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Sunday, March 30, 2003
BlogShares BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs - cool idea. Weblogsky's only worth $385.54 at the moment - blogs are valued by inbound links within whatever universe blogshares is considering. The value of an individual link is based on the linking site's value. [Link] Saturday, March 29, 2003 Regime Change USA!  Glen Engel-Cox notes that protests won't change many minds, and I'm not sure that a bumpersticker will do the trick, either... but we should all remember that we have a choice, and we have a way to express that choice when the time comes. (And if you're about to say we don't really get that much of a choice on election day, I can only ask - whose fault is that? [Link] Friday, March 28, 2003 Where is Raed ? Inside Iraq, is where. This weblog's been getting a lot of attention, so you may've seen this before, but just in case. [Link] "Bush Bravely Leads 3rd Infantry Into Battle" Our two-fisted president refuses to sit back while others do the fighting. (Thanks, Judy!) [Link] According to reports from the front, many of the soldiers were initially suspicious of the president, doubtful that an Ivy Leaguer who once used powerful family connections to avoid service in Vietnam had what it took to face enemy fire head-on. However, Bush—or, as his fellow soldiers nicknamed him in a spirit of battlefield camaraderie, 'Big Tex'—quickly overcame the platoon's reluctance to having a "fancy-pants Yalie" in its ranks.Discuss "Bush Bravely Leads 3rd Infantry Into Battle" Thursday, March 27, 2003 Another View of the War in Iraq Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter speculates that the U.S. will lose the war in Iraq. Ritter had resigned his position as weapons inspector in '98 with the complaint that Iraq wasn't disarming, partly due to weak efforts by the U.N. and the U.S. to push Iraq in that direction. (The war thing gets weirder every day, and I no longer feel I can hold an opinion about it. I was initially convinced it was a mistake, and if I was more of a "progressive" and less of an independent, I would probably continue protesting. However the signals are confusing, and I sometimes think that the stability and the health of the world is at great risk if we don't pull this off. But any opinion I hold would be based on conjecture, because there's too much that I don't know. I'll post more about this later... meanwhile who knows about Ritter? He seems to have an agenda of his own.) [Link] And I think that the harsh reality is that in buying off on the expectations of being greeted in the streets of Iraq with song and flowers... we now find we are being greeted with bullets and bombs.Discuss Another View of the War in Iraq Report: Why Am I Getting All This Spam? The Center for Democracy and Technology just published a report on spam. Not many surprises, but the report's a good comprehensive guide, especially for those who haven't studied the spam problem before now. The report includes tips for avoiding spam. Why Am I Getting All This Spam? In six months of operation, our project received over 10,000 e-mail messages to the more than 250 single-use e-mail addresses we created. About 1,600 of these were legitimate e-mail communications that we'd requested from various online services. Another 62 were unclassifiable due to incomplete e-mail headers or other missing data. And 16 messages were received after we'd opted-out of future communications from a business we'd given an e-mail address to, but were received within a two-week "grace period" that our methodology allowed. We classified the remaining 8,842 as unsolicited, a.k.a. spam, e-mail.Discuss Report: Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Tuesday, March 25, 2003 A Breath of Air, Never Mind Fresh The New York Press presents scathing summaries of the fifty most loathsome New Yorkers. This is the best thing I've read all week, but it's only Tuesday. [Link] 4 Ann Coulter, PunditDiscuss A Breath of Air, Never Mind Fresh Channels of Influence Got a pointer to this Paul Krugman column via Dave Farber's IP list. What better way to control and influence the ebb and flow of memes within the media-saturated republic than via radio - always on in the background, practically subliminal. These guys will no doubt be strong opponents to Open Spectrum. [Link] Why would a media company insert itself into politics this way? It could, of course, simply be a matter of personal conviction on the part of management. But there are also good reasons for Clear Channel — which became a giant only in the last few years, after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed many restrictions on media ownership — to curry favor with the ruling party. On one side, Clear Channel is feeling some heat: it is being sued over allegations that it threatens to curtail the airplay of artists who don't tour with its concert division, and there are even some politicians who want to roll back the deregulation that made the company's growth possible. On the other side, the Federal Communications Commission is considering further deregulation that would allow Clear Channel to expand even further, particularly into television.Discuss Channels of Influence Lessig and Benkler at Internet Law Program Donna Wentworth is blogging the Internet Law Program in Brazil, including an account of a conversation between Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler. Portions of the conference will be webcast this week. [Link] Larry: So what we said so far is that we began with a world of dumb receivers, moved to smart receivers, and added "gains." And then from there we envison a world where cooperation adds capacity.Discuss Lessig and Benkler at Internet Law Program Shaggy Apocalypse Stories Endtime believers figure the Iraqi war is a clear, flashing sign of armageddon. Our real concern should be whether George W. Bush and friends believe they're instruments of a destiny prescribed by zealots who distort Biblical texts to fit their curious biochemical surges. Perhaps they should consider sustained doses of Prozac. [Link] Such talk bothers Craig Hill, professor of the New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and one of many biblical scholars who say that end-time interpreters distort Scripture to fit their point of view.Discuss Shaggy Apocalypse Stories Saturday, March 22, 2003 What if Microsoft decides to go Open Source? From NewsForge, speculation about the implications of an OS future for Microsoft. Someone says (in comments) that this is improbable because Microsoft is a public company accountable to shareholders, but I had actually considered this same possibility when Microsoft diversified into the realm of products with embedded software (among its other diversifications). If Microsoft could no longer compete effectively with commodity-priced and free software created by communities of coders and consultants, I could imagine OS releases of at least some of its software products, perhaps even OS versions of Windows. [Link] While Microsoft's critics denounce Shared Source as a sham, at least it's a move away from binary-only, and although its rule is "look, don't touch" and limited to a privileged few, Shared Source is a concession to the power of Open Source in the current software industry.Discuss What if Microsoft decides to go Open Source? Friday, March 21, 2003 Kevin Sites Unblogged CNN war correspondent Kevin Sites has been asked to "suspend my war blogging for a while." Here's hoping CNN will realize the value of the blog - and the value they lose by shutting it down. [Link] "Current Events, with context" Something new from Technorati: taking the pulse of the blogosphere... links to blogs of current events, grouped by subject. [Link] Police Riot? Lisa Rein captured video of stressed-out San Francisco police losing their cool during an antiwar protest. Protestors are chanting "the whole world is watching," inspiring memories of Chicago '68. Thursday, March 20, 2003 Dreamcatcher  A guilty pleasure: though I studied English literature in a past life (bouncing from the English to the Journalism dept, then back), I almost never take the time to read fiction these days, and when I do, it's usually, er, not mainstream. However when Stephen King's Dreamcatcher was published, I was still living in Boulder, spending a lot of time in the snow, and occasionally visiting the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, which was the model for the Overlook in The Shining (which was the last Stephen King book I read, about a hundred years ago). So I grabbed a copy of Dreamcatcher and read it on long drives between Colorado and Texas. It was solid, creepy fun... a weird kind of alien invasion, lots of snow... kind of like Invasion the Body Snatchers meets The Shining. I remember thinking it might make a great film, if you could figure out how to handle the scenes that are set inside the protagonist's head. Sure enough, Lawrence Kasdan's taken it on, with a screenplay by William Goldman. Starts tomorrow - get in out of the snow! [Link] Wednesday, March 19, 2003 Talking 'bout Meta-Blog  Chip Rosenthal's post (with links to David Nunez and Adina Levin) about the innovative Austin Metablog. In just a couple of months, the Austin community of bloggers has pulled together and formed a happenin' community. [Link] CONELRAD: All Things Atomic  This is definitely the web site you should explore tonight. Conelrad, an abbreviation for CONtrol of ELectronic RADiation, was the civil defense emergency alert system that was gonna let us know when to duck and cover as the Soviet-driven a-bombs hit the anytown tarmac. Conelrad, the web site, is devoted to cold war apocalypse culture: I found it while looking, in a fit of nostalgia, for information about Panic in Year Zero, a quaint Roger Corman holocaust fantasy - Ray Milland and Frankie Avalon i the hills outside Los Angeles, fortunate to have hit the vacation road just before the bombs hit. [List] (From the review of Panic in Year Zero): When Mrs. Baldwin chides Harry for refusing to go back to help her mother, he replies testily, "Cut it out, will you? I didn't ASK for this, did I?" It's a rather tame argument considering the dire situation, but by fifties sitcom standards, it is an unholy row. The incredibly oblivious daughter then wonders aloud, "What's the matter with everyone?" Her parents remain silent but her sibling explains simply, "Panic, sis, they're panicking." Indeed. Karen remains inappropriately petulant throughout much of the film. Her dialogue, as you will soon read, suggests Gidget gone nuclear.Discuss CONELRAD: All Things Atomic Tuesday, March 18, 2003 "War is not healthy for children..." Imagine you're an American soldier in Iraq, and you're confronted by a battalion of fully-armed soldiers - and they're then years old. (Dave sent this along in response to my notes of despair about imminent war - more war-related craziness.) I read stuff like this, and I find it harder to oppose "regime change." [Link] A recent report from the respected Washington-based Brookings Institute suggested that these 'child soldiers' could become problematic for US troops even if they have overwhelming military superiority over Baghdad.Discuss "War is not healthy for children..." Monday, March 17, 2003 The Middle East  After I blogged about Rachel Corrie's death, a friend of mine noted that many more Americans have died, and gave me a reference on American victims of Middle East Terrorism up to July 2002. And here's something more recent, the death of 14-year-old Abigail Litle in a suicide bomb attack. There are also more links, more deaths. When I blogged about Rachel Corrie, some might've interpreted my post as some kind of political statement, but it really wasn't. I'm in despair about the death and instability, and the clear indication that we'll see only more of the same in other parts of the world, like Iraq. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get it at all. File Traders Feel Activities Are Not Wrong Via Slashdot: people who acquire music online just can't seem to get that it's "piracy," according to an Ipsos-Reid study. Well, heck - if I hop into your car and drive away with it, I might see that I've stolen it... but if I make a perfect copy of your car, and drive away in the copy, somehow that doesn't feel like theft. I keep wondering where the record industry will be after it's rounded up 40 million of its customers and tossed 'em in jail? [Link] What is most clear is the disconnect between consumer and producer. The scary truth for them is that there is a new distribution method that can take the artists directly to the consumer, a medium that disengages the record industry as middlemen. The record labels still offer powerful marketing muscle an artist needs to break through the white noise of millions of recordings, but distribution is where their business model exerts its most control and thus power.Discuss File Traders Feel Activities Are Not Wrong Sunday, March 16, 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) CDC information on the new, antibiotic-resistant disease that originated in Southeast Asia and has spread, though the World Health Organization is working to contain it. So far physicians and researchers have been unable to identify the cause. [Link] An American Death in Palestine  An Israeli bulldozer in Palestine rolled over and killed an American protestor, Rachel Corrie. [Link] The Israeli Army are attempting to dishonour her memory by claiming that Rachel was killed accidentally when she ran in front of the bulldozer. Eye-witnesses to the murder insist that this is totally untrue. Rachel was sitting in the path of the bulldozer as it advanced towards her. When the bulldozer refused to stop or turn aside she climbed up onto the mound of dirt and rubble being gathered in front of it wearing a fluorescent jacket to look directly at the driver who kept on advancing. The bulldozer continued to advance so that she was pulled under the pile of dirt and rubble. After she had disappeared from view the driver kept advancing until the bulldozer was completely on top of her. The driver did not lift the bulldozer blade and so she was crushed beneath it. Then the driver backed off and the seven other ISM activists taking part in the action rushed to dig out her body. An ambulance rushed her to A-Najar hospital where she died.Discuss An American Death in Palestine Images of War This page is not for the squeamish - it's filled with horrible images . . . victims of war. On the other hand I think anyone who favors war for any reason should dwell on this page for a while and consider the cost in real human terms. [Link] "When our troops enter a bombed village the pariah dogs are already at work eating the corpses of the babies and old women who have been killed. Many suffer from ghastly wounds, especially some of the younger children who...are covered with flies and crying for water."Discuss Images of War Saturday, March 15, 2003 We blog! I wrote an article on Austin bloggers for the Austin Chronicle, but there wasn't as much space as they'd hoped, so it was cut in half and published as A Corner in Cyberspace Turned Blog Party. Here's a a link to the original cut of the article. Blogging is more than writing and publishing, it's increasingly interactive. Bloggers link and respond to each other, and they include discussion links so that readers can give feedback. Some technologies, like Slash, which is the engine for Slashdot.com, combine blogs with forums, and include other enhancements, like reputation systems in which comments are rated so you can filter out those with low ratios of signal to noise. You can see blogs as an extension of zines, small independent magazines that published inexpensively, not for profit, but as a means of expression and a way to communicate. Zines were facilitated by the desktop publishing revolution, and many zinesters moved from paper publications to the web because the barriers to entry were even lower, so eventually there were fewer zines but many webzines appeared, and they weren't tied to a production schedule, so we evolved away from the sense of the "periodical" with the realization that the web is always on, so you can publish any time.Discuss We blog! Friday, March 14, 2003 More on Voting via Linking The Emergent Democracy conversation I blogged yesterday has advanced, and Kevin Marks has blogged his thinking about the concept, along with links to other blog items on the subject. David Weinberger's also blogged the concept. This suggestion of simple new standard may have bigger implications - the creation of a "social software task force" to work on emerging standards for blogs, wikis, discussions, etc. Thursday, March 13, 2003 Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate: Tomorrow Now! There are notes from the SXSW presentation on March 11 by Bruce and Derek. I meant to post them before now, even though they're a bit sketchy (I was half asleep!) Bruce invites the audience to his house for free beer (his infamous SXSW party later that night). "There may be weird surprises." Why am I here to talk about the future? What are my credentials (slightly any). Now writing a futurist column for Wired. Bruce and Derek are going to riff on six major league change drivers. Derek principal of Futures Lab in Austin 4 years, looking at future potential for major corporations. 1) Open Spectrum. Coming on pretty strong. 802.11 is the baby, under the radar version. Much bigger struggle: between the pigopolis and the pirates. In the world of open spectrum, there are no rules... the spectrum people are pretty nervous about it. You can lose HEAPS of money by bringing people access to information. Motorola Canopy - like a moonlight tower spreading information over the neighborhood. 802.11 is minor, but if the open spectrum guys can get one little chunk of real channel, they could cover the U.S. in 18 months... broadband for everybody forever. Derek: looking for a tipping point in a new technology. There are obviously aspects of it that will be important. The car seems to be the tipping point. People obviously believe more in the mesh network... hard drives standard in cars by 2007. Ford and Daimler etc. - will be key drivers, with that kind of commercialization. Other than moving heavy data, will see more of the local area networks... 80% LAN, 20% wide area in cars. 2) Where is the revenue in all this? Where is the business model? Bruce: odd that we put so much effort into a technology with no more than the hope that a business model would pop up. Google: "get me right into the database... and (with blogger acquisition) get those 100,000 hippies to help me." Guy from Red Herring on TV today says "I've seen this happen all the time: a bunch of people put blogs together, then I show up to show how to commercialize it." Where's your magazine, fella? The Internet is a tool of science and the military, and they're not profit centers. Floods of people are reading British newspapers now to find out what's going on in their own country. There's no money in media, Sterling says. It may be that there's never a business model, and we get worse and worse informed, and we never learn anything about anything ever again, but at least it's free. Derek: some areas might be interesting going forward (gaming). Things like escapism and maximum pleasure really ... I think there will be money for that... life enrichment. We are seeing creepage in a host of environmental issues. Ultimately where there will be bubble money is in security and personal safety. Also biotech - sensory industries, embedded technologies. 3) Ubicomp... ubiquitous computing. Example (underestimated): traffic monitoring. Red Ken, Marxist mayor of London, put video camps all over London for traffic control. Ubicomp mission creep... database of license plates and what people are downtown. Bruce: mysterious bloom of video cams on traffic signals around Austin. What is our city doing with all of this video? How do you leave town without them knowing. How do really know that when you drive across town for a rendezvous with your lover, your husband isn't going to call and ask where did my wife's license plate go on (date). Coming warfare between palmtop devices and cellphones... going to the knife over who controls portable data. Phones try to turn into PDAs, PDAs into phones. Microsoft, the beast of Redmond trying to swallow everything. Derek: more positive aspects of ubicomp. It's part of all the projects he's been working on. A suit is likely to be an office as we move forward (eyeglasses, head's up displays). Having a personal network within your clothing (MIT and some companies). Warewear. Bruce: a GPS could be wherewearware. An incredible number of new polymers with embedded technologies in them. Material Connection - Bruce loves 'em, they make great toys. New materials where you can embed anything... have to be sensory.. An aspect that is underplayed: ubijunk. What happens when you move into room that has roomware that has had the blue screen of death? 4) Implications for industry. Open source manufacturing etc. Suppose you built an OS model t out of foamed aluminum and bamboo? What would this do to the automobile industry. No DRM in it, and if you wore one out you would just get another. How do we fit it into the litigation structure?s Terrorist spread of WMD is like a Linux model for small groups of activists. (At this point I'm losing energy!) Derek - issue of community structures. If you look at changing rhythms of work - workforce - we're seeing breakdown of traditional structures. No real need to have big organizations. Community companies, or profit-making communities. People negotiate contracts on different basis... 5 ) Biotech, life extension. Revolt by healthcare workers against insurance rates (malpractice) - a breakdown of the social order. WHO - numbers show reduced populations due to AIDs. Better news - we have a better understanding of cells now. (At this point I had to leave...) Whuffie in Links The Emergent Democracy tribe's been discussing a possible enhancement of href links. Since Google's page ranking uses the number of times a page is linked as part of its algorithm, it might make sense to include other information about your evaluation of a page when you link to it. The idea is to contribute your assessment of the whuffie (reputation) of the link, so that you wouldn't assign more credibility to a bogus page if you linked to it for some reason. Broad implementation of a method like this could improve Google's assessment of value, and it might have other uses as well. There's a debate about the best way to implement something like this. My opinion is that you would add an attribute called "whuffie," after Cory Doctorow's term for reputation in the imagined future of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Whuffie could have a value of -10 to 10, so you might have <a href="http://www.weblogsky.com" whuffie="10">. Five Clues for Geeks Link found on Dave Weinberger's Joho the Blog: Arnold Kling has written a list similar to the recently-blogged "World of Ends" that Dave created with Doc Searls, but this one is aimed at geeks, who have their own stubborn misconceptions, of which Kling lists the five most common:
My goal is to see ignorance reduced on both sides of the Suit-Geek divide. Suits who are ignorant of the Internet ultimately do a disservice to the businesses whose outmoded practices they try to protect with misguided legal weapons. Geeks who are ignorant of markets do less harm, because they tend to limit their activities to applauding one another's manifestos. However, if the anti-market prejudice that they promote becomes more widespread, they ultimately will do a disservice to their vision of the future. That vision will arrive soonest if market forces are allowed to operate.Discuss Five Clues for Geeks Wednesday, March 12, 2003 World of Ends Dave Weinberger and Doc Searls have assembled a set of clear, defining statements about the Internet that are calculated to trash mistaken assumptions, what they call "repetitive mistake syndrome" because people keep making them, the same mistakes, over and over. Examples: "The Internet isn't a thing, it's an agreement." and "All the Internet's value grows on its edges." But you really have to read the whole thing to get it. [Link] All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It's not hard. The Net isn't rocket science. It isn't even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars' worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.Discuss World of Ends Link to Slashdot discussion of WoE (added 3/13/2003) The myth of interference David Weinberger on David Reed's thinking about the Open Spectrum concept. "Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." Interference is the excuse for treating spectrum as limited "real estate" and limiting its use to concentrated media sources. However interference goes away if you have senders and receivers that are smart enough to sort out multiple signals carried by the same frequency... similar to the way the Internet can sort out zillions of packets on the receiving end based on the way they were encoded before transmission. Reed has a complete grasp of the problem, as well as its social, economic, and political implications. [Link] ... ultimately Reed isn't in this because he wants us to have better TVs or networked digital cameras. "Bad science is being used to make the oligarchic concentration of communications seem like a fact of the landscape." Opening the spectrum to all citizens would, according to him, be an epochal step in replacing the "not" with an "and" in Richard Stallman's famous phrase: "Free as in 'free speech,' not free as in 'free beer.' Says Reed: "We've gotten used to parceling out bits and talking about 'bandwidth.' Opening the spectrum would change all that."Discuss The myth of interference Tuesday, March 11, 2003 SXSW: Journalism and Weblogs Very loose notes from a panel on Sunday, March 9. Actual title was "Journalism: Old and New."
Dan Gillmor: Most interesting thing is transformation from old mode of lecturing to a conversation... better sense of what the truth is or at least more nuance. 'My readers know more than I do, and that's not a threat, that's an opportunity, and that's basically what's got me into this...." JD Lasica (http://www.jdlasica.com/blog) Dichotomy between panel and audience sort of artificial. New journalists are more part of a conversation than the traditional. newmediamusings is his weblog. Writes about many topics, mostly new media. Wrote about RSS feeds for OJR, then posteed all transcripts of email interviews. Moved to MT the cadillac of blog softtware. Writing a book about IP and file sharing. In MT changed the word comments to conversations. Matt Haughey Smith "You all are setting the standards for what kind of communication is out there." Providence journal somewhat well known for its blogs. Lasica - it goes both ways: bloggers learning from trad journalists as well as vice versa. Matt says recently has seen bloggers picking up the phone to do background. Dan: the right wing has been far ahead of the left in using NT... first on bulletin boards, talk radio, and now blogs. Best political weblogs are right wing. People who feel like outsiders (tho now they're in charge of everything). Smith: Is Matt Drudge a weblogger? Broke Monica story. Old media forced to follow the footsteps of this guy. Benton: Drudge is certainly a journalist, though maybe not a good or ethical journalist. Easier for someone who is not a journalist to do journalism now. I get over 100 emails a week... don't have to have the blogging form to have that interactivity. Conflicts of interest between day job and blog? Benton: sometimes haven't gone all the way to post certain things. Supposed to be completely objective in what I do and I don't mind that restriction. once posted about an error in a Dallas Morning News story... editor said maybe not best to post to the blog... crabwalk.com Ethical to attack a competitor in blog? Dan: issue of independence. Let me start by addressing attack competitor: Journalism does a lousy job of covering journalism. .... I have a lot more freedom because I'm a columnist. I'm encouraged to say what I think and have considerable leeway in what I write. How come they let me do that? Because people read it... that's the bottom line for journalism. I have attacked my company on ethical problem, but there are some things I won't write about... stuff where it doesn't feel like my place. But if I saw something that made me sick to my stomach, I would quit or do something different. I wouldn't work for an organization I considered unethical. Matt... on independent sites, worried about how people are affected. Threatened with two lawsuits this year... removal of libel/slander. On independent sites sometimes, y ou've got to question people's motives. Area of blogger law developing? Different standards. Some people are working on this... Lasica - how do you know what to trust, to believe online? Bloggers don't have standards, values, guidelines of trad journalists? Someone's contention - but there is something going on in blogosphere... people are building brands, cultivating reputation. Ken Layne: "In the blog world, when you get something wrong, we can fact check your act." We probably need to edit ourselves more because people believe what they read on the web. Is ther a NY Times of blogs? Dan - a number of blogs that Ifind to be credible in their own realm. More niche pubs. (Mentioned a very credible 802.11 wireless blog.) Matt: I think weblogging is really transparent. Lasica: blogrolls cool since there isn't any one authoritative blog site. Benton: potenial problem - allows people to get caught in a world where they're just hearing their side of the question - hearing only the same voices and opinions. E.g. in education research, there's a lot of research to support all sides of a question... you have to look at sevewral to get closer to the truth. Dan: people working on tools to aggregate the conversation... aggregate blogs. Also bloggers should point at people who disagree with them. Smith: Fewer independent media - media conglomerates forming - blogs are the only source now of independent thinking. Chip: something to help bloggers do better weblogs (as journalists). Benton: maybe that's not what you want to do with weblogs - could be a bastardization of the form. More for community, personal opinions. Dan: "A" list? How democratic is the conversation if at the center is the journalist who is the 'superstar' of the process? Benton: part of my job is to be as invisible as I can be... as a journalist. Dan: the readers were scarcely part of it before blogs came along. And this tech is creating opportunity for new voices to emerge from the edges of this powerful network that is forming, giving rise to democratization of media itself, not overnight. Lasica - I worked in daily newspapers for a few years, you recognize what gets your story on the air. Blogs explode the myth of objectivity, personalize journalism, but people at the center of the story for better or worse. Derek: what's happened over the years in media is that everything has got bigger, forced to be more general - you don't want to piss your advertisers off. Weblogs powerful because small etc. Role of advertising - relevance - blogs become journalism because journalism has let us down, esp in focusing on the details and the local. Benton: myth of the golden age of journalism. Gillmor - no comments - making sure what they have is wroking before turning on the comments. No resistance "A lot of professional journalism has been turned into nothing more than glorified stenography." - Dan Discuss Journalism and Weblogs Cliff Figallo: Putting Conversations to Work "Attention is energy." When people pay attention, the person who is getting the attention is getting energy. Cliff notes that, on the WELL, people would exhibit bad behavior because it drew attention - 'feeding the energy creature." Defining conversation: Who's talking? What are their intentions, commitment, tolerance. How can you tell if you're getting traction. Sometimes you have to be selective about who you invite into the conversation. The WELL said anyone with money and a modem could participate in 1986, but from there it was up for grabs. Stewart Brand had hired people with communal experience (from the farm) to manage the WELL - because they understood what it took for a community to be productive, to be functional rather than dysfunctional. They learned that some people could prohibit many others from participating productively in an online conversation... dominate the conversation and send it in a direction that would chase people away. It kept people up at night, worrying that the WELL could become a strong community uniting writers and thinkers... but when someone would crash the party, members would insist that they throw them off, but Cliff et al didn't want to be despots, wanted the communityu to sort out its own problems. There were situations where they did have to remove people.
Intentional CommunityIntention = sense of mission, shared purose, shared ethos. "Intensional networks personal social networks (Nardi, Whittaker, Schwarz - technologists who wrote a paper for First Mo'nday a couple of months ago - the sp is on purpose, includes tension - in-tension-al.) Chose the term to reflect the effort and deliberateness with which people construct and manage personal networks. Cliff managed a temporary intentional community created to discuss what to do with the site of the World Trade Center. Even though they didn't agree, participants were moving in the same direction. Set up groups of 30, and those could read other groups' conversations. Some had assigned facilitators; for those that did not, facilitators emerged. The discussions were among people who had strong emotions, many of whom had personal losses from the WTC disaster. "Tall towers" people wanted to build towers taller, victims' families wanted a memorial. Some felt that the victims' families had undue influence. Everyone hoped to have some effect on the decision-makers, and they did. The f2f encounter found strong disapproval for the original plans - online contribution showed that it was important for towers to be tall and to have a memorial, and the final decision reflects those intentions.
Trust, identity, reputationThese are getting much discussion today - reputation management on the web. Cliff had experience with this at RealCommunities. This is stuff that we find in our daily lives - we rely on many factors to determine whether it is worthwhile to engage in a conversation. On the WELL, the trust level spiked at a point where Howard Rheingold and Tom Mandel started a conference called True Confessions... basically a place where people could write autobiographical stories about themselves. This accommodated multidimensional relationships -you could get a real sense of the other person. This opened up the community... you could learn why someone was the way they were. Leadership in a community is important, and there are different kinds of leaders. Founders (vision), implementers (trigger), sustainers (manage the conversation and keep it flowing). Power imbalances destabilize conversations. E.g. people don't want to go along with the U.S. - not a question of right or wrong, but whether the U.S. is 'put in its place.' Truth will out. The Internet is such that you can't keep a lid on anything. Many visions are represented (as in blogging - same publishing model as the web has always had, but this is a new element in a sense - blogging is now a medium or application of the medium that allows many viewpoints to come together, cross reference each other. argue with each other - an expanded conversation. There are levels of trust involved, despite whether you agree or not. There is a trust that all are trying to have a productive conversation. Subtext: undercurrent. You can read a conversation and tell whether there is a lack of credibility of a disbelief under the surface. A vibe of argument below the surface. In online conversations on intranets, same thing, because people are afraid to admit what they believe - their jobs are at stake. Subconscious - a belief system at work that someone doesn't want to express because it would cause an argument... however it comes out in some subtle form within the communication. Dave W. asks how you can make conversations work within organizations. Cliff notes that organizations were hierarchical, but the net has forced a breakthrough to a nonhierarchical, distributed information structure. Orgs now do team building etc. to try to overcome power imbalances - though power imbalances will still exist becausae of hierarchy, unless managers join the conversation. E.g. Stewart Brand was less open on the WELL when he was questioned or criticized. Now customers are empowered by feedback mechanisms (e.g. Edmunds.com, Epinions). If company doesn't join the conversation, it doesn't benefit from the feedback. Companies have to evolve, they have to see what is happening (e.g. Enron). If there's no communication, negatives can get out of control and cause significant damage. How do you deal with power imbalances - first, you have to acknowledge that there is a difference. Begin with an agreement that everyone will listen to each other, respect each other, everyone do everything they can to make the conversation as useful as they can. Important to have an agreement going into the conversation that formalizes the conversation to some extent. Use an alias? Not what you're looking for - looking for true identity. Alias allows person with the higher power position to cloak the position - might be useful for them, but not for everybody else. Nancy: if trust is an issue within the organization, this could be counterproductive. However in situations where everyone is anonymous, you can have useful conversations. Depends on the organization. Looping is getting into a circular argument. Unproductive. Not getting work done: shouldn't have to use diplomacy, should put your cards on the table. Politics and moving on - break the loop, get to other priorities. Gaming and competition - people like to have debate, winners and losers. Achieving stuff is about cooperating. Gratuitous complexity delays conversations that can happen through easy mechanism - email list, IMs, message boards. SummaryMore SXSW Yesterday much of my day at SXSW was about logistics for EFF-Austin - covering our booth and last-minute planning for last night's party, which went very well despite a snafu early on with the wireless feed. We did manage to bring it up just after Cory finished his passionate speech about EFF's work, and Sandy Stone did a bit of surreal performance art. We had exceptional music by Casamar, Dave Demaris, and Thomas Fang, and the Bumperactive crew were upstairs helping partygoers fired up by Cory's speech to create their own bumperstickers on the fly. We had a chat room, too, courtesy of Greg Elin... we projected the chat on the screen while the music played. Sunday, March 09, 2003 Conceptual Firewall Blogging from the panel at SXSW on 'Conceptual Firewalls' - unfortunately late to the panel after working the EFF-Austin table where Rebecca Blood was signing her Weblog Handbook. Ana Sisnett was just talking about barriers. From Cameron Marlow: no data exists so far on the defining attributes of the weblog population (read by Katharine Parrish from an email). Katharine Parrish says she became conscious of her gender when she became engaged with technology. Heather Champ talking about mail-dominated conferences - where are the women? This year SXSW has worked at getting more women, but she is concerned whether women feel that these events speak to women. Anil Dash had posted photos from a Dave Winer gathering where there were only two women present. Heather created a handout: the face of blogging? The face is a white male. Nancy White is talking from the audience about her work with young women in Seattle - talking about the possibility of a safe place, an incubator. Safe places between public and private? Ana talks about an email from Kwesi Evans of Nokoah, and Austin African-American newspaper - about how SXSW doesn't bring advertising to his kind of newspaper. Ana notes that there are few present who look like her - embedded racism, inherent in this space. Jason Nolan talking about someone in Pakistan who has tech that won't work in her environments because access blocked or otherwise unavailable. Talking about cultural segregation within communities where women can't talk and share even because they have proximity. Men won't let women access Internet because of the potential for accessing porn. Trying to develop tools for that environment. Anil notes that a minority of people find their voice through writing anyway, but Jason says this has to do with his specific situation dealing with grad students. Katharine: English teachers force students to journal, then interrogate them, something that hasn't had enough good thinging about it. She loses sleep over the requirement that she require people to journal. Bringing something that is private into the public sphere... relates to the issue of a private space (and Ana had commented earlier on the issue of a lack of private space in the home. Katharine found that students she thought would be excited about journaling had concerns about making private thoughts public. Ana in looking at blogs at first put in keywords re 'black' and found blogs by angry white men complaining about affirmative action. Not necessarily a welcoming environment. Ana says it was two white men who answered some of her questions - John Knowles of AMODA. Wrote to ask him stuff including what color he was. Also Adam Weinroth, a longtime supporter of Austin Freenet, has a very easy blog platform, easyjournal.com (which is what Ana's using to blog at the moment). How do we make this stuff useful within the communities we serve? Is it her (Freenet's) responsibility? What is private, public, and personal? Private - no place on the net. Public - put it out there! Personal - you have to figure that out. Discovered the Wayback Machine and realized that what he's put out there could be there forever. Ana: multiple personas while doing the blog. Ana's is as the director of a nonprofit unplugged, i.e. speaking as Ana, not as director of Austin Freenet. Has another blog with another voice. The choice whether to be public or private. Re. the camera and the recording: sousveillance. Lisa Rein has the camera - and says a bit about her thinking about creating the record. "That doesn't take away from the record to not embarrass somebody on their job." Jason doesn't want people blogging about skipping off when they're supposed to be looking for work and their welfare check depends on it. The question here is the extent to which you realize how public your presence might be. Different risks levels involved. Jason's wife leaving blogs, going back to forums because the forums are not as exposed. Talks about Japanese discomfort with online, public space (vs group, communal space... if I got that thought right?) Where do we go from here? A guy who only found out about blogging two days ago speaks up and asks what it is!? SXSW Notes I'm a little brain dead, but I feel an obligation to post something about SXSW... At 2pm David Weinberger talked about the nature of the web in his opening remarks. The room was full and the response to Dave's message was enthusiastic. Dave's a very warm, caring guy who gets that - and shows how - the web is all about human connection. (Somebody asked about corporate attempts to 'seed' blogs with astroturf, and Dave noted that corporations can't do blogs because they're not people, and they won't make effective use of the 'net and the blogosphere 'til they uncloak the real people behind the corporate veil and let 'em speak, not as mouthpieces, but as real human beings. In one of the best parts of his presentation, Dave brought up the Sears web site, and showed how they didn't have really useful information for potential buyers - then he brought up a forum where people were discussing Sears Kenmore products, and showed how, when he was shopping for a washer/dryer, he got detailed, credible human feedback from other people-who-buy (avoids using the gnarly term "consumers")... He also did a great job trashing the Kurzweil/extropian fantasy in which, someday, we transfer our consciousness to silicon "vessels" - he said "consciousness adheres in flesh." Yowzuh! Meanwhile, Nancy White, Adina Levin and I had a panel at 5pm on "Effective Social Networks"... my friend Heath Row more or less transcribed the session, so you can read about it on his blog! Dave W. also made some comments. Thursday, March 06, 2003 Tools for Electronic Democracy Adina posted about tools that support democracy following conversations related to Joi Ito's paper on Emergent Democracy. She's good at distilling lists, and here it's
Wednesday, March 05, 2003 Chilling Effect An attorney who wore a t-shirt with a message advocating peace at a mall in Guilderland, New York was arrested for trespassing. Two security guards told him to remove the tshirt (ironically purchased at a store in the mall) or leave. When he refused to do either one, they called the police, who charged him with trespass and took him to jail after their attempts to get him to comply failed. He could face a year in prison if convicted. [Link] Addendum: As ever, there was more to the story. (Thanks, Mark!) boingboing's discussion link (because I forgot to make one). Monday, March 03, 2003 Doom Looms Warren Buffet is predicting economic apocalypse, saying that banks don't understand the extent of risk in derivatives, described here as "often complex financial instruments that allow investors to take bets on anything from share prices to the weather." [Link] The views of the world's second richest man are closely watched and his apocalyptic vision will do little to steady nerves on Wall Street or in the City of London. Extracts from his annual letter, to be delivered on Saturday but posted on Fortune.com yesterday, reveal that he has little optimism for the stock market.Discuss Doom Looms Stone Genitalia  The riddle of Stonehenge may have been solved by scientists who theorize that the design was based on female sexual anatomy. [Link] "I believe it was meant to be a place of life, not death," said Perks, who thinks Stonehenge overall represents an Earth Mother goddess.Discuss Stone Genitalia Destination: Moon Most interesting aspect of China's planned moon exploration/colonization: they're going their own way, rather than building on U.S. and Russian technologies. "They intend to go to the head of the queue in terms of capabilities." And they're not going just to hang out: they're going to do some digging. China's hip to market economies, looking for the ROI! [Link] South by Southwest Interactive South by Southwest Interactive starts Friday (PM, with a presentation by Richard Stallman). I'll be on a panel Saturday at 5pm (Effective Online Social Networks), and we're throwing an ACTLab/EFF/EFF-Austin party Monday at 8pm. If you can't make the conference but want to attend the trade show, click here for a free pass. Here's SXSW's description of my panel: Effective Online Social NetworksDiscuss South by Southwest Interactive Sunday, March 02, 2003 UK Guardian: "US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war" A leaked NSA memo shows the extent to which the U.S. government is spying on members of the U.N. Security Council to determine how they plan to vote on the proposed war with Iraq, and how to influence those votes. This leak is embarrassing to the Bush Administration, though fortunately for them the U.S. media (with the exception of the Drudge Report) aren't reporting it. At least, not yet. (Thanks, Bruce!) [Link] Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery.Discuss "US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war" Saturday, March 01, 2003 Spectrum Conference I'm auditing Lessig's Spectrum Policy conference via webcast. Evidently there've been technical problems, but those are fixed now. I managed to pick up the webcast, but the sound was still bad... just improved radically, though. The live feed is here. Market-o-Matic Market-o-Matic is the right tool for the moment. It gave me this:
Work of Meta-Art in the Age of Symbiotic ReproductionThe mind creates, the chaos permeates. In the material reality, art objects are resurrections of the creations of the mind -- a mind that uses the chaos as a zeitgeist to enmesh ideas, patterns, and emotions. With the synergy of the electronic environment, the mind is conceiving a point where it will be free from the chaos to share immersions into the ejaculations of the delphic reality. Work of Meta-Art in the Age of Symbiotic Reproduction contains 10 minimal shockwave engines (also refered to as "memes") that enable the user to make surreal audio/visual compositions.
measuring chains, constructing realities Jon Lebkowsky's work investigates the nuances of vibrations through the use of fast motion and close-ups which emphasize the Symbiotic nature of digital media. Lebkowsky explores abstract and excellent scenery as motifs to describe the idea of hyper-real reality. Using exemplary loops, vectors, and interactive images as patterns, Lebkowsky creates meditative environments which suggest the expansion of culture... Sigh... this is the beginning of my career as an artist! Try it! Post your Market-O-Matic blurb in the discussions below. Note the disclaimer:
*Note: Certain restrictions may apply. Use of The Market-O-Matic (1.0) [fine arts version] void where prohibited, namely in any context where someone might be tempted to mistake it for art. Market-O-Matic Inc. and its associated affiliates make no guarantees as to the jury-pleasing ability of statements generated by The Market-O-Matic (1.0) [fine arts version]. Offer not available to residents of Trinidad, Yemen, or New Jersey.Discuss Market-O-Matic Market-o-Matic Market-o-Matic is the right tool for the moment. It gave me this:
Work of Meta-Art in the Age of Symbiotic ReproductionThe mind creates, the chaos permeates. In the material reality, art objects are resurrections of the creations of the mind -- a mind that uses the chaos as a zeitgeist to enmesh ideas, patterns, and emotions. With the synergy of the electronic environment, the mind is conceiving a point where it will be free from the chaos to share immersions into the ejaculations of the delphic reality. Work of Meta-Art in the Age of Symbiotic Reproduction contains 10 minimal shockwave engines (also refered to as "memes") that enable the user to make surreal audio/visual compositions.
measuring chains, constructing realities Jon Lebkowsky's work investigates the nuances of vibrations through the use of fast motion and close-ups which emphasize the Symbiotic nature of digital media. Lebkowsky explores abstract and excellent scenery as motifs to describe the idea of hyper-real reality. Using exemplary loops, vectors, and interactive images as patterns, Lebkowsky creates meditative environments which suggest the expansion of culture... Sigh... this is the beginning of my career as an artist! Try it! Post your Market-O-Matic blurb in the discussions below. Note the disclaimer:
*Note: Certain restrictions may apply. Use of The Market-O-Matic (1.0) [fine arts version] void where prohibited, namely in any context where someone might be tempted to mistake it for art. Market-O-Matic Inc. and its associated affiliates make no guarantees as to the jury-pleasing ability of statements generated by The Market-O-Matic (1.0) [fine arts version]. Offer not available to residents of Trinidad, Yemen, or New Jersey.Discuss Market-O-Matic  |
