June 2004 Archives

The craigslist phenomenon

Thanks to Gwen, I've found gujari girl:

I never thought the first person in Walnut Creek to whom I'd defend Oakland would be an Indian guy from New York!

I'm now two L(G)L behind on photos. If I post mine we'll have triangulation on a few of the scenes from the other day.

Mike Bazeley at the San Jose Mercury news writes today about authors open texts online for others to edit.

He focuses on J.D.'s experiment posting his chapters for Darknet (blogged here by Pete a few weeks ago), but he and I spoke earlier this week and he mentions me at the end of the article:

Annalee Newitz interviews Christopher Filkins (also featured in two chapters of POM) about his ideas for an open-source dating network in Wired 12.06: Cracking the Code to Romance.

Adding my secret special Jerry-shimmeree effect and that basic little uke feel track gets positively cosmic, man!

There's no ink on the contract yet but odds are looking very good that starting in July I'll be joining a consulting firm as chief mumbledymumbledy officer and work with some clients on projects that combine a lot of my interests today: netroots activism, taking back congress, weblogs and webfeeds and wikis oh my, promoting my book, attending both conventions, continuing to develop PEP, mastering new content management systems and scripting languages, doing visionary strategy work, helping to grow a startup to the sustainability point, and of course doing my own blogging.

Strangest job offer yet. Totally reversed. They came to me. No resume. "We spent a few hours googling you last night." The blog as resume. Blogger gets dream job. Film at 11.

There's a lot you can do with a simple rhythm and some time. Here's just a basic feel track on the ukulele. Tomorrow I'll post a processed version of it, but the plain track is out there for anyone who wants to mess with it or loop it back in any way, etc.:

Fire on the Mountain (basic uke feel track)

I'm still way a beginner, with incredibly amateurish chops, and yet look at how I am able to amuse myself already:

The Reuben Kincaid: Fire on the Mountain, take 2, basic uke feel track

Salon article [ad-view required] covers SNSs, saying, "The new social software turbo-charges friendships, sexual hookups and the business of human relationship -- and could turn our lives into an open book."

Alex Havalais points out that Orson Scott Card had a character blogging back in 1994:

"I've been studying history," Peter said. "I've been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world..."

- Peter Wiggin in Ender's Game, on why he is beginning to blog.

A guest blogger at Many-to-Many reports that the "Chinese government just launched a new website for people to report on what officials describe as illegal or unhealthy information on the internet. [...] The Chinese authorities are once again using a strategy which mixes intimidation, uncertainty, and divide and conquer techniques to create fear and distrust among people, therefore forcing internet users to censor themselves online. (If one wants to know more about how censorship works in Chinese society, you can read an excellent article written by Princeton professor Perry Link.)"

I'm doing author review of the glossary draft now (the book's appendix) and I'd like to hear suggestions from readers about terms we left out or improvements in definitions. I'm such a geek that I often forget which words sound strange to normal people. I want people reading the book to be able to flip to the glossary any time they encounter a word like "meme" or "blog" or "ping" or "wiki" and get an explanation without losing their momentum in the chapter they're reading.

I am about to update the Glossary section of the book's wiki so that it tracks with the current draft of the book. (I'm putting each definition on its own page so that they can grow in the future into encyclopedia-type entries, but I wonder if using the HTML definition-list/term, definition-list/definition would be semantically more meaningful, plus should I worry that the sage's like to say that "wiki is not a dictionary"?)

If you'd like to suggest a glossary term, you can post a comment here or propose it on the wiki. (To edit the wiki, simply sign yourself in with a WikiName - mine is ChristianCrumlish; no password required. This will give you the ability to edit nearly any page in the wiki, including any part of the glossary.)

You call it ahi tuna, rubbed with olive oil and peanut oil and stone ground mustard, seared over mesquite coals for two minutes a side.

I call it dinner.

For the first time in 39 days on Friday I wasn't the bottleneck in the editorial and production flow of my book. Today I had a day off on a weekend for the first time in months. I almost wasn't sure it was real: the feeling of being able to do nothing, lie in the hammock reading, take a nap, watch TV, whatever.

It feels like a new year, a good one.

Right now the book is listed on Amazon (Amazon.com: Books: The Power of Many: How the Living Web is The Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life.

Unfortunately, the book's search summary profile says it's out of print, and the detail page says it will be 304 pp., and softcover, when in fact it's in press for September, more like 250 pp., and hardcover (with a dust cover).

I had an author portrait taken for the dust-jacket flap last week (by Robert Birnbach) and it's all starting to seem strangely real.

(The ISBN is 0782143466.)

As soon as the Amazon listing is fixed I'll make the link from the book's cover image on this site into a link to the Amazon page for buying the book (using my xpollen-20 affiliation code).

Been real busy writing and little time for recording lately but I did manage to capture myself singing along to Cake's "Meanwhile Rick James" (without really knowing the words), so I mixed it up together with some string effects on some ridiculous single-note keyboard-mousing, yielding this whimsy, Kidney Shaped Pool (about 2 meg).

Bob Jacobson from Activist-Tech, Grassroots something, and the WELL passes along this article (IT on the Campaign Trail) from CIO Magazine's June 1, 2004, edition, calling it "State of the art reporting on the two campaign's IT efforts."

The 2004 presidential race may well hinge on which party most effectively exploits data mining tools to get out the vote.

...

In this year's presidential election, political operatives are relying more than ever on CRM-type systems to comb voters' histories and demographic data to find those supporters who will vote for and perhaps contribute to their cause.
To paraphrase James Carville, "It's the database, stupid."

The business blog Cutting Through reports conversations with a client... [quote reformatted for space]

And do you know which element of all this grabbed their attention the most? Wikis.

Which coincides with the volume of postings on wikis over the last few weeks in and around the blogosphere. There is definitely movement afoot e.g., Seth Godin, Business Week, Amy at Contentious. And finally A Penny For has recently created a wiki to capture business blogs.

The post continues with a list of some basic benefits of a wiki for the unfamiliar.

The early history of the Electric Minds online community founded by Howard Rheingold (running from 1996 to 2000 is preserved at the beginning of a conference on the current site that keeps the history up to date.

The period from '96 to 2000 covers the boom/bust sine wave so many starry-eyed wired people at the time experienced (you know, when the buzzword-du-jour cycled from portal to community and back).

I didn't know about the NITLE Blog Census until I stumbled across it in a Feedster search that turned up this eWeek article:

Blogging is the hottest thing on the Internet since, well, the Web browser. This is not news, as just about everybody who spends time online is maintaining a blog, regularly reading and contributing to a blog, or knows someone who is maintaining or regularly reading and contributing to a blog. And blogs are everywhere. The National Institute for Technology & Liberal Education Blog Census has logged about 1.9 million Weblog sites, 1.2 million of which are in English.

What is news is that bloggers and blogging are killing journalism as we know it. This is scary but not necessarily bad. I'll try to sort it out.

Political Wire: Democrats Lead GOP in Meet Ups

Yes, that's me, originating the part of Guy Forcips in Bill Cassel's delightful radioteleplay now current in rotation at Monkey Vortex Radio Theater: Everybody Loves Money

Available in plain, and peanut.

Party for America, a partisan group that builds on what was learned running houseparties and organizing other neighbor-related voter awareness activities in the Dean campaign by veterans of the East Bay for Dean grassroots organization (now East Bay for Democracy), is looking for a project manager to help with a web service development project.

In New Orleans, thanks to syrup, I was reunited with my tenor ukulele, Helena, last seen in an Austin, TX motel.

Our hosts there, S and E, run d-fly designs using photography and digital image manipulation and high quality printing with pigments to decorate linen pillow and handbags and other craft objects. The results are stunning.

Long story short, Steve snapped a photo of the uke, and sent me this photo of a pillow decorated with my ukulele's classic look a few weeks ago (I've been on deadline looking forward to posting it here but seeing it every day on the homepad of my voodoopad):

Via Jon Lebkowsky: a civic-service twist to Google e-mail:

As seen on eBay - we've gots 'em. Nine brand new, shiny, gmail invites are sitting in my inbox waiting to further dilute the value some people are apparently willing to assign to this...

15 invites given away
5 invites open
Donors: [...]

It's not free, however. If you're interested in one, comment here and let me know what you're willing to do for it. Not to me (though I am more than ready to trade for a few good massages), but to someone else. A random act of kindness, maybe? Work in a soup kitchen? Help out at a needle exchange? Or maybe you're doing that already - you'd be the ideal recipient.

Susan Mernit and Mary Hodder have unveiled the BlogOn 2004 conference, scheduled for July 22 and 23 at Berkeley, bringing together business, media, and technical people interested in blogging, social media, social networks, syndication, and related topics (you know, all that "living web" stuff).

Here's Susan's writeup and here's Mary's.

Sponsors appear to include Six Apart, Knight Ridder, and Microsoft. The Haas School of Business is hosting the event. (Mary does interdisciplinary work that overlaps with the business school, the journalism school, and the information science department - Mary, please correct any misstatements!)
I'm on deadline (way past!) ... more later.

Doc Searls points to a great piece by Russell Beattie on why Silicon Valley is living in the past and facing backward. Read it all; here's just one bit:

I first noticed that the leaders of Silicon Valley are *still* behind the times when I saw the line up for O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conference. Not a single member of telecom industry there and only one session that talks about telecom - and its focus is VoIP. Are you kidding me? Anyone who doesn't realize by now that the Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by mobile devices must be living on, well, here in the U.S.

Today, Lawrence Lessig declared e-mail bankruptcy, saying he was going to stop trying to get caught up on replying to his backlog. A colleague says, "This is Larry coming to grips with becoming a public figure, and recognizing he can't relate to e-mail in the way he did when he was just a law professor," but Lessig apparently still doesn't really "get it": he still plans to respond to all future e-mails.

Two posts turned up this week about proportions of male and female bloggers and blog-readers: Joho the Blog: Girls keep out? is entirely about it, and Political Animal: The Blogosphere... mentions it in addition to things like average education level.

This topic has been done to death for years, and there's a group blog on women in tech for the very reason that there are differences. But like so many iterations of this subject, these two posts miss the point: men and women blog in much closer numbers than they think, but the styles and (especially) topics of interest diverge sufficiently that it's easy to be misled if you only eat your little slice of the pie. So analyzing gender differences in a tiny subset of "blogs"—say, across a single blog as in the Joho item, or across a single topic such as politics as in PA—is not terribly useful even when the boundaries are well-stated, which they weren't in these instances.

The Joho item is all about tech blogging, and the PA item is all about political blogging. Hey, folks: men (and whites, and the highly educated) are overrepresented in politics and computer technology; it shouldn't be news that they dominate political or tech blogs. The PA item cites the recent Blogads survey that says 21% of blog readers are women. Thank goodness folks in the comments pointed out that Blogads is skewed toward high-traffic, political, and ad-bearing blogs.

Apparently many of these posters missed misbehaving's link to a recent Georgetown thesis, Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers: "Contrary to prediction, the results indicate that there are more gender similarities than differences in blog use." (Again, a small slice of blog reality... but at least the boundaries were clearly stated.)

Update: This post generated reaction and discussion in two posts on Misbehaving, including an apology and clarification from the post's author.

bestkungfu weblog:

Those of us at W3C who have been working on this each saw a hole that Atom fills, whether it's a simplified publication model, a more accessible means of getting to the core content of a site, or a great way to ease users into the upside of the semantic Web. And we think Atom should be in an environment where it can cross-pollinate with Web specs like XHTML and RDF. (Though that doesn't mean going back to RSS 1.0 at all.) I think that what we offer over IETF, all told, does meet Tim's better-than-10% criterion.

(via Scripting News)

WirelessUnleashed is a new group blog (Kevin Werbach, Andrew Odlyzko, David Isenberg, Clay Shirky), funded by Microsoft, that "advocates freeing up low-frequency spectrum globally for wireless broadband and unlicensed applications."

ZURL claims to be "the last URL you'll ever need." This implementation of the Open Directory taxonomy is gussied up as a Yahoo!-style deeper-and-deeper heirarchy, but with far too few categories—the top level is currently only Business, Cities, Companies, Drink, Health, Hobbies, Law, MLB, Medicine, NBA, NCAA, NHL, News, Olympics, People, States, Technology, US Soccer, and World. "Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web." (hat tip to Susan Mernit).

Mark Glazer notes that Craig Newmark often appeals to "nerd values" when explaining what makes craigslist run so well: OJR article: 'Nerd Values' Help Propel Tiny Craigslist Into Classifieds Threat.

I think we are seeing a transition in the internetworked world from geek values (arrogance, insiderhood, impatience with nongeeks) to nerd values (Craig suggests that as a "recovering" nerd he is sensitive to the need to include people who aren't socially adept on their own).

In Many-to-Many: Who owns a weblog's content? over at Many-to-Many, Seb Paquet inquires into ownership issues in the age of collaborative authoring.

Sites that provide statistics on worldwide Internet access and use (many sites and sources are listed on dmoz):

• World population is 6.45 billion today according to World Gazetteer; it was 6.3 billion in 2002 according to the UN.
• Global Reach says 729M have access (March 2004).
• Internet World Stats says 785M (March 2004).
• Nua said 606M (Sept. 2002).

A claim that "roughly" or "about" 10% of the world's people have Internet access seems safe. (We have no category for "intro" or "frontmatter", it seems. Probably a good idea.)

Though focused on online communities and written/populated mainly by hackers, Meatball wiki represents a fascinating resource for anyone studying how communities function in general and particular what tends to happen online and what patterns and anti-patterns are worth noticing.

For example, here's the current entry on the anti-authoritarian personality type. I also just read a great piece on the Court Jester role (one I tend to identify with myself.)

Let's Talk America is "a nationwide movement that will bring Americans from all points on the political spectrum together in cafes, bookstores, churches and living rooms for lively, open-hearted dialogue to consider questions essential to the future of our democracy." Its website has "Find/Host a Discussion" functions, prominent promotion of "the Democracy in America Convention, August 19th-22nd in Springfield, Illinois," and the promise of more features such as "downloadable discussion guides, tools that let you find events in your area or post one of your own, and an online voter registration system." Let's Talk America is a co-venture of several civic organizations and apparently is funded by The Institute on the Common Good at Regis University. (Hat tip to Jon Lebkowsky.)

Joi Ito is profiled in an AP story in USA Today, which of course has to define "blog" for its readers. "Most of the blog services are free so far. But once blogging gains acceptance as a self-publishing medium, business opportunities such as advertising and premium photo-sharing services should emerge."

Chris Nolan's blog has me addicted instantly, incisive, opinionated, well informed nonstandard political opinions, an acid wit, links by the tumbril. Her blog's design looks just like Craig Newmark's - did he help her get set up? I should ask him.

Recently, she asked the money question about Howard Dean and Iowa:

With all the chapters rewritten and the glossary nearly done, and the promotional publicity effort ramping up, I spent some time over the weekend trying to crisp up the design of this weblog a bit. I may have overdone it. The middle column is rather narrow in Safari. I'd welcome design feedback. I'm aware that some of my template syntax is jerry-built at best.

I'd also like to work out the problem of getting true domain aliasing working with http://thepowerofmany.com/ - right now permalinks still rely on my underlying x-pollen.com/many site, and that's the address people are bookmarking and adding to their blogrolls. It would behoove my publisher, who owns the brand of the title, to make it work better (else risk reinforcing the author's own x-branding).

What else? I don't know. Tell me what looks wrong in your browser or which jargon to rewrite as succinct plain English or if you're having trouble understanding this website, the book, the wiki, their topic or how to read the entries in the blog, the earliest of which were posted in late December of last year.

I'm going to post something to my Orkut friends group to see if that brings any beta traffic. The site's actual launch can really wait till the book is in reviewers' hands (late July), but for now we can kick the tires. I'll ask Blogistan readers to wander over and give feedback too, and etc., and the rest.