May 2004 Archives

Hossein Derakhshan writes in his English weblog on Iran, technology and pop culture, Editor: Myself, that the judiciary in Iran has begun a "widespread crackdown on many medium or small sized ISPs" there.

Explaining why an upcoming blog ging festival in Iran is important, hoder writes:

[I]t has a big government organization backing it which spends a big amount of money on these kind of events.

There are workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions planed for it and on their website they have interviewed the IT Minister and some other officials. I'm sure it attracts a lot of people and attention.

But the thing is that while the judiciary has started a wide-spread crack-down on many medium or small sized ISPs, and given their religious and political concerns, I guess the whole IT industry in Iran is in real danger in short-term. (I really don't know why the recent crack-down has been ignored by the western media)

The hardliners are very sensitive to radical anti-religious and anti-government websites. Also the student protest anniversary is to come in July 9th and like every year, they are going to fully control or close every possible channel of incoming information to Iran again, say Satellite TVs, Internet access, VoIP phones, etc. They usually become paranoid at this time of the year.

So the blogging festival is important in that it helps correct the bad image that the computer-illiterate judiciary officials and other religious groups have about the Internet. (Internet in their eyes is nothing but sex + radical anti-religious activism + espionage)

Many, among IT professionals and journalists, are seriously worried about the fate of the Internet in Iran, especially since the hardliners are coming to power.

Looks like I hadn't linked to Marc Bernstein's popular essay yet. Marc credits the term to Dan Chan of Daypop, btw.

(via my blogging-related outboard backup brain, A List Apart: 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web @ Radio Free Blogistan)

I envy Shirky his steady voice of reason. He's got a good look at user empowerment and the potential for experimenting with greater self-rule in virtual environmnets, particularly games, in his latest writing, Nomic World: By the players, for the players.

Inspirational quote:

This would fulfill the libertarian fantasy of no coercion on behalf of the group, because no one would ever be asked to assent to rules they hadn't voted for, but it would also be approximately no fun

Generally, most followers of RSS and weblogs and syndication and the living web consider that the RSS tipping point has already been reached. There is mass buy-in to the approach.

Even Atom advocates generally view Atom as simply a flavor of the broader RSS concept (regardless of what the letters stand for, point to, denote, or connote).

It looks like Dave Winer has launched a site called Really Simple Syndication to put the broadest possible stamp on RSS as the name of this new idea, and most especially to start talking directly to users instead of getting bogged down in the insider cant of other developers and ubergeeks.

His post from over the weekend could be viewed as a kind of manifesto for RSS in general and RSS 2.0 in 2004 in particular:

RSS is...

1. A format.
2. Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.
3. Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.
4. Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.
5. Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.
6. Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters - that distribute news and opinion in RSS.
7. Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.
8. A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.

The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.

RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It's big. A lot bigger than a format.

This is the inaugural post for a new website devoted to the community of people who create and use RSS. It's just a beginning.

Let's have fun!

# Posted by Dave Winer on 5/29/04; 3:54:55 PM

So the race is on to brand this next big thing (we like to call it "the living web" of course) and Dave is putting his money on RSS. It's got a lot of memeshare, for sure, and the site is a classic "eat your own dogfood" response to a challenge. This is Dave at his best, if you ask me, and by clicking through here, I suppose you did.

We've got one now.

Not sure anyone else can edit anything yet. I'd love to build the book's community around the wiki and not Orkut or something....

Jon Garfunkel writes at Civilities.net about his ideas for Replacing Spam with Social Network Emailing:

When you sign up for an organization ... you should be able to specify your "captain". This is the person who will email you, call you, and be responsible for your involvement. You may pick the person who brought you into the organization in the first place. You may pick the actual precinct captain. Or you may look at the list of people volunteering to be captains, and pick the most attractive one. Up to you. That's democracy. That's how real estate companies work. Big brand, personal agent.

The giant leap forward is that one should only get contacted by their captain - and not get spammed by the head office. If may be "zero cost" to send out hundreds of thousands of emails, but it's also zero benefit if the emails. It's more effective to send the captains, who can send it on to their teams.

Daily Kos has launched a wiki called the dKosopedia where Kos community member can collaborate to build a free online political resource for progressives.

(Note: The Power of Many interview of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is coming up soon.)

Democratic GAIN - Grassroots Action Institute and Network

Speaking of manifestoes (manifestoi?), here's the crux of a brief manifesto about how participating in Usenet had affected my writing style which I posted to alt.usenet.manifestoes back in 1995:

After launching myself that first time off the edge of the branch into usenet, writing in an immediate way, closer to real speech in all its burlesque baroque improv potential, it has now become painful for me to craft these laborious tech-writing sentences I sell, all of which might as well say "press F7" ... even thinking of it drags the sentence down.

Nancy White of Full Circle Associates has started an Online Interaction & Community Blog.

(via Seb at Many-to-Many)

"ePodunk provides in-depth information about more than 25,000 communities around the country, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, Pottstown to Podunk. Our listings also include geocoded information about thousands of parks, museums, historic sites, colleges, schools and other places across America."

I suppose to bootstrap an open network around this book, this site / blog should both have the names from the sidebar in a FOAF file and in XFN link tags in the head, right?

Obviously, that can wait till I'm done (re-)writing....

Doc Searls of Cluetrain (and Linux Journal) fame, reports on the growth in importance of the living part of the web:

Publishing 2.0

Chad Dickerson at Infoworld says

Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal.

During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks.

Feels like a tipping point to me.

Me too. It isn't just RSS that's getting huge. It's that more people are getting their Web services without the complicating container we call a browser. What we're stating to see is another Web, alongside the static one we browse like the aisles in a store, or the stacks in a library, looking for finished goods to read or buy. This other Web isn't served up the same way as the one we've been browsing for the last eight years. We see it in a news aggregator, or a blog, or a message on a phone, or a search through an engine that only looks for fresh goods. Yes, you can see it in a browser too, but it's different in kind from the static stuff. Most importantly, it's live.

(Emphasis added.)

Doc likes the Technorati name for this phenomenon ("the world live web" and credits hearing it from the first time from his son):

I first heard the best name for this other Web a year ago, from my son Allen, who called it the World Live Web. I was talking to Phil Windley about it yesterday. Here's what Phil wrote:

Why is RSS important? Because it says "here's what's changed on the Web." When I started building Web sites in 1993, it was very clear then that people visit sites that get updated frequently. That's still true. Now, however, we have a new tool, RSS, that tells us what's changed. I no longer have to limit my reading to sites I know get updated frequently. Instead, I get pinged whenever sites I'm interested in change. That's a fundamental shift in what the Web is. In fact, its something brand new.

It's still framed in publishing terms. We still "author," "write" and "post" things called "journals" and "pages." But there's a big difference, and that's currency. The Wide Web is archival. the Live Web is current. That the Live Web also archival doesn't make it any less current, either.

(He then goes on to say that he thinks the RSS brand has meaning at that the Atom one doesn't really suggest anything and that Dave Winer's proposal to merge them is magnanimous, given that RSS has reached this tipping point. I tend to agree with those who consider the concepts already merged. People will think of Atom as a type of RSS, or just lump the ideas together because they are so similar, although Atom also incorporates an API analogous to the Metaweblog API also pioneered by UserLand.)

Yet another article that has to define "blog": Reuters says Microsoft's Gates touts blogging as business tool at Microsoft's annual CEO Summit:

The growth in the number of blogs, and those who read them, however, is attracting greater attention from businesses as a means to communicate more directly with their employees, partners and customers. That's due in part to the way that blogging has driven the adoption of yet another technology, called Real Simple Syndication (RSS), which allows blog readers to track freshly posted information without having to browse through a long list of home pages. Instead, many subscribe to RSS feeds on blogs so that they can read them on desktops as they come in. Gates described to his audience, which included Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and other top business executives, how blogs worked and suggested that they could be used as a tool for businesses to communicate with customers. ...

Microsoft, which has already amassed more than 700 employee bloggers talking up its products and software in development, is embracing blogs and RSS technology because they are yet another potential threat and opportunity, said Joe Wilcox, analyst at Jupiter Research. Since blogging, and many of the tools needed to post blogs, can work independently of Windows, they could be used to draw away from Windows-based software, similar to the threat posed by Netscape in the early days of the Internet, analysts said. "If I'm Microsoft and my fundamental goal is to sell more copies of Windows, then I might want to get involved in that," said Wilcox, who also has his own blog called "Microsoft Monitor". ...

Instead of RSS, however, Google is also promoting a rival syndication standard called Atom. Microsoft last year targeted Web search as key strategic area and has challenged Google's lead in the market. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly working on a search function for information stored in personal computers.

words and music by Robyn Hitchcock (email downstyle of capitalization mine all mine mine mine):

linda ryan in the sky
i seen her laughing
but i never seen her cry
she took her fireman
it was her half-empty flight
he brought his hose and
everything just turned out right
i'm just watching...

german leather
a german tongue
lapping pleasure
when's he's rubbery and young
he played the oboe
i thought he would
he does it better
than a guitarist like me could
i'm just watching, don't mind me...
i'm just watching on my own...

flesh cartoons
flesh cartoons

life is easy
life goes by
linda ryan
she's still up there in the sky
thank you linda
she doesn't age
despite the weather
she looks the same on every page
i'm just watching, don't mind me
i'm just watching on my own

i got no feelings
i got no friends
i've got insurance
and i despise those who pretend
life's a movie
life's a dream
i love you baby
things are always what they seem
i'm just watching, don't mind me...
i'm just watching on my own...

flesh cartoons
flesh cartoons

"loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh"
yeah, i said, "loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh"
whoah, i said loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh""
yeah, i said "loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh loony, oh"

I'm not a huge Phish head but I really like some of their material and I love their whole approach to making live improvised rock 'n' roll together.

They also share some contemporaneous New Jersey-in-the-mid-'80s experiences with me in their origin stories (the Rhombus, the miniature guitars, the strange period in 1985 where the Dead head scene in Princeton was awash with acid).

Also, I represent The Mockingbird Foundation as their literary agent for their Phish Companion series with Backbeat Books.

We are shipping the second edition to the printer any day now, so this news of the band's breakup caught us short. With touring bands there is always the temptation to hold off a little longer to add the next run of shows, especially if it's about to be the finale (supposedly), but the truth is it probably makes more sense to come out on time and immediately start work on a retrospective third edition to come out in 2006 or so and be "Phish complete."

It's not my decision, of course. I'm just a consigliere on this deal, but I like all the people involved (and the band), so I care how it works out.

Here's the text of the announcement:

AN ANNOUNCEMENT FROM TREY 05.25.04

Last Friday night, I got together with Mike, Page and Fish to talk openly about the strong feelings I've been having that Phish has run its course and that we should end it now while it's still on a high note. Once we started talking, it quickly became apparent that the other guys' feelings, while not all the same as mine, were similar in many ways - most importantly, that we all love and respect Phish and the Phish audience far too much to stand by and allow it to drag on beyond the point of vibrancy and health. We don't want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse yet, a nostalgia act. By the end of the meeting, we realized that after almost twenty-one years together we were faced with the opportunity to graciously step away in unison, as a group, united in our friendship and our feelings of gratitude.

So Coventry will be the final Phish show. We are proud and thrilled that it will be in our home state of Vermont. We're also excited for the June and August shows, our last tour together. For the sake of clarity, I should say that this is not like the hiatus, which was our last attempt to revitalize ourselves. We're done. It's been an amazing and incredible journey. We thank you all for the love and support that you've shown us.

--Trey Anastasio

JD Lasica has published a report on how the RIAA has gotten the FCC to consider adding an "audio broadcast flag" on digital radio, to limit or prevent listeners from copying or distributing copies of radio broadcasts. (Lasica also summarizes himself, with a few additional links, on his own blog.) "Cheryl Leanza, deputy director of Media Access Project, a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C., says the recording industry is afraid of the Napsterization of digital radio."

David Weinberger is blogging from the Personal Democracy Forum in New York...

along with about 150 other people for a day of non-partisan discussion of how politics may be changing, particularly because of the new global connectedness. The conference organizer is Andrew Rasiej, who I almost met when he was with the Dean campaign.

I'm in the Bloggers' Corner, the front left of the auditorium where the power strip is. To my right is Jeff Jarvis. To my left is David Jacobs. Behind me, Anil Dash. In front of me, David Isenberg.

The chat and blogs can be found here. Also try Kinja.

Bloggers' Corner? ... Notable bits so far:

• Bob Kerrey on blogging: "It's not something you can control. Blogging is like gravity: It is. The question is what are you going to do with it?"
• Joe Trippi was asked, "Will the Republicans figure this out?" and replied, "Absolutely. They already have."
• Ralph Reed's idea of grassroots: "MoveOn.org tried doing bottom up and ended up with an ad on their site. As you empower people, you also have to maintain message discipline."

It's too early to celebrate but I just resubmitted Chapter 9, the final chapter of my book, the recursive, regressive one about media and publishing and information and knowledge and journalism and books and this book itself. That leaves one chapter left to rewrite. Of course it's the politics chapter, the biggest mother in the whole book, but it's about time I revisited it. (I wrote the first draft when everybody thought Howard Dean was a shoo-in for Democratic nominee.)

There's also a glossary. And then six or so of the chapters need to be redone one more time after the copyeditor and my peer reviewer have had a crack at it. So I'm not there yet, but I still feel like letting one a mini- war whoop because this has not been easy.

I don't know whether to eat something now or take a nap.

How to Save the World author (and knowledge-management expert) David Pollard reveals that a "major US book publisher" has approached him about writing a book with the "rather unwieldy working title of The New Entrepreneurship: Stepping Stones to Joyful Success: Making a Living with People You Love on Your Own Terms.

I'd read it!

The blog world has been basking lately in the glow of verteran journalist Bill Moyers' endorsement (in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air). Here's what he said (lifted from Techjournalism):

I think the Internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Payne and others, you could have your own press. ... After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others' politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in America in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophony, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history.

Should have blogged this when it first appeared. David Neiwert, the freelance journalist and author behind the extraordinary Orcinus weblog published a manifesto for a media revolt earlier this month.

He first explains why he thinks such a call to action is needed:

As the conglomeration and consolidation of the mass media has proceeded apace through the past two decades unchecked, that independence has largely vanished or become effectively strangled, and with it a responsible treatment of the public interest by the nation's press. The traditional media filters have instead become bottlenecks, preventing information that is in fact vital for the public well-being from ever reaching them -- oftentimes for reasons that are trivial and puerile, not to mention geared toward the manipulation of the media in the service of corporate powers and their agenda.

The blogosphere is a direct result of those bottlenecks. Information is now flowing around them through the networks of dissemination that blogs have become.

Blogs represent, in fact, the real democratization of journalism, which traditionally has always been about the work of keeping the public duly and properly informed. Stories and vital facts now no longer need go through the New York Times and NBC News in order to gain wide distribution. Blogs can effectively reach as many people as several large city dailies combined. And the network of their combined efforts represents a massive shift of data around the traditional media filters.

Blogs can also be terrific means for organizing, particularly for putting together a concerted response to political and media atrocities. One need only survey the ability of blogs to affect real-world politics -- their role in bringing about the fall of Trent Lott was just a start -- to understand that their power can readily extend to reshaping the media, since they represent in themselves a kind of citizens' solution to needed reforms in the media.

To bring that about, two things are needed: 1) A recognition that this power exists, and 2) Organizing in a thoughtful and effective fashion to wield it.

Then he puts his keyboard where his mouth is and sketches out a ten-point program. I will summarize here but the entire entry at Orcinus should be required reading for anyone interested in blogs, disintermediation of news and information, and participatory journalism (note that Neiwert is a former Republican and an unabashed anti-Bush partisan):

1. The well-being of American democracy ultimately depends on a well-informed electorate. As such, the role of the media in keeping the public properly informed is not merely vital, it is sacred.
2. Over the past 20 years, American media have been in a state of serious decline insofar is it lives up to the responsibilities of this role.
3. The nature of these declines produced a string of travesties in the past decade and more
4. This degradation of the media, and its concomitant failure to keep Americans adequately informed, culminated in the attacks on American soil by Al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.... The media, to no one's great surprise, have never even begun to confront their own culpability in this disaster.
5. When George W. Bush sidetracked the resulting "war on terror" into an invasion of Iraq -- a nation that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks -- by waving evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the public's face and suggesting that any dissent was akin to treason, the media utterly failed in its responsibility to examine the claims seriously and to treat them skeptically.
6. Coverage of the 2004 election has already begun to resemble the travesty of 2000, focusing on trivial (and mostly concocted) personality traits.
7. Americans have had enough. Like Howard Beale, they're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Unlike Beale, however, their revolt against the media Powers That Be will be neither manic nor futile. It will be organized, rational, factually sound, unintimidated and, in the end, constructive rather than destructive.
8. This revolt will be organized strategically around two realities: 1) Previous tactics in the efforts to reform the nation's media have largely failed or faltered.... 2) Though this is a revolution against an evolved status quo, the spirit it represents beckons to a return to civic-minded journalism that enshrines the diversity of voices in American media; it is, in fact, more traditionalist in orientation than radical.
9. The Internet -- and in particular, blogs -- will be the cornerstone of the strategy this media revolution will follow, though of course all means are important participants. Indeed, the reforms are intended to reach every facet of American mass media: newspapers large and small, television, film, radio, books, and of course the Internet.... Blogs are, above all, uniquely democratic in nature. Anyone can blog.... Blogs are also uniquely self-correcting in a way that eludes most other media; if false information is disseminated, it doesn't take long before it's eviscerated by other bloggers.
10. There should be no naïvete about the nature of what we are up against. This is a revolt against a national discourse that has degraded into a puerile swamp of innuendo, smear, and dishonest reportage.... When they natter about "character" or "likeability," we should talk plainly about policy and what happens in the real world.... It's fair (if a concession to diversionary tactics) to fight back with facts, but never fair to resort to twisting or omitting: that's what they do. Cutting corners just to score political points is a Pyrrhic victory. If this is a revolt about integrity, then it will fail if it does not embody integrity itself....
    
    Undertaking this task means hard work. But it has become clear to us as citizens, in an age when fear and terror rule our body politic, that what is at stake here is the soul of democracy itself. To save it, no labor should seem too great.

(via JD Lasica)

In JD's New Media Musings: The cool kid of micropublishing, JD Lasica includes a long quotation from PR Week's interview with Gawker Media's Nick Denton. Here's the choice bit that JD especially highlights:

The only time, in traditional media, when you get to express yourself is when you're 60 and no longer have any opinions that speak to the person you once were. Blogs allow those types of writers to circumvent the usual journalistic training program. It allows them to have the voice they have when they're young, without having it knocked out of them.

Seth's Blog: Five years from now...:

Assume that:

Hard drive space is free

Wifi like connections are everywhere

Connections speeds are 10 to 100 times faster

Everyone has a digital camera

Everyone carries a device that is sort of like a laptop, but cheap and tiny

The number of new products introduced every day is five times greater than now

Wal-Mart's sales are three times as big

Any manufactured product that's more than five years old in design sells at commodity pricing

The retirement age will be five years higher than it is now

Your current profession will either be gone or totally different

What then?

(via Buzzmachine)

Nice new analogy by Britt Blaser: Strawberry Roots Activism.

Your front lawn is dependent on you for seed, feed, water and weeding, each seed pushing out just a few blades for us to admire. Rhyzomes, like strawberries and crabgrass, are more creative. Once started, they shoot out opportunistic runners which put down roots in hospitable circumstances. If the new plant prospers, it puts out multiple runners, and so on. Strawberry roots activism may be the future of politics.

... Any campaign that wants to attract rabid support must give each potential supporter the power to connect substantively with the campaign and to accept all supporters' opinions on substantive issues. ...

There were several policy professionals working for the Dean campaign. They taught me that policy professionals hate the idea of the voters expressing their explicit policy preferences in a way that politicians must acknowledge and, perhaps, respond to. ...

(link via Weblogsky)

This chat from the GeorgeWBush.com website gives some insight into Republican grassroots organizing efforts.

At lunch yesterday, George Kelly asked me if I was going to write about Bush's social network in my politics chapter. That is to say, his father's rolodex.

Art McGee of Virtual Identity sent around this announcement for The Planetwork Interactive, June 5-6 (and 7), 2004, San Francisco, CA, USA:

Join Ben Cohen from True Majority and other leaders of online activism, MoveOn, Act For Change and the Dean Campaign, for two days of intensive InterActivity!

This largely self-organizing interactive forum for innovators from information technology, and civil society leaders explore how social networks, the internet and information technology can help create a socially just and ecologically sane world.

The majority of the event will be drawn from the self-organizing process. We are holding half of the time and space open for an InterActive process designed to
promote communication, dialog and networking.

In addition, a dozen topic proposals will be selected from among those posted to the InterActive site by participants before the conference for scheduled half hour presentations on the program. Topics are expected to span a wide variety
of Planetwork themes:

Social Networks and Civil Society
The New ID Commons Technical Protocol

Environmental: Proactive Responses to
Global Warming & Mass Extinction

Digital Democracy: Civil Rights & Civil Liberties
from the DMCA to Touch Screen Voting

Alternative Economics: Online & Offline Strategies
Complementary Currencies, Electronic barter & beyond

Independent Media from Blogs and RSS to DV and TiVo,
new technologies for independent networked news

The Real-World Game: Bucky's Spaceship Earth meets Sim Earth
a multi-player online game using real data to model future
scenarios

Major Themes:

Social Networking for Social Good

The Identity Commons framework is emerging as a first implementation of a digital identity protocol which promises to make possible new levels of self-organization and cooperation between social networking sites and throughout civil society. Both technical and social issues surrounding the implementation of this new protocol will be considered in parallel and inform each other at this critical moment.

Internet Activism

The Internet has already changed the landscape of political power as the Dean campaign, Move On, True Majority and others have demonstrated their ability to raise money and mobilize political voices online. The event will bring together leaders of Internet Activism in this election year, Ben Cohen from True Majority, MoveOn, the Dean Campaign, Act For Change, Get Active Software. Social networks may represent the next frontier of Internet Activism.

Planetwork Conference Website

Monthly Planetworking Forum

Augmented Social Network:
Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet

(via the Deanspace - now Civicspace announcement mailing list)

for a very important date. No time to say hello. Goodbye. I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.
.

In The Syndication Sky is Falling! Mark Nottingham disputes the idea that the polling-for-updates architecture at the heart of RSS and Atom and other syndication / pub-sub / webfeed formats (the living web's answer to "push") inherently won't scale:

Wow, I guess I should remind the folks at Google, Yahoo, CNN and my old colleagues at Akamai that what they're doing is fundamentally flawed; the Web doesn't scale, sorry.

I guess I'll also have to tell the people at the Web caching workshops that what they do is futile, and those folks doing Web metrics are wasting their time. What a shame.

... I do mean to pick on the general notion that the Web can't scale enough for syndication's purposes; the Web provably does scale, and like gangbusters.

In the eighth circle of a deadline hell of my own making, for the last time I say to myself for the last time I say this is the last time, this time, this is the last time, this time is the time, this time is the last time, this time is the last time, this is the last time.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

Robert Scoble has seen the future, and it left him "uncomfortable":

First, there's tons of reports on the blogosphere about NextFest (read them here on Feedster.com).

What was wrong?

1) Not much practical value. More on that in a second.

2) Microsoft and Apple weren't there. Big mistake. The crowds were huge and they were VERY tech savvy. Just the kinds of crowds that Microsoft should be marketing the Tablet PC, the Windows Media Center, Xbox Live, SmartPhones, OneNote, and InfoPath to. I met tons of developers, including many .NET and Linux guys . [...] The fact that Microsoft wasn't at an event like this was embarrassing.

3) It was too crowded. ...

Dan Gillmor has the latest on Zack Rosen's doings:

With the help of a local venture capitalist, Rosen and several colleagues are bringing the "DeanSpace" online collaboration software they created for the former presidential candidate to a wider civic audience.

Called CivicSpace Labs (www.civicspacelabs.org), their venture is building a software platform for activists. They envision a powerful and easy to use "grass-roots organizing tool kit" that gives people ways to organize campaigns and then connect with like-minded activists.

While CivicSpace is intended to support progressive and politically left-leaning organizations at the outset, the code will be openly available as time goes on.

Anne Collingwood wrote to Phil Wolff, asking how to apply the power of the Internet to the presidential campaign: "Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized?" "Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others?" and a handful of similar exciting questions. Phil didn't answer, but there's one comment that's a solid start; and the questions themselves provide fodder for thinking about "what is the living web, and how can we use it?"

From Rev Carr on the Deadwood Society mailing list:

Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 13:58:18 -1000

Call for Chapters-
Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture

Edited by Michael D. Ayers, New School for Social Research, New York City

Call for Chapters

There is no doubt that the Internet has the ability to shape and transform the art fields. The popular culture art forms- Film, Television and Music have found their specific homes in cyberspace, but out of the big three, music has found the most controversial space to say the least.

In the post MP3 scare[*], this volume seeks to examine the role of cyberspace in the cultural production, creation and transformation in the way which society consumes and uses music in its various forms.

This volume seeks to examine music and cyberspace, utilizing theoretical perspectives from cultural studies, sociology, cyberculture studies, feminist perspectives and media studies

Suggested submission topics include, but not limited to:

• How cyberspace challenges/confirms traditional production of music cultures
• Online music (sub)cultures vs. Real Life (sub)music cultures
• Musical genre manifestations online
• Theoretical perspectives on the digitalization of music
• Theoretical perspectives of consuming music through cyberspace
• Case/Comparative studies of fan groups and fan identity in cyberspace
• Quantitative studies on downloaders
• Artist/Audience Interactions online
• The Political Economy of Digital Music
• Politics of Digital Music

Chapters should be submitted in Microsoft Word format, 12 point font, double spaced. Essays should be in the range of 7500 - 10,000 words with references in ASA style.

Send submissions and inquires to michael.ayers [at] manhattan.edu

[*] It could be argued that we are now entering in a "phase two" MP3 scare with the recent RIAA threats on suing individual file sharers.

While tracking down some Meetup data, I found this Bentley College survey from January that analyzes Wesley Clark's supporters and their use of Meetup. Beyond the Clark demographics, it says, "Clark attendees were more likely than Dean attendees to find out about the December Meetup through Internet sources. Just over 20% of both groups mentioned an invitation from someone they knew. In October, Dean attendees also reported more personal invitations to their first Meetup." Any other research yet on who uses Meetup politically and how?

File under the snake eating its own tale:

unmediated: The blog tool you really want

And yes, I put Pete's name in the headline on purpose. The design of this site needs bylines because people are crediting me for stuff that Pete is posting.

While I wrestle with deadlines and the throes of finishing a book, Pete has been doing an amazing job of keeping this blog hopping. He deserves credit for his work. More than just the developmental editor of the book, he is the co-originator and one of the main co-conspirators in the assemblage of the entire project.

OK, back to Chapter 6 copyedit review....

Dave Pollard, at How To Save The World, posted a list of functions he wants his blog to have, such as "robust commenting" and "access to rest of personal 'filing cabinet'". He then scored its success at each:

This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost.

My benchmark for this scorecard is my father. If I could explain to him how to use a blog feature over the phone, it gets a 'green' score. If my brother, who lives a few blocks away from him and is an engineer, could set it up for him so he could use it, it gets a 'yellow' score. If it's not available at all, or unfathomable to novice users even with help, it gets a 'red' score.

Pollard explains each of the 20 features he's after and finds that only one rates 'green'. His sidebar also has lists of what blog readers and blog writers really want to see more of. (What a week over there; Pollard's blog is that wonderful kind of place where a critique of "knowledge management" can live side-by-side with kids jumping on trampolines and an Atkins diet for dogs.)

Clay Shirky has again put good phrases to a phenomenon (Moblogging from the front and the new Reformation): we are learning to live in a "fully disclosed culture."

I remember hearing about the security efforts being put into place around delivery of Ken Starr's Whitewater (Lewinsky) report as it was delivered, and thought "Why are they bothering? It will be in the web in 48 hours..." I was wrong, of course — it was on the web the next day. Now I hear that military officials are debating whether to release other photos with evidence of American torture of Iraqis, and I wonder again why they are bothering. If the images exist, they will be released. It's a fantasy to assume that they can re-assert control of the spread of images by fiat. ...

At a guess, filtered versus unfiltered information, in many settings and particularly around control of audio and visuals as opposed to words, is going to precipitate the same sort of conflict [as the Protestant Reformation]. (The music industry is a canary in that particular coal mine.)

... [I]t's a safe bet that we are entering a world of "That will kill this." We just don't know what parts of society "this" refers to yet.

Hallelujah. Jeff's Spleen is producing its... er, bile? once again! But that design, it's so 2003....

A group blog named unmediated "tracks the tools, processes, and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution." (They used the verb "reblogged by", which makes me start to wonder about terms for this kind of site, which PoM is also: "manually operated aggregator"?)

Researching why she's getting so many Friendster invites, danah boyd discovered that teenagers are mobbing the system by claiming to be much older, often seniors; it looks as though 69 is the most popular age. "I'm stunned that Friendster was so vigilant in going after Fakesters because it was ruining search and they weren't viable customers, but they ignore the Fakesters that could open them up to hefty legal suits. ..." Friendster made such a big deal about phony identities that it chased off its core audience, but it has left these kids alone: "It seems as though [Friendster's] efforts to configure the users didn't work so well."

Look who's the first result on Google if you search for "the power of many" or even just power many.

In addition to the formal peer review from Lucy Hodder (and Liz Lawley for some of the earlier chapters) I've asked a number of people in the book's "community" (such as it is) to review chapters informally and just send me notes instead of detailed interpolations.

Wrestling with deadlines (Chapter 7 is due in as a second revision today), I haven't managed the informal peer review process well. Pete have volunteered to step in, but I still must remember to send Pete names, email addresses, and chapter requests.

I also need to make bylines in this blog because people are crediting Pete's amazing blogging latel y to me, which isn't fair to Pete.

Plus, I need sort out my feeds in teh sidebars, add recent comments and recent trackback pings, technorati hoo-hah, and so on. (Once the next few chapters are in.)

Also, desperately need a wiki.

Sometimes I live in the country
Soometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I live inside a bass amp
And run Cecil's organ through a classic rock guitar filter for that sludgy hard rawk sound.

Laramie gave me the chord changes. I wrote 'em for Cecil. He played 'em on his electric pianer thing and sent me the AIF. I mangled it all together in GarageBand with my third vocal take.

All for the low low time investment of about a minute or so (plus download time), to hear my debut cut of Goodnight, Irene.

Effervescing Uncles has so many short songs on it that it's still only about 12 minutes long (thus far) including the best takes of

Goodnight, Irene
Effervescing Elephant
Uncle John's Band (partial)
Postcartesian Metaphysical Home[sic] Blues
Remix Nightmare (Land of Toil and Bluff)
Fire on the Mountain (Churchbells Softly Chime)
The Yeah Yeah Song (Hey Look the Sun)

note to self: shorten names of songs!

not recorded yet in any form:
Stardust
Someday Life Will Be Made Out of Velcro
Furry Green Atom Bowl
It's Gonna Be (Alright)
Touch of Jey
Neverending Song

Some songs will get longer no doubt, though I hope not too much longer. 3 minutes is plenty, especially on the web, but the above is probably about a whole album's worth, whatever that means these days. Ideally, I'd develop three or four times as much material, put out the best 46 minutes, and then sift through the rest as I coast through my sophomore slump and the rest of my quick unhappy but hedonistic music career.

Addendum, added a few more to the to do list (from memory: a few more covers, actually, of Robyn Hitchcock, Ween, and Hoagie Carmichael; to supplement Hunter/Garcia, Dylan, Leadbelly, and John Fahey), and remembered some songs-initiated-by-others I've agreed to work on:

Air (for shrevie at Zoka)
With a Little Help from My Friends (for Paris at Brokeland)

A Sybexian just joined MoveOn's list and received their welcome message, which I post here for archive and quote purposes:

Dear friend,

We just wanted to take a moment to welcome you to the MoveOn network and tell you a little bit about MoveOn.org.

Still working on a chapter today. I'm about three or four weeks overdue for a "to done" style posting here. When I get a round tuit it will be a doozy. Got a DFA meetup tonight, then back to finishing up the Chapter 4 rewrite. Then sleep, glorious sleep.

metaphizickillin'
great tase
less filling when i'm chill'n

dissing bob dylan*
while my radiator's illin'

*see remix nightmare (land of toil and bluff mix), see also Metaphysical home[sic] Blooz Nos. 12 and 35 if only because of the stoopit name. And plus that's what this post is about to, almost forgot.

Linklogging about Zack Rosen: he has started up Progressive Pipes (ppipes) to aggregate e-mail news from liberal causes, campaigns, and candidates. (Earlier PoM entry about Rosen's plan to build groupware and other development for nonprofits is here.) As Outlandish Josh put it, "Juggling 33 progressive mailinglist subscriptions so you don't have to."

Another reference track, a uke-and-voice take of EE. (Separate rhythm and vocal tracks available for anyone who wants to mess with them.)

I'm starting to work out a bridge and even some finger-picking ideas for the verses of this song. I'm refining the lyrics and haev some thoughts for lyrics for the bridge as well. This take starts off as a straight rhythm-uke reading of the first verse and a clumsy finger-picked take of the second, before descending into a series of bridge-idea variations and kind of getting lost on the spiral fretboard. I'm working toward one basic-track rhythm take that I can then layer vocals and other instruments over.

For now, here's a snapshot of the song's development circa this morning.

Not knowing the real words to the Wesley-esque hymn transmitted to me through John Fahey's Skip James-loving hands, I've made up some postcartesian lyrics of my own. Here's a reference vocal take of all the verses.

As many have noted, JD Lasica has posted chapters of his forthcoming book to a wiki. I didn't get around to blogging this for a couple of days, however, until Mary Hodder wrote the blog entry I wish I had written: "How very au currant. Participatory book editing. Napsterization approves. Prrrrrrrr."

But on the substances of the thing... First, the process. Lasica is using a belt-and-suspenders approach that doesn't strike me as very au courant, inviting comments through e-mail, blog, and wiki. He writes:

Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television will detail the rise of the personal media revolution and the escalating conflict between entertainment companies and individuals using the power of digital technology.

I'm nearly done writing it, so we're at the stage where it's time to bring in "the former audience," as Dan Gillmor puts it, and invite the blogosphere to participate in the book's editing (before it makes its way to its final editor).

Ross Mayfield at Socialtext was kind enough to set me up with a wiki last week. Don't be scared -- wikis are very cool new collaborative workspaces that let people edit and contribute to a work in progress.

Check it out at the Darknet wiki. Much of the book has to do with participatory media, so I hope many of you will join me in this experiment in collaborative editing.

For those who prefer just to leave comments, I'll also be posting the chapters to my new Darknet blog.

Certainly, being open to multiple modes of work and communication is part of eating one's own "living web" cooking. But I have to wonder whether manual effort will be needed to reconcile these modes. I hope for his sake that Lasica has automation for integrated the various types of feedback; combining queries and edits from multiple document versions—let alone multiple document types—is among the most inefficient things I do as an editor. After just a week, there are no comments on the blog and few wiki changes; most of the wiki edits consist of the addition of hyperlinks, which won't help Lasica's bound book at all. One new sentence of great substance helps Lasica's narrative a lot, but because most wiki edits are identified only by user number, that could even be Lasica doing a little rewriting. (Professionally, I do appreciate the visitor who edited "where" to "in which".)

I also find it interesting that both Gillmor and Lasica are inviting such participation when their work is so polished. They say they are releasing "draft" chapters but both are really revealing close-to-final manuscripts—at the very least, these are third or fourth rewrites. The next great step in participatory authoring (as opposed to editing) will be when someone is willing to share a version of their work that really is a first or second draft.

And finally, there's the content of Lasica's book itself: Excellent. The first three chapters have incredibly compelling anecdotes (such as a long telling of how three kids completely remade Raiders of the Lost Ark) and many insightful quotes on both the cluelessness and purposeful hypocrisy of media companies.

I just discovered a blog called Cutting Through. The guys who run it say about themselves:

We run a marketing & technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK. A lot of our work is now centring on using social software technology to reduce information problems in business. So this blog is designed to share our knowledge and first hand experience.

...but the tagline says more about the blog content: "A live case study to show how to cut through the information and technology clutter." They started out with entries on the how-to of blog tech and of website promotion, but they have moved on chiefly to metablogging, social software, and wikis for businesses, quoting A-listers such as Blood, Scoble, and Searls.

And it was only from this blog that I learned that David Weinberger has a version of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined blog for kids!

This great line by David Weinberger (commenting on an idea for a self-forming, mesh-based Wi-Fi network) can apply to so many realms of human experience that it reaches the level of Truth:

The old paradigm of top-down network provisioning is so fragile that just one garage-based genius - surrounded by an open source community - could implode it. Exciting.

Jon Lebkowsky points to a Doc Searls presentation on open source and "do-it-yourself IT." It has some real gems, among them bits on the meaning of "public" and "private":

The deeper battle is between metaphors. Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and "content." Techies see the Net as a place — a commons — where people can make culture and do business.

(Lebkowsky's coauthor, Mitch Ratcliffe, blogs "The book, Extreme Democracy, is almost done and is, we hope, really Something Useful.")

Mary Hodder has blogged her notes from the Cal panels on "living with the genie" (Thurs. eve with Kurzweil and Rheingold), virtual communities (Fri. morning with Newmark, Mernit, Kos, and Pincus), big/little journalism, and so forth throughout the "China's Digital Future" conference. Notable bits on copyright/copyleft, Net-technology, Chinese politics, and the primacy of culture over governing documents.

Stevin Berlin Johnson suggests that criticizing his book for its personal approach isn't, let's say, as fruitful as some other avenues of criticism he considers more legitimate.

Cecil found the chords underlying my vocal, and has developed them in a new direction. I am having trouble matching his time (swing, swing) but it's fun trying on this take of No Outside.