February 2004 Archives

I like it, but I don't get why anyone would bother to send it:

Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:07:33 -0800
From: "Terry Rhodes"
To: Lenore
Subject: resurgent

toss divan
soon
sebastian infamous
tomato
boggle fortify

bellamy

Nearly every week I shop for groceries at the Berkeley Bowl. Inevitably, near the end of my round, in the produce section, I find my mind humming the words "... yesterday don't matter when it's gone / Dying all the time / Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind / In life unkind...." Just when I start wondering why I'm thinking about a Rolling Stones song, the chorus kicks in "Goodbye, Ruby Grapefruit / Who could hang a name on you."

Just this morning, doing some dishes, I found myself mentally singing Dylan's Buckets of Rain, specifically the part that goes "Little red wagon / Little red bike / I ain't no monkey but I know what I like...." As I reeled back the mental tape, I remembered looking at some unsorted laundry on the bedroom table, specifically a pair of gray socks I thought might have been mind instead of B's, but then I noticed they were pretty small, so they probably are hers. This made me think of the cat in the comic strip Mutts singing his (her?) happy song while worrying a "little pink sock." A few minutes later, my mind had completed it's search for a related song and it was just a sohrt leap from little pink sock to little red wagon.

Yes, I know I am strange.

Scobleizer is back and hasn't lost a beat. (These are metablogging items, not strictly PoM fodder, but hey.) First, Why Robert Scoble blogs:

Chris Prately, who has become one of my favorite bloggers (yeah, cause he was the guy behind Microsoft's OneNote product) asks "why should I keep blogging?" and, taking it further, why does ANYONE keep blogging?

Isn't the answer going to be different for everyone? ...

Now, I won't guarantee that it'll change your life that much, but I believe that the world's most influential and most interesting people (who are often the same) are only reachable via weblogs.

Then, a link to FOAF, now on LiveJournal:

LiveJournal now is exporting FOAF (Friend of a Friend) data. I need to learn more about FOAF and the scenarios it opens up. I still don't get social software. Who's my friends? It's the people I link to. Linking to someone is a far stronger social statement about someone than saying "yeah, they're my friend" to Orkut or Linked Up.

And finally, he goes around the blog-dev world in 80 characters:

Dave Winer is asking for visions of what the future of Weblogging tools and services might look like. I've already seen the future. How can I say that? Because it's already here. The problem is that no one tool has wrapped up what's cool. Let's look ...

Ed Sim is a venture capitalist and explains why he blogs about it. (Link via Scobleizer)

Recently, a number of people asked me why I blog as a VC. Isn't privacy a good thing for VCs? Don't you want to keep the good ideas to yourself? For the past couple of years, I had my own personal blog which I mainly used as a bookmarking tool so I could retrieve interesting news stories and my running commentary from any web browser. As I made the leap to the public blogging world, I really did not know what I would find until I threw myself out there.

So, after my first 6 months or so, here is what I like about blogging. Blogging provides me with an outlet for my views on technology, venture capital, and other current affairs. Yes, like most VCs I am opinionated, and what better way to express them than through a blog. Instead of beta testing a product, I get to beta or alpha test my opinions or thoughts and receive instant feedback no matter how far-fetched my ideas may be. I find this incredibly valuable as a number of people either email me directly or post comments and tell me I am off the mark, on the mark, or point me in new directions to further research my ideas. People send me information about new companies or even their resumes based on some of my current interests. As a VC, this is a great way to have an ongoing dialogue with an active and participatory audience. BTW, any product companies out there should think about using blogs and other technology like RSS to build long-term relationships with their customers and get instant feedback on product direction and features. Secondly, based on my posts, I have built some new relationships by engaging in conversation either directly or indirectly through my blog. Last week at DEMO, it was actually nice to have met some of the bloggers that I regularly read and with whom I share similar interests. Next, understanding the value of the blog, I actively read and subscribe to a number of other people's feeds to learn about the hot topics of the day and to understand what the early adopters are currently thinking before a new technology or idea goes mainstream. I get to listen and participate in on the conversations about the next product or idea that will reach the tipping point as many of today's innovative thoughts gather steam and build momentum through a word-of-mouth or word-of-network manner. Of course, the danger can be drinking your own kool-aid from the blogger community (think Howard Dean-he seemed really hot with the bloggers but did not fare so well in the primaries) so some balance is required here. Finally, it is alot of fun, and I hope you keep visiting and actively commenting either privately or publicly.

Not sure how I found my way to Freecycle:

Membership is free. To join simply click on your city under "Sign up" below. It will generate a automatic e-mail which, when sent, will sign you up for your local group and send you an response with instructions on how it works. Or, go directly to the webpage for your city's group by clicking on your city's link on the left. Can't find your city? It takes about ten minutes to start your own (click on "Start your own" for instructions). Have fun and keep on Freecyclin'!

The Freecycle Network is a project of RISE, Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission includes reducing waste, generating employment training, and fostering cooperation between other nonprofit organizations and the public.

RISE started the Freecycle Network in May 2003 to promote waste reduction in Tucson's downtown and help save desert landscape from being taken over by landfills. Freecycle provides individuals and non-profits an electronic forum to "recycle" unwanted items. One person's trash can truly be another's treasure!

How does Freecycling work?

One rule: everything posted must be free. Whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano, or an old door to be given away, it can be posted on the network. Or, maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself? Respond to the posting directly and you just might get it. After that it is up to the giver to set up a pickup time for passing on the treasure.

Non-profit organizations also benefit from the Freecycle Network. Post the item or items you want to give away and a local organization can help you get it to someone in need.

Who can Freecycle?

As Abe Lincoln once said, "Think globally, recycle locally." The Freecycle Network is open to all cities and to all individuals who want to participate. Freecycle groups are run by local volunteer moderators from across the globe who facilitate each local group - Grassroots at its best!

Google engineer Orkut Buyyokktoken and two collaborators published A social network caught in the Web, a paper about a social network Orkut created at Stanford University called Nexus, in a peer-reviewed web journal called First Monday.

In it, Orkut and his coauthors describe some preliminary findings about connectedness and attribute trends in the network which appears to have been a direct predecessor to Google's already somewhat moribund Orkut YASNS.

Disturbing spam received today uses the the language of homeland security and currency manipulation to get you to log your identity information into an insecure site (the link claims to be pointing to www.fdic.gov but via HTML link formatting in fact points to a numerical IP address and port number - 211.191.224.108:3180 - presenting the false web address as a pseudo username with a forced linebreak to hide the actual destiantion).

I wonder if it's targeted at recipients of the Nigerian-scam spam who might be afraid their bank accounts have been somehow compromised?

Full text of the email attached in the overleaf:

The constant music is a reminder that I like to sing, especially when no one else is around to here, and that I like to dance, alone and in company. Singing unlocks my voice somehow my light-opera expressitivity, my comic whimsy, it loosens my neck and shoulders. Dancing gives my body a way to tell me where it feels sore and where it feels stuck. I have to pay attention. I at least don't make the patterns worse that day.

I wondered recently if our sinews in our muscles can get twisted like a telephone wire. There are times when repeated backward Pete Townsendish windmill armswings feel as though I am unspooling a tightly wound rope of jute through the shoulder joint.

Avoid Friendster and its clones, warns security expert:

The 'social network' sites present opportunities for ruthless marketroids and stalkers. Plaxo, the most notorious example Clarke cites, encouraged users to upload their entire address books to the servers.

"Every IP-address, every email, and every social-network relationship that arises appears to be entirely free of any express contractual constraints."

The YASNSes are rife with unsetlling issues of privacy, security, and gradations between public and private.

Note, another service Phil Wolff mentioned during our nearly three-hour interview Monday is called "The Spoke" or "Spoke."

stavrosthewonderchicken verges on tears (of laughter) contemplating the irony of the "nuking the echo chamber" meme proposed for BloggerCon 2 in EmptyBottle.org: Echo and the Bunnymen, asking

Am I missing all the constellations of new voices who haven't gotten linked as a result of what they write rather than who they've met?

(The discussion keys off the question of whether the Dean campaign talked itself into a corner, functioning as a sort of echo chamber or meme machine that turned off all but the fringe true believers and early adopters.)

Christopher Allen, whom I met at the recent blogger/new media dinner event in San Francisco put together by Susan Mernit, Deeje Cooley, and J.D. Lasica, offers his advice to social networking services (abbreviated SNS or YASNS, for "yet another" social network software / system / service), in an entry at his Life With Alacrity blog that flanks his comment on my orkut faux pas from a week or so ago.

On the other flank of his orkut entry is a post detailing some keen observations about hand-crafted FOAF.

Austin Free-Net, a community technology nonprofit, has found blogs both an effective supervisorial tool and a means for communicating to stakeholders and the public. From an article at NonprofitQuarterly.org:

When she encouraged her staff to blog about their work, Sisnett recognized another benefit of nonprofit blogging: She could now easily keep up to speed on her staff's work and the progress of various, concurrent projects. Soon, between the executive director, the technical staff and volunteers, Austin Free-Net had three staff blogs full of updated and archived information that could easily be incorporated into strategic plan updates, VISTA reports, press releases, newsletters and grants. When a colleague, a sponsor or even a journalist needed information about a project or issue, Sisnett could refer the interested party to a blog.

Free-Net's experiments with staff blogging fit a trend developing in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. According to Teresa Crawford, Technical Director at Advocacy Project and a leader in the movement to provide technology assistance to international nonprofits, blogs with an "internal focus" have made it easier for organizations to capture the knowledge of teams and support their collaboration. "Rather than only a linear discussion list for a team," she points out, "individual and collaborative blogs make it possible to see ties among team members and issues they are working on."

More typically, an externally focused blog can transform informal knowledge sharing into a new asset for an organization. Blogs can enliven your group's Web presence and engage clients, supporters and strangers alike in your work. "We think that there is a good chance blogging is a new way to express the nonprofit voice," says Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, a nonprofit organization that puts technology to work for social needs. "We feel we have unique things to say, so we should be saying them." Since October 2003, Fruchterman has been authoring the Beneblog, a component of Benetech's Web site where he has highlighted the work of his organization's staff and partners, commented on legislation affecting his field, documented his speaking engagements and attendance at conferences and described in real-time the impact of world travel on his work as Benetech's executive. "Blogs provide a more immediate form of communication than my quarterly update," he says. "They bring new content to our homepage and give us a chance to bring up ideas and links in a less formal context."

Article concludes with a four-step procedure for "Getting Your Nonprofit Up and Blogging." (Link via Weblogsky.)

Brian Dear has taken an interesting look at the Dean site's running Americans for Dean counters.

Mediachest.com: Organize, borrow, loan, and share books, CDs, DVDs, and video games

Perhaps chapter 8 should tackle other forms of socializing beyond dating, essentially anything that is personal or friendship-oriented, as opposed to professional and business-oriented?

If I haven't linked to Flickr yet, I should have. It's kind of like Orkut but with some actual functionality beyond ghost-town bulletin boards, primarily image-sharing and live chat.

Ed Cone analyzes John Edwards' online effort. He writes that the Web staff is active, serious, and successful (as measured by fundraising and communication)...

But there is no sense here of a revolution, or a movement in which the Internet takes on a mystique of its own. The rhetoric of transformation I heard at Dean headquarters, of power pushed to the edges to create a new type of campaign, is lacking. The candidate, not the online tools, generates the buzz. ...

Edwards recently topped the 10,000 mark in Meetup registrations, up five-fold in the last few months, but still well behind John Kerry’s nearly 50,000 Meetup registrants. Myers says he was impressed by Meetup when he first learned of it a year ago, but was ultimately driven to advocate for the service seriously when he saw how it worked for his rivals. “What pushed us there is that it worked for other people,” he says. Letter-writing and phone calls, coordinated online, have been valuable volunteer activities. Volunteers use the web to communicate with each other, says Winn, doing things like alerting the community to negative stories in newspapers, and coordinating responses to media coverage.

Volunteers have also helped build the campaign’s online arsenal, creating tools that facilitate local meetings between supporters, for example. The connection between staff and volunteers is tight. Myers talks to key volunteers like Mike Kasper on “a pretty regular basis,” he says. “I go days without seeing what he’s working on, then I’m amazed to see what he puts together. He’s been included in every major change we’ve made.” ...

The site is built on Slash, the open-source software that powers Slashdot. “It’s worked out great, because we can customize it, and grow with it,” says Winn. He reads other blogs as part of his job, and reports on them to Myers, who says he has little time to check out the Web – even competitors’ sites.

(Link via InstaPundit.)

ESFStandard.org - The home of the Event Share Framework

Johnson's Mind Wide Open is in Amazon's top 1000.

Doc Searls had a dream about what happens when nobody objects:

... I lay in bed for a long time thinking about what the dream meant. What bothered me about the dream wasn't that a bomb had gone off, but that I had been in a position to stop it and didn't. The problem wasn't the bomb, I realized, or the willingness of somebody to use it; but that I had been passive about it. So had everybody else, I realized. It was like we were all watching a TV show.

Passivism, I realized, is the sickness. And its cure is activism. ...

[In the Sixties,] the institutions of industry and government seemed far more vast and solid than they do today. They seemed connected only to themselves and others of their kind.

It's different now. Large institutions today - church, business, goverment, education, law enforcement, the courts (and crime as well) - are not just connected by the Net, but rely on its open, free and increasingly capable infrastructure. Activism can now be very direct and personal. The threshold of engagement, of organization, of raising and spending funds, is so low it has become negligible for all but the very poor.

Its enemy is passivism, which is maintained by manufactured entertainment, consumed on a massive scale by citizens of civilized countries around the world. The result is stupidity on a grand scale.

Link via Jon Lebkowsky.

Chapter 3 discusses Moore's blog article on "the second superpower". Writing up my notes within that chapter, I compiled a ton of URLs and figured I better make them linkable here:

• The Times originated the idea on 2/17/03, and the phrase was in play within the following week. Tyler’s original article is here, but the archive won’t cough up the article without payment; the text is mirrored here.
• The phrase “two world superpowers” was used on Hardball that evening.
• The specific phrase “A Second Superpower” is the title of an entry on a blog named Industrie Toulouse that same day, linked to the Times via This Modern World. I think Industrie Toulouse has the first chronological use of the phrase in this context.
• Press release from the Hague Appeal for Peace on 2/20
• Press release from Greenpeace, 2/25. (That scoop.co.nz site is a press-release collection point, but the Greenpeacers make it clear that that’s their text.)
• Even the Larouche-ians had the phrase online on 2/28, a month before Moore.

Physiological needs (currently in Chapter 3; move to Chapter 1?): a 12/29/2003 Yahoo/Dow Jones article about Medtronic CareLink Network and other heart monitor systems has expired now, but here is a Google cache.

When Dr. Philip Adamson was traveling in Spain recently, he logged onto the Internet to see how some of his patients with an experimental heart failure device were doing. Most of the patients - who had entered data from their devices onto the Web via Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT - News)'s CareLink Monitor - seemed OK. But several had pressure readings in their hearts indicating possible fluid buildup, which, if allowed to rise, could end up forcing hospitalization. Adamson immediately contacted them from thousands of miles away and changed their drug therapy. None ended up being hospitalized. ...

The Medtronic CareLink Network is a medical information system that combines the patient's monitor, a Web site for clinicians and a Web site for cardiac device patients and their families or caregivers. The monitor is a device that allows patients to collect information by holding a small antenna over their implanted device. The monitor automatically downloads the data and sends it through a standard home telephone connection directly to the secure Medtronic CareLink Network.

System introduced two years ago, costs clinics $200 per year per patient but reduces office visits for data-download from 4/year to 1/year.

Atrios explains his ad policy and wraps up by comparing BlogAds to the Dean blog.

What the Dean campaign tapped into was a bunch of people who wanted to feel personally invested in a campaign, but hadn't found any way to do that. Too many state and local parties are completely ossified and don't return calls by people offering to volunteer, and are often run by people who don't seem to want any new blood interfering with their little fiefdoms. Between impeachment, Florida, and the Bush administration there are a lot of people new people who decided they wanted to become "involved" but didn't know how. The internet allows a small degree of personal involvement by a large number of people, and they're grateful for candidates who let them feel involved. Haines, who is running to be the nominee in Georgia's 12th, started taking/responding to comments and criticisms. That's smart.

Look, a lot of the internet "personal involvement" is an illusion - and most people know that. Nobody ever thought Howard Dean read through thousands of comments on his weblog, but it nonetheless allowed them to feel they had a wee personal connection to the campaign, and that's all that mattered. The truth is, I think it's relatively easy for a campaign to tap into that sentiment, though not all campaigns will be comfortable doing that - and nor should they try. Blog readers are not your "typical voter" or your "typical Democrat," and not all campaigns/candidates are necessarily well-suited for trying to tap into that particular vibe. But, some are and with a little creativity and not too much effort they might be able to get the little extra money/attention they need to put them over the line in November. And, hey, write me a nice fat consulting check and I'll tell you how to do it... ;)

Daily Kos (among others) reports that, flying below radar when compared with the Dean campaign, blog-network activism on the left scored a victory today when former Kentucky state Attorney General Ben Chandler beat Alice Forgy Kerr in Kentucky's sixth congressional district.

Chandler had been advertising heavily on blogs in the last few weeks and had been singled out by Kos as a belleweather (sp?) opportunity. Joshua Marshall reports that Chandler raised nearly $100,000 with an advertising budget of around $2000 and speculates that the blog medium may be for Democrats what direct mail has been for Republicans: a fundraising channel that suits their base.

Of course it's too easy to tell, but as we're poised here between the endless "what went wrong?" handwringing about the Dean campaign and the incipeint encomiums that are sure to follow as soon as he formally concedes, it's worth noting that this targeted, piecemeal approach may yield rresults more readily than a shoot-the-moon run for leader of the free world.

Martin Kearns dropped by my post at RFB about weblog strategies for nonprofits to submit another interesting website, Green Media Toolshed, a service for environmental campaigns.

Visiting Kearns' Network-Centric Advocacy blog, I also read about a paper from OneNW called Network as Movement. Some key findings:

• The environmental movement is a network that is more than the sum of its people and organizations.
• This movement has invested in too much institutional overhead.
• Organizations need to focus on what they do best, and outsource the rest.
• The majority of local environmental groups work on niche issues and solutions that will never attract large membership bases.
• Funders need to help free the most important of these organizations from focusing on this distraction.

I will get this chapter in today, though I'm onto plan C (A was submit it early, B was submit it by 5 pm, C is submit it before midnight). It's a short-ish chapter, too, as you know, so it's really just that I'm plodding through my notes and outline branches and fleshing out as I go. The utterly unglamorous side of writing. I have to run out tonight briefly for a campaign-related key handoff, but see no problem being done by this evening. I feel close now, but just noticed it was after 5 and I could use a breather, but it's raining pretty hard here, so I'm feeling kind of cooped up.

Online Business Networks Blog » Waterside Productions to represent The Virtual Handshake:

ScottAllen (in "Success Stories", "OBN In The News"):

I’m pleased to announce that Danielle Jatlow at Waterside Productions will be representing us for our second book, The Virtual Handshake: Leveraging Online Social Networks to Grow Your Business. Waterside is “the world’s premiere literary agency for computer and technology authors”, having “successfully represented more than 5,000 books to over 50 publishers”. Needless to say, we’re thrilled.

One of the most exciting things about working with Danielle is that, quite simply, “she gets it”. It helps that our connection with her was through online social networking, rather than a traditional query letter. We had a couple of agents interested in representing us from earlier queries last year, but now that our first book is done, and we’re really serious about pitching the second one to a major publisher, we decided to try to seek out an agent who was active on online social networking and would understand how important and timely this topic is, and be represent that to the publishers.

So, we looked for literary agents on our various social networks, and came across Christian Crumlish on Ryze and LinkedIn. Turns out he’s also a user of the #joiito IRC channel, where I occasionally hang out, as well.

I contacted Christian, but he told me he was too busy on his own writing project, The Power of Many, a related book to ours, although with a slightly different focus. He referred us to Danielle as the most appropriate agent at Waterside for us to work with. A couple of e-mails, a revised proposal, one phone call, and we’ve got ourselves an agent. Never sent a “query letter”.

This is yet another success story for online networking in the process of writing our book(s). My co-author, David Teten, and I met online (and have yet to meet in person, btw). If you’re an author and would like to learn more about how to network online in support of your book project, from start to finish, not just for the marketing, take a look at my article, Online Networking for Authors.

Napsterization.org: Press - Blog Feedback Loop, or The Napsterization of The Non-Fiction Media

An interesting (if difficult) project would be to chronicle and catalogue the proliferation of entities in a sense vying to be the DFA successor organization, self-emerging now in email and irc and phone conferences and face-to-face meetings in California and elsewhere.

I may keep coming back to this entry to list things as I notice them. A few I've seen so far are:

• Truth and Hope
• We Want Our Country Back
• National Grassroots for Dean
• Change for America
• Backbone Campaign
• People for Change
• Crabgrass
• The PAC or whatever that DFA turns into now

Typical web/research experience: Something reminds me of Luke Menand, one of the best professors of art/literature/culture I had in college and I wonder if I can get in touch with him for this book - I'm sure he'd have some interesting things to say. On the other hand, I doubt he remembers me. I only had him for one semester, and I doubt I made any kind of impression.

Anyway, the search led me to an interesting article about fanfic and slash fiction by David Plotz from 2000

So I surf for his name (it's actually Louis Menand - that's his byline) but he's so widely published that I just get formal stuff and no reminder of where he's teaching now (NYU?). Probably I should be asking around via my personal network and some of the more academicky people I'm meeting these days, Luke Skywalker Is Gay?, in which he explores the idea that fan fiction represents a kind of communal folkloric storytelling in which the legendary icons of pop culture are reclaimed from the private ownership of the commercial television producers.

I first read about K/S slash fiction when I was in college. There was already a scholarly book on the subject hardbound in the stacks. I used to wander around a lot and try to find random stuff. The Internet has only expanded the reach of fanfic and slash.

Too bad, I said to myself, there's no meeting-in-person angle, since that's the hook we're hanging everything on in this book (though sometimes I wonder if that's a mistake...), then I got to this section of the article:

But fanfic turns writing into a communal art, as folk culture has always done. Writing and reading become collaborative. We share the characters and work together to make them interesting and funny and sexy. Write a short story about your crazy uncle and post it on the Web, and no one will read it. Write a short story about Dr. Who, and hundreds of folks will flock to your site. Fanfic writers meet at conventions ("cons"). Thanks to the Internet, writers communicate constantly on e-mail listservs. They invite e-mail responses and crave feedback. MedianCat, who writes Buffy fanfic, says he has heard from more than 400 people about his stories. Of the two-dozen-odd fanfic writers I e-mailed about their work, only one did not respond. (The Internet is also changing fanfic by opening it to kids. Click here for how the Backstreet Boys became literary heroes.)

So just like the post-eTech software-demo CodeCon is happening this weekend for the Cory/Ito crowd (danah told me about it - she's so swamped with her academic workload that she has to miss it - it's $99 so I'll probably give it a miss too), fanfic and slash writers have cons (conventions, from the tendency to add -Con to words to name conventions) of their own. The common thread between the techies and the fanfic writers, by the way, is science fiction (sci-fi, sf), where a lot of this jargon originates.

So, if fanfic authors get together for conventions, can I talk about them in the book?

Salon.com Technology | Politics by other means:

Ed Cone, a North Carolina journalist/blogger who'd written a definitive case study of the Dean campaign, asked, with some disbelief in his voice, "So you had the most formidable campaign communications system ever devised," and yet couldn't say to supporters, "We're in trouble - we need your help"?

"The press is now reading the blog," Trippi replied. "This wasn't a private conversation."

...

Meanwhile, Dean's campaign cannot be simply written off as a burst dot-com bubble. However few delegates the candidate ultimately wins, he long ago changed history. He taught his fellow Democrats, in Trippi's words, "how to be an opposition party" -- and he forced his party to face the gulf between its leaders in Congress, who'd mostly supported Bush's Iraq war, and its voters, who largely didn't. He filled that "vacuum of debate" with a clamor that could not be ignored.

Christian Crumlish's personal weblog, most recently called X-POLLEN, has been renamed. It is now called wake up and has been moved to xianlandia.com, as a more appropriate domain for Christian's personal effects. Christian feels strange writing about himself in the third person and will stop now.

You can also call it "xianlandia" or Christian's blog or really anything you like if you don't like the name wake up, which just came to me and who knows how long I'll stick with it? I'm fickle like that.

This, really, is the switcheroo I promised a few weeks back.

I just explained where the X-POLLEN blog went but what happened to the x-pollen.com domain? For now, I'm parking the site that aggregates all of my weblog posts, the site I call monolog or xian's monolog, there. In fact, it's not really all of my weblog posts, but just those published by the (Movable Type) software that runs on that same server and hosts a number of group blogs and guest blogs. I try to include writings from other sites in the sidebar, but I haven't come up with a universal solution for that, especially when you factor in blog comments posted elsewhere.

I might move it over to a me-specific subdirectory at the site, eventually, and turn x-pollen.com into a showcase for recent entries from all the blogs hosted on the site, featuring all the great writers I'm hosting. (Then I can relaunch Mediajunkie as an aggregator site featuring external feeds.) One step at a time, though.

As is inevitable when not doing a three-step switch between two items, I munged something along the way. In this case, the monolog stylesheet. So the site's design is raw old-skool vintage 1993-era HTML right now, till I come up with something new.

Elizabeth Lawley blogged from eTech on how hard it is to get conference-goers to deal with each other face-to-face

So, anyway, dinner. It was a great reminder of the real-world rewards of this new electronic community I’ve become a part of. Allan and I had a great time talking, laughing, eating, and sharing a bottle of wine. That kind of experience cements a friendship in a way that instant messenger just can’t do. I don’t use technology for the sake of using technology - at least, I try not to. I use it to enhance the things that I care about in my life - friends, family, my research. Yesterday afternoon I spoke to my kids over iChat audio. I arranged to meet Allan using email and IM. And I participated in great discussions about my areas of research interest during presentations. But all of those spill over into the real world, and I use them to enhance the real world, not replace it.

Armstrong Zuniga, LLC :: Netroots for Democracy

danah boyd's session/presentation from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2004 can be found online in text form at this location:

4) Finally, how do we create architecture that will allow for regulation through social norms? This is a huge challenge! Sure, we can all think back to MUDs and MOOs where social norms created the boundary cases of acceptable behavior. But we also all know the story of LamdaMOO and why it failed. The code that we build does not currently allow for rich regulation based on social norms. Trolls ruin it for all of us. This is part social problem and part technological problem. If we open our eyes to the social, perhaps we can figure out how to iterate on the technological?

The technology will not solve the social, but each design decision made in the technology affects the social. There is no formula though, no clear algorithm. No social scientist can predict what social behavior will emerge from each technology you build. But we can make sense out of what is going on and we can help you iterate.

The biggest trick in social software is to realize that, just like we can't predict the behavior that users will have, we can't force them into behaving the way we want them to behave while simultaneously giving them freedom to be social. The only thing that we can do is try to understand what is motivating new behaviors and figure out how to adjust the technology accordingly. We must recognize that, for any social software, disparate users will have disparate uses. But like any good city, we have to figure out how to create a live and let live environment, where those who want to visit XXX stores will do their thing without driving the moms with small children insane. You can't kill unwanted behavior without also killing desirable behavior. This is a design challenge, an architectural challenge and a social challenge. And, of course, a business challenge. If we want to make social software that meets the needs of a disparate group of people and not just ourselves, it's time to take up this challenge. Otherwise, we'll spend forever frustrated, failing to understand why other people aren't like us.

Joe Trippi: Q&A with Ed Cone (IT Conversation):

An 89-year-old guy called the headquarters one day and talked to my wife and said that he had been reading the obituaries every day because he was ready to cash it in, and that he heard Howard Dean on the radio that day and decided that he was going to stay and fight. This is true, this actually happened. This guy went out and brought a five-hundred dollar PC. He became the leader of his Meetup in Elsinore, California and became a leader in his community in terms of what was going on and used the Internet. He brought the five-hundred dollar PC so that he could read the blog and then he signed up for Meetup. He actually became the Meetup host in Elsinore California, and this is an 89-year-old guy who had given up. So a lot of these tools…I think the most important thing is how do we use the 'Net? The thing that we're just starting get to …it's easy to build 670,000 people who say "Yes, you can e-mail me." and "Yes, I will check the blog", casual members of the thing, the effort…It's how do we build better tools to let them take those tools into the community? How do we make better tools to let them take this straight into their caucus and their area and I think that's one of the things the Dean campaign was still trying work out at the end.

Jeff Jarvis describes a conference that might look like The Power of Many:

I think it's time for somebody to to split off and spawn another conference devoted to the impact of Internet technology on our lives: e, the conference.

Day 1: Media...
Day 2: Marketing...
Day 3: Politics...
Day 4: The world...
Day 5: Education...

Add in some BOF sessions on religion and such. Make technology, business models, and social implications a part of every day. Get plenty of bandwidth. Invite smart people. And, voila, you have a window on the future.

In the comments, Heiferman and Ito say they'd attend. Another commenter says, "Start it as a virtual conference/wiki and see where it goes...".

What the Deanies forgot (from The Hill.com) by Ben Goddard.

orkut is still pointless but at least now the friends you see on your home page are random intead of nine princes in amber.

now i'm paring down my communities, most of them have little or no action or real point at all:

it's kind of like a patchwork quilt or the ersatz coat of arms the confirmation workbook from my progressive Catholic school encouraged me to invent to symbolize the important milestones or themes of my life (as of age eleven, I guess).

As reported over at RFB, Joe Trippi has started a new blog at Change for America. Since his first post was given number 6 by the MT software, I poked around a little to see if there were any earlier posts. 1 and 2 weren't there but 3 and 4 were test posts and 5 was a longer test post with a comment (all by DFA blogger/webmaster Niccolo Miele).

They might want to remove the test post! In case they do, here is the contents (I don't know the source) of Blessed Are the Quitters:

just another test entry to fill out the template

"Dear people, my name is Nicco and I'm only here for a few minutes today to encourage you and enlist your personal participation in an intentional act of change and necessary transformation. At the heart of such a proposition is the reality that no change is possible without letting go of something. In other words, you can 't take up unless you're willing to give up .... something.

Now, you might be wondered exactly what I'm getting at. Well, someone here today...shouldn't be. What I mean is that someone among us is not fulfilled to a degree sufficient to justify their staying as opposed to going. If only they would take a bold self-empowering leap and act for the sake of themselves and all of us here today. If only we could surround them with sincere, supportive encouragement and faith in their ability to secure a better future. If only they would QUIT.

That's right. I said it. You heard it. And you know it's true. Sometimes, more often than we are willing to admit, the right thing to do is quit. It is the first step to real change. In our culture, we teach people not to quit. We suggest that it is weakness that makes one quit. On the contrary, it is self doubt and weakness that keeps us from quitting. Quitting is cutting away from the security of the dock and putting out to sea, not to drift but to find the wind, trim the sails, and set a course for what you believe is out there waiting for you.

Just for a moment, ask yourself when was the last time you practiced a good quit. I suggest you reconsider your sens-abilities. Without the ability to quit, you're stuck. Free will? -- No way! But you can reclaim your power; you can rise up on your own two feet. You can demonstrate to yourself and everyone around you that you aren't going to sit down and take it easy any more. You may be half-talented, semi-lame, and somewhat self-deluded, but that doesn't mean your finished yet. You have the power and the power you have is the power to quit. I know you would like to, but you're afraid, unsure, tentative, wary, etc. Don't let that hold you back from your future. Trade in your half-empty glass and seek out a full cup. You deserve. You've been thirsty all your life, but you've relied on others to bring you that always partially filled glass of satisfaction. Stand up. Rise up. Quit!

What is your last strand of reservation tethering you to the berth you occupy? Is it that you are afraid of being -- listen carefully, I'm going to say it -- "a loser"? Don't cringe. The strong among us are all losers, but we're able to cut ourselves away. We want more. And when you really admit it, you're a loser, but you have never let yourself "loose". Free. Wild. Hopeful. Daring. Just quit.

Posted by Nicco at February 4, 2004 01:57 AM

Comments

wow, you're so articulate & smart. why don't you have your own blog?

Posted by: nicco at February 4, 2004 03:10 AM

I just commented on one of Pete's earlier posts The Power of Many: Book competition?, and that reminded me that I wanted to mention the status of public discussion of the book.

The associate publisher told me that it's OK to start mentioning the book in public (on my other blogs, for example) as long as I don't specify the publication month (but he said I can say summer), or other details of the book.

He also said that for now this blog should stay password-protected and its contents not yet made part of the public record for the book (eventually this site should focus on promoting the book). We would probably make this blog public in about a month? I forget the key milestone.

I can live with that, although I do have a sense that we shouldn't worry too much about competition knowing what we're doing any more than we mind looking at what else is out there as we inform ourselves about the ideas. That's just part of my "openness" ethic, in which I think the value of secrets tends to be overestimated.

As I said in my linked comment, of the three of four books that have been identified as competition, each seems to be framing these issues in a different way from PoM.

I suppose other publishers might be working on entrants into this area that we don't know about, so of course I am going to defer to the publisher's wishes. I just wanted to air my own preferences.

Here's a similar story: Someone from East Bay for Dean didn't like that my Oakland for Dean website had links to the local Kerry and Clark sites. I did this in the ethos of "does Macy's recommend Gimbel's?" - trusting the voter/customer to do their own analysis of the available information, and trusting them to come back to your site because of the content and message and dynamism there. I was told, however, that my site is a partisan site and linking to your opponent is "just not done." So, I deferred to their wishes and removed those links.

Joi Ito is soliciting examples for ... Emergent Democracy Worldwide discussion, and the commenters include Craig from Craig's List ("I'm involved with the San Francisco 311 program, which I'm treating as a genuine opportunity to reinvent government. ...they sound real") and Jeff Jarvis from BuzzFlash, who points to Hossein Derakhshan's Editor: Myself blog in Iran and the way it has spawned tens or hundreds of thousands of blogs there.

There are other good examples worth following up in the other comments.

So far, we are talking about international examples (Eastern Europe, Middle East, Asia, etc.) in the main politics chapter, but I wonder if there might be enough material for a separate chapter?

Add Matt Welch to the eTech blog watch list:

Trippi especially, but also some panelists (which have also included good ol' Doc Searls, and Cam Barrett, Dan Gillmor, Halley Suitt, Mitch Ratcliff, and MoveOn.org's interesting Wes Boyd), have used quite a bit of the "we," and "us" and "you." As in, "you really made this Dean campaign possible," etc. (not a direct quote). The idea being (though I'm caricaturizing here), there's just something about Cluetrain bloggy techism, insurgent populist campaigns & left-of-center political positions that go together like peas & carrots. Maybe that's true, but I honestly suspect that it's not. One of the best moments so far came when Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman made the point that some of the more active use of his site has been by dog owners, so they can have their "pug meetups," and chihuahua festivals & whatnot. (Also, he said the fastest-growing sector now are Heritage Foundation groups.) Point is -- this groovy tech business is allowing normal folks from wherever the hell to do what they like, and what they like is not going to necessarily lead logically to what some visionary Silicon Valley folks find to be of pressing concern.

Procedural question for xian: better to put up a new post for this kind of thing, or update the previous post?

Oakland Tribune feature: "Missed Connections" is a craigslist board for people who want to follow up on a random encounter:

Since it began, Newmark has watched Missed Connections grow from 100 to 4,000 posts a week, across the 34 cities the Web site serves. "Like everyone else, I really do hope that it works," Newmark says. "I'm a bit of a romantic." ...

Do the hunters ever nab their elusive bounty? "Once in a while, someone connects. It's just not very often," Newmark admits. "One person has to write it, another has to stumble onto it. It's a long shot. But romance is always a long shot."

In a series of BuzzMachine posts currently culminating http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_02.html#006176, Jeff Jarvis is covering eTech, political media, blogs, and the Dean campaign, but right now mainly eTech.

I wish I was there. Probably 20 of our contributors are there. I could knock out a few interviews a day, but then the people are probably all talked out, but still... it's a tough one to be missing.

(thanks to the Dead) World66: visitedStates

An L.A. Times story on Dean's slide mentions more possible competition (emphasis added):

"The messenger exploded, not the message. The message has been adopted in part by other candidates and other causes," said George Washington University professor Michael Cornfield, whose book "Politics Moves Online" will be published later this month. "There are obvious lessons from the Dean campaign, but 'Do not use the Internet' is not one of those lessons."

That book has a December 2003 pub date on B&N and February 2004 on Amazon. Cornfield earlier wrote Democracy Moves Online (March 2002).

Wow, I haven't done too much of the world traveling I had in mind.

(via camilo's Mercurial)

You can create your own visited country map, which is part of some new (in beta) collaborative travel guide called World66 ("the travel guide you write").

Blogging from eTech: Joi Ito, Jeff Jarvis (lots), Howard Rheingold (less), David Weinberger.

apophenia (in "processing trippi"):

What does it mean to have a candidate who can distribute their voices down the Internet channel as well as the TV channel? Everyone gets all excited because the Dean campaign had an interactive communication scheme online. What does that mean? How many people's opinions were changed this way? Somehow, i get the impression that the digital interactive environment allowed those with the same views to talk to others with the same views. This is *great* for support groups, but dreadful for changing the system.

Other early reports back from the pre-eTech "teach-in" also sound somewhat disappointed by Trippi's analysis of the campaign. There's lots of other great stuff in danah's post, including a distinction between digital campaignnng (in the sense of fundraising, media, get-out-the-vote, volunteers, etc.) and digital democracy, but the above quote might work well as an introduction to the chapter I'm submitting today.

In fact, it might be cool to start each chapter with a quote from a contributor and/or a contributor's blog.

S.F. Chronicle: CLICKING FOR CONNECTIONS: After a big splash, social networking sites (both business networking and dating) try to hold onto users.

Social networking, as the industry is called, has enjoyed phenomenal growth during the past year. Millions of Internet users have signed up with services such as Friendster, MeetUp and Tribe Networks, many of which are based in the Bay Area.

But the question remains whether the Web sites can keep users interested beyond the initial few months. After users link up with all their friends and browse their profiles -- then what?

Update: Also a similar article today from the NY Times.

Appears to be named, simply, eDemocracy.

A new site named MySociety.org is trying to develop public-benefit Internet projects:

MySociety.org is a new charitable project from a mixture of the people who brought you FaxYourMP.com and VoxPolitics. Our aim is to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served. For more info on our aims, click here.

From their FAQ:

Q. I'm not in Britain - does any of this matter to me?
A.Yes! Whilst our home country is the UK, we do not see ourselves as limited to it in any way. We will gladly speak to and work with people from outside the UK, and it is our hope and expectation that people around the world will be able to use and adopt the open source tools and services we develop for use in their own countries. We will even consider developing projects based in other countries, if appropriate funding can be found.

(link via David Weinberger's Loose Democracy)

apophenia: publicly processing hurt

What Famous Leader Are You?

Bonus: Which rock band is your presidential candidate?

Shirky's piece, linked below, refers to Steven Johnson's stevenberlinjohnson.com: My Theory About Dean's Demise: He Got Fewer Votes Than The Other Guys:

I've been quoted in a couple of places saying that the Dean campaign was more like a system running for President than a candidate, and I think the last month has illustrated the downside of that phenomenon, which is that all that attention paid to the blogs and the Meetups distracted everyone - the media, the voters - from the candidate himself.

In Many-to-Many: Exiting Deanspace, Clay Shirky begins

I wanted to wait 'til today's polls opened to post this, because I wanted it to be a post-mortem and not a vivisection.....

Daily Kos || Dear Terry, here's how to ask the blogs for support... (Matt Stoller, DFA)

From: "California Democratic Party"

Dear Christian Crumlish,

Thank you for applying to be a Male district-level delegate in Congressional District 9 for Howard Dean. This email is to inform you that we have received and processed your form. Your name has been forwarded to the Howard Dean Campaign for their caucus in Congressional District 9 on Sunday, February 8, 2004.

You can find an updated list of caucus sites, as well as more information about the caucus process on our website. If you have any further questions about the caucus process please contact the Howard Dean Campaign in Northern California, 408-999-0222 and in Southern California, 323-965-9933.

Once again, thank you for applying to be a district-level delegate and for taking part in the democratic process.

Sincerely,

California Democratic Party

_____________________________
California Democratic Party
1401 21st Street, Suite 100
Sacramento, California 95814
(916) 442-5707 phone
(916) 442-5715 fax
www.ca-dem.org

_____________________________
Paid for by the California Democratic Party
1401 21st Street, Suite 100, Sacramento, CA 95814
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee.
______________________________

I just noticed Brian Dear's comment on one of Pete or Cecil's posts (I only get the email notification if I wrote the post) and it reminded me that one interesting thing about pulling together my own network for this book and asking people for help and relying on people who make a commitment to do something, from participating in a conversation to writing something to reviewing things, etc., all of that is strengthening my relationships with people, and sometimes lately I've felt a bit like George Bailey at the end of It's a Wonderful Life who underestimated his impact on other people and the resilience of his web of relationships but now sees people coming out of the woodwork to help.

My other favorite metaphor for this form of collaboration is the Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence story.

Freaky software malfunctions are currently making it nearly impossible for me to reply to email in the normal way, so if you need to hear back from me soonly, try calling me. If you don't have my number or don't know anyone who does, then that's probably just as well.

There's a weird dislocating feeling, having my ordinary email-reply method broken. It's like a phantom limb, but it's also a release for tense brain muscles that have been poised for incoming mail for about 11 years straight without much relaxation. I've been warming to the phone lately, and am finding that face-to-face still takes the cake, but the competition for that time can be pretty fierce.

I am receiving email, so don't worry about me not getting your messages. Other ways to reach me include posting to your blog (and pinging me so I know to look), contacting me via orkut, or looking for me in the chat-o-sphere. I usually check into Yahoo! Messenger and #joiito at least once a day.

Need an invitation to orkut? Let me know and I'll send you one.

This morning I made the coffee as usual and was about to get the oatmeal started when I thought I heard whispering from inside the refrigerator. I put down the pot and it stopped. Then it started again. I could distinctly hear a voice speaking in French. How strange! I went to the fridge and opened the door. Of course, it was the cultured buttermilk.

Last month, before Iowa, Matt Stoller recounted some of the early history of the Dean (and Clark) online movements.

David Weinberger has a new Corante blog that's looking into the effects of the Internet on democracy, partly using the Dean campaign as an object lesson.

When inviting friends to an orkut community, the interface should remove from the list friends who are already in the group, and maybe even let you know which you have already invited, in case they silently declined to join in which case things could get awkward.

More: Brian Dear has some impressions of orkut too.