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.

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):

• Seattle (KUOW and KPLU)
• San Francisco (KQED and KALW)
• Los Angeles (KPPC and KCRW)
• Atlanta (various vs. GBP)
• Minnesota (too many to mention)
• Oregon (JPR and OPB)
  

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.

So I called SuperShuttle to book a ride to the airport in Denver. The first thing the robot voice said was that I could also book this on the Web. So I thought, cool, I’ll do that. It’ll probably go faster, and I can copy the confirmation information directly onto my calendar.

No luck there. I had to register, and the registration never went through. I’d fill out the form, click to make it go, and my browser window would say, “https://www.supershuttle.com/Membership.aspx?content=AccountSettings”, completed 29 of 31 items… and then raise the __ of __ items gradually over time until it said no more and I wasn’t registered. It just sat there with a completed form that had no use. It also annoyed me that I had to opt out of their promotional email newsletter.

So I called their 800 number again. The following isn’t far from verbatim. I’ve done my best to preserve the surreality of it.

I gave her my number. Slowly. She got it wrong. I corrected it. She asked for my expiration date. She said the card was expired. I said no, the expiration date was in 2011. She finally gave up on the card, and went back to completing the rest of the surreal dialogue.

There’s gotta be a better way.

[Later...] And there is. I just got a call from SuperShuttle’s Senior VP of Global Marketing, looking to debug what went wrong here. It was a helpful conversation for both of us. Naturally, I suggested he take a look at what we’re doing with ProjectVRM. Once it’s ready for prime time, what VRM developers are doing can help improve what’s happening on the CRM side of markets such as SuperShuttle’s.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flaw of synchronous communication has been repackaged as the boon of realtime communication. Asynchrony, once our friend, is now our enemy. The transaction costs of interpersonal communication have fallen below zero: It costs more to leave the stream than to stay in it. The approaching Wave promises us the best of both worlds: the realtime immediacy of the phone call with the easy broadcasting capacity of email. Which is also, as we’ll no doubt come to discover, the worst of both worlds. Welcome to the conference call that never ends. Welcome to Wave hell.

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

Instituional corruption is the topic of today’s Lessig talk, at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Taking notes live.

Early point. The country’s founders value independence as, among other things, the absence of depencence. Or dependence on the wrong influences. Some great quotes, which I just missed.

Now he’s unpacking influence. Giving examples.

Lobbying now a $9 billion industry. One lobbyist earned more than $100 million in that industry (missed the name).

Hall & Deardorff (in American Political Science Review): Lobbying as subsidy.

Mazolli: lobbyists just get “access,” which is not influence. Easy cases allow us to charitably let that slide.

Example after example. Nutrition. Global Warming. Copyright. Health Care. Taking money is standard now. John Stennis, long dead and hardly a paragon of probity, quoted as opposing it. Lead in gasoline.

Side thought: to what degree are Harvard (or any major university) and its schools and centers, industries? Or influential within industries? Or influential within government? How many Harvard veterans now work in the Obama administration? (The same might have been asked about Yale veterans for some earlier administrations. Or for Berkeley in the California state government.) This isn’t taking money, or taking people; but rather an aspect of echo-chamberism. Perhaps. Not sure. I’m expecting Larry to visit this later. Hope he will, anyway.

Larry: The real decline of journalsim began happening long before the Internet came along. It began in the ’70s and ’80s when papers and broadcasters sold out to giants that could give a damn about the institutional missions, of community, and the rest of it. Or he’s citing sources and claims on that.

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.

The arguments here were foreshadowed in the architecture of the Web itself, the essence of which has been lost to history — or at least to search engines.

Look up Wikipedia+Web on Google and you won’t find Wikipedia’s World Wide Web entry on the first page of search results. Nor in the first ten pages. The top current result is for Web browser. Next is Web 2.0. Except for Wikipedia itself, none of the other results on the first page point to a Wikipedia page or one about the Web itself.

This illustrates how far we’ve grown away from the Web’s roots as a “hypertext project”. In Worldwide: Proposal for a Hypertext Project, dated 12 November 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Callao wrote,

Hypertext is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, Hypertext provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help…

…There is a potential large benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of information to another one. This forming of a web of information nodes rather than a hierarchical tree or an ordered list is the basic concept behind Hypertext…

Here we give a short presentation of hypertext.

A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser. When starting a hypertext browser on your workstation, you will first be presented with a hypertext page which is personal to you: your personal notes, if you like. A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number)…

The texts are linked together in a way that one can go from one concept to another to find the information one wants. The network of links is called a web . The web need not be hierarchical, and therefore it is not necessary to “climb up a tree” all the way again before you can go down to a different but related subject. The web is also not complete, since it is hard to imagine that all the possible links would be put in by authors. Yet a small number of links is usually sufficient for getting from anywhere to anywhere else in a small number of hops.

The texts are known as nodes. The process of proceeding from node to node is called navigation. Nodes do not need to be on the same machine: links may point across machine boundaries. Having a world wide web implies some solutions must be found for problems such as different access protocols and different node content formats. These issues are addressed by our proposal.

Nodes can in principle also contain non-text information such as diagrams, pictures, sound, animation etc. The term hypermedia is simply the expansion of the hypertext idea to these other media. Where facilities already exist, we aim to allow graphics interchange, but in this project, we concentrate on the universal readership for text, rather than on graphics.

Thus was outlined, right at the start, a conflict of interests and perspectives. On one side, the writer of texts and other creators of media goods. On the other side, readers and viewers, browsing. Linking the two is hypertext.

Note that, for Tim and Robert, both hypertext and the browser are user interfaces. Both authors and readers are users. As a writer I include hypertext links. As a reader with a browser I can follow them — but do much more. And it’s in that “more” category that Sidewiki lives.

As a writer, Sidewiki kinda creeps me out. As Dave Winer tweeted to @Windley, What if I don’t want it on my site? Phil tweeted back, but it’s not “on” your site. It’s “about” your site & “on” the browser. No?

Yes, but the browser is a lot bigger than it used to be. It’s turning into something of an OS. The lines between the territories of writer and reader, between creator and user, are also getting blurry. Tools for users are growing in power and abundance. So are those for creators, but I’m not sure the latter are keeping up with the former — at least not in respect to what can be done with the creators’ work. All due respect for Lessig, Free Culture and remixing, I want the first sources of my words and images to remain as I created them. Remix all you want. Just don’t do it inside my pants.

I’ll grant to Phil and Google that a Google sidebar is outside the scope of my control, and is not in fact inside my pants. But I do feel encroached upon. Maybe when I see Sidewiki in action I won’t; but for now as a writer I feel a need to make clear where my stuff ends and the rest of the world’s begins. When you’re at my site, my domain, my location on the Web, you’re in my house. My guest, as it were. I have a place here where we can talk, and where you can talk amongst yourselves as well. It’s the comments section below. If you want to talk about me, or the stuff that I write, do it somewhere else.

This is where I would like to add “Not in my sidebar.” Except, as Phil points out, it’s not my sidebar. It’s Google’s. That means it’s not yours, either. You’re in Google-ville in that sidebar. The sidewiki is theirs, not yours.

In Claiming My Right to a Purpose-Centric Web: SideWiki, Phil writes,

I’m an advocate of the techniques Google is using and more. I believe that people will get more from the Web when client-side tools that manipulate Web sites to the individual’s purpose are widely and freely available. A purpose-centric Web requires client-side management of Web sites. SideWiki is a mild example of this.

He adds,

The reaction that “I own this site and you’re defacing it” is rooted in the location metaphor of the Web. Purpose-centric activities don’t do away with the idea that Web sites are things that people and organizations own and control. But it’s silly to think of Web sites the same way we do land. I’m not trespassing when I use HTTP to GET the content of a Web page and I’m not defacing that content when I modify it—in my own browser—to more closely fit my purpose.

Plus a kind of credo:

I claim the right to mash-up, remix, annotate, augment, and otherwise modify Web content for my purposes in my browser using any tool I choose and I extend to everyone else that same privilege.

All of which I agree with—provided there are conventions on the creators’ side that give them means for clarifying their original authorship, and maintaining control over that which is undeniably theirs, whether or not it be called a “domain”.

For example, early in the history of Web, in the place where publishing, browsing and searching began to meet, a convention by which authors of sites could exclude their pages from search results was developed. The convention is now generally known as the Robots Exclusion Standard, and began with robots.txt. In simple terms, it was (and remains) a way to opt out of appearance in search results.

Is there something robots.txt-like that we could create that would reduce the sense of encroachment that writers feel as Google’s toolbar presses down from the top, and Sidewiki presses in from the left? (And who-knows-what from Google — or anybody — presses in from the right?)

I don’t know.

I do know that we need more and better tools in the hands of users — tools that give them independence both from authors like me and intermediaries like Google. That independence can take the form of open protocols (such as SMTP and IMAP, which allow users to do email with or without help from anybody), and it can take the form of substitutable tools and services such as browsers and browser enhancements. Nobody’s forcing anybody to use Google, Mozilla, any of their products or services, or any of the stuff anybody adds to either. This is a Good Thing.

But we’re not at the End of Time here, either. There is much left to be built out, especially on the user’s side. This is the territory where VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) lives. It’s about “equipping customers to be independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply side of the marketplace”.

I know Phil and friends are building VRM tools at his new company, Kynetx. I’ll be keynoting Kynetx’ first conference as well, which is on 18-19 November. (Register here.) Meanwhile there is much more to talk about in the whole area of individual autonomy and control — and work already underway in many areas, from music to public media to health care — which is why we’ll have VRooM Boston 2009 on 12-13 October at Harvard Law School. (Register here.)

Lots to talk about. Now, more places to do that as well.

Bonus Links:

• Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which digs deeply into many of the core issues touched upon here — and embodies in its title an ideal of the Web, which is that no big entities should be controlling it.
• User Driven Services, by Joe Andrieu
• VRM One-Pager, by Adriana Lukas
• VRM and the Four Party System, by yours truly. Is Sidewiki a fourth party service? Let’s bring it up at the workshop.

[Later...] Lots of excellent comments below. I especially like Chris Berendes’. Pull quote: I better take the lead in remixing “in my pants”, lest Google do it for me. Not fair, but then the advent of the talkies was horribly unfair to Rudolf Valentino, among other silent film stars.

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.

Now that the piece is up, I thought I’d add a few more thoughts of my own.

First, while valuation is unavoidably interesting, value is avoidably important. In other words, it doesn’t get much respect. Not if it’s not being sold.

For example, RSS (currently getting more than 3 billion results on Google). It’s extremely useful. We would hardly have blogging or online journalism without it. But Dave Winer, to his enormous credit, decided not to make RSS itself a business. Instead he decided to release it into the world so countless uses could be made of it, and countless businesses could be built on top of those uses. He made RSS open infrastructure, just as Linus Torvalds did with Linux, and countless other geeks have done with their own contributions to the virtual lumberyard of free building material we use to make the online world. Open building material is valuable beyond calculation, because it has use value rather than sale value. (Eric Raymond explains the difference here.) The leverage of use value on sale value can be very high indeed. Where would Google and Amazon be without Linux and Apache? Where would any of us be without SMTP, IMAP and other email protocols — or, for that matter, the suite of free and open protocols on which the Net itself runs?

Twitter’s creators have chosen to make it a commercial form of infrastructure. This is not a bad thing. In terms of investment valuation (especially at this point in time) it’s a smart thing. But we should not mistake Twitter itself, or even its API, for the kind of true (free and open) infrastructure that comprise the Net and the Web. Nor, for that matter, should we consider Twitter the last word in the category it pioneered and now dominates. At this point in history, Twitter soaks up nearly all the oxygen the microblogging room. Thus there is no widely adopted open infrastructure for microblogging. (Identi.ca and the OpenMicroBlogger folks have worked hard on that, but adoption so far is relatively small.)

But, given time, something will take. I’d place a bet Dave’s RSS Cloud. It’s live, or real-time. It’s open infrastructure. And, as Dave put it here, it has no fail whale. (And now TechCrunch is Cloud-enabled.)

This relates to Cluetrain in respect to what a market is, and what a market does. Markets by nature are open. They are not “your choice of captor.” Cluetrain, at least for me, was a brief against captors, a case for open marketplaces. So, while Twitter may provide means for conversation out the wazoo, it still falls short of what are, for me, more important Cluetrain ideals. I await the fulfillment of those with growing patience.

If you had told me in 1999 that the two hottest names on the Web in 2009 — Facebook and Twitter — would both be silos, I’d have been disappointed. I’d have figured that by now most folks would understand the infrastructural nature of open code, open protocols, open formats. (For more on those expectations, see Making a New World, written a few years back but still relevant as ever.)

With time comes perspective. It is helpful to note that the Web as we know it is barely old enough for high school. (The first popular browser appeared in 1995.) As an environment supporting new forms of business life — ones thriving in an environment of ubiquitous and cheap worldwide connectivity that each participant is in a position to improve — we are at a paleozoic stage in which even the innovative companies continue to follow familiar industrial age models of command and control. That’s why they trap users, customers and whole markets in walled gardens that are value-subtracted simulacra of the whole Net. In the best cases (such as Twitter’s, Facebook’s and Apple’s) they create new markets around new inventions and new ways of doing things, but at the expense of isolation for themselves and all their walled-in dependents. So, even when they embrace (though never completely) openness and other forms of goodness at the engineering level, they remain Old Skool at the corporate level where equally Old Skool investors still place their bets. And, while they speed things up in the early stages — when they are still new and original — they slow things down after their walled markets become large enough to become industrial farms, harvesting income from trapped inhabitants.

The longer that walled farming remains a prevailing business practice, the longer the Industrial Age persists in the midst of the one that succeeds it, and the farther we are from arriving at the Net’s mesozoic: it’s dinoaur age. That age will be characterized, as it was for sentient reptiles, by greater liberty for individuals and greater autonomy for families, tribes and other groups of individuals.

Many of us have long seen that liberation coming — and implicit in the nature of the Net itself. The Cluetrain Manifesto announced it in early 1999 with “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” Chris Locke wrote that, and it galvanized the rest of us by giving voice to the liberating nature of the Net itself. Yes, the Net supports silos, but it is not itself a silo. It provides a base infrastructure for freedom, independence and empowerment. It creates wide open spaces for the social and business constructions we call markets. True, the urge by companies to build walled gardens in these wide open spaces persists undiminished. But in time companies will discover how much more value can be created by contributing to open infrastructure, and by offering original products and services based on that infrastructure, than by trapping customers in closed spaces and operating their own private marketplaces. (As, for example, Apple does with its iTunes store, and other phone makers and companies are now copying. This is very paleozoic stuff.)

We are now caught up in “social” everything. Cluetrain’s opening thesis, “markets are conversations,” is often credited for predicting, if not inaugurating, the “social web”. Overlooked in the midst, however, is what I think is a far more important thesis, coined by David Weinberger: “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy“. Ask yourself, How well do links work in Twitter? Better question: What happens when bit.ly goes down — or out of business? URL shortening needs to be part of the Net’s infrastructure too. Today it isn’t. For more on that, look up Dave Winer and URL shortening: Dave has a history of not being listened to by Google, Twitter and other giants. But he’s right about URL shortening. And about how Twitter can help de-silo it. Single-source commercial URL shorteners are handy and all, but they weaken hyperlinks by making them vulnerable to the failure of one company, or one authority. I am sure Twitter doesn’t mean to weaken hyperlinks (but rather strengthen them, in a way), but that’s what it does by relying on a commercial silo for shortened links. Weakening hyperlinks, at least to me, makes Twitter less valuable, no matter how much investors think it’s worth on some future stock market.

Dave Winer has long advised, “Ask not what the Web can do for you, ask what you can do for the Web”. Answering that generously in the long run will result in maximum value — and valuations in alignment with a more open and value-producing future.