Recently in The Internet, the Web, Media, Communications and Connection Category

They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message that will not vanish. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: "I was here, and this is what happened to me"?

Ushahidi sounds inspiring.

The project is on Github.

Google is still censoring in China.

Seth Finkelstein has posted his answers to a Pew survey on the future of the Internet, and Google making us stupid (or not) in a thought provoking yet grounded (which is rare on the Web - admit it!) post.

Seth - if you're reading - I miss your blogging.

I've been trying to write a riff on Garret's 10 year anniversary piece on blogging for a while now. But every time I start, it ends up way too long. So just read his piece and come back.

Okay, did that? Because as is old fashioned blogger custom I expect you to derive context for my following thoughts from my links (did you read Garret's piece yet?) and from what I usually talk about here.

The march towards a plethora of walled-garden-social-networks has been a drag. And maybe it will be standards that will provide us a way out of the counter-personal-ownership of data mess we're in right now. I'm hopeful. And I hope to do some hacking along the way to try and put together some duck tape of my own.

But the important thing is here we are.

Flashback to 1999. Conservatives were accusing Clinton of 'wagging the dog'.

We were about to intervene in the Kosovo conflict. I felt our intervention in the Kosovo crisis was misguided for different reasons than those on the RIght. I felt that bombs couldn't be the answer.

Yes, I was (and am counting who you talk to) a peace loving hippie.

I wanted to share my view, but I realized my voice held little weight, so I collected stories that supported my opinion and added them to a headline feed.

I ran that feed of headlines into My.Netscape and My.Userland so that people who might be interested could follow.

The feed reached people around the world even though I believe there were only a few hundred subscribers. People from Russia and Kosovo sent me emails to comment.

Let me repeat that again "People from Russia and Kosovo sent me emails to comment".

I had made some kind of connection, with people from different countries, talking about war.

Me.

All it required was a text editor, searching for interesting stories that reflected my view, and manually writing out the RSS XML and storing it on a Web host. I registered the feed with My.Netscape and My.Userland and away it went.

Today, any of us can open an account at Wordpress.com or TypePad and do that and so much more. Everything we post to Facebook, Twitter, our blogs, our forums generates RSS and Atom. These common communication formats helped lay down what is becoming the foundation of the real-time web. Where any of us have the potential to reach anyone else, anywhere.

This very post, when it goes live, will appear in Twitter, and Facebook, and even more amazingly, Google and Yahoo! in the order hours if not minutes.

What Tim O'Reilly had called the "Architecture of Participation" and Dave Winer called the "Read-Write Web", way back when, continues to evolve and grow.

There is still much to do for it to reach its full promise. It has never lived up to its potential to enable those who need to be heard to be heard. Human nature is human nature after all and we tend to tune into voices that resemble our own. But the potential still is there to make a connection across our own biases and our own filters. The potential and capability.

For all the negatives that still abound, all the opportunities left to explore, the challenges left to solve, blogging has helped me connect with Garret, and many other terrific online travelers across the world and here in my home town. People who I consider teachers. Thought provokers. Inspiration. Friends.

You know who you are.

Thank you to all the folks who laid down this architecture for all of us to participate, twist, turn, innovate on, and completely take for granted. And thank you to all those who have made that connection with me and enlarged my heart, my mind and world.

Douglas R. Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition:

My point is simple: we are prepared to see, and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors that we each possess (some coming from without, some coming from within, some on the scale of mere words, some on a much grander scale) are the filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what we perceive on high and low levels.

Boston Globe: Joe Keohane: Imaginary fiends: In 2009, crime went down. In fact it's been going down for a decade. But more and more Americans believe it's getting worse. Why do we refuse to believe the good news?

Boston Globe: Easy = True: How 'cognitive fluency' shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel

Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that's existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.

Watch Clay Shirky on information overload versus filter failure:

Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky's view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk's from his book "Data Smog".

Far from it.

David Shenk attempted to identify the information landscape we are living in now way back in 1997. In a 2007 piece in Slate he took a critical look back.

As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.

In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky's talk there.

Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk's definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about 'information overload'.

Clay Shirky's point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.

Bruce Schneier: Privacy in the Age of Persistence: We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

Nick Bilton: NYTimes: 'Controlled Serendipity' Liberates the Web: We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

Anil Dash: CNN: Don't let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town: There's no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We've just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.

Roger Ebert who is living with what his fight against thyroid cancer has dealt him and how the Internet helps him connect: Nil by mouth: So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, "Remember that time?" I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it's sad. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now. (bonus link read his piece on making out.

Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: "Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough"

Previous entries in the series:

Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization

Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

You can read much more from the NPR team on their blog at Inside NPR.org. A recent post on the blog from Jason Grosman that caught my attention was "What Happens When Stuff Breaks On NPR.org".

Related:

Justin Cormack has some thoughts on the above series, in particular on content portablility, that are worth reading.

Also related to content portability (I think - okay - maybe a stretch - but is worthy to think about), is "Dive into history, 2009 edition": "HTML is not an output format. HTML is The Format. Not The Format Of Forever, but damn if it isn't The Format Of The Now."

Also Related:

AIGA: Callie Neylan: Case Study: NPR.org

danah boyd: "Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms"

Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don't want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?

Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don't have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That's the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn't dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?

Related:

Bruce Schneier: "The Eternal Value of Privacy"

Nicholas Carr: Other people's privacy

I'm cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.

The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the "frequency-model" - more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:

At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others -- that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism -- gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times' online reach.

Read all about it in New York Magazine's "New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers".

I'd call it some long-awaited recognition for many. Gawker: Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer.

Hmm... have I qualified as a Programmer-Journalist in the past?

It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the 'wrong signals'. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.

It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the 'Great Recession' we are now in. They didn't work hard enough. They didn't move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.

I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn't *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.

All this is echoed in what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson spewed this week.

I'm a free speech absolutist, so I'm not going to say these creatures don't have a right to speak.

But fuck them.

You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.

Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.

Update: Satan writes Pat Robertson a letter.

As Fred Clark says Pat Robertson would tell Jesus he must have deserved it.

The news out of Haiti this week is beyond horrific. While there has been a burst of giving enabled by cellphones that are lowering the barriers to philanthropy, if you haven't already, give, and if you can, give again.

It's a moment that those into cyberpunk have been looking for, for a long time - when a multinational corporation whose bread and butter is in cyberspace itself confronts a nation-state. When Google posted to their blog "A New Approach To China" it was historic for many reasons: it was an *Internet company* confronting a *country* over *hacking* (try and digest that for a moment), the first most of us heard about this was from Google's blog post, and it highlights issues of having to do with intellectual property, with free speech, and access to information.

Wow.

You can go on and on with questions, thoughts, concerns, and as usual there is a terrific Metafilter: Metafilte thread to check out.

Related:

NYTimes: Scaling the Digital Wall in China : "The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable."

I started to pull together some choice quotes from Bruce Sterling, answering questions about the "State of the World 2010" at the WELL, but realized I'd be quoting far too much. You are better off reading the whole thing yourself. Enjoy.

Okay, one quote! In this he is discussing network-culture:

It's not that print's a medium, and the web's a medium, and you get to migrate between media. The Web is a metamedium that turns everything it grips into network-culture.

*So it's easy to see that mags are in for it. What's a little harder is looking at the hollow shell of your once-favorite antique shop and realizing that's all about eBay. "Gee, I'm on the web all the time now... time for a stroll, it's a sunny day... Gosh, my neighborhood's full of spooky holes." Gothic High-Tech.

Update: Wired: Katie Hafner The Epic Saga of The Well

NPR: In Memoriam: Sweet, Sad Rocker Vic Chesnutt

NPR: The Man Is Gone, But Long Live The Blogosphere (via Garret Vreeland). Jeff Jarvis knows blogging as well as anybody, but NPR should have talked to people who knew Brad Graham, or, as Garret suggests, were at least among his contemporaries in that first wave of blogging. He offered way more than the word 'blogosphere' to the history of blogging and way more to the world other than blogging. Check out this related Metafilter thread.

ReadWriteWeb has the news and some related thoughts.

Instructions provided by Matt Cutts in "Doing the "Digital Cleanse": no Twitter for a week".

It's a time saver.

Spiegel: SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die':

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

Being the Difference names Mark Horvath "Person of the Year".

Read the link - be inspired - then find a way to act. No matter how small. A tweet here, a blog post there, actually can push the ball forward. Making a donation to organizations like Project HOME or donating your time, even better.

Lately, my mind has been thinking about Camden Hopeworks. They are a nonprofit teaching program that provides youth with experience building websites and GIS/Mapping solutions for clients across the area. Check out the Hopeworks GIS Gallery.

Bob Burtman, for Miller-McCune, recently wrote a related piece about GIS, "The Revolution Will Be Mapped". You will want to check out the Metafilter thread it spawned.

In Philadelphia we are doing better at helping the homeless move into permanent housing, but there are signs the past 10 years have decreased opportunity for economic mobility.

Economic mobility, according to Wikipedia, is "the ability of an individual or family to improve their economic status." In short, the ease with which a person can climb from poverty to lower middle class. From lower middle class to middle class. From middle class to upper middle class. From upper middle class to wealthy.

A point I should have emphasized in my last post on homelessness is my journey to self-sufficiency took place in the 90s. We're a long way from then.

The 90s were an interesting time. Good music, movies, TV in the early 90s devolved towards its end. I think art and entertainment get better during hard times. The end of the 90s there was a sense in America that we were on the upswing. Hence the bad art. We started with Nirvana and ended up with Limp Bizkit - that says it all.

American confidence was reflected in ways beyond art. Consider how unconcerned we were with the Presidential election. Many didn't care about the election because the choice of Gore or Bush seemed too narrow. It seemed inconsequential who would be President. Generation-X lived up to our slacker stereotype in 2000. Things changed in 2004 and 2008. My generation woke up. But I'm talking about the 90s remember.

In many looks back the 90s gets defined by the dot-com bubble. The idea being that any growth during the 90s was due to and then eliminated in that bubble. I think you can make an argument that belief is incorrect. I believe the dot-com bubble was an artifact of the late 90s. Pushed on and encouraged by the irrational exuberance that had built up over that decade. Right along with bad music and unconcerned political participation. Fact of the matter was the 90s laid the technological foundation for what we have today at mass scale.

Income inequality continued to grow from the 80s to the 90s and at an accelerating rate. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele published a book sourced from their Philadelphia Inquirer series that argued that the American Dream was already stolen. But the 90s featured such job and personal income growth that many were too distracted to notice. In fact, according to FactCheck.org, the last eight years of Clinton's presidency stand as the longest economic boon in American history to that date.

It was in this generally optimistic environment that me and millions of others were part of a "dramatic decline" in the decrease of concentrated poverty. Some attribute this to record keeping, that Welfare rolls were trimmed due to President Clinton's mislabeled 'Welfare Reform' effort. But I believe that I am proof that the the decade's optimism was reflected in greater opportunities for me and others. People were more willing to take a chance.

The 'Aughts' eliminated many gains made during the 90s. According to the Washington Post the "Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy and workers". Add to this the fact that the safety net was shredded by efforts such as Welfare Reform and now you have a growing population of America living on nothing more than food stamps. Take a dip in a Metafilter thread discussion for more.

Those without jobs have very hard roads to walk. Those that do, well many are working 2 or 3 jobs just to make sure they don't fall.

Eventually it will lead to an environment where chances are less likely to be offered to potential risks like what I was in the 90s. Less opportunity. Less upward mobility.

Ironically, I hear from a surprising number that those not doing well are 'lazy'. That they don't have 'vision'. They aren't 'motivated'. That they need 'to hustle'. To 'get a job'. That we are on our own - freelancing agents and personal brands. Social contracts, like those that existed between employers and employees, between government and its citizens, between seller and buyer, aren't to be expected or trusted anyway - right? Aren't these some of the lessons of the 'Aughts'?

Well no. I heard these things in the 90s. And why couldn't counter lessons become conventional wisdom? That more empathy towards one another will help us get through challenging times?

That yes - the world isn't fair - but that we should work hard to be fair to one another other?

It does look more difficult to repeat my story now. It saddens and frightens me. A complete lack of progress since the 90s. You have a dysfunctional safety net simultaneous with less work opportunity.

We all want so many of the same things. Health. Friends. Understanding. Acceptance. Self-sufficiency. Dignity.

People will do amazing things when given the tools to succeed and given the opportunity to succeed (and fail a few times on the way). It is in such environments that you find real innovation. Real forward thinking. Because you are not simply fighting to survive.

Related reads:

NYTimes series from 2005: Class in America

Barbara Ehrenreich: "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"

To be considered with such an awesome group of people. I think Daniel Rubin deserves much of the credit for being the host of and inspiring the discussion.

Both sides of the fence represented in the following links:

Tech Crunch: The End of Hand Crafted Content

Daily Patricia Daily Patricia - Dumb Things Media 2.0 Loves To Say

Doc Searls: The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated

Jeff Jarvis: Content farms v. curating farmers

Paul Kedrosky: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail

Read the whole thing. Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy:

...in the nightmare scenario that I've kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption -- that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they're shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

...So we don't need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they're endowments or crowdsourced or what have you -- we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That's the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself -- and I'll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it's amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns -- I think that's baked into the current environment. I don't think there's any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

Again read the whole thing.

People tend to pick apart Shirky's writings to find what supports their arguments. Which, I partially just did in fact, so don't do that - absorb the nuance because the opportunities and problems at hand are far more complicated than the either naysayers or utopians would lead us believe.

American RadioWorks: Emily Hanford: Early Lessons: "doing well in school, and in life, is about more than a test score.":

"Now you're getting into something really deep," says economist James Heckman. "How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?"

Heckman is a Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of Chicago. Preschool was not among his interests until he came across the Perry Study several years ago. What caught his attention is the apparent paradox at its core: The people who went to preschool were not "smarter" than their peers, but they did better.

The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls "non-cognitive" skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.

These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work - and in life.

And as it turns out, the Perry preschool children did do better in life.

Alex Hillman recently tweeted: "Twitter lists illustrate the most important shift in the internet: your bio is now written by others, and what they say about you." He follows up with a longer piece on his blog.

Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D: It's easy to see why many people who use it for the first time wonder what the big deal is--as I said above, you really need to try to accomplish something with it as part of a group before you understand what it's good for.

Rafe shares the frustration he has trying to correct the the misinformation friends and family are consuming off the Web and from cable news media.

I had my Twitter updates streaming to Facebook, but recently discontinued that. danah boyd shares some of the reasons in her blog post: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates:

One way to really see this is when people on Twitter auto-update their Facebook (guilty as charged). The experiences and feedback on Twitter feel very different than the experiences and feedback on Facebook. On Twitter, I feel like I'm part of an ocean of people, catching certain waves and creating my own. Things whirl past and I add stuff to the mix. When I post the same messages to Facebook, I'm consistently shocked by the people who take the time to leave comments about them, to favorite them, to ask questions in response, to start a conversation. (Note: I'm terrible about using social media for conversation and so I'm a terrible respondent on Facebook.) Many of the people following me are the same, but the entire experience is different.

Seth Godin comments on the penalty you face exceeding the Dunbar Number

And finally, this is brilliant.

TNR: Lawrence Lessig: Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government.

Yes - you read that title right.

Lessig connects the dots from newspapers to the music industry and the ripple effects taking place - everything having to do with the architecture of the Internet and the dynamics set forth.

You need to read the full piece because it is not 'against transparency' - far from it - but it does call for a sense of concern and realism to settle into conversations about transparency as means to an end. Ultimately, in regards to government, it is a call to reform, specifically election finance reform - and I agree with much of it.

Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else's problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done had more responsibility been in the mix. The music industry was never going to like the Internet, but its war against the technology might well have been less hysterical and self-defeating if better and more balanced alternatives had been pressed from the beginning. No one can dislike Craigslist (or Craig), but we all would have benefited from a clearer recognition of what was about to be lost. Internet triumphalism is not a public good.

Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.

Related:

O'Reilly Radar: Carl Malamud: Larry Lessig and Naked Transparency

David Larry Lessig: Beyond Transparency, and Net Triumphalism

Aaron Swartz: Transparency Is Bunk

Seth Finkelstein posts "Why (individual) Blogging Is Dead - Objective Measurement" - but his own thread proves otherwise if you ask me.

It comes down to who you want to hear you.

For me, its friends (online and off), family, co-workers, and those that might seek me out (or my opinions) for some reason or another.

If you happen to follow this blog for other reasons, you've always been welcome to.

Hopefully we make a connection. I have lots to learn and hopefully something to share.

If so, well all this is worth it.

Will Bunch: Inquirer editor says you're going to pay for this

Joshua-Michéle Ross : Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don't Need It

Realistic views I heard at the norgs unconference maybe finally taking hold.

Smokescreen is a privacy and data sharing awareness game for teenagers. via Boing Boing.

Shelley Powers was outright slandered by taking a sentence out of context from a comment she made: link.

This is part of the game of modern politics and modern media. The lack of apology from those involved is pretty damning, because no one wants to admit they participate in it or are part of the larger problem. A larger problem that is leading all of us to be less informed about the world around us when there is so much media available.

We have a responsibility one another. When you write from a position of trust - don't abuse it.

I'd be mad too. Someone at the St. Louis Times fix this. Fix it now.

I was contacted by someone who teaches journalism for my thoughts on Daily News and Inquirer plans to charge readers - how they might affect local bloggers who often link, comment, or refer to the news from those online publications. He asked three difficult questions.

• Q: Do you plan to pay for your local Philadelphia online news?
  A: It counts upon how much it costs and what if offers. I hope they pursue a NPR-like membership model instead of putting up a paywall. In the end, it counts upon the value offered.
• Q: Will you link to articles that your readers will have to pay to read?
  A: Not if behind a paywall. I will find free alternatives to link to (KYW1060, TV station websites, national news sources, and especially local independent sources).
• Q: Any general reactions to how you think this will affect what you do and what other local bloggers do?
  A: Local blogging will not be effected all that much believe it or not. There are many free alternatives. What is of concern is that we are becoming less and less informed as a people. At a time when we need *more* exposure to the work of the the Inquirer and Daily News, there will be less. That's tragic.

I have to add that my hopes are that the papers remain local and that the bankruptcy proceedings are favorable to the local ownership. While I may disagree on paywalls, I feel that the news organizations within the papers stand the best chance at survival that way.

Alan Kay on comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.beginners: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms:

What is wrong? Why is mere opinion so dominating discussions held on the easiest medium there has ever been that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work? Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?

That quote is going to be passed around a lot.

It's a one paragraph penetrating question into why the Bill O'Reilly's of the world have so much more popularity then those who pursue the fact based journalism that a Bill Moyers pursues.

BTW - Howard Rheingold's recent post at SFGate, "Crap Detection 101" is highly recommended (via Rebecca Blood).

Metafilter Thread: Scratch, a beginner's programming language

Shamus Young: Scratch

Researchers at Cornell have published a paper titled "Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle" that I need to dig into. They've published visualizations of their research at a NYTimes piece on the study says, "This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world... And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories."

Chris Anderson, who in May presented his own research into this to the International Communications Association (ICA) posted his reflections on that research and how it relates: Another Perspective on How "News" "Diffuses": The Francisville 4 from Inside the Newsroom

Scott Rosenberg shares some criticisms in: "Newsies beat bloggers? Some caveats on memetracker study".

Nieman Journalism Lab's Zachary M. Seward summarizes it up: In the news cycle, memes spread more like a heartbeat than a virus.

The New York Observer: In the Battle Between Facebook and MySpace, A Digital 'White Flight'

FlowingData: Rise of the Data Scientist

Coding Horror: Code: It's Trivial

Zero Intelligence Agents: How to: Use Python and Social Network Analysis to Find New Twitter Friends

Paul Lockhart's terrific essay about the state of mathematics education and what should be done: A Mathematician's Lament (25 page must read PDF):

G.H. Hardy's excellent description:

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker
of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than
theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

So mathematicians sit around making patterns of ideas. What sort of patterns? What sort of ideas? Ideas about the rhinoceros? No, those we leave to the biologists. Ideas about language and culture? No, not usually. These things are all far too complicated for most mathematicians' taste. If there is anything like a unifying aesthetic principle in mathematics, it is this: simple is beautiful. Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.

By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it.

By concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the "truth" but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity-- to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs-- you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I'm not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I'm complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes.

If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing of excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students? If adding fractions is to the teacher an arbitrary set of rules, and not the outcome of a creative process and the result of aesthetic choices and desires, then of course it will feel that way to the poor students.

Teaching is not about information. It's about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students. It requires no method, no tools, and no training. Just the ability to be real. And if you can't be real, then you have no right to inflict yourself upon innocent children. In particular, you can't teach teaching. Schools of education are a complete crock. Oh, you can take classes in early childhood development and whatnot, and you can be trained to use a blackboard "effectively" and to prepare an organized "lesson plan" (which, by the way, insures that your lesson will be planned, and therefore false), but you will never be a real teacher if you are unwilling to be a real person. Teaching means openness and honesty, an ability to share excitement, and a love of learning. Without these, all the education degrees in the world won't help you, and with them they are completely unnecessary.

It's perfectly simple. Students are not aliens. They respond to beauty and pattern, and are naturally curious like anyone else. Just talk to them! And more importantly, listen to them!

Read the whole thing. This essay has reinforced some beliefs of mine about software engineering, teaching and parenting.

Slashdot has a decent thread on the piece.

Tim O'Reilly: Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard (and check out the site itself at it.usaspending.gov)

Data.gov iteratively grows from 47 to 100,000 data feeds (source Atrios)

EveryBlock blog: EveryBlock source code released

Tim Bray: "Hello World" for Open Data - Tim Bray reviews, and is inspired by, happenings in Vancover.

And locally SEPTA has started to work with Google to help riders plan trips online

A huge round of thanks needs to go to the folks behind iSepta for showing just what is possible.

This and more was discussed at this year's Personal Democracy Forum - which I missed, which I hopefully won't next year. Sounds like it was a great event.

Related:

O'Reilly radar: John Geraci: The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System

Ignite Philly 2: Geoff DiMassi and Paul Wright "Open Source Philadelphia"

New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: Priced to Sell - a scathing review of Wired's Chris Anderson's new book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" and the concepts promoted within.

NYTimes: Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia - the NYTimes coordinated with Wikipedia staff to keep a factual event from appearing on the service.

Say Everything: Chapter One: Putting Everything Out There [Justin Hall]: a review of Justin Hall's history and his efforts on the Web. How they laid the foundation for all that came later.

NiemanJournalismLab: Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian's (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment

Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today

Chris Anderson (not Wired's): We've Been Living Through a Twitter Revolution for the Last 10 Years

Fellow CIMer Livia Labate shared some advice for those looking to get started in Information Architecture.

At a recent brown bag she reviewed a number of great design games for generating ideas.

BoingBoing: Videos from the stage production of Little Brother

I'm really looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg's "Say Everything".

I'm sure "Say Everything" will be a book I can share with others (which I do with "Dreaming in Code") to provide them insight into why I do some of the things I do and why I get so damn passionate about them.

Writing a book on blogging's history and how it related to the Web, Internet, and society is a difficult task. Based upon excerpts I've read so far, Rafe's review of the first half, and reading his fantastic "Dreaming in Code", I know this book is going to be terrific and insightful.

Speaking of blogging, I got to agree with Rafe - the most awesome thing about blogging *is* "corresponding with so many of the people I met through blogging back then here, on Twitter, and elsewhere.".

Absolutely.

Thank you Web.

for Steve Jobs

Jaffe Juice: Blogging is dying and Twitter is to blame

Chris Pirillo: Are Personal Home Pages and Blogs Dying?

ProBlogger: Blogging vs Twitter

Sysan Mernit: Thought-blogging versus twitter/lifestream/community

Linux.com: Abandoiung your blog for Twitter

As for me, I'm keeping the blog.

Thought provoking, conversation starting, and probably controversial counting upon who you are, check out the whole single page comic.

TED.com: Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

The terms 'social media' and 'social software' may have been useful for educational purposes a few years ago when development or business leaders were not versed in the changing nature of media or online tool sets, but no longer. Both terms have long ago been appropriated by marketers. The term 'social media expert' means that person is a marketer. Nothing more, nothing less. And nothing against marketers.

So first, I am simply renaming all 'social media' and 'social software' tags across the site to 'internet'. I will do the same with the site category (that requires a proper 301 redirect) hopefully later tonight.

This is a backgrounder primarily for Arpit who discussed with a few thoughts on Clay Shirky's latest piece on Newspapers.

I wrote an intro for readers of paradox1x, on Clay Shirky, back in September.

A few favorite pieces:

Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can't Get Up

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Clay Shirky: Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can't Get Up

The interesting thing about this piece, written way back in 1995, is that it leaves wide open the concept of information.

Just what is information? People instinctively grasp for "facts" as their definition. But in computing, we think otherwise. Can music be described as information - sure can. Opinions? Yep. Visual arts? Certainly. Video. Yes, even video. Anything that can be described in ones and zeroes can be thought of as information that can be transmitted and shared on a network.

Well, what about advertising? Yes, that too.

Jeneane Sussum: The Value of Words: These. People. Are. Lying. To. You. And. Themselves.

There is a paradox at work here. As the cost of generating and transmitting information decreases, more of it becomes available, thus increasing the need for better filters.

Advertising, Newspapers, and Libraries were the premier filters of the pre-Internet age.

So were the 'big 3' TV stations, radio conglomerates, record companies, book stores and magazine stands for that matter.

Search engines, blogs, social networks, and smart aggregators are those of the now.

How the practices of the old evolve in the infrastructure of the new, how new disciplines arise to meet the needs of today and tomorrow, will determine how informed, or how uninformed, we will be as a society.

Other interesting links for today:

P'unk Avenue Window: What should a modern library be?

reddit: Young Deer hit by google map VAN. Caught on street view.

keithhopper.com: A Brief History of Hyperlocal News

Fanboy.com:
Social Media "Experts" are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)

MediaPost: Yelp Reviews Spawn At Least Five Lawsuits

Epicenter: eMusic Says Data Supports Long Tail Theory

Epicenter: Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down

ComputerWorld: What the Web knows about you

Psychology Today: The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment

ScientificAmerican: The Serious Need for Play

defmacro: Taming Perfectionism

NYTimes Book Review: Reality Intrudes on an Undercover Mental Patient

Cognitive Daily: Would we still obey? The first replication of Milgram's work in over 30 years

The Frontal Cortex :Kandel on Psychotherapy

NewScientist: Our world may be a giant hologram

Wired: Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge

Shelley Powers: Hire me and other activity

Roz Duffy: 2009, a fresh start indeed

From Locus Magazine: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction:

• Short, regular work schedule
• Leave yourself a rough edge
• Don't research
• Don't be ceremonious
• Kill your word-processor
• Realtime communications tools are deadly

Read the whole piece for the thoughts behind these items of advice.

There are equivalents for programming that come to mind. I wonder, am I sliding back into Emacs a task at a time because I want to kill my word-processor (my IDE - Eclipse?)? Is that why Netbeans is starting to appeal to me (seemingly less work configuring (playing?!) with IDE settings and concentrating on the task at hand)?

Nice work New York Times.

Miller-McCune: Deep Throat Meets Data Mining: In the nick of time, the digital revolution comes to democracy's rescue. And, perhaps, journalism's.:

Investigative reporters have long used computers to sort and search databases in pursuit of their stories. Investigative Reporters and Editors and its National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, for example, hold regular computer-assisted reporting training sessions around the country. And the country's major journalism schools all deal in some way with computer-enhanced journalism. The emerging academic/professional field of computational journalism, however, might be thought of as a step beyond computer-assisted reporting, an attempt to combine the fields of information technology and journalism and thereby respond to the enormous changes in information availability and quality wrought by the digital revolution.

I would be remiss to write about computational journalism and not mention Irfan Essa, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who teaches a class in computational journalism and is often credited with coining the term. He says both journalism and information technology are concerned, as disciplines, with information quality and reliability, and he views the new field as a way to bring technologists and journalists together so they can create new computing tools that further the traditional aims of journalism. In the end, such collaboration may even wind up spawning a new participant in the public conversation.

"We're talking about a new breed of people," Essa says, "who are midway between technologists and journalists."

Tools for news is a Django driven application that lists web apps, references, software, and more that would be useful to anyone building a mashup, but in particular if you are a journalist. Via DigiDave.

It's the same story in any form of media publishing: WSJ: Musician Finds a Following Online:

"The Internet has been like the French Revolution for the music business," says Panos Panay, founder and CEO of Sonicbids. The aristocracy "has faded" as the "cost of distribution, production and even getting connected has come down." Now, he adds, anyone with "a niche and devoted fans can make a living."

Doc Searls: Beyond mediation: 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.

I believe that we truly are the media now.

When we criticize 'the media' we are criticizing ourselves. Media is intermingled. It's everywhere and each of us take part from the smallest of web forums to the largest of social networks. That implies a civic responsibility.

People hate that word - responsibility - but there it is. And when it comes to media - the responsibilities that spring from it are now shared by us all.

This much is clear - by the end of 2009, there will be many fewer newspapers publishing in America.

Some attribute the fall of newspapers to:

• Willful ignorance on the part of those working at the papers. - Clay Shirky
• Corporate greed and shortsighted management. - John Morton
• The journalists themselves, for being too slow, too stubborn, too head in the sand, and more. - Jeff Jarvis
• Progress (the Internet) - Jack Shafer
• Innovation and Creative Destruction (the Internet) - Fred Wilson
• Innovation and Creative Destruction (the Internet) - Brad Feld
• Profitable businesses that won't take risks and lack vision - (a version of the Innovator's Dilemma) - resulting in self-induced, profit squeezing death spiral - Jay Rosen
• Profitable businesses that won't take risks and lack vision (a version of the Innovator's Dilemma) - resulting in self-induced, profit squeezing death spiral - Dan Gillmor
• the Internet - Kevin Drum
• The Innovator's Dilemma (Disruptive Technology (the Internet) meets established business culture) - Ezra Klein
• The Innovator's Dilemma (Disruptive Technology (the Internet) meets established business culture) - the TLF
• Stock owner demands - public ownership's quarter driven profit demands - Georgie Anne Geye

Coming from where I come from, with the experience that I had at Philly.com, I couldn't help but think that Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky's point of view is a damaging re-write of history that obscures complicated truths. This is disappointing for me because both of them have important knowledge for newspaper organizations that can help them in their on going efforts to evolve, and their posting of what are essentially pieces that incite rather than provide insight did no one any favors. Jeff Jarvis, in particular, has been a major force in pushing along papers to meet the future. And I am literally a *fan* of Clay Shirky's writings - I share many of them with who I work.

It could be that Clay Shirky was trolled by the off the wall piece by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate about Jeff Jarvis. It was a true blue hatchet job. Still, I felt the need to reply in comments to Shirky's piece and to Jeff Jarvis's piece celebrating Shirky's article.

Me, replying to Clay Shirky (paraphrasing):

Sadly it is people like Rosenbaum who get the limelight, when perspectives of those within the industry are far, far different.

In fact they are so different that I say it is a dangerous re-writing of history to say that "The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us."

You can pull famous examples such as Dan Gillmor or Jay Rosen or Jeff Jarvis himself.

You can look directly at archive.org to see the competitive state of newspaper websites in the late 90s or early 00s (note when they stopped evolving - the .com crash).

Undeniably there some within news organizations that are (were?) willfully ignorant - for sure - however I can tell you from personal experience that the majority of my ex-co-workers were not keeping their heads in the sand and had fought (are fighting) tooth and nail to bring culture change to their organizations.

Take a look at

http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/

1997.

These organizations were doing fabulously well in their economics btw. So much so that what is occurring is a textbook example of "the Innovator's Dilemma" (thank you Henry Copeland for suggesting that book to me so long ago!).

You are more correct in your glacier analogy - however - think of it as a slow approaching death - a frog in a slow boiling pot of water.

Speaking of Dan Gillmor - I remember the difficulties he faced in getting his first blog off the ground within Knight Ridder. But he wasn't alone in pursuing the future.

It is factually incorrect to state otherwise.

If there are any lessons to be learned by all this - they won't occur if the narrative becomes a simplistic "we spoke - they ignored".

And to not expect people to cry out as they lose their jobs - jobs that many have been fighting to transform when they are still relevant (the reporting not the papers) is bull.

Oh, and speaking of those in the trenches, consider speaking to Wendy Warren, Will Bunch, and Daniel Rubin of Philly.com, the Daily News, and Inquirer.

As Jeff Jarvis himself spoke well of two years ago:

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/03/25/saving-journalism-and-killing-the-press/

This narrative of "us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get" needs to stop.

Me, replying to Jeff Jarvis (paraphrasing):

I'll call bullshit on Clay and you both on the idea that no one has been "caught up in this great upheaval". I'm a big fan of Clay Shirky. I share his writing with folks at work all the time and I've actually quoted him to you in various responses to you over the years. There have been many newspaper folks fighting for change in that industry over the past ten years.

Ya know, there is part of me that is downright mad at this - it almost resembles a re-writing of history.

I maybe in your ignore list now Jeff, I'm not sure.

But I am secure in knowing that of the many, many people losing their jobs and careers in the midst of this ongoing revolution - a revolution I feel part of as an early adopter, promoter, evangelist, software engineer, blogger and more - there are thousands that do *not* deserve blame for what is going on.

I WILL NOT thumb my nose at them.

They fought, and in many places continue to fight, to drive business and culture changes in organizations that still have relevant value in a world where we are no better informed then we were 10 years ago according to Pew.

Change is life. But the big story here isn't in the numbers of people who willfully looked the other way. There was some. But not the vast majority of people I worked with in the trenches at Philly.com.

Hell no.

And my heart goes out to them who fought (and continue to fight) with everything they have - to turn their ship around from the glacier that Shirky is right to indicate.

When the definitive history of this is recorded, hopefully it will capture the truth - that many of the guns pointed at the patient were those of the patient - but willful ignorance was the least of these. That many knew they were pursuing immediate profits over long term investments. Others were fighting for change and evolution to meet the future in every single project they worked on and found frustrating blockers in culture and immediate ROI turnaround demands of established businesses meeting the calls of investors. That culture and technology were dealing death blows to the 'paper' as information costs dropped towards zero and we each became empowered with our own printing presses - the Web.

There are *many* reasons. But I repeat - the narrative of "us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get" needs to stop.

Everyone needs to get over themselves already.

Elsewhere and recent:

Talking Points Memo has announced it will be sending two new additional paid reporters to Washington DC while it has been reported that newspapers will be sending far fewer to cover happenings at the Capitol.

Pew Research Center, in a recent study, has announced the Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of news.

Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) is buying Consumerist from Gawker Media. More on the news at Consumerist.

Business Week takes a look at other business models for journalism including a glance at Spot.us.

And at the LA Times an important milestone has been reached Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.

Meanwhile, Gabe Rivera speaks some hard to hear truth (to some) about automated news filters: Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work.

Jay Rosen summarizes the moment: Migration Point for the Press Tribe:

The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on--also called their business model--no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.

Migration-which is easily sentimentalized by Americans--is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don't want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons, a reactionary group. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism. Many are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses. A few are admitting that it's time to panic.

I expected this to be bigger news in my circles, but it hasn't registered. CNN has rejected the news crawl for a far less busy headline flip in its news broadcasts. The new UI makes it far easier to absorb the news broadcast without constant distraction and sometimes even helps to clarify whatever it is that is being reported. Great job CNN.

NYTimes: The Flipper Challenges the Crawl

The troubles in the economy come closer and closer to home. Via TechCrunch: "Tech Layoffs Surge Past 100,000" - but hey, at least you're not a journalist or auto worker - because if you were - it would be your fault right? (without context - that sarcasm wouldn't make any sense - I don't mean that AT ALL - but some pundits seem to think that's the God's honest truth). The economy is hurting everyone across the board far and wide. In an age where information flows as freely as air - this crash wasn't avoided and solutions are not forthcoming from our common conversation.

Then again, we can just blame it all on the invisible hand of the economy, right?

Blame it on changing technology, blame it on the journalists, blame it on shortsighted management, blame it on missing that oncoming glacier, blame it on the economy (everyone is WAY to concerned with throwing stones right now if you ask me) everyone is feeling pain right now and many institutions people rely on are being shook.

NPR: NPR Cuts Jobs, Cancels Programs.

I shared this previously, but it is worth a repost (many reposts), via Jay Rosen (as does title!). I'd say my entire career has been formed by this effect one way or another. And I am thankful.

When we think about the problems we face today, here is how the Internet provides a participatory platform to help. There's nothing in here that refutes human nature - it just celebrates an important facet of it: When we gather around communities of interest we care deeply about - we look out for others within that community of interest. The Internet changes the stage for which we can connect across those passions.

YouTube: Cay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:

Here is another must read from long ago. So much is still perfectly relevant to today. Tim O'Reilly: 1995: Publishing Models for Internet Commerce:

We've based our work in these two areas on two distinct but overlapping observations about publishing:

1. On the net, "Information is plentiful. Trust and attention are
scarce." (David Liddel) The development of brand identity is a
critical part of publishing success in what you might call
"commodity information businesses" where no one has a lock on
proprietary content.

2. A reference work is essentially a "user interface" to a body
information. What does that interface look like online? How can
a publisher who specializes in making sense out of complex
topics do it better on the net?

In an information glut, it is not content but context that is king. Someone chooses the New York Times over the New York Post not because of any kind of proprietary lock on content (though to be sure there is a role for scoops and special features) but rather because it has developed an editorial point of view that appeals to a particular class of reader. In a similar way, there is an enormous role for the establishment of "information brands" on the net--publications that have established relationships of trust with particular audiences.

...The actual content is valuable--but far more valuable is the relationship with the people who like the same kinds of things we like.

This relationship runs all through publishing--and not just magazine publishing. Publishing marketing is always affinity marketing:

"If you liked Steven King's last novel, you'll like this one even better." "If you like Steven King, you'll like Peter Straub." "If you like Steven King, you'll like these other books from the same publisher."

...In the old model, the information product is a container. In the new model, it is a core. One bounds a body of content, the other centers it.

...I believe that there's a tremendous market for those in the publishing business to turn their experience in making sense of complex bodies of information to this new world of online information publishing.

...In many ways, selectivity is the inevitable "other face" of universal distribution. When you can get anything you want, how do you select what you want? At the end of the day, while a consumer can walk into a bookstore and order any book in print, he or she typically browses through a much smaller selection offered by the bookseller. In fact, one of the key grounds on which a bookseller competes (other than location) is the nature of the selection that it offers.

And information has a funny characteristic. Up to a certain point, more choice is better. Then the situation flips. The user gets overwhelmed, and less is more. Publishing shows us the role not of the gatekeeper (who allows only certain content to be published), but of the adviser, whether that adviser is a trusted columnist or reviewer in a newspaper, or a trusted clerk at the local bookseller.

Understanding this role will be important to the future of commercial online services.

...The net isn't 30 million people, it's tens of thousands of overlapping groups ranging from a few people to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand at the largest. As I told one large publisher trying to figure out what to do about the Internet: "Yes, there is a billion dollar opportunity here. But you're going to find it a few million at a time."

Think niche. It's the net's greatest strength.

Look for opportunities to reinforce the fundamentals of the Internet--participation, access, communication.

Read the whole piece.

Christopher Anderson, after noting the conversation that Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer are having on the future of news reporting, and after outlining how a specific story was produced at the Philadelphia Daily News, lays down a interesting challenge to Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer.

"A New Media Tells Different Stories" by Bruno Giussani April, 1997:

There are also many other ramifications that the new journalist will have to take into consideration while handling information and exploiting the different tools.

quote First, the behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search. The first group is satisfied which just seeing what's there - they seek pleasure and surprise. The second group is looking for specific information - their priorities are easy and rapid access, and accuracy.

Second, geography is no longer an issue. Because of the Internet global reach, geographical audiences and ethnic audiences can overlap (for instance, Swiss readers living in the United States access our magazine online) as well as thematic audiences (say, worldwide car racing fans hooking up to an Indianapolis newspaper).

Thirdly, the development of the many different types of intelligent agents will double the human public in all of its diversity by becoming an artificial public. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots: software which behaves according to their owners' desires.

Forth, we will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.

Fifth, we will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques. The first name that comes to mind is, of course, Microsoft, a software company which has recently rolled out a magazine (Slate), launched a TV/Web station (MSNBC), and started projects for local Web guides (Sidewalk). But there are thousands more doing the same, becoming news publishers all the while being car manufacturers or phone companies.

Finally, and it's an essential point, we are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today - the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard. The digital revolution is giving birth to multiple new forms of devices bringing together the quality of television images, the communication power of telephones, the memory and speed of computers, the selection and ease of use of newspapers. They are spreading out in different shapes and forms and locations: cellular phones with e-mail capability, network computers, videotext, electronic paper, digital wallets, voice recognition, audiotex, pagers, beep-watches, and so on. The future will allow us to access worldwide information, in many different forms, adapted to needs and places

Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry - that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?:

So why oh why don't we have a better press corps?

Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they're being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.

This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you've purchased newspaper stock, then you're a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.

Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper -- even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market -- is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It's safe, but humble.

Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That's what's happening right now with newspapers.

Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:

Raise your hands: Who's got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?

That's what I thought.

Here's the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?

Dave Rogers: Blind Faith:

As the stock market continues its free fall into the Clinton era, and the economic news grows worse and worse, we are cheered by the report of a study that indicates that "Teenagers' Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing." Of course, irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, that little online headline was placed immediately across from this one: "Woman Who Posed as Boy Testifies in Case That Ended in Suicide of 13-Year-Old."

John Scalzi: Technology Changes, People Not So Much:

Technology changes, social trends change, hairstyles change, but people - the actual human animals inside all that technology, sociology and tonsorial grooming -- are the same as they have been for thousands of years. Grab a time machine, go back to ancient Egypt, and swap an infant there with an infant from today, and in twenty years you'll likely find two people perfectly well integrated into their cultures because there is no difference in the human animal between now and then. Even within generations (which are an artificial construct in themselves, but never mind that now) there's enough variation to drive you a little batty: The same generation that gave us the hippies went for Nixon in 1972, and that same generation gave us both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Go figure.

Jon Udell: Carl Hewitt on cloud computing, scalable semantics, and Wikipedia:

In one of the most striking moments in that talk, Carl says:

"What can I change? Just me. For anything else, I send a message, I say please, and I hope for the best."

Then he laughs and adds:

"Does this sound like some circumstances you are familiar with?"

Having thought deeply, for 40 years, about the intersection of computation and human affairs, he has arrived at an elegant synthesis: The same organizational and communication patterns govern both realms.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Cognitive Science:

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.

No one is above criticism, but the knock Jeff Jarvis took from Slate from Ron Rosenbaum missed the mark badly. It attempted to paint Jarvis as just another new media guru in pursuit of a buck it at the expense of others. Jarvis responded here. Many of Jeff Jarvis's ideas are very much up for debate - I don't think journalists are anywhere near as responsible over what's happening as much as he does (shortsighted publishers, corporations, management, business and technology changes are *far* more to blame (read "The Innovator's Dilema" - NOW)) and his tone can be brutal in the face of so much pain (so many jobs lost, so many families thrown into upheaval), but he's willing to debate his ideas and seek out those of others. The author went personal and attempted to de-legitimize ongoing efforts that Jarvis has been leading that are important to journalism, like the recent conference on the future of news at CUNY or hosting so much relevant conversation on his blog. It's a shame because argument is needed to address where we were, where we are going, what the consequences are. Blunt, honest talk. The Slate piece was a distraction from that.

Related:

Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?

Nick Denton: A 2009 Internet Media Plan

Wired: Poll: Internet, Fox News Are Most Trusted News Sources

Silicon Alley Insider: Record Traffic Not Saving Financial News Sites

Metafilter: Can nonprofit news models save journalism?

norgs - the unconference

the norgs must read list

Jeff Jarvis: Saving Journalism (and killing the press)

And, because this vid is so fit for the Daily Show, I just have to share it (vegetarians - do NOT click this):

"Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works." - Ad Savvy on Philip Zimbardo, whose talk at TED explains how ordinary people can become monsters.

TED: Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes

Scott McNulty, Philly blogger, food blogger, Apple tech blogger, longtime (now former) organizer of the Philly Blogger meetup, longtime contributor to Philly Future, and good friend, has had a book published on Wordpress and blogging best practices.

Buy it here at Amazon.com.

Howard Hall, likewise a long time contributor to Philly Future, friend, writer and poet, had a book of poetry published.

Get it here at Amazon.com.

(I feel like building a widget to highlight Howard Hall haikus - hmmmm... )

WashingtonPost: Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

Jeff Jarvis: The perils of publicness

The Atlantic: He Saw It Coming: The forgotten filmmaker who anticipated our modern media madness:

...the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant manipulation and counter­manipulation of the modern media, the push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that self-conscious "objectivity" and truth-telling are very different things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins, like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.

Furious Seasons: FDA Panel Slams Antipsychotic Use In Kids, Teens

NYTimes: What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?:

At least we know one thing: it's possible to have about the same number of men and women in computer science classes. That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.

Malcom Gladwell's new book is getting trashed by some rather big name bloggers. Me thinks they doth protest too much because - for once - one of his books runs counter to Web's domineering libertarian culture. If you've read "Blink", read "Tipping Point" - what I consider a far better book and more applicable to the Web. His new one, named "Outliers" looks like a must read.

To Watch: "Strive For Happiness" - a documentary about sensitive subject matter - what the lives are like for those in families with loved ones dealing with mental illness.

A question to think about - will Britney Spears's struggle with mental illness make it easier to talk about it?

David Cohn, contributor at Columbia Journalism Review, Seed Magazine and Wired has been exploring the future of journalism for a long time now, notably on his blog, at NewAssignment.net and NewsTrust.net.

His latest effort, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is Spot.us - a service founded on the principal that journalism is a process and not a product.

It's an interesting effort. It joins other non-profit journalism resources such as NPR and ProPublica in working to solve the funding question that has been consuming those who want to see journalism flourish as business models and technologies shift. In this particular solution - it is YOU who determines what stories you fund directly.

Commentary by Dan Gillmor: Spot.us Launches

Commentary by Beth Kanter: Spot.Us: Community Funded Reporting

By Digidave himself on his blog: Launching The Spot.Us Ship: Community Funded Reporting

And introducing the service at vimeo: Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting Intro:
Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.

And yes, this is me riffing off of a great conversation that was held by Aaron and Arpit at BarCampPhilly.

New site design! I finally got around to upgrading my templates to the latest and greatest in Movable Type.

My RSS feed has relocated to http://www.paradox1x.org/atom.xml. Please re-subscribe there.

This led to me changing my URL design significantly. Previously, I had used entry_id as each post's slug value, which wasn't optimal, SEO-wise, or for file system management (having over a thousand files in a directory is rarely a good idea), so URLs are now based upon post titles, as is the default of most MT sites. This forced me to find a means to redirect the old pages. A .htaccess file with 2500 entries didn't sound like a good idea. Instead, using a .htaccess file in the old design's weblog/kmartino/archive directory, I mapped .shtml to PHP. I then modified the templates of the old design to output some PHP that wrote the appropriate response header to do 301 redirects to the new URL each page would reside in. Seems to work well.

I like the default MT look and feel for now. I'll tweak latter to re-add some things I miss from the old design later, plus add some new sugar like pagination in my monthly and category archives.

As part of their Women In Tech series, Blogher's Virginia DeBolt interviews Shelley Powers. It's a terrific interview. Check it out.

Gabor Cselle: "The Future of Email" Talk in Sydney

Identity Management Manifesto: via robert_francis

Burningbird: This Week's Semantic Web, Burningbird style

Waxy.org: Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey

slacktivist: They need help: Information -- facts, reality, the rebuttal and debunking of lies -- is one kind of help that the captives of unreality need. That information is necessary, but not sufficient, for those who have chosen their own captivity. What else is necessary, and what might be sufficient to help them choose not to make that choice, is something I want to continue exploring.

Planet RDF

Penny Arcade! posted a comic that summarizes what many think of online anonymity and the Internet: John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Up until the past few weeks, I would have agreed. But now I am starting to adopt a more nuanced view.

I don't want to get into what has triggered the change of heart, and no - I am not anonymously blogging - my name lends credibility that I am not willing to trade. However, I have come to realize there are those who need to be able to speak out, and without anonymity cannot do so.

It's confusing subject matter, so here are a few links of various viewpoints:

CNet: U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity

Business Week: Busting a Rogue Blogger: Troll Tracker has been unmasked as a patent lawyer for Cisco. Now they're both facing litigation

SSRN: Anonymous Blogging and Defamation: Balancing Interests of the Internet: It is important not to silence communication on the Internet, but it is just as important not to silence victims of defamation. Therefore, this comment argues for the protection of libel plaintiffs facing defamatory comments from anonymous bloggers.

Media Bloggers Association: Announces Libel Insurance For Bloggers - huge news for those who intend to pursue acts of journalism independently.

Must See Video: Hope2604 - Steve Rambam Pt 1 - Privacy Is Dead - Get Over It

Must See Video: Hope2604 - Steve Rambam Pt 2 - Privacy Is Dead - Get Over It

Wired.com: 'Anonymous' Member Unmasked, Charged With Web Attack on Scientology

Bruce Schneier: Essays and Op Eds

Time Berners-Lee's new World Wide Web Foundation

Global Voices Online: Global Voices Advocacy: A project of Global Voices Online, we seek to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

Reporters Without Borders

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Risks Digest

Slashdot: Your Rights Online

Metafilter: If information is power, then access is empowering

NYTimes: Overfeeding on Information

NYtimes: Spinning a Web of Lies at Digital Speed

NYTimes: The Rise of the Machines

Andrew Sullivan: Why I Blog

Reason.com: Every Man a Derrida

Rough Type: Googling and intelligence

Techdirt: Is Web 2.0 About Exploitation Or Empowerment?

Tech Crunch: Big Blogger Pay Cuts At b5Media

Valleywag: Valleywag cuts 60 percent of staff

Gawker: Friday Is Always Black

Hopes and prayers for all those affected.

Check out the new version of Google's Blog Search. I'm looking forward to seeing what this evolves into. About time there was some new competition in this space.

Other meme-trackers I visit all too often:

Memeorandum.com

Blogrunner

Technorati

Megite

Links on a theme in today's roundup.

Union Square Ventures: Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed:

. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Jeremiah Owyang (of Forrester Research): Why 'Friending' Will Be Obsolete:

Like a baby, we're teaching the 'system' our language, how to walk, how to coexist in our real flesh and blood world, the 'system' is just starting to show intelligence. One primary example of this is the use of hashtags in Twitter. We use the # sign to tag content so it's easily to organize and find. That one # character isn't native to our tongue (unless when you recite your grocery list and say "hashtag") it's another example of us speaking machine language in order to teach the system.

For example, I started a social experiment on Sunday, where I encouraged folks to tweet related music artists using the tag "#relatedmusic" you can see the database form when you search for that term -If we had enough people do this in my -and your- network we'd be able to build a reference engine that other music reccomendations services could pull from.

Search Engine Land: Danny Sullivan: The Google Hive Mind:

As Google turns 10 years old, that important birthday sees the company more powerful than ever before. With its competitors in disarray, the Big G seems likely to grow even further. The secret to its success? For me, it's what I've been calling the "Google Hive Mind. " Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company's direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they'll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do.

Phil Windley's Technometria: Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?:

One of Alan's undergraduate degrees is in molecular biology. He can't understand it anymore despite having tried to review new developments every few years. That's not true in computer science. The basics are still mostly the same. If you go to most campuses, there is a single computer science department and the first course in computer science is almost indistinguishable from the first course in 1960. They're about data structures and algorithms despite the fact that almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms.

The Internet is like the human body. It's replaced all of its atoms and bits at least twice since it started even though the Internet has never stopped working. Attacks on the 'Net aren't really attacks on the 'Net, they're attacks on machines on the 'Net. Very few software systems, maybe none, are built in ways that sustain operation in spite of being continually rebuilt and continually growing.

That's what John Baichtal at his Wired Blog "Geek Dad" called Cory Doctorow's book sci-fi novel "Little Brother", in his glowing review posted last week.

While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I'm going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf - it's a great book so far.

One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series "Futuristic Tales" from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.

Media Bloggers Association is offering to its members a plan for libel insurance.

Bottom line: it's a big deal.

Read more at Dan Gillmor's and Seth Finkelstein's.

Check out Kevin's thoughts on making RSS easier.

Ben Kenobi, when he told Luke, "the truths we cling to are greatly determined by our point of view", is looking pretty good right now.

And as Google is apt to promote the democratization of data rolls on.

As a software engineer and as a person with an interest in sociology and communications, it's clear this presents a set of opportunities to be explored, problems to be solved. How do we learn of 'truth' when our echo chambers (our social networks, our friends, family, co-workers) are the best tools to keep us from the noise of modern media?

In a presentation at TED.com, Jonathan Haidt explains why Tim Berners-Lee's new foundation is both timely and has such a hard fight ahead. The presentation reinforces that the questions I've been asking in some latest posts aren't that invalid, and there is something more here to explore.

Shout out to Shelley Powers for posting about this (even if so few seem wanting to discuss) and to Antonella Pavese for the heads up on the video.

TED.com: Jonathan Haidt: The real difference between liberals and conservatives:

There are big echos of Dave Rogers in that presentation.

Bottom line - if we want to change the world, we need to start with ourselves.

Related and new at Salon today: Robert Burton: "My candidate, myself": "Even when faced with new facts and insights, most voters don't change their minds about their favorite candidates. A neurologist explains how they might.". Timely.

Tim O'Reilly is sounding the alarm - CNet.com: O'Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy:

"(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways," O'Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. "And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call 'Web 2.0,' the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I'm not talking about an investment bubble. (It's) a reality bubble."

Lefsetz connects other media industries to the music industry - Lefsetz Letter: Denial:

Is this getting familiar yet? Does this sound like the record business?

What we're going through in America replicates what happened in Japan in the 1990s. But rather than taking the bullet, eating the loss, the government continued to try to prop up the country's financial system, to its detriment. It took almost a decade for it to revive. Every analyst says this was a mistake. They should have taken the hit immediately and started over.

The major labels refuse to believe we're living in the twenty first century, they refuse to bite the bullet and get with the program, they want to continue to live in the glory days of the 1990's. Isn't that what Warner's failed Estelle effort was about? Getting people to buy an overpriced CD to get the one good track? As they said in that old 1990's TV show, homey don't play that no more.

The labels have to confront reality, and bite the bullet now.

Dare explains why what bit Sarah Palin - a typical 'forgot your password' function - bit Sarah Palin - Dare Obasanjo: The Problem with Every Implementation of a "Forgot Your Password?" Feature I've Seen Online:

The fundamental flaw of pretty much every password recovery feature I've found online is that what they consider "secret" information actually isn't thanks to social networking, blogs and even Wikipedia. Yahoo! Mail password recovery relies on asking you your date of birth, zip code and country of residence as a proof of identity. Considering that this is the kind of information that is on the average Facebook profile or MySpace page, it seems ludicrous that this is all that stops someone from stealing your identity online.

Lots of people scratched their heads at Google Chrome. Dare explains why Google would pursue it - Dare Obasanjo: The Significance of Google Chrome:

his boils down to the corporate ideology that "anything that is good for the Web is good for Google". This means Google is in favor of anything that increases the breadth of the Web which explains why it is investing in O3b networks in an effort intended to bring the Web to 3 billion people in emerging markets. The more people there are using the Web, the more people there are viewing ads on Google's services and on pages of sites that use AdSense and DoubleClick ads. This also means that Google is in favor of moving as much media consumption as possible to the Web. This explains why purchasing YouTube was so important.

Congrats to Livia Labate on being voted for the IA Institute Board of Directors.

Kevin Fitzpatrick posted some good advice: Don't hide your ideas.

Anandhan Subbiah, my manager at CIM, redesigned his blog.

And I was Burningbird-ed in reference to a post about Tim Berners-Lee's new foundation initiative. The tech community seems not engaged.

The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.

arstechnica.com: WWW creator Berners-Lee launches ambitious Web Foundation

BBC.com: Warning sounded on web's future

The Register: Berners-Lee backs web truthiness labelling scheme

Wow. Talk about timing!

Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?

Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on 'truth' be the prevailing 'truth' as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).

Marc Ambinder: What We Learned This Weekend:

The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It's all a struggle for power.

ScienceBlogs.com: Cognitive Dissonance And Politics:

...dissonant facts made them double-down. It would be too painful to be wrong, and so they convinced themselves that they were right.

USNews: The Campaign, "The Matrix," and the GOP Offensive Against Truth:

Among historians, there's a raging Great Debate about the question of Truth.

Wall Street Journal: The Triumph of Culture Over Politics:

For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like "politics," "spectacle" and "entertainment" barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack Obama:

In my book "True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society", published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"--the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio--lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then 'truth' is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.

I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual 'truth'.

Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common 'truth' ?

YouTube: Stephen Colbert on The O'Reilly Factor

Google Video: Colbert Roasts President Bush - 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner

What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we've come to a core reason why computer programming is so... flawed - that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?

And if it seems odd that I am making connections between tech, media and politics, well Dave Winer posted yesterday "People thought I stopped writing about technology but the technology and politics are all one and the same.".

I'm just asking questions here, I have no answers. And probably need to drink less coffee in the morning.

I like what I see at Stack Overflow so far. Growing an online community of any sort can be tricky, but this collaboration engine looks smart. Additional info at Joel Spolksy's. Hmmm... I might post a Java, Emacs, or Python question shortly to give it a whirl.

For coworkers (you know who you are...):

Jeff Atwood says, It's Clay Shirky's Internet, We Just Live In It

Hugh Macleod says there is only Clay Shirky's Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.

Ted: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration:

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.

Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Power Laws, Weblogs, , and Inequality

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Shirky, to me, is noteworthy for his balanced views on the Web and its applications to and effects from society.

Far more here.

YouTube: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:

The news in the newspaper media and creeping on to TV news as 'breaking' (this was building for a while), is what sounds like real trouble in the investor markets.

If you were an average 401k investor, what should you do to try and save your retirement money?

My instinct, since I am not retiring any time soon, since I have a fixed rate mortgage and manage my debt responsibly, is to stand pat. But I wonder if that is the right path if you are about to retire? Or if you rely on your investment income.

Don't look to the policial blogosphere either. They were too busy talking about 'lipstick on a pig' and 'ominious photos' to have discussed this. There are financial centered blogs - but as with all media - we subscribe to what fits our communities of interest. Hopefully you were subscribed to a good finance blogger. Not me. Wish I was.

Shout out to Metafilter, while a general interest link community, there have been a few discussions over the years indicating issues in the economy leading to today.

Update 7:01AM: Bloomberg TV just called it "the biggest financial shakeup since the Great Depression".

Anyways, here we go.

Boing Boing: "America's financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday."

Wall Street Journal: Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters,
Merrill Is Sold, AIG Seeks to Raise Cash

NYTimes: 5 Days of Pressure, Fear and Ultimately, Failure

NYTimes: Bids to Halt Crisis Reshape Wall St. Landscape

Metafilter: Brokergeddon.

Interesting Economy Blogs:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

The Simple Dollar

Get Rich Slowly

self-evident.org

nacked captialism

Angry Bear

Know more? Especially those that have advice to handle this economic situation that is occurring?

Hey, I was Suburban Guerrilla-ed :) Now back to the subject at hand...

FiveThirtyEight and Electoral-vote.com.

Meanwhile, truth is finally starting to trickle out of the newspaper press.

WashingtonPost: As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood

NYTimes: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

But will the much more influential TV newscasts follow suit or keep the 'controversy of the day' story-lines that are to blame for turning so many folks off and away from voting (I know a number of folks who have grown disgusted these past few weeks and are not voting now - great work national newscasts).

David Weinberger on Echo Chambers: Echo chambers: The meme that will not die:

erhaps the persistence of the question is due to our shock at being shown who we really are. When all you can see of yourself is what the sanitized mass media show you and what you can see around you in your physical environs, the differences the Net makes visible unsettle us profoundly.

Sounds like some in the tech community are starting to wake up.

The Web is not built on love. It is a reflection of humanity. That is a vital difference.

The conversation at Doc Searls had a few folks circling in on some interesting conclusions about framing and what I call 'attention influence'.

My friend Daniel Rubin, at the Inquirer thinks this is due to 'stupid media tricks'. I hope he is including all of social media and bloggerdom in his definition of media. Memeorandum pretty much reveals that any media where controlling attention matters is subject to get involved in 'lipstick on a pig' activity. We're in this together. It really is 'We the Media'.

BBC News: Saudi judge condemns 'immoral TV': The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.

What's your reaction to Sarah Palin's performance in her interview with Dave Gibson last night? If you were a conservative, it most likely was positive. If you were liberal, most likely negative.

How can I confirm such a crazy statement? How can there be two opposing opinions of the same event? Two different takes on the 'truth' of it?

Go to memeorandum and follow the discussion on blogs that match your political view point and follow the discussion on blogs that don't.

Or switch between CNN and Fox News if you want a massively bad head ache.

Witness reality torn asunder.

Back in 1997 Dave Winer wrote a piece about programming that helped solidify how I felt about my career choice - he summed it up as a pursuit of truth: Programmers:

Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can't lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That's all there is! I think programming is deep, it teaches us about the non-cyber universe we live in. There's something spiritual about computers, and I want to understand it.

...When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed. I've seen this happen many times, a programmer languishes for months, chipping at the edges of a problem. Then all of a sudden, a breakthrough happens, the pieces start fitting together. A few months later the software works, and you go forward.

When I look at memorandum each day and click away from the warm confines of blogs that share my political view, I am confronted with the the fact that truth is greatly determined by our point of view.

Thank you Obi-wan Kenobi, you bastard.

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President is both interpreted as a disaster by liberals and as an inspired move by conservatives.

But one thing is for sure, the move has dominated our attention and driven us a way from weightier topics like the economy and moves taking place across the world, with light weight controversies and indignities (kinda like Britney Spears news does every once and a while).

On this point, two folks I read daily for their points of view (usually opposing), greatly agree:

Doc Searls: Framing wins:

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.

Groundhog Day: Competing Messages: Attention Deficit Nation:

...as I watched the media coverage around the announcement, and that of the self-important, self-aggrandizing "blogosphere," it became clear, to me anyway, just what this was about.

While this is at least partially about winning attention for McCain's candidacy, some of it even negative attention, it is mostly about taking attention away from Obama's campaign. And, in that regard, it's been a brilliant tactical move. Whether it will be enough to swing the election his way remains to be seen.

Obama at the bottom of the FM dial. And so moved are the policies and important events of the world taking place, while we are dazzled and spun every which way.

Jay Rosen outlined the strategy, in a piece posted on September 3rd, that was prescient: The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option:

John McCain's convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the "angry left," Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago '68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.

At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.

It's not like much of the press isn't reporting on the lies and mischaracterizations spewing from McCain/Palin. Witness WashingtonPost.com on the 9th: As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They're Undone:

From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin declared that she had opposed the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," critics, the news media and nonpartisan fact checkers have called it a fabrication or, at best, a half-truth. But yesterday in Lebanon, Ohio, and again in Lancaster, Pa., she crossed that bridge again.

Wired.com on the 10th: FactCheck.org Finds That McCain's 'Facts' Don't Check Out

Fact is the media, mass and independent, are being played like marionettes in a game to control your attention and keep Obama, policies, or real impacting events like the economy, from the public discourse.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon did a good job of tracking one of the latest false controversies - the 'lipstick on a pig' quote that was taken out of context. He mistakenly attributes the mass media as being the first on the story when Memeorandum was spreading the meme a day before it broke across the country: New heights of stupidity:

It isn't surprising that the McCain campaign wants this sort of tawdry, Freak Show/Reality Show vapidity to determine the outcome of the election. If you were them, wouldn't you want that, too? And though it's not news that establishment media outlets are so easily and happily manipulated by these tactics, tactics which enable them to cover "stories" which their empty-headed reporters can easily comprehend, it is still striking to watch the now-decades-old process unfold and observe how absolutely nothing has changed.

It makes you wonder if 'truth' really matters anymore. Marc Fisher at Washington Post goes so far as to wonder if the Boomer ingrained distrust of authority has morphed into something far more ominous: For Working Moms, 'Flawed' Palin Is the Perfect Choice:

In this hyperdemocratized society, the national conviction that anyone can succeed is morphing into a belief that experience and knowledge may almost be disqualifying credentials.

Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin's lack of experience as an asset. "I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent," said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. "And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things."

This is where culture wars, identity politics and self-suffocating academic theories of deconstructionism have led us: Authority is suspect. Experience is corrupting. Ignorance is strength?

Next will be "war is peace." Or have we already heard that one?

Shades of Nick Carr there huh?

Boing Boing posted about a book that might be the most important must-read of the year (I'm buying this today): True Enough: the science, history and economics of self-deception:

Manjoo makes a good case. He walks through a number of net-based conspiracy theories on both sides of the political spectrum, speaks with their adherents, the experts who claim it's all bogus, and then to cognitive scientists and other scientists who explain the gigantic gap between what is so obvious to non-partisans and what is blindingly, passionately important to the adherents.

Grounded in history and science, True Enough paints a dismal picture of a species with a limitless capacity for self-deception and selective reasoning. But Manjoo doesn't ascribe the rise of truthiness to fragmented media alone: he calls out PR firms, media outlets and others who have profited from the erosion of the truth.

Here's a link: Amazon.com: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Hardcover)

So what to do?

As a programmer with a drive to find and share 'truth' I have no idea whatsoever. To me, 2+2 will always equal 4. Trusting a sound bite is like criticizing a system's infrastructure without recognizing the context it was built in. I don't give a damn what a politician says on the matter. We should all be looking for the big balls of mud that provide us with truth.

But slacktivist has an idea (which I don't agree with) and that is to fight fire with fire - witness his latest post - John McCain, Friend of NAMBLA.

And a reminder - beware the October surprise: NYTimes.com: Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan. It's about time we close the deal, but why did it take seven years?

Add to /private/etc/hosts on OSX:

64.233.169.99	memeorandum.com
64.233.169.99	www.memeorandum.com
64.233.169.99	drudgereport.com
64.233.169.99	www.drudgereport.com
64.233.169.99	popurls.com
64.233.169.99	www.popurls.com
64.233.169.99	originalsignal.com
64.233.169.99 www.originalsignal.com
64.233.169.99	www.digg.com
64.233.169.99	digg.com

NYTimes: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy: About social networks and software and how we are using them to connect with one another.

Mind Hacks: The distant sound of well-armed sociologists - Reflections on the above mentioned NYTimes story.

wordle.net - generates graphical 'word clouds' from the text provided.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper sales fall record $3B in 6 mos.

NPR.org: An Uneasy America: 'Why We Hate Us':

The Reality Club: A coversation On "Is Google Making Us Stoopid".

J-School: Philly.com's Convention Coverage and the Ethic of the Link

J-School: The Future of Journalism

Annenberg's FactCheck.org: is doing a great job fact checking our candidates. Anyone listening?

SciAm.com: The Political Brain - Brain-imaging study shows political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias. How we see reality is biased towards our own currently held beliefs.

It's been an interesting week and a half in American politics, but today, the Web is going to take a special role, the blogosphere in particular, and in an a real ugly way.

There are pictures floating around of some MySpace pages, with titles and comments that are easily misunderstood not given appropriate context.

And based upon our biases we will automatically believe what we want to believe about them.

While we all take special delight in exposing hypocrisy, as we should as it reveals much about character, sometimes things go way, way too far. And I have a feeling this is about to.

We're all flawed human beings and the sooner we each recognize that, and be understanding towards that, the better this world will be. From all sides of the political isle.

I think Obama's speech last week was a bit of an inspiration. And this is an expression of that.

Now here's a great way to introduce a new software project - to illustrate it as a comic book!

Scott McCloud illustrates for the world Google Chrome - Google's browser project.

More details at Google Blogoscoped and Dare Obasano's.

There's a theme going on here that is a bit hard to place... but it's there.

Jon Udell: Homophily, anti-recommendation, and Driveway Moments , shout out to Global Voices Online:

Recommendation systems don't help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I've shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven't yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.

Crooked Timber: Blogs, Participation and Polarization:

So whether you like political blogs will depend to some extent on whether you prefer deliberation across party lines to participation, or vice versa. Personally (at least as regards political efficacy in the current era), I'm on the vice versa side, but we leave this question deliberately open, as people from different perspectives may disagree &c &c.

NYTimes: via rc3.org: Undecideds More Decided Than They Think, Study Says:

Voters who insist that they are undecided about a contentious issue are sometimes fooling themselves, having already made a choice at a subconscious level, a new study suggests.

Wired: Presidential Election Already Decided ... in Voters' Minds:

The electorate has already made up its collective mind who it will vote for in November. Even many of those all-important and highly coveted undecided voters aren't really undecided.

They may think they are carefully weighing their choices, but their decision is rigged in advance by their subconscious minds, say psychologists, and they just aren't aware of it.

CJR: Echo Chamber: How blogging failed the war in Georgia:

There are, of course, many others. The point is not that some blogs covered the conflict well, and fulfilled the promise of a blog network that transcends the spin and amplifies ignored voices: it is that the majority of blogs did not. Watching the most prominent blogs turn into their own worst enemies largely deflates much of their egalitarian mystique--and drives home just how important it is to remain a skeptical reader.

Slate: What's Really Killing Newspapers: Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition.

Corante: Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2):

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about 'data smog'.

Bubblegeneration: Data is a Commodity, or How Not to Revolutionize...:

This is an old question. We discussed it at USV Sessions two years ago - I think it was phrased, "What's the value of data in an open world". And even then, little insight was generated.

It's the wrong question. Data isn't the valuable.

In fact, data's a commodity. We're drowning in data.

Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is - because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.

What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.

Chicago Tribune interviews Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock.com and Django: Cyberstar.

Current issue of Scientific American deals with privacy and identity: How I Stole Someone's Identity, Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World o Wiretapping, Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles, Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?, Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe.

And Apple bans a... comic book.

"You're No One If You're Not On Twitter"

WashingtonPost.com: Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere:

The strategy part is important because a blog may not work for every business. Before starting one, companies have to "make sure that the blog fits in with the existing culture of the company," said Walter J. Carl, a professor of communications at Northeastern University who has studied corporate blogging. He says a blog is a "really bad idea" for companies that are secretive or tend toward non-disclosure.

Mark Glaser asked his audience to imagine "a Future Tense for Newspapers", back in February 2007, inspired by a post by Jeff Jarvis. Among many great responses, I added my own two bits:

The way it is:: Newspapers judge readership size/demographics via subscription numbers and use these numbers to make themselves attractive to classified advertisers

The way it will be: A combination of metrics that combine traffic with online relationships/connectivity statistics will become the new way news sites make themselves attractive to advertisers.

The way it is: Newspapers finance the cost of in-depth journalism via the selling of classifieds.

The way it will be: I have no idea.

This is a problem because newspapers provide the financial, legal, organizational and attention driving infrastructure that acts of journalism largely require.

To lend credence to how much this is a problem, consider the results of Pew's News IQ Quiz (take it - I dare you - it is short and fun!). Do you think a community so ill-informed can drive its government effectively? Try driving with one eye closed (no don't do that!).

And it is getting worst.

But hey, don't listen to me, listen to Google's Eric Schmidt:

Newspaper demand has never been higher. The problem is revenues have never been lower. So people are reading the newspaper they're just not reading it in a way where the newspapers can make money on it. This is a shared problem. We have to solve it. There's no obviously good solution right now."

As indicated by Bethany Anderson in a conversation Leonard Witt:

strictly speaking, the American public does not pay for its journalism - nor has it ever, really.

Advertising and Classifieds subsidized journalism as a side-effect - not directly.

So I tend to disagree with Leonard Witt when he says that "if advertising and journalism are forever linked, we will not have a problem."

Advertising never directly paid for journalism. Acts of journalism bolstered the reputations and influence of newspapers, that drew demographics, that advertisers wanted to reach. It was the audience that advertisers were paying for.

Attention driving influence is flowing elsewhere now. Like Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter now).

Read Jack Shafer in "What's Really Killing Newspapers":

You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide. As falling circulation indicates, fewer do. And the newspaper isn't the only media hub suffering in the new era. Radio, which once served a similar social role with its menu of music, news, and talk, is plummeting.

One of the more interesting research exercises in all this is examining how we got here.

Christopher Anderson is doing a terrific job of that working on his dissertation, "Networking the News: Work, Knowledge and Occupational Authority in the New Metropolitan Journalism" in the Philadelphia area.

His latest posts (from oldest to newest) "Paying For Reporting, Paying For Conversation ... a Thought Experiment.", "Adding Nuance to the Journalist / Blogger Relationship", "Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: By the Numbers", "Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: Beyond the Numbers" are must reads.

I say this as a former employee of Philadelphia Newspapers and Knight Ridder.

So if you are interested in the topic, and want to read the thoughts of a non-insider who is doing considerable research in the trenches, go forth and read.

Paul Stamatiou: How To: Live the Cloud Life.

A must read: Dare Obasanjo: Explaining REST to Damien Katz:

There are other practical things to be mindful of as well to ensure that your service is being a good participant in the Web ecosystem. These include using GET instead of POST when retrieving a resource and properly utilizing the caching related headers as needed (If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified, If-None-Match/ETag, Cache-Control), learning to utilize HTTP status codes correctly (i.e. errors shouldn't return HTTP 200 OK), keeping your design stateless to enable it to scale more cheaply and so on. The increased costs, scalability concerns and complexity that developers face when they ignore these principles is captured in blog posts and articles all over the Web such as Session State is Evil and Cache SOAP services on the client side. You don't have to look hard to find them. What most developers don't realize is that the problems they are facing are because they aren't keeping RESTful principles in mind.

NYTimes: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?:

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it's been "The Daily Show" that has tenaciously tracked big, "super depressing" issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the Comedy Central program -- which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh -- has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. "The Daily Show" resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart's frequent exclamation "Are you insane?!" seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-"Catch-22" reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace -- an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

Aaron Wall: Emotionally Engage or Enrage:

Market research, site structure, and on page optimization are important. Doing them well can double or triple the earnings of a site, but when you get into the big fields where people are deeply passionate or interested links are needed to win. And those links are often a reflection of our emotions.

When you look at your site do you find anything that is emotionally engaging? enraging?

As the web gets more efficient and search engines gather more data, those who evoke emotional responses will keep gaining marketshare while bland webmasters fall quietly into the abyss.

If you aren't linked to by others, you have no chance of being seen or heard.

Of course, there is a chicken and the egg here.

And as Aaron Wall suggests, it pushes us to post content that shouts out to be heard.

To protest the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a large portion of the Web had turned their site's background color black. Read about it on Wikipedia and read Howard Rheingold's thoughts on the historic day.

It's interesting to hink about the collective action that it represented and to think about that in today's context. I mean - Yahoo! turned its home page black!

Paris Hilton responded, via a video of her own, to John McCain's Celebrity advertisement.

How you see her video is completely based upon your pre-existing bias.

Want proof?

If you are liberal you see it as an endorsement of Obama's plan and as a smack down on McCain:

Open Left: Why Obama's Drilling Compromise Makes Some Sense

Talk Left: Paris Hilton Strikes Back

reddit: Paris Hilton Responds to the McCain Ad = McCain gets served.

If you are conservative, you see it as an endorsement of McCain's plan and as a smack down on Obama:

Althouse: Paris Hilton does a pro-McCain ad!

Hot Air: New third-party ad: Obama no longer the biggest celebrity in the race; Update: Her plan's better than Obama's, says McCain camp

Either Paris Hilton is a genius, or we are so wrapped up in our own points of view that we look for ANYTHING to reinforce it.

Maybe both is true. But that's a stretch right? Right?!?!?!

Beyond that, there is literally two takes on reality playing out over the video. And there are no links to opposing points of view - it is as if the opposing view point doesn't even exist.

I've taken on as organizer of the Philly Blogger Meetup and we will be gathering in one week at The Memphis Taproom. I'm looking forward to hanging out with fellow bloggers and sharing a few drinks.

This looks like a must read: The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age.

Two interesting chapters right off the bat:

Seth Finkelstein's concise description of PageRank and some of the interesting societal issues it raises: Google, Links, and Popularity versus Authority

David Weinberger's passionate arguments and assertions that links are good: The Morality of Links

louisgray.com: Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

Why does everything suck?: Does Anonymity Lead To Social Anarchy?

Sexism Runs Rampant on Reddit (and maybe the rest of the social web)

Wha, that last link threw you a bit? Why is that? Is it that we are more comfortable confronting racism then sexism? And has the Presidential campaign reflected that? Why?

How we go about fighting racism and sexism, while protecting free speech is confusing territory.

I figure the best way is by speaking out loudly, and clearly.

PS - Make a donation to the Thomas Jefferson Center for free speech in George Carlin's name.

Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.

What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?

NYTimes: Link by Link - Poof! You're Unpublished

Boing Boing on the matter.

Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.

There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this - but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don't wish to add to any of it.

However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking - note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don't point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don't.

As Rafe states - links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we've earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don't live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.

Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.

Related:

Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)

Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or... well.. see above)

I had a GED, was struggling with homelessness, and was a telemarketer at Sears Product Services selling maintenance agreements. But I had access to Compuserve, AOL, and Usenet via dialup accounts work and at home. For me, the Net was an important route to a new life - a career I love - software engineering.

You would think that I would be a techno-utopian. A true believer that the Web, the Net, will be a tool that will help lift humanity out of its troubles by helping us be better informed and connected.

And I was for a while there. But time and experience has tempered my enthusiasm with a recognition that human nature is a hell of a lot more robust then we give it credit for. That, as Dave Rogers might say (and has I think), that technology may change what we do, but not who we are.

Now, for me, recognizing that, doesn't eliminate my belief in the Web's potential to enrich our lives and be an instrument of tremendous positive change. But it does force me to ground it - the Web is a reflection of who and what we are, the good, the bad and the ugly. Whenever I recognize successful social software it reinforces this to to be true to me.

What brought about this round of reflection?

Author and blogger Nick Carr wrote a provocative cover article for this month's The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".

It's worth a read. It's over the top for sure. But maybe it needed to be so in order to draw attention to the fact that all is not as rosy with the Web's potential as we'd like to think.

This same discussion has cropped up again and again, only to be dismissed by not only the digerati, but the mainstream media.

An example, in the wake of the publishing of David Shenk's "Data Smog", back in 1997, a small discussion formed around similar concerns, that some branded as a movement called Technorealism. Read Newsweek's put down of the discussion - labeling it as not worthy to have. As "glorifying the obvious".

If it was so obvious, then why so much vehemence and venom in the face of it?

Related:

Kevin Kelly: Will We Let Google Make Us Smarter?

Andrew Sullivan: Google is giving us pond-skater minds

Rebecca Blood: Is the Internet making us stupid?

Burningbird's RealTech: Timing

Infothought: Nick Carr: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and Man vs. Machine

AKMA: Au Contraire

Publishing 2.0: What Magazines Still Don't Understand About The Web

Slate: David Shenk: Was I right about the dangers of the Internet in 1997?

NYTimes: Excerpt: Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

the cluetrain manifesto

Bryant Urstadt, in MIT Technology Review, challenges the conventional wisdom about Social Networking.

Shelley Powers is blogging about her latest book at Painting the Web, about all things society and tech at RealTech, on personal matters at Just Shelley, and about Missouri at MissouriGreen Her latest posts at MissouriGreen are covering the sandbagging efforts she has been taking part in and have been harrowing.

The news coverage of the weather and floods has been spotty at best. I'd like to urge folks to donate to the Red Cross (probably what Richelle and me will do this week) but I don't know if that's the best route to help for those of us so distant and disconnected.

Boing Boing: Death and Taxes, and a Boing Boing story

code_swarm

Advogato: Advogato: The Myth that Content Management is easy

Rajiv Pant (my old boss at KRD): Future of Content Management for News Media for Web sites

Related:

Artima: The Importance of Model-View Separation

Webmonkey: Get Started With the Yahoo HTTP Geocoder API

Yahoo! User Interface Blog: Patterns for Designing a Reputation System and more at their Design Pattern Library.

A great fellow Philly blogger, upon seeing that recent CNN video of a person ran over with no one helping posted a passionate piece questioning where our society is headed when a group of people can act so unconcerned about someone else's welfare.

In his comments, I felt the need to remind him of Kitty Genovese.

Phil Ochs's wrote a song about her in 1967, that, with its refrain, is all too painful.

The lyrics make me feel uncomfortable, and if they make you feel the same, then that says something about their ongoing relevancy.

"Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends":

Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Sweating in the ghetto with the (colored/panthers) and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Now wouldn't it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they got too much already and besides, we got the cops
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Oh, there's a dirty paper using sex to make a sale
The Supreme Court was so upset, they sent him off to jail.
Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine.
But we're busy reading playboy and the Sunday New York Times
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides, we're much too high
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Oh, look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Down in Santiago where they took away our mines
We cut off all their money, so they robbed the storehouse blind
Now maybe we should ask some questions, maybe shed a tear
But I bet you a copper penny, it cannot happen here
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

I tend to think that the human condition is made of sterner stuff than our culture can throw at it. For good or ill.

That's why we need to shout from the rooftops the good wherever we may find it. It is out here. There are great stories to tell. Heroes who break the mold everyday.

I know I don't talk about them enough myself.

But the question is - does anyone care outside our circle of friends?

Douglas Adam's Hyperland, via North Is Up.

Waxy.org: "The Machine that Changed the World

In Vanity Fair.

For us, the Flip doesn't make sense, because we use our Canon PowerShot 870SD IS for "of the moment" videos and it has been terrific. We have over a hundred short home videos, including landmarks like Emma walking for the first time, that would have been impossible to capture with a video camera. I compose these into DVD collections that we keep in keepsake albums. If we were okay with uploading to YouTube, we'd have quite an audience. In any case, I tend to agree with Michael Arrington that the hype around the Flip is a bit extreme. Simplicity rocks - I get that, believe me. But wow there is a lot of hype.

Tim Bray: Not an OS:

...I: It's About People Not Technology
...II: It's About Information Not Technology
...III: It's About Business Not Technology
...IV: Nobody Uses the OS Anyhow
...V: It's Platforms That Matter
...VI: And Anyhow, It's Not Like an OS

And previously Jeremy Zawodny: There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS):

...Computers need operating systems but networks don't (not at the OSI layers I'm interested in, at least). A Web Operating System is a myth propagated by people who either don't understand the Web, don't understand operating systems, or both.

...The web is a marketplace of services, just like the "real world" is. Everyone is free to choose from all the available services when building or doing whatever it is they do. The web just happens to be a far more efficient marketplace than the real world for many things. And it happens to run on computers that each need an operating system.

...The web is open and decentralized. Everything is one click away. Remember that.

Mashups are not toys. They're a good illustration of this point... a hint of the future.

Read both.

I'm going to be migrating to the latest and greatest Movable Type templates soon and wanted to collect the best resources I could find. Here are three:

How to upgrade to Movable Type 4 full templates (MT4) - Robert Green's DIY

Upgrading Your MT3 Templates to Movable Type 4.0 | Movable Type Docs

Movable Tweak: Movable Type 3 vs. Movable Type 4: A Modular Site Approach

(ah, I used 'top n-number' in a post!)

Jeremiah Owyang: The Many Challenges of Corporate Blogging

Akamai Report: State of the Internet

An oldie but a must read to gain some context: NYMag: Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.

Livia Labate, Principal of Information Architecture for Comcast Interactive Media, my team at Comcast, is asking some hard questions around why there are not more women speakers at conferences. She raises the issue here and follows up here.

Livia, meet Jeneane Sessum, writer, consultant, marketing pro, all round social media expert. In her latest post she runs the Industry Standard over the rails for doing what so many other media publications seem apt to do - publish a list of (top or must read) bloggers and not include women.

Livia, meet Shelley Powers, author, Javascript/AJAX extraordinaire who has written a number of posts on the subject, here are two: Progress, Invisible.

Shelley and Jeneane, meet Livia.

Before I mention anything from my point of view and experiences, two more links - one a shocker, and one a think piece:

NYTimes: Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain: Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of "The X Files." On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls. The section this article appeared in? Fashion. Not Business. Not Technology.

Salon: The question isn't why a blogger like Emily Gould has the spotlight -- it's why other women don't.

Onward...

I've written in the past about why I feel diversity is crucial to a successful gathering where information discussion is the goal.

I've never shared the difficulty I had in helping manage the Norg Unconference to meet that ideal.

The Norg Unconference was to build bridges between media technologists, independent bloggers, and traditional newspaper media, to help newspapers, indeed all of us, find a path to build the new news organization, or norg, as Will Bunch called it.

Many in attendance thought it was groundbreaking how it brought together such radically different world views in media such as members of IndyMedia and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

But part of me walked away feeling it wasn't such a big success - the participants in attendance weren't a true representation of the real diversity in Philly - and in assisting Wendy Warren of the Philadelphia Daily News and Susie Madrak, in organizing the meeting, which was taking place in the lead up to Emma being born, and me burning the candle at both ends, I burnt some bridges myself, as I fought, prior to the conference, to get folks to work together across views of each other. I partially failed, and lost some friends I believe. For an ideal. I won't go into details, as I hope bridges can one day be restored, I have no bad feelings.

I leave it at this - it is very, very hard to get people to open up to what others can bring to the table - and do so pro-actively - while looking outside the usual suspects to make it happen. For all my love of the Web's capability to widen the scope of conversation, it also empowers us to be discriminating in who we give attention to. It's human nature at play - the Web is an attention economy. You think it's bad at conferences? Check out who is considered the 'thought leaders' in any niche blogging conversation, who is considered the A-list in any blogging topic space.

More background:

kottke.org: Gender diversity at web conferences

O'Reilly: Women in Technology

Dori Smith (Javascript Guru/Author): BackupBrain: Gender diversity at web conferences.

Kimberly Blessing: Where are all the women? (Revisited)

Anil Dash: The Old Boys Club is for Losers

One last question still bubbles...

This is from my earlier post (which has a lot more reference links):

Aren't we collectively building an architecture of participation? Our face to face gatherings should mirror that. And if they don't - then they reveal who we truly care about - don't they?

Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker wrote of her experience sharing her life online in the NYTimes. It's a weekend must read.

The piece has drawn interesting reaction from here and there, but the response that stood out the most to me was Garret's:

NY Times, you got snookered. You need editors who've had a history on the internet, with experience of the weblogging phenomena going back to the beginning of the revolution.

Why is there such a strong reaction among webloggers to this piece? To us, the lessons gleaned from this article were new eight or nine years ago. Now they're reflexive, done without thought: Revealing personal information online, is like lending your favorite books. Only lend what you don't mind losing. Never lend what is valuable to others, without permission. Don't expect to be forgiven if you do, because you cannot 'take it back.'

Repeat after me: The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Again, louder.

The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

The sooner you memorize and understand that, the better.

The NYTimes looks at the effects of DVRs and Web video on mass entertainment. It's not as clear cut as you think: In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time? - New York Times: "As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted," the senior television executive said.

That's so counter intuitive. In my experience, my TV watching not only increased, but Richelle and me watch a far wider variety of shows.

• Epicenter: Google Health Goes Live - It will have huge ramifications in how very sensitive data will get shared and managed.
• Google Friend Connect launches, proving what me and a few others have said in the past - Social Networking isn't a set of destinations, but a set of features that services that aim to surface online community focus must provide. Forums and Instant Messenging 3.0.
• Talking about opening conversation in a truely powerful way, ever notice how few talk about mental illness? Well the same holds true online as well. Furious Seasons, a great blog that discusses mental health care from different angles, shares that one of the best blogs about the subject, editor of the Philadelphia Weekly, Liz Spikol, maybe leaving us.
• Philly.com relaunches. I have a lot to say about the work Mark Potts and team accomplished, but for now - congrats!
• ReadWriteWeb shares The Ultimate Twitter Revenue Model. Advertisements. Show me a business plan that doesn't include them. The funny thing is we all claim to have read The Cluetrain Manifesto, yet instead of discouraging advertising as a business model - it appears to have empowered it as one. Maybe reinforced it as one. The irony is thick.

This is weird. I am almost never at a loss for words, but this time I've been for over a week now.

Antonella Pavese tagged me to share my favorite historical figure and five random/weird things about him or her.

That's a hard one! While I've read few biographies, I do consider myself a bit of a history buff.

Anyways, as soon as I figure out my favorite, I'm in. Coming soon...

It's a sad day as Shelley Powers closes down her home on the web to concentrate on other projects. Her blog was host to some of the best online conversations I've ever participated in. The people who connected there were smart, passionate, and rarity of rarities in a single online community - diverse. You could get in a heated argument about any number of aspects about online media and respect would still be kept by those conversing. For me, the only place that came close to that experience were Salon's Table Talk in its early days (before it went behind the pay wall).

I'm looking forward to what comes next Shelley, but I will miss Burningbird.

And congrats to Anil Dash who is celebrating five years at SixApart. The company has made tremendous changes these past six or so months, basically it's been reborn, without loosing a step. And there is a lot to admire there.

Track your Domino's pizza delivery with a python script.

Or try this nice one liner in your favorite Unix shell: curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B)' | cut -d \- -f 2 for a Futurama quote from Slashdot.

Coding Horor: "Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?":

Here's my honest question: does open source software need all that process to be successful? Isn't the radical lack of process baggage in open source software development not a weakness, but in fact an evolutionary advantage? What open source software lacks in formal process it makes up ten times over in ubiquity and community. In other words, if the Elbonians feel so strongly about localization, they can take that effort on themselves. Meanwhile, the developers have more time to implement features that delight the largest base of customers, instead of plowing through mountains of process for every miniscule five line code change.

Are large commercial software companies crippled by their own process?

I'd say that in large corporations, I've seen many internal projects beat down by the same.

The new portal architecture at CIM doesn't suffer from this, but the old one certainly did. We've come a long way.

Dan Gillmor is right to knock the press in its coverage of the housing bubble. It didn't do its job. But I thought we were in the age of the crowd having more information than the experts? In the age of news that bubbles up from the conversation where knowledge of something as disastrous as a oncoming financial collapse of the country would umm... be somewhat noticeable.

Beat up on the press all you want Dan. They are an easy punching bag in an age where over 60% of the public have lost confidence in them.

While I am sure we can find voices in the blogosphere that were warning us to impending troubles, as we probably can in the press, it didn't get surfaced to wide enough audience.

The media failed certainly. And so did We the Media fail.

And it is something that must be confronted.

I am a big trumpeter of social media and how it can empower each of us to connect in ways that were impossible just a short while ago. I'm planning to share some great examples here in later posts. But as you say Dan, there's plenty of blame to go around in this mess.

As Dave Rogers recently pointed out many tend to look to technological solutions to problems when what they are really dealing with is something different. We prescribe solutions way before we even understand the problem.

And hard enough, sometimes understanding the problem involves a hard look in our own mirrors.

What Shelley Powers describes in the below linked piece is the current economy that encourages folks like Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears to do whatever it takes to get publicity.

David Shenk's "Data Smog" put it like this "All high-stim roads lead to Times Square".

That's the Web. It is nothing if not high-stim.

Folks like Michael Arrington not only have embraced where that leads, but know how to make a profit from it.

Kevin Kelly, in a piece that cuts away at the hype, describes one possible business model for artists in in "1,000 True Fans". But he never describes how you are going to find those fans. In an attention based economy, will it force artists to involve the kind of marketing that, in the words of Dave Rogers tries to "exploit love"?

Bb's RealTech: Shelley Powers: Stop Creating and Get a Real Job:

According to people like Michael Arrington all recorded music should be given away for free, and artists make their only income from concerts. If they can't make their living from concerts, or busking for tossed dimes in the subway, than they should consider music to be their hobby, and get a job digging ditches.

Of course, if we apply the Arrington model to the music industry, we should be able to download all the songs we want-as long as we're willing to sit through an ad at the beginning and in the middle of every song. Isn't that how Techcrunch makes money? Ads in the sidebar, taking time to download, hanging up the page. Ads at the bottom of the posts we have to scroll past to get to comments? And in between, loud, cacophonous noise?

It angers me how little value people in this online environment hold the act of creativity. Oh we point to Nine Inch Nails and Cory Doctorow as examples of people who give their work away for free but still make a living. Yet NIN levies an existing fame, selling platinum packages at several hundred a pop to make up for all the freebies, and Doctorow has BoingBoing as a nice cushion for the lean years. They bring "fame" to the mix, and according to the new online business models, you have to play the game, leverage the system if you really want to make a living from your work. We don't value the work, we value the fame, yet fame doesn't necessarily come from any act of true creativity.

All you have to do to generate fame nowadays is be controversial enough, say enough that's outrageous, connect up with the right people in the beginning and then kick them aside when you're on top to be successful. You don't have to have artistic talent, create for the ages, or even create at all-just play the game. If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there's the ditch.

I recently re-read Rebecca Blood's 2003 BlogTalk presentation: "waging peace: using our powers for good". It is worth revisiting by anyone who is a blog evangelist or critic. Taking a look at the daily lack of cross linkage on memeorandum.com, unfortunately, it seems almost prophetic.

...People agree most readily with the things they already believe, and everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Because of these two factors, weblogs are too often enclosed in echo-chambers of their own making.

In the book 'Data Smog', David Shenk says: 'Birds of a feather flock virtually together' and this is certainly true of weblogs. He goes on to say: 'The problem... is that people are tuning in and becoming informed--but they're tuning into niche media and they're acquiring specialized knowledge. As our information supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease. Technically, we possess an unprecedented amount of information; however, what is commonly known has dwindled to a smaller and smaller percentage every year. This should be a sobering realization for a democratic nation, a society that must share information in order to remain a union.'

Let me add that it's not just specialized knowledge that we are accessing. It's news and opinion about current events. The Web has given us the ability to retrieve news accounts from around the world. It used to be that most people got their news from just a few sources. This limited access meant that most of us were evaluating events from a common pool of information about the world, or at least a pool that was common to the people around us. But Web users can choose to get their news from wherever they like. And factual accounts of the same events quite often differ substantially in their wording, emphasis, and in the conclusions they draw. We now have the ability to choose from among news accounts until we find one that we feel gets it right.

Now, I don't advocate returning to the pre-Web world of local newspapers. But there are consequences to the wide access we have gained.

Democracy depends on groups of people coming to terms with one another, and devising solutions that will address the needs of most, if not all, of its citizens. Even a system like mine, in the United States, where majority rules, cannot afford to completely ignore the needs of anyone not in the winning party. Democracies simply cannot function unless citizens and policy-makers can talk to one another and achieve some sort of common ground in addressing the issues of the day.

However, when people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is 'a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.' It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information--including opinions--that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.

This isn't deliberate malice. It's a simple matter of choosing, from the available sources, those that seem most accurate, and those that seem most accurate will always be those that most closely reflect one's own view of the world. So while the Web, in theory, makes it possible to explore many more points of view than ever before, in practice, few people actually do this to the extent that they can.

Read the whole piece.

88 percent of newspaper coverage is 'churnalism': rewritten wire copy and PR. Only 12 is derived from reporters initiative or is fact checked.

That's the state of newspaper journalism in Britain according to what Nick Davies has written in his book "Flat Earth News". You can read more about "Flat Earth News" in a recent London Review of Books article (via dangerousmeta).

No wonder the majority of Americans no longer trust the media and folks like Jeff Jarvis are making an issue of it.

We have a clue we are being spun. And I bet that niche media's pursuit of 'authenticity' - the practice of wrapping news in greater and greater extremes of opinion to seem 'genuine' - folks probably feel at an instinctive level the exploitation.

In this environment, it has become more and more difficult to find investigative journalism you might care about or might need to know about.

There are many initiatives that have sprung up over the past few years that attempt to address how investigative journalism can be pursued, developed, created and funded.

Scott Rosenberg shares his doubts about one of the latest, "ProPublica", a non-profit driven by some big names in traditional journalism.

Think about a story the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published: "Philadelphia faces shortage of housing for mentally ill". It was front page of the Local section. Some editor thought that I, as a reader, would find that story interesting or pertinent.

In a world driven purely by linkage, PageRank, traffic counts, and other topic based story algorithm filtering systems - would I see that story? Would that story even be written? Who is its audience?

Think about it. And what it means for your knowledge of others that sit outside your topical or social spheres.

Now I'm not saying that algorithm driven - or crowd driven - news filtering is bad. Far from it.

Nor am I saying that a world where only 'experts' provide access to the news stories is good. Again far from it.

But the folks who *do* say one or the other are selling something. And it is at our expense.

There are far too many who like to paint the future of quality filtered media as either entirely driven by 'the wisdom of the crowds' or entirely by 'the experts and the elite'.

Both these extremist views are wrong as hybrids that combine the best of both have already proven successful and will continue to do so over the long haul, no matter the fashion of the moment.

Newsweek.com: Is User-Generated Content Out? | Newsweek Technology (Stupid)

I hate the term "MSM" (Mainstream Media) that we bloggers use to describe older media and news organizations, but sometimes you need to acquiesce.

Lots of folks thought that members of traditional media couldn't 'do blogging' for various reasons. They were wrong. Take a look around and you will find some of the best blogs are being produced in places once thought unlikely.

Wired Magazine's Wired Blogs have some of the most interesting technology/geek focused blogs you could subscribe to.

For politics there are those hosted at The Atlantic.

And, at least in Philly, local newspapers have fully embraced them at Philly.com (The Inquirer and Daily News), philadelphia weekly, and Philadelphia City Paper.

Shoot, even local TV News shows have gotten in the act at NBC 10 and Fox 29.

I'm one of those guys who really appreciates folks who shoot from the hip and share what they feel, especially in the face of lots of heat. That's one of the reasons why I follow many of the writers I do on the Web, including Michael Arrington and his blog CrunchNotes.

But his latest post just won't go away. It's been sitting as his latest now for over a week and the longer it sits there, without correction, the further it spreads mis-information.

What is that mis-information? Well it's one thing to dislike Shelley Powers and to back it up with facts, and even feelings.

It's another thing to spread a falsehood, which is what the post in question does. Shelley Powers, unequivocally, will criticize anyone, regardless of sex or station. She really puts her self on the line by speaking truth to power day in and day out.

Questioning dogma is a lonely place to be sometimes.

How this happened is a mystery really.

There was an argument that erupted over the use of an image in an online video, produced by a band.

You can read about the controversy at Wired.

There was some interesting discussion about copyright, much that resembling that which followed other similar controversies in the past.

Conversation that is again springing up about Fox helping itself to someone's Flickr pictures.

I simply feel that without a lawsuit, contrary to the opinions of folks I respect - because of lack of clarity - no one knows who was in the right and who was in the wrong.

During arguments like this, where facts are few and opinions are many, where clarity is hard to find, I tend to absorb all view points, to weigh my own opinion. This was a great opportunity for that.

That is, until it ran off the rails at at Mathew Ingrams's blog. Normally a place, like Shelley's, for some of the best discussion about social media and the Web.

Rogers Cadenhead said that Shelley is due an apology - I agree.

Jeneane Sessum looked at this as a bigger, cultural issue with the blogosphere:

...the larger LARGER problem for the blogosphere and twitterspehere is that a culture is developing -- thanks in part to time-saving, fragment-tossing platforms like twitter, that by design silence dissenting voices -- we have all become easy targets for extinction, the casualties of casual dismissal.

THAT's what bothered me about this situation, about what Mike said to Shelley, about what Mike and others said about Lane without asking Lane anything, and STILL DOES bother me.

The "you're just" mantra is getting way out of hand.

It is cultish and thought canceling.

The irony is that my attraction to 'shoot from the hip' opinions is part of the problem.

When I look around me, it seems more and more that context or historical background doesn't matter - all that matters is the headline, the blurb, and the attention driving influence of the one sharing it.

Increasingly it seems our culture encourages 'winning it all costs' behavior - no matter the right and wrong.

And I guess, at Christmas time especially, these things make me sad.

I'm 2/3rds of the way through reading Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming In Code" and wanted to share with you my enthusiasm for the book - I'll be buying it as a gift for a few folks this year.

TechCrunch: NYTimes Blogrunner v. TechMeme.

They are using a technique I had originally suggested while I worked at Philly.com to handle the enormous legal and quality concerns - use a third party aggregator service like Blogrunner.

Bravo to the NYTimes :)

EarthTimes.org: "Consumer Reports Names Their All-Star Appliances":

"Our brand-repair histories are culled from approximately 450,000 respondents reporting on nearly 2.5 million appliances," said Robert Markovich, editor at Consumer Reports. "Choosing a reliable brand will boost a consumer's odds of getting a reliable model and in the end often save consumers money."

You can even say the report was 'crowdsourced'.

Now if only we could collate a list of safe and fun toys that parents would want to buy.

We maybe on the eve of a new war (USAToday: Poll finds Americans split on taking military action in Iran). Do *you* think you're doing all you can to inform your fellow citizen of facts or opinions? Do you think it matters? Do you think people are informed enough to weigh in on this? Why do you think that is and who gets the praise or the fault?

The greatest book about the Web, bar none, is David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I think the book nailed the nature of the Web, and the motivations behind how we use it and why it has become such a large part in our lives. So when I quote the following, I really believe it. It's one of the things that motivates me to continue in the line of work I am in.

David Weinberger: Small Pieces Loosely Joined - Kids Version:

So, here we have two worlds. In the real world, people are kept apart by distance. Because of the vastness of the earth, different cultures have developed. People live in separate countries, divided by boundaries and sometimes by walls with soldiers and guns. On the Web, people come together - they connect - because they care about the same things.

The real world is about distances keeping people apart. The Web is about shared interests bringing people together.

Now, if connecting and caring are what make us into human people, then the Web - built out of hyperlinks and energized by people's interests and passions - is a place where we can be better at being people.

And that is what the Web is for.

Taking that as gospel, and taking the following as the truth most of us agree on (most folks still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11), can it be that the Web as an information platform has failed? And if so, what can be done about it?

Salon: Michael Massing: "What Orwell Didn't Know::

Orwell had expected advances in technology to allow the ruling elite to monopolize the flow of information and through it to control the minds of the masses. In reality, though, those advances have set off an explosion in the number and diversity of news sources, making efforts at control all the harder to achieve. The 24-hour cable news channels, the constantly updated news Web sites, news aggregators like Google News, post-it-yourself sites such as YouTube, ezines, blogs, and digital cameras have all helped feed an avalanche of information about world affairs. In Iraq, reporters embedded with troops have been able via the Internet to file copy directly from the field. Through "milblogs," soldiers have been able to share with the outside world their impressions about their experiences on the ground. Even as the war has dragged on, it has given rise to a shelf-full of revealing books, written by not only generals and journalists but also captains, lieutenants, privates, national guardsmen, and even deserters.

In short, no war has been more fully chronicled or minutely analyzed than this one.

...Yet even amid this information glut, the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image, than to controls imposed by the public itself.

...In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don't.

Take a gander at the new Comcast.net (we're still in beta) home page :)

As some of you know, I'm part of the development group that builds the systems that drive and support comcast.net.

I'm excited about this latest release - it's been my pleasure to be part of an awesomely talented team and on this project, I've been a primary contributor to the architecture as well as code. In a way, it's a return to my previous role at Knight Ridder Digital.

I think we've built a platform that will enable our product teams to rapidly get new, working features and functionality to customers, where previously, doing so was a chore. This system really sets our UI team free - no longer requiring server side developers to create new functionality or even present new content.

Hopefully I'll get the chance to to post about the technologies and techniques we've employed in its development, like Arpit has about The Fan.

I think it's safe for me to mention the Web tier using Spring MVC and FreeMarker, with a back-end that resembles something akin to CouchDb, and feeding it all is a very modular, extensible CMS. Each tier is usable in different projects, together or independently. It always comes down to implementation details and I hope to share a few sometime, either here, or on a team blog someday.

You can visit our community blog to track changes to the site and get a short summary here.

Or should I say - RottenNeighbor.com.

Takes participatory media to new heights...errrr lows.

This service allows you to query by zip code your neighbors and reports that have been posted about them.

Dive right in. It's a world where everyone is a HO or a WHITETRASH CRACK HEAD.

Labnotes: "RESTful Web Services: the book you already decided to read":

If you think the idea of using services as building blocks for your software is the best thing since 30" displays and free schwag, then you already know this book exists. You also know that SOA is some serious stuff best left for trade magazines looking to sell more ads. Out there in the real world, we can't get anything done without our power tools. And you heard of the one called REST, they say it's the best brand around. So anyway, you already decided to read this book, now you just need to make it happen.

Here's a link to buy the book from O'Reilly or click here to buy it from Amazon and help Labnotes (a terrific blog in its own right).

Honestly, this book reinforces long held beliefs of mine about Web development, while giving me a useful vocabulary and set of examples to use in discussion.

That means it's invaluable :)

More from Jon Udell and Linux World.

rc3.org: "I am not a systems administrator":

I'm beginning to feel like every time I touch anything, I have planted the seeds for a future outage.

The more systems administration tasks I perform, the more I understand why systems administrators tend to hate programmers.

I relate.

Marc Andreessen posts thought provokers all the time on his must read blog, but this once, I just have to comment. In "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet" he attempts to clear up confusion about the concept of "platforms" and how they relate to the Internet. Specifically, he describes three "levels" of platforms that you find on the Internet. Go read his post for context. But let me just say that I feel his descriptions are spot on. But the examples he gives for "Level 3" platforms miss a biggie...

The Web itself is a Level 3 platform according to his definition.

It looks like Fred Wilson agrees with my point of view on this.

Unbelievable isn't it?

Editor & Publisher: "Hit and Myth: Poll Shows 1 in 3 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved in 9/11".

Wow.

The sad thing is, predictably, pundits and experts on both sides of the new media debate (something I have yet to understand) will inevitably point fingers.

Nick Carr: "The people formerly known as informed".

Dan Gillmor: "Journalists Failure to Dispel Saddam-9/11 Myth is Media Scandal".

Mathew Ingram: "News flash: Digg headlines not "real" news".

Fact: Despite the information revolution, despite the advent of 24/7 cable news, despite the advent of 24/7 talk radio, despite the Internet, set aside the Web and participatory media for just a minute, it's already been determined we're no better informed about our world than in 1989.

So those who long for the good old days can point your fingers at bloggers all you want.

And those who say today far better than the past can point your fingers at 'traditional' media journalists all you want.

The failure is complete. It is across the board.

And it portends terrible things for our democracy and society as a whole.

The Onion: September 26, 2001: "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule":

Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

"Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand."

Worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, God said His name has been invoked countless times over the centuries as a reason to kill in what He called "an unending cycle of violence."

"I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else's, ever again."

...Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: "Can't you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism... every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you're supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It's not that hard a concept to grasp."

"Why would you think I'd want anything else? Humans don't need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other - you've been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!" God said. "The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?"

"I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore - ever! I'm fucking serious!"

Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.

The Onion: September 26, 2001: "American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie": "In the movies, when the president says, 'It's war,' that usually means the good part is just about to begin," said hardware-store owner Thom Garner of Cedar Rapids, IA. "Why doesn't it feel that way now? It doesn't feel like the good part is about to begin at all. It feels there's never going to be another good part again."

The Onion: September 26, 2001: "Report: Gen X Irony, Cynicism May Be Permanently Obsolete": "This earnestness can't last forever. Can it?" No. It didn't.

The Onion: September 26, 2001: "Bush Sr. Apologizes To Son For Funding Bin Laden In '80s": "I'm sorry, son," Bush told President George W. Bush. "We thought it was a good idea at the time because he was part of a group fighting communism in Central Asia. We called them 'freedom fighters' back then. I know it sounds weird. You sort of had to be there."

POSTSCRIPT: The Onion: October 3, 2001: "A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again":

"The United States is a free country, a strong country, a prosperous country," Schuitt said. "Many veterans gave their lives so we would have the right to focus our attention and energies on the DVD release of Joe Dirt, the latest web-browsing cell phones, and how-low-can-you-go hip-hugging jeans. It is a sign of our collective strength as a nation that we genuinely give a shit about the latest developments in the Cruise-Cruz romance. When Mariah Carey's latest breakdown is once again treated as front-page news, that is the day the healing will have truly begun."

POST POSTSCRIPT - Six years later, Bin Laden is still free, our troops are deployed in a nation building exercise in a previously dictator led country we decided to dismantle that had nothing to do with the attack - and Afghanistan is sliding back towards the Taliban.

And the day before the sixth anniversary of the attacks headlines were dominated by Britney Spears.

The biggest blogs these days are actually getting TV shows - Perez Hilton and TMZ.com.

And according to Technorati, well, the rest of the known blogosphere is focussed on gadgets and making money.

God bless our troops. God bless the world.

And good day everyone.

First, a reminder about what makes the Web, the Web....

W3C.org: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One: 2. Identification:

In order to communicate internally, a community agrees (to a reasonable extent) on a set of terms and their meanings. One goal of the Web, since its inception, has been to build a global community in which any party can share information with any other party. To achieve this goal, the Web makes use of a single global identification system: the URI. URIs are a cornerstone of Web architecture, providing identification that is common across the Web. The global scope of URIs promotes large-scale "network effects": the value of an identifier increases the more it is used consistently (for example, the more it is used in hypertext links (§4.4)).

Principle: Global Identifiers

Global naming leads to global network effects.

This principle dates back at least as far as Douglas Engelbart's seminal work on open hypertext systems; see section Every Object Addressable in [Eng90].

What are the global - public - URI's of Facebook? What are they in regards to any social network for that matter?

This is an important train of thought to consider when debating how Facebook and other social networks influence our relationship with Google, and the entire Web.

Facebook's growth devalues Google's utility - it devalues the public Web - at least how it is described in "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and the Web's own architecture document.

This is why Scoble can't be more wrong when he says "Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years" because Facebook and other social networks are going to not only affect how we use Google - but will eliminate the utility of the Mahalo's and TechMeme's of the world - because they too rely on a robust and growing *public* URI ecosystem.

Dare: Why Google Should be Scared of Facebook:

What Jason and Jeff are inadvertantly pointing out is that once you join Facebook, you immediately start getting less value out of Google's search engine. This is a problem that Google cannot let continue indefinitely if they plan to stay relevant as the Web's #1 search engine.

What is also interesting is that thanks to efforts of Google employees like Mark Lucovsky, I can use Google search from within Facebook but without divine intervention I can't get Facebook content from Google’s search engine. If I was an exec at Google, I'd worry a lot more about the growing trend of users creating Web content where it cannot be accessed by Google than all the "me too" efforts coming out of competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!.

The way you get disrupted is by focusing on competitors who are just like you instead of actually watching the marketplace. I wonder how Google will react when they eventually realize how deep this problem runs?

None of this invalidates Scott Karp's riff on Scoble's main point - there is a growing role for "Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web". Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms.

My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me.

There's nothing new to that fact that people play a direct role in how we discover what may interest us on the Web. It goes back to Yahoo!'s earliest days. Back to links.net, back to the NCSA What's New page. It goes to the heart of what blogging is all about.

People have been way too hung up on Digg's voting algorithms and forget that what makes Digg, Digg is its community of participants.

People forget Slashdot outright. As they do Metafilter.

So it still comes down to trust - What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?

And just how do we share that with each other?

Leonard Witt's blog and PJNet got a great facelift.

So did Scott Karp's Publishing 2.0 courtesy of bokardo.

Doc Searls recently moved into new digs.

Steve Rubel is contemplating a move to Wordpress.com from TypePad (I think his reasoning is flawed and so are most of the folks leaving comments for him).

While Rafe recently upgraded to MT4 . I need to get around to doing the same.

Speaking of Scott Karp, he's launched an interesting new journalism service.

Bill de hOra posted an interesting question the other day, that has to do with mapping views to requests, cleanly, in a RESTful way, as Sam Ruby framed it:

it's easy to forget that Servlets were Java's response to CGI, way back when. Here's is the link for Stefan's entry:

http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/08/15/java_web_frameworks.html

I'm wondering how would one produce a URL space for a blog style archive, using Servlets+JSP, and do so in a way that isn't a CGI/RPC explicit call? That is, the URLs don't end up like this:

http://www.innoq.com/blog/entry.jsp?id=java_web_frameworks

with one constraint - "just a servlet" that pulls java_web_frameworks.html direct from a "2007/08/15" folder on the filesystem and byapsses JSP is out. All the response is to be generated via JSP. Would we need to a create framework, however 'micro'?

In Django world, answering such a question is rather easy. And for PHP hackers, you're probably saying, hey, use .htaccess to route requests, but in Java, this question becomes a bit more complicated.

A Java developer would want solve two problems here: enable "clean" RESTful URLs, and do as little Java coding as possible by distributing responsibility for defining views to a templating language. Hopefully empowering someone who knows just HTML/CSS to work their magic. The benefits to such an approach can't be underestimated. We we went down such a path at Knight Ridder with the Cofax CMS and it empowered a lot of creativity with little resources on hand (lots of folks know HTML/CSS/JS, few know Java).

Carbon Five discusses an approach that decomposes path info into parameters for Spring MVC controllers: Parameterized REST URLs with Spring MVC. This solves problem one. It still routes requests to a Controller defined in Java, and I've seen far too many not solve problem two, which leaves a design where you have a Request, that maps to a Controller that maps to a single View. But this leaves you with an *excellent* foundation to solve the second problem.

Sam Ruby points to URLRewriteFilter as one possible solution. This potentially solves both problems.

Stefan Tilkov explains how to decompose path info and use RequestDispatcher as a solution. In Sam Ruby's comments, I suggested just such an approach and it's worked great for me in previous (and current) projects. This potentially solves both problems.

BTW, if you're interested in a templating language, outside of JSP (and who isn't?), consider FreeMarker. A huge project I'm helping design and develop is having terrific success with it and Spring MVC. Real magic starts to happen when you decouple Requests from Views. A shortcut to this in Spring MVC is implementing a RequestToViewNameTranslator.

Yahoo! has relaunched it's local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.

Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.

They still haven't gone as far as I expect them to one day do - integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.

On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.

Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.

Despite the information and communication revolutionary time we live in, Americans remain in the dark about our world.

Pew released a survey back in April detailing Americans knowledge of current affairs, comparing the status quo to that of 1989.

We've had a literal explosion of new media and communications services and tools come into being these past 15 years. They have completely reshaped how we get our news and how we connect with our communities.

Social Networks, Blogs, RSS, News Aggregators, Email, Email Lists, Message Boards, Websites, News portals, the Web, the Internet, Cable network 24/hr. news, talk radio, online magazines, collaborative news filters, algorithmic news filters, the list goes on and on.

You would think with so many choices, so many avenues to get informed, we'd actually be better informed.

You'd be wrong.

On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.

In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.

The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs.

I'm among a bunch of folks who tend to trumpet online services as a cure-all for our past lack of information awareness and communications access.

On the opposite side of the bench have been those who have sounded alarm after alarm about how our ever growing media-and-communications-scape will fragment us ever further and result in ever tightening echo chambers, making us less informed about subject matter as a whole.

Turns out both perspectives are wrong.

Here we are, with so much new technology, so much new media, transforming the way we live our lives, and yet we are as informed, as ill informed, as we were in 1989.

Related:

Newsweek: Dunce-Cap Nation

Wired: Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed

Tim Berners-Lee, as quoted by Jon Udell in a piece that greatly influenced me back in the day, called the web "a shared information space through which people and machines could communicate." . The original piece in which Tim Berners-Lee said that is still up for all to read, titled "The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future". I found the piece by typing the quote in Google. Give it a try.

As we share our knowledge, collectively with one another, across blogs, message forums, email lists, and any other services that permit indexing, and reinforce that knowledge via hyperlinking, we are, collectively, building a space that benefits humanity.

It is this collective space that helped me learn what I needed to learn to build a career.

And all this happens, not because of altruistic reasons, but because the architecture of the Web empowers, via the hyperlink, a certain form of communication and collaboration.

The conversations that occur on Facebook, and on most social networking services, happen in the public-private.

In places not indexed by Google, not indexed by Yahoo!, yet are public to selected communities that have access and privilege to them. Gated communities. Islands.

Certainly, there has always been places out of reach of search engines (and there will always be a need for some), but until the last few years, the call from the digerati was to surface these databases of knowledge to the public, behind whatever proprietary walls that may have kept them out of reach. Whether they be newspaper archives, or email lists.

Don't get me wrong - there's a lot celebrate when it comes to social networking services. I'm a participant in more than a few, to be sure.

But if they come to define the Web, as they are to some in the media, then I fear we are taking a great step backward.

I'm in the process of writing a piece on Philly Future, about it's future, titled, "Philly Future, is it in 'the dip' or in a cul-de-sac?". If you've read Seth Godin's "the dip" you would immediately get the reference.

The thing is, every time I start to write it, I can't help but feel demoralized.

Depressed. Run down. Beaten up.

If I think about how things are at PF right now, it is full of unexplored and sometimes broken promise. It's taken all the free time I've had just to keep it running.

It doesn't meet my personal standards for what I expect a great service to be. And I'm never satisfied simply running in place. So things there need to change.

With my day job being as full tilt as it has become (in a good way, my team is building something to be proud of, I hope to share more sometime), with my body as wracked with pain as it has been on and off, I've felt stretched for time as I haven't since I was maybe ten years ago, when I still working at Sears, putting all else aside so that I could learn software engineering.

Shoot - the pain is so frustrating that I haven't played my guitar longer than five minutes the last six months. I'm good at managing it. I'm functional. And I've improved quite a bit since I earned the herniated disk. And for that I am thankful. I'm not forced into surgery they way some are.

But sometimes I find myself spinning.

The great thing - the unbelievable thing - is that I've learned that it's easy to get centered again.

Sometimes it's simply hearing a friend's or my brother's voice on the phone. Sometimes, all I need to do is turn to my wife, my daughter, and even my dog on the couch and smile at my blessings as my heart fills.

As long as I have that - I have everything in the world :)

Happy Birthday to Doc Searls.

For all those folks who think innovative thinking about the web is for the young, well Doc has just turned 60 and has been greatly influencing how to think about the Web for as long as I've been out here (which is pretty darn long, I can remember Dave Winer announcing Doc's blog's launch).

Thank you for sharing so much.

Others: David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer.

I believe that the Web comprises a living representation of human nature and desire. Our hopes, dreams, wants, needs, joys and hates. Our need to connect with one another. The Web, simply put, is made of people, and the hyperlink is a representation of that.

I realize this makes me sound like some kind of hopeless hippie stuck in 1998, but the proof is all around us.

Jeff Jarvis puts it like this:

Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.

I could have just as easily quoted Howard Rheingold from the mid-nineties.

Real successes on the Web have shown an understanding of this, whether you call these sites, services and communities Web 1.0, Web 2.0 or whatever - it doesn't change - and it won't change - unless something significant happens to the underlining architecture we all participate on.

So when I read the next three pieces that Mathew Ingram says (when you take into account Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere) reflect a trifecta of failure we can all learn from, it simply reinforced that belief for me.

Center for Citizen Media: Dan Gillmor: Citizen Media: A Progress Report (where are matters now? where are they headed in the future?)

Mark Potts: Backfence: Lessons Learned (great reflections from a Backfence founder)

Wired: Jeff Howe: Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (certainly not a failure - there is a lot here to be learned from - and what was produced - and continuing to be produced - is to be proud of)

Previously:

PressThink: Guest Writer Liz George of Baristanet Reviews Backfence.com Seven Months After Launch (she nailed it didn't she?)

Even more previously:

In my opinion, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" is still the most important book to read about the Web. It will make you realize that on the Web - participatory media happens. All the ideas, features, and concepts we thread through it, we try and trumpet, won't change it. We can either recognize it - work with it - realize it's a wondrous, powerful thing - or try and re-invent it or usurp it. The later leads, eventually, to failure. As the record shows.

(note - I was an advisor to NewAssignment.net - so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. however, all you need to do is dive in and you'll see some impressive, thought provoking work has been put together by everyone involved)

Sorry for the sudden lack of conversing and blogging as of late. My day job has been keeping me really busy. That, along with physical therapy (which has stalled btw - I'm going to try epidural steroid injections next), has really been kicking my ass.

In addition to all this, the past month or so, Philly Future started to crash uncontrollably. Drupal's aggregator isn't built to scale, in terms of size, as I have painfully found out. It took some major indexing, cache tuning, and aggregator module tweaking, to stabilize things. Along the way I learned quite a bit about MySQL and Drupal. Enough to know that I need look for a replacement for the aggregator or majorly refactor its database usage. Even so, I plan to submit the improvements I made to the community. They're going to give us a few more months I think.

Some days I still can relate to Chris Gardner's character in "The Pursuit of Happyness", where instead of traveling a myriad of buses, perfectly timed, each day to negotiate making it to my place, the job, or school, six hours on public transportation, now it is balancing work, home, health, and passions like Philly Future. A far better situation. But still not enough time to do it all.

I was happy to read about Dave Rogers's and Doc Searls's conversation on Dave's blog the other day. Both write about subject matter I care about - various intersections of society and the web - and have opinions I respect, if not always agree with.

The back and forth between them is a great and rare example of how two people of very, very differing opinions can converse and connect across the Web.

So color me sad when I read Stowe Boyd's response. Yes, Dave called him blowhard. But his denouncement of Dave was downright Cheney-like, putting words in his mouth and even calling Dave an "enemy of the future".

I hope I never get such an elitist, my-view-is-the-only-correct-view way of looking at the Web or the world.

Congrats to Rajiv Pant, who has taken a job in NYC at Conde Nast Publications as VP of Information Technology for CondeNet!

Rajiv was my manager (and eventually VP) at Philly.com and Knight Ridder, before the dotcombust, back when KR took risks and had a future. He's a real visionary who always finds a way. I learned a lot from him during my time there and miss our deep talks about the nature of well.. just about everything.

Rajiv, my friend, congrats to you :)

Kay Miller is one of the first five Philadelphia recipients of free laptops provided by Impact Services Corp in their welfare to work program. Impact Services provided me the tutoring I needed to get my G.E.D., and I am forever thankful for the time I spent with them.

Laptops and low cost Wi-fi can make a difference in the lives of the working poor. The Web provides access to information and resources that are not easy to find otherwise - especially with the crush of time you suffer when working multiple jobs and possibly having to take care of a family simultaneously.

While there is far too much digital utopianism sprouted by some, it's important to remember just how empowering the Web can be.

I say this from direct, measurable, personal experience.

Wi-fi Philly's laptop leap - 5 get free computers, giving breath to city's wireless dream:

Five welfare-to-work women in West Kensington just became the first city residents to earn free laptops and Internet service from Wireless Philadelphia, the mission of which is to connect low-income workers to the Web so they can get better jobs and provide better lives for their families.

The five women represent the tiny start of Wireless Philadelphia's citywide dream.

...Gathered at Impact Services Corp., the welfare-to-work agency on Allegheny Avenue near 19th Street where they earned their wireless bundles by holding a steady job for a year, the five women are the first to receive a high-tech makeover that Wireless Philadelphia hopes to give to 500 low-income workers by year's end, thousands in years to come.

"Access to information is access to opportunity," said CEO Greg H. Goldman while Chief Operations Officer Agnes Ogletree's eyes welled up at finally seeing three years of plans realized.

In a post a couple weeks ago I mentioned that David Shenk in his book "Data Smog" should have put down Law 13 of Data Smog to be "Cyberspace is Libertarian" instead of "Cyberspace is Republican". He stopped by and posted a comment - I didn't realize this - but in the paperback, he had made that change.

Movable Type 4.0 Beta Launches, Platform To Be Open Sourced

Burningbird » Movable Type: The Princess Time Forgot

rc3.org: Movable Type 4

I'm excited to see the participatory media functionality being added to MT. A while back I wrote a piece that was a little controversial - "del.icio.us is going to die, so is Digg, so is Flickr". I believe that personal blogging solutions will evolve to enable us to host our own social networks (they do already in a sense). PC computing history leans towards personal empowerment.

I've tried more blogging solutions then almost anyone. Folks tend to break things down into false choices, thinking that a marketplace can only sustain one ore two options, when over the past few years, I think it's been obvious that in the blogging ecosphere not only can two or more options co-exist - they can thrive.

While I've used Wordpress and Drupal on other projects, I've kept Movable Type as my personal blogging solution, and it has been my recommendation to use it in various projects of differing scope. It's always come through for me.

No solution is perfect. Don't believe the hype. These are just tools to keep in your toolbox. Loyalty to a hammer over a screwdriver makes no sense.

This is a good day for blogging. And a good day for freelancers and corporate developers everywhere that require a reliable, flexible, content management solution.

danah boyd: "The Significance of Social Software" (pdf)

Guy Kawasaki: By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

Seth Finkelstein: The Dr. Robert Lindeman / "Flea" anonymous blog outing - Blogging HARMS! (Read "Blogger unmasked, court case upended" right away!)

Invisible Inkling: 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head (subscribe to this blog now!)

A VC: The Free Music Business

akkamsrazor.com: The New Creative Class: A Threat to the Republic...

Christophe Coenraets: Flex-based SQLAdmin for Google Gears (niiiiceeee)

tecosystems: The Gears That Power the Tubes: The Google Gears Q&A (via rc3.org)

Tim Bray: Gears

MediaShift: Interview with Placeblogger's Lisa Williams. Read this for some insight into why I'm excited to have joined the advisory board.

KCNN: Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?. I was honored to be interviewed and a few of my answers are quoted in the report.

fortuitous: How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs

NYTimes: For Pornographers, Internet's Virtues Turn to Vices

TechCrunch: The New Portals: It's the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter (wow, I've linked to TechCrunch - it's gotten better as of late - gotta give credit where it is due.)

Deep Jive Interests: The Trouble With "The Decline In News" Has Nothing To Do With Journalists

Dare Obasanjo: Why Facebook is Bigger Than Blogging

Publishing 2.0: User-Generated Content Is Not A Panecea

Chris Daly's Blog: Readers to the rescue?

Doc Searls: Because paper is scarce. And so is time.

Mathew Ingram: Doc Searls is dead wrong on newspapers

Kent Newsome: News in an Accelerated World

Rough Type: Happy Birthday, Cathedral & Bazaar. Notable for ESR's comment:

...Open source is, fundamentally, about the software. Spewing a lot of Web 2.0 hype around it confuses more than it clarifies.

It's legitimate to argue that open source software is strongly suggestive that similar arrangements that might work elsewhere. But it's also way too easy to forget that some of the critical enabling factors for the open-source software movement are hard to replicate elsewhere.

Of these, the most important is the fact that the correctness and performance of software can be objectively measured -- whether or not an application segfaults is not a matter of political dispute.

This, not the presence or absence of particular kinds of authority structures, is why Linux succeeds and Wikipedia fails.

Yaouch!

A lot of folks are going gaga over Google Gears and its capability to enable partially connected web applications (web applications that can run offline).

Here is a paraphrase from a comment I left at Burningbird (Shelley Powers's blog is one of my favorite places to discuss web technology and how it relates to society, politics, and more):

What really interests me about Google Gears is the local web server.

It's the Dave Winer Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea (from back in 1997), that's finally come of age.

Just what is possible when each of us have our own web servers, running on our desktops?

Immediately you think p2p heaven. But the possibilities for building collaborative apps is just massive.

I know, I know, for anyone who knows Perl, Python or Java, it's never been too much of a big deal to spin up your own webserver, but this looks like it makes it more than simple - it makes it practical.

If I'm reading it right, you'll need some form of centralized web app to co-ordinate collaboration across machines, which is no big deal.

The web's about being connected. And it's the online possibilities that Google Gears opens up that are rather mind boggling.

Dave Winer: What is Web 3.0?:

...There's always been too much made of death in the tech world, in fact newspapers are still published, you can pick one up at any airport or train station. Many people have them delivered at home. We often go to newspaper websites for the news. Sure, there are problems, and the world is changing, but imho, we'll all do better if something called the San Francisco Chronicle continues to be published, even though the form of the newspaper will certainly change in the future. It would be a waste of a tradition, of a good coral reef, if newspapers really died. They need to change, and imho, when that change happens, we will safely be in the era of Web 3.0.

Congratulations to Will Bunch whose book, "The News Fix: Ink-stained Wretches and Digital Rabble Rousers Reviving American Media" is available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Will Bunch, one of the terrific columnists at the Philadelphia Daily News, coined the term and kicked off the norgs conversation, when just under two years ago he broached the idea on his blog and courageously, openly, talked of re-inventing the news organization business.

Congratulations to the Winners of the Knight News Challenge who have been awarded grants to innovate in community news.

Comments from some winers and commentators:

holovaty.com: Knight Foundation grant

Placeblogger: Placeblogger Wins Knight News Challenge

Global Voices: Global Voices wins Knight Foundation News Challenge

Center for Citizen Media: Citizen Media and the Law a New Project

Recovering Journalist: Hyping Hyperlocal

Publishing 2.0: Knight Foundation Funds Innovation In Online Journalism And Civic-Minded Digital Media

Socialmedia.biz: News Challenge winners

I almost applied for the grant for Philly Future, however, it just didn't feel like the right time for Philly Future, or for myself. Maybe next year.

Speaking of myself, congratulations to, ummm... me, for joining the Placeblogger advisory board. Philly Future is a placeblog. It's a place blog of placeblogs :) And if PF can help, I hope, me and we, can be of some service.

I made a few important edits to my post yesterday. Added links that gave context. Removed a typo here and there. Did you notice?

Well that's your fault you see. You're not media literate.

You are expected to revisit my posts to see edits and updates. As a good host, I should indicate my edits in one fashion or another (which I didn't do).

See Dan Farber: Media literacy in a media saturated world.

Very, very related if you want to see the societal shift this is part of: BusinessWeek: "I Want My Safety Net".

We are shifting risk from institutions, the producers of things, to the consumers of things.

The expectation is that since we are all now producers, we must individually keep BS meters up and running at all times, otherwise, it's our own damn fault if we get fooled by something.

While people point to blogs as the primary purveyors of this kind of thought, in actuality, it seems prevalent in all forms of media.

Scott Rosenberg: Amateur hour:

...saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is "better media literacy" is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is "better learning skills."

He says this sarcastically but the redistribution of risk is a trend in everything from the food we give our dogs, to the education we give our children, from what we expect from our government (just re-look at Katrina), to the relationships we have with our neighbors.

The lesson - keep your guard up. You are on your own. Trust nothing and no one except yourself.

Good or bad? You decide.

The title of this post refers to a "law of data smog" in David Shenk's terrific book, "Data Smog". He was referring to the libertarian impulse that was prevalent in the late 90s Republican movement. He should have said "Cyberspace is Libertarian" and it would have been timeless.

Update:David Shenk posts a comment in this post's thread that in the paperback version of "Data Smog" he put down Law 13 of Data Smog to be "Cyberspace is Libertarian" instead of "Cyberspace is Republican"!

This morning I read a few posts, about a conference session and a panel at Berkley, that focussed on "Web 2.0", online journalism, and amateur participation.

While the topics discussed at both meetings seemed to overlap with many of those we discussed at the norgs unconference, I couldn't help but feel that the folks involved are far behind the discussion that's been ongoing in Philly.

So much so, I actually felt a bit sad. So wound up they are in false choices and pointing fingers. Jeff Jarvis had a recent, heated thread on the subject.

Read for yourself at down the avenue and Union Square Ventures (who has yet to approve my following comment - update:comment approved, good old spam filtering :)).

I posted the following at both blogs, and fully expect to be ignored or put down, because what we did in Philly was to stop pointing fingers. We stopped preaching to each other. And we listened (read Jeff Jarvis's take here and here).

For some weird reason, folks on either side of this debate, don't seem to care for that.

My comment:

------------------------------------

I wish I was at this event.

We had a similar event in Philadelphia last year that was focussed on news journalism and the web. It sounds like it covered related territory. (link).

Fact of the matter is, there is room enough for numerous approaches to filtering/finding news.

Algorithmic - Memeorandum, Google News

By the crowd - Digg, Newsvine.

By a single unpaid editor - A blogger.

By communities of unpaid editors - A genre specific slice of the blogosphere.

By a news organization - A newspaper with staffed editors - Yahoo News, Salon, Slate.

By hybrid community/editor efforts - Slashdot, Indymedia.

There seems to be an effort on the parts of some to create some false conflicts between these approaches. To promote one approach over the other as the *ultimate solution*.

That's a shame really, because in the dust of that are people becoming less and less informed (check out the latest Pew research) while wealth and fortune flow from one kind of media organization to another.

We can do far better. All of us can. My bet is that will happen when groups of us decide to put down our guns and work together.

Karl
------------------------------------

We've seen this story before. Newspaper announces cuts. Pundits and experts speak out about how to fix things. Then, more cuts, then, a sell off. It doesn't need to be that way.

SFGate.com: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom:

To cut costs and try to adapt to a changing media marketplace, The Chronicle will trim 25 percent of its newsroom staff by the end of the summer.

IP Democracy: Why Can't Newspapers Get With the Program?:

If somehow the newspaper industry just understood that even now the Internet is still the wild west, they'd take the journalists they're jettisoning and instead use them to create new web-based businesses.

Dan Gillmor: San Francisco Paper Whacks Jobs:

When Hearst bought the Chronicle years ago, it pledged to keep all the employees from the old Chronicle. Then it brought the SF Examiner employees along, and had what can only be called a bloated staff.

But the paper did improve - wow, did it improve.

The city always deserved a vastly better paper than it had. It still deserves a better paper, but the positive change has been incredible since the Hearst buyout.

Yet that didn't translate to subscribers - circulation kept dropping, in part due to deliberate corporate decisions, and advertising didn't recover after the burst of the tech bubble and the increasing inroads from classified-ad competitors that work better for buyers and sellers. The newspaper was said to be losing $1 million a week a year ago, an amazing number. I've heard that the losses were slowing, but obviously not enough to matter. (For the record, we get the Chronicle - and several other papers - delivered to our door each morning when we're home.)

The Chronicle's website has been among the most progressive anywhere, and it reflects the dilemma many publishers face. The site is free, with no registration requirements. There are ads, but not enough revenue to make up for the whacks to the print advertising that are hard to stop. The archives are also free and open - which I have to believe is on balance a revenue booster over the paywalled archives at most other local papers.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Staff cuts won't cure Chron woes:

The Chronicle's year-to-date deficit of $165,563 per day is roughly equivalent to the annual pay and benefits of two journeyman reporters. If the paper continued losing money at the same rate every day for the rest of the year, it could fire every journalist in the joint and still not break even.

With continuing uncontrolled losses of this magnitude, the Chronicle, if it were a standalone company, would be going out of business.

The only reason the Chronicle is still around is the continuing forbearance of the Hearst Corp., a family-owned, $7 billion-a-year media conglomerate whose other newspaper, magazine and broadcasting interests are sufficiently profitable to effectively subsidize the struggling newspaper.

Not directly related, but worth a read or re-read:

Recovering Journalist: Betting on the Future:

Or this, from a Microsoft exec: "This is about the opportunity," said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division. "We believe that there are tens of billions of dollars in economic value that can be generated in this industry, and we are committed to getting a bigger share of it."

Bingo. We're in the very early stages of Web advertising, and there's nothing but growth ahead. That's what Microsoft, Google and others know, and are betting on--while newspaper execs complain that the online business can't seem to catch up to the losses on the print side.

Oh, and why didn't a big newspaper company, or perhaps a consortium of them, step forward and buy DoubleClick or aQuantive? Good question. It would have been a very smart acquisition, a real bet on the future. The technology companies seem to have that vision. The newspaper companies apparently don't.

A few years ago, I was privy to a conversation among board members of a newspaper-centric media outfit about the possibility of buying a major Web company (I have to fudge a few details here to protect confidences). One short-sighted board member protested, "It would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars." But a smarter exec said, "Yeah, but if we don't do it, in a year it will cost us a couple billion dollars." He couldn't convince the others, and it turns out he guessed low: The Web company was sold a year later for several billion dollars--to another technology company. Once again, the newspaper industry failed to pull the trigger on the future. Some things never change.

Publishing 2.0: The New Vertically Integrated Media And Advertising:

It's clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company - the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google's AdWords created a new model by combining a media company - Google's search results and its network of AdSense affiliate websites - with an advertising agency, i.e. advertisers buy ads directly from Google through its AdWords platform. Google also revolutionized the media and advertising business by introducing a data-driven dynamic marketplace into what had once been a market based largely on human relationships.

Doc Searls: How to Save Newspapers:

Informing is not the same as "delivering information". Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.

What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.

The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.)

norgs.pbwiki.com: The Norgs Unconference Statement Of Principles:

7. The Internet 'disintermediates.' Business models based on scarcity of media and high barriers to production and distribution, are not only threatened, but are terminal. It's change or die time for broadcast TV, traditional record companies, and yes, newspaper companies.

fortuitous: Matthew Haughey: Some Community Tips for 2007 - Seven tips on how to run a successful community

Dare Obasanjo: "Social" is More Important Than "Software" in Social Software

InformationWeek: Cory Doctorow: How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

Derek Powazek: The Real Story of JPG Magazine (Metafilter thread)

Mathew Ingram: Community is the hard part

Jeff Jarvis: Smartest media quote of the year

NYTimes: Clive Thompson: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog

Blog Law: 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

From David Van Couvering 's Blog: Technology as a positive force:

You may have read my blog about my concerns around technology. At the same time, I also believe that if you are conscious and committed and vigilant about how you use it, technology can be a huge enabler for helping make a difference in people's lives. That was actually one of the key reasons I chose computers as a career path when I first started in the mid-eighties.

You are not alone David.

Kent Newsome: A Little Perspective Can Set You Free:

People from my work life have discovered my blog. I knew it would happen when I started doing it. It's always a little scary to put yourself out there. But as Ayelet says, we are who we are, and there is freedom and efficiency in just letting down your guard and trusting yourself. Who we really are is the best resume of all. Other than a few well-meaning jokes about my little online journal, I have never once had a negative reaction to my blog. And I have had more than a few people tell me that it makes them more comfortable to see who I am away from work.

We can't change the blogosphere, and we can't make others embrace our blogging philosophy. What we can do is try to see things from other points of view.

That's what I'm going to do.

That's pretty much where I am, and what I try to do every day. It's good advice, that's hard to keep.

Not all "old media" has turned against "new media". The situation isn't as bad as this discussion on Techmeme may present. Far from it.

Here is, what I am sure, is just a small example: On March 25, 2006 a group of about 40 technologists, bloggers, newspaper and media execs and business leaders got together to discuss the future of journalism and held an unconference in Philadelphia.

The history of the unconference and on going conversation can be found here, but an important artifact of that day has been missing online until now.

A statement of findings by those that came to the unconference and conversed.

There's a lot here to chew on, as it walks the line between recognizing reality and finding a way to meet the needs of the future.

Some will find the following too general to be useful, others will think it nothing more than marketecture-PR-speak, others will be surprised that newspaper folks and bloggers, in a heated, intimate, discussion, came to conclusions as robust as these are.

I tend to think it it was great start, and I am working to gather the sign offs of those who attended the conference on what will be an evolving document.

The Norgs Unconference Statement Of Principles:

1. The 'product' of a newspaper isn't the newspaper. In the sense that the 'product' of a musical act has never been the CD, or the Cassette, or the Album - mediums come and go - the music lives on.
2. Newspapers are aggregates of information *and* relationships.
3. Newspapers have been traditionally bounded by time and space. Inches on paper, space on news stands, the daily news cycle. The Web changes our relationship with time and space. The 'audience' isn't confined by physical boundaries now, neither should the 'newsroom'.
4. Healthy democracies must have informed citizens. The reach and production of acts of journalism plays a major role.
5. Lets be honest, most of the pieces in a newspaper aren't acts of journalism, but these additional bits are almost as important.
6. Newspapers - for a time - defined the 'fourth estate', having near monopoly over attention driving influence. They were influence intermediaries.
7. The Internet 'disintermediates'. Business models based on scarcity of media and high barriers to production and distribution, are not only threatened, but are terminal. It's change or die time for broadcast TV, traditional record companies, and yes, newspaper companies.
8. The Internet and Web are a platform for collaborative communications and social/participatory media. Blogging, Citizen Journalism, message forums, email lists, Usenet, YouTube, Google, Digg, Slashdot, Flickr, Wikipedia, are just some examples of the many.
9. The most successful Web services have recognized and utilized its participatory architecture. It's a read/write Web. eBay, Amazon.com, Slashdot, Yahoo!, Google,MySpace, have all leveraged this and based their businesses upon it.
10. As technical barriers have fallen, and broadband availability widened, different forms of participation have proliferated - text, software, images, music, and now movies.
11. 'Users' of the Web are not passive consumers. They are 'The People Formerly Known as the Audience'. They know more then you do.
12. Acts of journalism can be produced by anyone and the Web blurs distinctions between the professional and the amateur.
13. Producing certain successful (but not all) acts of journalism requires knowledge, skill, infrastructure (legal and financial), marketing and influence.
14. The existence of ever increasing flows of media does not portend the same for acts of journalism.
15. There is no news media versus blogging conflict. Blogging does not remove the pressures that existed on journalistic endeavors - corporations, politicians, forces of power - anyone who wants to manipulate a message - will try to do so.
16. Journalists must become familiar with the medium they are communicating over. Editors have an important new role that will be embraced by someone, if not them.
17. Participating on the Web means more then simply publishing files to a Web server. It means providing a means for those outside the organization, for the community, to participate in what you've published (link to, comment on, extend). It means going out of the confines of your Web presence and participating elsewhere.
18. Authenticity, transparency, voice, and ultimately trust not only matter - they are central.
19. Publishing systems and CMSes must be far more nimble. Stories are no longer static pieces that once published, are of no additional use. Collaboration must be enabled not only across a newsroom, but across the world, especially taking into account a newspaper's existing community.
20. Stories on the Web gain in value long after original publication. It's the economics of the Long Tail. Reference archives - link to individual items prominently!
21. Collections of stories, and our interactions with them, define communities.
22. While birds of a virtual feather may flock together, this presents opportunities for those willing to provide new aggregates of news, opinion, and information.

I think technologists like myself sometimes get confused between something that is potential, versus something that is real.

Small (well not small...) example:

With this personal blog I have the *potential* of reaching anyone - across the entire world - with an Internet connection.

That's amazing when you think about it for more than a split second.

It's easy to get caught up on that empowering potential and miss the hard realities that define it.

Matthew Alvey wrote up a nice profile of me for the Media Giraffe database a while back.

Five completely unrelated posts. Well sorta. Damn I love software engineering....

Coding Horror: JavaScript and HTML: Forgiveness by Default:

...The lesson here, it seems to me, is that forgiveness by default is absolutely required for the kind of large-scale, worldwide adoption that the web enjoys.

The permissive, flexible tolerance designed into HTML and JavaScript is alien to programmers who grew up being regularly flagellated by their compiler for the tiniest of mistakes. Some of us were punished so much so that we actually started to like it. We point and laugh at the all the awful HTML and JavaScript on the web that barely functions. We scratch our heads and wonder why the browser can't give us the punishment we so richly deserve for our terrible, terrible mistakes.

Even though programmers have learned to like draconian strictness, forgiveness by default is what works.

Shelley Powers: Accessibility, Microformats, and RDF as the Bezoar Stone:

...Here I was, tripping along on a well presented argument defining a tricky problem when, bammo: it could have been worse, it could have been RDF.

It's as if RDF has become the bezoar stone of metadata–people invoke RDF to draw out all the evil.

"Ohmigod, an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we're all going to die!"

"It could have been worse. It could have been RDF."

"You're right. Whew! I was really worried for a moment."

Jim Waldo: Jini and OSGi, yet again :

...People would be amazed at how long this discussion has been going on. My first encounter with it happened just before we announced Jini to the world, and was an attempt to make sense of the two technologies with the group that was working on OGSi within Sun. The manager of that group was a guy by the name of Jonathan Schwartz (I wonder what ever became of him?), but the questions were the same that we are seeing now. Jini is a service architecture. OSGi is a service architecture. Both have ways of dealing with services written in Java. So why are their two?

This, of course, is a classic example of what I have called the Highlander Fallacy, which briefly stated is the principle that there can be only one. If any two technologies can be described using the same set of words, then there is no need for both of them, and only one will survive. I call this a fallacy because, to use a technical term, it is total crap. Certainly, there are cases where there are two technologies that are described using the same words where the two technologies actually do the same thing in the same context with the same requirements and the same restrictions. In such cases, having two may be one too many.

But far more often the two technologies are described using the same words because the English language (or any other that I know about) allows very different things to be described using the same terms. Descriptions, after all, have to elide a lot of the detail, and it is often in the detail that the distinctions are to be found. The shorter the description, the more detail is elided. A description like X is a service architecture is so short that almost all of the meaning is elided. There are going to be lots of different technologies that fit this description but that are different enough in the elided parts to make it worthwhile to know, and use, them all.

In fact, OSGi and Jini are service architectures built for completely different contexts. OSGi is a service architecture for services that are in the same address space. It allows you to build programs out of cooperating services. And for that sort of thing, it is pretty good.

Jini is a service architecture for distributed systems that are built out of services that are separated by a network.

James Shore: Continuous Integration on a Dollar a Day:

There's an easier, cheaper way to do continuous integration than using a build server like CruiseControl. In fact, it's so easy, you can start doing it right this second and stop feeling bad that IT hasn't okay'd your request for a build server yet.

(The dirty little secret? What I'm about to tell you is better than using CruiseControl!)

the.codist: All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten:

Programming is complicated stuff, but a lot of what makes a good programmer isn't all that different from the earliest learning we did in school.

Read Christopher Allen's fascinating piece on his blog Life With Alacrity.

The push to have blogs adopt a 'Code of Conduct', including content warnings for visitors, reminds me of the P.M.R.C. and the "Warning, Explicit Content" stickers that are smacked on on just about every album worthy to buy.

I wonder what Frank Zappa would have to say?

Watch the whole Frank Zappa video. Then read Tim O'Reilly's post and comments about the proposed 'Code of Conduct'. Then revisit the conversation taking place about it (more links later). The overtones are there.

Question... where can I find the blogosphere equivalent of the "Filthy Fifteen" so I can subscribe to their RSS feeds?

Update: Frank Paynter has a way forward that sounds right to me - and I think it can still be effective.

Update: I'm not alone in seeing the similarities. I like that icon :)

Update: Additional links and commentary:

Jeff Jarvis: No twinkie badges here.; "This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone - they'll do us the favor - can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it's not. It's a place.

deep jive interests: Why Are We *Still* Confusing "Blogging Code of Conduct" With "Having a Comments Policy"?: What we really mean to discuss is the more mundane aspect of blogging, which is to merely having a comments policy.

Shelley Powers: badges: I've seen as many vicious comments in men's weblogs, as I've seen in women's. I think the perceived 'threat to all women' supposedly inherent in weblogging has been exaggerated-not to our benefit, either.

Boing Boing: Blogger "code of conduct" trades freedom for politeness: Tim O'Reilly's well-intentioned Blogger Code of Conduct is an attempt to come up with a voluntary set of behavioural norms that will keep blogs civil and honest. However, I was very uncomfortable with Tim's draft, as it seemed to preclude real anonymity and invite censorship.

Dan Gillmor: In Blogosphere, Honor Should Rule: They're creating a bit of a monster, as they discuss asking people to put logos on their work defining various categories of behavior. Who'd be the judge of it? The government? Libel lawyers? Uh, oh.

Nicholas Carr: Thanks, Tim and Jimbo!: In the future, blogs that can safely be ignored will be marked with a cute little badge..

Dave Winer: O'Reilly's code of conduct: We all seem to be speaking with one voice today, this code of conduct idea is not a good one.

Robert Scoble: Code of conduct or not?: So, for now, I guess I'd have to wear the "anything goes" badge.

Seth Finkelstein: "Blogging Code of Conduct" - WHO ENFORCES IT?: I am simply shouting to the wind here out of frustration with the failure of blogging to provide any defense whatsoever: WHO ENFORCES THE CODE-OF-CONDUCT?

TNL.net: Blogger's Code of Conduct: a Dissection: Because of such lapses and because I believe that "the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship," I have to say that this code is not only a bad idea but one that should strenuously be rejected by members of the blogosphere.

A comment I left on Tim O'Reilly's post:

"I think I'm still very concerned that saying you take responsibility for the comments on your blog means you actually take *legal* responsibility for them.

The only people who can take such responsibility are those with time on their hands - with money and resources.

Which leads to thinking that only those with money should enable comments on their blog.

Maybe I'm the only one concerned about this angle because I'm the rare exception of someone still in touch with poverty and being poor and folks that aren't tech savy - in this discussion mainly filled with technologists and such.

I'm sorry but that and the addition of the badges make this feel like a form of self-segregation - just another way of identifying 'us' against whomever 'them' is.

Aggregators will be able to use such badging to further filter the Web, keeping other voices from its edges from being heard.

Having commenting policies makes a ton of sense. That's obvious. But what this is evolving into....

I'm sorry, IMHO it's reactive and needs a re-think."

We become part of the stories we discuss on our blogs. We mold, change, and affect the public's perception of the people, places and events we talk about, via Google's lasting, aggregating lens.

More and more evidence points to Jeneane Sessum being unfairly connected to the matters I posted about yesterday and her good name has been drug through the mud. That mud leaving trails all over Google.

As Jeneane says:

There are layers and layers of important issues that intelligent people can tackle and use to make meaning out of this. I hope that effort moves forward.

Me too.

So while folks are discussing the code of conduct suggestions over at Tim O'Reilly's, I'd like to remind folks of The Citizen News Network and Center for Citizen Media project - Principles of Citizen Journalism, and think about that first principal - Accuracy - before passing on information that isn't proven again.

As Scott Karp says, this entire episode illustrates "Why Journalism Matters":

I have been watching in silent horror for days as this drama has unfolded - horror not only at Kathy Sierra's traumatization, but over the total unrestrained free-for-all in the blogosphere. This is a case study in hearsay, innuendo, rumor, defamation, libel, jumping to conclusions and every other negative consequence of unrestrained publishing that the principles of journalism are intended to prevent, and notwithstanding some notable failures, generally do prevent when applied with some seriousness of purpose.

I read dozens of blog posts on this incident, and I still had NO CLUE who might or might not be guilty of what. Each new post I read tangled the web further, layering misinformation on top of disinformation. There was precious little "WHAT do I know" and a whole lot of "WHO do I know and how do I feel about them."

Then I read this article by a JOURNALIST at the San Francisco Chronicle. I can't say for sure whether all of the fact here are straight, but this is the only place I came across that actually attempted to ascertain through a coherent process what the facts might be or to lay out a coherent sequence of events. AND, you'll notice that the only names of those (alleged) to be directly involved in the incident that the article mentions are Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra, both of whom the journalist interviewed and quoted. In the blogosphere, naming names was all about shoot first and ask questions latter.

Update: Anyone can commit acts of journalism. With this story, the fact is, few of us actually did. And the consequences are no good for anyone.

Update: There should be a "Clay Shirky rule" for social software discussion threads...

First person to make a connection to a Clay Shirky piece gets props or insults or something like that....

I bring this up because so much of this series of events recalls an old Clay Shirky piece worth revisiting: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy":

...We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.

Now, there's a large body of literature saying "We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors." Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.

Well worth reading if you never have, or re-reading if you did a long time ago.

The tech blogosphere nudged closer in resemblance to the political blogosphere (actually - the rest of the Internet) this week when Kathy Sierra revealed she was the target of emails and anonymous comments that made her fear for her life. In response she has canceled future conference appearances and may end her participation in the blogosphere entirely.

Kathy Sierra is co-author of a series of a popular technology books, one of which is almost a daily reference for me, "Head First Design Patterns". She maintains a popular blog "Creating Passionate Users" that focuses on social media and software.

This isn't the first time individuals in the tech blogosphere have faced such things. People as diverse as Amy Gahran, danah boyd and Scripting.com's Dave Winer have been the focus of such attacks. Dave Winer has had entire sites devoted to spewing invective his way.

I want to join others and offer my support for Kathy Sierra. No one should suffer under personal attack that threatens ones life. In particular the misogynist nature of the threats Kathy Sierra received were just too vile for description. I hope those that posted death threats are prosecuted.

A distributed discussion sprung up to offer Kathy support and to question the online world we are collectively creating.

It's a conversation that's been brewing for some time, about the validity of anonymous commenting, our responsibility as hosts to encourage environments for open discussion instead of fields for hatred, and how to best achieve these ends while still encouraging open and honest communication.

At its heart - how do you create an environment free from fear and still free? Can you actually pull it off? And can that scale?

Besides the calls for support for Kathy, the ongoing discussion offers both hope and cause for concern.

Some additional details to offer context first:

The anonymous comments were posted to two websites, meankids.org and unclebobism.wordpress.com. Both sites have been taken down. Both, in Kathy Sierra's post, were associated with a number of the digerati, albeit, the digerati's self-critical edge: Cluetrain co-author Chris Locke, Frank Paynter, and Alan Herrell. Frank Paynter says that MeanKids was a "purposeful anarchy" (btw - that is an apt description of the Internet and Web), meant to offer "art and criticism, pointed and insulting satire, but not foster a climate of fear".

Kathy Sierra also mentions Jeneane Sessum who may have posted only once. My take is one or two posts - and even some linkage - don't indicate *any* association with *any* site. I've posted on threads on numerous services I am not associated with. Just because I've written on some service doesn't mean I agree with everything there. Just because I've linked to something doesn't mean I approve of it.

Early on Shelley Powers, while offering her support for Kathy Sierra, expressed concern that anyone in anyway mentioned might be wrongly implicated, and that the distributed nature of the conversation taking place might form a mob that leaves permanent damage to additional people's lives. Compounding the wrong that Kathy Sierra was subjected to.

Doc Searls urged caution in "Getting past the bottom of What Went Wrong":

...It will be easier for everybody if those involved disclose what they know.

My last post before this one was a pointer to the new Principles of Citizen Journalism site. The first principle is Accuracy, and it begins, Getting your facts right isn't always so simple. No shit. But that's what I'm trying to do right now. I suggest the rest of us do the same.

Those fears have appeared justified as Dave Winer notes. See Tara Hunt's post where she leaves accusations that have not been confirmed on her site and accuses the MeanKids maintainers of encouraging such behavior from the anonymous contributors.

Hugh MacLeod describes what he feels happened with a high school metaphor:"OK, so you weren't the actual jock who raped the cheerleader. But it seems you were in the posse circling them, chanting 'Go go go go go go go...' "

Great metaphor. For a different corner of the web (more on that later in this piece). It's a shame that many took this track because it obscures a set of important questions we all need need to ask ourselves:

What responsibility do *we* have over the conversations *we* host and over the environments and tools *we* create? Is attacking people in addition to ideas ever valid? And when we talk about responsibility - what about its two dimensions - Moral and Legal? And just what should the consequences be when we don't live up to those responsibilities? Do we hold a conversation creator responsible for every hatred-poisoned addition to any thread?

Some feel the the criticism of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report towards political punditry like Bill O'Reilly is hateful and encourages malaise. Jon Stewart showed a lot of anger during his visit on Crossfire. Should they be held responsible if someone threatens Bill O'Reilly's life?

Ridiculous you say? Well how about Howard Stern or even South Park? They are routinely accused of inspiring hatred and intolerance towards various religions.

Both the political Left and Right have phrases to try and frame the other side as "mean": the "Hateful Left" and the "Intolerant Right".

Speaking of which, lets try a little closer to home - should a Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs or Markos Moulitsas of of Daily Kos be shamed into obscurity for the hatred that spills out by a minority of commenters on both services?

I bring up these examples not to dissuade thinking about these questions - only to continue the dialog. The dialog about accountability and responsibility - and what it means.

As Antonella Pavese put it:

Should Kathy have refrained from naming names? Perhaps. For one, it would have saved her some grief. Some of the people she mentioned by name seem to be very weakly connected, if at all, with the site. So, we are back to the beginning: we may not have the legal responsibility to be respectful to others, but we do have the social responsibility to think about the consequences that your words and actions have on other people.

danah boyd spoke of social responsibility as well in "safe havens for hate speech are irresponsible":

There's nothing illegal about what the prominent bloggers did, but i think it is unethical at every level. This is not an issue of censorship, but an issue of social responsibility. What does it mean when the most prominent bloggers are encouraging speech that divides, particularly that which divides along the lines of race and gender? What kind of standard does that set? How can anyone support their practices, even as a "joke"? I believe in moral responsibility and key to that is a level of social respect, even for those with whom you disagree. Without social solidarity, the moral fabric of society erodes. When you allow room for intolerance, you breed hate.

"When you allow room for intolerance, you breed hate." is a powerful thought. It's one I believe in.

The trick is in defining "intolerance" - Chris Rock divides by race and gender in almost any comedy routine of his. To powerful effect. The world would be less rich without it.

Others wondered if the entire Internet culture as a whole was to blame, in particular, the way many use it objectify women. See Robert Scoble, whose wife was attacked on MeanKids, in a post that would have left me furious if directed towards my wife Richelle. You can get to that post from Don Park.

Some have characterized Robert Scoble's handling of this as an overreaction. Well his wife was personally attacked. That erases rational thought in a husband. I admit my own hypocrisy here. While I feel he overreacted - if it was my wife - well - I'd react the same way. Hopefully not worst.

If you want a real taste of how women are objectified on the Internet, to see behavior that does resemble Hugh MacLeod's metaphor, well go to WeSmirch or Megite's Entertainment channel (where one of the latest headlines worthy of blog discussion is "Lindsay Lohan's Nipples are Happy to Hang"). Click some links. But watch out, much is not safe to view at work.

These blogs get orders of magnitude more traffic then the tech centric blogs involved in this discussion. In fact, members of the tech centric blogs in this discussion have actually developed and built the tools that enable and empower the services aggregated on Megite or Memeorandum.

Why does it seem that we tech folks think of our corner of the Web is the *only* corner? Memeorandum is a terrific tool that exposes that fallacy. I've criticized it in the past, but to me, it is a valuable tool that exposes major conversations taking place in other "blogospheres" that are not connected to each other via linkage or awareness.

Some see see what happened to Kathy Sierra as a side-effect of anonymity. See Mathew Ingram's post "Kathy Sierra: the dark side of anonymity" and Penny Arcade!'s "Total Fuckwad Theory" for this take.

And maybe in tech discussions, there is no need for anonymity. But in political? In activist? In our rush to condemn anonymous commenting we forget the important role it plays in corners of the Web we don't go to. On Philly Future I've struggled with this and we are going through a period where anonymous commenting is not allowed. But we may open the gates again one day.

Can you have a Craigslist without anonymity? Really?

A few notable folks, like Tim O'Reilly, and previously Anil Dash, have called for an optional code of conduct that participants in the blogosphere can follow and promote.

Doc Searls mentioned The Citizen News Network and Center for Citizen Media project - Principles of Citizen Journalism. Take a hard look with an open mind. If you're committed to providing journalism or punditry online, there you will find a set of values that I feel are worth upholding, and resources to help you pursue them.

Personally, I've always held beliefs akin to Mena Trott:

• It's not about being nice - it's about accountability.


• Ultimately, we need to get more people blogging.

The point I was trying to make in my speech is that it's about taking as much responsibility for what we write online -- whether that's on a blog, in an email message, or on IRC -- as we would in a face-to-face, private conversation. What we say might not always be nice and that's okay. Certainly neither Ben M. saying "this is bullshit" or my calling him an "asshole" would qualify as "nice" -- the important point is taking accountability for what we say.

I think accountability and responsibility is about holding off seemingly anonymous attacks, giving people the benefit of the doubt and understanding that what you say online not only affects others but is part of a permanent record -- a record that, right now, is scary to some watching from afar.

The majority of people in the world aren't blogging yet, and a lot of them could truly benefit from this form of communication. We want them to be a part of our world, not only because we make blogging tools, but because every day we're reminded of people whose lives blogging has enriched or just made more enjoyable.

The irony is - if we all followed that advice - the Web would be a "nicer" place. For all of us.

Far more by Lisa Stone at BlogHer on "Hating Hate Speech: Safety for Kathy Sierra and all women online"

Update: Tim O'Reilly posted some ideas about what a code of conduct might look like. Shelley Powers, Dave Winer, and Don Park share their concerns and objections.

A few of you know me solely from this blog, others from my time at Knight Ridder/Philly.com, others for the conversation I'm helping spawn between technologists, bloggers, and newspaper industry in the Philadelphia region, and many, many others for my hosting of the Philly Future - Philadelphia's blogging community. You might consider me a blog evangelist in the Philadelphia region, however, to the folks who announce "Philly's blog-father is here" when I make it to Philly region blog meetups (which I haven't in ages - but plan on making a comeback to) - ummm... that's nice but it makes me want to run for the hills.

I rarely talk about my employer - Comcast - here on paradox1x.org. Shoot - I rarely talk about it at all. I don't speak for the company and there are better avenues to get customer service then a blog.

However, I *am* qualified to share why I like working for Comcast, and to share a little about what I do (I'm a software engineer, more on that in later posts). Maybe by doing this, just maybe, some of the artificial walls between us may come down, and maybe you'd even want to join the company.

Over the past few months, behind the scenes at work, I've been encouraging teammates to join me by mentioning on their blogs Comcast and CIM.

Today, I'd like to point you towards two of them, Flash gurus both - Gabo, our User Experience Lead at gabocorp.com and Arpit Mathur at code zen. One of the interesting personal projects they are working on is wiring up a Flash UI to Wordpress with XML-PRC - and that's just for fun :) Check out Arpit's review of his last two years at Comcast.net.

Norgs discussion participants Lisa Williams, and Dan Gillmor, along with Jane Mackay produced a must read report that documents a group of newspapers that have either dived in and embraced social/participatory media as part of their mission, or are dipping their toes in the water.

The report shares the tools, methodologies, and approaches these newspapers have taken - along with splashing some cold water on the hype that some of us are apt to shout.

The report includes findings on what works, what hasn't worked, and provides recommendations.

You can read it here: http://citmedia.org/frontiers.

The past few days there seems an opening in the ongoing conversation talking place about speaker lists at tech conferences and their lack of diversity. A subject Shelley Powers has rightly brought up to various of promoters and organizers of conferences to their regular dismay.

Take some time and read around:

Eric Meyer: Diverse It Gets: In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don't feel that I have anything to address next time around. What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That's it.

Shelley Powers: Diversity isn't important...and neither are standards or accessibility: Maybe I've been weblogging too long, but it seems to me that a lot of people are doing a lot of crap in the name of 'marketability'. If you want to be self-serving jerks, that's fine with me, but at least be honest about it: don't wrap it in 'marketability' and think it noble.

Kottke: Gender diversity at web conferences: From this list, it seems to me that either the above concerns are not getting through to conference organizers or that gender diversity doesn't matter as much to conference organizers as they publicly say it does.

Dori Smith: Gender diversity at web conferences: The number of conferences I'm currently scheduled to speak at this year about JavaScript/Ajax is the same as the number of conferences that have asked me to speak - zero. So I have to say that no, these folks aren't even trying.

Anil Dash: The Old Boys Club is for Losers: Those of you who are defending this status quo are defending a culture of failure.

Rafe Colburn : Women and men: Diversity is a worthwhile end unto itself.

Sometimes it requires a series of kicks in the ass to move things forward. As things stand - if tech conferences are a reflection of the Web industry (see Kottke's post for some figures) - then the Web industry is *exclusive* rather than inclusive. A reflection of society's status quo. Vint Cerf, might agree.

Aren't we collectively building an architecture of participation? Our face to face gatherings should mirror that. And if they don't - then they reveal who we truly care about - don't they?

Update - More Links:

Meriblog: Conference Diversity .. the Permathread Returns: There is a distinct and definite business case for diversity.

Anil Dash: The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover: To conference organizers: If you haven't heard of these people or their work, or you think that Yet Another Bookmarking To-Do List Guy is more important, perhaps you owe some refunds.

Personism: List of Women Speakers for Your Conference: Making a list is just a start, but what a freaking list it is. I am psyched.

Shelley Powers: Progress: Consider this: every time this topic comes up, about women in the industry and women in tech conferences, who are the people who get the most links? The most attention? The most respect? Who appear in Techmeme, Tailrank, and Megite? Kottke, Dash, Myer, Messino, Scoble, Searls, Winer-do you see something odd about this? Regardless of how many women write on this, it's the men who get the attention. I'd say if we want to look at what's 'wrong', we start right here.

And with that last insightful quote, human aggregator Karl is ummm... going to spend time with his daughter now. Shelley has a point - a few glances at various aggregators pretty much bore it out today - and all I could think - being the guy I am - is how sadly ironic it was.

Update: More Links

Troutgirl: The gender of conference speakers: With one exception, technical (or tech-biz) conference organizers do NOTHING proactive to seek out or push for female speakers -- and I wish they would just stop claiming that they do. I am a long-time LAMP dev and author, a founding member of Dojo, leader of a Comet project, a proven scaler of graph-based systems, CTO of a venture-backed Web 2.0 company, vocal proponent of women in tech, experienced speaker at technical conferences, and friends with many of the people who program talks, panels, and tracks. If I'm not being proactively sought out to speak, I can be confident few other women are either.

He's going to jail, and there are calls to put him to death. Yet the blogosphere, the Tech blogosphere, the Left blogosphere, and most of the Right, just don't seem to care. Boing Boing has extensive linkage about Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, and what he faces, for sharing thoughts about political oppression, discrimination against women, and more on his blog. Much more at Free Kareem!.

Update: Global Voices has a post sharing other Egyptian bloggers speaking out. via Ed Cone.

Mentions of 'Stormhoek', a South African vineyard that Hugh Mcleod is Marketing Strategist for on his blog: 31.

Hugh public relations is "getting social media all wrong":

...the blogosphere is not a good place to "push" corporate messages.

That being said, the 'sphere does have its uses for corporates, the same way it does for individuals. As I see it, the 'sphere is the world's largest "Idea Incubator". It's a great place to seed ideas. It's a great place to test which ideas have traction, which ideas are "Beyond Lame". Which conversations get people's attention, and which conversations make people roll their eyeballs.

If your ideas have merit, bloggers will talk about them. If they don't, they won't. This lets you know what to expect when you finally unleash your ideas for real on the big, bad world. Without spending a king's ransom finding out the hard way.

It's simple and brutal and it works.

Humpf

Very, very, oh, so very related:

Seth Finkelstein: Pay Per Post And The Populism Pose - Or, Blue-Collar vs. White-Collar Capitalism

Shelley Powers: Falling Out

Mathew Ingram: PayPerPost: a Web 2.0 witch-hunt

Mathew Ingram: Scoble says he’s biased — does it matter?

Publishing 2.0: Transparent Ads Are Better Than Fake "Conversations"

Robert Scoble: Scoble’s a shill … more details

Valleywag: Robert Scoble: Shilling for Intel

Buzzmachine: Pray per post

Hypocrisy. Elitism. Us-people-who-get-it-versus-the-great-unwashed. The-rules-are-different-for-us-then-those-who-are-ugly-and-dumb.

Lost in the discussion about Google changing its algorithm to defeat 'googlebombs', is that it marks a turning point for the search engine - pointing away from a service that that trumpeted democratic means to determine relevancy of links in search results.

Web 2.0 proponents believe that algorithms, when used to achieve such aims, are somehow different then human editors.

They certainly scale better. But goals can be very much the same.

Instead of letting the web inform Google what *it* wants, Google has started to second guess the web. Maybe it has all along and PageRank was nothing more then a marketing message. I don't think so. I think what we're seeing here is a passing to be mourned.

Nick Carr puts it clearly in his Guardian piece:

...One of the company's top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: "Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)

The company is allowing concerns about its public image to influence the search results it dishes up. The upshot in this case may be salubrious, but what kind of precedent is being set here?

And, perhaps more important, what does it tell us about what's inside the Google black box that determines how most of us find information on the web most of the time?

Three years ago, when Google was first asked about Googlebombing, it gave the corporate equivalent of a shrug. It's not our problem, the company's technology director, Craig Silverstein, told the New York Times. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web, for better or worse."

The implication was that Google's search engine was a passive feedback mechanism that reported the public's wisdom - or stupidity - back to the public. Reflecting all the strengths and flaws of democracy, it was the people's machine. Google itself had little control over it. (nytimes.com)

The perception of Google as an honest broker, disinterested in the information it presents, remains a popular one. We like to believe that "we the people" control what comes out of Google's mouth.

But while that may have been true once, and while it was in fact one of the company's founding ideals, it's not so true any more.

Not so long ago, technology pundits marveled at how Google enabled a group of bloggers to influence the meaning of the words 'Second Superpower':

...Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.

Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.

To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.

You're especially susceptible to this if you subscribe to the view that Google's PageRank™ is "inherently democratic," which is how Google, Inc. describes it.

Make no mistake, Second Superpower was a Googlebomb, that for now, still lives. But probably not for much longer.

Hey, I could be wrong. I'm not a search engineer. Search engineers worship the alter of relevancy above all else. And 'miserable failure' certainly was incorrectly defined - in a strict sense - by the linking web public. Like 'second superpower'. But that was our linking influence that Google once let us wield. No longer it would seem.

Update: Seth Finkelstein comes by and mentions that the algorithm won't eliminate the Second Superpower google-bomb *itself* due to the fact that the author probably didn't mind it so much since the piece uses the text 'Second Superpower'. Understood. And that's not the point I was trying to make. The point is that the 'Second Superpower' is no more. The web - as a voting public, with linkage, now has less influence to define and redefine language, meaning and ultimately - drive attention. That maybe a good thing in terms of quality of search results. But that doesn't celebrate or further the fabled 'democratic' nature of the web that Google once trumpeted as its means to its end. Another classic google-bomb that will probably disappear: santorum.

Google now makes it easy to read ratings, reviews and other associated information about businesses you find on Google Maps. Google has taken its usual approach of aggregating the participation of multiple services and communities across the web to provide a fast way to consume related information. It's an impressive effort since no metadata or microformat standards exist that make it easy to produce.

Lets use a local Philadelphia business, the Khyber rock club as an example, to contrast and compare Google's approach with that of its competitors.

Click to open a new window: Google Maps page for the Khyber.

It's a very tight page featuring most of what you need to know about the Khyber at a glance. Contact information. Hours of operation. Reviews and ratings posted from various services across the web, including Citysearch and Yelp. There is a details page with aggregated information about the Khyber including the club atmosphere. There is a link for me to go to the Khyber's home page, but at this point, do I need to? I have the many of the vitals I need right here. Except for an events listing.

Now lets check out Citysearch.com and AOL's Digitalcities entries on the Khyber. Citysearch and Digitalcities have been around for as long as I can remember.

Click to open a new window: Citysearch Khyber page

Click to open a new window: AOL Digital Cities Khyber page

Both Citysearch and Digitalcities incorporate hosted user communities to provide ratings and reviews, these accompany information provided by editors and the businesses themselves. The additional information, which in this instance includes an Events listing - very important for this kind of business - makes them well rounded resources. There is even less reason here for me to visit the Kyber home page.

The last two services I want to compare are Yahoo!'s and Yelp's entries for the Khyber. First Yelp.

Click to open a new window: Yelp Khyber page

Yelp's page on the Khyber is information sparse. No editorial reviews. No business provided information. No information aggregated from any other source. Businesses do have the capability to add some basic info to their Yelp page however.

What you do find is an intense social networking focus. Yelp encourages reviewers to maintain profile pages like those you would maintain on Digg, Facebook, Myspace, etc. The kind of information you would share on your own personal blog if you had one. The intersection of sharing local places and services you use, with social networking, provides social opportunities along the lines of MySpace.

So is Yelp a good place to learn about businesses in your area? Maybe. In comparison with Google Maps or Citysearch? No. But it maybe a good service to meet people.

Lastly, lets look at Yahoo!. Yahoo, provides elements of *all* of the previously mentioned services. Aggregated reviews. Editorial content. Some social networking. But participation is lacking. I get no sense of an existing Yahoo! local community I want to interact with.

Click to open a new window: Yahoo! Khyber page

Some thoughts

Local newspapers have been urged by many to go 'hyper-local', precisely because they used to have the market cornered for such information. Each of these services attempts to be a regional information and community home page and if the papers don't look out, these services will eat the last of their lunch left over by Craigslist.

If you're a local business owner, you have to be concerned. Why? Because these pages are indexable by search engines and will compete with your own home page for visibility in search result placement. Where before a local business would only need to concern itself with an advertisement in the Yellow Pages, and local advertising, now it must gain competency in online marketing to compete for attention-share across enumerable services. It's a whole lot more work. And if your product isn't one that is globally deliverable - lets say - pizza - then that work offers no real reward for effort.

Yahoo! is a sad case. If it leveraged Flickr, deli.icio.us, upcoming.org and its other engaged online communities in a coordinated fashion, could be a winner here, but for now, especially since search is the biggest 'front door' to this kind of information, it's Google for me.

And I'd be at Yelp if I was single or looking to network with others.

Update 2/2/07: It looks like Yahoo! is working on *exactly* what I suggested above! GigaOM: Yahoo tests Local mashups. I wonder how long they are going to take before rolling this out. Like Om, I think missing Yahoo! Map integration is a mistake. That, and adding Yahoo! local and Yahoo! Answers to the mix, could make it a useful service to any particular region.

Nick Douglas, at Valleywag has a concise list of services to visit to get a daily dose of tech/social software/media business news. He suggests using a feed reader to save time if you're so inclined.

Here goes a simpler suggestion - visit OriginalSignal.com and Popurls.com.

There you will be able to scan the latest stories published by the services Nick Douglas mentions (except for Paul Kedrosky - bookmark him or subscribe), plus those of many more.

And it will take you less than 5 minutes.

Publishers of tech biz-news news have embraced RSS and Google, and have adapted their writing styles to suit. This has created the opportunity for services like OriginalSignal and Popurls to coalesce conversation in this niche and provide useful filters for news and information flowing around it.

There are *only two* reasons to visit tech biz-news services when simple views into whats being talked about on them - right now - like OriginalSignal - exist: to read the rest of stories that catch your interest (not as necessary since most follow a terse, fact based/keyword rich headline/lede style to improve their their standing in search engines), and to participate in related discussion threads.

OriginalSignal and PopUrls provide a convenient front door for both purposes.

It's a blessing for consumers of this kind of news and information. I wonder how publishers plan to make money if services like OriginalSignal and Popurls proliferate.

So save yourself the time spent following separate tech-biz news services and spend that time being creative.

Placeblogger, an effort by The Center for Citizen Media, Pressthink, and Lisa William's H20town launched on New Years. It's focussed on sharing with you blogs that cover a geographical region. I believe this will grow to be an important service over time. And I gotta admit - it is great to see so many ideas expressed from Philly Future adopted in a national effort. (disclaimer - they might make me an honorary adviser due to influence). Read Pressthink for more.

Placeblogger, an effort by The Center for Citizen Media, Pressthink, and Lisa William's H20town launched on New Years. It's focussed on sharing with you blogs that cover a geographical region. I believe this will grow to be an important service over time. And I gotta admit - it is great to see so many ideas expressed from Philly Future adopted in a national effort. (disclaimer - they might make me an honorary adviser due to influence). Read Pressthink for more.

RawSugar, a service that has been compared as a del.icio.us competitor, but in actuality had a number of great differentiating features, is in funding trouble. My friend Bill Lazar has some to say about this, as a do a few folks like Steve Rubel.

RawSugar isn't dead, nor does it deserve to be. One feature it has - the capability to consume and coalesce your personal content streams and tag them - is one that I feel should be adopted by other social media. I was planning to figure out how to leverage it - finally - when the news broke over the holiday. Notice my experimenting with del.icio.us in my right hand menu.

RawSugar, to me, is a victim of two things: 1. A UI that hides the good stuff. It's front door is little more than a pitch/splash page when it should surface the activity taking place within. 2. A lack of attention in the online press - grassroots and otherwise. No matter what anyone says - there is only so much attention to go around and only a few people who have direct influence over it. Without their attention influence as a help - it takes a groundswell approach - vast numbers of those with lessor influence - helping spread word. It's possible. But far more difficult. Hence the demand to get noticed by blogs like Techcrunch. Being labeled too easily as a "del.icio.us" competitor - unfairly since it has a host of differentiators - didn't help either.

I hope they get some funding. In the meantime, Bill is up for some new opportunities.

There is a spammer who has targeted this blog and I accidentally removed valid comments. Apologies.

One of the ideas that gets branded about whenever slumping circulation numbers are screamed from headlines, CD sales are found to be tanking, movie ticket sales slumping, or broadcast TV viewers disappearing, is the notion that because the Web disintermediates the middle-man between content creator and content consumer, people are going to the Web and abandoning "traditional" media.

There is some truth in that to be sure, but there is also truth in that human nature abhors a vacuum. We seek out sources of information and entertainment we decide to trust. And as such, the Web has always created a new opportunity for intermediaries, bundlers of information and entertainment, and aggregators to help manage the flow we partake in each day.

A simple out of the box example - What is a good link blogger like Eschaton, other then an aggregator of sorts?

How about YouTube? What of Google or Yahoo!?

Something to chew on as you read the following stories:

paidContent.org: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment (source for the graphic)

Philly Future: MyFox Philadelphia - Fox News Wants Your Blog

Philly Future: DigPhilly.com - NBC 10 Wants Your Blog (includes a who-who in local social media efforts)

Washington Post: Howard Kurtz: At the Inquirer, Shrink Globally, Slash Locally?

Center for Citizen Media: Newspaper as Blog Portal

GigaOM: The Content Aggregators and the Fat Belly

Last week a prime example of the utility and the need, for news organizations like those in our newspapers, played out in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer as it reported on mismanagement in Philadelphia's Department of Human Services.

Mismanagement that has led to up to five children deaths in 2006.

In the report's wake, two officials have been ousted and workers are left up in arms and in disarray, organizing a huge protest last Friday.

Contract negotiations are taking place at the Inquirer and Daily News, in the midst of huge shifts in the newspaper marketplace. Shifts that have been taking place for sometime now, shifts that force the issue - newspaper companies must change their business models or die.

Knight Ridder papers responded to changing marketplace, the past six years, with ever shrinking budgets, ever tightening belts, and consolidation of resources and empowerment in the hands of the few. The culmination of which was the fire sale that took place over the past year.

In Philadelphia a sense of optimism sprung as it was a group of local business leaders that purchased the papers. They talked of investment, and a recognition that further cuts were almost impossible to make.

So you gotta give the Daily News's Will Bunch a pass for the bleak tone in his latest piece on the situation at the papers and the industry at large. I'm reflecting his irony here. This post being an echo of his in a sense.

How could he not feel that way with the memo him and other Philadelphia Media Holdings employees received Friday? A memo that sounded, I bet to his ears, all too familiar.

While saving the paper isn't about saving jobs - it is about investment. Bold bets. A look towards the future. That's hard to do with less and less resources, with folks busy just trying to keep up.

There is massive opportunity for the papers to reinvent their business models. And there are folks at the papers with the knowledge and wherewithal to do it (read all of Will's post). But time is running out.

----------------------------------------

More at PJNet by Leonard Witt.

To Susie Madrak, who said goodbye her father last weekend. Read her tribute to him. If you don't know her, you are missing out on knowing a special, passionate soul. Her part in running the Norgs unconference was central to it being a success, in every way.

And to my friend Lynne, who lost her grandson this weekend.

My heart goes out to you.

• Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock and everyone's hearts are a flutter. There's been much grousing about what this means (see Memeorandum), but like damn near always, I find what's missing is a historical perspective. Google acquired large particiaptory media companies in the past. Think Blogger. Think DejaNews. This fits what has always been in the company's DNA. A recognition that the web is social software. The frightening thing is that companies are liable to take the wrong lessons from this. Time for everyone to take a deep breath. For some interesting thoughts see Scott Karp, Scott Rosenberg, Niall Kennedy, Susan Mernit, lostremote, Jeff Jarvis, and Don Dodge.


• ONA sounded like it was a success this year, where real progress was made and minds opened.
  
  Jeff Jarvis called it "The death of Eeyore", sharing the optimism and passion he noticed at the conference.
  
  But it had to happen. Someone had to go back to that tired fiction,that tired lie - that of a 'fight' between blogging and journalism. This time it came from a blogger - Mike Arrington, of Techcrunch - who talks about it, from his point of view on his blog.
  
  It's clear that from Jeff's perspective, and Staci's at paidContent,Arrington turned it into a polarized circus, and helped make bloggers look bad.
  
  Mike Arrington doesn't speak for the rest of us folks. Take note of Staci's and Jeff's reactions. We gotta continue to build bridges of understanding - not walls.
  
  Amy Webb was there and thought that papers might be looking to hard at video as a savior.


• Speaking of building bridges of understanding - Doc Searls has a set of ten tips for newspapers, that sound very much in line with what we've been discussing here. It's a good read, even if you find yourself nodding in agreement the whole time.


• Jay Rosen's Q & A at Slashdot is a real must read. He answers, in depth,questions about NewAssignment.net, Citizen Journalism and the news industry.


• Rebecca Blood, talking about product customer service, and a concrete example with United Airlines, explains how Social Media Works.


• A long piece, that I have yet to read, but which looks to have much to chew on, is Alice Goldman's paper (of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law) Community Node-Based User Governance: Applying Craigslist's Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance.

Did Hugh MacLeod just illustrate my blog?

I think I'm honored.

(posted while singing "You're So Vain" to myself...)

Ross, a friend of mine, details his experience getting to Digg's home page. He's surprised at the small number of negative comments posted (it was a how-to on motion detection and your webcam). I'm not. Ross can write a how-to better then anyone I know.

I'm happy to share that eRobin and her Fact-esque is our latest featured blog at Philly Future. Fact-esque has a strong focus on election reform issues, including electronic voting machines, and local Bucks County politics and news.

Make sure you check out Civil Defense, the latest blog featured at Philly Future. Better yet, spread word and expand the online discussion.

Reuters has donated $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, enabling it to hire its first editor. Jay Rosen:

It's going to be a fun job. This is editing horizontally amid journalism gone pro-am. The idea is to draw "smart crowds" - a group of people configured to share intelligence - into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren't getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that's most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the "pro-am" part.

NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it's closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. As today's announcement shows, New Assignment can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant.

Read the rest of Jay Rosen's thoughts about the development over at Comment is free.

* NewAssignment.net has launched a blog and is looking for potential stories to cover. Mark Glaser has been surveying folks at MediaShift and it looks like they want to see the U.S. Government as the focus of any investigative reporting. I've been asked to help advise NewAssignment.net. Finding models to pay for acts of investigative journalism is crucial. If, in any way I can help, I am happy to do so.

* keepgoing.org: The Big Fish: The story of Suck.com, it's rise and eventual fall, is chock full of early web publishing lessons. Suck (and Feed) are two efforts that don't get mentioned very often in these conversations, since they no longer exist, but maybe should.

* Mark Glaser: News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?: Last year the Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation joined with five journalism schools in pledging $6 million dollars to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Education - News21. It's already producing results and lessons.

* Tom Mohr, formerly of Knight Ridder Digital, has a solution for the newspaper industry's woes: and it sounds suspiciously like recreating the Market Leader CMS platform and Knight Ridder Digital.

* Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post, describes a fundamental way newspaper sites need to change. It costs money, but the end result is an investment that will help papers be far more flexible in their reporting.

Hey - what's a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.

That's the composition of speakers at an upcoming Office 2.0 conference.

WTF?!?

Read Shelley Powers and Jeneane Sessum.

Edit: I removed an unfunny reference. This isn't subject matter to take lightly.

Having one woman speaker among so many men seems shortsighted, and honestly - weird. It's especially a shame, because the subject matter being covered is important not only to enterprises, but small and home businesses.

I'm rather disappointed in the round of discussion I'm reading following Ryan Carson's piece at Vitamin: "Why I don't use social software".

It's a thought provoking piece, but along with responses to it I've read, from Phil Edwards, Nick Carr, Mathew Ingram, Kent Newsome, for example, they seem to share the same fallacy - that social software is new. That it is a recent phenomenon. That what Digg, del.icio.us, Netscape.com, and MySpace represent is something fundamentally different then what's come before and that we need to beware the hype.

Just like these writers, I'm tired of the hype as well, but to suggest that these services represent something new, is to fall for it. Even to inflate it. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, it would appear, agrees. From the article's referenced transcript :

LANINGHAM: You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?

BERNERS-LEE: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SVG and so on, it's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.

So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.

To ask if "Social Media" is a passing fancy is to ask if Amazon.com or eBay are passing fancies. To ask if Slashdot is a passing fancy. To ask if the Web itself is a passing fancy.

As I mentioned over in Nick Carr's comment thread, these aren't the examples branded about by the media, or by the digerati these days.

The conversation seems to have no groundings in what's come before, and in what's already been established:

Those who remember the empowering effects of Netscape and the moment email became more than just borrowing your mate's CompuServe account at work will also recognize such blanket assertions of historical revisionism for what they are.

The fact is the most successful web services - since the beginnings of the web - were social software applications. The Web's participatory architecture lends itself to them. It's always been a Two Way web as Dave Winer would say.

We're simply seeing an evolution of what's come before. The revolution is that so much of it has become mainstream (MySpace is mainstream) and the barriers to launching a service that incorporates participation have fallen so low. Not that there is some new fangled set of features that everyone must go out and implement to stay relevant.

Knocking some hot air out of the hype is warranted. Some of these newer services resemble those dot coms that launched in the late nineties that didn't grasp what Amazon.com, eBay, Blogger, and others, were *really* doing. You know, those sites that thought if they had a clever domain name, niche, and a particular set of features, they were on their way to riches.

And it looks like today's media hype resembles that late nineties hysteria in more then a few respects. Just listen to Rob Hersov, then boss of Sportal, in a Guardian look back on the Dot Com Crash:

Those were incredibly heady days," he says. "Fun - absolutely. We thought we were making a difference. We thought we were getting out there, shaking things up, doing something no one had done before. We really were pioneers - buccaneers.

Sounds familiar doesn't it?

But there is something to be concerned about here. That the words "social software" and "social media" become part of a lexicon that represents a massive failure up the road. And that will obscure an important set of truths.

I worked for a company, which was already far ahead of the curve, prior to the Dot Com Crash. It looked at the failures of that era as an indicator that the Web as a whole wasn't a place to continue to invest as heavily.

What a mistake that was. And now it no longer exists.

By and large it was "social media" that survived the original dot com crash. And I expect that, by and large again, the best "social media" will survive whenever next bubble pops.

So when the next time of reckoning comes, and it will, look at what lives on. And think about why.

Burn this in your brain - the Web *is* social software.

And re-read "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" while you're at it.

For information, see this site.

Lisa Williams: What if citizen journalism is just a mirage?

Jeff Jarvis: Networked journalism at work

Meet them over at Doc Searls's.

VideoJug. Neat. Check it out.

VideoJug. Neat. Check it out.

The same economic drivers that are disrupting the newspaper industry, indeed any industry built on the distribution and packaging of creative acts that can be transmitted digitally, on the Internet, are the same.

I don't think it's all that different whether you are talking about newspapers, music, radio, TV, or movies.

Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine for some time now. These past few years they have been finding new ways to fund their art and reach fans and new audiences. God knows the previous arrangement's math didn't favor them anyway.

The important thing - from records, to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, and now to mp3s, it's the music that survives.

And it is going to thrive. No matter what naysayers may believe. The industry, on the other hand, has been and continues to be transformed. The economics have irrevocably been changed.

This while the news paper industry is still flailing about. In some instances working to produce less of its core product, in pursuit of profit.

Then again, what is the product? Is it the package (CDs in the music industry, the morning paper in the newspaper industry), or what is contained within?

The web presents a true medium to re-invigorate democracy. It's a participatory architecture, built for collaboration and communication above all else. Every person that is on the web expands its usefulness, and presenting new opportunities to connect, converse and share.

So if you consider the product of the papers news and opinion, you'll see the monolithic fourth estate crumbling as either a sign for alarm or celebration. With us barbarians at the gates. Unlimited choice, simple to use tools to find and share information and opinion, being the unintentional weapons.

The primary difference between losing the music industry and losing the work of newspapers is that we still need systems to research, filter, and present the news in a way that is beneficial in our lives. For our livelihoods. There are dire consequences to democracy, if we continue down a path of more media, less news and not find systems for people to deal with the ever growing fire house of information we are hit with day in and day out. I think we are already feeling some of the effects.

There is hope. But the choice for the newspaper industry remains as stark as Kent Newsome laid out for the music industry - find new business models or hold on as tight as you can until the well dries up.

Some in the industry know this already and are facing the future with open eyes and open minds. The new, local ownership of Philadelphia's largest dailies might result in nimbler, more responsive, more participatory media. And conversations are underway exploring new infrastructures to support acts of journalism.

Others? Well hopefully Nick Lemanns of the world learn to recognize that the best way to move reporters to the web is to embrace the web as the participatory media it is. That the web, while offering challenges, presents terrific needs that journalists can fulfill. But it requires building bridges. And fast.

In-depth journalism requires legal, financial and information infrastructure. No one has solved these issues in a way that leverages the participatory nature of the web and has solved the funding equation. That's why efforts like NewAssignment.Net are so crucial. Its work to put together a path is one to watch, and one to take part in. Tools like Memeorandum and Bloglines, along with plumbing like RSS and Atom, along with participatory news filters like Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, IndyMedia and Philly Future, early news magazine efforts like Salon, Slate and Suck, and early newspaper efforts, many of which are lost to the nineties dot com crash, provide us with additional lessons to learn from. Not to mention the millions of blogs, and social networking users, many who have participant loyalty, that for some, rivals the relationships newspapers have forged with their readers. And what about Wikipedia?. These early efforts will help lead the way, but that's no reason to sit on your hands. In this environment, those that wait too long for others to lead, will die.

Other stories of note this weekend:

Washington Post: An Eye for Cool, and Cash: Social news sites paying people to write. Imagine that!

paidContent: Advertisers Will Follow Audiences

NYTimes: What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse: Knight Ridder was ahead of the Internet curve, back in 1996. It even beat a threat from Microsoft (Sidewalk) remember. What happened?

Did I get a decent answer? Judge for yourself. It was, understandably a question with many dimensions and having no easy answer whatsoever. That's why I asked it. What I found fascinating however, was that some gave it a shot anyway. And if there is to be any solution or set of solutions, open discussion will be a major part of it.

There is a small work flow issue with Yahoo! Answers. Unanswered questions that linger do not get the visibility they might require and as such, do not get the number of answer attempts as new question submissions do.

The online world owes a great deal of debt to America's Funniest Home Videos don't it?

:)

This graphic is one a great many clarifying ones you'll find on David Armano's Logic+Emotion. His "Visualizing the Social Network" is on my wall at work to trigger conversation.

Some are going to look at this graphic and see a suggestion that the blogosphere is a "pyramid scheme". On the other side of the fence, this particular post is bound to upset certain myth pushers. When I see it, I can't help but think it upholds both Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and well almost every list on Technorati (just replace "authority" with "influence").

I've made the point before that what linkage helps bestow a blog (linkage alone isn't enough) isn't authority (no one has authority on the web), but "attention influence". The thing to note is the importance of the number of links is relative to the community of interest. If you work within a small niche, then having just two or three inbound links by fellows participating in your niche will go a long way to have voice there. As Jeff Jarvis says, small is the new big. He's right.

Dave Rogers puts it like like this:

It's a competitive world, and the blogosphere is no different. Some people have little stomach for competition. I'm ambivalent about it myself. If I have to play, I play to win. I'm not playing this game. If you want to have a large audience and be influential, you have act like a jackass sometimes to get attention, much like a certain high attention-earning weblogger whose initials begin with the same letter that jackass starts with. There's no shortage of that going on. You have to kiss up and piss down. You'd think that it would help if you're intelligent and write well, but there are quite a few high attention-earners who exhibit neither of those qualities. A gift for the good snark or sly put-down helps. Or maybe you can make scribbles, or wear a skirt (that only helps if you're a male). It helps if you have A-list patrons who'll transmit trust and authority to you. It also helps if you flog the popular memes, and endorse the ideas and metaphors of the A-list. Taking off your clothes has helped some. You can be a contrarian, but you'll get a ration of shit from the conventional authorities who will call you names and invite you to sit down and shut up, so come to that party with a thick skin.

In short, you'll pretty much have to sell your soul. But, if you work really hard at all that, and are more than a little bit lucky, you'll have your audience, your influence and your authority. Maybe you'll have your dignity, but that seems like an optional commodity these days. I guess the thinking is that you earn that back once you make the mainstream media circuit.

Now, some of the earliest bloggers didn't have to sell their souls. They earned their trust and authority when there was relatively little competition, and some of them sound as though they don't like the game much anymore either. But you already know the problem with the rat race - only the rats win. Welcome to the world.

Finding the old Wayne's World trailer on YouTube was sublime.

Don't you think the story line - new medium enables amature to reach many, the amature gets lured by money and power the big corps offer, disillusion follows, and wisdom (well that's one of the endings) results - timely?

It both marked the end of the 80s metal subculture I grew up in, and foretold the rise in participatory media.

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin thought the idea of "Wayne and Garth's late-night, public-access television show, the one they do from the sofa in Wayne's basement, is so good that a wily television executive (Rob Lowe) will scheme to exploit their commercial potential" strained the movie's credibility.

Heh. No foresight that one.

Finding the old Wayne's World trailer on YouTube was sublime.

Don't you think the story line - new medium enables amature to reach many, the amature gets lured by money and power the big corps offer, disillusion follows, and wisdom (well that's one of the endings) results - timely?

It both marked the end of the 80s metal subculture I grew up in, and foretold the rise in participatory media.

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin thought the idea of "Wayne and Garth's late-night, public-access television show, the one they do from the sofa in Wayne's basement, is so good that a wily television executive (Rob Lowe) will scheme to exploit their commercial potential" strained the movie's credibility.

Heh. No foresight that one.

There are those that want to believe that in life, skill and good works are all it should take. That if you are the most kick ass guitarist in the world, that playing in your bedroom should be enough to alert the world to your talent.

Well we know the world doesn't work that way. We wish it weren't so, but it's just the way it is. But that doesn't stop some from perpetuating a belief that the web is different. That the web is "flat". That every link is worth the same as the next. You get a taste of this whenever someone says that good content alone is the way to web super-stardom. If you are a great writer, and know your subject matter, that's all that counts, they say.

A basic understanding Google's PageRank algorithm lays this fallacy bare: "Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.". All links are not equal according to Google.

Worst, and kinda ironic, you hear these sets of belief by some who profess to believe in the the mathematics of The Long Tail of the web. That really makes me do a double take, because a key tenet of it is that those in "head" have more attention giving influence then those in the "tail". That attention flows in certain directions that can be be observed as behaving along a power law.

Clay Shirky nailed this a long time ago in a piece that was once oft quoted, yet you never see his essay mentioned by these folks since.. well it hurts. If you believe that the web changes human nature for the better in any shape fashion or form, Shirky's piece can shake you a bit. Hugh MacLeod summarized it as Shirky's Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two".

That's the web. That's everyday human existence for that matter. It's always a struggle amongst the three.

But do not despair - the Long Tail suggests power laws, on the web, are actually okay and present opportunities. The web, instead of representing one channel of attention, is a mass of niches. That there is no A-List, but multiple A-Lists. That's something Jeff Jarvis is fond of saying. Working a niche begins to make sense since attention - the real currency of the web - has zero shelving space needs and services exist which make it easy for those seeking out their passions and concerns, no matter how out of the *current* mainstream. Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" put it like this: "The Long Tail is a powerlaw that isn't cruelly cut off by bottlenecks in distribution such as limited shelf space and available channels.".

Our attention isn't an inexhaustible resource. We have only so much to give. So we naturally seek filters for it since so much in our world demands to have it. One of those ways is by trusting the word of mouth of friends, family, co-workers, and those we perceive as experts.

Dave Rogers ran some searches and shed some light on Seth Finkelstein, and his chosen niche subject, censorship, of which he is an expert in research, and how much influence he's been assigned by Doc Searls. If you are a follower of Doc Searls, you would know little of Seth Finkelstein's knowledge and work in researching censorship.

I would like to see a search on the word "censorship" and an account of how many times Seth and Doc get inbound links for it. And by whom. Because if the community that concerns itself with censorship, links to Seth as an expert on the subject more often then Doc, the Long Tail theory, that power laws are okay on the web - is true. That Seth is the A-Lister in *that* community. I believe this to be the case, but am too lazy to do the work. Anyone up for the challenge? Update: See further down this post for more.

In either case, I really wish folks that sling the bullshit that the web is "flat" would stop. Especially by those that trumpet The Long Tail theory. Sure no one is stopping anyone from writing anything. That's not the point. The point is that it's a fallacy to believe that being an expert in your space and writing good content *alone* is enough to be seen or heard on the web.

Following are some opinions from fellow realists:

Seth Finkelstein: Bogospheric Calvinism, or Unread != Unworthy:

Frankly, I don't know how to reform society, even the bogosphere, to make it more egalitarian. And my own activism efforts have ended pretty badly overall for me. But (not singling out any individual person here, but making a general statement) the standard A-list reactions of denying the mathematics and attacking the critics, are not a solution.

Dave Rogers: What Can't Be Fixed:

The point is, some amount of the attention and trust resources of the blogosphere at large are distributed arbitrarily or randomly, whimsically even, through the reading and linking habits of high attention-earning bloggers.

It's not equal, it's not flat, and it's not fair. In other words, it's just like the world at large, and technology does not change that. Whether I like it or not, my product consumption habits support companies that perhaps don't treat their employees the way we believe they ought to be treated. Short of taking a vow of asceticism, or investing significant amounts of time in investigating the origins of all the competing products I might have use for, I can't change that.

Whether Doc likes it or not, his reading and linking habits help to distribute the attention and trust resources of the blogosphere at large in an unequal and unfair way, and short of investing significant amounts of time into finding, reading and evaluating somehow, the relative merits of unknown bloggers, he can't change that.

Doesn't make either of us bad persons, just people existing in an imperfect and unfair world.

Shelley Powers: Eat the Red Couch:

I could respond in depth, like I�ve responded elsewhere this week, hopefully with something learned sounding and impressive but then I thought: why waste my time? Why not just have some fun, and say whatever the hell I want and we�ll all have a giggle, which is probably a lot better use of our time anyway.

And finally, last word to Kent Newsome, who kicked off this latest discussion about the A-List: Of Shel and Chip and Seth and Nick:

I'm not so much interested in having the blogosphere operate differently as I am in calling bullshit when people try to say it operates differently than it actually does.

What gets my dander up is when someone like Mike (and Shel for that matter) who got to the top of the hill, in part, due to relationships with the Scobles and Winers of the world, tries to say the blogosphere is an equal opportunity place.

It ain't. Life ain't either. It's OK that they ain't, as long as you don't try to pretend they are.

Update: Seth replies in my comments (paraphrasing, read the whole thing):

The problem is that THE POWER LAW APPLIES PER-TOPIC!

Repeat: THE POWER LAW APPLIES PER-TOPIC!

The logical fallacy runs like this:

Hype: The web is flat.

Refute: No, the web is exponentially distributed in terms of attention.

Fallacious Rebuttal: That exponential distribution of attention is a first approximation of overall attention. But even though the first approximation refutes the first evangelism sales-pitch, I'm going to try to pretend that the first approximation shouldn't be taken to be meaningful because of the very fact that it is a first approximation, and the full structure is more complicated. By saying attention is finely divided, I'm going to imply to you that the exponential distribution law of attention is inapplicable, because that may be able to delude you into believing you can get some attention when the fact is the exact same law of exponential distribution applies. I'll repeat endlessly that there's niches, and hope you won't notice that I'm implying those niches are *flat*, which is the same sales-pitch which worked on you before.

So, to apply this to myself, I *KNOW* I'm in a niche. I've never had realistic ambitions for more. But it's the same issue *within* that niche. My problem is specially the gatekeepers within that niche, and for reasons well-explored elsewhere, quite a few of them are very clear I'm disfavored to pass through the gates (Slashdot being the more infamous example of this, as well as, later, Berkman). And blogging doesn't help, arguably it hurts in several ways (depressing, wastes time and energy, makes more detractors than supporters, etc).

You don't need to do any experiment. IT'S BEEN DONE! :-(

Paraphrasing my reply:

Yeah, I wouldn't buy that any one particular niche is "flat" either. That would be more bullshit.

What a terrific post Seth. It justifies Dave Rogers when he talks about human nature and technology.

When you get into a niche, into a real conversation/argument, it gets down to personalities and relationships - who is willing to reciprocate, listen, and give credit to whom.

...So, here goes a net-centric argument. The "web routes around damage argument". I don't believe the web does on its own. It requires humans to make it so. The web is made of people as I am fond of saying.

Slashdot was one route to do this back in 2003. Today there is Digg, Newsvine, del.ico.us, Yahoo MyWeb, and other services where your work could have been shared - right past the gatekeepers of your niche's community.

I think tools like these are at their best when used to spread word of items the mainstream - and the gatekeepers of the smallest niche are what I would call the 'mainstream' in this case - misses - or actively wants to suppress.

Then there are other blogs of course.

I don't have time to spread word of Philly Future, and know jack shit about marketing. Our service suffers because of it. I know - I KNOW - that we will be overtaken by a competitor, if I don't find a way to make up for the lack of effort on these counts. Not only that, but our story will be forgotten.

You never hear about Philly Future and 'hyperlocal' blogging do you? Yet I started the site back in December 1999!

I partially blame myself, as I know you do on this score. What it comes down to this requiring a precious resource and skill that few have.

Time and marketing.

Time to interact with your niche's community. Be present. Be visible. Be vocal. I know you're already doing this. But you don't usually write content not only to satisfy needs, but become a linkable resources (lists, howtos, etc). Even if you recognize most of these pieces are trash, worthless the moment it is posted, they encourage discussion and linkage. Wasn't it your guest poster's Google list that got all that attention a few months back?

And marketing, because, on the web, the most successful, are marketers or those with marketing resources. On the web there is a whole lot of noise. You need some skill here, to be heard over the din, in even the smallest niche. Hence the demand for SEO expertise.

I need to follow my own advice. But I need time, knowledge, and resources.

Just checked: Seth is a top five search result in Google for "censorware". But that is a sub-niche of censorship. Doubtful many use that search term. Where does he land for "censorship"?

Stowe Boyd's summary of the latest argument concerning the existence of influence in the blogosphere, is perhaps the best: "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand... Or Can It?":

I used Lincoln's paraphrase of something attributed to Jesus -- A house divided against itself cannot stand -- for the title of this post because I believe the blogosphere is big enough to hold all this controversy in it: this is not a civil war, but just a heated argument. The Shel Israels of the world -- the small-minded, exclusionary, and uncivil -- will not actually cause people like Nick Carr to shut up. The possibility of huge success like Arrington's will continue to inspire and cause concern. New entrants will struggle to become prominent, and some may become discouraged while others will push forward. The system will be gamed, and the game itself will change.

But the house -- the blogosphere -- will stand, so long as we keep at it. There's no stopping it now. Even the old media players showing up and throwing big money around won't stop the transition of power to the edge, even if power falls into the hands of the A-listers, too. The edglings are having too much fun, and everybody wants to jump in.

Can I get an amen?

And fuckin' A man. Amen.

Jay Rosen: "The Era of Networked Journalism Begins":

Today marks a key moment in the evolution of the Web as a reporting medium. The first left-right-center coalition of bloggers, activists, non-profits, citizens and journalists to investigate a story of national import: Congressional earmarks and those who sponsor and benefit from them.

This is networked jounalism (“professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story”) beginning to come of age, and it’s very much in the spirit in my initiative NewAssignment.Net.

The partners in the Exposing Earmarks Project are the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters, and the Examiner Newspapers, along with Club for Growth, Human Events Online, The Heritage Foundation, Tapscott’s Copy Desk— and you, should you choose to be involved.

I'm really excited to see this get launched, so in comments I replied:

Wow this sounds like a great effort. It's a shame it can't help but be looked at as political, but to me, what's important here, is the methodology, the technology, and the participatory nature of it.

Let me say it again - Wow.

Jay, while your title is great, I would argue the era of Networked Journalism began a long long time ago - with the launch of AltaVista perhaps. When tools emerged that those interested could pull from multiple resources of information on the web and the barriers to sharing that information fell down to consisting only of time and knowledge. I tend to see all of this as an evolution of the foundations of the web itself, as a collaboration tool.

This is simply a terrific effort and one that will stand up as an example as what is possible.

I also wanted to highlight a previous effort that that is very, very notable notable, an early mashup that seems forgotten about:

I'd like to remind folks of another interesting effort here - GovTrack.

GovTrack is a mashup that pulls together data from various sources to provide views of information about bills, representatives, and conversations taking place about them them.

The interface is a bit complicated. Maybe that's why it hasn't earned the attention it deserves. But it is a powerful tool to look into what those who represent us are doing in Washington.

The service won Technorati's Developer Contest back in 2005.

This feels strangely relevant today....

Jason Calacanis: Noted:

Jeff has a great tag on exploding newspapers. I've been thinking about newspapers a lot since Dan Gillmor's journalism event at Harvard 10 days ago. In another 18-24 months newspapers are gonna hit the bottom and I think I'm gonna swoop in and try and buy one, build out the online portion, and buy a local TV station to go with it. Newspapers are not dead, they just have another purpose in life. "I'm watching you" guys (say in DeNiro voice from Meet the Parents/Fockers while pointing the piece symbol into your eyes for extra effect :-).

Filled under "hello?!?!" -- there is no A, B, or C list in the blogosphere people. There is your list, my list, and the entire list. No one is blocking anyone, no one is in a position of power, it's flat... you can do whatever you want--stop crying about it and post something interesting.

Jay Rosen posted a comment about Philadelphia, to which I added (with minor edits):

Indeed, Philly is a place to be. I invited you to an unconference having to do with this a while back. I have hopes for great things.

On the "blogosphere is flat" myth, that was popped a long time ago by Clay Shirky, in the same piece in where he described the Long Tail of the web.

If you are a believer in the long tail concept, you gotta accept its core tenet - power laws present themselves on the web. Those in the head end get far, far more influence and attention then in the tail. And the tail is mighty long indeed. The flip side of "The Long Tail" is that this is perfectly acceptable. In fact, it represents an opportunity.

The web empowers niches - communities of interest - to flourish. You can target a niche in the tail and do well very well there. A consequence of having zero shelving space and technologies that make it easy for those seeking out their passions and concerns, no matter how out of the *current* mainstream, to find them.

I think you know this however, so why perpetuate the myth?

via Kent Newsome, Be A Good Dad. Looks like a great blog for ideas and tips.

Trodding a path that's been well walked before, Nicholas Carr posts an eloquent piece for those tho think the web is their way to fame and fortune.

I had this to say in his comments:

People blog for different reasons, not only to be influential. Lets set this down as a rule of fact okay? Without acknowledging it, those on both sides of this debate are raising up straw men to knock down.

Most people I know who blog don't care about being influential, they just want a way to be heard by the friends, family, co-workers - their own social community. They want a chance to define who and what they are.

I've heard countless times, from folks, who I've tried to convince to start a blog, "I have nothing to say to the world."

Fact is, no one knows that, but at least you have an additional way of communicating that acts as a journal, as a memory extension, as a piece of identity.

Nick, this is a well written piece, poetic even, but I don't know so much if people fall for the story line of "have a blog, reach millions" anymore.

I've had pretty intense discussions with folks like Jeff Jarvis over the existence of the A-List, usually well supported by Clay Shirky's piece "Power Laws. Weblogs, and Inequality".

Where I've distinguished myself is with a nuanced view that people, like you, like Seth, like the great writers he mentions who I read everyday, who I consider friends, don't want to agree with (understandable since they have purer hearts then mine...)

Sure the A-list exists. It's human nature. Within any social system such influence scales emerge. Not only is there an A-List - there are multiple A-Lists within topic spaces.

And there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing.

Kent's piece about equating blogging to songwriting (I play guitar) is apt for a great many people that have some internal drives towards becoming famous or influential (like Seth and like me, but less so). And like any musician, if you have a goal to be influential, you need to do more then practice your art, you need to make a spectacle of it, spread word of it, find people to spread word of it, market the shit out of it. The web changes nothing on that score. It's hurts the heart a bit if you are an idealist that believes that valuable hard work alone should earn you the influence you desire. But it's part of our existence. Online and off.

Those who deny it have something their selling. On both sides of the fence.

For most people, the vast majority of folks, the A-List issue, it doesn't matter - it's about friends, family, co-workers - their own social community. And no A-Lister is keeping me from reaching them. From being heard by them.

The magic of blogging, and the danger, that is rarely discussed, is that this sharing is done in what danah boyd calls the "super public". By sharing our passions, concerns, our lives in a public space, the opportunity presents itself that we may be heard outside of our sphere of life. When that happens, sometimes it's magic. Influence, sometimes follows. But more exciting is that sometimes, even new friendships are made.

Nuance sucks don't it? And if your goal is to be influential - it gets you nowhere fast.

Let me add that by sharing in the "super public", you sometimes contribute to a store house of knowledge that can be a resource for others. I've found a solutions to a programming problems from a blogs countless times. And I am thankful for it.

Dan Gillmor says Doc Searls committed an act of journalism, even if he wasn't a journalist, when he posted his report from Logan Airport . Albert Yee, in Philadelphia, attended a community meeting on violence at Louis Kahn Memorial Park and and reported on the experience and the event itself. A powerful example of the same.

As Dan said of Doc, "He witnessed something and told the rest of us what he was seeing. It's ordinary, but also extraordinary in the meaning for society in the long run.". Indeed I believe that to be the case. But there is two ways of reading these acts of journalism. You can look at them as threats to 'the establishment', revolutionary examples of why we no longer need paid journalists and editors filtering the news for us. Or you can look at them as opportunities. Opportunities for paid journalists and editors to expand their role as as news gatherers. What if paid journalists and editors opened their horizons and looked outside their newsrooms to look for, discover, and empower those voices that wanted to contribute reports like Doc's and Albert's to a paper, or didn't realize it's a possibility?

Services like Inform.com and Technorati enable this on one level. Witness how WashingtonPost.com uses Technorati to expand coverage and discussion on their articles. But what if an editor at a paper was proactive in seeking out these acts of journalism? Using toolsets that enabled them to pull together reporting and opinions from across the blogosphere and to connect with those who have already contributed something? What if?

A terrifc, biting essay, that I wish I wrote: 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable: I'm just going to quote number seven, because it helps point to why I do some of the crazy things I do online, make sure to read the whole thing:

7. We feel worthless because we actually are worth less.

There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about:

They demand less from you.

Sure, you emotionally support them, comfort them after a breakup, maybe even talk them out of a suicide. But knowing someone in meatspace adds a whole, long list of annoying demands. Wasting your whole afternoon helping them fix their computer. Going to funerals with them. Toting them around in your car every day after theirs gets repossessed by the bank. Having them show up unannounced when you were just settling in to watch the Dirty Jobs marathon on the Discovery channel and then talk about how hungry they are until you finally give them half your sandwich.

You have so much more control in AOL Messanger, or in chat, or in World of Warcraft.

But here's the thing. You are hard-wired by evolution to need to do things for people. Everybody for the last five thousand years seemed to realize this and then we suddenly forgot it in the last few decades. We get suicidal teens and scramble to teach them self-esteem. Well, unfortunately, self-esteem and the ability to like yourself only come after you've done something that makes you likable. You can't bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking and playing video games, doesn't it follow that I'm worthless for doing the same thing?

It doesn't matter what you tell yourself, or what slogans you memorize about how everyone is special. You'll think of yourself as special when you do something special. If you think of yourself as special prior to actually doing something special, you're not healthy and well-balanced. You're a narcissist, disconnected from reality.

You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer, and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for Mom and Dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter and listen to the sound of the free-flowing water the next time it rains.

It ain't rocket science; you are a social animal and thus you are born with little happiness hormones that are released into your bloodstream when you see someone else benefitting from your actions. You can line up for yourself a spread of your favorite liquor, your favorite video game, your favorite movie and your favorite sex act, and the sum total of them won't give you the same kind of lasting happiness you'd get from helping the cranky old lady down the street drag her garbage to the curb.

This is why office jobs make so many of us miserable; you don't get to see the fruit of your labor. But work construction out in the hot sun for two months, and for the rest of your life you can drive past a certain house and say, "holy shit, I built that."

That level of satisfaction, the "I built that" or "I grew that" or "I fed that guy" or "I made these pants" feeling, can't be matched by anything the internet has to offer.

Except, you know, this website.

A cross post from Philly Future yesterday....

Chris touched on something big in his post on today's primary in Connecticut - today will be a test of how well the web works to shorten the distance between someone who is selling something, in this case a politician, and consumers/participants, in this case voters. The Ned Lamont campaign's use of viral marketing (Internet campaigning), while suffering some faults and trip-ups as any political campaign does, should be looked at as a case study in how to connect people to causes they care about and generating buzz.

Last year I had no idea who Ned Lamont was. And if it wasn't for the web - I doubt few in Philadelphia would be so concerned, let alone the entire country. But here we are. Think about it.

So let the talk of partisanship and division wash over you for a second. Partisanship and division in politics and within political parties isn't all that new is it?

What *is* new (well at least was long missing) and is very, very heartening, is the infectious enthusiasm and growth of a politically aware and involved public.

That has to be celebrated. No matter the outcome.

In a similar vein, go read Richard Cranium at The All Spin Zone: "In Connecticut - America Wins".

And um... go Ned Lamont!

... and Lamont wins!

A note from Shelley:

Lieberman stood for something once upon a time. Whatever it was he stood for, though, was lost in the 9/11 attacks. He lost his perspective, and now he�s lost the race. Running as an independent, as he has threatened, just shows that he�s about to lose the one thing left: his dignity.

On the other hand, the �people� weren�t entirely the winners, as has been proclaimed. The Lieberman challenger, Lamont, may have made effective use of the grassroots to run his compaign, but he also made a great deal of use of his personal wealth. He wasn�t exactly one of the little people.

Still, hopefully this will shake up the Dems enough to force the party into something other than Republican Light.

Jeff Jarvis makes a point I agree with, but I'm afraid not many look at it this way, at least not yet:

The Times has two good stories today that were both helped by the work of bloggers. I don't say that at blog triumphalism or as a war cry of bloggers replacing journalists. Quite the contrary, I say that because these are the sorts of examples of networked journalism at work that I hope we'll be seeing more and more.

...It's not about them v. us, as Nick Lemann would have it. It's about them and us. The more we work together, the more informed society will be. It is a good thing for journalism that there are now more people than ever doing journalism and these are just two small illustrations of that.

I replied (paraphrased) in his comments:

Wish the rhetoric from the community that spread word of the doctored photos shared your way of looking at things.

Because they don't you know. And maybe it's from their rallying cries that the Lemanns of the world derive their fear and concern from.

I'd say it's dead Mathew. And that most folks just don't realize it unless it personally impacts them.

Case in point, this article in CNet has it all wrong on how to protect yourself. It's not your IP address that gives you away. No amount of cloaking can help you when it's what you type that identifies you. As this NYTimes article proves.

Oh, and want to unlock your kid's profile on MySpace, there's a way now.

As Mr. Edelson, of Stealth Ideas says, It's not like you�re stealing a key out of their drawer and reading their diary,� says Mr. Edelson. �This is public information."

That's the way a whole lot of people and organizations seem to feel about the information we unknowingly devulge everyday.

If you're a Comcast.net user, you can click here to sign up to participate in a beta program for our new Webmail. It's far easier to use, with a cleaner interface, and new functionality.

And speaking of something interesting, check out this search interface. Try typing in a long query for fun.

Oh, and if you're into widgets, we have one for the fan.

It's true I normally avoid talking about what I do at work, but Webmail is a special case since the beta program is limited to a small number of participants and the other efforts are up on labs. Get-a-clicking and leave feedback for us.

37Signals: Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math:

This week’s BusinessWeek cover story features a beaming Kevin Rose from Digg. Across his chest it says “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” Wow, now that sounds like a great success story.

Too bad it’s a blatent lie. BusinessWeek knows it....

...So why are you writing about an 18-month old company that took $2.5 million to be “finally be flush with enough cash to pay salaries, rent an office, and keep employees in standard startup snacks like Twizzlers and Vitamin Water.” If BusinessWeek wants to say it only takes $50 and an internet connection to be the next mogul they may want to cite a valid example. It’s certainly possible, but Digg isn’t that example.

via the Bb Gun

37Signals: Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math:

This week’s BusinessWeek cover story features a beaming Kevin Rose from Digg. Across his chest it says “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” Wow, now that sounds like a great success story.

Too bad it’s a blatent lie. BusinessWeek knows it....

...So why are you writing about an 18-month old company that took $2.5 million to be “finally be flush with enough cash to pay salaries, rent an office, and keep employees in standard startup snacks like Twizzlers and Vitamin Water.” If BusinessWeek wants to say it only takes $50 and an internet connection to be the next mogul they may want to cite a valid example. It’s certainly possible, but Digg isn’t that example.

via the Bb Gun

Craig Newmark: What I'm doing regarding journalism and why:

Democracy requires an active press, asking tough questions, and speaking truth to power. When that fails, we get ineffective government. I figure people of goodwill gotta stand up and support the press.

In my case, I have no background in journalism, so I'm listening hard, and relying on people who really know their stuff, some of whom are taking big risks.

PressThink: Introducing NewAssignment.Net:

In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.

The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

In this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t.

But I should add: NewAssignment.Net doesn’t exist yet. I’m starting with the idea.

Salon on Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk: "I make $1.45 a week and I love it":

The 21st century twist on the Turk, conceived by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, doesn't try to hide the people inside the machine. On the contrary, it celebrates the fact that we have become part of the machine. For fees ranging from dollars to single pennies per task, workers, who cheekily call themselves "turkers," do tasks that may be rote, like matching a color to a photograph, but they can confound a computer. Conceived to help Amazon improve its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace where many companies have solicited workers to do everything from transcribing podcasts for 19 cents a minute to writing blog posts for 50 cents. Amazon takes a cut from every task performed.

Amazon claims its virtual workplace provides "artificial artificial intelligence" -- a catchy way of saying human thought. "From a philosophical perspective, it's really turning the traditional computing paradigm on its head," says Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services. "Usually people get help from computers to do tasks. In this case, it is computers getting help from people to do tasks." As Tim O'Reilly, a computer book publisher and tech industry figure, puts it on his blog, old dreams of artificial intelligence are "being replaced by this new model, in which we are creating more intelligent systems by using humans as components of the application."

So who wants to be the human component of a computer application? A lot of people, it turns out. Since last November, thousands of workers from the U.S. and more than 100 other countries have performed tasks on Mturk.com. The most dedicated turkers have even formed their own online communities, such as Turker Nation.

Calacanis: The first 10 Navigators: We've hired three of the top 12 DIGG users, the #1 user from Newsvine, the #1 user from Reddit, and a bunch of Weblogs, Inc. folks.:

It is important to note that this is all an experiment. No one knows for sure if this model of "paying people for work" us gonna work. I mean, it's crazy to think that people could be paid to do a job and do it with integrity--that's just crazy talk. :-)

Seriously, the fact is that the top 10 users on DIGG are responsible for 30% of the front page stories on DIGG. That's 3% of total front page stories each!!! Think about that for a second... the top 10 users of DIGG do 3% of the work each--that is stunning. They get paid nothing but they are responsible for 3% of the total content on the home page. Wow. Like WOW, WOW, WOW!

BusinessWeek: Digg.com's Kevin Rose leads a new brat pack of young entrepreneurs :

Those in the know believe that Digg could become a new kind of clearinghouse for news and that its interactive community concept could snowball. That could be a jackpot for Rose, who owns 30% to 40% of the company (he won't specify) -- a massive stake for a founder in a world in which investors routinely demand up to 20% with every outlay. But it's still only paper wealth, which he and many others have learned can evaporate. "I was here in 2000," he recalls in an instant message.

More in this story and on Metafilter.

Many "grassroots" participatory media efforts "flip" (are sold) to larger companies, earning their founders millions, while those that helped build these businesses - those who participate in them - get no portion of the ever growing riches.

Kevin Rose of Digg is furious at Jason Calacanis of Netscape to propose a model were top contributors actually get paid for their labors, their passions, their enthusiasm.

Kevin Rose seems to think it's ridiculous that some people get paid for their efforts: "Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivation".

Really? So you're giving your excess investment money to charity Kevin? Not taking a salary in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars? You aren't going to take a few cool million of your own when you flip?

Driving a Hyundai like myself bub?

Didn't think so.

Here is what Dave Winer has to say:

Digg's Kevin Rose responds to Jason Calacanis, but doesn't really respond. Jason raises a good question. No doubt Kevin is going to make something like $20 or $30 million when he sells Digg, which seems a pretty likely outcome. What will the users get? It's a bit awkward for him to claim they do it for love if he himself doesn't do it for love. As always Silicon Valley breeds hubris, that's what Calacanis is taking advantage of, and doing it skillfully and without shame. If a lot of people didn't agree with him he wouldn't get away with it (Calacanis, that is).

I've mentioned before that I wouldn't want Philly Future to follow this typical Silicon Valley narrative. It would be nice to be rich, but not on anyone else's backs. Especially my neighbors. And that is the difference isn't it?

Philly Future's community is comprised of neighbors. Not just in the virtual sense, but in the actual physical sense.

Update: Turns out Kevin Rose doesn't take a salary. That doesn't change the rest of these questions however.

Crossposted from Philly Future. Comment there.

There is a classic moment in Megadeth's "Peace Sells" video, where a shirt and tie wearing parent storms into the living room and chastises his son, "What is this garbage you're watching? I want to watch the news!", to which the teen replies, "This IS the news".

The dad these days would be a whole lot hipper looking and would have caught his son blogging to be sure.

Watch it all the way thru and get over your elitist musical sensibilities for once (you know who you are). The imagery, the lyrics, the terror and power could all be ripped from today's headlines.

This follows earlier music video posts by Duncan and Susie, related to today's world's madness.

According to to Pew's latest study, "Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers", "Bloggers are about as likely as the general internet population to pursue non-partisan news sources. Forty-five percent of bloggers (and 50% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that do not have a particular political point of view. Twenty-four percent of bloggers (and 18% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that challenge their political point of view. Eighteen percent of bloggers (and 22% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that share their political point of view.".

That's interesting since linking patterns of fellow bloggers suggest otherwise. But maybe, just maybe, folks are reading what they are not linking to.

One place to get exposed to new and different conversations and discussions is Global Voices Online. It's a Philly Future style service that "seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. We are committed to developing tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices everywhere to be heard.". Sounds a lot like our mission.

It's a great service, one I wish there were more emulating, but the business model might not be there and that maybe why we see so few try.

Having the possibility to open our minds so simply, by just a few clicks, is a large part of what the web offers that excites me so much. Of course, the web can help us hear other points of view, in the end it may not change how we listen. We still need to click, even if we don't link. The great thing is that according to Pew, we do. Let's hope they are right.

According to the New York Times lots of media companies are investing in the web, looking for a business model.

I have a simple question - when folks wonder 'how do we make money at this?', why do we instinctively forget the models that have come before that already do?

Amazon.com. Yahoo!, eBay, Craigslist, Google, Salon (I believe in the black).

What is similar about their business models? Do they recognize some essential nature of the web? Any other good examples?

And when we talk about new models for news gathering versus the old, and worry about how in-depth journalism will get financed, is there something related here?

According to the New York Times lots of media companies are investing in the web, looking for a business model.

I have a simple question - when folks wonder 'how do we make money at this?', why do we instinctively forget the models that have come before that already do?

Amazon.com. Yahoo!, eBay, Craigslist, Google, Salon (I believe in the black).

What is similar about their business models? Do they recognize some essential nature of the web? Any other good examples?

And when we talk about new models for news gathering versus the old, and worry about how in-depth journalism will get financed, is there something related here?

The Long Tail suggested that it will be within narrow communities of interest where the future of entertainment lies. Jeff Jarvis has long been a proponent of this point of view. With online music it is probably already so (Washington Post). But would you ever think this applied to Beer?

Check out this quote by Scots whisky manufacturer James Thompson in comments at gapingvoid: "We have decided to create a drinks product that will never be made available to large retailers - ever. We don't need them and we don't like them that much."

Technology shortens distance and time between people and the things they desire. Likewise, it enables companies to market to individuals, or small communities, instead of the masses.

Related thread in Slashdot.

The Long Tail suggested that it will be within narrow communities of interest where the future of entertainment lies. Jeff Jarvis has long been a proponent of this point of view. With online music it is probably already so (Washington Post). But would you ever think this applied to Beer?

Check out this quote by Scots whisky manufacturer James Thompson in comments at gapingvoid: "We have decided to create a drinks product that will never be made available to large retailers - ever. We don't need them and we don't like them that much."

Technology shortens distance and time between people and the things they desire. Likewise, it enables companies to market to individuals, or small communities, instead of the masses.

Related thread in Slashdot.

Coming from the Washington Post is news of a study that reveals people keep far fewer close friends these days.

I've seen this at work in my life and I've tried to rationalize it. I thought, possibly my work, and our growing family, were pressures here, but when faced honestly, this was gnawing at me for a long while. It sometimes seems the only friends I have are those who I personally reach out to, and I keep a short list I must admit, but now it seems far fewer confide back. A while ago I tried to meditate on what a friend was, thinking my definition was maybe too narrow. But possibly this is just a sign of the times. Of our increasingly busy and less trusting natures. Our electrons may meet in hyperspace for a while, but our hearts miss each other completely.

Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.

A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone.

"That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. "There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants."

If close social relationships support people in the same way that beams hold up buildings, more and more Americans appear to be dependent on a single beam.

Compared with 1985, nearly 50 percent more people in 2004 reported that their spouse is the only person they can confide in. But if people face trouble in that relationship, or if a spouse falls sick, that means these people have no one to turn to for help, Smith-Lovin said.

"We know these close ties are what people depend on in bad times," she said. "We're not saying people are completely isolated. They may have 600 friends on Facebook.com [a popular networking Web site] and e-mail 25 people a day, but they are not discussing matters that are personally important."

Chris Anderson analyzes some Rhapsody and Wal-Mart figures revealing the Long Tail at work. Question: If Wal-Mart is selling a particular track, doesn't that help make it a popular hit?

Sometimes the best way to learn of the future is to look at the past. Slate and WashingtonPost.com are now 10 years old. There is much to gleam about where online media is going by looking at where they began, their efforts over the years, and where they are today.

Slate: Michael Kinsley: My History of Slate

WashingtonPost.com: Jay Rosen: Web Users Open the Gates

WashingtonPost.com: Patricia Sullivan: As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed

WashingtonPost.com: Steve Fox: Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

Sometimes the best way to learn of the future is to look at the past. Slate and WashingtonPost.com are now 10 years old. There is much to gleam about where online media is going by looking at where they began, their efforts over the years, and where they are today.

Slate: Michael Kinsley: My History of Slate

WashingtonPost.com: Jay Rosen: Web Users Open the Gates

WashingtonPost.com: Patricia Sullivan: As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed

WashingtonPost.com: Steve Fox: Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

On Friday, in a moment of either clarity...or something else... I removed all of my subscriptions from Bloglines. I had grown frustrated with my habit of checking a few times an hour for updates. I've mentioned before that Memeorandum is like crack. Well Bloglines is like cigarettes.

One thing I immediately miss is keeping up with my friends across the web. I feel partially disconnected. But at the same time, I've found myself more focused.

This isn't an anti-RSS screed. I'm thinking there is something about Bloglines that, for me, makes it too easy to distract myself from what's important.

So, what comes next.... hmmmmm....

On Friday, in a moment of either clarity...or something else... I removed all of my subscriptions from Bloglines. I had grown frustrated with my habit of checking a few times an hour for updates. I've mentioned before that Memeorandum is like crack. Well Bloglines is like cigarettes.

One thing I immediately miss is keeping up with my friends across the web. I feel partially disconnected. But at the same time, I've found myself more focused.

This isn't an anti-RSS screed. I'm thinking there is something about Bloglines that, for me, makes it too easy to distract myself from what's important.

So, what comes next.... hmmmmm....

And redirecting requests to memeorandum, del.icio.us, reddit, rawsugar, and popurls.com to localhost == peace and productivity.

Coming a day after news of AIM Pages comes word that MySpace launches "myspaceim". AIM Pages better launch soon, and see some major participation.

Speaking of needing participation, Nick Carr recently pieced together the real new economy emerging from participatory media:

I fear that to view the attention economy as "more than just a subset of the financial economy" is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There's no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the "I." In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities. Karp's wrong to say that MySpace is resistant to advertising. MySpace is nothing but advertising.

...Far from existing outside the financial economy, the online attention economy is its fulfillment, its perfection. It's the place where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes life.

This was his reply to Scott Karp's thought provoking take on the question : "what if no one will pay for content?":

In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION.

Karp wonders who will get paid when the interMEDIAries are gone. It's a good question. I think Nick Carr shared something close to an answer.

Normally I avoid the hype on such things, but this deserves some attention - AIM Pages coming launch signals a return to core competencies. AOL's chatroom/profile/buddy discovery system was the first large scale 'social networking' app that normal folks used and loved. It changed the way we communicated (remember "You Got Mail?" folks?).

What's so amazing about this you ask? Well it's amazing it took AOL this long to leverage it's AIM user base and get back in the game of connecting people.

Ask yourself how do you discover new online friends and how do they get on your buddy list. Think back to 1997 for a second. Remember how you did it back then? Think hard about it. Come back to the present day and watch a teenager use MySpace. Anything familiar?

MySpace is the the second generation (third most likely) of that system from way back when. That's why some of the digerati dismiss or even hate it so much - it empowers normal folks to use the web for what they want to use it for - communicate and connect - and it looks messy.

If AOL gets their mojo back - and it is social networking that was AOL's first true blue call to fame - then the space will get interesting. Yahoo!'s 360 is boring and kinda complicated sadly. Will AIM Pages be any different? We shall see.

Shelley Powers is shutting down her primary blog Burningbird, but that doesn't mean an end to her writing, or blogging necessarily. She joins a growing list of first and second generation bloggers who are moving on (or have said they are moving on). Her blog was one of the few whose comments I frequent regularly and where I've connected with some who I can see myself becoming friends with one day. Her passion, compassion, great writing, creating and participating in her environment that welcomed terrific online conversations, and her views that don't toe the line enabled that. I'm looking forward to what she does next.

Thank you Shelley for Burningbird.

I have a line in one of my songs that laments that "I learned about life at the age of 3, had it all their on my TV screen" so I can attest what happens when you expose a kid to too much media too soon - that's me as an early teen on the right btw.

But the web is far more empowering. Not like passive media at all. If MySpace was available when I was a teenager - I would have been all over it. I probably would have found new outlets for expression. I probably wouldn't have felt so lonely.

But maybe I'm lucky it wasn't?

The great many things I know I fucked up while learning to be a man, aren't all over the web, to be findable and usable forever by those that want to do so.

I didn't have responsible and knowing parenting that would have educated me to the consequences of living life so in the open with so many. And I haven't grown so old as to forget that my teenage years were messy, confusing, and sometimes downright ugly. I'm happy to have lived them - I wouldn't change them - they made me who I am - but thank the Lord it's difficult to exploit them. They are difficult to exploit because because they weren't public, cached, searchable and available for all to see in perpetuity.

Maybe my childhood is an example of an edge case. But I feel a responsibility to ask if is not.

Back on April 5th I wrote a small piece in response to the concern Doc Searls posted over media consumption and children, including the net. I pretty much agreed with him, but wondered aloud how he would handle it when his son ventures onto MySpace. He came by and replied in a comment:

Ya'll missed some modifiers. I said,

"I think letting *small* children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their *most *formative years*..."

So I'm talking about young kids here: from 1 to 6 years old; or, to stretch it a bit, through age 9 or 10.

Thirteen year olds are another matter. I wasn't talking about them, and I'll gladly defer to the expertise of Danah and others on what MySpace and Xanga and Second Life and World of Warcraft might mean for them.

Meanwhile, I've got a 9-year-old kid who still believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and who loves to swim and play basketball and read books. From what I can tell so far, the stories and lessons he's getting from those books, and from his Waldorf School (where none of his peers, for what it's worth, watch much TV or use computers... yet), will help equip him to be a discerning and independent soul in the Connected World where he and his peers will spend plenty of time in their teenage years and beyond.

I definitely missed the modifiers. Read his post again. He did make a distinction between being a teenager and not.

I'm happy to announce that my membership to the Media Bloggers Association, for Philly Future, was approved. See Philly Future for the details. Congrats to all the new members, which I see includes Seth :)

Also on Philly Future, we are helping spread word about Maine Web Report and the multi-million dollar federal lawsuit it has been hit with.

MBA will be helping defend Lance Dutson who blogs for Maine Web Report. Maine Web Report is a service very much in the spirit of Philly Future, and what Lance Dutson is dealing with is illustrative of the threats we face. Scratch that - the threats you face.

Whenever you speak truth to power you take a massive risk. A risk where those with more resources then you can crush you and your family thru the legal system. Newspapers have numerous measures of defense that enable them to do the work that they do, but bloggers, by and large, operate without a net (no pun intended). Make sure you read the EFF's legal guide for bloggers if you have not done so.

Slate: Paul Boutin: A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace:

When trying to rope in the movie and TV studios, YouTube should point to MySpace, where A-listers like Eminem peddle their wares alongside unsigned bands and lip syncers. MySpace makes it easy for musicians, kids, and grandparents to post their own pages by removing the technical hurdles. I created a profile page in three minutes, complete with an auto-play jingle. I'd planned to upload an MP3 of a band I used to play in, until I found they already have their own MySpace page. Clicking "Add" instantly copied the song from their page onto mine. Another one-click tool imported my Gmail and Hotmail address books so I could mass-invite everyone to join me.

MySpace isn't that much easier to use than Friendster, or than other shared-user-content sites like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (bookmarks), or Digg (tech news). But it mixes multiple publishing models—blogs, photos, music, videos, friend networks—into one personal space. Most important, it doesn't presume to know what your goals are. The site's management ditched their early focus as a home for musicians when they realized Margaret Cho and my crazy friend Kenny wanted spaces of their own. Next, MySpace may let marketers set up profiles for brands. That's a great idea—the same people who'll bitch about Snickers having a page will add Wikipedia as their friend.

I think MySpace's popularity has to do with its puppylike accessibility. A typical page looks like something a Web-enthralled high schooler might have put up in 1996, but with more pics and a soundtrack. I agree with design guru Jesse James Garrett, who says the site's untrained layout sends a "we're just like you" message to newcomers. That encourages them to experiment with content genres the site's designers didn't build into templates. If tech builders want to hand the controls over to their users, shouldn't they presume they haven't thought of everything? Apple's iWeb publishing system is easy to use and way more attractive than MySpace, but we'd have gotten old waiting for Apple to invent a Lip Sync Video template.

The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way. If you think collaborative architecture matters more, click the charts: The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate's. Photos, news, and other people's bookmarks just aren't as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties . The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life (emphasis mine - Karl).

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Power Law of Participation:

Most of Chris Anderson's Long Tail examples have focused on models of consumption, not production, where intelligence is largely artificial. Amazonian algorythms guide users down the long tail from Britney Spears to Nobodys, made available without the constraints of shelf space. But the interesting question is will the tail wag? Can users discover their own power together to either discover something great, or even create it?

As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention. Even when we Read, our patterns are picked up in referral logs (especially with expressly designed tools, like Measure Map), creating a feedback loop. But reading alone isn't enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users.

With so many pictures of Emma, I have an urge to write a wallpaper swapping script. This looks like the beginning of one.

I have a huge library of articles and stories from the web on my PC that was growing out of control. 700 megs worth of knowledge and history that just sits there, backed up on CD. Not anymore. Using ScrapBook, a Firefox extension, I've organized my library and now it is a searchable personal reference. Lifehacker has a handy howto.

I need to get around to trying EverNote, a similar free tool with more capability, however, I've been looking for a lightweight, simple tool that gets out of my way and lets me work the way I work and ScrapBook is just about perfect. I'm partial to using my file system as a database, I don't want to need the software to access my library directly. ScrapBook does that and builds a RDF document describing my library's contents that I can parse for reusing my library in different ways with a little bit of Python or Perl. Shoot, I could simply consume the RDF and library (it's HTML after all) and build my own UI with minimal effort.

Seth posted his 1000th today and really should be among the blogs you subscribe to if you want to open your mind about the web, blogging, the DMCA, and more.

Google does an end run around the RSS and Atom war. GData, Google's new API to read and write from the web, combines elements of both. It's big additions over the Atom API are authentication and query functionality. RSS 2.0 output is mainly available for reads.

Check out the docs at Google. More on the protocol and authentication.

Going for readability over all else, Philly Future underwent a subtle redesign.

I use this blog to communicate with friends and family, while discussing technology and sometimes politics. The funny thing is the folks who read this are *very* diverse - the tech folks couldn't care less about the politics and my friends and family couldn't care less about either the tech *or* the politics.

Ahhh.. what to do? Maybe indicators as to what kind of post is something is so that it can be safely skipped?

My smart and talented nephew told me I should dump the blog and go to MySpace. Why do all that work? Where are your friends? Blogs aren't cool. They suck.

del.icio.us does not allow me to push my feeds to it, forcing me to spend effort using its service that is better spent elsewhere. The pattern emerged where I would post links on del.icio.us far more frequently then paradox1x or at Philly Future, which, in the end, is counter productive - I already have a publishing platform!

Many of these services have tools that enable you to post on them and have that participation pushed back into your site. Other tools exist to grab your data from these services and pull them into your primary space. That's not enough.

I predicted earlier that these services will have to acknowledge and leverage what we already do in our own spaces, in our own environments. As each of us start our own blogs - our own publishing systems - what do we gain by posting twice? Three times? Four times? Not all that much when I should be able to post once, in an environment of *my* choosing, syndicate what I want, and be done with it.

RawSugar gives me this capability, saving me a lot of time in sharing what I want to share with a larger community.

I'm happy you kept after to to try it Bill, so I am going to stick with it for now.

Philadelphia Inquirer's Kristen A. Graham deserves credit for writing about teenagers and MySpace and not putting out yet another sexual-predator, obscenity, fear-fest as so many others have.

She parses the real issue that few fellow technologists address or want to concern themselves with - how MySpace has empowered millions of children to share their private lives in full public view, the repercussions of which are not yet understood.

In fact, I've only seen one post, by Scott Karp, and he was met with a chorus telling him he didn't get it or that "no one has privacy anyway so who cares".

One oh his critics attempted to reduce the concern to that of a parent allowing the child to ride a bike, and of course we let our children ride bikes. So why not allow them participate on MySpace? Shoot - we should be encouraging both right?

How great it would be if it were that simple.

When you address privacy concerns on MySpace (or Xanga, or any other social media platform), you MUST address the nature of the web - when you post you are not simply sharing that participation with those who visit your site, but you you are contributing to a store of information that is cached on servers you don't know of, syndicated to places you have no control over, retrievable, sortable, and searchable again and again and in perpetuity. Forever.

Sure sexual predators are a concern, but threats to living so publicly - in such a scale - permanently - are manifold.

The job we mysteriously couldn't get. The date who ditched us for some unknown reason. The apartment application denied. The business loan we were turned down for. The incapability of moving on from past mistakes since anyone can now retrieve them and use them for their purposes. That new 'friend' of ours telling us about the new shoes that we just have to buy.

Imagine if your credit report was in public view. If you could not get a report of who was requesting it. Think about it.

That's small fry in comparison to what we are *willingly* doing here.

I'm not some Luddite. I've had a web presence since 1996 and a blog since 1998. I don't know many who have lived so openly on the web. But I do keep somethings close to chest and off my blog, understanding, long ago, the responsibility I had to my employers, my friends, my family, and myself - long term.

I've attempted practice, over the years, the good advice Rebecca Blood gives in the article:

"people forget they are publishing when they are blogging. It feels personal, it feels like a conversation - but it's not."

In today's TMI age, it's a given that that new boyfriend or girlfriend, that recruiter for the job you desperately want, is going to Google you, she said. Then they'll find out that you've written about how you keep multiple sex partners and play endless rounds of Minesweep on company time.

"Whoever you don't want to read your blog - your mom, your boss - will probably find it. Keep that in mind," she advised.

You need to wonder why others in the digerati don't share her concerns... maybe she sounds too old fashioned? Too old school?

Maybe Rebecca Blood just doesn't get it?

The price we're all going to pay is huge.

Doc, I doubt you read me, but I wonder how you feel about Xanga and MySpace and the fact that for many, many 13 year olds these days, spending time participating is as important as what takes place in the lunchroom or in the school yard?

Because this makes me think you have no idea what's going on:

I think letting small children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their most formative years need to interact with each other, nature, and themselves. They need to read and play and feed their curiousity about the world. They need to use their minds and their bodies to explore the Real World.

Is the Net real too? I don't think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don't want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. If you're going to get sucked into an activity, let it be reading a book, shooting baskets or playing an instrument.

TV and computers have never been big in our 9-year-old's life. Starting when he was about 5, however, we began limiting his TV watching (and ours as well) to an amount that rounds to zero. As a result, his main indulgence is reading. He plows through several books a week. He has a delightful imagination and an adult vocabulary. Yet he still has plenty of time to play. It's amazing how much a kid can do if he or she isn't watching 6+ hours of tube a day.

I think the time will come when we'll look back on massive media consumption by kids in the same way we look back today on ubiquitous smoking and blasé attitudes toward drunk driving.

We've been building something that encourages people of all ages and background to share, to live their identities online.

I don't think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don't want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. Blogging and other social media services on the web are evolving to enable, empower, and encourage the web’s use as a primary social hub in our lives, that when disconnected from, we are disconnected period. And an element of this that gets short shrift is just how public all this is.

How will you handle it when your son starts to share not only what music he loves, but who in his classroom is “cool” and why? With oh… 20 million other people. Permanently. Cached and indexed. That day is already here for parents across the country.

Read Danah Boyd's "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace":

Adults often worry about the amount of time that youth spend online, arguing that the digital does not replace the physical. Most teens would agree. It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online - it's the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted.

In this context, there are three important classes of space: public, private and controlled. For adults, the home is the private sphere where they relax amidst family and close friends. The public sphere is the world amongst strangers and people of all statuses where one must put forward one's best face. For most adults, work is a controlled space where bosses dictate the norms and acceptable behavior.

Teenager's space segmentation is slightly different. Most of their space is controlled space. Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces. Teens are told where to be, what to do and how to do it. Because teens feel a lack of control at home, many don't see it as their private space.

To them, private space is youth space and it is primarily found in the interstices of controlled space. These are the places where youth gather to hang out amongst friends and make public or controlled spaces their own. Bedrooms with closed doors, for example.

Adult public spaces are typically controlled spaces for teens. Their public space is where peers gather en masse; this is where presentation of self really matters. It may be viewable to adults, but it is really peers that matter.

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends' homes when their parents are present.

Additionally, structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.

In contrast to my earlier post, see Philly Future for details on Missing Monday and how to spread word today of someone who has gone missing and has dropped from the news.

BEATRICE E. ELLIOTT Case Type: Endangered Runaway DOB: Apr 6, 1991 Sex: Female Missing Date: Mar 14, 2005 Race: Black/Hisp Age Now: 14 Height: 5'6" (168 cm) Missing City: PHILADELPHIA Weight: 180 lbs (82 kg) Missing State : PA Hair Color: Black Missing Country: United States Eye Color: Brown Case Number: NCMC1031088 Circumstances: Both photos shown are of Beatrice. She was last seen at home on March 14, 2005. Her nickname is Bee.

We can can use the web for the purpose of attacking others. We can use the web to spread hatred and fear.

Or we can decide to use it for something better.

The choice is ours.

There will be deserved talk today over how a group of Right-wing bloggers and talking radio party mouth-pieces (note not all, some have withstood criticism and not joined the mob - and yes it is a mob), took Jill Carroll's release, instead of a cause for celebration, or at least pause, to be a moment to viciously attack a fellow American for different world views. They took the circumstances around her being let go from her captors and the propaganda tape she was forced to make as evidence of her being anti-American and in league with terrorists. Attacking a victim of fear and hatred with more fear and hatred.

Right Wing Nut House's "TWICE A VICTIM" was especially powerful in its critique and concern:

In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us – including myself – have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

Scalp hunting has become the national pastime of blogs. Both lefty and righty lodgepoles have some pretty impressive trophies hanging on them; Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (twice), Eason Jordon, Trent Lott, Ben Domenech, to name a few more noteworthy ones.

But is this what we are? Is this what we are becoming? Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixelated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next? If this be the way to fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I truly fear that, like television, the last great technological breakthrough that promised to change the world, we will degenerate into a mindless, bottomless pit of muck and mudslinging, dragging down the culture and trivializing even the most important issues.

This is no idle concern that can be dismissed as the nature of the beast or the way of the world. This kind of thing has to be stopped, an admitted impossibility with 29 million blogs out there. Maybe it’s enough that we are aware of it and that people of good faith and good intentions will, in the end, marginalize the muckrakers and come out on top.

Don’t count on it.

...My question is what will the blogosphere look like 5 years from now? If things continue the way they are, we’ll be just another cog in the great mass communications bordeom killing machine, titillating and entertaining our readers with our own snarky takes on the dirt dished by the MSM while our blogs are festooned with ads for everything from cold cream to the latest super-absorbent manifestation of Depends.

So much for citizen-journalists…

The blogs that jumped in on this hate machine have a ton a visibility, at least one was venerated by Time magazine. More important - the dirt they are dishing will have a long term echo because on the web, nothing is ever forgotten, and on the web, he (or she) who has the most inbound links, has the most influence. The sad thing is such hatred and partisanship draws MORE linkage and influence. And some who work for the the old guard are watching.

The Moderate Voice: Jill Carroll Hostage Case: A Black Eye To Blogging (UPDATED):

If each time a weblog screeches that X person hates America or X person is a fascist it gets kind of old — unless you are a member of a choir that wants to hear the same song over and over. There's nothing wrong with that — but it does NOT enhance the credibility of blogs.

Do blogs want to be news analyzers? Opinion shapers? Political influencers? Or do they want to become like the very worst extreme left and extreme right talk show hosts? If the choice is the latter, then why shouldn't the news media view blogs as a written by a bunch of hyperactive political activists who want to get their harsh opinions out there first no matter what so they attract attention to themselves?

Indeed. So ask youself again, how could washingtonpost.com accidentally hire a plagerist to launch a blog to represent the views of "the majority of Americans" (which was on purpose - their goal to open their opinion section to more "diverse" opinion)?

Because it is learning, ahead of the curve, how to exploit blogs, by the worst of its examples. They seem to realize that blogs are not a threat, but something to be embraced and extended.

Good for them, but bad for us as a society. We can promote services to our better angels, or decide that promotion by division is the way to gain influence and then riches.

David Weinberger: "Small Pieces Loosely Joined": The conversation I believe we need to have is about what the Web is showing us about ourselves. What is true to our nature and what only looked that way because it was a response to a world that was, until now, the only one we had?

He wrote those words back in 2002. That conversation still needs to take place.

With no barriers to entry to share at the speed of thought... well is this our true nature?

Lord I hope not.

Two instances of links reinforcing and strengthening what shouldn't be:

Shelley Powers: Link Link Link.

Doc Searls: Tale of Whoa.

Related:

Matt Cutts: Dropping Valleywag.

Russell Beattie: Blog Sensationalism.

Nick Carr: The amorality of web 2.0.

Finally, from a terrific book:

David Weinberger: "Small Pieces Loosely Joined": we can see reflected in the Web just how much of our sociality is due not to the nature of the real world but to the nature of ourselves.

You haven't seen nothing yet folks.

It's always a thrill to meet folks for the first time who you've talked to for years online. It's doubly a thrill to to do so for a good reason. I'm nervous as hell - I'm not one for large groups of people, but this is worth it. Hopefully bridges will be built that help ideas come to life. Here's to a good day tomorrow.

In a link driven world, where attention equals influence, *any* attention is good attention for someone who is a pundit and in the media. Hear me out now...

WashingtonPost.com is aware of the growing controversy over "Red America" - the blog for a part (the majority?) of Americans. If WashingtonPost.com had integrity, they would realize that they didn't just hire one half of a Crossfire-like team (do they even realize this? if so where's the other side WaPo?), they hired a political operative and someone who appears to have had a bad plagiarism habit a while back: Salon, Salon, Scott Rosenberg, Atrios, Atrios, Atrios, Albert.

Alex Koppelman calls this affair in a dragonfire piece The Post's "Embarrassment". It may well be. But it doesn't matter. WashingtonPost.com probably already *has* taken its lumps from the Washington Post newsroom regarding this - but WashingtonPost.com is independent of the Washington Post! It has its own management and editorial team. Its audience is national, not local. Its goals and methods to reach that audience are different.

For confirmation, look at this email from the Washington Post disowning any responsibility:

From: Deborah C Howell HowellDC@washpost.com
Date: March 23, 2006 9:44:05 PM EST
To: xxxxx
Subject: Re: Domenech

The Washington Post has not hired him. The website has. The two are under totally different management. He will not be working for the newspaper. If you want to complain to the right person, try executive.editor@wpni.com.

Deborah

I think WashingtonPost.com is smarter then everyone is giving them credit for. They took a calculated risk that has generated buzz and interest in their service. From folks they want linking to it. Link bait that has caught its prey. They will "cave" sooner or later and hire a hard left blogger to 'balance' Red America. But the influence gain is already done.

Thousands of influential conservative bloggers, plus a heaping of critical liberal bloggers have posted links pointing to Red America. On the web, such activity boosts you in Google and in services like Technorati. That boost equals influence. WaPo.com has probably already gotten a nice bump in hits but the big effect will be the additional Google-juice gained by the time the controversy dies down.

Fuck all about integrity. It's about hits and Google visibility.

If I'm right, while I am disappointed in WashingtonPost.com - they are helping to further coarsen the dialog in this country (can't blame them really - is *anyone* trying to get both sides to talk at that level?) - I can't help but be impressed with their knowledge of the web, of Google, and the blogosphere. And yeah - that's cold blooded.

Then again, I could be wrong. This is just my opinion.

Lots of folks out there take a hard line when it comes to publishing either full feeds (the entire contents of each post being published in RSS/Atom) or partial feeds.

Scoble, for example, is famous for declaring he won't subscribe to anyone's partial feed.

Shelley and Rafe have posted thoughtful takes on this, from either side of the fence.

My take? Well I publish a full feed. But for the longest time I didn't. It hasn't made a difference as far as my readership is concerned one way, or another, because this is such a personal space for me.

'There is more than one way to do it' should not only be the motto of Perl, but the motto of the web. There is room for both approaches - and many more. We've mostly gotten each other speaking the same language (hey I know that's arguable), but to argue that there is only 'one true way' to publish the sentences misses the beauty of the web.

Well I don't know about that Seth. I follow you for your occasional updates because you speak about things I find interesting and are a unique voice. You have knowledge, experience, and a point of view to share.

According to Bloglines you have 208 subscribers. That's a large community if you ask me. But it's all a matter of perspective. paradox1x has just 28. But I'm okay with that. It's an honor that even a few find me interesting enough to do so in this crazy world. And sometimes we even talk :)

Aftermath:

This case was my last big "open" civil-liberties task. I too often think I'm going to get my big break, and be vaulted to netgeek rockstardom (or at least some level above street performer). But that's a delusion. It won't happen unless either I strike it rich (so I can buy the necessary attention), or get a prestigious policy position (so the institution directs attention to me) - both of which, contrary to some myth, are relatively difficult and improbable. Otherwise, I'm going to be slogging in obscurity forever.

Now that this case is over, I think yet another reason for me to keep a blog is gone. I thought there might be something to "citizen journalism" coverage. But again, I think any objective assessment of the results would have to be negative. Nobody is going to read me just for the very occasional update. And as I keep asking, what's so great about being an unpaid freelancer?

I switched the implementation of my quote viewer from Flash to Javascript last night for fun and education. If you view source, it's there for you to find in gory detail, but here it goes for the lazy...

In the header of this page you will find tag that loads the script that enables the quote viewer:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/widgets/quoteview/quoteview.js"></script>

At the top of the script you will notice two variables, one sets the number of seconds I want this quote to auto-refresh (set to -1 to disable) and the the next indicates where to find the XML document that contains the quotes I want to display.

Methods in the script will load a random quote and refresh a div element on the page:

<div id="quoteview"></div>

To kick it off, I call a method from the script:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/widgets/quoteview/quoteview.js">quoteViewXmlRequest();</script>

And that's it :) I'm a server-side developer by trade so if you care to take a look at this and critique, it could be helpful.

Jon Stewart hosting the Oscars has helped draw the attention of many, many bloggers. Lots are trying to cash in on the hype by publishing prediction lists of winners - an old cheap writing trick. Admittedly, I'm curious, so for once I will tune in for a few minutes, but nothing more. If something interesting happens, I will hear about it from my online community of friends and I will download it via Bittorrent. Even with all the new buzz this year, I'm sure the Oscars remain the self-congratulatory circle-jerk they always were. 'Nuff-said, right? Well no. This opens a door to connect some dots...

Publishing a list is one type of attention drawing tactic, being snarky is another...

Dave Winer:

These days you could rename Memeorandum to Snarksforall, with one blogger trying to top another for the most vacuous post.

So true! Performancing has a handy guide to these techniques: 10 Killer Post Ideas:

...Here are ten proven post formulas to get your creative juices, and your traffic, flowing.

...1. How to...2. Lists...3. Campaign...4. Interview...5. Review...6. Case study...7. Research results...8. What's new, trends...9. Attack!...10. Ask the audience...

There are other linkbait guides out there for you, go ahead and search if so inclined. Howard Stern was ahead of his time man. Way ahead of his time.

Then again, you can have the best writing or service in the world, if no one knows about it, you're shit outta luck. You need to know how to get the word out. You need to know who has influence and who doesn't.

Publishing 2.0: Who Are the New Media Gatekeepers?:

Who decides what�s worthy of your attention � a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

Answer for today: bloggers!

Jeremy Zawodny: How to give Oral Sex to Bloggers in Return for PR Favors:

..there's nothing like a few excited bloggers to kick off a good viral marketing campaign, right?! Who cares if your product is lame. Just get some bloggers to talk about it!

But which ones? Well it's Technorati to the rescue...

Guy Kawasakli: How to Suck Up to a Blogger:

...Nowadays buzz begets ink. Journalists no longer anticipate or create buzz--rather, they react to it: "Everyone is buzzing about FaceBook. There must be something to this, so I had better write a story about it." This role reversal has fried people's minds.

The latest development is that blogs beget buzz. Blogs have changed everything because they represent a cheap, effective podium for creating buzz on a massive scale. Technorati provides an easy way to identify the A-listers, so all you have to do is attract the most influential bloggers.

...Sucking up is not an event--it's a process.

Don Dodge: The new way to launch your product or company:

It doesn't cost anything to publicize your new product or service. Simply engage a couple of the "A-List" bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus, Stowe Boyd, and others) by sending them a link to your new product or service. Tell them what problem it solves and why it is cool. When they blog, people listen. When their stories hit Tech Memeorandum, Digg, TailRank, and other services the story explodes across thousands of blogs within hours.

You see, if you don't have buzz, you don't have reach. You don't have reach, no one will know you exist without one hell of a hard slog - no matter how good you are.

NYMag: Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom:

...By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is.

...In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today�s bloggers, they�ll complain that the game seems fixed. They�ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches�gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)�yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It�s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs�then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can�t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. �It just seems like it�s a big in-party,� one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level famous.)

That�s a lot of inequality for a supposedly democratic medium.

It's because the web resembles the wishes, desires, and motives of humanity. And humanity, while striving for something greater, is grounded in behaviors inscribed in our hearts, in our minds, in our genes.

Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality:

...In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

...inbound link data is just an example: power law distributions are ubiquitous. Yahoo Groups mailing lists ranked by subscribers is a power law distribution. (Figure #2) LiveJournal users ranked by friends is a power law. (Figure #3) Jason Kottke has graphed the power law distribution of Technorati link data. The traffic to this article will be a power law, with a tiny percentage of the sites sending most of the traffic. If you run a website with more than a couple dozen pages, pick any time period where the traffic amounted to at least 1000 page views, and you will find that both the page views themselves and the traffic from the referring sites will follow power laws.

...any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link others, which would require both global oversight and the application of force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to save it.

Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?"

So, lets get this straight shall we? The new way of doing things looks remarkably like the old way. The names and methods have have changed, but that's pretty much it. At least Technorati lets me see who those with influence are. I wonder when that will go behind a pay wall?

Some A-listers seem to want to keep this knowledge obscured while selling an ideal that doesn't exist. It's a very sellable ideal. In a way, these few folks exhibit a form of long tail denial. Kent Newsome connects the dots nicely here: Bloglogic and the Litmus Test for Link Love:

...making traffic and links your focus is not the most effective way to build a blog. Most of the people who have been at the table when we've talked about it seem to agree with that.

But just because traffic and links aren't the focus doesn't mean they aren't legitimate goals. To tell someone that traffic and links don't matter at all is a little like a rich guy telling a poor guy not to be so concerned about money. I don't obsess about money, but making some is certainly one of my goals when I head out the door each weekday morning.

The key is to have many goals, but a narrow focus.

...Here's the only question you have to answer to determine whether traffic is one of your blogging goals: would you blog happily for an extended time if no one ever read your blog? No Comments, no clicks, no links. Just a dark corner of cyberspace where your blog sits idle and completely unnoticed

Dave Rogers:

It's just marketing.

Indeed.

For my part, I'm going to keep doing it the way I always have - by trying to put out the best service I possibly can, and be a good person. That service attempts to use its influence to expose those who should be heard to a wider audience. I don't have the time, nor inclination, to play suck up. I guess that's my loss.

Update: I check Technorati fairly regularly to see who is linking here and to my surprise, Memeorandum picked me up. I was indeed there for a few seconds, as you can see from this archived page, but whatever algorithm Memeorandum uses has replaced me, with someone who ranks higher.

Update: Whups. Incorrect. It moved my link reference to someone else. I'm still there. It's fascinating to watch it move links and references every few minutes to help present a picture of the thread. Okay.. I'm breaking my Lent promise...walk away... walk away...

to nominate finalists for Philly Future's next Featured Blog poll. The poll should appear on the site by noon today. Until then, anyone of PF's 450 (and counting) members can nominate a favorite local blog (or second (or third, or fourth,...) an existing nomination). Click here for more info.

Copied from Howard :)

While I haven't talked about this here or at PF, it will be - at the very least - educational. Thank you Scott for opening the discussion.

Have a lot of work to do - the Philly Future hosting situation needs to be resolved right away - work has been intense - big things happening personally - and the local journalism work group I'm helping to organize is coming along.

Some thoughts:

Since November 1st, I've read or sent 1551 emails related to Philly Future. And folks wonder why I don't post more :)

Garret, Bill, and Dave have posted their "Four Things".

Bill's RawSugar will be paying maintainers of its top twenty user bookmark pages between $25 and $500 per month.

And last, but not least, well wishes to Zoe.

NYTimes: A Growing Web of Watchers Builds a Surveillance Society:

It is strangely fitting that President Bush's no-warrant wiretapping came to light during the season of holiday gift buying, much of which took place online.

As Washington huffed and puffed over a new erosion of privacy, untold millions of us clicked just as fast as our little clickers could click through Google ads and Amazon checkout pages, unwittingly updating our "cookie" ID badges at every new screen. We bought our loved ones cellphones with built-in Global Positioning System and flocked to family gatherings in cars loaded with OnStar and EZ Pass. We paid for mostly everything with credit and debit cards. Out of convenience, we embraced technologies meant to track our every move.

There are important distinctions, of course, between government prying and the emerging web of consumer surveillance. But they share a digital universe that facilitates and rewards watching. Spam, spyware and identity theft are only a taste of how exposed we have all willingly become as we enjoy the benefits of the networked world.

If the American public seems a bit confused about the raging debate of security versus civil liberties - Bush/Cheney versus the A.C.L.U. - it may be because the debate itself has been outpaced by technology. In our post-9/11, protowireless world, democracies and free markets are increasingly saturated with prying eyes from governments, corporations and neighbors. For better and worse, free societies are fast entering the world of total surveillance.