Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

Doc Searls and Dave Rogers Converse

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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.

Congratulations Rajiv

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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: “I had low self esteem, thinking I couldn’t achieve anything.”

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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.

David Shenk stops by

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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 Is Going to Rock

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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.

Latest Norg and Social Software/Media Must Reads

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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…

Latest Norg and Social Software/Media Must Reads

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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!

What’s exciting about Google Gears

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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: “There’s always been too much made of death in the tech world”

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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.