Perspectives and Contrasts

It’s hard to answer the question of whether technology is good, evil, or neither. But one thing we can assert – it’s what you do with it that counts.

Washington Post: The Web as Weapon:

…”The technology of the Internet facilitated everything,” declared a posting this spring by the Global Islamic Media Front, which often distributes Zarqawi messages on the Internet. Today’s Web sites are “the way for everybody in the whole world to listen to the mujaheddin.”

Little more than a year ago, this online empire did not exist. Zarqawi was an Internet nonentity, a relatively obscure Jordanian who was one of many competing leaders of the Iraq insurgency. Once every few days, a communique appeared from him on the Web. Today, Zarqawi is an international name “of enormous symbolic importance,” as Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus put it in a recent interview, on a par with bin Laden largely because of his group’s proficiency at publicizing him on the Internet.

By this summer, Internet trackers such as the SITE Institute have recorded an average of nine online statements from the Iraq branch of al Qaeda every day, 180 statements in the first three weeks of July. Zarqawi has gone “from zero to 60” in his use of the Internet, said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden. “The difference between Zarqawi’s media performance initially and today is extraordinary.”

As with most breakthroughs, it was a combination of technology and timing. Zarqawi launched his jihad in Iraq “at the right point in the evolution of the technology,” said Ben N. Venzke, whose firm IntelCenter monitors jihadist sites for U.S. government agencies. High-speed Internet access was increasingly prevalent. New, relatively low-cost tools to make and distribute high-quality video were increasingly available. “Greater bandwidth, better video compression, better video editing tools — all hit the maturity point when you had a vehicle as well as the tools,” he said.

BBC NEWS: Tim Berners-Lee on the read/write web:

TBL: …I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don’t like, are problems with humanity.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

TBL: …It’s a new medium, it’s a universal medium and it’s not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographical boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.

But on the other hand I see it as a substrate for humanity, I see it as something on which humanity will do what humanity does and the questions as to what we as individuals and we collectively do, are still just as important and just as much as before, up to us.

TBL: …The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

TBL: Some people tell me. I suppose the question is to what extent the people use it for things which should seriously concern us. For example, are people using the web to get information about how to do illegal things, whether it’s to make explosives, how to kill people, poison people, or whatever it is. So there’s a certain amount of danger that this tool can be used for bad purposes. It’s a very powerful tool.

ML: And you’ve never had a sleepless night over that?

TBL: No I haven’t. I haven’t had a sleepless night over it because I suppose I’m so much more surrounded by the good things that people are doing with it. There are lots of positive stories of people doing great things, putting educational information out there for people in developing countries and things, for example. There’s a huge spirit of goodness. Most of the people I meet who are developing the web are focused on all those things.

BusinessWeek: Craig Newmark: The Net’s Free Force:

“In a way, I’ve only had one idea,” says Newmark. “Everything comes from the community.”

Newmark may be the host of the world’s most inclusive happening. In the 1990s, when the tech boom turned the Web into a story about wealth and elitism, Newmark was all about giving the little guy a break. While craigslist charges for help-wanted ads posted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York — at $25 to $75 per ad — elsewhere the listings are free.

That democratic ethos has fueled astonishing growth. The site now spans 34 countries, with listings for 175 cities from Burlington, Vt., to Bangalore. Nielsen/NetRatings says the site’s 5.7 million readers — double the total a year ago — generate 1.5 billion page views a month, making it the ninth-biggest U.S. portal, alongside megasites such as Yahoo! (YHOO ) Consultant Classified Intelligence reckons the site drew $10 million in revenue last year. But Newmark refuses to talk about sales or anything so crass as a business model. “Craigslist is about authenticity,” says Howard Rheingold, an authority on online communities. “Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.”

In the early days of the Net, skeptics predicted that virtual communities like craigslist would sink in a sludge of digital vandalism. Newmark proved them wrong. Amid meteoric growth, he and a staff of four police the site, aided by snazzy software and scores of folks who e-mail daily, alerting him to scammers. “We don’t run the site. The people who use it run it,” he insists. While he has worked at times with prosecutors to put people in jail, “I have no Batman fantasies except recreationally,” he jokes.

Like most successful Web phenomena, the site is also a disruptive force, striking fear among newspaper publishers who rely on classifieds revenue. Newmark regrets undercutting other businesses, but he’s also eager to contribute to community journalism. He has a blog at cnewmark.com and hopes craigslist can serve as a forum for volunteer journalists who can take on hard-hitting topics, including investigative stories. “I’d be willing to pay,” he says.

Related: N-Ten, Fundable.org.

Nonprofit pay tilts heavily toward men

Philadelphia Business Journal: Nonprofit pay tilts heavily toward men:

The Philadelphia area isn’t a bad place to work for a nonprofit, especially if you’re a male who’s running one.

A survey of the region’s nonprofits conducted by the Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University found that the vast majority offer a variety of benefits, while planning to give pay raises this year.

The 2005 Greater Delaware Valley Nonprofit Wage and Benefit Survey also found that male executive directors earn, on average, 42 percent more than women in the same post. That statistic is particularly interesting because of the margin by which women outnumber men in the nonprofit sector, said Laura Otten, who directs the LaSalle Nonprofit Center.

“If you pull together a group of 20 [nonprofit workers], you’re probably going to have 16 women and four men,” Otten said.

… The survey suggests that the women running nonprofits need the increase more than their male counterparts. The average salary received by male executive directors was $109,000, while the average salary earned by female executive directors was $76,973.

That roughly $32,000 differential is larger than the $29,524 one between the average salaries of male and female executive directors that showed up in the NonProfit Times 2005 Salary Survey.

via Tulin from PhillyPolitics. Discrepencies everywhere you turn.

Integrity

I can go to Opensecrets.org and tell who gave which politician money. There is no similar service to find the same type of information about us, or members of the media for that matter. Who gave which blogger money? I can’t imagine a service like this would ever be built. It would veer into privacy concerns. However, those who voluntarily agreed to be part of such a service would earn great trust.

The following quotes aren’t directly related to this, but their posts are good for thought. In one, Duncan Black is giving some great advice to local politicians in where to reach out to the netroots. In another Jeff Jarvis is turning down a request to attend and blog about a conference that he doesn’t agree with, and feels unconfortable being paid for:

Eschaton: Bottom Up:

I get far far less of this kind of thing than I imagine Kos does (very little, in fact, which is fine by me), but the best way for candidates to reach out to the netroots now is to begin by reaching out to local bloggers. No matter how much research I do I can’t possibly have any decent sense of the 470 odd federal races that will happen in ’06. More importantly, local races require local press and as we’ve seen local press will pay attention to local blogs in these kinds of things.

The real value of the netroots to campaigns won’t really be, for the most part, their ability to raise money. Sure, campaigns are always trying to get donations from anywhere they can and I can certainly understand that. I’m happy to suggest candidates for the Eschaton community to support. But, an email or phone call from a campaign manager isn’t going to do squat to encourage me to do that.

The buzz about campaigns, and the “infiltrating” into the netroots, is for the most part going to come from the ground up now. Reach out to local bloggers.

Jeff Jarvis: Blogging junket:

I got a most odd invitation to come to Nashville to blog Justice Sunday II Tom DeLay, Zell Miller, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Phyllis Schlafly. I got email with the offer but there’s also an open invitation here. That’s most odd, since I’ve held these events — and politicians sucking up to them — in disdain. But what’s interesting is that they offered to cover travel expenses. I said no thanks for a few reasons: don’t want to publicize their event, don’t want to take the money. But if any blogger does take their money, I hope it is disclosed.

Of the Many Deaths in Iraq, One Mother’s Loss Becomes a Problem for the President

NYTimes: Of the Many Deaths in Iraq, One Mother’s Loss Becomes a Problem for the President:

President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now.

Ms. Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State.

But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush’s 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.

Albert took part in a conference call with Cindy Sheehan that you can read about here.

A lot of discussion about her at Metafilter.

Money, money, money…. and service

JenSense: Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis

Sean Mountcastle: Business for Geeks

Garrett Dimon: About Going Solo

Philip E. Agre: Department of Information: How to Be a Leader in Your Field

Nonprofit Curmudgeon: Your heart is pure, your cause is just, and you’re still not qualified to start a nonprofit

Craig Newmark: news was a community service, now it’s largely a profit center. nice if it could return to being a community service.