WordPress instigator Matt Mullenweg took advantage of his site's googlejuice to earn some funds for the project, hosting articles designed to game the Google Adwords program, as documented at waxy.org. My pal Jonas Luster, now the first Wordpress employee, has been handling the controversy that resulted while Matt's traveling. Matt's written his own detailed response now that he's back online. I wanted to add my two cents: Matt and Jonas are great guys, WordPress is a terrific piece of software. Putting the articles up was an error in judgement, but they've taken 'em down and they're being responsive. I'm expecting this won't be an issue for WordPress going forward. WordPress users who're concerned about this issue should consider the real message here: WordPress could use more seed money, so if you haven't so far, make a donation.

Here's a link to a Quicktime of my SXSW interview with Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc.

Bloggers and journalists have the potential for a natural partnership, but we have to work around a negative perception of bloggers that crops up occasionally, most recently in this feature at DesMoinesRegister.com, by Erin Crawford, about a whacky theory that "Jeff Gannon" is actually Johnny Gosch, and Iowa paperboy kidnapped in '82. What I found interesting in the story is this paragraph:

If you have the time to read a few hundred Web postings, you will see how Johnny Gosch and Jeff Gannon, two completely unrelated individuals, became the same person on the Web. The way the theory developed says much about the anything-goes nature of the blogosphere and self-proclaimed reporters on the Internet, who seem to find accuracy and proof a nuisance in uncovering fantastical conspiracies. (Italics mine)

Ian Gilfillan posts a good analysis of the impact of oil price increases as shortages grow worse. Nobody's dealing with the consumption problem, but the market will have its effect.

The transport and airline industries would take serious strain. Investment in renewables and nuclear (I talked about the high road of renewables versus the low road of nuclear in my post George Monbiot and the looming energy crisis) is lagging, so the effects cannot be other than a recession. This recession would hit developing, oil-dependent countries hardest. New technologies would first appear in developed countries, meaning that there would be shortages in developing countries, and of course exchange rate fluctuations would again hit developing countries hardest.

Some positive effects would ensue. Local goods would be more attractive as they gain a greater relative competitive advantage. A Cuban-style model (where urban farming boomed after Soviet funds dried up) would ensue, while American-style suburbs would become less sustainable as it becomes less feasible to commute long distances, and ship goods in from afar. The eventual decrease in oil consumption can only have good effects on the planet's health.

WiFi has become an inherent part of municipal economic development and urban renewal efforts, according to David Strom, who acknowledges the Austin Wireless City Project: "...volunteers are getting organized and community-level projects are bringing techno-geeks together to build their own hot spots. The best example of this is Austin Wireless City Project in Texas. They have even produced a training manual to show how they have built out their network..." [Link]

Austin

Spurred by the great enthusiasm of a revived and happening SalsaNet, San Antonio's getting fired up about WiFi. An article from the San Antonio Express-News talks about efforts by WiFi-Sa.com and Salsa.net to get free or low-cost Internet access to underserved areas, and WiFi adoption by Urban-15, an SA-based regional arts group.

I knew blogging had sunk in as part of the mediascape when, on Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, the prolific Arianna Huffington was listed, not as a mere writer, but as a blogger. She's only blogging once a week (and like many high-profile political bloggers, she's getting tons of comments).

Arianna has a nice blogroll; I followed the link to Marc Coooper's blog, where I found a post about the inane media coverage of the Pope's death, which reminds me of the running Saturday Night Live gag (Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!) three decades ago. Cooper links to an essay, "On Not Mourning the Pope", by Christopher Hitchens and says

Hitch further reminds us of this juicy irony: The same yammering media airheads who have spent the last week breathlessly proclaiming that it was the “Polish Pope” who had single-handedly dealt the death blow to World Communism are the same geniuses who, less than a year ago, had credited Ronald Reagan with this same superhuman achievement. Then again, these are the same folks who told us Diana Spencer was “The Princess of the People” just as Wojtyla is now “The Pope of the People” (someone should buy the networks a thesaurus).

The bigger story the gushing media misses, says Hitchens, is not the Pope’s anti-communism but rather the striking similarities between today’s crisis of the Church and the crisis of Stalinism a half-century ago.

Unbelievers are more merciful and understanding than believers, as well as more rational. We do not believe that the pope will face judgment or eternal punishment for the millions who will die needlessly from AIDS, or for his excusing and sheltering of those who committed the unpardonable sin of raping and torturing children, or for the countless people whose sex lives have been ruined by guilt and shame and who are taught to respect the body only when it is a lifeless cadaver like that of Terri Schiavo. For us, this day is only the interment of an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long, and whose primitive ideology did not permit him the true self-criticism that could have saved him, and others less innocent, from so many errors and crimes.

(Technorati tag: Blogging)

Jakob Nielsen summarizes the findings in a JAMA paper on a hospital's order-entry system. The paper reports on a field study that shows design flaws in the system that could result in patient deaths. (Nielsen being Nielsen, he also takes time to analyze the usability of the JAMA web site). [Link]

MuniWireless follows up on the San Antonio Express article I mentioned a few days ago, noting that SBC is not excited about free wireless in its home town. A quote from Gene Acuña of SBC in the article: "When a city seeks to provide such information services like Wi-Fi to nonpublic places in direct competition with the private sector, then we have some real concerns." However MuniWireless notes that "it does not look like the city itself will be providing Wi-Fi, rather it's a private initiative with some city support." My pal Ed Preston, VP of SalsaNet posts a comment saying that his organization is not supporting municipal wireless networks, but advocating all sorts of WiFi developments, fee-based and free, and advocates working with the major telecoms. Ed says

The major Telecomms are NOT the enemy here, all you MuniWireless folks... they simply need to be educated and enlightened as to how they can make profit AND offer free access (like ad-sponsored portals). Remember also that they are responsible to shareholders at the end of the day, same as we are to our families and children, to put "food on the table".

I really want to appreciate SBC's side of the discussion about community broadband, but only after the change their tactics, start listening to us, too, and back their lobbyists off. I'm not holding my breath. [Link]

A couple of things I learned today that are at different latitudes on the musical map...

My pal Stephen Dulaney creator of and lead evangelist with the Austin Podcasting Network, had blogged a link to the Biddycast, a podcast by The Lascivious Biddies, who captured my ear with a live spot on Austin's KUT during SXSW (I was driving around the block at the time and hoping David would take his time filing EFF-Austin's incorporation so I could keep listening. Now I can lisent whenever and wherever.

Another pal, Ed Ward, did his Fresh Air gig today on the Rocka nd Roll Trio featuring Johnny and Dorsey Burnette as well as Paul Burlison. I thought I knew a thing or two about rock and roll, but I never knew the Burnettes were brothers or that they had this incredible rockabilly band (I think Ed said they coined the term rockabilly)... so I clearly have to do some research. Follow that Burlison link and you'll get a dose of "Train Kept A-Rolling," a old favorite of mine. Burlison tore it up.

Are elite "road warriors" laboring 80-100 hours a week at their jobs? A new Fast Company article says so, though when you read the article they're not talking about actual work, necessarily – many of the hours are devoted to travel. [Link to Fast Company article on "Extreme Jobs"]

I'm a known workaholic, so I've thought about this a lot, and I've observed other people who have "extreme" jobs. I find that people who are "at work" from 6am to 10pm don't work 100% of the 16 hours. They do all sorts of things, but because they never officially went home and called it a night, and they're doing stuff that's work-related along the way, they're still "at work" in a sense, even though the actual focused labor may not exceed 6-8 hours.

Is travel "work"? The Fast Company article talks about constant travel; I don't travel as much these days as I used to, but I remember pretty well what it was like. I once conducted a training session for a group in Chicago. I left Texas in the early AM and came back that night. It looked like I had a very long day, but I actually worked 4-5 hours that day. Much of the time I was in transit to or from, and I was reading or sleeping.

Most of my business travel was like that, and I didn't see profound differences in other people I knew.

I was also aware of people who would stay late at the office and who gave the impression they were working, though if you paid attention you'd find they were doing other stuff, like surfing the web at the office because the connection was faster.

People go to mixers and business events, and they're still "working" though much of the time is spent hanging out.

We call all of this stuff "work" when we're still tethered, still operating within your company's ethos. But I hate to perpetuate the myth that this is hard labor.

And just incidentally, I'm trying to learn to spend less time "working," not more. I think we should all do that for the sake of our clearly-imperiled sanity.

Right now I have to get back to work, though.

My Worldchanging colleague Dina Mehta writes about social software tools, focusing on her own uses and experiences, and inviting others to post comments about their experiences with these evolving tools. (Includes a couple of quotes from yours truly, from an email exchange we had while Dina was writing the post).

On a personal level, let me share a little blog moment I had. Two weeks ago I was at this small Korean eatery in Bangkok, enjoying a fantastic meal. Throughout the meal the young lady at the counter who was glued to her computer screen intrigued me. From her actions, I could tell she was browsing a lot, typing in stuff, then sitting back and reviewing it, and smiling. Then back to more writing. And smiling. I told my husband then that she looks like a blogger!

When we walked over to the counter to pay for our meal, I couldn't resist peeping at her screen ... and what I saw there looked so much like a blog ... except it was in a language I couldn't understand. So curious me asked her what it was that she was doing, and she said she said "blog" ! I was thrilled - there I was, a visitor from India in Bangkok, meeting a Korean blogger. So unexpectedly. She spoke very little English and I speak no Korean .... still we connected at some level, almost as if we were sharing a secret of sorts.

I was interviewed for an article on blogging in the April 15 issue of the Austin Business Journal, called "Been around the blog?"

...Lebkowsky at Polycot says that if a company chooses to launch a blog, it's not guaranteed to be an effective communication tool in the marketplace.

"You have to have a certain openness and authenticity, which means that you can't control your message as you do with other marketing and public relations channels," he says. "You have to be prepared to add content regularly, and you really should be prepared to invite comments from the public, which can also mean dealing with angry customers or difficult questions in public.

"Handling this sort of thing well can have a net positive effect, but handling it badly can be disastrous. If there's a legal issue, you should always consult your attorneys, but try to find a solution that's conversational and non-threatening, if at all possible," Lebkowsky says.

If you find yourself playing for hours on end with Google Maps' satellite view, and/or you're into virtual travel, this site's for you. The above image is Black Rock City, aka the Burning Man site. [Link]

In a discussion on the WELL, someone questioned whether conversation-based online community has died in the era of the blog. We often argue that blogs are conversations and that blogs in aggregate work as platforms for online community, but they really are less conversational than dedicated discussion forums, so if you focus on blogs alone, it's harder to get the sense of community that you have in more traditional virtual spaces like the WELL. Here's the response I posted:

We're seeing more and more ways to connect, and no one mode is all of the story. The virtual communities I hang out within these days are more fluid and less enclosed than the conversations on the WELL, and you can't zero in on a single technology or mode that the typical community uses. They may have conversations via their blogs, collaborate via wikis, have realtime discussions via chat, do eamil and IM, have conference calls, find each other in social network sites, share bookmarks via del.icio.us and photos via flickr.com, etc. What's happened is that communities are no longer tethered to specific technologies or virtual places. They find many ways to connect, and they keep searching for more.

Technorati tag: Blogging

Deceptively short post from Don Turnbull summarizes the character of "web 2.0" and the obsolescence of the portal concept as we accumulate the tools we need to roll our own. This has intranet implications, too. [Link]

ORACLE’s recent buyout of Peoplesoft may not be so smart in the long, long run when every business unit, not to mention employee, can crank out structured data feeds, tweak simple logic to act on other’s sources and keep up to date with everything in the organiztion with just a few clicks on everyone’s favorite orange button: .

Several correspondents have sent me emails about Issue Dynamics' new "Blogger Relations" practice, which "includes a robust blog monitoring service. Currently, the monitoring service provides organizations with 'actionable intelligence' - giving clients an effective and economical way to sift through the vast amount of blogosphere information, distill what is truly relevant and timely, and take appropriate action." Muniwireless quotes Glenn Fleishman's description of Issue Dynamics as "a group that specializes in creating the appearance of grassroots and independent support for ideas on behalf of their clients. They don’t hide this specialty." According to IDI, they'll be monitoring blogs for "non-traditional or 'below the radar' public statements from policy experts and thought leaders," and to give "clients the ability to track and respond to blog postings quickly, before they grow and 'jump' to traditional media sources - and to the world." Should be fun.

Business Week discovers bloggers, publishes a pretty good rundown, kinda gets it... " How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it." jonl gets indigestion. Web 2.x, here we come... [Link]

The Berkman Center's Global Voices Online project is ramping up. I just posted about it at WorldChanging.

Refugee children from Darfur are drawing scenes of bombings and militia that "provide visual evidence that international media organizations have not been able to provide, as they’ve been blocked by the Sudanese government from travelling in Darfur." Human Rights Watch has collected many of these drawings and displayed them on the web. Background info regarding the "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur is posted here. Thanks to Ethan for the pointer.

Tag: darfur

My hard-working friends at SocialText just raised a series B round of venture capital – Ross Mayfield announces a contest to celebrate. Congratulations!

Speaking of growth, Texas Freedom Network is celebrating its 10th anniversary - and has just launched a new web site, actually a powerful web/email publishing system built by my company, Polycot, and managed by TFN's staff and volunteers. TFN "is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization of more than 23,000 religious and community leaders. Based in Austin, the Texas Freedom Network acts as the state’s watchdog, monitoring far-right issues, organizations, money and leaders. The organization has been instrumental in defeating initiatives backed by the religious right in Texas, including private school vouchers, textbook censorship and faith-based deregulation." Congratulations to TFN, the hardest-working grassroots organization we know!