March 2004 Archives

From Publisher's Weekly, a note about MoveOn's book (from Inner Ocean Publishing; links added). Perhaps it's worth noting that networking or marketing online always has a slight hazard of turning off potential customers or partners who aren't wired?

Grass roots has trumped big media--at least for the moment--as an e-mail marketing campaign for MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change has enabled the title to knock Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies off the top spot on the Amazon.com bestsellers list.

An e-mail, sent in waves over the past few days by MoveOn to a mailing list that has more than two million addresses, urges members to buy the book and "push it to #1 at all booksellers." The group tries to balance the desire to reach the top spot on Amazon with the need to avoid alienating offline booksellers. The e-mail urges members to ask for the title at their local bookstore, but also provides a link to Amazon.com.

I wrote a pretty simple song on my ukulele today. I still can't play for shit, but tapping into the magic of chord patterns is just too fun. It goes (basically) G C G C7 D Em A C and back to G again. I was so thrilled that I called up Cecil Vortex and played the song into his voicemail. He played it back into his cellphone and sent it to me along with a little remix. Warning: it sounds atrocious!

• The Yeah Yeah Song (take 1) (~ 2 meg)
• The Yeah Yeah Song (take 1) Remix (~ 1 meg)

What a week this is already turning out to be in the metaworld:

• Mitch Ratcliffe posted another essay from the O'Reilly book last night.
• Jon Lebkowski writes, 'About technology for SNs I keep thinking "The map is not the territory, but it's good to have the map."'
• David Weinberger has a long blog entry kicking off the Microsoft symposium.
• RSS GUI Shrook goes 2.0.
• About that recurring theme: A June book titled Critical Mass is reviewed in the Guardian (link via The Futurist's Bookshelf).

A bit from that review:

... This yearning for universal mathematical laws to govern the behaviour of human beings has burdened the west with all sorts of harmless and less harmless nonsense, from phrenology to economics. It now finds a champion in Philip Ball in this long book.

Ball's argument is that this time, it's different, guv. In other words, mathematical and statistical physics has attained such a sophistication that its insights into the behaviour of particles of matter can be transferred to the mass behaviour of human beings, whether investing in the stock market or racing for the exits after a fire at a football ground.

In addition, and sotto voce, Ball tells us that society in mass has now become so mechanical that human beings really do resemble atoms of physical matter interacting with one another through forces of attraction and repulsion. ...

I'm still not logging my things done each day but I'm starting to get to it in less than a week, so that's something.

Thursday I started an email interview with Levi, found the tab for Syd Barrett's "Evervescing Elephant" on the web and transposed it for my ukulele, put out the garbage and the yard waste, and went to a meeting in the evening ostensibly to plan the PFA website but ultimately to work on voter-registration drive pyramid scheme.

Friday I managed to speak to Joan Blades of Move On for my book, went grocery shopping, and threw together a rapid first-draft wireframe for the Pyramid project using VoodooPad. I also got the tab for Uncle John's Band, learned that most of the chords are doable easily on the uke, and serenaded my friend Nick with a tortured rendition played into his voicemail.

Saturday I went to another Pyramid meeting (developing software for political purposes goes much faster than for business purposes!) around 10:30 am in Berkeley and spend about four or more hours there, with lunch provided by our lovely hostess, Simona (a frittata, some risotto, and some strawberry-yogurt parfait). We hashed out a second draft of the process flow and I'm currently stil updating wireframe 2. On the way home I exchanged some unmentionables for B at Victoria's Seekrit.

Yesterday (Sunday), on a whim, we drove into the city before midday to take in the Art Deco show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was beautiful crisp day and hte Marin headlands were starkly visible across the golden gate. You could also see Mount Diablo quite clearly off in the other direction. The show was great too. IT was the perfect weekend afternoon. B bought a book on tiaras in the museum bookstore. I had a turkey and bacon sandwich in the cafeteria and B ate some of my pickle.

When we got home I practiced my uke for a few hours and then went out to write with Cecil Vortex and the Monkeyman, who are working on their new Monkey Vortex Radio Theatre concept, which I offered to host at x-pollen at least until they get famous and break my server.

in which I remember the chords a bit better but still to no avail

In which I try to remember to keep strumming

one day i will be able to play this

choppy and sad

if gumption was horses, this beggar would ride

My grandfather had a ukulele. I loved it as a little boy. When he died, I was nine and I inherited the uke. I never learned to play it but I bashed it up pretty good. They even got me a new ukulele because I really wanted on. I loved the way the both looked. They were made with blond wood, probably soprano ukes. I don't know what happened to the second one.

It turns out, someone in everybody's family played the ukulele. I bought my new tenor ukulele on Tuesday and it gets warm looks everywhere I go. When I take it out and practice people come up to me and say "My aunt played the ukulele," or "I just bought a ukulele for my son," and so on. They look happy and they want to talk. It's a happy instrument.

So far I've fallen into this habit of learning a new song on the uke every day. On Wednesday I got the hang of Yellow Submarine, a song I remember my kindergarten teacher playing on guitar and illustrated with large construction-paper collages on an easel. Yesterday I looked up the tab for Evervescing Elephant on the web, wrote out the ukulele chords, and then figured it out. My fingers are really starting to hurt now.

Today, I hit looked up Uncle John's band and I've been playing that all day. Not the weird bridge stuff in seven, just the verse chorus verse chorus variations. Almost all the chords in those parts of the song (G C D Amin Emin) are easy to play on the ukulele. It's such a revelation to hear the song start taking shape in the changes and to start to get a feel for the inevitable sound of the instrument. I never realized how easy music is if you don't try so hard to be good.

It's as easy as falling off a log ( + 25 years).

All people are googled, but some are more googled than others.

Tangent: Speak truth to interfaces. The tyranny of the nerds is ended. The time of the helpful loving nerds is dawning. The new category I made to catch these rendom thoughts isn't called random thoughts. Every time to ask me to type in a box I'm going to write what I want and not necessarily what you want me to write.

I propose a new word to describe people who live at least to some extent on the Internet: peeple. I'll explain later.

<smallerer>I learned how to play Yellow Submarine on my tenor uke this morning.</smallerer>

1. Did first scan of peer-review comments on Ch 3
2. 8:30 Talked to my editor to synch up on priorities
3. 8:50 Phoned Fox media rep, left message
4. 9:15 Called Nicholas to plan for Dead conference
5. Called Arthur to discuss digital studio plans, and to get his mobile number recorded
6. Left JAC a message to find out if her dog is OK (she called back later, he is doing fine - what a constitution that dog has!)
7. Took message from Jodi (best. landlord. ever.) about the tree guy coming by this afternoon - gave her B's phone info
8. Sent followup inquiry to MoveOn founder for interview
9. 1:15 Marketing brainstorming meeting with my publisher
10. 3:30 Jodie and tree guy come by - we put B on the phone and they walk around trading the headset and discussing the trees overhanging the roof that need trimming
11. 4:30-6:00 huge email backlog catchup
12. 7pm Democratic Unity MeetUp - ad hoc DFA / East Bay for Kerry summit meeting, rapprochement, beginning of plans to coordinate together
13. 8:45 Jupiter for pizza and beer.
14. 9:40 Greendale II

Now that's what I calll lifelogging!

Newsweek writes about Google (which owns Blogger), so of course bloggers write about Newsweek writing about Google.

And here's the Newsweek article: "Let's face it—it's good to be Google. Every minute, worldwide, in 90 languages, the index of this Internet-based search engine created by these Stanford doctoral dropouts is probed more than 138,000 times. In the course of a day, that's over 200 million searches of 6 billion Web pages, images and discussion-group postings."

However, mainstream media about Google is too twentieth-century for most bloggers: a search on Google for "newsweek google trackback" gets nothing recent; same in Technorati gets 0 results.

I handn't bought the Greendale record or heard any of it yet, nor seen the live stage show, but I did just see the movie this evening with Scot and some of his cool friends. Everyone noticed how literally the images tracked the lyrics - and the lipsyncing was better than Britney's. I could easily see Mike Watt filming Contemplating the Engine Room using essentially the same technique.

Weird coincidence: the Acts I and II movie theatre in Berkeley has a vintage French language Soylent Green poster on which the movie is called Soleil Vert, which literally means Sun Green, the name of one of Neil Young's protagonists.

I think we should set up a table in the demo room at the Waterside conference next month for this book. Can we get one of them outsized cardboard glossy cutouts with a mockup of the cover, and some preorder forms?

Dan Gillmor has an update on what Zack Rosen is up to:

The campaign is over. But Rosen tells me he's going to push ahead with what he started, aiming to create an open platform that others can use.

He says he's gotten venture-capital funding from a California firm that looks for public-interest investments. He and his team would, he said, build a "groupware tool set" that included content-management, mail list and forum posting, blogging and much more. Initially, the goal was to create an analogue to Yahoo Groups, the online service that lets non-techies set up mailing lists, but to aim its functions at political campaigns. In the long run, he said, the goals were much more ambitious:

"To establish a permanent foundation that can spearhead social software development projects for nonprofit organizations. ..."

I can't find a transcript (or even a mention, for that matter) of Joe Trippi's interview with Lester Holt (MSNBC, March 21 or 22?). But a Newsweek article on Trippi, Dean, and the Net shows up at MSNBC: Dean's Net Effect Is Just The Start (it sticks to politics).

Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; xian, I have a copy if you want to borrow) is a bit dated but covers a lot of online-creativity ground, from MUDs to serial group writing to VR. She writes (link added):

With the advent of the VCR, a new branch of literature has arisen in which actual scenes from the broadcast programs are reedited into new stories. Kirk and Spock, whose friendship is a centerpiece of the original series, have been reinterpreted as lovers through the magic of videotape. This “textual poaching,” as media critic Henry Jenkins has called it, has become even more widespread on the World Wide Web, which functions as a global fanzine. Although some copyright holders have protested, fans have little trouble obtaining digital images and even digital video clips from their favorite series, which they put to their own use on personal Web pages.

By the way, it's "pon farr." "pong far" is what happens when you can't reach the controller.

If I hadn't been so ragged out B and I could have stayed for more than the first four Mekons songs at the Starry Pluff in Berkeley last night, but what I heard sounded fantastic. I said to B, "What they've retained of the punk aesthetic is the 'no wanking' rule." Everything was spare and tasty and their voices sounded great. Good thing ear at zoka was taping from the soundboard!

My guitar was too hard to learn on. I took it the Thin Man music store in Alameda and the dude there to restring it with lightweight strings and lower the action for me. I also bought this beautiful tenor ukulele for $75 because I figure that will also be much much easier to learn on. I practiced a bunch of chords this afternoon and the fingers on my left hand have that gonna-be-calluses feeling.

I'll snap and post a picture of the uke soon. Looks like I'll be out of town (in New Orleans) during the Ukulele Festival in Hayward on April 25.

If you thought I was busy before, you ain't seen nothing yet. Actually, I heard a good new impromptu expression form Outlandish Josh the other day that I'm sure I'll find myself repeating. I asked him if he was busy and he said yes, he was busy, but "flexible busy."

A week ago Monday I handed in the introduction, frontmatter, and final chapter of my book (in crappy first-draft form). Representing a triumph over deadlines and earning a bonus.

Tuesday my flu was pretty much gone. It's kind of weird that I got sick on the day of the Cal primary and got better the day after my deadline from hell. Also the sun came out in a big way and a lot of other things happened at once so I got so bubbly that my close friends started looking at me strangely.

I had a phone interview for a possible job that ran about an hour and a half and which I enjoyed immensely (I hope she did too). I got my haircut. I shaved my winter beard.

Wednesday I did some laundry, called the flacks of a bunch of famous people I'm trying to interview for my book and in a job-seeking mood, sent out about 10 copies of my newly updated resume.

Thursday I went grocery shop first-thing in the morning. For once there were beautiful unpicked-over chanterelles available. That evening I went to Howard Dean's announcement of DFA version 2.0, but it was so crowded and insane in the hotel ballroom that I retreated to the hallway to snap photos and try to blog what I was seeing. I also realized that rallying is fun but what I was really looking forward to was the upcoming Northern California grassroots DFA summit, a working meeting.

Craig Newmark happened by and invited me to tag along with him as he addressed the SF Democratic Club, with folded perfectly into my need to talk with him about the 311 project through which San Francisco is trying to improve its "customer service" for my book.

I also got the OK that day to decloak the blog for my book.

Friday I saw my therapist, finally paid my bills (nothing scary was lurkingin there), and booked my plan flight to San Antonio for early next month (for the Dead caucus at the American Popular Culture Association conference where I will be presenting a paper on James Booker and Jerry Garcia, plus seeing my buddy Nicholas, and possibly syrup as well, and maybe now jonl, fresh from SXSW, may show up too. I gather that San Antone is only 73 miles or so from Austin.

Saturday I went up to Montclair in the morning and bought some chives and some grassfed beef to grill later (well, not the chives - they were for the baked potatoes). Then I went home a slept for a while. B finally got most of an afternoon off, and later Rich and Martha came by for dinner. B sauteed the chanterelles and also cooked some cauliflower with grated cheese that was ncredibly delicious. The grilled steaks came out great, especially with the mushrooms on top, and the potatoes were good as well, although for some weird reason I only baked three and when B tried to give me her over the centerpiece, I got kind of embarassed and barked at her, leaving her with the hot potato in her hand.

Sunday B went down to Palo Alto to celebrate her mom's birthday. I wanted to go but couldn't because I had this NorCal DFA summit from about 10 am when I picked some folks up at BART till well after 4 pm. If you've never been in a room with 50 battletested organizers (these are the doers, not the talkers) who have a broad consensus on what they want to do next and what they're long term goals are, let me tell you: It's very exciting. One of my mentors, whose first campaign was Youth for Wallace (Henry, not George!) reminisced with another longstanding activist that the only similar moment they could compare it too was the Roosevelt campaign. So much more to talk about but this isn't the place for it.

Monday
I left a message with a city council chief of staff I met during the campaign and stlll would like to take out to lunch some time to learn more about how local politics work, and I don't remember what else I got done that day, and it was just yesterday. I know I sent and received a lot of email and kept working on Chapter 4 but did not finish it.

Oh, one thing was that something clicked for me and I suddently realized that VoodooPad is the best thing for a writer) sinced sliced breaf. Maybe this is what TinderBox does (or less), but when I finally realized that I could just jot notes anywhere anad link them all up with all the bogus instantly static pseudo structure of all my previous organizational and productivity apps, well it was like a veil was lifted. Joe Bob says check it out.

(Then I blogged about my newfound enthusiasm and earned a friendly reprimand from the editor eagerly waiting for me to finish my chapter revision.)

Tuesday morning I finally finished Chapter 4 and sent it in, spoke to my editor to discuss priorities, revised Chapter 6 and sent that in and initiated or sent follow-up communications with all the people I still need to talk to about either of those two chapters.

Now I'm off to get my guitar restrung and get some new tires put on Eve.

In the still-not-done category, there's get new tires for Bandx, nail down travel dates for the Dem convention in Boston, rent a car in San Antonio, try to get press credentials for the convention, and continue figuring out whether it's worth $90 to replace the lost sunglass clipons from my spare pair of glasses.

craigblog: first review of 24 hours on craigslist

(I have to reboot my computer, so I have to close about 400 browser tabs, so I have to blog some of them so I can find them again later.)

I'm finally down with the wiki way. I get it. It's light years beyond. It's most of what I've been waiting for.

And VoodooPad is amazing (for OS X users only, sorry), a desktop wiki app. When I finally got that it was easy as a wiki but native to my desktop environment and thus not sluggish or otherwise crippled, I rejoiced. Then I wished it could synch with a public or private web wiki.

It asked me to pay after I created 15 pads. Pretty smart, I was hooked. More importantly, I want to pay them. Sure, I could delete a few minor pages and eke the free period out a little more, but I want my $20 (okay, $19.99) to go to the people woh made this thing so they'll keep up teh good work.

That's the thing about the power of many. It's not that money is going away. Money is a very useful technology. But the tyranny of money is ending. We've figured out that many beats money every time. In a more gift-oriented economy, I pay for things I value, because respect each other and negotiate fairly (it's much closer to being a fair market). You don't have to pay me to advertise yuor product or service. Just make it good and useful. Just solve a problem for me. Just give me one gadget that can do what I used to need two gadgets to do, and I'll tell people about you for free. But I (as always) digress.

I'm doing this whole second draft of the book in VoodooPad, I'm telling you. 'll have to put the crappy Word formatting back in before I hand chapters back, yes, I know.

I think in the long run blog software is dead, as a bloglike template in a wiki would do all a blog does and more, but this is still the short run and blogs are very important and the logging idea is here to stay.

Someone must remind me to spell out the new protocols for cell phones I've worked out (law: waste no time!) in another blog entry. See blogging is still important. Not dead yet.

But wikis are easier and the masses are crying out for what William Burroughs called the philosophy of Do Easy.

To a nerdy kid like me from the '70s, the recent Cheaper by the Dozen remake left out the best part of the book - the fact that Gilbraith (?) was an efficiency expert. And his method was to find the laziest guy in the factory and watch what he does and then teach everyone else to do it. The twelve redheads, the high jinks, they are cute but they were not the point of the story (to me).

More on this later, I have a chapter draft due.

I think we can safely log any themes or motifs in Chapter 1.

Though I have a chapter overdue from first-round development (Chapter 4) and I'm supposed to be calling Bill O'Reilly's press secretary at FOX, I find that this past week I've been spouting themes left and right.

Mostly in conversation, answering questions like "What is your book about"? It all starts coming out. And it needs brainstorming, and email and even this blog are inadequate for all of us to discuss it together. We need a group whiteboard thing like the Schwarmanizer that Laramie Crocker (a Berkeley musician - "Little Black Box," etc.) built to Dan Robinson's (eVol*? CTO?) spec or.... a wiki.

I am finally starting to get wikis, because of VoodooPad, which presents the convenience of the wiki model in a latency-free (desktop) environment using familiar (Mac OS X, in this case) interface conventions.

I started using it for brainstorming and realized that it's going to absorb my to-do list and my address book and my scratchpad.

Wiki is the killer app, in a way.

Have I mentioned that anyone who wants to post to this blog should just get in touch with me (I'm an open source person) and ask? If I know you, I'll definitely say yes. If I don't know you, I'll probably say yes if you are sincerely interested in contributing and not trying to sell* something**

*besides my book... in the immortal words of Susan Mernit on seeing the soft launch of this blog (and I am trusting my sense that she will not mind me quoting a private email message - if you do, smernit, just let me know and I will redact immediately), "what's the biz model"? Right now the business/self-sufficiency mission of this blog and the rest of this site is to sell the book. If we succeed and the book is considered a success, this blog and related sections will be free to continue covering the beat.

**particularly anything associated with hate or shame.

OK, back to best practices. I want a brainstorm list of themes that must weave through and be addresed in all revelant chapters and which may affect the flow of presentation of ideas.

Just posting a lot of brief blog entries such as

• Managing your identiy online

makes for a tedious playback experience later. Better a whiteboard/wiki approach, as I mentioned. I am debuging phpwiki and will probably get it going here soon, at which point I can build a list in public and accept open-source improvements in the remaining time.

Also, then I can focus on the next draft of Chapter 4 without the nagging feeling that there's something that isn't getting tracked properly and the awareness that in a few hours people won't be working too hard on the east coast anymire.

Note to self: Add textile or smartypants or the new markdown filter for easing rich-blog-authoring.

When you laugh at me, I learn where my blind spots are. Things I am trying to do suddenly seem ridiculous.

It's not that I winced or spoke sharply when you noticed me misspeaking.

It's not that I misspoke.

It's that I obviously can't stand making mistakes and I try so hard to elude criticism that my mistakes are inevitably funny to the people around me who have to put up with my almost obsessively erudite use of language in ordinary discourse.

Then again, I've been putting the books into the air and writing the talk down on paper for a while and it looks like it's finally time to switch that back up.

Technorati has exposed its new beta redesign as its default look and unveiled a new slogan:

Search the World Live Web

They start noticing things again. When they feel that something needs doing, they do it. They stop being afraid of making mistakes. They stop hiding from themselves. They wake up to find out they are the eyes of the world.

Jonas Luster (whom I know primarily as jluster on #joiito) provides a pretty deep starter bibliography on the topics of social networks, social networking, and social network analysis.

The personal expression platform wants to do sound and it wants to do pictures and it's going to want to do motion capture eventually but right now it just wants to be able to sing, recontextualize, and join the great chorus of call and response.

So, to sound. Cecil writes music, sings, plays guitar, and plays piano. Bob and Jeff from the Uncalled Four are both hugely talented musicians. Their group was my own personal Nirvana a year before grunge made the '70s play clothes of my childhood (think corduroy and plaid flannel) into a fashion statement. We were kids then, though, still mostly in our 20s, and when a Nirvana came along, the dominant impulse was to give up, instead of thinking "look what can happen when things are going right." Of course I need a better example than one that ends with brains on the wall. Too bad Nick Hornby already wrote the Nirvana novel. Oh wait, I'm doing it again.

And plus, nobody's done the Camper van Beethoven novel yet.

Also, GarageBand is here. As soon as I get some scratch I'll want Panther and an iPod and a decent mic for my inimitable cover-song stylings.

Really what I need to do is talk to Michael o'Zoka, who's a decade ahead of me in understanding how to digitally grease the wheels of music.

Hey, my band needs a sound guy and a midi clarinet player and a graceful system admin. We need a drummer too.

And that's just the music. I'm rounding up the writers and artists and book designers and coders and crowd from Nightjar and Too Many Cooks and Enterzone and Arts Beyond Borders and Watchword and To-Do List and (the good, old school) Bust and Coffee House.

I've got ideas for Open Publishing. I have some intellectual property sitting on the shelf. I've got some not-ready-for-prime-time plans brewing down at the meme house and the metaphor barn.

I need help. I can't do all this stuff alone. But I wanna be your lover baby I don't want to be your boss. Don't ask me to hire you and handle your insurance in this fucked up dying-off system. Work with me. Do the stuff you want to do and get help with the things you need help with. We'll barter services and we won't even keep track. I'll pay too if that's the only way to get things to happen. (I'd happily pay MichaelZ his hourly rate just to come in and consult on my media tools and make some hardware, software, network, and config information.)

If any of this is making sense, I apologize.

Magister Mundi sum! ("I am the Master of the Universe!")

You are full of yourself, but you're so cool you probably deserve to be. Rock on.

Uh, OK then. Thanks, I guess, Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You? brought to you by Quizilla.

Be the first on your block to hop on board the xianerrific express! Later, you can tell your friends: "I knew that guy back when he was just a blogger."

Act now!

Password protection is off, we're grabbing the domain name, and I've started dropping hints on other blogs.

Just set up to ping a bunch of sites on update. In addition to the Movable Type recently updated page and the usual weblogs.com and blo.gs suspects, we're also pinging the following servers every time we update:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rcs.salon.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Next I'll set up the categories to receive and display incoming pings.

At one point, I used to blind cc my agent any email I sent that might lead to a book deal.

There was a time I used to blind cc my academic deadhead friend every fascinating bit of music information or dialogue or culture i saw online. That was a form of blogging. If Nicholas has saved that old email archive, i bet it's publishable.

I wonder what would happen if I put a few people on a permanent bcc list and then permitted myself to forget that they were listening in? It might be the closest I could get (in the scientific sense of modeling and approximation) to an autobiography in this medium yet.

Wired News reports that RFID tags have uses beyond retail:

In order for the elderly to live at home longer, however, CAST believes seniors will have to sacrifice much of their privacy. Doctors and nurses will need to use RFID and other sensor technologies to keep tabs on them more frequently.

Some of the marginal "See Also" stories related to this one:

• Lawmakers Alarmed by RFID Spying
• Tracking Junior With a Microchip
• Tech for Elders Must Have Purpose

and I'm late on my way to the Palace Hotel in SF for the coronation anunciation assumption announcement by Howard Dean about his plans for DFA 2.0.

We hope you like our new direction.

A Penny For is running its second Business Blog Book Tour, modeled on the Virtual Book Tour. Something to mention in the business chapter—and perhaps also to add to the PoM marketing plan?

More evidence that human interaction cannot be reduced to Boolean algebra (or binary math, or quantum physics, or any other course in the catalog): Clay Shirky writes,

Behold RELATIONSHIP, a vocabulary for describing relationships between people.

I don't know if I'm the one to shoot these particular fish in this particular barrel, since both mme. boyd and Herr Weinberger are more eloquent than I on the subject of of making the tacit explicit, but this thing is self-critiquing.

Here, just in case you were wondering, is how you should be characterizing your relationships with one another:

friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf, spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith, knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation, closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith, employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf, grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf, participantIn, participant

Describing relationships with a controlled vocabulary can sound credible right up to the moment you see the vocabulary, but this thing is a mess. ...

Steven Berlin Johnson's latest title, Mind Wide Open, is climbing the bestseller charts.

I used to joke that SBJ was my nemesis, the way he successfully went from the popular Feed magazine to his current big-idears book-writing and magazine/web-journalism career.

I saw a remaindered link at Tom Coates' blog and took the test:

Thanks for taking Match.com's Ph.D.-formulated Physical Attraction Test, a revolutionary development in the world of relationships. This scientific system will help you narrow your search for those who are truly compatible with your physical preferences.

Below is the summary of your report. To view your complete test results, click here.

Or click here to search for single Match.com members who you'll find physically attractive.

Favorite Qualities

• Your photo choices suggest a woman over 55 is probably getting a little old for your tastes
• You seemed interested in dating a woman at least 30 or older
• So-called "Ecto-Mesomorphs," with narrow chins and nicely angular faces
• Light brown hair
• Wavy hair


• Straight hair

Favorite Looks

There's a reason why you can't keep your eyes off a beauty pageant. We describe a lot of the women you found attractive as "Beauty Queens," because of their flawless beauty and winning smiles. These women usually have long, shiny hair setting off a face that is either rectangular or heart-shaped. They have very feminine features like thin noses, big eyes, and full lips, conveying a strong, confident look rather than looking delicate or fragile. Even though they look like the "Girl Next Door," they tend to look mature for their age and lack the "cutesy" appearance of more "girlish" women. Although very popular to look at, most men are sort of intimidated by this type, which is probably why only 1 in 3 (31%) say they specifically seek out these women.

We'd guess your first crush was on a "Tomboy." You also seemed to notice the healthy, active, and all-natural look, which was a common thread among your photo choices. Their sun-tanned faces are usually either long and narrow or square-like in shape. Either short or long and straight, these women don't invest a lot in big hairdos or wear a lot of makeup. They don't need to, since their good looks come across even hanging out on Saturday in a baseball cap. In fact, this is one way you (and the other 1 in 10 men (12%) who like this type) can find her.

Favorite Face Type

Faces known scientifically as "Ecto-Mesomorphs" repeatedly caught your eye. Women express this type in two ways. One version has a rectangular face shape that is long and narrow. The other type's face shape is often compared to a diamond or a heart, because it is wide at the cheeks and then has a sharply angled jaw. Ecto-Mesomorph women have either delicate pointed chins or chins that are slightly squared-off or rounded at the base. This "classic" face type is one of the most idealized for women and can be found on most movie and music idols. These women also tend to have lean, but shapely, builds when they're young. About 57% of other men especially prefer women with this face type.

Compare your results

Tell your friends to take the test and then compare your results, or for more details, visit http://attraction.match.com.

P.S. You've received this email because you requested to have the Physical Attraction Report summary delivered to your inbox when you took the Match.com Physical Attraction Test. You will not receive additional mailings such as this in the future. If you have questions, feel free to contact Customer Care directly.

At culturekitchen, Liza Sabater notes a post by Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker to the nettime-l mailing list called The Limits of Networking that seems to address the "echo chamber" flaw. (Not quoted due to this disclaimer from the mailing lists's sig-statement: "no commercial use without permission".) The entire thread can be found at the nettime-l web archive.

Here's Liza's prefacing comment:

I'm going to have to shell out the money for your book.

This is one of the best, and I mean, BEST pieces of political theory I have read in years. It could not have come at a better moment, since my work as an independent schooling advocate is a direct result of my use of the Internet --and a lot of my colleagues in the movement, just like I, are making it as we go. To have ideas of strategy and tactical intervention articulated in this manner is just precious.

There's something to be said for sleeping whenever you're tired and waking up a lot to fiddle around with stuff until you're tired again.

How's that for preemptive self-recrimination?

The Might of the Living Web

Your liver pays dearly now for youthful magic moments,
But rock on completely with some brand new components.

How do you afford your rock'n'roll lifestyle?
How do you afford your rock'n'roll lifestyle?
How do you afford your rock'n'roll lifestyle?

Excess ain't rebellion.
You're drinking what they're selling.
Your self-destruction doesn't hurt them.
Your chaos won't convert them.
They're so happy to rebuild it.
You'll never really kill it.
Yeah, excess ain't rebellion.
You're drinking what they're selling.
Excess ain't rebellion.
You're drinking,
You're drinking,
You're drinking what they're selling.

[Courtesy of Lyrics.Net.ua]

Coming soon...! The Dead Vault on your freaking iPod.

I introduced myself to Chris Gulker recently and he spotted me as a fellow person- with- first-name- Christian. I said, "Oh, you're a stealth Christian!" I found growing up that people who remembered my name as Chris eventually got around to calling me Christopher. Plus I just didn't answer to it. I didn't think "That's me," when I heard someone yell "Chris!"

In high school I knew an Irish kid named Christian who was called Christy (pronounced kristy). I thought that was an elegant solution. My grandfather dropped Christian and referred to himself as Tom, C. Thomas Spitznas. (Christian is a name more common among Scandinavians and Germans, and Grampy lived through two wars in which the Germans were the enemy. Christian Spitznas (loosely "Goodman pointynose") was just too much of a sauerkrauty wienerschnitzel frankfurter of a mouthful. Better to be Tom.

I wore my long improbably name like a badge of honor when I was a dorky kid. ("Maybe you should go back to the nerd committee," said Mal last night when I joking suggested "Voting is Fun" as the name of East Bay for whatever Dean's For's new VoterSalon plan, since renamed Parties for America.)

Christian T. S. Crumlish (I have Grampy's whole name and my father's Irish last name) and most people didn't call me Chris but some always do. They are the people who don't notice.

I guess if they spelled it chris. and pronounced it "Chris-dot" I could live with that but I settled on my xian handle even before I got online and I'm stuck wth that although people always ask me how to pronounce it and I give a different answer every time but that's another krinksby story.

Crumbles
Crumbliest
Crumbs
Crumples
Crumbiest
Crumbling
Crummiest
Crumpling
Crumbing
Rules
Crumb
Crumble
Crumple
Crumbled
Crumpets
Crumpled
Crusts
Crucify
Crudity
Crumbed

Joe Trippi and Scott Heiferman shared Wired's Rave Award in the "Political Force" category (ceremony at the Fillmore Monday night).

My cell phone rings. It's a guy from my car insurance company's marketing arm. He's reading my survey answers about how I switched from my old insurance company because I saved a couple hundred dollars.

He tells me they're planning an ad campaign on California highways and they want to feature real customers who are residents of the state, representing the diverse population. Am I interested in being on a billboard?

Sure, why not? I tell him. He tells me to email a mugshot to suchandsuch address.com. I tell him it's no problem if they've already got enough chubby white balding guys with glasses and don't need me.

Immediately, I'm thinking, Is this a mistake?

I don't mind telling the truth. My friend Andy says it will freak me out if I see myself on a billboard. I'd have to take a picture. Will they send me a poster-sized version of the ad? I'll only tell the truth, but what's the harm.

I instinctively no B would say no, but I'm such a ham. What a trip, being 20 feet tall. Maybe they're looking for the next "it nerd" in Hollywood and some talent agency will give me a call. Stranger things have happened.

I tell B about it. Don't tell me anymore, she says. She is appalled.

I go out back to snap a few picture. I need a shave and a haircut. My neck is fat. I end up taking a bunch of pictures of the cat first. I accidentally switch to the video format and shoot a bunch of nonsense interstitials. What the hell.

The usual subspects are there according to Joi Ito, who's on the panel. He also notes that SXSW is blogger unfriendly.

It's as good a time as any to do another week in review:

Monday I finally closed out my February files, deposited some checks, and then met my editor, Pete Gaughan, for a lunch on the sidewalk outside Arizmendi (pizza in the sun, yea! it almost made me feel like I had kicked this cold) and to discuss the progress on my book and the all important subtitle. That night I went to the monthly Alameda County Organizing Committee meeting for the once and future East Bay for Dean organization.

Tuesday I got the groceries and made dinner (petrale soul baked with sauce bercy) but that was about it. Hey, I'm still sick.

Wednesday I managed to submit the book's glossary (nee appendix) after making dinner (grilled grass-fed cross-rib steak, baked potatoes, salad).

Thursday once again I was wiped out and slept almost all day. I did get the garbage and the yard waste (green bin) put out for the next morning's pickup.

Friday I did my laundry, sent out a message to my book's participants via Orkut inviting informal peer reviews of a few chapters, sent a note to one of the authors of Extreme Democracy to invite them to participate in a panel on politics and technology at the Waterside conference in Berkeley in April, and put in a call to a publisher in Connecticut on behalf of one of my clients. He was on another line and will call me back Monday. Oh, also tried to help move along the production process for another book.

Today I got a birthday present for a friend, picked up some sour cream for the icing on the cake, refilled a prescription at Kaiser, took nine shirts to the cleaner, had a pair of trousers (Christmas gift from B) altered, got my glasses readjusted and priced a replacement for the magnetic clip-on sunglass part of my other glasses ($90, holy shit! decided to put off that purchase for a while), and did a preliminary sort of agenda items for a Northern California summit meeting of grassroots Dean organizations taking place next month.

Things I didn't get done this week but meant to include reviewing and resubmitting Chapter 4 (I'll try to finish that tomorrow), updating all teh contact info for participants in my book, initiating the next set of interviews for my book, paying my bills, booking a flight on Southwest to San Antonio for the American Popular Culture conference in March, booking a flight on JetBlue to Boston for the Democratic convention in July, coming up with other ideas for the Waterside conference.

And a propos of nothing, I see that the warm weather has restarted the Ladies (and Gents) who Lunch series in Oakland, next scheduled for March 18. See you there?

Susan Mernit set up a blog called morph specifically for participants in and commentators on the American Press Institute's Media Center's MediaMorphosis conference, (a new one.) The other day she invited a number of non-attendees via email to drop by and post comments if interested.

There's a whole world of forums/boards for graphic artists, where they swap and critique art, most commonly with Adobe Photoshop images, Macromedia Flash animations, or 3D stills or animations from Alias Maya or Discreet 3ds Max.

In a lot of cases, the art is collaborative or competitive. The biggest genre for this is Photoshop Tennis. To "play" PT, usually some parameters are agreed on first, such as file format, time limits, or even artistic theme. One person creates a Photoshop file, then sends it to a second person. That player alters it—whether minimally by touch-up, or extensively, even perhaps throwing out the entire image and starting over—and returns the file. This back-and-forth can go on haphazadly or for a prearranged number of rounds; the end result is more than just a single image but an artistic sequence.

Just as no two artists are identical, no two art matches are the same either. The participants can range along the spectrum from collaboration—agreeing on a common theme, subject, motif, or purpose—to competition, with each trying to outdo the other in a demonstration of digital-art "chops."

Although Photoshop Tennis developed and evolved spontaneously in several places, Coudal Partners, a Chicago design house, is where PT was finally formalized in a significant way. (Coudal also has one of the best freakin' blogs on the planet, right on their home page, but nobody knows about them outside the graphic design community.)

Here are some sites where collaborative art is made, or where the gallery sections include extensive community comment and critique:

• Designologue
• Digikitten
• The Flashkit Arena
• Worth1000
• Baseboard
• We’re Here
• 12Stone
• The digital "Exquisite Corpse"
• We're Over There
• Graphic Forums (look for the Showcase and Battle Grid)
• Creative Fight Club
• YayHooray!
• Newstoday
• Highend3D
• Graphics.com

The collaborative art trend eventually led to a book, Photoshop Secrets of the Pros, which teaches Photoshop techniques through the medium of Photoshop Tennis matches by 20 designers and artists.

Auren Hoffman has been getting a lot of requests for referrals from LinkedIn and wrote this summary of a month's worth of requests recently.

Linking to Gillmor's book made me realize that we really don't have "journalism" as a topic anywhere. Not that it's necessary—as always, where's the "effective, public, real-world action" component?—and we're not a book on blogging, but both journalism and blogging probably merit mention per se and not just as means or adjuncts in the major topical divisions. I categorized Gillmor in Chapter 1, because that seems like the only place for it. Other ideas? (Update: re-placed to Chapter 9, as "meta" material is falling into there.)

And whenever we do find a place for journalism, we should mention Correspondences.org:

Think of this as a "newspaper out of the box" where everyone can contribute. We're building a portal for reporting of events by participants and commentators covering all aspects of events around the world, locally and internationally: politics, business, economics, technology, medicine, media and culture.

Some good insights from Peter Merholz and Anil Dash reported in hiphopmusic.com: Fear and Glowing at the Orkut Launch Party.

Also, found via the same source (Waxy.org links), someone who is mapping the social networks in Shakespeare's plays.

A few days ago,Jen Golbeck, a Ph.D. student in computer science sent this message to her friends of friends at Orkut:

Christian > Dan > Jen 3/9/2004 from: Jen to: friends of friends subject: Social Nets: Obligated to add friends?

message: Hi,

It seems to me that a lot of friend connections here are made because we feel obligated to reciprocate when someone adds us to their list. I want to make this claim in a paper, but I need some evidence. If you have a second, I have a form that just asks how many friends you have on orkut and how many of them are on your list only because you felt obligated to add them.

I appreciate the help.

Thanks,
jen

The same day, Clay Shirky contrasted two (or more) friendship-handshaking models by discussing recent changes at Friendster and Orkut in YASNSes get detailed . He notes that the more fine-grained, pseudo-nuanced gradations of friendship require a lot of maintenance work and seem to only give value to the owner of the network, and also that passively ignoring friendship requests models real life more accurately than a challenge-accept/deny model.

He also points to LiveJournal as a good model and claims that "Those who do not understand LiveJournal are doomed to repeat it, badly."

The discussion that follows is spirited, with Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp (the Flickr people) challenging many of Clay's conclusions.

BTW: The Orkut message in the previous post told me it was coming from "clay." At first I wondered why Shirky was sending out a press-release for Blue Digital.

Clay Johnson, late of the Dean campaign, just sent this press release to his "friends" and "friends of friends":

Christian > Clay 3/11/2004

from: Clay
to: friends of friends
subject: Dean Internet Team Launches Blue State Digital

message: WASHINGTON, D.C.--Key members of Howard Dean's internet team today launched a consulting firm to bring their expertise to Democratic candidates and progressive political organizations. Blue State Digital, LLC, will use the tools and expertise that Howard Dean used to raise more than $50 million and organize hundreds of thousands of volunteers to help Democratic candidates, advocacy groups, and non-profit organizations nationwide empower their people.

"Howard Dean changed politics," said Clay Johnson, Blue State Digital co-founder and lead grassroots software programmer for the Dean campaign. "He proved that the Internet can not only raise tremendous amounts of money, it can also empower and engage people. We are here to help candidates and organizations harness this power to win elections and create positive change."

By combining years of experience in technology with a deep political knowledge and passion, the people of Blue State Digital will provide clients with cutting-edge tools and techniques to tap the enormous fundraising, communications, and organizing potential of the internet. Blue State Digital will offer clients tools, services, and support that are right for them -- not a cookie-cutter solution.

For more information:
Blue State Digital, LLC
(202) 250-3420

Over at Napsterization, Mary Hodder notes that a number of writers who are seeking input from readers on their blogs for works in progress (this, by the way, is an approach that we are thus far too timid to try).

This vaguely open-source approach enables the writer to incorporate the feedback and suggestions of many minds in advance of publication.

She includes links to Dan Gillmor's draft introduction and first chapter from Making the News, J.D. Lasica's blog entry Looking for feedback on book chapters, and John Battelle's Searchblog, a book companion, and Jay Rosen's Weblogs: An Extremely Democratic Form of Journalism, a draft chapter from the upcoming O'Reilly Extreme Democracy collection, which is itself adapted from the most popular post from his PressThink weblog so far, "ten things radical about the weblog form in journalism."

Originally uploaded by
mamamusings.

Posted by xian from

how do i post this to a different blog?

A year ago, Dan Gillmor—reporter and commentator at the San Jose Mercury News—posted a book proposal and outline (to be published by O'Reilly; includes an abstract of each chapter) for Making the News: What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer (Editor, Producer, Etc.). Yesterday Gillmor posted drafts of the introduction (2500 words) and first chapter (6600 words). He's requesting comment on the draft text:

My editors and I are most interested in your immediate feedback on:

• What's missing—that is, a topic or perfect anecdote that absolutely has to be included.
• More important, what's wrong. If there's a factual error I want to fix it before the book is published.

In both cases I'll ask that you send me e-mail at j3@gillmor.com, and please include your phone number in case I need to contact you. Otherwise, feel free to comment on and discuss (or ignore) what you've read in the comment-posting area below.

Chapter 1, "From Tom Paine to Talk Radio and Beyond," starts out mentioning Roosevelt's and Kennedy's deaths and the Al Qaeda hijack attacks, then says the news is being changed by the Internet. He backsteps for the deeper analysis by taking us through Paine's broadsheets, 19th-century muckraking, the introduction of radio, newspapers, I.F. Stone, Berners-Lee, McLuhan, talk radio, Cluetrain, Winer/Manila, and much more. Random highlights:

• The intro makes the "tipping point" out to be March 26, 2002, when Gillmor and Doc Searls were blogging a speech by the CEO of Qwest. ("Why am I'm telling this story? Because journalism hit a pivot point that March morning.") But Chapter 1 makes "9/11" the tipping point: "The first draft of history was being written, in part, by the former audience."
• Like xian, Gillmor has a personal anecdote about his first wired experience, on CompuServe in 1985. But: "Of course, I didn't fully get it. I spent the 1986-87 academic year on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, which in those days was at the heart of the Internet -- then still a university, government and research network of networks -- without managing to notice the Internet."
• Good subheadings: "Writing the Web, Raising a Barn"; "Open Sourcing the News"; "Terror Turns Journalism's Corner"

I think he leans too heavily on "9/11"; one commentor really ripped him on this, and in fact the comments are more critical than I expected them to be. The best line in the comments is also the most revealing: "It's a nicely written piece but that's it biggest failing."

So: another related title, this one about the intersection of blogging and journalism. No sign of it on Amazon, B&N, or O'Reilly's site yet. BTW, he has a chapter on "what happens when the audience is part of the process"—how his weblog affects the book.

Originally uploaded by
caterina
on 31 Dec 69, 4.00pm PST

Posted by xian from

Well, I'm posting this partly just to test the flickr-to-weblog interface but also because there's something indescribably delicious about the idea of bread-in-a-can.

Nothing surprising—Kerry and Edwards have profiles on Friendster that look a little calculated, shock horror drama:

Being able to attract such high-profile visitors -- even though it's possible some staffer created the profiles instead of the candidates themselves -- is another positive sign for Friendster, which last fall received $13 million in seed money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The site's appeal only goes so far, however. President George W. Bush declined an invitation to join. A campaign spokeswoman says Friendster doesn't fit in with his Internet strategy. Apparently, Bush is willing to cede the young, hipster demographic.

apophenia: echo-chambers and homophily

Microsoft gadget lets you spy on your own life.

SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts by Microsoft Corp., is designed to be worn around the neck. The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights and sudden movements and can take up to 2,000 images in a 12-hour day without the wearer doing a thing.

One day, SenseCam might even respond to other stimuli such as heart rate or skin temperature -- to track medical problems as easily as to record a Hawaiian vacation. And it could eventually link with other technology, such as face recognition to remind wearers when they've seen someone before.

Since Pete has done a good job of tracking back the second superpower meme, I figured we should also continue tracking it forward, as in Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower.

In it, the author looks at how blogging and other forms of Internet community building (obviously working from Moore's re-definition of the 2nd SP) are spreading to the least wired parts of the planet, formerly referred to as the third world.

A few choice quotes (almost at random - the whole essay is worth reading despite the funny characters sprinkled throughout):

Marketers refer to the challenge of selling products popular within a technical elite to the mainstream as "crossing the chasm", phrase coined by Geoffrey Moore in a book of the same name. While marketers have a vested financial interest in ensuring that the mainstream uses products the technorati embrace, it's unclear whether webloggers have a similar incentive to open their community to the wider world. Indeed, the willingness of the first generation of tool builders and users to open their community may be the key determinant in deciding whether these transformations affect only the technical elite or the whole world.

and

If the social software community cares about ensuring global use of their tools and global participation in discussions, we need to take a close look at the usability of our tools by people in other nations. For example, many popular blog hosting services are modestly priced, but require payment online via credit card. This creates an insurmountable barrier for the majority of people in developing nations, who while they may have the means to pay a $5 per month hosting fee (comparable to the costs associated with a few hours access to a cybercafe), but lack the method to make the payment, as credit cards are largely unavailable throughout Africa and much of Central and South Asia. Designers of social software who hope to have a global audience for their products need to start designing those products in conjunction with that global audience.

On Monday my throat felt scratchy and I had a sinus drip. By Tuesday it was a full-blown cold. It's almost as if my body scheduled its next breakdown for the precise end of the California primary season. I voted for my candidate but, as he had already withdrawn from the race, he of course lost. Wednesday I had another chapter due so even though my cold kept getting worse, I sucked it up and finished it. Then Thursday I lay around sleeping most of the day. Often I get sick when I'm exhausted and sometimes I think it's my body's way of telling me to take a rest. Mission accomplished. Today my voice is hoarse and I've got a dry cough. I think I'll have shaken this thing by the weekend. Not too bad as colds go. Definitely not a flu or a bronchial infection. Thank goodness for small favors.

Between writing my book and being sick, that hasn't left much time for browsing the web lately, let alone blogging. I have continued to keep track of my major activities each day. After I posted my Last Week entry last week, a few people commented to me (mostly in email) that I seem very "busy and productive." I guess that's true. I'm always busy although I don't always keep good track of what I'm doing. I'm not always productive. Sometimes my busy-ness (business?) is taken up by activities and behaviors that don't produce anything. Writing this book has focused me, though, and sharpened my priorities. Also, I think if anyone logs all their activities and sums them up at the end of a week, they would seem productive. Here's another:

• Monday I made sure one of my client's publishers had all the information she needed to do the crucial word-density calculation required to do the castoff, make a page estimate, and come up with a working size for the book's typeface. I also started reviewing the pre-developmental edit of Chapter 3 of my book.
• Tuesday I was mostly sick but I did help resolve a problem with the same publisher and client involving getting a file transfered via FTP (being an agent means being a jack-of-all-trades sometimes: IT support, psychotherapist, diplomat, bad cop, general troubleshooting).
• Wednesday I completed Chapter 8 of my book and submitted it (although actually, being sick, I went to sleep early, got up again at 5:30 am the next morning and wrapped the chapter up and submitted it around 7:30). I have only one chapter, three appendices, and some frontmatter left to write, although I still have about 25 interviews to do and a lot of rewriting before this thing is in the can. Around the same time, B made our reservations for JazzFest. We'll be going for the first weekend again this year. We both really need - and have earned - the break. In fact, April is going to be a travel month for me, with a pop culture conference in San Antonio April 7 to 10, then back to the Bay Area for the Waterside conference in Berkeley April 15th-ish, and then to New Orleans for Fest around April 21 or 22 (I forget).
• Thursday I was reminded that I was running up against the extended deadline to interview some local high school students for the Princeton alumni schools committee. This had been nagging at the back of my mind and I was worried about blowing it, despite the fact that the alumni interviews don't carry much weight with the admissions committee. I managed to set up interviews with two of my three students. The third had an unlisted number. I got her home number from her high school's guidance counselor (thank you, Internet), and left her a message. Most of the day, though, I slept, coping with my cold.
• Friday (today), I completed my review of Chapter 3 and sent it back to my editor and to my peer reviewer. I also completed the two student interviews and filled out their forms. I was never able to get a call back from the third student. Oh well. I'm tired. I hope there's a new Joan of Arcadia on tonight.

Things I wanted to do this week but never got to: grocery shopping (I'll do it tomorrow), interviewing Craig Newmark, Seth Godin, and Christopher Filkins for my book (next week), reviewing the pre-development comments on Chapter 4 (this weekend), updating the massive content database I'm compiling for my book's participants (never?), resubmitting Chapter 4 (probably Monday), checking in with the author's of O'Reilly's Extreme Democracy book to see if any of them are available to join a panel on politics and technology at the Waterside conference (as soon as I get around to it), paying my bills (this weekend).

Next week I've also got to connect with various contacts made through the Dean campaign, namely the local grassroots group which is meeting Monday night, the national technology task force, and the local Kerry campaign people.

Dave Pollard's Blogging as Conversation, No Echo Here starts a decision flowchart of which method to communicate with:

1. Can you afford the time and cost of face-to-face?
2. Are you communicating criticism or bad news? ...

but the post's text continues into many supporting examples, related aspects, and musings. What is it that speaker/writers trying to do? Why do reader/listeners read or listen? A digital-age starter piece covering ground that many others have wrestled with—I studied it as Robert Longacre's "discourse grammar." Pollard brings in group conversation and links to Jay Rosen's Master Narratives article, which I've read three times already as I try to wrap my mind around its implications. (Again, link via the Scobleizer.)

One of two products from Howell Development is Syndication Studio 2004, "the world’s first desktop application allowing creation of feeds in all flavors of RSS, Atom and OPML, supporting everything from RSS 0.9 to Atom 0.3."

Putting Control Back Where it Belongs.

Syndication "feeds" are the new means to convey content from source to user efficiently, effectively, and under the exclusive direction of the user alone. Private individual users, on-line publishers, and large multi-national technology corporations alike are desperately searching for an easy, cost-effective solution to the SPAM crisis. Well, look no further. Syndication is the only way out there to completely extinguish unsolicited advertising. Users are downloading feed readers; are you publishing feeds for them to read?

(Link via the Scobleizer.)

The Blogging of the President reports:

On March 7th, Doc Searls, blogger and guru of the Linux Journal is scheduled to be on CBS' Sunday Morning. The subject? The net and the election. BOP's Ellen Dana Nagler was there, at the event where Doc was interviewed.

Which leads back to the original question: what has changed? Has it, a some insiders say, been stopped by the fall of Dean? Or is it, as people such as Dave Winer and others have said - about something deeper than a candidate?

ElizabethSpiers.com: Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated:

Dear people who know me personally, have my cell phone number and my email address (some of whom have even referred to themselves as my friends) yet apparently still can't be bothered to contact me for verification because it would ruin the scoop on your blogs**:

New York Metro experienced technical difficulties this weekend and the URL for The Kicker is not resolving properly (nor are several of the other pages.)

The Kicker has not been shut down.

That's not to say that The Kicker won't be shut down. It may; it may not. Today was Adam Moss's first day and we haven't talked about it yet.

** I'll let Felix and Gothamist off the hook a bit here, because they were re-reporting, but Choire and Nick have no excuse...

A counterexample to some of the utopianism about blog power and virtual community.

My interview with Phil Wolff last week was instructive, in that he made a point of dwelling on the downsides of collective action as much as the upsides.

I'm the same way. I love it when you can talk about all music as popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, or unpopular and bad. I love magic squares. Is it because they're very small databases?

Monday I invited some potential speakers for the upcoming Waterside conference this April, had lunch with Phil Wolff and interviewed him for my book, and then deal with a flat tire on Eve. I wasn't carrying my insurance company's roadside help card, so I called B (on Phil's cell phone) and asked her to call AAA and meet me there on Lake Park. The guy from Ken Betts' tow service asked me why I'm still wearing my Dean button. "That guy lost when he lost on TV, man," he tells me.

On Tuesday I reviewed the general notes memo from my developmental editor about how to structure the chapters in my book. I also finally trimmed and posted my photos from the blogger / new media dinner in San Francisco a week before, including as many observations as I could recall. I also worked on Chapter 7

Wednesday I worked all day finishing the first draft of Chapter 7, uploading it via FTP before going to be around midnight.

Thursday morning I woke up early to make sure that the file had uploaded, then went back to sleep. Around 10:30 or 11 am I saw email from my editor saying that the file I had uploaded contained only a bunch of notes and quotations. I had uploaded the wrong working copy of the file. I uploaded the correct file and then went back to sleep. I spent the rest of the day dozing on the couch and later in bed, waking up every 15 or 20 minutes when the phone rang (it was usually Jerry Brown telling me to vote for Henry Chang or Barbara Lee telling me to vote for Measure A, and so on). Bottom line: I was burnt out and needed a day off. It was great.

Friday I put on my agent hat and made a bunch of calls to publishers, authors, and my agency's mothership, to sort out some backlog of billings for one of my writers and to tdiscuss the production process for the second edition of the Phish Companion being published by Backbeat Books. I also finally remembered to tell the Mockingbird Foundation (the nonprofit that "writes" the Phish book collectively) about a show on the Princeton campus in 1985 in which Trey Anastasio and - I think - Jon (?) Fishman regaled a quad full of partying preppies with literally several hours of Grateful Dead songs, played and sung in two-part harmony arrangements with custom-made miniature guitars. I doubt anyone taped it and I'm sure memories are hazy but this seems like a key missing link between the east coast Dead Heads I grew up with and the whole Phish trip, so we're going to try to get the anecdote into the book in some form.

At the end of the day I called in for part of an activist-techie conference call, but had to ring off (and later read the transcript) so I could drive across town to Picante in Berkeley to pick up tamales and enchiladas and agua fresca for our dinner. For the last two weeks B has been working nearly around the clock, attending evening and weekend meetings, sometimes staying up till 1 or later preparing comments and reports, and generally wrestling with deadlines every bit as grueling as my own, so I wanted to make sure dinner was a no brainer that night.

Saturday I did the grocery shopping that I usually try to do during the week. The Bowl is insane on Saturdays, so it took a while. I helped out with the vacuuming later that afternoon, and then remembered that we were out of coffee. B made a wonderful bouillebaise (how the hell do you spell that?) with snapper, mussels, and clams, but my stomach was a little upset, so I had a small bowl of it before going off tobed early.

Sunday I finally got around to cleaning the bathroom, reviewing the developmental editorial comments on Chapter 3, and revising and returning a pitch letter that my publisher's genius intern drafted to query some of the more famous-y people I'm still trying to nail down interviews with for my book. Then I watched most of the academy awards and finally met Dan and Bill at the L'amyx tea bar on Piedmont Avenue for our weekly writing session.

Here are some of the things I meant to do during the week and never got around to: pay bills, interview Craig Newmark, resubmit Chapter 3, review Chapter 4 comments, catch up on organizing interviews, solicit someone to write the book's foreword, set up three Princeton alumni interviews, follow up with Elsevier for an embedded systems book proposal, interview other contributors, resubmit Chapter 4.