November 2004 Archives

Professional weblogger Jeremy Wright has figured out that an eBay auction and a press release may do a better job of advertising his availability than a listing at Monster.com (Investor's Business Daily: Breaking News).

Not sure if it's appropriate to add semi-public events to Upcoming.org, so I'll just mention this dinner here. I plan to be there, perhaps with some copies of the book in the trunk of my car.

Blogger Dinner Thursday, Dec 2 in Berkeley, 7pm:

7pm At Beckett's. 2271 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley. (510) 647-1790

Doc Searls is going to be visiting and we were talking about how there are rarely blogger events in Berkeley, and we'd like to have one here. Please send me email at mary at hodder dot org to RSVP so that we can give Beckett's some idea of how many.

If Dori at Backup Brain is right, a large chunk of the tech-support generation have installed Firefox on their parent's computers over Thanksgiving or will do so during the coming Christmas / Hannukah / Solstice holiday, tipping the new browser war just a little more away from Microsoft's IE.

For anyone trying to learn how to popularize an open source project and promote and distribute it correctly, Firefox is a good model to emulate.

If you want to help evangelize Firefox, there's even a community site for that (Spread Firefox - Igniting the web) build with CivicSpace.

(And now I hear that Netscape is becoming an ISP - things are feeling very retro on the Web these days.)

Expect blog posts to ramp back up again around here.

If you want direct reportage from the Ukraine on their election crisis, then don't miss this Ukraine Revolution weblog.

This post includes a link to a "smoking gun" MP3 sound file documenting plans for vote fraud:

Voice records containing voices of members of Yanukovich head-quarters and government discussing the methods and ways of falsification were published by Ukrainian security services. It's interesting - will government "notice" it?

Looks like Corante's got another blog (Operating Manual for Social Tools) that I should be following here at POM. Where does David Weinberger find the time to contribute to so many weblogs? Also, I'm a little unclear of the overlap between this and other Corante blogs, such as Many-to-Many (to which danah and David contribute) and at least one other one that David contributes to.

<huffy>Plus why has Corante never asked me to write for them?</huffy>

Anyhow, here's a taste from the new(?) weblog (quoting from sociability first, technology second, posted by danah boyd):

A squad of TPM readers are outing congressfolks in the Republican caucus on how they voted on the DeLay Rule:

Quoting from Ch-ch-ch-changes

Rare is the PDF reader who doesn't also read Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo but what's going on there today is so interesting that I think it's worth everyone paying close attention.

Marhall has been running a series of posts today, Nov. 18, talking about the various reactions that his readers - let's call them "researchers" - have been getting from Republican Congressmen. The researchers are calling up and asking how the Republicans voted in yesterday's caucus. The question on the table was wether or not a member of the House leadership should have to step down if he or she gets in legal trouble.

In other words, if Majority Leader Tom Delay is indicted for violationing Texas' campaign laws, will he have to step down from his leadership job? Yesterday, accoring to ABC News, the answer was "no."

Today, it's a decided "maybe." Why? Because if Josh Marshall and his researchers....

As I just posted over at Personal Democracy Forum (Trippi says blogs driving Kerry camp's interest in recount):

On MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann has been one of the few television newshosts tracking down the issues related to counting and recounting votes and addressing potential voting irregularities (such as voter fraud and suppression), particularly in the closest states.

Without appearing in any way to contest the election, the Kerry campaign lawyers do seem to be pressing for a careful validation of the results in Ohio. A rush transcript I just received via email quotes Joe Trippi giving credit to the rumor mills of the blogosphere for keeping the recount / potential voting irregularities stories alive long enough to encourage the Kerry people to "get back into the game":

TRIPPI: I don‘t think there‘s any question about it. I mean, I think they were willing to walk away from it on election night. I think they wouldn‘t be sending anybody on this mission unless, except for the fact that the blogosphere went out, grabbed the story. And you know, it was something we were seeing all day at MSNBC. Citizen journalists were commenting on our blog of problems that they were seeing in Ohio. We have the make your Count Vote Project that MSNBC was running, has 2000 recorded complaints from Ohio. So these complaints were out there. But it was blogosphere that picked them up, ran with then, and then bloggerman yourself reported it. And I think it sort of got - another one of those stories that jumped in the mainstream media. And now all these campaigns are reacting to it, and I think even using it as a valid excuse to go in and see what‘s there and try to, you know, at least count every vote. Make sure some of this stuff didn‘t happen.

By far, Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion blog has been my favorite lately, especially for news and ideas related to blogging itself. Perhaps this site should have a featured recommended blog that can rotate whenever I get addicted to a new one? I already push headlines from a lot of weblogs relevant to the book on the Resources page, but you have to go looking for that.

Well, I'll think about it next time I tweak the site's design.

Anyhow, here's what caught my eye this morning, quoting from How to Pitch Into the Long Tail News Curve

In a report (PDF) published last month, Morgan Stanley analysts Mary Meeker and Brian Pitz discussed the impact of the long tail of content on the news cycle. They compared this to a similar phenomenon that occurs on eBay. Typically, eBay users have the greatest opportunity to capitalize when selling products that are at either new/scarce or near the end of their lifecycle and hard to find. Much the same, bloggers are having the greatest impact at either the beginning or end of a news curve, the analysts wrote…

We believe that one could view Web content in a similar way. For news content, typically a few well-placed sources are privy to an event first, with the news then rushing into the mainstream. Traditionally, beat reporters disseminate the news to others; with online publishing, any individual with a keyboard (or a digital camera or other recording devices) can disseminate information quickly. At the end of the tail - as time goes on - the news becomes the subject of more nuanced discussion. While many blogs deal with mainstream content, their very nature makes them ideal for dealing with the tails at the beginning and the end.

Last week I wrote about the long tail of content for iMedia Connection and urged marketers to get on board. This week, as a follow up, I thought I would explain one way PR people can immediately convert this theory into an executable media outreach strategy by pitching into the evolving news curve. Feel free to print this out and plug it right into your PR playbook.

As we say in the blogosphere, "read the whole thing."

In Towards tag-based bookmark management in web browsers?, Tom Coates proposes a bookmark-classification system somewhat similar to the tagging used at Flickr and Delicious:

So since playing with Flickr and working on a little fun project at work on (cough) folksonomies with Mr Webb, I've become obsessed with tags and the ways in which they can be used to build better navigational interfaces. Currently I'm interested in how we might use tags for better folder-less bookmark management in web browsers.

The way I see it, most people find the style of bookmark management commonly used in web browsers pretty much totally useless. Once you've added the two or three sets of bookmarks that you might use every day the bookmarks section of the web browser swiftly becomes very quickly a wasteland to which links may be consigned and never looked at again. After a while even the simple job of finding a URL that you previously bookmarked becomes so difficult that it is often easier to instead use Google to find the page afresh. Clearly there is something wrong here.

...

To summarise the problems with current bookmarking systems then, we could say that (1) the process is slow and annoying (2) that it requires us to continually refine and redevelop our taxonomies if we're going to keep track of everything, (3) that URLs can belong in a number of bins and that (4) we can be left with unmanageably large lists. An ideal system would therefore speed the process up of both bookmarking a site and retrieving it later. An ideal system would try to alleviate the problems of categorisation and would work as an a priori assumption that a URL might wish to be stored in multiple bins. An ideal system would not display all the links by default. An ideal system would, in fact, use tags...

...

In The Rise of Open-Source Politics, Micah L. Sifry discusses the influence of the new grassroots technologists on the past year's campaign:

Josh Koenig, one of the twenty-somethings who cut their teeth at the Dean campaign and a co-founder of Music for America, says, "We're only seeing the first drips of what is going to be a downpour." When he told me that in most high schools in America, students are using the web to rank their teachers, I thought that was a bit of hyperbole. But then I discovered RateMyTeachers.com, where more than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than 900,000 teachers at more than 40,000 American and Canadian middle and high schools. That's triple the number from one year ago, covering about 85 percent of all the schools in both countries.

Just imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives, and start rating other authority figures, like politicians and bosses. The future is in their hands, though the rest of us will be taken along for the ride.

(Micah is also, as noted previously in this weblog, my editor at Personal Democracy Forum.)

Scalzi is spreading a meme:

1. Open up the music player on your computer (if you have one -- the music player, I mean. Clearly you have a computer, because otherwise you couldn't read this).
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the "shuffle" command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That's right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It's time for total musical honesty.

1. "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling" - Righteous Brothers
2. "Junco Partner" - James Booker
3. "Down in the Cockpit" - XTC
4. "Cryptical Envelopment" - Grateful Dead
5. "Cup of Kindness" - Emmylou Harris
6. "Japanese Folk Song (Kojo No Tsuki)" - Thelonious Monk
7. "Pleasant Moments" - Scott Joplin
8. "Satellite" - Robyn Hitchcock
9. "All We Have is Now" - Flaming Lips
10. "A Soft Seduction" - David Byrne
11. "Dear Prudence" - Jerry Garcia

in RConversation: Blogger Corps?, Rebecca MacKinnon writes:

In the final wrap-up session of Bloggercon III, I suggested that socially conscious members of the blogging community (of all political persuasions) might want to organize a "Blogger Corps." Through it, bloggers could donate their time to help poorly funded activists or non-profit groups to figure out what blogging tools are right for them, set up blogs, and develop effective blogging strategies.

In Blog Post Spurs Potential Legal Trouble for Electronic Arts (Micro Persuasion), Steve Rubel writes:

The San Francisco Examiner reports that an anonymous writer who claims to be the spouse of an Electronic Arts employee has sparked an online venting session, drawing hundreds of disgruntled employees out of their shells to complain of slave-like work conditions. As a result, employees at EA, one of the country's most successful video game companies, are beginning to talk of unionizing and bringing litigation against the corporation.

It's time for a (dance) holiday!

in Kevin Sites: photoblogging Falluja, Boing Boing :

"Xeni Jardin:
Link"

Say, no one told me Skype had come out for the Macintosh (as of October 25!). This is great news. I've been waiting to try this out. All the kool kidz are using Skype (a free Internet telephony solution):

Download Skype for Mac OS X

Back on October 19, Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn aired an interview with me which is now available for listening online in Real Audio format.

I'd like to get the Bloomberg interview in some online format as well (note to self).

Also, now that I've kicked this bronchitis and election season is past, it's time to resume the Inkwell interview (in a public conference on the Well) with some discussion of topics beyond politics.

headphones on? falling rain, electric rawk remix.

From English hymn to African-American spiritual to Fahey acoustic guitar blues to christmas carol to jazz piano to cabaret to falling rain version, another improvised arrangement on a theme.

i think i'm getting the hang of this fretted instrument thing.

also, anyone speak french? some ukulele guy wrote something on his blog. jeff? annie?

With the hard launch of Firefox 1.0, Google appears to be hosting a Mozilla Firefox Start Page that will probably help with bandwidth management.

Andy Baio calls Firefox "the best consumer product out of the open-source movement."

My new motto is

What would Philip K. Dick Do?

In How BC04 made better use of its email list, Daily Kos points to Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated, usability maven Jakob Nielsen's "interesting analysis" in his Alertbox web column:

Although I don't actually claim that Bush won because of usability, I do think that wise use of email newsletters contributed to his victory. I analyzed the email newsletters sent out by both candidates in the week prior to the election....

Kerry supporters were bombarded by repeated fundraising requests, to the extent that many of them probably tuned out the newsletter in the final critical days. Although the Internet is great for collecting money from the masses, there is a limit. Kerry exceeded it. Bush sent more messages than Kerry asking supporters to get other voters to go to the polls and vote for him. This is a more appropriate use of the newsletter medium because it connects emotionally with subscribers. Being treated as an active participant in the civics process is more motivating than being regarded as an open wallet.

Bush also repeatedly sent out information that promoted himself and attacked his opponent in relation to current events (such as the Osama video). This is a good strategy: offering newsworthy content makes subscribers more likely to continue opening newsletters. Up-to-the-minute arguments are a classic use of email and gave Bush's supporters fodder in their get-out-the-vote efforts, thus reinforcing the newsletter's value in getting voters to the polls. In summary, Kerry used his newsletter to collect money. Bush used his to increase voter turnout, and he won because he was better at turning out his base. Understanding the strength of email newsletters thus directly contributed to Bush's victory, so his Internet team can claim some credit for the outcome.

Kos adds

The Dean campaign made the same error. Unfortunately, that institutional memory wasn't transferred to the Kerry campaign.

It was bacterial, it wasn't pneumonia, the zithromax killed the little buggers, and the prednisone kept my lungs inflated while my heart was breaking all week.

Off to celebrate a friend's birthday and watch the sun set over Alameda's beach.

Dave Winer's unconference BloggerCon is having its third second annual instance this weekend at Stanford. I am mostly following it in my aggregrator:

Lobbycon is always one of the best parts of any conference; hanging in the courtyard and talking to folks - both people I've read and not met, and friends and colleagues I see regularly.
JD Lasica, Bob Wyman, Stacie Kramer, Gabe Rivera, Frank Paynter, Tony Gentile, Chis Nolan .Phil Wolff, Steve Rhodes, Roland Tangalo, Andrew Anker, among the throng.

Lots of other folks posting on the conference.

A look back: Bloggercon 1, Oct. 2003

Susan Mernit: Bloggercon: Lunch and links.

P.S.: Susan, you seem to have told Blogger your blog is now called "an."

The editors of the Personal Democracy Forum have asked a number of experienced activists and commentators to take a first look back at the events of the last 18 months and identify the biggest impact technology has had on politics. The first responses are now featured over there (Election 2004: Lessons for the Future, part one).

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: it's the people, stupid.

That is, the effect technology had on the election is that it gave new tools to people for connecting with each other. This brought a stratum of society that has lacked traditional forms of community new ways to meet and interact.

Nonetheless, it seems that some of the oldest structures of community organizing, religious congregrations, had as much or a greater impact on the election. Perhaps we should be asking them what they were using. Telephone and newsletter? Sermons and Sunday School? Or possibly mailing lists, Yahoo groups and websites?

Regardless, my point is the same. The technology may be fascinating but it's people and their ways of congregrating and communicating and forming bonds that will drive politics and community organizing. The tools that best adapt to what the people want will always have the biggest impact.

Then again, if you ask jwz, the greatest impact technology had on the election was in subtly rigging the results below the margin of suspicion.

To add your own views on this discussion, you can post a comment to the open thread on the Personal Democracy Forum blog.

Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion weblog is bursting with great insights into blogs, public relations, and the way conversations are changing marketing online. I find that in the first year or so of a new blog from an insightful weblogger like Steve you get a lot of great thinking about the medium itself.

Old burnouts like myself start to find the medium itself a little boring to talk about for a while, so the fresh infusion of new blood and new perspectives is always more than welcome.

Today one of Steve's posts caught my eye in my news aggregrator (NetNewsWire), because he foresees a conflict that Dave Winer explicitly warned about when Atom began forking from RSS (Yahoo's Love for RSS Will Turns Google into Unbeloved Portal):

Interesting perspective from a European analyst, who believes that Yahoo’s embrace of RSS will have Google morph into a portal. What the writer omits, but you can already see it coming, is that Google will try to use its weight to build momentum around Atom as a competing standard to RSS.

The real Jeff Green is back. Do not read the previous posts by the Jeff Green pretenders who have been blogging here....

Jed Miller writes about building town blogs at Personal Democracy Forum (another site I contribute to):

Mark Glaser of OJR keeps a steady eye on the encounter between journalism and the Internet. In today's article he uses the lovely coinage "town blog" to describe a wave of new "hyperlocal" citizen media sites.

There's really good thinking here about microjournalism as a collaboration between editorial thinking and citizen anthills. Glaser's not boostering for "chaordic" journalism, but thinking intelligently about how the traditional and the new can collaborate

Looks like Chuck Olsen's movie is ready for prime time:

Just noticed that Chuck Olsen's film Blogumentary is premiering in Minneapolis on November 5th. Chuck started working on this - and posting - in 2003 saying:

We live in an age where everyone is a mediamaker. Blogs empower us to tell our story, spout and debate our politics, and share ourselves with the rest of the world ? or at least the 5 people who read our blog. What compels us to blog? How does it affect us, each other, our work, the mediascape, the world? Do bloggers have anything in common? Does the blogosphere have a life of it's own, like the emergent behavior of an ant colony excited by the discovery of food?

(via Susan Mernit's Blog.)

On the Creative Commons blog, Neeru Paharia writes about the beta version of The Publisher, an application that enables anyone to publish content with a creative commons license and host it permanently at archive.org:

Leveraging the Internet Archive's generous offer to host Creative Commons licensed (audio and video) files for free, we recently completed the 0.96 beta version of The Publisher, a desktop, drag-and-drop application that licenses audio and video files, and sends them to the Internet Archive for free hosting.

When you're done uploading, the application gives you a URL where others can download the file. It also is able to tag MP3 files with Creative Commons metadata and publish verification metadata to the Web. A HUGE congratulations to Nathan Yergler, who's done an amazing job with this. Also, a great thanks to Jon Aizen and the folk at the Internet Archive. You can download the Publisher from here - give it a test run and let us know what you think.

Also note that aside from being downloadable from Internet Archive, these tagged MP3s can flow on to P2P networks, and be identified as Creative Commons licensed (see our Lookup app we recently also updated to 0.96). Morpheus is currently the only file sharing application to identify Creative Commons licensed files."

(via Joi Ito's Web.)

We're waiting for the dust to settle around provisional ballots and the like but it appears that despite the distributed efforts of a revitalized liberal movement to get out the vote and mobilize as many supporters as possible, the Republicans managed to poll 3 million more popular votes than the Democrats in this presidential election.

Ironically, with Ohio in dispute, the precedent from last time around will prevent an argument for closure from the popular margin (although it looks to be six times larger than Gore's in 2000), and we may have to wait for the counting of provisional ballots and absentee ballots and possibly even recounts and the return of close examinations of the chad kind.

With the spotlight first on Dean for America and more recently Act for Victory, Move On, and organizations like that conducting unprecedented get out the vote efforts, less attention has been paid in the media to the largest ground game ever mounted by the Republican party. A closer look at the Republican's use of its large email list and targeted GOTV will surely be part of the postmortem on this election.

And so to bed.

According to Tom Burka at the hilarious Opinions You Should Have:

Dave Johnson of Seeing The Forest, a liberal who knows more about the history of the Republican Party than many Republicans, is helping Joe Trippi and MSNBC keep their hands on the pulse of the blogosphere during the coming election. Dave is blogging at MSNBC's Hardblogger and will be posting his insights and other bloggers' pearls of wisdom over there throughout their Election Day coverage.

I met Dave in Boston when we were both credentialed bloggers at the Democratic National Convention. He's a sharp cookie and a very nice guy and I'm pleased to see MSNBC including his voice on their blog.

Apologies for radio silence. Over the weekend I was celebrating my birthday but I've also been experiencing really bad asthma and some nonspecific aches and pains. It got pretty bad last night so I went to Kaiser today and they told me I've got (if I'm lucky) bronchitis or (if I'm not) pneumonia. Well, at least I know why my energy has been so low lately.

Don't worry about tomorrow. If I have to crawl to my voting location to cast a ballot I'll do it.

Also, along with the rest of the editorial staff, I'll be blogging election day at Personal Democracy Forum tomorrow. We'll be trying to pay special attention to the effects of technology on the race.