September 2004 Archives

OK, it's just for one day, but it's still an interesting idea: So, you want to manage my campaign for a day?

via Susan Mernit's Blog:

Politics & the Net: Free online discussion this Tuesday: "There's a free online discussion on The Impact of Participatory Media on Election 2004 happening this Tuesday, October 5, 2004 from 2:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. Eastern U.S. Time

Brought to you by The Media Center, a think tank examining the intersection of media, technology and society, this public webcast focuses on the impact of new technologies and participatory media on the Nov. 2 U.S. election.

Join bloggers, cable news, and print journalists to discuss the transformation in information flow and the rise in grassroots activism demonstrated during this election.

Participants include Markos of DailyKos, Retha Hill from BET, the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin, and Jehmu Green, prez of rock the vote . Jason Calcanis is the host.
I am dreaming that Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor are in the audience, along with many others who have much to say. Maybe you?

Register here."

"See" you there.

A lot of talk online today about the flaws in the most recent presidential Gallup poll - specifically, oversampling Republicans. Kos writes:

Just got off the phone with a reporter from USA Today who is writing a story on potential problems with the Gallup poll, and the liberal blogosphere's work in bringing attention to the issue.

Here are some applicable links: from the Kos main page, a discussion in a diary on dKos, at the left coaster, and this Reuters article that cites a related ad just out from moveon.org.

This strikes me as the sort of media anti-bias watchdog story that the right has had so much success with. Be interesting to see if the Dem-friendly online world can do as good a job getting a story out into the national conversation as the GOP-friendly online world did with the CBS/forgery story.

Add to my vocal take and Cecil's sepulchral midi piano take (the "15-foot Christian" one) this reasonably crisp run-through of the melody on ukulele, processed to sound like electric guitar.

Note the hymn originally had a right-boring Anglican melody called St. Peter and this version is set to an African-American spiritual, hence its lovely pentatonic goodness.

Now I should compare the chords Cecil derived from my vocals to the chords of some sheet music I found online recently, which I'm trying to transcribe for my tenor uke.

Peter Beinart at Time has an analysis of the election that suggest, suprise suprise, that with Iraq back as a major campaign issue, maybe Dean may not have been such a poor choice of a nomineee (TIME.com: If Howard Dean Were the Candidate ... -- Oct. 04, 2004):

Political punditry is harder than it looks. That's what a lot of Democratic voters must be thinking right about now. Last winter Democratic-voters played political consultant. They tried to step inside the minds of swing voters and figure out which Democratic presidential candidate could beat George W. Bush. With an eye cast coldly on November, they rejected the man who had first won their hearts, Howard Dean, and flocked to the more "electable" choice, John Kerry. Among New Hampshire voters who said beating Bush was their biggest concern, Kerry beat Dean by a whopping 52 points.

Democratic voters should stick to their day jobs. With just five weeks until Election Day, there's reason to believe they guessed wrong - that Dean would be doing better against Bush than Kerry is.

...

In last week's TIME poll, Kerry's biggest deficit versus Bush was in "sticking to his positions." Only 37% of registered voters in the survey said Kerry does that, compared with 84% for Bush.

Dean wouldn't have that problem. Polls in Iowa showed him doing best among voters who value a candidate who "takes strong stands."

Gradually, b and I are entering the 21st century. We just got a DVD player (but not a TiVo or other PVR yet, and we still don't have cable or satellite - how to choose by the way?). So of course I just signed us up for a free NetFlix trial. Our queue should now show up as one of my offsite feeds somewhere in the sidebar here.

A Syracuse paper which published an article that was skeptical about the how authoritative an online collaborative encyclopedia could be has now published a front-page article that is much more positive about wikis (Syracuse.com: NewsFlash - 'Wikis' offer knowledge-sharing online).

The article even picks up on my (not that I own it) preference for referring to wikis as whiteboards, since at least in the corporate suites everyone knows what a whiteboard is:

"At its core, a Wiki is an empty room, devoid of furniture and decoration, said Sunir Shah, founder of an online community called Meatball. Visitors bring the personality and mission, turning the Wiki into a library, a party or a conference room.

Wikis are also described as online whiteboards, shared notebooks or group memory. They are forums for sharing knowledge and control — and fostering trust in the process."

(Via leuschke.org links.)

J.D. Lasica researches how sites end up on Google News (and why certain political opinions dominate there). He contrasts Yahoo! News' human approach with Google News' algorithm-only one; Yahoo says the person-powered one is actually faster.

Cecil pointed out to me that we haven't really kept up with the latest weblogs- meet- the-power-of-many storyline in which legions of skeptical bloggers took down the mighty Dan Rather and CBS over the AWOLgate forged documents.

He's probably right and I shouldn't let my pinko biases keep me from acknowledging a situation where the bloggers once again got the better of established media and exposed some of its flaws and blind spots.

Personally, I was never convinced by most of the typographical analyses of the many-times-copied documents, but agnostic wasn't where the action was on this story.

Lefties have been pointing out that some of the bloggers who were on the story right away appear to be Republican operatives and conspiracy theories within conspiracy theories have been spawned to explain the whole thing as a diabolical ratf*cking.

The whole thing has been discussed all over the blogosphere, not just the right coast of it, but as is often the case, Jay Rosen has put out some of the best media analyses, such as this one (Did the President of CBS News Have Anyone in Charge of Reading the Internet and Sending Alerts?):

My initial statement on the CBS surrender: A clerk who understood the Net, read the blogs and followed the press could have seen the danger signs accumulating day-by-day. But CBS made statements and took actions that showed a reading comprehension score near zero. The outside reviewers should pick up the plot from there. But who gets appointed: only insiders? [PressThink]

Leuschke's links pointed me to TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook, a very cool implementation of the wiki concept with an entirely fresh way of presenting the reader's path.

Visit the site and start clicking some links to see what I mean.

Brian Dear has noticed a trend among new social network services (brianstorms weblog: Going Local):

There's a lot of activity in the social-network-based local listings recommendations arena right now. Think "friendster meets epinions meets local.yahoo.com".

...

InsiderPages and Judy's Book are social networks (notice the emphasis on "friends helping friends") geared at trusted recommendations of local goods and services. The hope is clearly that if your friends recommend something, you're more likely to try it out than if some stranger posts a recommendation in a local message board, or the local newspaper or other media outlet recommends it.

I suppose that would be true. Question is: will people be willing to join yet another social network and drag all their friends over to these services?

Good question. That's the Achilles heel of any new SN service.

I have some thoughts about how to keep the data in the hands of the users and make things more portable (not too different from the FOAF-approach Brian mentions in his article) but I need to sort through some of the ramifications of these ideas. Hey, that's what the blog's for! As Brain says of Judy's Book CEO:

Andy Sack, its CEO, has a new blog where he's going into amazing detail about the company's financing (amazing as in, I'm surprised the VCs are comfortable with him outlining the day-to-day saga of how he got funded). Nevertheless-- I'm really glad to see this openness and I hope it continues, and spreads.

When I get started, I'll make a new category to frame out my ideas there. (Disclosure: I am also pitching this idea to a few existing business entities.)

Bart Decrem, the producer of a political discussion site called Of, By and For, a site launched by Mitch Kapor (founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Joe Costello (who worked on the Dean campaign) and Decrem (head of marketing for the Mozilla project) writes:

This Friday, we are hosting our first live audio event and online chat session, a discussion between Joe Trippi and Mitch Kapor. Could you help us spread the word about this event by mentioning it on your blog?

This Friday, September 24, the site will host its first live event, a conversation between Joe Trippi, the campaign manager during the Dean campaign, and Mitch. Check out the site and make sure to tune in for the show (audio stream and text chat) this Friday, September 24 at 2pm PDT (21:00 UTC).

More details are at Of, By and For.

We need to be on this list: Technorati: BookTalk.

I see that Technorati is displaying Amazon links. I wonder if their system counts links to a book's home page and its Amazon page as two different books?

Then there's the problem that my preferred domain name for this book, thepowerofmany.com, currently resolves to x-pollen/many or some variation on that*

Are they catching sidebar material or just blog posts. Do I have to keep posting the ISBN somewhere? I'm going to make a page for this site called "How to link to the book online."

On that page I'll ask people to^ point to thepowerofmany.com, and give out the basic format for an Amazon affiliate link to my book and probably reiterate that the book's ISBN is 0782143466 (in case you want to set up a link to B&N or ISBN.nu on your own).

Perhaps I'll add make banner or badges or blogad-format links if bloggers want to add them that way.

• #2 in Computers & Internet > Digital Business & Culture > Culture (right behind Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised)
• #18 in Computers & Internet > Networking > Internet, Groupware, & Telecommunications > Internet Publishing
• #176 in Nonfiction > Politics > General

(I don't know why Amazon categorized this under Business & Investing > General.)

I just got sent an invitation to FreeFlixTix by a friend and as I poke around the site it's clear to me that the whole thing is a giant spam address collector by its very nature. I wish she hadn't used my "friends and family" address. :(

A friend and mentor of mine in local East Bay politics took a look at the website for this book and told me it gave him the impression that the book was quite technical.

While the book deals with technology, it focuses squarely on people and how they interact and work together in groups to accomplish common goals. It's about people and not wires and circuits and standards and protocols. It does discuss technology, though, and that's one reason why there's a glossary, but I write in plain English (as plain as I can make it, with my Irish heritage, that is) and I describe the ways groups of people are living together on the web by telling stories and anecdotes and by quoting interesting people.

This is not an engineering text!

So, a question for readers. What can I do to this website to make it seem more humane and less geeky?

If you're trying to call me on my mobile phone I may miss the call for a few days. The thing doesn't ring anymore and its about to come to pieces.

I'm also about to swith carriers but shhhh! don't tell Verizon.

I'm seeing some traffic coming in from an blog entry at hochan.NET that also lists Gillmor's We the Media, The New Media Reader, A Pattern Language, The Great Good Place, Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and The Healing Power of Doing Good.

I'd be much obliged if a ChineseKorean-reader could tell me what the entry says in full (not just the link to my book and this site).

Update: A reader has commented on this post to explain that Hochan is an A-List blogger in Korea who bought the book and reviews and recommends it in the entry linked from here. Thanks Hochan! And sorry about mistaking your alphabet for Chinese. That just shows my ignorance. (Read the comment below for more insight into the link.)

From Ftrain I found this link to a sex wiki that calls itself "the Internet's first wiki on sex."

This might make a good test-case for whole authority-of-wiki references debate. Will it spread disinformation or will it incrementally begin to give better information than other sources online or off?

In other wiki news, Wikipedia has hit the one-million article mark (via Waxy [via Joi Ito]).

I meant to note a week or so ago that Cam Barrett, one of the prominent first-wave bloggers who played an important role in the Clark campaign and has now worked for the Kerry campaign as well was one of the speakers at the IMHO panel I attended with Liza Sabater while I was in New York.

This was my first chance to meet him in person although, as I said to him, "Orkut and Multiply think we're friends." He was very friendly and smart, not suprisingly.

Looks like he's involved in a few other projects I've been hearing about lately, but I think it may be too soon to discuss them in public.

He was kind enough to give the book a plug on his legendary CamWorld blog (CamWorld: Thinking Outside the Box: The Power of Many).

I received a spam invitation to join a SNS, but then they wouldn't let me in...

I just updated the about the author page at this website.

The time has come to launch this site for real, after all the pre-launches and decloakings and other ramping-ups. I've finally got all the sections nearly looking the same, but I could use some help from a PHP maven since I've got a blog and a wiki combined at this site and a few of the seams are still showing.

In just a few hours I'll be getting in a cab to head for JFK to fly home to Oakland on JetBlue. I am way ready to be home. I miss my life. It appears that I missed the killer dry-heat wave too, though I caught the killer humid-head wave here. Both waves appear to have broken. It was nice and cool in New York today.

Levi Asher and I went to Sara Schaefer is Obsessed With You downtown Friday night, and saw Jonathan Ames talk, read, and do the Hairy Call; and were treated to a performance of a twelve-minute musical by Paul Ford and Steve Burns called Rat and Squirrel. It was witty, poignant, clever, funny, touching, and musically lively. Plus they've already got an animator lined up apparently.

A nice way to finish off my current visit to New York.

I also spoke to Scott McFarland on the Michigan Talk Radio network, syndicated to 28 stations in Michigan on Friday. It will air today (Saturday) but I'm not sure when.

He got into some interesting areas related to meeting people online, job searching, and just generally overcoming the stereotype of the Internet as an antisocial realm.

Oh, and Uncle T, my New York area interview airs this coming Monday, September 13, sometime in the 9 am to 10 am slot on WLIU.

If anyone manages to record it, please let me know!

The Anti-Defamation League has an article online titled "The Quiet Retooling of the Militia Movement". It includes a section about how the far right is learning to fine-tune the protection of their own privacy and publicity—basically, learning the lessons of public speech through the classroom of Internet:

The more recent resurgence of activity has attracted little attention, in part because militia activists generally keep a much lower profile then they did in the 1990s, when militia-related Web sites and public meetings were more common. Militia activists still use the Internet, but tend to prefer the lower-profile arenas of online discussion forums and mailing lists over Web sites. [...]

This lack of trust - because of fear of federal informants as well as fear of nongovernmental "watchdog" groups - governs many modern-day militia interactions.

After the Champaign County Unorganized Militia in Ohio was publicly identified in early 2004 as an active "patriot" group, one member of the group who frequented a Maine militia discussion board posted that "I would understand if you rather me not come to the board. Just ask. I don't know if I'm being watched or not. It's up to you guys." [...]

(Among the groups mentioned in the article is "The CREST", which has 922 members in a members-only Yahoo! group.) The question, "How public any of us should be?" has never been more important, regardless of our politics, religion, or habits. It's not just a matter of keeping your credit card number to yourself, or even of "never writing anything in e-mail that you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times" (as the now-old saw has it). Your very fundamental perception of life and culture can be both discovered and used against you, via the digital world.

(Link via David Neiwert's Orcinus)

I had the opportunity to meet my publicist Susannah Greenberg face to face yesterday (she treated me to a drink at the Rink Bar at Rockefeller Center, where we managed to catch a few breezes in this stifling New York heat), and she told me about this article in the New York Times from earlier this week: The New York Times > Technology > An Online Pioneer Resists the Lure of Cashing In

Ironically, I keep up with the nytimes better when I'm in California (where I'm a subscriber) than when I'm here in the city.

The impetus for the Time articles is the news about eBay acquiring a stake in craigslist, which of course we had the scoop on nearly a month ago.

I just taped a ten-minute interview with Jim Asendio of WLIU, a Long Island public radio station, that will air between 9 and 10 am this coming Monday (September 13). We covered a lot of ground in that time. Jim asked some excellent questions and we ranged from talking about the fast-pacing changes in the tech world to the new ways that people are reaching out and connecting to each other through the various technologies of the living web.

New York area readers should tune in for the interview this Monday and let me know how I did!

Chris Bowers at MyDD notes that blogs are competitive with cable news websites:

Over the past thirty-one days, the ten most trafficked political blogs, Dailykos, Instapundit, Atrios, Josh Marshall, Little Green Footballs, Wonkette, Political Animal, Teagan Goddard, Captain's Quarters and Real Clear Politics (listed in no particular order), totaled just over 28,000,000 unique visits. This compares favorably to the website traffic of the three 24/7 cable news networks.

...

By 2006, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the top ten blogs have a combined traffic significantly greater than the three cable news networks combined. I can only wonder at the operating costs of these ten blogs versus the operating costs of the other three websites (100-1?).

Patrick Di Justo writes about TxTMOB in the New York Times (Protests Powered by Cellphone:

As thousands of protesters marched through Manhattan during the Republican National Convention last week, some were equipped with a wireless tactical communications device connected to a distributed information service that provided detailed and nearly instantaneous updates about route changes, street closures and police actions.

The communications device was a common cellphone. The information service, a collection of open-source, Web-based programming scripts running on a Linux server in someone's closet, is called TXTMob.

In BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin writes that some messages were being blocked as spam during the protests:

In a BoingBoing post last week, one reader wondered if political motivations may have caused T-Mobile's reported "blocking" of messages from activist messaging service TxTMOB. Not so, replies BoingBoing reader Gabe, who says:

"I'm a network data analyst for T-Mobile. I've actually tested the network to see why those messages were blocked, and from the response our email-to-sms gateway is giving, apparently our immensely retarded spam filter thinks that txtmob's SMTP server is spamming us. Basically, if the network sees more than about a hundred messages coming from the same SMTP server within an hour, it just blacklists it. Stupid but true."

More from the Times article after the break:

During the RNC, b!X sent me a link to this entry on his Portland Communique blog: Tim Hibbitts Requests 'Retraction' And/Or 'Clarification':

So consider their request fulfilled. You have his quote, and you have all of our characterizations of it. Feel free to weigh-in on the controversy in the comments here. While, as we stated above, it's conceivable that we erred in not explicitly labeling our characterizations as characterizations, we nonetheless stand by those characterizations, and believe that Hibbitts' intent was to label Portland's liberals as police-haters, even if the term he actually used was "not terribly enthusiastic about the police."

(I've only just had time to get around to posting this now.)

One way or another, this implies that citizen media is having an impact.

Judith Meskill notes an article at Time.com called What Are Friends For (Relationship-Capital Management - The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com):

Deals vs. dates? Is that the difference between LinkedIn.com and, say, Orkut.com? Not really. But it is the difference between a LinkedIn, Visible Path, Spoke, or Ryze and the top dating sites.

The Social Software Weblog also has a spiffy new design. Kudos to the Weblogs, Inc. Network for the upgrade. I find the new look much more soothing than the old one.

Hard to know exactly how to characterize this but cognitive dissident John Perry Barlow has been leading revelers through a series of public dance mobs in the vicinity of the Republican convention (Dancarchy Reigns!)

He seems happy with the results so far:

Republicans were hard to encounter at first. They are being quarantined behind the blue membrane of the NYPD (for whom my affection and respect has only increased through this experience). In addition, they spend much of their time inside the Garden having a lot less fun than we were. (As several of them told us.) Levels of engagement have increased with fine-tuning. The results vary, ranging from the Stepford husband whom we made so nervous that he walked into a plate glass window to the sweet young delegate from Oklahoma who tore off his tie and joined us for the balance of the evening.

Liza Sabater, one of the contributors to my blog-about-blogging, Radio Free Blogistan, was involved in organizing one of Barlow's dance "pods."

Barlow was scheduled to speak last night at the blog panel called IMHO at P.S. 122, but didn't show. Throughout the evening Liza got text messages on her phone with news updates of his whereabouts and escapades, along the lines of "Barlow is currently being chased by the police."

(The panel discussion deserves more coverage. I took notes and will write something up when I have time to digest. The topics covered frequently strayed beyond strictly blogging into the realm we've been calling the living web in general. Jeff Jarvis moderated crisply - boy the man talks fast! - and Douglas Rushkoff provided some of the most nuanced insights of the evening (although all of the panelists did a bang-up job, in my humble opinion).

Today is the official publication date for the book.

w00t!

It will take a few weeks, though, for it to appear on most shelves. My mother has already asked me to drop by her neighborhood Barnes & Noble to make sure they'll put it in the window.

Joyce Park has been fired from Friendster and assumes it's because she blogged about her work.

Ross Mayfield has a good, short take on who Park is, how it happened and, more importantly, where the implications are when a YASNS fires a blogger:

There are so many threads in this to be explored. Employee blogging policy, education, leadership, PR, setting market expectations, architecture, supporting advocacy, supporting research, supporting open source, competitive strategy and social network relations.

Except, as he points out, it's up to us to explore them, because Friendster certainly won't.