So does life really begin at forty?
Given that I've just started playing music this year, maybe so.
This is also the 7th birthday of my online journal in its various incarnations.
I'll be offline most of today.
Up to Point Reyes later.
All I want for my birthday is to see the last of that guy with the mysterious thing on his back.
Greg Palast reports a man videotaping early voters in Florida
Steve Garfield will be watching the polls and posting his findings on his video blog as he did in Massachusetts during the primaries, when he checked the compliance of campaign workers with voting regulations (150 Feet).
Jon Lebkowski points me to a new site called Video Vote vigil, a grassroots effort to document voter intimidation.
(Personally, I don't think they should use that newly distributed video of Governor Bush horsing around as their hook. I suspect Bush's gubernatorial "the finger" video is probably giving him a percentage point or so in swing states. It's one of his funnier, more natural moments, and it reminds me of the old Bill Graham giving the finger photo they now display at the Fillmore.)
I'll be at the Technorati Party in SF, Thursday Oct 28 party this evening. I never added it to my Upcoming.org event calendar feed since I wasn't sure it was OK to enter it over there.
I'm still looking for a good virtual book tour management system!
I may stick a box of my books in the trunk in case anyone wants a copy.
Hey, looks like Upcoming just added a new most popular metros and events page. Power-law discussion leading to long-tail discussion here we come.
The essay collection, Extreme Democracy, edited by Mitch Ratliffe and Jon Lebkowsky, has been coming out in PDF form published via the book's blog. (I imagine there's a wiki in the works as well.)
Adina Levin's chapter on Campaign Tools should be required reading for any activist.
(Now I'm off to Personal Democracy Forum to blog it over there too.)
Rob Goodspeed correlates creativity and online culture on his blog (On "Cool Cities" and Blogs):
My theory: cities with the richest local online culture (measured in number of blogs, and use of a select group of other geographically-bound websites) will reflect those cities with the highest numbers of creative class people.
He also notes that as a critical mass of people become able to present themselves online, the old idea that the Internet inherently transcends geography is now complemented by a proliferation of local, neighborhood-centered groupings.
Although the internet was initially treated as a global affair, limited only by language (and perhaps not even that), recently geographic logic has emerged in the medium. New technologies have allowed for a flowering of locally-based online communities.
This has been made possible both by an increase in the size and use of the internet, but also by new technologies which make it easier to generate webpages. One of the most important developments was a variety of software programs which enabled people to create weblogs with little to no specialized technical skills. Blogs have lowered the barrier for more than an elite participation in creating content for the web.
(via Waxy Links)
Jon Stahl looks at the success of the online campaign to punish the Sinclair TV network for planning to make its affiliates air an anti-Kerry film under the rubric of news (A new network takes on an old one... and wins!).
The network aired a watered-down, balanced show that included clips of a pro-Kerry film and even looked into Bush's Texas Air National Guard record.)
Stahl asks, "What lessons does this hold for future "rapid response" campaigns?" and suggests a few:
- Don't agonize over which tactics are best - try 'em all and continually report back on what seems to be working. In this fight, we quickly figured out that going after advertisers worked well.
- Use technology tools to quickly aggregate information and make it available to everyone. In this case, one person put together a quick, simple database where folks could report in on Sinclair advertisers. This allowed a massive, distributed boycott to take shape overnight.
- All of this stuff is way easier when you can leverage already-existing media interest. But you can amplify your voice through the blogosphere.
- You can win. So fight.
What do you think our take-homes should be?
Just a reminder that a public interview is underway in the Well's Inkwell conference (The Power of Many: Many in the inkwell).
So far, the discussion has been pretty wide ranging and everyone is welcome to participate.
The platform of this decade isn't going to be around controlling hardware resources and rich UI. Nor do I think you're going to be able to charge for the platform per se. Instead, it is going to be around access to community, collaboration, and content. And it is going to be mass market in the way that the web is mass market, in the way that the iPod is mass market, in the way that a TV is mass market. Which means I think that it is going to be around services, not around boxes. I postulate, still, that 95% of the UI required for this world will be delivered over the browser for the same reason that we all still use a steering wheel in a car or have stayed with<< < | > >>for so long. Everybody gets it. But this will, by definition, be an open platform because the main value it has is in delivering information and communication. Notice that the big players, Amazon, eBay, and Google have already opened up their information through Web API's. It is Open Data coupled with Open Communication built on top of Open Source that will drive the future, not Longhorn.
Dare Obasanjo comments:
When I read Adam Bosworth's post this weekend, it became clear to me that folks at Google have come to the same conclusion or soon will once Adam is done with them.
So where do we begin? It seems prudent to provide my definition of social software so we are all on the same page. Social software is any software that enables people to interact with one another. To me there are five broad classes of social software. There is software that enables
- Communication (IM, Email, SMS, etc)
- Experience Sharing (Blogs, Photo albums, shared link libraries such as del.icio.us)
- Discovery of Old and New Contacts (Classmates.com, online personals such as Match.com, social networking sites such as Friendster, etc)
- Relationship Management (Orkut, Friendster, etc)
- Collaborative or Competitive Gaming (MMORPGs, online versions of traditional games such as Chess & Checkers, team-based or free-for-all First Person Shooters, etc)
Interacting with the aforementioned forms of software is the bulk of the computing experience for a large number of computer users especially the younger generation (teens and people in their early twenties). The major opportunity in this space is that no one has yet created a cohesive experience that ties together the five major classes of social software. Instead the space is currently fragmented. Google definitely realizes this opportunity and is aggressively pursuing entering these areas as is evidenced by their foray into GMail, Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, and most recently Google Groups 2.
However Google has so far shown an inability to tie these together into a cohesive and thus "sticky" experience. On the other hand Yahoo! has been better at creating a more integrated experience and thus a better online one-stop-shop (aka portal) but has been cautious in venturing into the newer avenues in social software such as blogs or social networking. And then there's MSN and AOL....
This foray by Google into building the social software platform is definitely an interesting challenge to Microsoft both in the short term (MSN) and in the long term (Windows). This should be fun to watch.
I've always felt that presidential elections are, on one level, a competition between narratives. In one sense, people vote for a story, not necessarily for a protagonist or even an ending.
We've seen that supporters of the two parties each are looking at almost entirely different realities. Last Sunday the Suskind article in the Times reported an unnamed White House official scoffing at a reality-based journalist and suggesting that as an empire, "we" are now able to create new realities simply by acting.
(Total tangent: does anyone have the film rights to Nine Princes in Amber?)
Jay Rosen is trying to lasso a long list of seemingly related ideas into a coherent thought in PressThink: Too Much Reality: Is There Such a Thing? and he's asking for help.
Drop by his comments and add one more reality to the mix. Or if you really want to help him out, maybe subtract one. Otherwise, I'm afraid we may never be able to boil it all down into something graspable.
It seems that logging is a no-brainer. Systems already can do journaling and to the computer (by which I mean a central processing unit) everything happens in a totally linear way as it is. The real trick of what we today call blogging is to determine what information to make public to anyone, what information to make ubiquitously accessible to you and a set of people defined as needing or deserving access to that same information, and what to hide, destroy, or at least keep private.
So blogging points to logging, something it's silly not to do if the hardware is already thinking in those terms.
And wikis are at least pointing us in the direction of better ways to build knowledge stores online collaboratively, though your typical wiki software these days needs to evolve another layer of abstraction or three before ordinary people can set up and administer (and tweak the design of) wiki pages.
But now this whole "folksonomy" thing (such as the group tagging at Flickr and Delicious) is making me wonder: Why can't I tag every email, every action I take through my 'puter as I do it or as it falls away?
My interview with Dan Gillmor in the Well's public Inkwell conference has come to a close and Jon Lebkowsky's interview with me in that same venue has now begun, concurrent with Lisa Goldman's interview with Farai Chideya of Your Call Radio.
We'll be popping up in each other's interviews as our topics are nicely interrelated.
Anyone can read the interviews as they unfold and submit questions. Well members can post questions directly and nonmembers can submit questions via email.
Yes, I do have a birthday coming up, the big four-oh on October 30. (That will also be the seventh anniversary of this journal - w00t).
People never know what to get for me, but this year it's easy. First of all, the perfect gift for me is to buy a copy of my book. If you already have a copy, buy one as a gift for someone else. If you've already read the book please review it at Amazon or elsewhere.
Speaking of Amazon, I do have a
wish list there. It's kind of random but I do want all the things on it.
Then just in general, since my latest obsession is playing my ukulele and guitar, I would love anything related to that.
A pick. Some sheet music. An instructional LP or video or DVD. Books of music theory or explanations or terminology even. Just about anything to do with music is fair game.
There, so don't say I never told you. Also, I should mention that my general rule is that of course it's great to receive a gift but I don't like anyone to feel obligated and I realize life doesn't always permit that level of involvement. Sending me some good wishes is also appreciated and I'm not strict about day-and-date (which is why B and I tend to celebrate each other's birthday-months - or birthmonths).
Aldon Hynes, who reviewed my book at Amazon and on his Orient Lodge weblog also started a discussion about the book in the book club group of the Omidyar Network.
Soon afterward, Marnie Webb from CompuMentor and Tech Soup and N-Ten (whom I met in person when we appeared on a panel together at the N-TEN conference in San Francisco a month or so ago) asked me to join another conversation there.
I need to do my homework, but it looks like the site is designed to faciliate cross-collaboration among nonprofits. Functionally, it offers many of the features of social-network systems with much of the functionality of a wiki.
Seems like a strong core group is there already. I will report more as I continue to study it and participate.
A piece called The Value of Values at Omidyar gives some guidance and clues by relating the network's statement of values:
- We believe every individual has the power to make a difference.
- We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen.
- We are actively building a network of participants because we know we can't do this alone.
- We invite you to learn more about us and some of the people we're working with.
Something tells me that for this book and its attendant quest my site will have to provide a locus for interaction, but we don't yet have a critical mass of either posting or commenting "citizens" yet, so I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.
Also, I continue to be weary of entering personal information about myself over and over, each time more meta- than the last.
Add to glossary: Omidyar Network
Note to self: Need easy shorthand plugin translator to make glossary links on the fly.
Haven't posted any to-dones in a long time, so there are so many they'd make our heads explode.
Here's a "classic" from just a little over two years ago - interesting all the already obsolete software brand names i was working on at the time (Radio Free Blogistan):
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
To don't
Things that won't get done today:
review tapers addendum for dead letters magazine
finish installing pmachine
install and test rss monkey
set up godetia and wildflowertrips domains for b
set up virtuser mail forwarding for antiweb.net
send book promised to friend
make household budget
plan/prepare for moving site root to radiofreeblogistan.com
*set up rss monkey*
learn opml
final notes on j-school panel
jump menu for sidelists
http://www.onfocus.com/snap/cats/
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/index-media.asp
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/
rush to judgement mediajunkie.com/rush
don't know if suexec or cgiwrap available <==figure out!
Please Notify in my event log. Does that mean rss feed received? How notify?
possible to do e-mail list, just send summaries?
Also, how about "Mail this entry..."
w.bloggar
kung-log for MT
make blog books page, link from masthead
make colophon
. typography
. software, radio, dreamweaver, fireworks, textedit, palm desktop, eudora, ie, mozilla, opera, omniweb, netscape
. hardware: mac, speakers, camera, handspring visor, pen and paper
xmltree
PEP is my codename for my dream application, the Personal Expression Platform
start blog directory process
include blog reviews
blog books
required reading
by tool
blogger
radio
movabletype
livejournal
other
respond to blog-related e-mail
try out manila
consider bbCMS for ezone/thedeadbeat/mediajunkie/memewatch
Type design, bold vs italics vs quot marks, not having a style sheet or set design, semantic <strong>? it's more like <span class="thoughts"> and defining that to look italic? accessibility and standards sometimes feel like an infinite regress
tractionpeople have died of exposure
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/nation/crawford/index.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28609
http://mcns10.med.nyu.edu/intro/brain.tumor.primer.html
turing test for spam arrest
q: how to use short listings in rss feed instead of entire post?
abude brazil ins story meme
(originally posted bodega and thus somewhere in the archives.... let's see... ah yes. If I had posted here on 10/15 it'd've come up automatically in the margin).
Zogby doesn't think so (Edgewise: Simon World blogs Zogby's Hong Kong talk):
- The impact of the Internet has been huge. In 1996 about 4% of voters got most of their political information from the net. In 2000 it was 31%. For 2004 it will be in excess of 50%.
- The second key impact has been in fundraising. Firstly Howard Dean, then John Kerry have used the internet to balance out and neutralise the fundraising power of Bush and the Republicans. Ironically Al Gore, the "father" of the net, didn't capture this avenue in 2000.
- Blogs: Zogby saw these as important, with each having its own constituency. However they are unlikely to change minds; instead "they serve to stoke the fires of anger." In other words, blogs are preaching to the converted.
Some try to reach out, though, don't they? Kevin Drum practically bends over backward to maintain an evenhanded sense of moderation. The whole libertarian strain online represents an area of potential crossover if not realignment. Perhaps when we are not in thick of an unusually conflicted election season we will see something beyond strictly partisan blogging?
Spread the word. Let's help them get their equipment back.
(via MZ, who adds: "This stinks.")
>Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:07:59 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "J. Segel"
>Reply-To: jsegel@magneticmotorworks.com
>Subject: [BA-NEWMUS:14634] stolen gear
>To: "Bay Area New Music Discussion"
>
>hey i don't know if anybody knows anybody up here in montreal, but:
>
>all of camper van beethoven's guitars and violin and our merch got stolen last night in montreal. if anybody has any contacts up here, tell them to look for our stuff in stores. or hunt down the robbers and kill them.
>
>jonathan's violin with stickers all over it
>jonathan's 1971 strat (sunburst) (with a couple stickers, etc.)
>victor's 1969 precision bass (natural finish)
>david's green charvel surfcaster
>david's black jackson surfcaster
>a couple ibanez acoustics
>johnny's black eric clapton strat
>greg's frankenstein strat (black) and tele (tobacco sunbusrst) (warmoth esp or something)
>plus mike duclos' precision bass and ezster balint's gibson sg and danelectro semi acoustic.
>maybe more.. not sure yet.
>a few tshirts and a road case of cds. including the email list we collected last night, preventing this from going out to montreal fans!
>
>and i liked this city!MAGNETIC -- Jonathan Segel PO Box 460816 S.F. CA. 94146-0816
Anil Dash (An unkind community) wonders if the tenor of (at least) the political blogosphere has reached a point of no return in terms of loss of civility and mob behavior (as when a popular political blogger "sics" his readers on someone espousing an unpopular viewpoint):
I wonder if there's any other steps we can take to raise the standards of the weblog community so that we can expect more civil behavior. It's clearly an issue that can only be solved by cultural change, but I find surprisingly few people who even see this as a problem, let alone any who want to see change.
I was on NewsRadio 7000 WLW in Cincinnati today and was asked how blogs will affect politics in the long run. Despite the polarization evident in this national election, I actually think that as more voices speak up, the dialogue can become richer and more nuanced.
The host of the interview, Bill Cunningham flattered me by calling me a "great American" and seemed every bit as interested in the way blogs were both able to question the veracity of the CBS / Dan Rather / Texas Air National Guard documents and to offer counterevidence to Vice President Cheney's claim in his debate that he had never before met Senator Edwards.
Asked to name some influential political weblogs I pointed Cunningham's listeners to Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's Daily Kos.
He also asked me if weblogs lean left or right and I told him my view which is that they lean every which way and that you can find just about any perspective you go looking for.
Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry have relaunched Personal Democracy Forum. The site will run two or more feature articles a week, and shorter blog entries on blog time. There's also a newswire pointing to interesting stories about the politics and technology, a list of the most influential political weblogs, and a dynamic, Technorati-driven list of the most talked-about congresscritters in the blogosphere.
Full disclosure: I'm a contributing editor for the site (I've just posted my first blog entry there). I'm in good company!
Joe Bob says check it out.
Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, and others have put together p2p-Politics as a way of enabling people to point each other to political ads online.
From the site's FAQ:
Does this have anything to do with p2p filesharing?
It is peer-to-peer, or people-to-people, but the files are not themselves shared. Only links to files are shared.
Where is the content hosted?
The Internet Archive hosts the content under a Creative Commons license. The links on our site and in our emails point to the Internet Archive.
Is Creative Commons sponsoring the site?
No. The site uses Creative Commons licenses to make it easy to collect and share the content, consistent with copyright. But Creative Commons is not sponsoring or supporting the site.
Last week Jon Stewart put down Tucker Carlson on the latter's CNN show. Today, Jeff Jarvis lays out how the publicity afterward exemplifies the living Web:
Welcome to the future of TV!
In old TV, a moment like this came and if you missed it, you missed it. Tough luck. In new TV, you don't need to worry about watching it live -- live is so yesterday -- because thousands of peers will be keeping an eye out for you to let you know what you should watch (we call that metadata now) and they'll record it and distribute it.
There's much more, with links.
Friday morning I got up at the crack of dawn to make a phone appearance on WJR AM in Detroit (news/talk at 760 on the AM dial). That was fun. Then this morning at 6:05 am I spoke with Jim Sharpe on KTAR in Phoenix, the number one news station in the Phoenix metropolitan area, where we talked about the efforts to freep online polls and how you can trust what you read online. My spies in Arizona tell me that I may have been heard by about a million sleepy commuters today.
Oh, and Friday afternoon I taped a nice long interview with Dr. Moira Gunn of TechNation. I'll put a link to the RealAudio up as soon as its available, and Friday was when my appearance on the Simply Put show on Bloomberg Radio aired. I'm going to ask them for a copy of that too and see about putting it up here on the site or getting a transcript made. Both of those two in-depth interviews got into some very interesting areas and topics.
(I'm posting from a hotel in Ashland, Oregon. They offer free wireless everywhere on the premises.)
danah boyd, who's made a practice of studying how younger people use social media (as contrasted with how we old fogeys tend to do so), noted recently (apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture) that the Web 2.0 "excitement" about RSS and syndicated feeds and suchlike may be missing the fact that it doesn't match up well with the online habits of younger people:
As i wrote before, i quit using RSS/syndication readers. Sitting in at Web2.0 for 20 seconds, i was intrigued by the ongoing hype of RSS - how everything is going to be syndicated and how everyone is going to access data that way. For this audience, i think that it is certainly true. But i'm wondering if that's really true beyond the info-nerds.
Syndication is based on an email model, relatively close to a mailing list model. You subscribe to a set number of things and the program informs you of updates. Like email, updates come in the form of a new item. If you leave your syndication tool alone for too long, those new items build up and you're faced with an INBOX-esque situation, an eternal queue waiting to be checked off. Of course, there's also a morbid pleasure in keeping that number at zero, motivating most digital control freaks to obsessively and compulsively check off the items as read. Syndication readers are the modern day whack-a-mole.
It should be noted that Dave Winer has always advocated an all-on-one page form of aggregration and is a staunch opponent of the email model that danah associates with syndication.
Matthew Yglesias takes a look at the organizing effort from the left blogosphere to oppose the Sinclair TV network's plans to air an anti-Kerry film on the eve of the election.
These activities aren't limited to one ideological camp. The right blogosphere drummed up the swift vets story and complained about it not getting covered sufficiently by mainstream / "liberal" networks, got the planned Reagan biopic moved to cable, and so on.
Matt also points to the Urban Tribes site, where a blog supports a book that looks at some of the new ways people are organizing their lives.
My publicist sent out a press release today relating The Power of Many to the online post-debate spin efforts discussed in an entry I posted after the first debate.
In it, she quoted mistakenly affiliating Joe Scarborough with FOX when in fact his show is aired by MSNBC. I'm sorry for this error I made in haste.
(A FOX newscaster personally alerted my publicist to the error via email, which is kind of cool in and of itself.)
I hate making mistakes, especially in public! Anyway, I apologize to FOX and to MSNBC as well as to Mr. Scarborough.
Here's the corrected paragraph for the press release:
After the vice presidential debate, conservative cable talk-show host Joe Scarborough mentioned that he'd gotten "in trouble" after calling the first debate for Kerry, presumably either by a concerted campaign of criticism from hisFoxMSNBC viewers or from his higher-ups at the network. Either way, the growing media savvy of the audience and its desire to play an active role in managing the post-debate spin is a perfect example of the power of many at work.
Yesterday I engaged in a long interview / discussion with Tom Moroney, one of the hosts of Simply Put, a politics-oriented show on Bloomberg Radio. We got into some fairly interesting areas, such as questions about whether the Internet is a social or antisocial medium, and how you can trust the credibility or authority of information sources that change from moment to moment (as opposed to, say, a newspaper, that goes to bed at night for better or worse).
The interview will air this Friday at noon in an hour-long slot. Simply Put airs nationwide on satellite radio: XM channel 129 or Sirius stream 102. In New York City, tune to 1130 on the AM dial. In the Hamptons, 96.7 FM.
You can also listen to the station online via its streaming feed.
After Jerome Armstrong posted a nice blurb about the book at MyDD and Daily Kos, a long discussion thread has ensued, mainly at dKos.
Stirling Newberry, of BOPnews (and formerly the Draft Clark movement) objects to our use of the word many in the book's title, seeing it as code for old-school mass-media broadcasting (Daily Kos :: Comments The Power of Many).
I think he suggested the book should be called The Power of Spherical Networks, but I'm not sure that's catchy enough.
As far as "calls to action" go, there's also a great subdiscussion about how to go beyond blogging from behind a screen and get into actual organizing in the real world. This comment (Here is a list of things we need to do) itemizes a number of avenues that online activists can take to pursue their agenda beyond the blogs.
Note, of course, that Kos is a pro-Democrat site, but that grassroots-driven political reform is not inherently a matter of left or right ideology.
I've been meaning to blog about Paper Airplane since April when I first read about it at the Nanopublishing weblog, which got it from hatch.org: Flying the Two Way Web.
Technically, it's a Mozilla plug-in, but implementation details aside, what's intriguing about it is the way it builds on the P2P model to faciliate ad-hoc group formation:
Paper Airplane ... empowers people to easily create collaborative communities, known as Paper Airplane Groups, without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Paper Airplane Groups are stored locally on a user's machine. A peer-to-peer network is created between all of the Paper Airplane nodes that are running in order to resolve group names, reach normally unreachable peers due to firewalls or NAT devices, and to replicate content.
To get an idea of how it works, look at this slideshow.
Today we begin an interview in the Well's public Inkwell.vue conference. In it, I am talking to Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News columnist and weblogger and author We the Media.
We have crossed paths a few times in the past year while working on our respective books and I expect a lot of complementary synergy between the two of them, as Dan focuses on the changes to media and the effects of participatory journalism while I touch on that but look at the power of many across a wide spectrum of pursuits.
The interview (and anyone is welcome to submit questions) is already off to a great start.
Interestly, in a few weeks the tables will be turned and someone on the Well will be interviewing me about my book. More on that as it comes to the fore.
Some Dan links:
In the process of interviewing people for the book I would often end up extracting the most salient bits you can find to illustrate points in the words of my sources. Inevitably, there would be other fine nuggets of observation that would end up on the cutting-room floor. Because of the relatively unlimited space online (if not unlimited attention spans) I've been planning to publish more complete interviews with many of my contributors.
In this case b!X has beat me to the punch by publishing our interview at his PORTLAND COMMUNIQUE site, so I'll just do the webby thing and point you over there for the complete conversation.
By the time you've heard of a popular band they often represent a kind of supergroup built out of the hottest bands from some microscene you've generally never heard of. Via Andy Baio's Waxy Links I stumbled upon an interesting article detailing how MP3.com, the now-defunct online music site, used to mine their data to identify bands that were not yet showing up on the national charts.
Here's an interesting look at the common characteristics of bands that were making an impression on their local scenes without major-label support:
- These bands were generally pre-Soundscan (they didn’t show up on local retail sales figures because they only sold their CDs at shows.)
- They were organized online using a combination of IM, blogs, and street team tools to get the word out.
- A majority of them were playing all-ages venues which didn’t normally pop up on the radar of club goers. (Who wants to hang out with 15 year olds? ;-) )
- The genres of music were genres that weren't typically represented by MTV, radio and retail and were clustered around emo/pop punk and grindcore.
- These bands generally played around 50-100 shows a year.
(Emphasis added.)
Derrick Oien, the author of the blog entry, makes this additional interesting observation:
Most content businesses are driven by people with a subjective understanding of content whose taste can discern whether or not something can be a hit. My hypothesis was that when you have a large number of people, quantitative data can be used as a proxy for subjective or qualitative measures that typically come from A&R etc.
Paging James Surowiecki....
Here's the blog ad Miles Kurland just designed for us (based, of course, on the beautiful cover design):
Scott Rosenberg has also been blogging Web 2.0 and his view of this moment in the evolution of the web- as- a- business platform is instructive:
What we're seeing is that a lot of the ideas and technologies that have incubated over the last couple of years, and have been showcased at places like the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, are now on the radar of the venture-capital world. Ideas for new web companies built around RSS syndication and blogs, wikis and social software, innovative search technologies and mobile applications are hatching. And once more we're witnessing the strange, messy process by which the enthusiasms and ideas of technologists are packaged, streamlined, prettified, sometimes improved and sometimes wrecked, as business people struggle to figure out how to make them work for the general public - and how to make money from them.
In terms of the evolution of the Web as a collective human endeavor, this conference's name is a little off - I'd say we're on Web 6.0 or 7.0 by now, at least. But in terms of the evolution of the Web as a place for people to try to invest, for a lot of the people here - "scarred veterans," as William Janeway just described them, of the turn-of-the-millennium speculative frenzy - I guess it feels like only the second time around.
He makes the Bubble 2.0 joke too, and points to Jeff Jarvis's eventblogging at BuzzMachine as well as Jeremy Zawodny's.
Women's-right website Failure is Impossible offers a primer for countering astroturf letters- to- the- editor campaigns (Fight Back Against Killer Astroturf).
The page explains how repetition of boilerplate language in letters to the editor of newspapers can be detected through web searches for key phrases.
It targets Republican astroturfing but admonishes astroturf-sources on the left as well:
In keeping with the frankly partisan theme of Failure Is Impossible, I list here only pro-Republican Astroturf. I deplore the fact that Democratic and liberal organizations are also not merely encouraging their supporters to write letters about specific issues, but actually providing boilerplate text. (Yes, I'm talking about you, MoveOn.org.) If you're going to send a letter, write it yourself. Sending Astroturf is cheating!
It's interesting to think about the fine line between boilerplate and suggested language as well as the conflicts between liberal partisan urges and the impulse to pursue reform regardless of ideology.
(Josh Marshall has recently been exploring the idea that national greatness conservatism, embodied by John McCain among others, represents the reform impulse on the political right.)
It seems that I'm not the only one out there who sees the ukulele as the perfect punk rock instrument.
This article, Punk Uke: The four-string Underdog rudely rocks by Christopher Arnott from last year describes an eerily similar path to my own:
[Y]ou can wake this restless monster up gently with a quaint strum, then by the second verse start slamming the strings with more abandon, until by the end of the song you're scraping and scratching the barest and brashest notes out of the instrument like a demented Dashboard Confessional car crash.
Now that punk itself is the province of hit-making conglomerates and prefab teen sensations, where can we turn for some gutsy, unadulterated chords that don't remind us of the crap on the radio? I say it's the ukulele, and I'm not alone. A new breed of punks has brought revolution, raw roots and cultural controversy to the uke community.
The ukulele's Hawaiian origins as an ornate small guitar to accompany beautiful island warblings was long ago warped by the American and British desire to use it to play drinking songs. The riot-uke or uke-punk contingent is the next obvious step in a dishonorable but highly entertaining tradition.
Adapting rock and punk songs to the ukulele is not so much a deconstruction as it is wanton destruction. Feeling those tough nylon strings sproing and churn under the savage swipes of fingernails, holding on while the hollow reverberations shake that vulnerable little wooden body, hearing the chords bend out of tune and into their own realm of acoustic feedback.
Filtered through the four twangy strings of a ukulele, every song becomes a brittle shell of its former self, knocked down to its barest punk essentials. There's a perversity to this, but also a divine purity. Folk, bluegrass and blues influences come to the forefront. So does a chirpy, silly glee.
The first song I learned from the gleefully bizarre songbook Jumpin' Jim's '60s Uke-In, one of many useful uke guides prepared by the hyper-enthused uke evangelist Jim Beloff, was Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay." Beloff's arrangement of this deeply moving soul classic transforms the song into a travesty of its former self. And how could it not? You're playing a doom-laden, world-weary Motown-tinged lament on a jolly little instrument best suited to pep songs like "The Varsity Rag." It's impossible not to add cheery "do-be-do-be-do"s to "Dock of the Bay" when you're playing it on ukulele.
I raided guitar-tab Web sites for the chords to the most unlikely uke fodder I could think of[.]
Stripped of its echoing drums and rampaging vocals, Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" reveals its hidden kinship with "I'm Henry VIII I Am."
A little more quotage and some good links below the fold (but read the whole thing, you'll want to get every drop).
Jeff Jarvis is "eventblogging" the Web 2.0 conference.
I'm just glad they didn't call it Bubble 2.0.
Somewhat reminiscent of the Hollywood movie of a few years ago called Pay It Forward, One Million Acts describes itself as
... an event that is driven by the Urban Leadership Foundation (ULF), with the goal of funding job training in low-skilled, low-education, low-income urban areas. The vision for graduates of the ULF's Job Training Programs is to increase motivation and build self-respect, offering a real opportunity to learn a skill toward earning for a living wage.... [W]e engage communities to become self sufficient, by becoming creative in their own development.
At the site you can register an act of kindness you promise to undertake on behalf of a stranger.
According to the site's About page, ULF is "a nationwide social enterprise, non-profit job training and leadership program, which won the 1999 Governor's Award for best Texas non-profit in volunteerism" and its goal is "to be a self-sustaining entity by connecting its mission and financial strength to cause-related marketing activities specializing in urban communities throughout the United States."
Daily Kos (a Dem-friendly political community) has been going through some growing pains over the last few weeks, triggered in part by the departure of Theoria, a popular and well-established poster.
dKos founder Markos Moulitsas has put up an interesting post over the weekend addressing the subject. In the process, he talks about the lifecycle of his community - one I suspect is mirrored on other large, mature sites featuring intense participants. He writes:
I've seen it three times already, and now I'm seeing it happen again. We have an established community. The influx of traffic means lots of new faces who don't know the established etiquette start posting on the message boards. There is tension as the established guard clashes with the old guard. Eventually, the old guard is outnumbered, and seeing fewer and fewer of their old online friends, kind of fade away. It's like seeing your favorite pub taken over by a new scene.
Might also post this without my voice, because though the strums and plucks can be labored, there's a reasonably successful set of parts, lead, counterpoint, bass, and chords all overdubbed by machines of loving grace.
Not sure who I'm channeling on this stumbled-upon patriotic standard, but I'm sure who I'm not.
Not content with the track record of the Democratic party or its surrogates in winning the post-debate meta-debate media framesetting in the 2000 election, left/liberal online activists circulated chain mail messages online yesterday, itemizing the contact email addresses and websites of the major print and cable TV news and punditry outlets with a concerted effort to hammer home a pro-Kerry spin online throughout the next few news cycles.
One diarist at the left-wing Daily Kos collaborative media site posted a yardlong list of online pollsites, lifted with glee from the right-wing Free Republic message board.
When right-leaning news commentators (example, Joe Scarborough) and networks (example, Fox) began ceding the victory in this first debate to Kerry and seemed halfhearted in their assessment of Bush’s performance, left-wing blogs republished their commentary online, vowing to hold up a mirror to these same pundits and anchors should they start mouthing a refreshed set of talking points in the next few days.
One would assume that the right-wing bloggers* and online activists were voting in polls early and often themselves and would be quick to pounce on and hammer home Kerry’s one bona fide gaffe (his use of the phrase “passing the global test”) and probably praise Bush for staying on message and communicating on a more populist level.
It appears, though, that in the first news cycle after the debate the distributed pro-Democrat spin team was succeeding in creating or protecting a perception that Kerry won the debate. I have yet to see an online poll that gave the debate to Bush.
Still, it remains to be seen whether the reaction shots displayed on TV despite the candidates’ agreement will tar the President with the equivalent of Gore’s sighs in 2000 or whether popular conservative opinion will find something off-putting about Kerry’s agressive dominance of the terms of debate last night.
In the meantime, I have never before seen such a campaign in which the supporters shared so widely an analysis of the role media plays in determining elections and felt themselves to be taking an active role in an important measure of success or failure.
Eventually, the traditional press may catch on to the salient fact of the living web. It is not left or right, conservative or liberal. It is decentralized and two-way and many-to-many and populated by human beings with real voices, not statistically abstracted data points.
Update: If the Republicans were caught sleeping in the online postdebate spin game after last week, they won’t be this time around, according to this post at Kos.
