April 2004 Archives

Second of today's Cal panels: Disrupting the News Industry Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism. Panelists:

• Neil Chase, managing editor of CBS MarketWatch
• Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance LLC media consulting firm
• Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book We the Media
• Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media at the Spokane Spokesman-Review
• Bob Magnuson, lecturer at the school and former CEO of InfoWorld (moderator)

I attended two panel discussions this morning at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. This is the first-ever meeting of the fellows of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism; today and tomorrow they will continue as a conference on China's digital future.

First, this morning, Revisiting Virtual Communities: The Internet's Impact on Society and Politics. Panelists:

• Susan Mernit, partner in 5ive consultancy and author of Navigating the Info Jungle blog
• Markos Moulitsa Zuniga, author of the Daily Kos blog
• Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
• Mark Pincus, CEO and co-founder of Tribe Networks
• Paul Grabowicz, new media program director at the school (moderator)

Cecil put his moneymaker where his If Jesus were an a capella song about himself, I'd like to think this is the song he'd be is.

Craigslist is ready for its closeup.... (Fortune.com)

I'm blogging this from Living With The Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, an exciting star-studded, deep-thinky conversation introduced by Michael Pollan, moderated by Christina Desser, co-editor of the Living with the Genie title that inspired the panel (idea for promoting this book in the fall or next spring?), and incorporating Denise Caruso, Mark Schapiro, and Ray Kurzweil (via 2D telepresence).

Met Justin Hall after reading his journalings since the mid '90s.

Shacker is webcasting.

Spoke briefly with J.D. Lasica (been working on his Dark Net book) and Scott Rosenberg (working on his philosophy of programming/software book?), and am keeping an eye out for Mary Hodder.

Who's for dinner afterward?

Howard Rheingold, admits to an enlightenment-era bias

Richard Schapiro is pointing out that the laws governing the technology of shipping were established in the 18th century.

I know this is random.

I am posting pictures via TypePad. They should soon show up at Mr. Spontaneous.

Richard Rhodes couldn't make it for personal reasons.

What I really want to know is this: Is this Churchbells Softly Chime remix (about 7 megs as MP3 - it was closer to 50 megs as an AIF) an improvement over the previous take or not?

Lawrence Lessig is well known for making the argument that looser copyright laws allow for a huge amount of derived creativity, and that this, in turn, earns more money and fame for the original works. He has once again put his money where his mouth is by making his latest book available for free. He's hardly the first (or even most successful) author to give his book away for free electronically, but today's New York Times: Practicing the Liberty He Preaches reports (links added):

Lawrence Lessig wants to make intellectual property more widely available. So he has decided to offer some of his own at no charge.

His new book, "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity," is available online, free. But a bound version from Penguin Press costs $24.95 (list).

Since the book's publication on March 25, 21 editions of the free digital version have been created. Among them are two volunteer efforts: a collective project in streaming audio (akma.disseminary.org/archives/001253.html) and another in HTML (www.easylum.net/book/view/12), with handy links that explain details in the text like who Ub Iwerks was (a master animation artist for Walt Disney). ...

Mr. Lessig said he was gratified that remixes of his book had popped up (free-culture.org/remixes), although it took some getting used to. "I confess when it first happened, I had to take a deep breath and reconvince myself of the principles here," he said.

The book is available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded in PDF format from the book's site, FreeCulture.org, or from LegalTorrents.com. (The NYT article says it can also be downloaded from Amazon.com, but I can't see how.) (Hat tip to Rachel Boyce.)

Sébastien Paquet has a wiki-enabled page to list sites and blogs and such doing research on social software. He also has "a wiki page to help find a promising strategy for enabling a self-organizing directory of research weblogs."

Ross Mayfield put up an "open post" based on an oversimplification: a two-by-two categorization of social software. (The JPEG matrix is here, the post is here ... and of course, this being Mayfield, the wiki that springs from the starter post is here.) Social software tools, sez the chart, can be implicit or explicit (Technorati vs. Friendster), and designer determined vs. user controlled (portals vs. blogs).

Mayfield reports that "Lee LeFever won the perfect pitch competition by highlighting the unique property of weblogs to capture context." The purpose was to explain the value of enterprise blogging, and LeFever's excellent three grafs are posted in their entirety.

Liz Lawley points to notes by Heather James about online etiquette in wikis. (Academic links and provence given by Lawley are abbreviated here.) James writes, "Wikis don't offer technical solutions to social problems; rather, wiki technology encourages or even forces the contributers to define and manage their rules of etiquette and behaviour. Through this process of consensus building, a culture is created that allows for a more complex set of interactions which is neccessary for people to manage and construct mutual understanding."

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism invite all to a series of panel discussions April 29-30 at UC Berkeley on how technology and the Internet are changing American society and the human experience:

Living With The Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery
Thursday, April 29, 7 pm (Pimentel Hall)
Howard Rheingold, Denise Caruso, Ray Kurzweil (by remote), Richard Rhodes, Mark Schapiro, and Christina Desser

Revisiting Virtual Communities: The Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics
Friday, April 30, 9 am (North Gate Library, corner of Hearst & Euclid)
Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, and Mark Pincus

Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism
Friday, April 30, 10:30 am (North Gate Library)
Dan Gillmor, Vin Crosbie, Neil Chase, Ken Sands, and Bob Magnuson

The panels are free and open to the public and no RSVP is necessary. For details, go to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism site.

These panels are followed Friday afternoon by a two-day conference on the Internet's impact on China and Asia. That conference also is free and open to the public.

Still behind on taking notes, but here are my photos from Saturday.

I'll post my notes later, but for now here's a photo album.

Much to blog about from the last few weeks (pop culture conference in Texas, publishing / technology conference in Berkeley, and now here I am posting from New Orleans), but too much big fun to want to sit in front of a computer posting to the blog, so ideally it will all come pouring out in a week or so.

Rest assured, I am jotting down what I'm eating and hearing at Jazz Fest and I'm taking photos, and the moment the fun stops I will post my reportage.

Till then, laissez les bon temps roulez, or something like that.

Capitol Advantage provides services and tools to coordinate mass lobbying:

Building action-oriented communities is no small task. Capitol Advantage has helped organizations educate and inspire their supporters since 1986.

Capitol Advantage provides the tools and technology to engage and enlist your supporters in the campaigns that are important to your organization.

No other company has delivered more messages to Congress. When your organization needs to step up and influence legislation or public opinion, we're the only ally you'll ever need.

They promote an "email relationship manager" called Capwiz™ ERM for communicating to large numbers of people. Their site has, among others, sections for "Web-based grassroots solutions," "election guides," "our content on your site," and "personal engagement tools;" that last category points to another C.A. site:

On Congress.org, visitors can take advantage of the full suite of tools, services and content that Capitol Advantage has spent nearly two decades developing and mastering. Use our ZIP code search engine to sort through pages of biographical information on national and local elected officials or candidates for office. Similar functionality is available for locating local media, bills and legislation, rules and regulations open for public comment, and much more.

Molly Holzschlag has written about web design, markup, and interactive media for many years. Now she writes (Integrated Web Design: Social Networking - The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age) about how the living web (without using that term) is connecting people in real ways:

The interaction between community, computers, and society is now being referred to as "social networking," and it's making a lot of heads turn. But what is social networking, really, and what does it mean to web technologists? In this compelling article by Molly Holzschlag, you'll learn what social networking is, which languages are emerging to support it, and what it might mean for the next generation of web design and development.

She describes blogs and YASNSs, puts she also more weight on geographical mapping than most commentators on these topics.

Even the fugitive has to do it. I print out chapters six and five, prepare to mark them up in pen while wolfing down a bagel and whtefish sandwhich after buying some lox for the flight on southwest tomorrow. (bagels out, po'boys back, that's our motto).

On return (from lunch, not n'awlins), I will key in updates and submit at least one of the he two chapters and then finish the other before getting on my plane tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I also need good pens, triple-A batteries, and cash. Plus I need to call Veteran's Cab for a ride to the airport tomorrow morning early.

UPDATE: Got everything, still need to call the cab. Chapter 6 nearly ready to upload, yippee.

Here's a vocal in search of some instrumental accompaniment in the obligatory MP3 as well as the (possibly more Cakewalk friendly?) AIFF format.

In an essay that starts out about Gmail, Tim O'Reilly pulls together the disparate phrases that are groping at where computing is headed: small pieces loosely joined, the world of ends, IOS, the Internet as OS, software above the level of a single device, and even "one ring to rule them all."

The Gmail question, to me, is being framed wrongly. "Gmail is a huge privacy threat" misses the point that Gmail is not so very different from any other digital service. To me, berating Google—and only, or even primarily, Google—for its terms of service, data mining, and potential for abuse makes it that much easier for MSN, Yahoo, and hundreds of other firms to hide in the bushes doing the same things. Those who strongly object to Gmail are apparently putting zero value on the fact that Google has been the least offensive, most responsible major online provider; O'Reilly says, and I agree, that there is some value in this. I don't value it enough to ever sign up for Gmail myself, but someone who's currently in the clutches of Hotmail should think objectively about whether Gmail's TOS are really worse.

But the more important part of O'Reilly's article is saying that the Internet will become the OS; that Internet companies will (even if you choose to believe they don't already) hold terrifying powers; and most importantly, that where we thought this "network is the computer" thing would lead toward the world of ends, toward distribution, toward decentralization, the trend is actually toward centralization. There will be multiple companies competing in this new space, yes—and multiple trial-and-error over which apps or services will work best in the new paradigm—but, as Rich Skrenta showed, each company, app, and service can accumulate much more power over people as they accumulate the CPU cycles. O'Reilly's words: "once storage and bandwidth become cheap enough, a more tightly coupled, centralized architecture is a real alternative, even on the internet."

I've been working so many angles trying to get onto the floor of the Democratic Convention when I'm forgetting that my book comes out September 1 and we should do a big thing at the Republican Convention in New York later that month!

I should go back to Princeton and look up the rich folks I used to know. Some of them probably are connected to the Republicans now. none of my ragtag lefty friends are going to be any help there. I don't think John Perry Barlow is even still a Republican.

I'd love to have my father audioblogging the Republican covention into my $15 Best Buy microphone (Labtec?) for Edgewise, for that matter.

First sentence of t his Howard Rheingold article (from October 2003) says it all: "It has taken 10 years of talk about “new media” for a critical mass to understand that every computer desktop, and now every pocket, is a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, and organizing tool - and to learn how to use that infrastructure to affect change." Convergence is small-er-ing journalism, reviving the town square, and producing political miniparties.

And yet, as Rheingold wrote even earlier, the critical mass and new media aren't cure-alls. "There is no market for solving social problems", and "Throwing technology at problems can be helpful, but the fundamental problems are political and economic and rooted in human nature. ... A tool is not the task".

Accidentally wiped some vocals, but the mix is getting better (I think).

Another Many-to-Many post by Ross Mayfield: He notes Jason Kottke's post titled "I think we should probably stop calling [RSS/Atom] syndication". Feeding, threading, and aggregation are all attractive features of RSS, but they're not necessarily syndicating. However, says Mayfield, "I'm not brave enough to venture a new term for Syndication, but unless one is found, there is a lot of explaining to do."

Ross Mayfield has posted to a wiki the chapter he's contributing to O'Reilly's Extreme Democracy. (Haven't had a chance to read the chapter or follow the links yet, but Mayfield's pages look worth exploring in depth.) As he puts it in a post at Many-to-Many, "Along the way, collected some links that may be of interest about wikified books, ranging from Wikipedia's Wikibooks Portal to the distributed proofreading project."

Mary Hodder provides another reminder that it's the people, and their behaviors, that matter, not the tools they use. She's talking about blogs and journalism, but one of her analogies is:

BTW, in case you're wondering, this is a blog. Yes, folks, Napsterization. Just a blog. In case you were reading this and didn't know. But frankly it could just as well be done with some other tool. The point is, now our tools (and practices) are about interchangeable parts and air-compressor nail-guns instead of handmade hammers and nails.

Which made me wonder whether, in most human activity, tool change 'just happens'; only in a minority of cases does anyone raise a fuss at the time. Making an exception for occasions when a tool replaces a human (steam engines for laborers), it seems that most progress in tool choice is only commented on well after the fact.

I've always loved woodworking, though until my parents moved into a new house I hadn't actually done much of it. But I've built things since then. And a year or two ago, I started watching some "reality" home-improvement shows, such as Trading Spaces. The team rolls up with their macho trailer, sets up "Carpentry World" in the driveway, hauling out lumber and sawhorses and table saws and safety goggles. There are tools everywhere, and toolbelts; but there are no hammers on the show. The pros don't even think about this. Yes, every couple of weeks we get a laugh at the expense of some homeowner who has never seen a pneumatic tool before. But the people who really do the work don't miss hammers. They don't keep them around for special occasions or for "small" jobs. The important thing is to get the nail driven as accurately as possible with as little effort as needed—hence the nail gun.

The important thing is to get the information disseminated quickly—hence the web page and the e-mail. The important thing is disintermediating the conversation— hence the blog, the wiki, the IRC or texting channel.

A couple of linked posts that have been delayed while I was ill...

Berkeley's danah boyd explains how personal feelings of vulnerability should be given priority when analyzing systems that lend themselves to data collection, privacy invasions, and security failures. Where YASNSs, browser-trackers, search-trackers, ISPs, and the like all meet creates "ickiness"; we're not comfortable with Google + A9 + Dodgeball + Friendster building the dossier on us any more than we were the gov't doing so, but the commercial version is more extensive, more invasive, and yet harder to avoid because it is so insidious, has so many apparently "good" uses. People designing systems and tools must go beyond password protection: boyd says we must "Encourage them to minimize vulnerability in their design, not simply protect privacy."

When in doubt, hide time and rhythm errors with special effects!

Wow. I'm started to get really excited about this book. I'd better finish it! So many people still to talk to, no pun intended.

This cover impressed my father, who spent most of his career in the New York printing game and has seen several waves of graphic design styles come and go.

This is just a comp, by the way, with stock art. So it's not final, but it's close and I think the fonts are set.

My last few Macs have had their hard drives named after Irish or Celtic literary takes on mythology. The last one was Tir-na n'Og and the current one is At Swim-to-Birds. Phil Gyford republishes Donald Barthelme's reading list and while DB claims it is in no particular order, of course it is in an order and the first book listed is my 'puter's namesake by Flann O'Brien (and the inspiration, at least in part, for No Bird but an Invisible Thing):

Phil Gyford: Writing: Donald Barthelme's reading list

Lately, my more popular (Googlejuicewise) weblogs have been under assault from spammish inane comments from Stepford social communities.

I guess Bayesian cuts both ways.

Note to self: Make upcoming.org feed for Power of Many -esque events (such as the Democratic National Convention, the GiftHub conference mentioned in my previous entry, Waterside, and so on.

Fire on the Mountain, some basic tracks. How do I speed up my slow pickin' in GarageBand?

Gift Hub: Conference Invitation/Agenda

(Linklogging till deadlines are met...)

Clay Shirky is interviewed in the Gothamist, and he has (as usual) the definitive insight into what this whole nanopublishing "thing" is about:

[Q] Blogs: beloved little observations grouped sequentially. I'm almost afraid to ask the question but what's your brief take on where all this blogging is headed?

[A] It's headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what's important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.

Already blogs are used for groups of teenagers to bitch about their lives, as on many LiveJournal sites; to track gossip, politics, and tech trends, as with Gawker, Wonkette, and Gizmodo; as an adjunct to political campaigns; and as a kind of giant distributed OpEd page. Too much for one little word.

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

The interviewer assumes that Shirky has "seen the future", which seems a safe bet. In response, Shirky does mention the FCC and the Web, but notice that mobile phones come up twice. Shirky is, as usual, brilliant on almost everything; his intuition on fashion is impeccable, even if his execution of it isn't. And because it's New York, the comments even include a second opinion on Shirky.

Is the term "orkward" going to catch on? No sign of it doing so yet... (That's not fair to the link blog entry, which is really very interesting and in which the coinage is a tiny aside.)

David Weinberger (JOHO the Blog: The truth about why I hate Friendster) has "fake but worthy reasons" and "real but unworthy reasons" why he doesn't like "artificial social networks (ASNs)":

I am a member of Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke, Flickr, Orkut, and DeanLink. Friendster aims at dating, LinkedIn at business contacts, Spoke at sales team efficiency, Flickr at photo sharing, Orkut at who knows, and DeanLink at enabling Dean supporters to organize local events. I am equally active in all six, even though one of them is defunct, which tells you exactly how active I am.

The only one I liked was DeanLink, and that was because I wanted Dean to be elected president. All of them suffer from the following problems, to one degree or another. ...

Beyond his look at why ASNs are no good, he also mentions FOAF and LOAF, and he finds them good:

LOAF is a new proposal for making available information about social networks. It encrypts your address book and makes it accessible to others. The most immediate application is in fighting spam: If I receive a message from someone not in my address book, LOAF (which stands for nothing, although List of All Friends seems to be catching on) can see if it's coming from a friend of a friend. ...

FOAF and LOAF add value to the Net, enriching it with voluntarily disclosed information about who we are and who we know. In this they are unlike Artificial Social Networks that capture the conversations between us but make them inaccessible to other applications. ...

Dodgeball.com is not related to kickball. It's a site that allows you to alert your acquaintances to your whereabouts by cell-phone text message. A feature in Time Out New York magazine calls it a "Friendster/Citysearch hybrid". It has other geography-related features: get the address of a venue, or find, for example, all Ms. Pac Man machines within a 10-block radius of a given landmark, again on your cell. It's available in NYC, Boston, L.A., Philadelphia, and S.F. (Via apophenia.)

My room at the CheaperNearby hotel naturally offers no high-speed access and sadly I can't get my modem to work with it either. Fortunately, Roadrunner offers pay-for-use wireless service in the RiverCenter mall attached to the Marriott, so I can briefly check mail and get a message out to the wider world before heading to the next panel discussion at this conference (the joint American Culture Association, Popular Culture Association, and Southwest/Texas ACA/PCA conference in San Antonio).

Also, I have a partially completed post from the airplane written in ecto, but I can't get back into ecto without a serial number, although I did make a contribution when it was called kung-log so I'm not sure if I am really required to pay up. In the meantime, that post is stranded and won't show up till I sort that out.

At least now I can submit the chapter I've been working on later today just by coming back here to the mall.

I noticed there are some interesting discussions related to weblogs going on here. Most of them conflict with the Grateful Dead program, but if possible I will try to drop in and meet some of the academics studying or working with blogs. Who knows, maybe some of them read RFB.

Before my batteries run out, I think I’ll get caught up on “what I’ve been doing all week,” especially since I’m only getting busier. I’m currently on a plane headed for San Antonio with a stopover in Vegas. I’m going to a joint regional and national conference of the American Culture Association / Popular Culture Association for a Grateful Dead caucus. (I’ll post more about my presentation soon at Uncle John’s Blog.

Last Thursday I did nothing special for April fools. I did a little work on smoothing relationships between the East Bay DFA and Kerry campaigns, I got more coffee, I did the grocery shopping and I made dinner (baked potatoes; seared tuna; parboiled, marinated, and grilled asparagus; salad that we didn’t eat - too full; and peach sorbet).

Friday I tried airing out my bedroom, which was getting pretty funky, went to see my therapist, and did an updated version of the wireframe (version 3) for CitizensVote. I made dinner with the leftover seared tuna and aspargus and we ate the salad (oak leaf, radicchio, frissé, half a pear, half an avodcado, stilton cheese, baby tomatoes and sliced cucumbers marinated in balsamic vinaigrette overnight) plus bread and chocolate ice cream for dessert. I also paid the rent and took my shirts in to the cleaner. (They’re ready today but I’m out of town so I won’t be able to pick them up till next Tuesday.)

Saturday I upgraded my titanium G4 powerbook to the Panther (OS X 10.3) version of teh operating system, got an external La Cie hard drive with 120 gigs, bought iLife to get GarageBand, researched upgrading to Airport Extreme!, researched upgrading B’s ibook, made lunch for B (salad w/leftover seared tuna), vacuumed the floors in the house, transferred all my iTunes to the external drive, freeing up 5 gigs on my overcrowded laptop, visited with B’s sister in town for a class, and made pizza for dinner (eggplant, red pepper, garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, oilves, and pecorino romano on corn meal crusts).

Sunday I forgot it was time to spring forward, made waffles for breakfast and spent all afternoon at the inaugural Party for America in Berkeley. That evening I wrote and discussed creative projects for a few hours with Cecil Vortex at L’Amyx, our tea haunt.

Monday I emailed my old friend PJ who now has a kewl job at Google to welcome him back to the Bay Area and plan lunch (plus talk about what my next job or gig should be), realized that I did a review of the developmental edit of Chapter 6 the day I got it back from my editor, Pete, so as it was only due today, I can ignore it in my dayminder. Around noon, my new $15 microphone from Best Buy came, enabling me to start producing even more frightful music. That evening I dropped by a friend’s house to pick up a pre-release copy of the movie Festival Express t show to the scholarly deadheads and pop culture enthusiasts in San Antone. Also, I finally finished my review of the peer-review comments to Chapter 3 (which was due a week ago!).

Tuesday I took Felicia Borrego from Save the Bay out to lunch to interview her for my book and talk about her experience helping to organize the Million Mom March. I went to the Thin Man Strings in Alameda to get my ukulele tuned (I couldn’t get it right on my own - turns out I should probably get better strings, then think about upgrading the pegs, then think about getting a non-cheapo instrument, once I have a chop or two to worry about).

…here I had to shut down my ‘puter and so I’ll finish this entry next chance I get.

Gift Hub is a site to facilitate giving with a grassroots civic purpose ("responsive philanthropy"?). "As a volunteer and friend of philanthropy I try to connect idealistic donors with resources that may be helpful to them." ... "Ideally, the site will help good people find each other to do good things not only for themselves but for the causes we support." (Link via Loose Democracy.) From the Gift Hub FAQ:

Q: What is your purpose?

A: To create an open space where advisors, givers, and activists for grassroots organizations can meet to discuss ways and means, as well as ends in view.

Q: Is this space open to all grassroots organizations, whatever their politics?

A: Yes, but think of it this way. We are all fans, say, of baseball, but to be a fan is to have a passionate rooting interest in a particular team. Same with civil society. We support an open society and favor particular causes, and encourage you to do the same.

New York Times: One-Doorbell-One-Vote Tactic Re-emerges in Bush-Kerry Race says that local effort is back in vogue.

After decades of playing poor relation to television advertising, grass-roots politics has become a campaign star this year, as many political pros predicted it would be in the aftermath of the Bush-Gore face-off of 2000. And today it ranges from old-fashioned shoe leather to Web technology that can make a precinct captain of anyone with a computer.

It is a matter of adaptation, or survival of the most flexible. With the country still so sharply divided that political analysts figure as few as 10 percent of voters are undecided, each side is fighting to find and bring out every last one if its voters, and persuade the "persuadables," too. That means competing door to door, computer to computer, Web site to Web site. A ground war to complement the air war.

"It's funny; it's in vogue," said Steven Rosenthal, a former labor organizer now directing America Coming Together, one of those new tax-exempt groups in pursuit of a large Democratic turnout. "Some of us have labored in the trenches of grass-roots politics for a lifetime and fought with the party leadership for more resources," Mr. Rosenthal said. "Now it's the thing to do." ...

"We're going to find every Bush voter, we're going to call them, we're going to write them, we're going to knock on their doors, and when the day comes, we're going to physically take them to the polls," Ralph Reed, coordinator in the southeast for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said to those meeting in Macon a few weeks ago.

Be sure to read all the way through the second page, where phrases like "niche communications," "527," and even "palmtop" are defined in Times-reader-level language.

The insider outsider take (take 4 was the outsider insider take)

Now, with microphone and multitrack...

Clipped off the bass loops at the end and started the vocal a little more into the track.

In 1967, Stanley Milgram developed the "the small-world method" or "small-world experiment", which became popularly known as the "six degrees of separation" hypothesis—"the idea that every person in the United States is connected by a chain of six people at most", according to a 2002 Wired article about efforts to prove Milgram's claim. Like so many other aspects of human existence, the online world has adapted and adopted the concept ("hijacked", perhaps?); many people are trying to prove the six degrees limit through e-mail. But in fact Milgram's original experiment (which was also technology-limited: participants could only hand-deliver a paper message) was too small to draw conclusions from, and even if it were conclusive it demonstrates that the people involved were not as connected as Milgram imagined.

Judith Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks found that:

• Milgram recruited "particularly sociable" people for his study using newspaper ads, not random people.
• Only about 30% of the letters from Milgram's small-world studies ever arrived, sometimes taking nine steps or more.
• An unpublished study in the archive sent to Milgram for review suggested that low-income people's messages didn't get through.

The N.Y. Times quotes her as saying, "Instead of showing we live in a small world, it really shows the opposite. Ninety-eight percent of people can't reach anybody." As USA Today puts it, "Instead of the 'small world' Milgram proposed, the research suggests we live in a 'lumpy oatmeal' world, says Kleinfeld, populated by a few very well-connected wealthy individuals, with everyone else not so well connected."

• Wikipedia entry for "small-world phenomenon"
• Site of another researcher who studies Milgram's larger work in psychology
• More on why Kleinfeld says "six degrees" is an academic urban legend here and here

PC Magazine cited a lot of data on how people are getting campaign info via the Internet. They named the Pew Internet & American Life Project, but those data are in a report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Last Saturday at the Univ. of San Francisco, the Computer Science dept. tried to establish the biggest-ever ad hoc supercomputer... flash mob computing:

FlashMob I was very successful and a lot of fun. Over 700 computers came into the gym and we were able to hook up 669 to the network. Our best Linpack result was a peak rate of 180 Gflops using 256 computers, however a node failed 75% through the computation. Our best completed result was 77 Gflops using 150 computers. The biggest challenge was indentifying flakely computers and determining the best configuration for running the benchmark. Each of the 669 computers ran Linpack at some point in the day.

The event included loot and was, of course, followed by a LAN party.

Remix Nightmare (Land of Toil and Bluff bounce mix in D)

Basic Internet marketing teaches us that your email sig is the place where you should be mentioning and linking to whatever it is in your life or portfolio that you most primarily ought to be promoting at the moment. Modern mail programs make it easy to have multiple sigs so that you can revert to your favorite quotes or whatever with your friends, but make the default sig the promotional one. this would include "Kittens looking for new home" or "I'm looking for a new job" type messages.

I believe the subtitle is locked now, so I updated it here on the blog and in my sig. Also, the thepowerofmany.com domain is pointing here, which means I need to tell my blog software to report a new root (home) address, and that I can start announcing the site more widely, and that my sig can use the official URL instead of the underlying x-pollen/many location.

So here's what I'm using as of now (it's too long, though, probably won't wrap well in replies - we'll see):

Please to eagerly anticipate my new book, The POWER of MANY, in which I examine ...
	how the living web is transforming politics, business, and everyday life!
In bookstores September, preorderable soon, contact me for an August review copy, ...
	blogging now and until we figure everything out at http://thepowerofmany.com/

Mr T in AZ over on Kos is compiling a list of books for progressives here. Be interesting to see what they come up with and what portion of them are informed by the last year's events.

Don't know how much longer I can keep up this pace. It seems like my obligations keep mounting, but I am trying to keep up and stay balanced.

Monday I discovered the chords for Ripple are also just G C D Am (a subset of the chords used in Uncle John's Band). I sorted out the election results for the Alameda County Steering Committee for the local still-unnamed DFA chapter. Had to sort out some discrepancies with our election monitors, discovered a ballot that hadn't been cc'd properly. (By Tuesday all the votes added up the same. I still have to announce the results today.)

Monday I also nailed down a time for coffee with Craig Newmark for my book, tried to reschedule lunch with Scot Hacker, reviewed a draft of my book's title profile for my publisher, reorganized my sub to-do list of hard-to-land interviewees, did my laundry, and drove to Berkeley to make sure that the hotel for the Waterside conference is equipped to offer Boingo.net wireless service for our attendees.

I also ran through the Berkeley Bowl to get more steel-cut oats since I had spilled the last of our most recent batch all over the kitchen floor over the weekend.

Tuesday I had an 8 am sales meeting with my publisher's sales staff (on conference call) all over the world, to discuss this book and the extraordinary efforts everyone is making to promote and sell it. The meeting was very exciting and inspiring. These sales folks have accounted for nearly half my income over the last 12 years. I owe them a lot.

Since I was in Alameda for the meeting, I went to pick up my restrung and action-lowered acoustic guitar (a Martin knock-off called, I kid you not, a "Carlos") from The Thin Man String Co. I also got around to putting my notes from the book marketing meeting a week ago into VoodooPad format in anticipation of setting up a private wiki (whiteboard) for brainstorming.

Wednesday I ran late for my coffee with Craig, violating my new cardinal rule, "Thou shalt not waste anyone's time." I felt bad and was a little more motormouth-y than I often am (a real contrast to Craig's quiet, considered speaking style), but Craig kept me on track, asking me as my interviewees often have to do, "What is the question?" As a whole, the interview went well and Craig expressed willingness to answer followup questions via email or phone as needed, so that's cool.

I was unable to have lunch with my agent as planned, so we are now trying to reschedule for two weeks from now. I did sit in the sun in Cole Valley quietly strumming my uke outside the coffee shop for a while. That was fun.

At 4 pm I had a phone conference call for the NorCal-DFA (or whatever we're going to be called) group, to discuss structure and governance. We had a lawyer on the call who very helpfully explained the rules surrounding PACs, 527s, and 501c(4) entities.

Then at 7 I dragged B to a meeting for PFA and CitizensVote. It was her first time meeting most of the old Dean grassroots campaigner and perhaps a strange introduction to the political work I've been doing since August, but it did get her thinking that maybe we should host an environmental-issue themed Party for America at our house this summer.