Tired of end-of-the-year top ten lists and predictions? Try Blake Ross’s Ten predictions for the new year. Here’s my favorite:
Yahoo, acclerating its bid to dominate the social space, will announce that it is buying the actual societies of 32 cash-strapped governments. Citizens will be allowed to link their existing names to their Yahoo accounts.
Happy New Year!
Ron Fournier, political writer for the Associated Press, put an article on the newswires on Christmas Eve summing up a trend over the past few years: Internet Fosters Local Political Movements. Sound like a familiar premise? The examples he cites include MoveOn, Meetup, and BlogsforBush.com. Not sure what prompted the article, but there's no time like the present to note an ongoing trend I suppose.
Meanwhile, I just blogged over at PDF about eBlock, a service that provides neighborhood-level websites: eBlock addresses the 'bowling alone' problem.
Bookmarklets were always a hack, says Kevin Burton in his Feed Blog: Bookmarklets 2.0?. Is it time for some (don't say it!) standards?
A day or so after reading that a number of national governments are unhappy about Google Earth's aerial views of their sensitive buildings and installations, I read in the Telegraph (UK) about Insurgents 'using Google Earth'.
There's no real way to avoid these trade-offs, is there?
First Typepad had its embarassing outage and now Delicious is feeling some pain:
Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear [sic] a number of continued hiccups. We've taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience.
Updates will be posted on our blog as we have them.
Ruh roh! Rumor has it that U2 has been booked for Fest. This may be good for turnout but it may also be kind of a nightmare for just hanging out and being mellow.
I got a call from a producer of a CBC show, The Hour, last night, looking for someone who could discuss the Siegenthaler brouhaha on Wikipedia from both a cultural and technical perspective. Hey, I'm that guy! They taped five minutes with me this morning and it should be airing about now.
Since I don't get CBC here in the States, I have to wait till they send me a CD or tape of my appearance to found out how I did. It's funny being a talking head twice in two weeks.
They were happy to cite my book as proof that I'm an "expert" on the subject of emergent authority and the living web. It's ironic, of course, that earning credibility by publishing a book is very pre-web.
And how did they find me? Google, of course.
Sheesh! What Web 2.0 startup or blog fad *won't* Yahoo acquire?
Yes, this is envy speaking.
Jeremy Zawodny comments on potential synergies between Delicious (I stopped typing the dots a while ago) and MyWeb 2.0.
Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book for Peachpit / New Riders’ “Voices that Matter” series, called Dispatches from Blogistan. She is interviewing a number of bloggers (including yours truly) and of course blogging the process of writing the book.
Now she has posted an entire chapter in her blog: Dispatches From Blogistan :: chapter two: the urge to publish is universal and irrepressible and is inviting feedback.
It’s a brave move and one that I think we’ll see more of. Why not get commentary and insight and even criticism before the copy is locked down on paper?
Here’s a little excerpt, but you have to click through to get it all:
By the time Julius Caesar assumed power, the written word had become a powerful political tool. Caesar was quick to realize that the roads linking his far-flung provinces could facilitate more than just the movement of troops and merchants. In 59 BCE, he dictated that daily reports from Rome be posted throughout the empire for all to see.
Called Acta Diurna—literally, “news of the day”—these missives recorded on sheepskin and metal sheets not only listed official decrees and judicial rulings, they also broadcast the results of gladiatorial contests, announced notable marriages, births, and deaths. They also recorded astrological omens, as well as recaps of ever-popular celebrity trials and executions. These uniform daily reports lent a sense of cohesion to the motley Empire. Respect for the written word wasn’t universal, of course. In 48 CE, Caesar’s successors sacked and burned the Alexandrian libraries, but the Acta did continue without a break until the year 200. By then the marauding hordes were moving in from the eastern steppes and not that interested in old news from Rome. But the legacy of the first daily news lives on.
Some etymologists believe that the word journalist derives from these Acta Diurna.
When Napster hit it big a lot of people pointed to the success of the Grateful Dead despite having almost no hit records and ascribed it to their liberal tape-trading policies. Part-time Dead lyricist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow spread the gospel of music sharing and how a liberal intellectual property regime had fueled viral word-of-mouth advertising for the band.
Not only that but Deadheads played a big role in the development of early online communities, as I touched on in the book. There were a lot of hippies enthralled by the potenial of the personal computer (Timothy Leary saw it as the next LSD), and Deadheads helped get the Whole Earth spinoff, the Well, off the ground back when it was a dial-up BBS. Deadheads were also overrepresented in the early days of Usenet, spawning the first subdivision of the old net.music newsgroup. While taxonomical purists objected to the creation of net.music.gdead (now rec.music.gdead) before broader genres and forms had been split off, a filibuster by Deadheads finally led to an agreement to give their own space, helping crystalize the Usenet principal that spawning new branches in the tree can help prevent people from getting on each other’s nerves.
The Dead’s tape trading culture experienced a digital revolution, as mangy old cassettes gave way first to DAT (digital audio tapes) and later to CDs and raw non-lossy digital files. The folks at etree.org tried to model the old bubble-wrapped snail mail tape trees in a digital format to enable people to download and share digital music more easily. Along the way they conceived of the ultimate Grateful Dead archive of live concert recordings, to preserve and distribute the music well past all of our lifetimes.
At some point the etree folks approached Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive to ask if he’d be interested in mirroring (backing up) their collection. This led to the creation of the Live Music Archive, which offers downloadable and streaming recordings from a huge and growing collection of bands and other musical entities.
The Dead collection on the Archive supposedly exceeded 2300 recordings when contact from the Grateful Dead management led to all of the downloads being removed from the website and audience recordings only being made available for streaming.
The fans reacted, mostly shocked by the seemingly greedy action of their heroes. Pro-EFF blog Boing Boing accused Jerry Garcia’s widow of being behind the shutdown. Rumors and petitions spread. The mainstream media picked up the story, and the explanation for how what happened happened started changing day by day. Dead bass player Phil Lesh posted an announcement on his website saying he had not been consulted and disapproved of the change. Barlow condemned the policy, seeing it as a repudiation of the Dead’s formerly open trading policy (and, incidentally, belying one of the music-sharers’ primordial myths).
The New York Times picked up the story and ran with it for several days. As did the AP, CNN, Yahoo News, and so on. Deadhead blogs also provided commentary and shared tidbits, binding together themselves as a new offshoot of the longstanding Deadhead online presence. I did my best to cover the story at Uncle John’s blog.
As of yesterday the band changed their policy. Now it’s OK for fans to download (fan-created) audience recordings and to listen to streams of (crisper but unofficial) soundboards. Most of the outraged ‘heads seem satisfied by this compromise. (Many bands do not permit soundboards to circulate, even on LMA.) And the band reaffirmed its commitment to the community-building activities of tape trading and music sharing.
What was essentially a PR snafu (the music was alreadey out there and was already showing up on Bit Torrent sites and elsewhere) may have been pulled back from the cliff, and a 40 year-old band that broke up more than ten years ago managed to stir up ripples throughout the online world and the mainstream media. It’s been quite a week.
I’m taping a discussion about this with CNN blog reporter Jackie Schechner this evening. It will air at 7 pm eastern tomorrow (Saturday, December 3) and again at 1 pm on Sunday (December 4).
“Enough with the Grateful Dead already,” writes so-called Bill. “What happened to Cecilia?”
Well, I didn’t get into the 50,000-words-in-November winners circle. (Some people hit that number in the first week! I on the other hand, have a life.) I did, however, hit my personal goal of 30,000 words by Nov 29 and I took yesterday off, partly out of exhaustion. Ironically, I still have not reached the scene that inspired the title of my novel.
I expect I will keep writing about 1000 words a day throughout December, maybe with slightly more frequent gaps, with a goal of reaching 50 or 60,000 by the end of the year.
We’ll see what happens after that.
