued to the north into the wind overnight with limited movement.

    Planned actions:

    Structure protection, create safety zones and establish contingency lines In the Goleta foothills. Construct control lines when conditions permit. Damage assessment from last night will be conducted.

    Remarks:

    Firefighters are from several agencies including the United States Forest Service and Santa Barbara County Fire Department and several local cooperators including the San Marcos Volunteer Fire Department. The California Highway Patrol, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, and the American Red Cross are assisting. ICP has been established at Earl Warren Showgrounds. Dos Pueblos High School will remain a staging area.

    Current wind is gusting at 30mph from the north (down the mountains, toward Goleta). The temperature is 75° and the humidity is 25%.

    InciWeb has no maps for the fire, but does suggest visiting these sources:

    It’s sad that InciWeb remains both slow (often overwhelmed) and behind its own curve. I’ve had a number of email exchanges with folks working on InciWeb, and have great respect for the hard work they do within what is essentially a bureaucratic morass. I think the lesson here is that we have to do our best with many sources, and the messiness that involves.

    Somewhere among the sources above I read that an aggressive aerial attack was planned to start at dawn this morning. I’m too far east (~5 miles) of the fire to see that; but it helps that Santa Barbara’s airport is in Goleta itself, almost next to the fire, and is home to one of the main Air Attack Bases for the U.S. Forest Service. Here is a photoset I shot of that base, and the P3 Orions used for bombing fires with supressant. I am sure these are in use right now.

    Finally (at least for now), I want to say that I’m optimistic about this fire, even though I must disclaim any qualifications for that other than as an amateur observer. I feel a need to do that because I’ve also shot photographs that could easily be seen as scary. These two sets, for example. Please note that I shot those with a long telephoto lens to maximize the apparent size of the sun — reducing the apparent distance between subjects in the photo (such as Mission Santa Barbara, the fire and the Sun). Also because, hey, I wanted to take good photos.

    Speaking of which, I also shot the fireworks from up in the hills last night, where there was also a pretty rocking party. Life goes on.

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Gap Fire progress shots

    July 4, 2008 in Events, Geology, Health, Journalism, Life, News, Places, problems, Travel | 3 comments

    I’ve loaded too many pictures onto this blog, so for this round I’m going to just point to shots elsewhere: in this case to a photo set of  maps built with .kml files from the MODIS Active Fire Program and Google Earth.

    The latest one, from about 6pm this evening, has fewer active hot spots than the previous one from 4am this morning, or the one before that from yesterday afternoon. Not sure how to interpret that, but whatever. It’s data.

    This afternoon we took a walk along the beach, where hundreds of families and other social groups had set up homes and kitchens and play areas along the beach and in the park, in preparation for the fireworks tonight. It’s an annual festival, and a lot of fun. There was hardly a sign of the fire, since the wind was mostly onshore.

    But this evening the wind shifted, and now we’re getting orange clouds of low smoke and ash fall.

    The fire hasn’t stopped the fireworks though. Going next door now for a party. Watch for pictures of that show too.

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    July 4 workfire

    July 4, 2008 in Events, Future, Journalism, Life, News, Places, Politics, Travel, Uncategorized | 4 comments

    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.

    Jesse’s gone

    July 4, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    Among the most amazing things to me, during my many years as a North Carolinian, was the eagerness with which a majority of voters there elected, and kept re-electing, Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate. Hal Crowther did the best job, I thought, of summarizing Helms’ politics, even if Hal went over the top in some ways. (I can’t find my favorite Jesse piece by Hal, alas. It was written too long before the Internet, I’m sure. Meanwhile here are a few among Hal’s more recent and all-too-rare columns.)

    I met Jesse Helms once. He seemed — as he was to all acounts — a nice guy. And he did save Internet radio from obliteration before retiring from the Senate. I appreciated that much.

    He died early this morning, at age 86.

    Gap Fire, 4am on 4 July

    July 4, 2008 in Events, Journalism, Life, News, Places, Science, Travel | 5 comments

    The above is the latest from http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/wms.php. These are updated every hour. Download the .kmz and you’ll have what I show above on Google Earth. Details:

    The data links below provide access to MODIS MOD14 fire and thermal anomaly data in both a Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format for each specified geographic area. Both the WMSes and KMLs are updated hourly.

    What’s new here, and very consistent with Ray Ford’s report below, are the red spots spreading in all directions from the fire’s origins and earlier dimensions (other colors). Note the new red ones on the right, or east. They are very close to Painted Cave, which is on the east side of highway 154. Painted Cave is currently under mandatory evacuation orders.

    Bear in mind that winds are currently from the northwest, and quite gusty. The conditions are very much like those that prevailed during the Painted Cave fire, almost exactly eighteen years ago.Read the story at that link. We had friends over to the house last night. They barely escaped the Painted Cave fire, and said that the look of the smoke last night was nearly identical to what they saw during Painted Cave.

    More than six hundred homes were lost in that one.

    [Later...] at 7:50am the skies look clear to the west. Between this picture and story at Noozhawk (using this among other pictures by Tim Burgess) and this story at the Independent — and nothing so far on the radio (that I can find) — it looks like the winds blew the fire in a westward direction overnight, which is good for Santa Barbara, though not for the houses and ranches to the west.

    Photoset: Gap Fire from Upper State Street

    July 4, 2008 in Events, Journalism, Life, News, Photography, problems | 1 comment

    Click on the shot above to see the sunset I witnessed on Upper State Street in Santa Barbara last evening. I had gone to Radio Shack for supplies, and paid cash in a dark store, since the power was out. Stopped on the way back, stepped out of the car and shot this series.

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Gap Fire Day 4, 3am

    July 4, 2008 in Journalism, Life, News, Photography, Places, Politics, problems, Travel | 1 comment

    Ray Ford has an excellent report on the fire in the Independent. A sample:

    Rather than forcing the fire downhill into the ranch lands where it could be dealt with by the forces that were massing along Cathedral Oaks, the flames followed lateral channels east and west along saddles formed by erosion of softer rock materials, turning what was a half mile wide fire into one with a three-to-four mile wide. By 8pm, in the Ellwood area, rancher Ken Doty, his son, and son-in-law were busy spending the night building dozer lines to protect his property from the advancing flames.

    On the other end, at the top of the Fairview area, neighbors were out in the street, dumb-struck by the huge flames they could see on the hills immediately above them. The questions were mounting.

    Here is Ray’s photo gallery. Also excellent. And as scary as the text.

    It is significant that Painted Cave is now under mandatory evacuation orders. If the fire jumps 154 and moves into the Painted Cave area, then winds blow down toward the city from the ridge, that would be extra bad.

    [Later...] 9am. Looks like the wind is blowing the fire to the west now. Except for the firefighters, it looks like this will be a nice 4th in Santa Barbara.

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Gap Fire, 2-3pm Thursday

    July 4, 2008 in Blogging, Events, Fun, Future, Life, News, Past, problems, Travel | 1 comment

     [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:

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Fire from the Mission

    July 4, 2008 in Art, Events, Journalism, Life, News, Photography, Places, problems, Travel | 4 comments

    Click on the above to dig one of the best photosets I’ve shot in a while. I was driving to a Radio Shack to pick up a volt-ohm meter, so we could monitor the browning out of electrical service, when I saw the sun setting through the smoke from the fire, and knew instantly that I could get a good angle on that through the Mission in silhouette. So I turned the corner, and sure enough. Got it.

    Any blogger or news service that wants to use any of those shots should feel free to grab any of them. Give me photo credit if you like, but it’s not necessary. Just here to help.

    (tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire)

    Gap Fire, 2-3pm Thursday

    July 3, 2008 in Events, Life, News, Places, problems, Science, Travel | 5 comments

    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:

    Tag: sbgapfire.

    Gap Fire growing

    July 3, 2008 in Events, Life, News, Photography, Places, problems | 5 comments

    Inciweb’s latest on the Gap Fire (tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire) is 10 hours old, it says (as of 12:17am Thursday morning). Most of KEYT‘s 11pm newscast was devoted to the fire. Currently they’re reporting 1200 acres burned, 5% containment. The winds are not Santa Ana grade, but do come down from the NNW, flowing SSE over the Santa Ynez mountains (where the fire burns, above Santa Barbara and Goleta), directly toward town (and also in to the path of areas already burned by backfires, one hopes). KEYT also reported 10-13mph winds, with possible gusts up to 35. But the reporter on site said winds below, where houses are threatened, were calm.

    Meanwhile ash is falling and the smell of smoke is strong. It’s stuffy, but we have all our windows shut here.

    We also had a power outage. KEYT reported that nearly all of Santa Barbara and Goleta were knocked out by smoke affecting the main power lines into town, which come over the mountains from the North. (The other main power lines come over the mountains near Gibraltar Peak.) We came back on, but around 70,000 homes are still without power. The County of Santa Barbara has more on the front page of its website (that last link), but no direct link to any single report.

    I’ll put up some pictures shortly, taken from our neighborhood close to the center of Santa Barbara itself, about 10 miles by air from the fire center. [Later: It wasn't easy, since the Net's speed has been way down... no doubt Cox is affected by this... but I got at least one picture up: the one above.]

    Tuning around the radio dial, I only hear fire news right now on KCSB/91.9 from UCSB, alternating between English and Spanish. The station’s many Web streams are here.

    More from The Independent (also on its fire page), Noozhawk, Edhat…

    Here is a very deep history of wildfires around Santa Barbara. Scary and important. And here is my post about them, from the last time a fire threatened. I also had some ideas last year about public radio filling the hole left by departed news and “full service” commercial stations (all of which are gone from Santa Barbara). It was on my old blog here, but seems to be gone right now.

    [Later...] The Net from Cox, our cable Internet provider, is down. The borrowed Sprint EvDO card, however, works perfectly. I even managed to upload the rest of my fire smoke photo set to Flickr.

    Free as in markets

    July 2, 2008 in Ideas, News | 1 comment

    My latest in Linux Journal: Time to school the FCC on what “free” really means. One excerpt:

      The easy take here is to say “On the one hand, it’s free; on the other hand, it’s filtered.” But there are more than two hands here. FCC rulemaking is octopus farming, often resulting in a tangle of tentacles that suck in more ways than you can count.

    Free range tweeter

    July 2, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Fun, Future, Ideas, Life, News, problems | 3 comments

    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.

    The fire this time

    July 2, 2008 in Events, News, problems, Travel | 2 comments

    There are orange clouds to the West. Turns out this is the Gap Wildland Fire. (Tag: . Hashtag: #sbgapfire) It’s only 35 acres so far, but it’s very close to civilization. Here’s an LA Times story that shows the fire itself, near Lizard’s Mouth, a favorite local hiking site off West Camino Cielo. (Here are some pictures I took a couple years ago.) It started late yesterday afternoon and evacuation orders stand for Glen Annie and La Patera canyons.  There is also an evacuation warning for residents above Cathedral Oaks Road, between Glen Annie Road and Fairview Avenue. Here’s a Google Map with the evacuation order marked. Lizard’s mouth is the bare area above that on the map.

    Cool: Kevin Marks just turned me on to the user-created Maps search for Glen Annie Canyon. (Tried to embed it, but that didn’t work. Not sure one can embed stuff in Harvard blogs.)

    If you are among the hundred thousand or so in the potential line of fire (pun intended), here are some links:

    I’d include the Santa Barbara News-Press, our local newspaper, on that list, but the website is down right now. Of course the News-Press itself has been one long sad story over the past three years.

    I’ve also just set up an experimental Twitter source, sbgapfire. If it works it should serve the same purpose that sandiegofire did last year. If any of ya’ll want to help me set it up right, or to set up something else that’s better, please do. (As of 10:02am PDST, Twitter is “down for maintenance.” Grrr.) Thanks.

    In case we forget

    July 1, 2008 in News | 3 comments

    There are aparent connections between forms of cholesterol and memory.

    Blogging that matters

    July 1, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News | 1 comment

    In The right to blog: freedom’s next frontier , Evgeny Morozov came away from Global Voices Online‘s Citizens Media Summit in Budapest with a perspective on blogging that is refreshingly free of U.S.-centric tech and political preoccupations, and grounded in truly serious social and political concerns elsewhere. Some excerpts:

      …these idealistic people did not talk much about gadgets, fashion, or campaign-financing; nor rush to praise or scorn Barack Obama or John McCain; nor fret over the latest celebrity-hunt or political trick in the style of Gawker or the Huffington Post. Instead, they got into heated discussions (often in heavily accented English) over a different set of topics: internet filtering, human-rights violations, and the future of freedom of expression.

      This, then, was a different kind of blogger and a different order of reality. The background of many of the participants told the story: for in their countries of origin many at the Budapest gathering sustain their blogs in face of the threat or reality of arrest, intimidation and beating from the authorities. Their enemies are real, not imaginary. Their blogs are exercises in courage.

      …Even in places with low internet penetration, blogs can still have a significant impact in creating channels to voice dissent and influence wider media networks. Kenyan bloggers, for example, have built synergistic relationships with the country’s radio journalists, who have come to rely on blogs for materials for their programmes, thus making blogs accessible (albeit indirectly) to virtually anyone in the country.

      …The Budapest experience suggests that the movement slowly emerging on the margins of the blogosphere shares much in common with an older generation of those who sought to “speak truth to power”.

      …The ubiquity of the internet – accessible via computers or mobile-phones in almost any corner of the planet – is being matched by the growth in explicit and implicit restrictions on free speech.

      …The long-term balance of forces in this contest is poised. If not all governments have the time, money, or patience for systematic censorship, they may resort to an easier and cheaper way to collect a person’s email password: imprisonment and, eventually, torture. Today, the greatest threat to freedom of expression online is not web censorship but mistreatment of bloggers.

    And finally,

      The Citizen Media Summit raised the idea that the equivalent of the Reporters without Borders group – a “Bloggers without Borders” – might be created to lobby for bloggers’ release from jail and right to speak freely. But would bloggers get the same protection as journalists and political prisoners; could traditional groups expand their role and make such a new organisation unnecessary? Such are the questions that western governments and many traditional human-rights organisations – as well as bloggers themselves – must answer as soon as possible.

    Blogs are journals (as I’ve said many times). As we saw at this summit, blogs in many places are about as serious as journals can get — and among the most essential of emerging institutions in civic life. So, rather than start a new borderless organization just for bloggers, how about expanding Reporters Without Borders to include bloggers as well? I’d say more about it, but I can’t get the Reporters Without Borders site  rsf.org, for reporters sans frontieres) to load. Here’s the Wikipedia page. That’s where I discover that to some degree it’s already happening. Reporters sans frontières – Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents is an RSF publication with sections contributed by Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman, a co-founder of Global Voices Online.

    In any case, blogging matters for the same reason journalism has always mattered. Discussions at the Citizen Media Summit highlight that fact.

    Obama as Reagan 2.0

    June 24, 2008 in Journalism, News, Politics | 7 comments

    Caught a bit of Michael Krasny’s Forum yesterday on KQED, and heard that George Lakoff will be on the second hour today: 10-11am, Pacific time.  Michael is among the most intellectual and probing of interviewers, and I look forward to hearing how he does with George. If you miss that, get the podcast.

    What you’ll hear from George about politics, and especially about the appeal of Barack Obama, is unlike anything you’ll hear anywhere else. And perhaps more important as well, because George’s work has had a deep influence on the Obama campaign, and especially the candidate’s speechwriting.

    This first post-primary TV ad by the Obama campaign. Listen to Lakoff and you’ll see exactly how it appeals to deep unconscious meanings of shared values across political divides. Reagan did it in 1980, and by the time the next decade was over the Republicans were the party of traditional American values while the Democrats were the party of tax’n'spend Liberals, fading unions and collections of minority interest groups. Blame talk radio and Fox News for that, if you like (or the Democrats themselves, who certainly deserve it); but it was Reagan’s work. And it was genius. George Lakoff has studied that genius. So has Barack Obama.

    In the primaries Obama beat the Clinton machine with a much more modern and functional one, geared to a wider, deeper appeal: one targeted across political divides.

    Ignore policy statements for a minute. Ignore “issues”. Ignore race, voting records and the bullshit that gasses up TV news. Look at how Obama appeals. Ask What are the deeper sensibilities he is appealing to? Then look back at what Reagan did in 1980, and through the presidency that followed. Then look at how well Obama is raising money and weakening the oppositional resolve of conservatives like George Will.

    The best competitors learn from both their own mistakes and their opponents successes. The Obama Campaign has been doing that for the Democratic party from the start.

    In November, the best Reagan will win.

    Bye, George

    June 23, 2008 in News | 6 comments

    George Carlin, one of smartest and most challenging comedians who ever lived, is gone. Heart failure. 71.

    Wesley Clark for VP?

    June 20, 2008 in News | 10 comments

    That’s what Hootsbuddy hints.

    I thought that Clark was a good candidate four years ago, but he didn’t click. But now… ? Maybe.

    Is BHO MIA?

    June 20, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    Sez that here. I’m not so sure. As the first comment puts it, “This doesn’t sound like an Obama MIA issue at all, as this is still in the House and the Senate has yet to weigh in”.

    Differences

    June 19, 2008 in Health, News, problems | 19 comments

    Everybody’s different. That’s the problem. Medicine and medical care, however, isn’t about that. They treat templates. Differences are accounted for, such as in my case, where I had a 1-in-20 chance of developing pancreatitis. But I weighed the odds, signed the consent form, and got to be that 1. So differences still matter. None of us is a template.

    I’ve always had hunger pains. These were different from the feeling of hunger but they came at the same time. Certain other family members also have them. I’ve looked many places on the Web for answers to what my hunger pains actually are, with slim results. “Stomach acid” is the main suspect. But other people have that when they get hungry too, without the pain. What’s different in my case? The doctors say “That’s a good question”. Whenever somebody says that, they don’t have the answer. Would this condition have suggested that I might be sure to get pancreatitis if the inside of my pancreas was probed? I’d say yes, because that’s just instinct. I don’t know.

    I tend to be prone to minor problems with what TV ads used to call “irregularity”. In both the liquid and solid directions, if you know what I mean. Was this a harbinger as well? Especially since I had spent more than a week prior to this event fighting irregularity of the liquid sort? How?

    Anyway, pancreatitis in me was manifested, principally (though among other symptoms) by hunger pains in the extreme. Without the hunger. What does that tell us?

    And what does it tell me now that my hunger pains (which are now associated with pancreatitis) are accompanied by actual hunger — not a lot of hunger, but some?

    So, I have questions. Which means I’m feeling better. I still have a long way to go. Four bags of fluid now drip into my left wrist, and six colored wires run from a heavy portable telemetry unit to sticky tabs on my chest and back. I keep a spitoon by my side and dose my bathroom visits with choreographic precision, since wiring and tubing management — not to mention work with craphats and pisshats — makes every vist a complicated ordeal.

    As of tonight I will have gone a week without a meal. And the end is not in sight. Yet.

    Novel norms

    June 17, 2008 in Health, News, Places, Science | 47 comments

    So here I am at 3am for the second day in a row, taking a moment betwen hits of Dilaudid to do something that was for many years normal for me: writing something.

    I have a new normal now, and it’s getting old. I’ve lost count of the wires and tubes running from my body to mechanical and electrical instruments. I haven’t eaten in close to a week, and my intake is entirely from bags of liquid dispensed by “smart pumps” that beep loudly and often for what seems most of the time to be no reason at all. I’m creepily cool now with being 90% helpless, even as I’m close to 100% hopeful that I’ll get past this thing, which remains pancreatis, with complications, the latest of which are fluids in my abdomen, with encroachment on my right lung: the same one that took a hit from a wayward embolus a couple months back, when I first made my acquaintence with this hospital.

    It’s a Harvard teaching hospital, which means that a procession of young doctors come through, each with a fresh line of inquiry, few of which, when fulfilled, contributes to an institutional memory. Most of the doctors I’ve seen here have been only once or twice. Nice folks, all, however. And all less than half my age, it seems.

    My new room is a solo one. I miss the company of other patients, but I do like some of the posh features, such as a toilet that has more than five square feet of flooor space. They moved me here so they could monitor me more closely. I do appreciate that. But the reason creeps me a bit: so I won’t get pneumonia or chronic pancreatitis of the sort Suzi reports here.

    Well, that’s about all I have energy for. Look for another report in a few hours, I hope.

    And thanks again for all your kind wishes. I’m really looking forward to returning to normal normalcy.

    Comcasting for clues

    June 12, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, News, VRM | 1 comment

    This isn’t pretty. On the other hand, Comcast also says it is increasing upstream speeds. Taking advantage of DOCSIS 3.0. Appears to have promise.

    Anybody have any thoughts about that? Experiences? I’ve had zero with them, but I know a lot of the rest of ya’ll have. Just wondering.

    But how good a phone will it be?

    June 11, 2008 in News, problems | 7 comments

    I’ve seen a waterfall of iPhone 3g coverage, but nobody yet has answered the question that actually matters most to a lot of people: How good a phone is it? The original was adequate as a phone, but that’s it. Basically it was very average as a phone. Looked great, worked okay.

    My guess is that one reason was the metal back. The celluar signal hasn’t been made that isn’t hurt by metal surronding the antenna. The new phone has plastic in the back. Much better idea, signal-wise.

    Be interesting to see how it goes.

    Whether report

    June 11, 2008 in News, problems | 3 comments

    Says here at Weather.com,

    Severe Thunderstorm Warning
    SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA 1157 PM EDT TUE JUN 10 2008
    THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS ISSUED A
    * SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR… EXTREME EAST CENTRAL WORCESTER COUNTY IN CENTRAL MASSACHUSETTS… WESTERN ESSEX COUNTY IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS… THIS INCLUDES THE CITY OF LAWRENCE… EASTERN MIDDLESEX COUNTY IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS… THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF…WALTHAM…NEWTON… LOWELL… FRAMINGHAM… NORTH CENTRAL NORFOLK COUNTY IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS… EXTREME SOUTHEASTERN HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY IN SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE…
    * UNTIL 1230 AM EDT
    * AT 1152 PM EDT…NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A LINE OF SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING PENNY SIZE HAIL…AND DAMAGING WINDS IN EXCESS OF 60 MPH. THESE STORMS WERE LOCATED ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM TYNGSBORO TO ASHLAND…OR ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM LOWELL TO FRAMINGHAM…AND MOVING EAST AT 55 MPH.

    … with this picture:

    It’s 1212am now, and the breeze just turned into a wind. Lightning in the distance. Ominous sounds.

    … And now it’s 1231 and nothing has happened. The story at Weather Underground is very different:

    I like the little arrows, which are much more revealing than the moving-blob motion of the Weather.com map. It also contradicts the warning, with motion to the east-northeast rather than the east.

    Anyway, it’s still hot as hell here. Even late at night. Relief was in sight, then… gone.

    Meet the new boss, nothing like the old boss

    June 8, 2008 in Ideas, News | 19 comments

    Nobody gets the idea of Obama, and perhaps Obama himself, better than Dave Winer. I love Dave’s latest post, Blowing Up the Beltway. Step back a year, to when the Clinton Restoration was proceeding on schedule, and Obama was still this skinny dude from Chicago who gave a great speech at the ’04 convention.

    Washington, we all knew, was an insider’s game. It was the Politorium, a backslappy blabblosphere inhabited by a few elected officials, vast allied bureacracies, lobbyists, consultants, and center-feeders of the sort that Hunter S. Thompson explained best. There were good people in there too, but they were trapped.

    (An aside: would HST have offed himself if he know Obama was coming? How would he have covered this election? Man, we miss that guy.)

    I know people who know Hillary, and to a person they all love her. But she played a new game the old way, and lost while leading in popular votes and Heartland America. It was a defeat more decisive and bizarre than Al Gore took when the Supremes railroaded him and the whole freaking Constitution, at the turn of the Millenium.

    But we’re done with that. I think even the talk radio addicts who hate all Democrats by reflex know the old gig is up. The reason has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with Democracy 2.0. That’s the one where the threshold of participation narrows toward zero. We’re not there yet, but we’re headed that way. Obama is leading the way, but it’s not just about him, or his candidacy, or his policies.

    Sez Dave,

      As much as I believe in the idea of Obama, if he doesn’t live up to it, I’ll still believe in the idea, because I always have. I don’t want to be an insider, I don’t want the insiders to rule, I don’t want there to be insiders at all. I want to distribute opportunity and acknowledge intelligence and goodness where ever it appears. I fought against the centralized Inside The Beltway way of doing things in Silicon Valley, and we won. Of course a new aristocracy pops up but their power is as thin as the people whose power got popped in every bubble that came before.

    Then, this kicker:

      The Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts. It erases every barrier to entry. The only way to win is to point off-site, in every way you can think of. Win by offering better value, not by locking users in. People will become instant refugees to escape your clutches. Think you’re immune? Think again.

    It’s about the Net. And the Net is us. It’s all outside, not inside.

    And it’s not just about elections. It’s about governance. How we do it matters more than what we do with it. And we’ve hardly begun to visit that one.

    The thrill of Jim McKay

    June 8, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    The best thing about the Olympics on TV was, and will always remain, Jim McKay. Loved watching that guy. Sad to learn he’s gone.

    The Iraq War Railroad

    June 8, 2008 in Business, Events, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Politics, VRM | 2 comments

    Frank Paynter writes,

      Putting the ME in. That’s what this thing is about. So I have my personal secret plan… (not evil, like gapingvoid’s is), but the sustainability piece is missing…. monetizing…. business model… cash… shekels… ducats… does it have to be an advertising magnet? They’re not really talking about that here.
      More seriously they’re talking about the media role in the Iraq war. Amy Goodman, Phil Donahue, Norman Solomon (moderating), Lennox Yearwood (“Make Hiphop, not war”), Naomi Klein, Sonali Kolhatcar… a lot of this is preaching to the choir. The people here already get it. Many of us knew it in 2002. The administration manipulation of media from 2002 forward was a certainty. What we need is for the libertarians like Doc Searls and his ilk to get exposed to this information and find a certainty they’re willing to declaim.

    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…

      Over the past six years we have seen a failure of the tradiional media to live up to its obligations of oversight and challenging the government, greater than any we have seen in the nation’s history… Those who have not yet come to feel ashamed will feel ashamed of their performance and their letting down of the American people.

    (I might be off by a word or two there. Transcibing from YouTube is no bargain.)

    Also, for what it’s worth, at 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 while it’s still going on. Great conference. Wish I were there.

    With Google we’ll get Bingo

    June 6, 2008 in News, problems | Comments closed

    Twitter and Amazon are both down right now.

    Drink long and prosper

    June 4, 2008 in News | 5 comments

    NY Times: Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan…

    A little

    May 29, 2008 in News | 7 comments

    Good news.

    Looking for Libertarian help with Saving the Net

    May 23, 2008 in Ideas, News | 13 comments

    Interesting video on the Threat to Net Neutrality.

    Well done, but I’m not crazy about bills that legislate something that isn’t well-enough defined or understood. By which I mean both the Net and Neutrality.

    Here’s S.215, for example. (Full text here.)

    What’s meant by “lawful”? Or “broadband”? I suspect the language in this bill will be as antique in five years as the languge of the 1934 act is today. And if this new bill passes, the untintended legacies of both will still be in force.

    The framing bothers me too. It is all inside what Bob Frankston calls The Regulatorium. I’d rather see the Net defined and understood outside of that.

    This is not to say I don’t think the Net is threatened. It is. I just think its biggest enemy is lack of imagination, not lack of regulation. And by that I mean lack of imagination by both the carriers and their opponents.

    The carriers have trouble imagining being in any businesses other than the “triple play” or “quad play” they’re offering now, or to imagine there are any benefits to incumbency other than improvements on the customary forms of coersion.

    The pro-neutrality folks have trouble imagining any case to make other than one that involves more lawmaking and regulatory relief.

    Both are arguing inside the Regulatorium.

    By policy and temperment Libertarians and dynamists like to think and work outside the Regulatoriium. So I’m wondering where creative ones might want to go with this thing. Adam Thierer’s 2004 Cato Institute policy analysis on Net Neutrality makes some important points, especially about unintended consequences of legislation, but it’s framed entirely within The Regulatorium, and the belief that the Net is (in Bob Frankston’s words) a “thing” we “consume”. And the somewhat Libertarian Wall Street Journal, now more than ever the Church Bulletin of the Republican Party, still sees “The Market” (at least where the Net is concerned) as “Your Choice of Lock-In”.

    I’d rather look at the Net as the best marketplace the world has ever known. Nothing is more wide open and supportive for business, as well as culture. Is the best way to grow that marketplace to have it reduced to a crippled “service” offered as gravy on top of TV and telephony? Or to oppose that with legislation?

    I think the Net will grow best if lots of players enter its marketplace with new value-adds — including the carriers themselves, leveraging advantages to incumency other than their position to charge monopoly rents.

    I think there is lots of opportunity for individuals and small businesses to take the lead by connecting to each other any way they can, with or without carrier help.

    Think about all the small businesses that could be liberated to do inventive new stuff if the carriers didn’t overcharge “business” customers (a legacy of Ma Bell that hasn’t gone away, and needs to). Think about how many generic (and generative) servers, services and data storage facilities could be installed in old switching plants and cable head-ends, operated by the carriers themselves or in partnership with the likes of Amazon, Google or Rackspace — taking advantage of both existing real estate and low latency connections to customers. Think about what will happen when the last mile becomes the first one — when consumers not only become producers, but when electricians, small contractors and homeowners can start deploying their own infrastructure from the edge inward. For a peek at how that will start to work and look, check out some of the pictures here.

    My point is that we need other voices here, other ideas, new arguments. Fighting threats is good. Pursuing opportunities is better.

    An OLPC pre-mortem? Hope not.

    May 14, 2008 in Blogroll, News, problems | 5 comments

    Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi is a long and wrenching piece about the project by Ivan Krstic. Just one man’s take, but Ivan’s been a strong advocate for the OLPC’s highest purposes. Performer too.

    Some pushback from Taran Rampersad. Also this from Tom Hoffman. (And privately from some people.)

    For what it’s worth, I’ve loved the ambitions of the OLPC program from the beginning, even if I thought they were crazy to start in 5th gear by rolling a zillion laptops out to 3rd world countries, too many of which are run by dictatorships that could be bought by actual vendors.

    Still. Ordinary laptops have been stale for a long time.

    Even if they crater, they’ve blazed a worthy trail along the way.

    What’s up at IIW?

    May 14, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    Not seeing large amounts yet on Technorati or Google Blogsearch. One Flickr shot so far, tagged iiw2008. Unfortunately, iiw tags also pertain to other stuff.

    Your national paranoia state at work

    May 14, 2008 in Art, Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News, Photography, problems | 4 comments

    Andy Carvin & NPR crew get kicked out of a public place for taking pictures with a weird (but way cool) camera.

    Handbasket weaving

    May 13, 2008 in News, problems | 8 comments

    One of the worst effects of the Reagan Revolution was a near-complete loss of conscious caring about public infrastructure in the U.S. Most capital-intensive essentially public projects with no Wall Street box office were neglected. For decades.

    I’m reminded of this by On the pot-holed highway to hell, by John Gapper in the Financial Times. It begins,

      If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

      That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness...

      There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two.

      First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough – broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year.

      Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better.

      Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system – at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record.

    Will this be an issue in the upcoming election? Barack Obama lists 21 issues in a pull-down menu. One of those is “additional issues“. There are six of those. Last on the list is “transportation“. Its entire text says “As our society becomes more mobile and interconnected, the need for 21st-century transportation networks has never been greater. However, too many of our nation’s railways, highways, bridges, airports, and neighborhood streets are slowly decaying due to lack of investment and strategic long-term planning. Barack Obama believes that America’s long-term competitiveness depends on the stability of our critical infrastructure. As president, Obama will make strengthening our transportation systems, including our roads and bridges, a top priority.” But there is a .pdf of the full plan. Argue with it if you like, but at least he has one.

    John McCain lists 13 issues in his pull-down Issues menu. None of them cover this stuff, near as I can tell.

    Wright makes Right

    May 10, 2008 in News | 4 comments

    Back when Bush the Elder was running for President, campaign strategist Lee Atwater said he was going to make Willie Horton into Michael Dukakis‘ running mate. He did, and it was a lesson that has been applied to great effect ever since.

    Now in Wright Controversy Deepens Voter Divide, the Washington Post says,

      Religious voters in Indiana and North Carolina held to familiar patterns in Democratic primary balloting Tuesday, with the controversy over Sen. Barack Obama’s relationship with his former pastor deepening the divide.

    Exit polling sought associations between votes, race, religious affiliations and frequent churchgoing. What it didn’t probe, apparently, was talk radio listening. Every time I hit SCAN on the car radio’s AM band, Rush or Savage or some other right-wing yakker is still working the topic like a fat piece of gum.

    The other tar for Obama is culture. Here’s Charles Krauthamer:

      The line of attack is clear: not that Obama is himself radical or unpatriotic, just that, as a man of the academic Left, he is so out of touch with everyday America that he could move so easily and untroubled in such extreme company and among such alien and elitist sentiments.

    They’re working that one too.

    Here’s Obama’s path to the election.

    Via Andrew Sullivan.

    Waiting by the river

    May 7, 2008 in Blogging, News | 1 comment

    Haven’t heard from riverbend since October. Anybody know if she’s okay?

    I thought of her after I read this.

    Raising the new media barn

    May 6, 2008 in Blogging, Future, Ideas, Journalism, News, Photography | 1 comment

    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.

    Fire in the hole

    May 6, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News | 4 comments

    While stading in Harvard Square yesterday, taking pictures of NSTAR workers fixing whatever it was that caused the underground fire there last Friday, a guy on a bike comes up and says, “YouTube. Just look up Harvard Square fire. Some great footage.”

    He didn’t say, “Tune in Channel 4 at 6pm.”

    Here are the results.

    I hope that answers Chris Pirillo’s question.

    Unrelated…

    A few minutes ago I transfered all the photos I took yesterday while biking, driving and walking around Cambridge. Got a lot of great ones, including shots of the work at Harvard Square, Spring on The Yard, sunset on railroad tracks, friends at a restaurant, family doing fun stuff…

    Then I put the SD card back in the camera and re-formatted it.

    Then I discovered I had failed to transfer the pictures.

    I’m still bummed.

    And that doesn’t even cover yesterday’s other screw-ups.

    In the midst of which the doctor told me I still have chest pain because my lung isn’t done healing and I should give it more exercise.

    Anyway, enjoy the footage. The longest. The best.

    May the best giants adapt

    May 3, 2008 in Business, Future, Life, News, VRM | 13 comments

    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.

    Tags: , , , , , ,

    Jump! tonight

    April 28, 2008 in Art, Events, Fun, Future, Life, News, Places, Travel | Comments closed

    After brunch at yesterday, we caught the — 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 , a movie showing that afternoon, and this evening, right next door at the Somerville Theater, as part of Boston’s .

    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.

    Think softly and punish a big schtick

    April 26, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    Seventeen-year-old Brandon Rosario has successfully auditioned for a job as the new Howard Stern. Opposing him, naturally, is his school’s administration. Yule Heibel has the rest.

    Bonus link.

    Big news for Small Pieces

    April 24, 2008 in Ideas, News | 4 comments

    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).

    The Oil Bubble

    April 24, 2008 in News | 14 comments

    On the one hand, high oil prices are the result of commodity markets at work. More demand and less supply means higher prices.

    Meanwhile, prices are still out of whack with actual supply, both on and in the ground. Methinks therefore we are in a bubble of some kind. A couple days ago the Wall Street Journal said the same thing. (But I can’t find the piece online, hence no link.)

    What will happen when it pops?

    Every story tells a picture

    April 24, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    The Clinton-Obama Pennsylvania Decision Tree, by Amanda Cox, in The New York Times. Hat tip to Nathan Yao of Flowing Data, who explains, We see an entire story between Obama and Clinton – positions taken, counties won, and counties lost. Go ahead and take a look. Words bad. Picture good. Ooga. Booga. Via Andrew Sullivan.

    Danke!

    April 22, 2008 in News, Places | Comments closed

    Some news from München. Here’s a page with some context. No coverage yet that I can find, but I’m busy prepping a talk I’ll give at the same event — — tomorrow morning at 0830 local time there, and 0230 here. Hope my batteries hold up. I’ve had about 6 hours of sleep since I got up Sunday morning, and 0230 is just a few more hours away.

    Noticing deaths

    April 22, 2008 in News, Past | 6 comments

    I’ve meant to write about Bill Buckley and Hal Riney, both of whom I held in fond regard. Now I just learned about Darian O’Toole, who was a standout disk jockey in San Francisco and elsewhere. Bill and Hal had full and long lives. Darian didn’t. Sad news.

    Here’s her now-ghostly blog, last updated two years ago. Here’s Big Rick on the subject. Been too long since I’ve visited Rick’s blog, or Brad Kava‘s. Reading around Brad’s blog I also learned that Sean Costello, a fine young blues talent, died in an Atlanta hotel room.

    Holy shit, I wandered around the Radio-Info message board for San Francisco, where there is this notice about another death: Jack Armstrong, late of KFRC. A detail… Extremely saddening news… I hoped I never had to write… Our extremely amazing Dad and your friend Jack Armstrong aka John C. Larsh passed away yesterday March 22, 2008 at his home in North Carolina.

    John Larsh? Could this be the same John Larsh I knew back at Guilford College? Sure enough: Larsh used to work at 1320 WCOG radio here in Greensboro and his dad was a professor at the Univeristy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. John Larsh briefly attended Guilford College.

    Jeez. He was a kid, a couple years older than me, who still hung out at Guilford even though he wasn’t going there any more at the time.

    The big kahuna at ‘COG then was John Coffman, or “Johnny C”. On Saturday nights, all the local teenagers went cruising up and down Walker and West Market Streets, threading through the parking lot of the Boar and Castle, a legendary run-down car hop place with a famous sauce. Johnny and WCOG played from every radio in every car. I can still hear “A Lovers Concerto” by the Toys and “One Two Three” by Len Barry over the low thrum of “glass pack” mufflers on souped up cars creeping along at two miles an hour. I knew Johnny too, though not from radio. Johnny had a side business selling cookware, and for awhile I made a bit of money working for him. John died of cancer not too many years after that.

    But my reeling mind is still flashed back to 1965, when Johnny wasn’t budging from his night slot at ‘COG, and John Larsh was a way-better jock than Johnny anyway. So John headed off to Cleveland, where he worked for what was then WKYC/1100, one of the original (literal) clear channel stations. It boomed into Greensboro every night. I remember how John stirred up some controversy by saying that the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” wasn’t music. Guess he changed that tune, because here’s this story, at that same link, about how John, now Jack Armstrong, prevented 35,000 Beatles fans from rushing the stage in Cleveland when the Fab Four played there. John/Jack went on to work everywhere, it seems. Funny, I always wondered what happened to him. Now I know.

    John was 62. Now, as then, two years older than me.

    At the end of every show back then, John used to say “Remember, when you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot, hang on and swing”.

    Still swinging, John.

    Making the world safe for infrastructure

    April 20, 2008 in Ideas, News | 4 comments

    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.

    Too true

    April 17, 2008 in Blogging, News | 1 comment

    Stuff white people like.

    Memphis meltdown

    April 8, 2008 in Events, Fun, Life, News | 9 comments

    Comes a time in every NCAA final when a team melts down. It usually happens near the end, when the game is close, such as when Chris Webber of the Michigan Fab Five called a time out when there were none left, and Carolina went on to win the game. And to Duke when it went down to Kansas, and later to Louisville. I was there for the Kansas game, in Kansas City, as a Duke fan. The next year Duke was #1 again, and in the final four at the Kingdome in Seattle. Four of us drove seventeen straight hours from Palo Alto to see that game. Duke was up by a pile of points against Seton Hall when its ace rebounder, Robert Brickey, went down with an injury. After that Duke tanked and lost by 25 points of something. Michigan ended up winning it all that year.

    This year it was Memphis that melted, and they did it at the foul line. Kansas was behind and fouled for possession, hoping that Memphis would miss. It was a good strategy. Kansas needed great play to do the job, but they also needed Memphis to melt. Which it did.

    The Tuesday Morning quartercoaches are being highly critical of Memphis coach John Calipari for not getting his guys to foul Kansas players in the final seconds of the game — which would have left Kansas still behind by a point, even if they had hit both free throws — and for not calling a time out. Yet the players had earlier chances to win at the foul line, and choked. They melted, plain and simple.

    A side issue. Because the game started after The Kid’s bedtime here on the East Coast, we got up early and watched it this morning on the DVR. But because the program was scheduled for 2 hours and 30 minutes, the DVR cut off right when Kansas’s last shot was in the air. I gotta say that totally sucks. We didn’t know if the shot went in, and saw none of the overtime. (Which may have been just as well, since The Kid’s bracket had Memphis winning it all. He was a partisan on this one.) Instead we went to ESPN and learned the ending from Mike & Mike.

    Anyway, why isn’t there some kind of override in DVRs that comes into effect when sports are involved, and the end of the show isn’t known? Next time I’ll record the following show, just to be sure.

    Meanwhile, arg.

    Worthwhile Workshops

    April 5, 2008 in Events, News, Travel, VRM | 1 comment

    The best conferences aren’t conferences at all. They’re workshops. Meaning, work gets done there. Things move forward. Barns get raised. Or razed to make way for better barns. And all those things are subjects chosen by the participants, which for conferences would be called “attendees” or “the audience”. At workshops, everybody contributes.

    This is the basic format of the Bloggercons, of BarCamps, and of the IIWs: Internet Identity Workshops.

    The next IIW is on May 12-14 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. When you look down the list of organizations, technologies, standards and other entities represented at the IIW, you’ll see plenty that were either born or improved there.

    Look up iiw at Flickr and you’ll get a visual sense of what goes on there.

    More things are overlapping with digital identity all the time.

    For example, data portability. For that the Data Sharing Summit is coming up. There’s a workshop on April 18-19, and the Summit itself on May 15 at the Computer History Museum. That’s the day after the IIW.

    In addition to detailing both the IIW and the Data Sharing Summit, Kaliya Hamlin also notes Interop sessions at RSA next week. There’s also a dinner.

    Since I still lack clones, I can’t make any of these, which is a huge bummer because IIW is in some ways my baby, and I’ve never missed any of its birthdays. Instead I’ll be at other things for which I have superceding obligations, including Berkman@10, VRM2008 and the European Identity Conference (aka eic2008). The latter two are both in Munich.

    In any case, check them all out.

    It would be kinda late

    April 1, 2008 in News | 2 comments

    My sister just heard Steven Colbert ask Jon Stewart if Bill and Hillary would catch the Cluetrain.

    The Kurse of KFI

    March 27, 2008 in Life, News | Comments closed

    I just learned that KFI’s new tower went down while it was going up. This was the long-awaited replacement for the tower that was knocked down in 2004. Here’s what I wrote about it back then. It was delayed by local opposition to reconstruction, and the tower was a compromise design. (Here’s a story from the Orange County Register.)

    When I used to listen to KFI at night in New Jersey as a radio-obsessed kid, I was hearing the signal from the old tower, which was installed in 1947. (As was I.) Back then the site was in an open field in La Mirada, CA, near the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Later I-5 ran nearby. Now it’s in the midst of office buildings and parking. It’s lucky nobody was seriously hurt. (There was one minor injury.)

    I try not to care about this kind of stuff, because my concerns these days are with the leading rather than the trailing edge of technology. But what the hell. I know too much about it not to be interested.

    [Later...] Mary Lu has a nice long report.

    Forrest on journalism

    March 23, 2008 in Journalism, News | 1 comment

    Forrest Sawyer gave a killer talk at The Future of Multi-Media Digital News & Cultural Networks, which was put on at UCSB last year by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

    I took part as well, on a panel that followed Forrest’s talk, speaking as a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society there. The pull-quote: We have seen the failure of the traditional media to live up to their responsibilities of oversight and challenging the government. And, …those who have not yet come to feel ashamed, will feel ashamed.

    I enjoyed meeting and getting to hang with Forrest that day. He was a good and friendly guy, and not the least bit vain. So I’m not surprised to find that, a few months after this event, he was credited with “acts of heroism” following a helicopter crash in which he was also injured. Initially, everyone thought they were dead, including executives at the Travel Channel, that last story said.

    Copping in

    March 22, 2008 in Ideas, News | Comments closed

    Carter F. Smith: To Protect and to Twitter. Two examples.

    The Less Street Journal

    March 21, 2008 in Journalism, News, problems | 3 comments

    Says here the Wall Street Journal, long a fee-to-see site, is now secretly free: …in many cases, the method is drop-dead simple; in some cases, it requires the Firefox browser and add-on software. But in all cases, it’s completely legal, and in fact it’s hard to see how the Journal could object to it at all.

    I subscribe to the print Journal, and will continue to do that.

    I’ve generally avoided going behind the Journal’s paywall, or even visiting the journal’s website, for several reasons:

    1. I never remember my login/password. Nor does Firefox or any other browser I use. Worse, they remember the wrong thing, so I get “We Don’t Recognize Your User Name or Password”, which annoys me too much to screw with.
    2. I don’t want to get any kind of add-on software to do anything that ought to be free and routine. Especially when Firefox is slow and flaky enough to begin with. I mean, right now, on a brand new laptop, Firefox is sucking up to 48.8% of my cpu, just sitting there with no tabs open. (And yes, I am using 3.0b4. It’s better than the non-beta 3.x was, but also won’t run most of the add-ons I used to have.)
    3. Too many links take me to “The Page You Requested Is Available Only to Subscribers”, which pisses me off, since I am a fucking subscriber.
    4. The front page is, in the modern tradition of too many news sites, crowded beyond endurance.

    So, Rupert, hurry up with the free version, but for real this time. Your paying subscribers will thank you.

    The making of an icon

    March 21, 2008 in Art, Business, Events, Fun, Future, Life, News, Sports | 4 comments

    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.

    Earth needs women

    March 20, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, News | 3 comments

    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.

    NewsGang up

    March 16, 2008 in Art, News | Comments closed

    Friday’s NewsGang, with Dennis Haarsager, Stephen Hill (of Hearts of Space), host and yours truly, is up. It was long (1:25) but very good. Here’s the MP3.

    The main topic was Dennis’ new job as iCEO of . I was on a panel with Dennis just a few weeks ago. He’s a great guy, very sharp, extremely aware of the challenges, and much more.

    He even seemed to agree with the ten prophesies and one fond wish that I presented during our panel. (That talk was a compression of this post here.) It won’t be easy for him, but I’m extremely encouraged with the prospects.

    Profitsy

    March 14, 2008 in Blogging, Future, Ideas, News, Past | 1 comment

    Not content to just make the future, sometimes also predicts it. Congrats to the big guy for winning $2k with his forecast.

    Live and kicking

    March 12, 2008 in News, Uncategorized | Comments closed

    Nice to read by Phil Windley that Kathy Sierra is back in the game.

    Nature improvises with sculpture

    March 10, 2008 in Art, Journalism, News, Photography, Places, problems, Travel | 8 comments

    Yesterday we went to visit the De Cordova Museum in Concord Lincoln, where we were looking forward to seeing the museum’s iconic pink pig sculpture along with other exhibits in the museum and its Sculpture Park.

    Rounding a curve on the road through the park heading into the museum, we were shocked and saddened to see that a tree from the center of a nearby grove had fallen squarely across the pig, smashing it right in the middle. No expert could have dropped the tree more squarely. It was amazing that, given 360 possible compass degrees that the tree might have fallen, it picked exactly this one.

    Later we learned that the tree had fallen just that morning, no doubt because its rooting had been weakened by gound saturated with rain over the past few days.

    Then this morning I was surprised to find no mention of the news in blog or the Boston Globe. So I just started uploading a bunch of pictures taken with my pocket camera. The lighting wasn’t good, but there are plenty of shots for anybody to use, should they like, up here at Flickr. If you’re a journalist of any kind, feel free to take and use them.

    More about the pig. It is a work of Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks. Its title is Trojan Piggybank, and it is on loan from the artists. From the writeup two links back:

    Originally exhibited in the 2004 Navy Pier Walk: The Chicago International Sculpture Exhibition, Trojan Piggybank comes to DeCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park with a playful warning from its collaborative team of artists, Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades, who caution, “Sometimes things are not what they appear to be.”

    From a distance, the large pink wood piggybank appears friendly. A closer look reveals military camouflage colors painted around the snout, suggesting a recent wallow in filth, while imparting an additional and foreboding meaning. The artists intend this familiar military pattern to represent the greed associated with our ever-expanding military industrial complex. This visual stratagem is furthered by grates protecting Trojan Piggybank‘s eyes, and a hatch door on the underbelly hinting at hidden invaders inside. A large silver coin waits at the ready in the piggybank’s slot. As Simpson and Georgiades observe, “The pleasures of consumer culture are accompanied by less desirable social consequences. When we impose one way of life onto another, the bad goes along with the good. The playful piggybank has a hidden agenda.”

    No wonder our first thought was that the tree across the pig was itself a sculpture, or an improvisation on the original.

    Well, in a way it was, no?

    Familiarity breeds ennui

    March 8, 2008 in Journalism, News | 1 comment

    Emerson said, If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

    There are corollaries. When the miraculous becomes mundane, people complain about it. Think about air travel. And, When the awful becomes common, people tend to ignore it.

    The latter is the risk for Santa Barbara in respect to its landmark newspaper, the . To put the SBNP in perspective, both the paper and the city’s offices overlook De La Guerra Plaza in the middle of town. The paper’s building is larger and far more pretty and imposing. And, of course, it’s currently trying to bully the city about how the plaza is improved. The paper’s hostility to the mayor and other elected officials is a matter of editorial policy. And that’s far from the whole of it.

    The proprietress of the paper is Wendy McCaw, who may be setting new records for litigious obstinacy by a newspaper owner. The “meltown” of the paper is now moving on two years in age, and progresses toward closure on an asymptotic curve: one with a long tail of decay akin to the half-life of Strontium 90 — one that constantly approaches but never arrives at a conclusion.

    I’m not in Santa Barbara enough these days to sense how inured folks are to the awfulness of a civic landmark going through a screaming divorce from its constituency while still cohabitating with it. But I do fear for the town becoming a bit too accepting of an unpleasant situation that shows too few signs of ending.

    That fear was allayed by the release of Citizen McCaw, and by reading this comment by John Quimby about its premiere. But, as they say, constant vigilance is a price of anything worth keeping.

    Look for more amidst stuff tagged or .

    The story none dare tell

    March 7, 2008 in Events, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Politics, Science | 9 comments

    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.)

    Proof the advertising bubble is at full stretch

    March 5, 2008 in News | 6 comments

    Jarrett Interaction Design, from Mix 08:

      Microsoft views advertising as the key to the web ecosystem economics. And most of their examples are traditional, print-style advertising (banner ads with video, etc.). Much of their investment in these technologies is to drive the advertising business. Seems diametrically opposed to the ClueTrain Manifesto and marketing as conversation. Hugh Macleod, where are you?

    It’s gonna be interesting

    March 5, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    Lakoff hits it out of the park is Dave‘s latest, and has a podcast that’s required listening. George Lakoff is the best thinker and scientist that the Democrats have right now — or ever. He has been ever since ’96, when he came out with Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t (later subtitled How Liberals and Conservatives Think). Even if you don’t swing with George’s politics, or his conclusions, his thinking is lucid and provocative, and good for your mind. It is also extraordinarily useful to the Obama campaign at this piont in time. I hope somebody there is listening.

    That said, it was interesting to find, when I spoke today to women I know, that so many of them went Yessss to Hillary’s victories yesterday. On the basis of that too-small sample — and what they told me — I draw the provisional conclusion that Hillary’s appeal is broader than Obama partisans have been willing to face. And that, if Obama doesn’t take George’s advice, he’ll be Hillary’s VP candidate.

    After that, McCain wins anyway.

    At least they’ll both be better than Bush

    March 5, 2008 in News | 32 comments

    It depresses me that Hillary won the states that mattered yesterday, even though the delegate contest is far from decided. If she becomes the Democratic nominee, she’ll lose to McCain, even if Obama is her VP choice.

    It’s only gonna get uglier as the Democratic convention approaches. For all of Obama’s high-road smarts and strategizing, there is no overstating the ability of the Democrats to shoot themselves in their feet, and settle on a doomed candidate come convention time. The ghosts of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry — and even Gore and Carter — loom large. Obama can win, mostly because he has so many positives and he isn’t hated by Republicans. Hillary can’t.

    So then the only question that remains is who McCain will choose as his VP candidate. Because, as of this morning, McCain and that guy (it won’t be a woman) will likely be our next two presidents.

    So, not to worry

    March 4, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    The Onion: Nation’s Presidential Assassins Still Undecided.

    Can life keep up with death?

    March 4, 2008 in Ideas, News | 7 comments

    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?

    What he said

    March 3, 2008 in News | 2 comments

    Marc Andreessen as a good rundown on Barack Obama, based on a 1.5 hour conversation with Obama before the campaign began. I like what Marc says about leadership:

      We asked him directly, “how concerned should we be that you haven’t had meaningful experience as an executive — as a manager and leader of people?“

      He said, watch how I run my campaign — you’ll see my leadership skills in action.

      At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of his answer — political campaigns are often very messy and chaotic, with a lot of turnover and flux; what conclusions could we possibly draw from one of those?

      Well, as any political expert will tell you, it turns out that the Obama campaign has been one of the best organized and executed presidential campaigns in memory. Even Obama’s opponents concede that his campaign has been disciplined, methodical, and effective across the full spectrum of activities required to win — and with a minimum of the negative campaigning and attack ads that normally characterize a race like this, and with almost no staff turnover. By almost any measure, the Obama campaign has simply out-executed both the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

      This speaks well to the Senator’s ability to run a campaign, but speaks even more to his ability to recruit and manage a top-notch group of campaign professionals and volunteers — another key leadership characteristic. When you compare this to the awe-inspiring discord, infighting, and staff turnover within both the Clinton and McCain campaigns up to this point — well, let’s just say it’s a very interesting data point.

    I have my doubts about Obama’s chances against McCain (though I still think those chances are good); but I’m quite sure he’ll finish wiping up Hillary tomorrow.

    Film on paper

    March 2, 2008 in Art, News | 1 comment

    Sorry I won’t be in Santa Barbara to see the premiere of the documentary Citizen McCaw this Friday. The film’s subject is Wendy McCaw and her “war” to keep her paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, independent of everything but herself (as best I can put it this morning, anyway). There will be a DVD on sale pretty soon. Here’s the trailer. And here’s an FAQ.

    With the emphasis on “by”

    March 1, 2008 in News, Politics | 2 comments

    In the shortest and most famous speech in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln summarized our democracy as one “of the people, by the people, for the people”.

    In the Internet age, we have the means to make that democracy work better than ever, to gather and exercize our power to participate — not just by voting, but by engaging directly with our local, regional, state and national systems of governance.

    That’s what Britt Blaser is talking about here:

      I’m a big Obama booster, but I don’t think any President can lead a “sea-change in the way we produce and distribute political power in this country”, because of the Mutually Assured Destruction built into the system. But he might inspire US to build US 2.0 as Dave Winer and Doc Searls have been urging, an upgrade to USOS, the United States Operating System…
      Governance sites. Lots of sites.
      Indeed, we’re like Neo in the Matrix, needin lots of guns. But guns won’t help us. We need lots of by-the-people hyperlocal governance sites. We need them everywhere to aggregate and impose the locals’ interests on their representatives and senators. No one’s gonna build them for us, and there’s no f/x department to surround us with racks and racks of political firepower. So it’s up to US.

    He’s working on exactly that kind of equipment, by the way. Stay tuned for more.

    Frames that prevent a neutral Net

    February 27, 2008 in Ideas, News, problems, Science | 8 comments

    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-dwelling) fruit.

    One can’t blame carriers for going after easy pickings; but one can blame them for wearing blinders toward the massive opportunities that appear when they deliver wide-open bandwidth on which nearly anything can run… and to discover their first-mover advantages there.

    But, thanks to these ancient frames, the Net is seen by the carriers (and the FCC) as tertiary to their primary and secondary services: telephony and television, or vice versa. That’s why it’s still just gravy on your phone or cable bill.

    Bonus link.

    The FCC and the Giant Zero

    February 25, 2008 in Future, News, Science, VRM | 13 comments

    So here’s the concept: the end-to-end nature of the Internet is not about “access for consumers”. It’s about creating a 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: .

    Quote du jour

    February 22, 2008 in News | 1 comment

    Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it’s so fluid, versatile and remixable — not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology. – Cory Doctorow

    I love “Hollysaurs”.

    More Lessig

    February 20, 2008 in News | Comments closed

    is where Larry Lessig is anchoring vectors toward both running for Congress and changing it in any case.

    Searches: Google, Yahoo, Google Blogsearch, Technorati.

    Bonus link: Some gentle pushback (or push-somewhere, sort-of) from Gabe Wachob.

    Can KRCL be saved?

    February 20, 2008 in News | 3 comments

    I discovered in January of last year when I was driving from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas. It was a Sunday morning, and the music was some kind of Native American fusion mix that I couldn’t turn off. I love radio like that: radio that surprises me, radio that’s unlike anything anywhere else except in the sense that it’s good, radio produced by real people sharing original work that challenges and engages listeners.

    I was amazed that KRCL existed, and in Salt Lake City of all places, and with a big signal too: as big as any other in that part of the West. It was the kind of station I expected to find in artsy-liberal enclaves such as Santa Cruz or Austin or Madison. But here it was, serving up fun and challenging stuff for one of the most Republican states in the nation.

    I have KRCL’s stream programmed into our Sonos system at our home in Santa Barbara, where I listen from time to time. But since we spend most of our time around Cambridge these days, and our lives are full of Other Stuff, I haven’t listened much in awhile.

    So now here I am at the Public Media Conference in Los Angeles, where I just heard that KRCL is going through big changes. Specifically, I was pointed to Dead Air: KRCL is getting a corporate makeover. Is community radio done for? by Ted McDonough in the SL Weekly, which has a follow-up story in KRCL Update [Focus Group Hell] — Get Ready for Baby Boom Radio. Of course, what’s happened is that KRCL isn’t making its fundraising goals, and has a shrinking measured audience. Between focus groups, consultants and other deliberations, a decision has been made to make KRCL into, well, something else. Here’s how Ted McDonough puts it:

      The station started 28 years ago by anti-war protesters, hippies and counterculture activists was now replacing all of its weekday volunteer DJs with three paid radio professionals.
      The change, to take place in two months, appears to be part of a plan hatched by managers and directors to turn KRCL into the best music station in Utah. But then, many think it already is the state’s best music station. And the planned changes raise a larger question:
      If DJs are paid professionals; if they are told what to play; if programming is the result of consultants, market surveys and focus groups of listeners watched from behind one-way glass—is it still community radio?
      “The station as we know it is going away,” says Alison Einerson, a KRCL drive-time volunteer who will soon be off the air.

    Now, it could be that KRCL is simply dealing with a fact of life that will become a fact of death for many stations everywhere: listeners have many more choices of (what we now generically call) content, including goods they store and produce for themselves — or for listeners of their own. Certainly that’s involved.

    But we still live in a world where all new and old cars come with AM/FM radios, and radio listening on the whole is still strong, and where the flywheels of habit and technology maintain the relevance of advantages stations like KRCL still have — such as a core of listeners, volunteers, relationships and a powerful mountaintop transmitter.

    The thing that consultants and focus groups are unlikely to tell you, and that in fact cannot be changed, is where something comes from. In the case of KRCL, that something is hippies and war protesters and music mavens. There’s nothing wrong with KRCL making moves to better serve its community, or from doing what it does better. But there is something wrong with changing what the station is. According to the second SLWeekly story, that’s exactly the plan:

      The consultant’s bottom line: KRCL should play a mix of “heritage rock” and “modern adult contemporary.” In the future, the difference between KRCL and the oldies station will be that KRCL will play the B sides.
      Dominowski said the sound would be like (all together now) WXPN in Philadelphia. That just happens to be the direction station management was hinting at more than one year before the consultant ever set foot in Salt Lake City.

    I don’t know where things stand now. The Salt Lake Tribune ran Listeners give KRCL managers an earful for cutting volunteers on February 10. That story makes clear at least two of the problems:

      Although the Salt Lake Valley’s population has grown by nearly half a million people over the past decade, KRCL’s listenership – roughly 35,000 people – declined slightly over the same period, said Roberts, the board chairman. Roberts blames recent technology, such as Internet and satellite radio, that makes it easier for today’s listeners to find the fringe music heard on KRCL.
      The station may have been able to weather the loss of the CPB funds, Maldonado said. But the CPB also negotiates complex music-licensing agreements for KRCL – an invaluable service for a noncommercial station with seven full-time staffers, she said. So last year the station applied for and received an additional $195,000 grant from the CPB. Under the conditions of the grant, KRCL agreed to hire the three DJs, including a music director.

    The first thing is, “fringe music” isn’t just a pile of stuff on hard drives. It’s stuff that grows and spreads when connoisseurs share it with others. KRCL should face that challenge by doing a better job, not by abandoning the mission.

    The second thing is, the deal with the CPB is turning out to be a bad one (that I suspect is bad even from the CPB’s perspective) — for the simple reason that compliance with the CPB’s requirements are killing the station.

    Or maybe not. The Trib piece closes with this:

      Although some listeners are skeptical, Ryan Tronier, KRCL’s program director, believes the station’s musical palette won’t sound much different from how it does now.
      “We’re still going to be playing music you’re not hearing on the commercial end of the dial. It’ll be more than just putting your iPod on ‘random.’ It’ll be a cohesive mix of many genres,” he said. “We’re still going to be the best radio station in town – we’re just going to have more people listening.”

    Here’s my own closing thought about that: If I wrote this blog for the largest possible audience, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

    Is Google selling out to the GOP?

    February 17, 2008 in Berkman, Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News, problems | 5 comments

    … or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it?

    Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release:

      As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP’s online presence with new applications, search tools, and interactive video. In addition, Google will help generate buzz and excitement in advance of the convention through its proven online marketing techniques.

      and…

      “As more Americans go online to learn about elections, we’re pleased to work with the Republican National Convention to give citizens around the world easy access to convention information and new ways to engage in the event,” said David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

      “This year, YouTube will bring a new dimension to this landmark event by enabling GOP visitors to share their unique experiences with the world through the power of online video,” said Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder. “We look forward to working with the convention committee and watching the action unfold.”

    This would be pure PR jive and nothing more if the release were restricted to the first paragraph. But when two high-level Google Execs, including its Chief Legal Officer, provide sales blurbs to just one side (so far) of a partisan political battlefield, expect Serious Questions to follow.

    To help answer those questions, some context.

    First, Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, makes clear at least one strong trend in computing that is being led by Google (along with Amazon, Yahoo and others): Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. No, personal computing won’t go away, but much of what we need, from storage to applications and raw compute power, will be available (and increasingly relied upon) as utility services. As utilities, these are going to be as free from prejudice about usage as are electricity, gas, water and waste treatment. (That is, not totally free, but sensibly so.) Looking at what the GOP says it will do with Google utilities, I’d say that’s the case here.

    Second, it’s important to study how utility providers such as Google engage with large customers (and whole countries) that some find objectionable. For a view on that, check out the recent talk by the dissident Chinese journalist Michael Anti at the Berkman Center. Ethan Zuckerman has a long and helpful write-up. So does David Weinberger. From the latter:

      Q: (colin) Anything that international companies can do?

      A: If Congress banned Google from doing business with China, what would happen to gmail? If Microsoft left China, what about Messenger? For Congress, it’s easy to be black and white. But the Chinese people depend on these tools to communicate about freedom and rights. The real cost is Chinese freedom. (Yahoo is different. It’s “a real bad thing.” It “didn’t do any good to China.”) The Chinese authorities want to embrace the Internet, to be part of the international community, not like North Korea. So we should encourage them to do more with the Internet and to continue to say that the Internet is good. The outside world should encourage as well as blame the Chinese government. The Chinese people don’t like blame and don”t like being told what to do.

    Somewhere in there (not sure it got on the podcast) Michael said that Google had great leverage through a single simple fact: most people working for the Chinese government use Gmail. Leverage isn’t always something that is actively used. In fact, in many (perhaps most) cases it doesn’t need to be brought up at all. It’s simply a fact that must be recognized.

    Whether one likes or dislikes Google’s engagement with China, or the GOP, at least it’s engaged. For some things it may be in a better position to make a positive difference than if it were not engaged.

    As for Yahoo, Michael said that the company had completely lost face in China. Never mind that, as this TechCrunch post puts it, Yahoo owns only 40% of Yahoo China. And that Yahoo may have “been made a scapegoat for the flaws of US foreign policy”. The fact remains that Yahoo, according to the International Herald Tribune, “provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a Chinese journalist for leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site…”

    There is no doubt that Google has been far more successful than Yahoo in dealing with China. Is it just because Google has a “don’t be evil” imperative and Yahoo does not? I don’t think so. Rather I think that Google has been smart and resourceful in ways that Yahoo has not. Specifically, Google has stayed true to its roots as a tech company with specific and easily understood guiding principles. Yahoo had those too, and for longer than Google. But Yahoo broke faith with those principles, and lost its integrity, when it decided to become an entertainment company and hired Terry Semel as its CEO. In doing so Yahoo ceased being a flagpole and instead became a flag — one that soon will be flying from somebody else’s pole.

    Quotes du jour

    February 17, 2008 in News, problems | 2 comments

    I believe the unbroken web is the source of creativity, something that belongs to all of humankind…
    I believe the arts belong to everyone and that artists should be revered in culture. They are not, especially in a world run by anti-creative, left-brained bean counters. I’m not sure it’ll ever be any different, and for me personally, that’s okay. For no bean counter will ever experience the rush that is touching the unbroken web. That, my friends, is a form of currency more costly than gold.     — Terry Heaton

    The cowards among us never started, and the weaklings died on the road. — Niles Searls, a forty-niner and later 14th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. Found via Hank Searls in his book Blood Song. Best quote from Hank: The adverb is the enemy of the verb.

    On the continuing end of broadcasting as usual

    February 16, 2008 in News, Past | 8 comments

    In The end of DAB is nowhere near nigh?, Russell Parsons says,

      …this morning’s announcement from GCap’s that it is closing two digital-only stations, Planet Rock and TheJazz, and selling its stake in national commercial digital radio operator Digital One to Arqiva, strikes a rather more portentous tone.

      With the UK’s largest commercial radio company running to the hills, branding DAB as “not economically viable”, where does that leave the suddenly maligned format? An experiment which is proving burdensome and expensive when set against internet radio or a misunderstood medium that is growing in popularity quarter on quarter?

    The key phrase in that last paragraph is the one I bold-faced. This is the first time I’ve seen Internet radio treated with the respect due what will surely be the winning approach in the long run.

    Meanwhile, PORS (my new initialism for Plain Old Radio Service: AM/MW, FM, shortwave) is growing ever more anachronistic — and so are efforts either to A) give it with a digital gloss (as do the IBOC digital enhancements to AM and FM, which have made listening worse on old radios while reaching too damn few new ones), or B) replace it with something new developed decades ago (such as DAB), while still sounding like regular old radio stations (while listeners are moving by the millions to iPods and other alternatives over which they are the ones in control).

    Everyone’s time is scarce. On the whole, less and less of it will be spent listening to radios as we knew them. Even if the signals they get are called “digital”.

    Lobbying for Lessig

    February 15, 2008 in Events, News, Places, Politics | 3 comments

    isn’t running for the late Tom Lantos‘ congressional seat. But that doesn’t mean we can’t push him.

    Which is what’s going on through the Draft Lessig for Congress blog and Facebook group.

    Google has 99 results as of 2:37pm (Pacific) today. Google Blogsearch has 13. Technorati has 14. Here’s the graph:

    The Facebook group has 576 members. Quite a start.

    Let’s see how it goes.

    For Larry’s sake, I hate wishing this on him. For the country’s sake, I love that we’re doing it.

    Remember how Dave says Ask not what the Net can do for you, ask what you can do for the Net.

    Nobody is better for the Net, and for the Country, than Larry.

    You too tube

    February 14, 2008 in Ideas, News | 1 comment

    Yes we can.

    No you can’t.

    Remembering Tom Lantos

    February 13, 2008 in News, Past | 1 comment

    Andrew McLaughlin has an excellent tribute to my late former congresman, Tom Lantos. A sample:

      During Committee meetings, he made a deep impression on me as a forceful orator, a sharp questioner, and a committed defender of due process and the rule of law. On the handful of occasions when I accompanied senior staffers to brief him on an investigation or upcoming hearing, I witnessed a different side of him — warm and gentlemanly, curious, incisive, skeptical. Flowing from his experience as a young Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by escaping from Nazi labor camps to a Budapest safe house protected by Raoul Wallenberg, Congressman Lantos’s life’s work was aimed at securing human rights and civil liberties for the oppressed and disenfranchised, both at home and abroad. In pursuit of that cause, he followed his conscience, full stop. He demanded that institutions with power over individuals — governments, armies, corporations — act not only out of crude self-interest, but true to a higher moral calling to protect the rights and interests of the people they affect.

    Quite a guy.

    What’s wrong with this picture?

    February 12, 2008 in Ideas, News, Politics, VRM | 16 comments

    So far I’ve had mostly nice things to say about the Obama campaign. So here’s my first dig: the index page. Hey, what if you don’t want to give them your email address and zip code? What if you don’t like the suggestion that the only way to Learn More is by giving that information to them? What if you want to go straight to the website itself, which surely must include more than just this family-foto welcome page?

    You can, if you click the “skip signup” button, which is in type so barely visible that I missed it the first few times I went to the site, even though I’d clicked on it before.

    While we’re at it, Dave points out here that the contributions mechanism could use some improvement too.

    Musical seats

    February 11, 2008 in Ideas, News | Comments closed

    Steve Lewis on musicians as presidents. For me, a musician in the White House would be no less unthinkable than an aging B-movie actor as president or a one-tine professional body-builder as governor of California. In contemporary Russia, even former chess grandmasters entertain political careers. Musicianship, like other endeavors, can generate requisite empathy and responsibility.

    An interesting post that continues his one on Jordan for President.

    What companies would you volunteer for?

    February 11, 2008 in Ideas, News, VRM | 1 comment

    That’s a thought raised by The Volunteer Economy.

    Sobering thought of the day

    February 11, 2008 in Ideas, News | 2 comments

    George Bush and John McCain say The Surge is working. But how? Here’s John Robb’s explanation. If you’re impatient, go straight to the last short paragraph.

      The Sunni Tribal Awakening (rather than “the surge”) has radically slowed violence in Iraq by bringing it back to the levels of activity seen in 2005. That’s a good thing, but the Awakening has been wrongly attributed to a new (resurrected) counter-insurgency doctrine (COIN). Here’s why. The main objective of United States COIN doctrine is to enhance/extend the sovereignty and legitimacy of the host nation. Everything that is done is slaved to this top level goal. Unfortunately, the development of legitimacy is a long and slow process that takes decades of effort (if it can be accomplished at all). In contrast, everything about the Tribal Awakening is diametrically opposed to this. It arms and trains militias and groups that aren’t loyal to the host nation and thereby diminishes the host nation’s legitimacy by undercutting its monopoly on violence and its control over sovereign territory.

      What did happen with the Awakening, and the speed of the transition should be a clue to this, is that the US military opportunistically embraced the insurgency (in a move akin to IBMs embrace of open source development in the 90′s). This embrace showered autonomy, weapons, money ($300 per month x 60,000 participants), protection (from Shiite militias and the Iraqi government), and training on insurgent groups. By doing so, it replaced the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaeda affiliate) as the leading participant in the insurgency. The only “cost” to these insurgent groups, which were under extreme pressure from Shiite militias due to overreaching by the ISI, was to sacrifice the ISI. They rapidly complied.

      Where this goes from here is problematic since (and I say this to get you thinking and not to shock you) the US is now leading both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency in Iraq.

    John will be speaking, along with Thomas P.M. Barnett (another among the other most provocative thinkers and bloggers on strategic military affairs), on Principles for Winning the Peace, at Austin-Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, this coming Thursday, Valentine’s Day.

    Will the Clinton Era come to a graceful end?

    February 10, 2008 in News | 9 comments

    In Can Mrs. Clinton lose?, Peggy Noonan writes,

      We know she is smart. Is she wise? If it comes to it, down the road, can she give a nice speech, thank her supporters, wish Barack Obama well, and vow to campaign for him?

      It either gets very ugly now, or we will see unanticipated–and I suspect professionally saving–grace.

      I ruminate in this way because something is happening. Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It’s not one big primary, it’s a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor. She is having trouble raising big money, she’s funding her campaign with her own wealth, her moral standing within her own party and among her own followers has been dragged down, and the legacy of Clintonism tarnished by what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina. Unfavorable primaries lie ahead. She doesn’t have the excitement, the great whoosh of feeling that accompanies a winning campaign. The guy from Chicago who was unknown a year ago continues to gain purchase, to move forward. For a soft little innocent, he’s played a tough and knowing inside/outside game.

      The day she admitted she’d written herself a check for $5 million, Obama’s people crowed they’d just raised $3 million. But then his staff is happy. They’re all getting paid.

      Political professionals are leery of saying, publicly, that she is losing, because they said it before New Hampshire and turned out to be wrong. Some of them signaled their personal weariness with Clintonism at that time, and fear now, as they report, to look as if they are carrying an agenda. One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she’s a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched.

    She concludes,

      The biggest problem for the Republicans will be that no matter what they say that is not issue oriented–”He’s too young, he’s never run anything, he’s not fully baked”–the mainstream media will tag them as dealing in racial overtones, or undertones. You can bet on this. Go to the bank on it.

      The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell.

    I don’t know. Obama hasn’t had an embarrasing blow-up yet, as most campaigns eventually do. He’s not perfect. It’s going to happen.

    And on the bus last week here near Boston, I overheard a lively political discussion among acquaintances that was all about the comfort they felt with Hillary, and even their affection for her. I’m reluctant to dismiss that.

    But my gut says Peggy’s right. And I think it has to do with the matter of “change”. It’s hard to say “change” is what you’re about when you’re proposing a series of four presidents with just two surnames between them.

    One thing I didn’t expect to see, going into