Designing Social Interfaces - Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media
Originally uploaded by xian
The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out.
Yay!
Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:
gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian
was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?
As you may know, I am writing a book with Erin Malone called Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media.
Erin is the the founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and hired me to be its third curator. Today she is a partner at Tangible UX, a consulting firm, and I maintain the library as a YDN design evangelist on Micah Laaker’s Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) team, in collaboration with Luke Wroblewski’s Front Doors and Network Services (FDNS) team.
The top of my agenda in the past year has been to identify, gather, and document a family of social design patterns: observed practices that work well in resolving common design problems in social applications. I’ve been looking for and teasing out patterns that enable social environments to thrive and sustain themselves.
Fortunately, I had a leg up or two. While there were very few documented community or social media patterns in the library, there are a wealth of specs, papers, patterns, presentations, and guidelines scattered around the intranet, and there was Matt Leacock’s first take on a social media toolkit, shepherded together on an internal Yahoo! wiki.
More importantly, I looked out across the landscape of the web and drew on my own personal experience as a user, analyst and addict of online social experiences.
At BarCamp Block last year I facilitated a session on social media patterns (at least that’s what I was calling them then) and the net takeaway was an amazing mindmap of potential patterns. Quite a few of them turn out to be social moments, social behaviors, or social objects; or scenarios that illuminate patterns without being patterns themselves. But the outline and cloud diagrams we built from that brainstorm helped get me started sorting out some possible organizing structures beyond what we had internally a Yahoo.
This mindmap went through a series of iterations and refinements. Meanwhile, I started presenting on the topic of social patterns at BayCHI, at South By, at the IA Summit, at Ignite and more recently at TechPulse and soon PLoP and Interaction09.
Taking your half-baked ideas on the road and presenting them to a demanding crowd of payng customers is a great way of figuring out which ideas have resonance and which miss the mark. Presenting ongoing work in progress is tough: you make yourself vulnerable and open to criticism. But the criticism will come eventually anyway. Why not hear it now while you can still address it and incorporate the best ideas of others into your work?
For that matter, I feel it’s essential to be clear about one thing: almost none of this work on social design patterns is original. Yes, of course I am naming patterns and writing them and perhaps throwing in a nugget of experience here and there, but for the most part I am still curating these patterns. I’ve been stealing from everybody!
We hates plagiarism so we cite sources and point back to originators where applicable. I’ve proposed that the nascent PLPL (Pattern Language Markup Language) standard include an attribution element, with a common structure for reflecting sources, reuse, derived work, and licensing matters.
Furthermore, in our book we are inviting a wide range of leading practitioners, thinkers, and bloggers to contribute essays on one or more of the pattern families we’re developing for the book. Because, yes, the book is in many ways an offshoot of this ongoing social pattern collecting effort. And in that same spirit we’re both interested (Erin and me) in experimenting iwth methods of opening up the writing process and seeking feedback, correction, criticism, and contributions before the book’s ship date.
We’ll probably post patterns in progress on a wiki and in the meantime we will both be posting thoughts about the chapters we’re working on on our blogs. I’ll also post some draft patterns here at least until we have the wiki process figured out.
My next post in this series will be about a set of fundamental social design patterns I’m pulling together in Chapter 2.
I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.
So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.
At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.
I’m having second thoughts about Notchup. The other day I checked my mail in the morning, as is my wont, and found an invitation to Notchup from a friend who left Yahoo a while back to work with venture capitalists. I wondered if this was something he had had a hand in, but I didn’t ask. I went and signed up because it sounded interesting.
A few years ago I had some interviews at LinkedIn for a position that didn’t work out (didn’t work out for me, at least) and they asked me at the time for suggestions and ideas about additional businesses or products they could build on top of their existing platform. I was gung ho at the time about the idea of a reverse-auction style site for hiring. Just as Priceline reversed the polarity on hotel and plane bookings by having customers bid what they are willing to pay and having vendors match that, I figured that job searches could also work in reverse.
Instead of applying for a job, you could advertise the sort of work you are willing and qualified to take on and prospective employers could apply to you and try to make the case that you should “hire” them to be your new boss. The LinkedIn guys suggested that that’s what they were already doing but I thought there was still something missing from that model.
So Notchup seems to be somewhat in that same ballpark, which was why I thought I’d check it out.
Next, I saw that they had a way to import your personal info (effectively, your resume) from your LinkedIn account, if you have one. That sounded a lot better than entering all the data myself, again, so even though I had qualms about this violating LinkedIn’s terms of service, and even though it’s generally not a good idea to give your login credentials for one site to another site (even if “all it’s going to do” is scrape some data from the screeen), I went ahead and did that.
So then Notchup offered to enable me to invite my LinkedIn connections into their beta, saving those people the trouble of applying. I started that sequence and went through my list of contacts, which is long so this was tedious, unchecking the folks I figured are either definitely not looking for a job, or whom I don’t actually know that well, or whom I believed would have no interest in the latest social network thingamabob.
I assumed I would have the chance to write a personal note, something along the lines of
Hi! I’m checking out this new site called Notchup. I don’t know much about it and I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I thought you might be interest in checking it out too.
Unfortunately, before I was given an opportunity to write a note or even review the boilerplate they were going to sign my name to, I was notified that the invitations had been sent. This is not as bad as what Tagged.com and some other sites have done, tricking people into virally inviting their entire address books, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.
All that morning and the next day I got email notifications of friends joining Notchup, and a few personal notes from people asking me if this was for real - because we’ve all gotten spammy invitations in the past. When people asked I told them the gist of what I would have written in the invitation, but many people just joined, apparently trusting me. By now I wasn’t sure what the person who had invited me was thinking.
Then, the other day I saw a message from Russell Unger on the IA Institute members mailing list establishing that he had done more (that is, some) due diligence and actually read Notchup’s terms of service, and that he had uncovered some troubling clauses in the user agreement:
9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.
10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.
As Russell pointed out, this sounds a lot like signing up for Notchup means agreeing to receive spam.
He also pointed out another pair of clauses:
18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (“NotchUp Account”), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUp’s web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.
19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.
So now I’m really concerned, particularly about seeming to vouch for a site and luring a bunch of best contacts into it. I’ll keep an eye on Notchup but so far I don’t like what I’m seeing, and to those I invited in before researching the subject further, I apologize.
I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of social web design patterns).
If you’re interested in joining this conversation, let me know and I’ll invite you when the list is set up.
I just heard today about Not Just A Number, a community journalism project coproduced by the Oakland Tribune and InsideBayArea.com.
It endeavors to tell the real human stories of Oakland homicide victims, rather than letting them become merely statistics.
The site speaks for itself, and I feel like I might be cheapening it by talking about how it works technically (there are maps that show murder sites that lead to multimedia testimonials about the victims, and so on, but how it works isn’t really the point).
It just seems like the right sort of response (among many) to one of the worst crises in my adopted home town. It’s not like it solves the problem, of course, but it feels like a way to keep the humanity in the picture. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to other, possibly more positive, community needs?
At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.
These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).
The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.
Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.
In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.
When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.
TechPresident, a project of Personal Democracy Forum (which I used to write for), in cooperation with the New York Times and MSNBC, has launched a site called 10 Questions where anyone can suggest a question for the presidential candidates and anyone can vote the suggested questions up or down.
It’s a kind of more open version of the YouTube debate concept or the recent mashup Yahoo! did.
In round one, you ask a video question, you vote on the best questions, the top ten questions get selected.
In round two, the top ten questions are presented to the candidates, candidates post their video answers, and (here’s the beauty part) you decide if they actually answered the questions.
(via Zephyr Teachout, who’s always up to something cool.)
This is a quandary for me. I try to keep my LinkedIn network literally to people I know and have worked with or with whose work I am familiar. From what I can see, you seem like an excellent person to know, I’m flattered that you enjoy my posts on that list, and I appreciate your providing that context since so many invitations I get have robogreetings on them.
I couldn’t bring myself to click the “I don’t know Jack…” button, but since I take LinkedIn literally (I want to be able to recommend people from my own direct experience) I also don’t feel right accepting your invitation.
I hope you understand.
Just got a call from an organizer named Barbara with the local Barack Obama for President campaign, telling me they are opening a new Northern California campaign office in downtown Oakland, and inviting me to a grand opening party for the office on 4136 14th Street (near Broadway) this Sunday, September 30, from 1 to 5 pm.
I’m thinking of going. I haven’t gotten involved in a campaign yet, nor have I picked a candidate, but I do like what I’ve seen of Obama so far, even as I wish he would take a harder line on ending the war in Iraq.
They say the party will have music and they expect the media there so they’re hoping to get the word out, so consider this my first volunteer effort for the campaign, trying to get the word out about this party just a little bit more.
At BarCamp Block I first heard about plans for She’s Geeky, a tech (un)conference for women by women. Immediately, I was intrigued. It sounds like a great idea, I love the title, and the organizers are some of the coolest folk I’ve met on the geek circuit.
One of the prime movers is Kaliya Identity Woman Hamlin, a strong advocate of the OpenSpace unconference model for events.
She’s Geeky takes place October 22 and 23 in Mountain View, CA (near Palo Alto). Here’s a description In their own words:
This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.
Kaliya goes into some more detail about here “motivations and hopes” on her IdentityWoman blog, and addresses any concerns folks might have about exclusivity (which is a good thing, because even in this male-dominated tech world, I sometimes get that twinge of entitlement when something is for me, about me, catering to me and my ilk, etc.), saying, “My motivation is not to create an event that is ‘exclusive’ but to help create a space for women who some times are very isolated in different niches of the tech world. One women I spoke with yesterday recently found herself being one of only 12 women at a tech conference of 600.”
I have no doubt that She’s Geeky will be a watershed event and I look forward to reading about it and studying its impact.
I’ve written about MAPlight before but from time to time I feel the need to post an update about the amazing work it’s doing. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to this nonprofit, although my direct involvement is limited.)
Since the last time I mentioned MAPlight it’s gone from just documenting donations to California politicians to covering the Federal level as well, at a new site that launched back in May, called Our Congress (“Our Congress tracks every vote and campaign contribution for all U.S. Senators and Representatives”).
That alone is a huge addition to the service it provides. If you’re interested in what Congress is up to, also check out OpenCongress, another project that has received support from the Sunlight Foundation (as has MAPlight).
Then in May, MAPlight won the NetSquared innovation award for “social impact, sustainability, and technical innovation,” taking first prize in a contest based on open voting online, and earning a $25,000 prize grant.
More recently, MAPlight announced a set of customizable widgets “that allow anyone to track presidential fundraising on their own blogs, social media sites, and personal Web sites.”
Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis.
If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation.
Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash is at mash.yahoo.com/xian21370.
Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the problem is really panels that are underprepared or have too many participants. After moderating a panel with five participants last year I’ve decided that that’s too many for a 45 or 50 minute slot. I think four (including moderator) is the max, and three or even two is probably ideal.
The first panel I’m proposing pertains to my ongoing book project (working title: Presence of Mind), on the subject of online/digital identity, reputation, attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Last year, my panel, Every Breath You Take (podcast, my slides) seemed to go over fairly well, despite the gawdawful 10 am but really 9 am because of daylight savings Sunday morning slot (you must recall that Saturday night - and, really, every other night - at SXSW involves a lot of drinking for most attendees.
I took to heart the positive and negative feedback and so the sequel this year will feature just three participants: myself, Ted Nadeau returning from last year, and Andrew Hinton, whose presentation on communities of practice at the IA Summit this year was such a huge success. We’re going to strive to go beyond the typical talking-head panel format and enage the audience in innovative ways. We’re also going to try to take the conversation past the grounwork-laying, high-level philosophizing of last year and hand the attendees some practical tools for building on what we’re tentatively calling the “human operating system.”
If this sounds appealing to you, please go vote for Online Reputation: And I Do Give a Damn about My Bad Reputation.
My second proposal draws on my experience running Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library and moderating a mailing list for pattern authors. I’ve recruited Jenifer Tidwell, the leading figure in UI patterns; Austin Govella, who can talk about implementing a pattern library in a commerical context at Comcast; and James Reffel, also now at Yahoo!, who will share what he learned getting eBay’s pattern engine off the ground.
Luke Wrobleski’s talk on patterns at SXSW last year filled a large room and generated a lot of interest and I’m hoping to serve that same constituency by sharing practical experience and advice in our panel Design Patterns: the Devil’s in the Details, which we described this way:
Patterns ground frameworks like Rails and Django drive libraries like Prototype, and enable rapid product development at companies big and small. But what happens when patterns go wrong? How do you know when a pattern is right? We’ll examine common issues facing groups who use design patterns and share our experiences at making sure patterns go right.
There are a lot of other great proposals. I kind of wish I could sort my existing votes into star order to remind myself of the ones I’ve already deemed must-sees, but here are a few I’ve been able to recall or find.
Hit me up in the comments if you’d like to recommend another panel or presenter as well.
Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job.
I’ve finally checked it out. Mark was clever enough to give me short precis of the project:
Here are the questions (to users) the research is designed to address:
Mark said he was planning to run a survey of users so if he notices this post, he can chime in and let us know “some of the findings on how personifying the interface effects users motivation levels.”
Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.
According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.
I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?
Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.
I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.
Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons
Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.
I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.
I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.
I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.
I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.
It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.
(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)
I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.
Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.)
Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li and her collaborator are using a full suite of “living web” tools to write their book, Groundswell (why does that name sound familiar?): Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): 7 ways the Web makes writing a book better & faster:
Collaboration with a wiki. Charlene and I have put as much as we can into a SocialText wiki. It’s contains research interviews, title ideas, the latest table of contents, the elements of the proposal that got us here, everything. I just added a page which tracks all the chapters as they move through various writing, editing, and review stages. We don’t generally use the Wiki to write the chapters — the drafts still move back and forth by email, partly since SocialText can’t quite handle all the formatting flexibility that MS Word can — but copies of the chapters do live there. A bicoastal collaboration needs a wiki. We also share it with other interested parties including my boss, Charlene’s boss, and our editor at HBS Press.
This blog for testing ideas. I can’t count the ways that a blog helps. When we think we have a good idea, it goes up here. For example, the five goals of a company for social computing, which became the core of the book. We put our outline up here for your review. That post became extremely useful, because I reference it in every email I send to people I’m trying to influence or interview. People doing interesting things contact us because of the blog. And I’m not even getting to the uses of the blog for promotion, which will start after the book is written, but well before it’s published.
Del.icio.us for gathering research documents. Every story, vendor, YouTube video, and anything else on the Web gets tossed into the del.icio.us bucket. I rarely used to bookmark things — now I bookmark everything. These sites are even classified with our own proprietary set of tags that indicate what chapter they relate to. (We’ll share this when the book is closer to done — right now it’s proprietary.) I don’t believe we could have written this book without del.icio.us.
Email for everything — but highly personalized. Every single contact in this book — and there will be hundreds and hundreds — will have been made by email. I’m sure you’re not surprised that I email Charlene 10 times a day and do a few IM conversations, but I’m talking about making introductions by email. If I need to introduce myself to somebody, I send a personalized email describing the book in one sentence, linking to the blog post about the book, and telling them what I want and making it clear I have researched them and know what they are about — and I frequently get a response the same day. This email might take 15 minutes to write, but it’s worth it — it’s the opposite of mass emailings, highly personal and personalized. (I recently invited a CEO to speak at our Forum in October and got an affirmative response within two hours — astounding our events team.) Where do I get the email addresses? Forrester has a database that may or may not help. Easier is finding the PR email address on a company’s site. Often somebody I know, knows it. Sometimes I use Zoominfo’s PowerSearch. And sometimes, if I know the email address of somebody else at the company, I guess based on that format. That actually works — recently got the CEO of an Italian company to get back to me that way.
At first I had big spreadsheets full of contacts I was pursuing on Google docs but I’ve found a better way. I just flag all incoming and outcoming mail that relates to contacts. The yellow flag means I’ve pinged somebody and need them to get back to me. Then I just check all those flags when I’m in followup mode. It’s not ACT, but it works for me!A big monitor in a quiet office. When I am ensconced in my home office with my high-speed Internet, VOIP phone line, home network, and big flat monitor, I am highly productive. The big monitor has made a big difference — I no longer feel cramped and squeezed by my laptop screen, and I frequently have one thing up on the laptop (like a Web site, or edits I need to address, or an interview) while I write on the big monitor. When I’m not at home, my productivity goes down. My home office, while it’s in the basement, also has a window out onto my lawn, a fireplace, a hardwood floor, big whiteboards filled with the stuff I’m working on and my kids’ artwork, and quick access to the kitchen and my family when I need to decompress. Makes all the hours possible.
A phone line that follows me anywhere. Forrester has an Avaya phone system with a cool little feature — an Internet app I can run on my laptop that turns any phone into my office phone. At my home office, I can call Japan using Forrester’s phone system, conference people together, transfer them to other Forrester extensions — everything I can do at my desk. And if I go anywhere else, I can do this with any phone line — my mobile, Forrester’s Foster City office, or my parents’ house. People see my caller ID as if I were calling from Forrester, and my voicemail is one click away. I find this far better than giving everyone my mobile phone number.
Firefox and Netvibes. I use Firefox for everything possible, because the tabbed browsing and the bookmarklets make it very efficient for me. I cannot survive without tabbed browsing since I am typically browsing 4 or 8 things at once to build a chapter. (I know IE has tabbed browsing now but it’s too late, I’m happy with Firefox.) I use Netvibes to track a surprisingly small number of blogs including Micropersuasion, The Church Of The Customer, The Long Tail, Blog Maverick, and Seth Godin. I also have up TechCrunch, GigaOm, TechMeme, and TechDirt, but they post so frequently that I don’t read them unless something catches my eye.
(via allaboutgeorge)
If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.
In an interesting rambly ‘meme of the month’ post at her famed CultureKitchen website, called Radical Fringe, Liza writes:
… Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp, confirming my theory that you’re not a true net native if you don’t know who Christian Crumlish is or if, at least, he doesn’t know who you are. If you don’t know who he is, then you have to read his book
. It’s freaky how almost of the pioneers of the net have one or two degrees of separation from Xian.
But is it freaky, really, or am I just an exceptionally good stalker?
Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!):
First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and we’ll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web - Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.
We’ve also worked really hard at making our user interface simpler, and more intuitive. We’ve been spending months doing user testing, and listening to you, our users, collecting and prioritizing what you wanted, what you liked, and what you hated about Technorati. We haven’t gotten it 100% right yet, and we’re going to keep working hard to improve, but I think we’ve made a big step forward with this launch.
…
With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more.
In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):
First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.
1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?
I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.
2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.
I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.
3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?
I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)
I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.
4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?
I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.
I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.
5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?
My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.
6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?
I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.
On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago.
Now I’m learning that the site encourages new members to submit their email usernames and passwords. It then scours the user’s address book, sending spam invitations to all of the email addresses it finds, sent as if from the new member, and follows up with reminders. (Much like WAYN and the original version of Plaxo.)
It also make the email addresses available to “marketing partners” on an opt-out basis.
It’s nearly impossible to find out who’s behind the site. (Its registration is associated with p.o. box in San Francisco.)
It doesn’t pass the smell test.
Shun. Avoid. Eschew.
Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of mine:
When social networking sites started cropping up everywhere in 2004 a lot of people wondered what they were for. Some had clear purposes. LinkedIn is for business/professional networking. Others are for dating. But many of them seemed more like a proof of concept waiting for a business model. The next logical step to look out for is to see businesses and sites with existing purposes and flows of people and data embracing social networking as a service to their communities (and, incidentally, as a way of redoubling those flows.
Amazon appears to making tentative steps to test out these possibilities.
A lot of political blogs are reporting today that White House staff and operatives evaded regulations and used outside email services, such as their RNC accounts, resulting in the deletion of reportedly five million email messages:
Thing is, email is harder to kill than Dracula. Email messages inherently hop from server to server (in packets) on their way from sender to recipient. Each of the interim hop-stops might easily have a backup copy, if the system administrator is doing a good job.
Remember how the Iranians painstakingly reconstructed shredded documents from the U.S. embassy in Tehran by literally piecing together the strips? It would be much easier to recover and reconstruct these supposedly “lost” five million email messages the White House doesn’t want us to see.
I’ve been using pobox as a mail forwarding service since 1995 (I think I read about it in Wired and I was sold on the idea of a middle layer between my correspondents and my potentially ever changing email addresses). When I started owning my own domains I simply forwarded custom (“vanity”) email addresses from them to the pobox account and had everything funneled into one place.
Today I was poking around the pobox website and had a few questions about changing my settings and getting around the site, so I used their customer service form to send in two comments. Literally within minutes I had personal replies from their customer service rep, Kate Marstin.
In both cases her replies were informative, helpful, friendly, and personal. I did not feel like I was communicating with a robot or corporation.
I think my account at pobox is paid up through 2011, but effectively they’ve got me as a customer for life. Even when their website is overwhelmed by the myriad spams they are filtering out for me and all of their other customers or when I have trouble finding the right link to change my preferences, I’ll stick around because I feel like there are real people putting their actual selves into their work and their presence and their communication with their customers; and that they consider me, one of their customers, to be a real person worthy of a human response to a simple question.
Thanks, pobox.
I was discussing yesterday with Jay Fienberg how it bothers me that some of the ostensibly supportive comments on Kathy Sierra’s blog include thoughts along the lines of “I am a big man so I am not vulnerable to these kinds of threats.” Not only does this sort of reinforce the chauvinism, as Jay pointed out, but it’s also ludicrous. I don’t care if you’re tall and male and you work out. Someone can still shoot you, jump you, drop a safe on your head, or kidnap your children. It smacks of role-playing fantasy to believe that your macho body will avert the evil eye.
Laura Lemay wrote a particularly thoughtful piece on the Sierra situation (lauralemay :: blog :: kathy sierra, or, imminent death of the net predicted) and noticed a difference in how men and women have tended to react:
Mostly as I read the comments on Kathy’s post and on other blogs I have noticed a kind of interesting but obvious breakdown. Men, in general, are shocked and horrified that this kind of harassment goes on at all. Women are of course shocked and horrified at Kathy’s situation, but they also kind of nod ruefully and say yeah, it happened to me, too.
I honestly didn’t think this was a secret, that women get disproportionally picked on in the internets. I thought it was a big fat obvious fact.
Do I get stalked and harassed and picked on on the internet? Do I get death threats? Sure. I started getting them the week I first posted to Usenet twenty years ago, and I’ve been getting them ever since. It was worse during the usenet era, and WAY worse when I was selling a lot of books. Its pretty quiet these days now that I’m mostly anonymous and I write a mostly personal journal blog. No one cares about cat posts; there are bigger targets. But it still happens.
and
But even though all I’ve had is silly email and blog comments I would be lying if I said I was immune to it, that I just blithely delete it all and move on with my life, or that the barrage of it when I was a popular author wasn’t a factor in wanting to maybe not be so popular anymore. You always wonder if its THIS particular scary nutbag who’s going to be the one to go beyond recreational typing. There’s always a small nagging fear.
Honestly until this week I thought this sort of constant harassment was so common and so obvious it wasn’t even worth mentioning. It had gone on for so long and I had gotten so used to it that it hadn’t occurred to me that this is anything other than what it means to be female on the internet. I told [my husband] about it and he asked me, aghast, why I had never mentioned that I get death threats. We’ve known each other for fifteen years. It just never came up. The shocked reactions internet-wide to Kathy’s post have made me realize that hm. maybe this isn’t normal. And maybe it shouldn’t be.
In Not looking for sympathy or anything Dave Winer deplores the mob mentality that has arisen from Kathy Sierra’s complaint and the way it tarred a range of people with varying degrees of involvement with the same brush.
He also notes a gender imbalance tilted the opposite way:
People aren’t going to like this, but it’s true — when a woman asks for a riot she gets one, and almost no one comes to the defense of a man who is attacked. Who’s more vulnerable? Well, honestly, it’s not always a woman.
and
The time to act is way before it escalates into the kind of post that Kathy Sierra posted. There should be people who are willing to provide personal support to others who are ostracized this way — and that support should be available regardless of gender, age, or other circumstances.
I won’t support anything that only offers support to women and not men. We must help unpopular people, even people who we think are mean. It’s no crime to be unpopular, and you can measure our humanity by how good we are to people we don’t like.
Nancy White, an expert on online community, weighs in with Hate, Threats and the Culture of Love, and looks for opportunities to learn from this situation. Her thoughts don’t dwell on gender divisions but more on how the we collectively (in communities, in the blogosphere, in the human race) can engage with each other constructively.
She looks at three levels at which we can try to find a way forward:
- What I choose to take personal responsibility for - on my blog, on websites I host, garden or facilitate and WHY. How transparently I do this so people can choose to engage or not. I delete spam. I delete hate comments. Have I made that clear? Not clear enough. So I need to get my personal online house in order.
- What I choose to negotiate with the communities and groups I participate in. This goes to the possibility of being complicit in something that goes against my beliefs, values and promises I make to and with others. For me, the issues with MeanKids etc. fall into this one and it is worth some more conversation. I accept that we will have differing views on this. But we have choice about what we support, what we ignore and what we speak out on. Free speech is essential. Hate attacks and rape fantasies should not have to be policy level decisions - or only as last resort. We as a community should not tolerate them. If you want to have hateful discussions, take it to a walled garden. If you do it in public, expect impact on your reputation. (Note: this is NOT directed at anyone. I don’t know who did what and leave that to those involved to sort out. I’m talking at the general level.)
- What I choose to support from a policy level. Death threats should be prosecuted. Privacy should be protected. Free speech should be protected.
I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to make a point of reflecting them here:
Jason Toney at Blog is a Mix Tape wrote:
- New etiquette rules really need to be established for online and mobile communication
- Reputation, Identity, Presence, Nameplaces - these are my kinds of buzzwords
- How does the desire for someone like me who wants a persistent online identity exist at the same time that many people (particularly young people) like the concept of disposable identity? Are their tools and applications that can make the web better for both types of folks?
- What about those who want no online identity but still wants the tools that are increasingly requiring identity creation?
The author of swirlspice wrote:
Started the day with Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation…. This could have gone on for another hour. Mostly about managing your identity and how your reputation develops and propagates (your reputation is assigned to you more than you create it).
In Wired’s “Listening Post” blog, Laura Moorhead wrote Leave No Trail Behind:
Who are you? Your Wikipedia entry or your last blog entry? What about that half-clothed avatar or raunchy kid from a few years back?
The panel “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online” reminds us — not that we needed it — that our identity lives on and it’s mutating out of control. Friends, enemies, and crazy exes (aka Sibils) augment it, and big companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, use and benefit from it. Where’s the user control?
Early on in the hour-long panel, Ted Nadeau, from Dot Line Inc., reminds us that though we’re all pro privacy, there really is no privacy online.
Take a look at the top handful of sites trying to offer users control over their online identity - be that one or 12 personas - and expect to be disappointed. “Reputation 1.0 isn’t working - there’s no consistency in someone’s reputation,” says Nadeau. “There’s big thinking, but no one coding yet.”
What’s the perfect reputation system? Perhaps, says Nadeau, one in which you can move your persona from one web site to another, with different data stores and key spaces (say, your copy, that of others and a shared version).
This is pretty much what panelist Kaliya Hamlin, a freelance evangelist for open standards in user-centric identity (OpenID2, i-names, XRI/XDI, SAML, icards, Higgins), backs. With OpenID2, she says, you travel the web with your identity. Essentially, you own it, and there’s no breadcrumb trail for online companies to feed off.
Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble, a social search site, goes on to ask, Why shouldn’t users own all their clicks? Hodder put this question to companies like Amazon and Google — and (amazingly) they agreed. She’s even got a tool to track a person’s online life via clicks.
This idea of leave no trail behind is big. Eliot Van Buskirk’s article about the RIAA’s latest poison pen shows us why users might want to own a copy of all their online wanderings and actions.
Another option (I think from Hodder and Hamlin): If all our info is public, but anonymous, that’s even better.
One last nugget from Hodder: We’re agreeing to things we don’t understand. Consider Google’s deal with San Francisco to set up the city with a wireless network. Taxpayers are giving up their “attention data” — their online entities — for 17 years. Hodder says that’s worth millions, far more than the cost of the wireless setup. Shouldn’t the city or someone get a cut?
Bill Humphries wrote in his blog Whump, I’m a 10th Level Link Blogger:
Liz Henry: Ted Nadeau says our non-monetary assets are: Identity, Attention, Intention, Influence, Reputation. (In addition to Str Dex Int Wis Con Cha.)”
Laura Fisher wrote in her a later date blog:
Attended a great panel, moderated by Christian Crumlish, on web identity and attention. There were some terrific things said; I took notes - it deserves a post of its own.
Laura Porto wrote in Digital Dialogs:
Identity and reputation in the digital space is one of those gigantic topics to try to tackle in an hour. This panel provided some discussion starters, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to go deeper.
- Mary Hodder made the suggestion that we all be transparent about what we do online so that the government can’t stigmatize certain people or certain behaviors
- Ted Nadeau made the point that while you are connected to your identity you are not in control of it
- George Kelly showed us the interactive Johari window as an example of how our reputations so not belong to us, but rather to the people who interact with us
One of the most interesting points of the panel came from an audience participant who asked about changing identity. We are, after all, a young industry. How will we feel about having one identity in 10 or 20 or 30 years? I for one, find it fun to Google my Usenet entries circa 95.
Another interesting point raised was how we manage the public versus private space.”
Rob Pongsajapan wrote in arrivals/departures:
One panel that was excellent, however, was the Christian Crumlish-moderated panel on identity, attention, presence and reputation. I was trading notes with Aly after the session and sent her my impression of the panel: “Mary Hodder didn’t disappoint,” I texted.
In Composite: Thoughts on Poetics Liz Henry transcribed very accurate notes and wrote, “Wow, I dig all the stuff Ted has been saying.”
In Eco-Geekery Brian Fitzgeral wrote:
This was a great panel, really well facilitated by Christian Crumlish, author The Power of the Many. He’s working on a new book, and claims “my scam was to put this panel together, take notes on what they say, and sneak it into my book.” Man, that is SO going to be a book if he does so. His online identities are. xian, mediajunkie.
Chris Hunter wrote in jugglebird:
I’m at SXSW early for a panel on reputation and identity. It started out very slow, with the moderator, Christian Crumlish, rambling on without making many definitive statements.
Ted Nadeau went next, with an admitted preface that he was new to identity and reputation. While his talk was rambling, he threw out some interesting observations about existing reputation systems (eBay, LinkedIn, Slashdot, etc…) but generally noting the lack of widespread and open reputation systems. It definitely seems like there’s an opportunity for something tied to OpenID and given the direction LoTV is headed, it’s worth paying attention to this area.”
Mary Hodder spoke next about the Attention Trust, starting with an example of how Google uses attention in the form of links and AdSense to power their businesses. She related that the Attention Trust founders actually had a much easier time than expected in getting large internet companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc…) to release this information to their users.”
The last panelist, George Kelly, spoke about the interactive johari window which allows an individual to self-select attributes and then compare them to the attributes selected by others. The inverse, a nohari window, allows the selection of negative attributes with the same kind of comparison and filtering.”
The author of worldmegan took extensive notes, including this:
This panel is called Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation. Christian Crumlish is our moderator. He seems nice, though very sleepy. Poor west coast people. Hell, I’M sleepy.
and notes on the discussion of an attention economy:
Attention: The “attention economy,” what is this thing? It’s actually incredibly consequental that Google is collecting your information - this has to do with the attention economy. A link to a site is a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes. Rank results are based on this, are based on what a person clicks when they search for something. Adsense is also based on all of this. The “attention trust” asserts that you own a copy of this information. (Attention is still bothering me, I’m not quite getting it.) Seth Goldstein and Steve Gilmore started the attention trust, Mary is explaining. They got everybody to agree that the users own a copy of their attention streams. An attention stream is all those clicks you put into your browser, all these things someone is recording. There’s also a recorder you can use to record your own stream, it sounds like… this is actually really interesting! I like Mary Hodder.”
Rex Hammond did some very thorough very thorough liveblogging.
Will Kern wrote in 15 Meanings:
The first panel I went to was Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation, which consisted of Christian Crumlish from Yahoo!, Kaliya Hamlin from Identity Woman, Mary Hodder from Dabble, George Kelly from the Contra Costa Newspapers and Ted Nadeau from Dot Line Inc. The title of the panel seemed very intriguing and I thought I could gain a lot out of it and how it applies to social networking.
There were a few things I took away, but not necessarily how they directly applied to social networking. Kaliya talked about identity and namespaces, which I thought was good. She illustrates how OpenID like services work she was pitching the Yadis protocol, which would bring the various OpenID like options into 1 single sign on.
Ted discussed reputation (which he knowingly admitted that prior to a few days ago; he did not know much about the subject matter, kinda scary). With that being said, he did make some good points on the matter. He defined what reputation is as it pertains to the web and how you are not the primary authority on your reputation as it appears differently to different people.
And Leisa Reichelt wrote in her blog disambiguity:
Every Breath You Take - an incredibly intelligent, engaging and interesting panel on identity, attention and reputation which are topics that I’m finding incredibly interesting at the moment. There are all kinds of problems and opportunities around identity at the moment and this panel, including Christian Crumlish, Ted Nadeau, Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin and George Kelly took a run at some of them. I’m still thing about the idea of Identity Friction and how we need to increase identity friction in virtual spaces to better replicate how it works in the ‘real world’.
On the whole, I think we managed to spark some interesting thoughts and kick off some much needed conversations around these vital concepts for the social, living web.
Note: I’ve added Ted Nadeau’s slides to my own in an earlier post to this blog.
I’ve been following the upsetting story of how Kathy Sierra, creator of the Head First book series, author of the Creating Passionate Users weblog, and noted speaker on the web / technology circuit was frightened into cancelling her scheduled appearance at eTech by a series of escalating threats to her personal safety in the form of email messages sent directly to her by readers and posts to several community blogs, now defunct, oriented toward taking pot shots at the more famous and popular bloggers.
Bloggers, her readers, and people learning about the story from news and blog sources have generally rallied to support Sierra. The long comment thread at the end of her post announcing the cancellation and detailing the communications that terrorized her attests to that. A number of people have quibbled with her interpretation of the messages, told her “man up” and to stop being hysterical, or have accused her of manufacturing her response as a public relations / marketing ploy.
Myself, I’ve been known to be verbally mean at time, to pick on people, to be saracstic and snarky when it suits me, but the two sites (“Mean Kids” and “Bob’s Yer Uncle”), ostensibly designed to encourage freewheeling, humorous, creative criticism, puncturing the puffed up much like certain gossip blogs do for the true celebrities in our culture, somehow gave free rein to a much more virulent form of attack: unbridled misogyny edging into images of sexual violence and horror.
It’s a dirty little secret of our world that hierarchies are sometimes enforced, under the cover of darkness, by sexualized threats of violence and domineering acts of humiliation. It’s more visible in lockerrooms, prisons, and other sealed male enclaves, but it may stem from primate behaviors that predate our humanity and it carries on to this day inside families and, at least in symbolic form, in public communication.
What struck me about this situation is how the worst attacks - revenge fantasies described in cartoonish pornographic terms, tend to have come from people writing under the cloak of anonymity, or deniability (for example, it’s still not clear if the posts associated with Alan “Head Lemur” Herrel cited in Sierra’s blog entry are actually by the man who goes by the nickname).
On Slashdot, no haven of civilized discourse, a poster who refuses to register and adopt a consistent persona is given the default name “Anonymous Coward.” Throughout the generally supportive comments flooding into Sierra’s blog post are peppered juvenile hit-and-run posts attacking her or making random racist and sexist comments. These comments are inevitable posted anonymously and associated with made-up email addresses or urls.
In the political blogosphere, where this sort of situation is less uncommon, there is an ongoing debate about the role of pseudonymity in blogs. A number of Sierra’s readers were sent there via the conservative blog, Protein Wisdom, whose author experienced a similar verbal attack from a commenter featuring vile “hypothetical” threats of sexualized violence (in that case targetting children, if I recall correctly). At the same time, the author of Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein, is often criticized in the sort of left-wing blogs I frequent for engaging in threats to “out” pseudonymous bloggers while at the same time claiming to stand for civiility and sponsoring a set of ethical guidelines for bloggers.
Defenders of pseudonymous blogging make the point that not everyone is free to speak in public about political and social matters without fear of retaliation. Further, they argue that it is the persistence and consistency their assumed identity to which their reputation attaches, and that a perosn posting day in, day out, for years, as Sifu Tweety or Atrios is every bit as accountable for his (or her) words as someone signing their posts with a “real” name.
In Sierra’s explanatory post she called on several bloggers by name, blaming them for instigating the climate that incubated these attacks and for allowing them to escalate. She also cited a few less well known identities: one calling himself Siftee, who sent her a threatening email message, and another signing his posts Joey, who wrote apparently about a fictional character named Kat in misogynistic terms in the vicinity of posts attacking Kathy Sierra.
Of the contributors to Mean Kids, only Frank Paynter has come forward to apologize, without reservation, for his role, however inadvertant, in the development of this situation. I consider Frank a friend based solely on a shared history of reading each other’s bloggings, occasionally linking to each other, and even more rarely exchanging brief notes. I’m connected to Frank through Twitter and older social network environments and I admire his forthrightness in this situation.
Jeneane Sessums and Chris “RageBoy” Locke have been less willing to apologize or to own any responsibility for what happened. Sessums disclaimed any involvement at all with the sites although others seem to believe she was involved with the Mean Kids project. She has also refused to discuss the topic further in public. Locke argued that he did not write any of the sexually crude scenarios or send any threats and that hence Sierra invoked his name only to drive attention and embroil him in her controversy.
I feel that both of these people could have made an apology and still attempted to clarify their own culpability while distancing themselves from the statements they wish to disown.
Finally, “Joey” and a fellow named Paul Ritchie have mounted a more aggressive defense of themselves and the Mean Kids and Bob’s websites, arguing the Sierra is deliberately grandstanding and deluding her readers in order to form a lynch mob online, drive more sales to her books and increase her speaking fees.
I do not find these arguments compelling and I am not sympathetic partly because neither of them seems willing to repudiate the grossly indecent verbal attacks on Sierra (nor the violently misogynistic fantasies involving imaginary stock female figures).
What I will grant is that all of the people I just mentioned have to some extent been willing to go on the record and produce themselves in public in the aftermath of Sierra’s accusations, cancellation, and self-enforced seclusion.
Thus far I have not seen a public statement from Alan Herrel either claiming or disowning the misogynistic entries Sierra included in her blog post, which were posted under the name “Rev ED” on the Bob’s site using his familiar avatar
Both Paynter and Locke cited a motto from the Well known as “You own your own words” or “YOYOW,” and I find this interesting. Paynter referred to it when discussing how the two snark sites did not censor their contributors, saying “Misogynistic postings at MeanKids.org led me to try to moderate, but indeed the group there was of the ‘You Own Your Own Words’ tradition, so moderating or central editorial control wouldn’t work. I tore the site down.”
Locke likewise cited YOYOW in his defense of himself on his own blog:
I was a conference host on the Well 15 years ago where the core ethos was acronymized to YOYOW — You Own Your Own Words. This has remained a guiding principle for me ever since. I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote. However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole site go away.
(I know Locke only by reputation but have exchanged email with him in the past.)
What struck me about this is that I think they both may be missing some of the key elements of that philosophy. On the Well, while contributors may adopt pseudonyms at any time, their real names are always discoverable and each user is allowed only one single identity. This has long been considered a key reason why so many Well conferences manage to stay on topic and avoid the sort of flame wars that tend to eventually ravage utterly free-wheeling online discussions.
Furthermore, Well conferences are hosted, and hosts are given a handful of moderation tools and guidelines for how to use them to manage situations that are spinning out of control and contributors who are causing grief. These tools range from verbal warnings to the ability to hide or scribble offending posts to the power to ban members from the conference entirely (usually for a limited three-day cooling-off period).
When people can post whatever they like without having to accept any impact on their own reputation or identity, when they don’t establish and main tain a consistent finable presence online then they are not in fact owning their own words. I don’t think the YOYOW ethos is intended as an excuse for moderator to avoid managing the tenor of their discussion forums, and I find it interesting that the people involved who have at least engaged Sierra’s complaints are all, except for Joey, people writing under their real names or who have at least established longstanding records of their thoughts online under their chosen handles. (Sessum specifically points to her blog archives as a character witness.)
One last point about owning your own words: To varying degrees Joey, Ritchie, and Locke have argued that Sierra is victimizing them by associating them with words they did not write or by painting them as part of an organized conspiracy when anarchy and permissiveness are all they actually engaged in. Here I think owning your own words again comes into play. If you gleefully call yourself a mean kid and stand on the sidelines egging on bullies, don’t cry foul when the bullies’ victims fight back and you find yourself tarred with the same brush.
UPDATE: I see that Doc Searls has posted an email message from Alan Herrel denying authorship of the post that used his avatar and saying that this scandal has effectively destroyed his online presence. Reading his words I feel sympathy for him, particularly if his systems are being attacked as he describes and if he is being harassed off the net, but I still find myself wondering whether he distanced himself from the person who had assumed his image when the inflammatory comments were originally published.
These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides.
I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich.
Update: Here are Ted’s slides:
So I just wasted, er, spent a half hour surfing twitter pages and poaching friends of friends. I noticed that I had a strong gut sense of who I felt it was ok to befriend, most of the time, but that it doesn’t necessarily map to people who are actually my friends or whom I’ve met, although it may factor in how recently I’ve dealt with them.
For some, I added them because I’m interested in what they have to ssay or what they’re doing. I anticipate that their feed will be intereesting, or the preview of their recent thoughts is copmpelling. I’m aware that some of these people may not remember me, may not add me back (which is fine) or allow me to add them if they are twittering privately.
The etiquette is awkward. The UI at twitter sort of implies you should add people back, but that may be just in the contexts of private twitters.
I often notice odd disjunctions between my friend lists or various social services. Some people have talked about being able to bulk upload friend networks using hcards or something from one service to the next, but I wonder if that mapping really makes sense. For whatever reason, for example, Joi Ito is a contact of mine in Flickr but not on LinkedIn. At least one of us probably wants it to be that way.
The whole topics of reciprocity and social guidelines about when it’s ok to ignore a connection or a friend request and when it carries a social burden to do so is interesting too.
This has been another in a series of posts full of questions and half-baked proto-thoughts with few answers or real insights.
Speaking of twitter, I’ve dressed up my sidebar with badge bling. Been thinking hard about seriously redesigning my main blog and possibly moving it over to mediajunkie, which may be the catchiest domain name I own.
This story (Open Call From the Patent Office - washingtonpost.com) suggest that a breath of fresh air may be entering the patent-review process:
The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.
via, everywhere
oh, and this is the sort of thing I would have posted to the The Power of Many blog in the past but in the interests of blog-consolidation I am posting it here now.
Which means I have to next import all the PoM original posts into this blog, under a single category, and then have the PoM site subscribe to that category from this blog so it can still have fresh content on its home page from time to time.
Hey, I’m only a month late on congratulating Jay Rosen on the launch of NewAssignment.Net (“an experiment in open-source reporting”). My excuse is I was finishing a novel and working full time, but what about the blogs, Christian? And who will think of the children?
Here’s some tidbits from Jay’s update of the time, which have no doubt been superseded by new news that I will be sure to report sometime in mid-2007:
The launch package includes…
- an interview by Amanda Michel with Regina Lynnn, sex device columnist for wired.com who uses a forum she runs to do one type of smart mob reporting
- my announcement of the launch (yesterday) of the Polling Place Photo Project, which will attempt to collect digital photos from polling places across the USA
- a feature by David Cohn on what Netscape.com is doing, which Jason Calacanis calls “meta-journalism”
- my interview with Asa Dotzler
- Steve Fox, formerly of washingtonpost.com, explains why he quit there and agreed to work with us; and more.
Our plans for the test site are…
- daily content, M-F that tracks new & noteworthy developments in open source journalism and networked, pro-am reporting, plus any related Web. 2.0 stuff;
- interviews with key people (practitioners like Asa Dotzler of Mozilla and Regina Lynn, observers like James Surowiecki of The Wisdom of Crowds)
- lesson-learning from prior projects that definitely bear on NAN
- we will introduce elements of NewAssignment.Net’s operating style, preview and critique some possible projects for 2007, and begin to recruit participants and contributors - i.e., build the network during Nov., Dec. and January 07.
One thing you will notice is a tab section for NewAssignment Lab. That will be the section of the site where we invent stuff, run experiments and trials, try to break ground. Matthew Burton’s proposals on reading the laws open source style will go there. Reports on the Poling Place Project will go there. Anything have to do with invention.
Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.”
This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting email message about how she became a community advocate and what the job entails. I asked for her permission to reprint it here on the blog and she agreed:
It’s a really interesting question because it’s one that those of us in these roles are asking and answering for ourselves as we go along. I know another person who does a similar job at another site, and what she and I both have in common is that we were underemployed, educated moms for a couple years, spending way too much time on social networking sites and blogs and such. We are online community junkies. I was a latecomer to the internet, partly because I lived in France during the 90s and partly because the internet never really seemed that compelling until I found my first online community (an egroup of friends of a friend, all from Iowa like myself). Email? I was and still am an avid epistolarian (is that a word?). Buy train tickets online? I pass the SNCF outlet every day. But yack it up with a bunch of new and old friends, gossip, tell secrets, discover that the imaginary people are actually real… that’s compelling. Both myself and my friend got our jobs by writing a lot of free feedback for friends’ websites and having the friends say, “Hey, want to work on this project with us?”
There’s an interesting problem in the social web boom. Often the people who are most knowledgeable and savvy about the politics, functioning, and workings of online communities are people who have been spending a lot of time slacking off in front of the computer in recent years. How does a new blogging network service, for example, go about recruiting these slackers? Or even understanding that it would be a good idea to have one on staff? I know of one site that had a guy in my role whose background was in e-commerce. He had never belonged to or even heard of any major online communities except for Friendster. He didn’t even really use the site he worked for that much! But he was recruitable.
I do a lot of different things at Platial. Marketing to be sure, but specifically grassroots-style, relatively low-impact marketing. I contact people who have great content and try to help them make maps. I write to online community mods and ask them to post about maps that I think are interesting to their communities. I write to bloggers.
The most important thing I do in my job is I communicate with users. That’s the community I’m advocating for. I make more maps than anyone and know how to use the site best. I gather feedback, I chart feedback, I follow up on feedback. I’ve got some kind of friendly relationship with most of our main power users. If I notice someone on the site having trouble with their images or something, I send them a message offering help. I answer ever single feedback email we get within a week, usually faster. I listen to people and I advocate within the company for what the users are asking for. Because I use the site myself every day, I know their frustrations when things are broken and I know the excitement when a long-awaited feature gets added.
I also try to make connections between users sometimes. We have a beta tester club comprised of people I’ve chosen to invite because of the high quality of their feedback. These people get early notification of new features and often get to test drive stuff on a testing site we set up. It’s great having a bunch of extra hands on the site looking for glitches in the hours before a new site launch, and we really appreciate how much those people care about what we do.
I keep the faq updated, I make how-to screencasts and instructables, I blog, and I do a ton of qa. We’re a small company (5 full time, one part time, and a design intern), so everyone ends up doing a lot.
Thanks for your time (if you made it all the way to the end—I know it’s long). When I read your post it set me to thinking.
So there you have it.
Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco families, neighbors and concerned citizens across the City.”
Here’s more about the series:
Offered 4 times during the school year, the series seeks to grow a sense of community and demonstrate Grattan School’s commitment to being a place where the well being of children and families are addressed at the highest level, where dynamic thinking occurs, and where community is engaged. The talks will be held in the school’s auditorium and a suggested donation of $8 will be asked for at the door, with all proceeds benefiting the school. No one will be turned away.
In addition to the evening adult audience, each speaker will also be asked to commit to time with Grattan kids during regular school hours, thereby integrating the speaker themes into our student community. These kid forums may take the form of general assemblies or small classroom audiences and will be offered at an age-appropriate level.
Dates:
- Thursday, September 28 - Tim Redmond, Editor-in-Chief of the Bay Guardian
- Thursday, November 16 - Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist
- Thursday, January 18 - tbd
- Thursday, March 1 - tbd
Newmark will be speaking on the topic “craigslist (community in the 21st century).”
When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone” and gmailed to myself:
warner:
tech change cuts through everythingfundamentalist fear of sweeping change… how to prepare people for the inevitable change?
beyond tech industry policy issues
how to help people get their voices heard
most politicians lesson from Dean is fundraising, meetup, and something vague about blogs
danah:
media, always a generation gapnatural to kids, unnatural to parents
adina:
industry issues more about incumbancy vs innovationswarner:
i fought the incumbents on the telecom issuesi think we need a national policy re broadband and need to protect innovator’s ip
??:
a creative commons model plus individual choiceadina?:
principles going back to the foundersanil:
tech industry is politically incompetentwe look to politicians for leadership
tech change not inevitable
warner:
i would argue america got seduced by the tech bubblebut it’s happening now… evangelism is called for
jon:
and educationdanah:
we are behind in mobile because of carrier lock downpolitics needs to get beyond money
me:
how to get politics beyond money???warner:
tech = economic promise but the issue got elevated beyond national leadershipmary:
i disagreecraig:
i strongly disagreemary:
1890s railroads bubble (analogy), then carnegiewas approached by a candidate in 2004 but not interested in campaigns… unless it’s taken straight into governance… but they were scared
craig:
acceleration… viet nam 8 yrs, iraq 3 yrs
in the next 3 wks i’m scared of a gulf of tonkini believe just get the bad guys out of the way…
kaliya:
overarching theme is freedomanil, wagner james:
techies exhibit real unseriousness about terrorism and predatorswj:
partisanshipspace race target analogy
cultural not political the 30s
danah:
parks analogyme:
freedom opportunity national greatness
Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly:
It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model.
The key ideas are
- using tags (no groups)
- +/- feedback (no moderators)
- browsing (tagged) users (social networking potential)
Hopefully it would reach some kind of critical mass, prove some value and take 1 of 2 directions:
- a delicious-like database. Ideally this would make niche discussions possible, something like a long tail of discussions.
- an open source piece of software that would compete with current message boards. In this case the news would be that discussions and users could now (at least theoretically) be aggregated thanks to tags.
It’s online since 4 weeks. It is currently just a prototype with about 30 users.
Sounds like an interesting experiment.
Here’s Jay Rosen’s announcement of a $100,000 grant for his NADN project: PressThink: Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone
My first thought was, “This sounds like a job for George,” but George already has a job….
I like that Rosen wants to have both a paid editor and a paid “network wrangler” to pull off this “pro-am” journalism experiment.
As I disclosed last time I posted about this, I am an advisor to this project. Rosen was in SF recently to do some brainstorming about the NADN website. I wasn’t involved in that meeting (it sounds like it was a very fruitful meeting) but I did have a chance to get together with Jay over dinner last week and I’m very excited about the potential of this project to catalyze an evolution in journalism beyond how it’s currently practiced.
More on this when I have time to reflect and write.
Tracy Rolling, the community advocate for Platial.com (“the people’s atlas) recently sent me a heads up about a new styling feature for the DIY maps that Platial makes it so easy to, er, make.
And, by the way, I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general. They usually seem to understand, though, that I’m a sucker for people who’ve read my book or follow my blogs or both and say they like my writing. Still, I won’t blog about anything! I’m not a total flattery whore.
OK, so back to Platial. Tracy demos the new feature in her own blog, The Sputterly Utter, and describes the service and the process like so:
Platial, the website which allows people who don’t know what an api is to create their own Google mashups, has just launched a new feature called Mapstyler. Now you can build your own map and then give it a custom style for publishing on your website or blog. People can also upload their own css files and custom markers, to have their way with Platial maps and integrate them into their blogs and websites.
Note to Woody: Investigate for Bikr?
Blogger (and former Kos front-page poster) Kid Oakland has been gradually building a network called Blogs United to help local political bloggers learn from and support each other:
Local bloggers are citizen journalists and activists. They are a vital part of the emerging netroots infrastructure. My goal this election season is to show how local blogs are changing the political landscape of the United States. And my goal with Blogs United is to try to provide a forum that is useful to local blogs and bloggers themselves. Something is going on here just below the radar. I’m committed to tracking it and helping to explain it.
Disclosure: I’m a member of Blogs United and am helping K/O with some technical stuff.
Back in late July, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen announced an initiative called NewAssignment.Net. (Full disclosure: I am one of a medium-sized set of advisors to this project.) The goal of NADN, in my words, is to leverage blog networks and traditional editorial expertise to define, assign, write, and edit news articles covering assignments that might otherwise go unreported. To hear the project explained much more effectively, in Jay’s words, check out this interview with NPR’s On the Media.
Karl Martino says “paradox1x: Social software can’t be a fad since the WEB is social software”:
The fact is the most successful web services - since the beginnings of the web - were social software applications. The Web’s participatory architecture lends itself to them. It’s always been a Two Way web as Dave Winer would say. We’re simply seeing an evolution of what’s come before. The revolution is that so much of it has become mainstream (MySpace is mainstream) and the barriers to launching a service that incorporates participation have fallen so low. Not that there is some new fangled set of features that everyone must go out and implement to stay relevant. Knocking some hot air out of the hype is warranted. Some of these newer services resemble those dot coms that launched in the late nineties that didn’t grasp what Amazon.com, eBay, Blogger, and others, were *really* doing. You know, those sites that thought if they had a clever domain name, niche, and a particular set of features, they were on their way to riches. … By and large it was “social media” that survived the original dot com crash. And I expect that, by and large again, the best “social media” will survive whenever next bubble pops. So when the next time of reckoning comes, and it will, look at what lives on. And think about why. Burn this in your brain - the Web *is* social software.
Can I get an amen?
My friend Freeman Ng alerted me to this post at Slashdot: Slashdot | Bloggers 1, Smoke-Filled Room 0:
MarkusQ writes “A few days ago a bi-partisan bill (PDF) to create a searchable on-line database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans, financial assistance, earmarks and other such pork was put on ‘secret hold’ using a procedure that does not appear to be mentioned in the Constitution or in the Senate bylaws. This raised the ire of bloggers left and right and started an all out bi-partisan effort to expose the culprit by process of elimination. As it turns out it was our old friend the right honorable Senator from Alaska, Mr. ‘Series of Tubes’, Ted ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Stevens.”
The day after last year’s Personal Democracy Forum I attended a Civicspace workshop event and Gregory Heller conducted a brief interview with me talking about PDF, Civicspace, and how to run conferences with an “open API” so that other events can plug-in and piggyback.
…what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior.
I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.
I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.
I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:
What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.
and
One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.
and, also
Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.
Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:
Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:If you know a developer - pass the word along.
- David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
- Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
- Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
- Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.
Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?
David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.
I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:
The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.
Adrian Chan asks Is attention over time not identity? while suggestiing, semifacetiously, that Creative Commons and AttentionTrust should merge.
Is what I make, and what I pay attention to, over time, not, basically, my identity? That’s how an Amazon would look at it. The consistency of my choices over time is, well, it’s what I like, and therefore to any commercial enterprise, it’s who I am (as far as they care). Perhaps we could use a CC/AT/ID mashupcamp. Call it EgoCamp?
I seem to recall playing with a prototype of PeepAgg back in the heady social-web miniboom of 2003 but it seems that the real thing is now in alpha.
I was invited, I joined it, and I’m poking around. In many ways it looks like other social network systems, especially Yahoo! 360 and Tribe, in that, like both of them, it allows you to integrate content hosted elsewhere (such as Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks, and presumably blog posts and other RSSable streams, most likely including events and reviews and such).
There’s a fairly subtle friendship model, though subjective of course, with five distinct levels, from haven’t met, to acquaintance, through friend, good friend, to best friend.
(PA founder Marc Canter considers me, and no doubt countless others, as a good friend.)
There are both Groups and Networks and I haven’t figured out what distinguishes them. I also haven’t figured out how to plug in my content from elsewhere, and I’m reluctant to hand-populate yet another profile.
More as I have time to explore.
dKo draws my attention to A Shift Among the Evangelicals by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post (Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25):
Sometimes very important elections receive very little attention. When the Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Frank Page as the group’s president… One other force was at work in this year’s Baptist voting: the rise of the blogosphere. Over the past several years, an active network of Baptist bloggers has opened up discussion in the convention and given reformers and moderates avenues around what Parham called “the Baptist establishment papers” and other means of communication controlled by the convention’s leadership. Thus may some of our oldest and most traditional institutions be transformed by new technologies.
Brian Dear from EVDB wrote me recently to bring to my attention the Eventful Demand service on Eventful.com (the event-planning website powered by his EVDB service). He is justifiably proud of this new feature:
We premiered it at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego in March. Eventful Demand is a set of tools to enable fans to form grass-roots campaigns to “demand” an event to happen, by inviting their favorite performers to come to their town. Performers might be lecturers, book authors and journalists, musicians, bands, filmmakers, politicians, entrepreneurs, astronauts, scientists, who knows… it could be anyone. The idea is, put the power of creating events in the hands of the people who want most to go to the event - the people! What’s great is that we’re seeing performers start to embrace the technology, and participate with the fans in making events come about.
I have to admit, that last bit does sound cool. If you’re interested in watching this in action, you can view the “hottest” current demands
The first two sheduled events to emerge from this service were a book signing / film screening by blogger, author, and actor Wil Wheaton in Boston, and a music concert in the DC area by Jonathan Coulton (of the Thing a Week blog project and the classic multimedia song Flickr).
To grease the skids, Eventful Demand also provides tools for performers to encourage fans to start “demanding” them. I wonder if this could be adapted for the next Ross Perot or Wesley Clark to encourage supporters to draft them to run for office?
Paul Bissex has released Jabberwocky 2.0. Of course it’s still in beta (unlike Flickr, which has recently upgraded to gamma).
In the world of web design, especially among those developing community sites or sites for collaboration, 37 Signals’ Get Real philosophy is all the rage, but frankly those guys are too timid. They come close to a breakthrough but then they fall back on safe ideas and the tried and true.
Thus its falls to me to unveil the new new model for social web app design, which I call…
Getting Really Real
The Starting Line:
Stay Lean:
Priorities:
Feature Selection
Process
The Organization
Staffing
Interface Design
Code
Words
Pricing and Signup
Promotion
Support
Post-Launch
Conclusion
According to Boing Boing, the recent LA student immigration protests have been organized on MySpace. The revolution will be smartmobbed?
Update: Here’s danah boyd on the same topic. Check her next post too, in which MySpace inadvertantly takes down the NPR when Tom sends the community there.
I’ve just ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit.
Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow. We talked about some of the emerging themes in his current book project (called Everything is Miscellaneous and eagerly awaited in this corner) and he mentioned that he’s noticed recently that marketing and particularly PR folks seems (finally) ready to board the Cluetrain.
“If blogging were to change PR,” he said (quotation approximate), “that would be big.”
“Let’s hope that PR doesn’t change blogging, though,” I said.
“It already has, to some extent” he kinda replied.
“We wouldn’t want blogs to become the silencer on the gun of PR,” I said, gesturing with my hands as if screwing a silencer onto a gun, something I would have no idea how to do in real life, but I’ve seen a lot of movies with Nazis and gangsters in them.
“That’s a great image,” he said. “You should blog it.”
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit
Seems like a lot of the Web 2.0 skeptics come out of Australia. Not sure why that is. Personally, I hate the whole "2.0" concept. It's already played out as a meme and it means nothing (or everything, which has the same effect).
Now a blog called Squash claims to have detected a sign of Web 2.0 fizzling.
Things definitely felt hype-y at SXSW this year. While some of that optimism and energy is based on real advances and growth, in some ways it reminded me a lot of the 1999 energy when everyone with a web idea seemed to think they could launch it, get millions of users and flip it within a year or so, except now the popular exit strategy seems to be to sell out to Google or Yahoo! instead of having an IPO.
I’ve nearly recovered or recreated all the pages and templates that were damaged by the nasty little scriptkiddy who hacked our server. I’d rather not go into detail about how it happened, at least until I’m sure we’ve locked the barn door.
Here are my raw notes for beyond folksonomies: knitting tag clouds for grandma:
from pidgen to creole
tags popularized by (delicious, flickr, technorati)
hodder on usability problems
a lot of web 2.0 sites, hoping people will fill in all the info, but interfaces poorly done … half-done systems because others got critical mass (which makes them interesting)
swedlow mentions goals: wants people to become comfortable discovering, sharing, making meaning
think about tools/features/usaiblity
what are people really trying to do?
question (bill anderson): i’m just having fun - it doesn’t bother me. i don’t care about most of that stuff (paraphrase)
(emergent issue)
question: analogy to designing object oriented systems (classification), we need better tools to let us refactor
swedlow: problem: that’s a lot of work and we’re all lazy
comment: i guess i’m just obsessive compulsive
swedlow: that’s great, but the other 99.5% is lazy
question: tags are made by individuals, we’re not building community up
(but [me] doesn’t delicious tell you what tags other people have used? … this is a great conversation BUT it feels kind of obvious, protests too much)
Hodder discusses Dabble, video tagging. there are 98 commercial video hosting sites, 15 noncommercial. about half have tagging…. about 53% of videos have tags
distinction between implicit and automated tagging: implicit meaning aided, automatic tending to reinforce groupthink
Liz (finally - that ghod) jumps in (and says the new headset mics are incredibly uncomfortable), asks how many of you use tagging tools?
80% of hands go up
you are not like most people
too many places
i’m not going to use shadows - my links are on delicious
interop problem
(mention tagsonomy… dria’s article)
comment from audience: real existing folksonomies example: each person’s folder structure
(my thought: yes, but folder vs. tag, folders are hierarchical… gmail breakthrough… search don’t sort = i do that in outlook now)
new word: “emergently”
comment: iTunes folksonomy/tags are “political” (example: they put downtempo under ambient but “ambient doesn’t have a beat and downtempo does”)
question: best practices for tags UI?
hodder mentions i-tags.
I just got off the phone with Jeannie Yandel, the producer of a show called The Conversation on an NPR station in Seattle, KUOW 94.9 FM. She asked me about how online communities cross over into the real world, what did I think about the rash of bad-news stories about teens on MySpace lately, and whether online communities are here to stay.
It looks like I’ll be on the air live around 1:25 to 1:35 pm, speaking with the show’s host and possibly with callers as well.
The promo for the show looks intriguing:
MySpace is a web site where you can post a personal profile with your picture and your interests. It’s become hugely popular among teenagers. MySpace gets more than twice the web traffic of Google. It’s just the latest example of social networking on the web, following Friendster and Meetup.com. Is this a revolution in the way we relate to one another? Or is it just a fad? Do you use a social networking web site like MySpace, or do your kids? Is it worth your time? Has anything good come from it? Has anything bad every happened? Do you have a history of on-line social networking? How has it changed? Have you dropped out of on-line social networking? Why? Do on-line social networks really connect people or are they just simulations of real human interaction?
They’ve posted some related links as well:
- ‘Show and tell online’, The Guardian
- ‘Scenes From the MySpace Backlash’, Wired
- ‘MySpace: The Story of the Month’, Poynter Foundation
- ‘20 Calif. students suspended for looking at MySpace site’, USA Today
- ‘My daughter is on Myspace.com and I’m concerned…’, The Seattle Times
- ‘The cases your judges are hiding from you’, The Seattle Times
Sketch Swap gives you space to draw a picture. When you’re done, you submit it and get someone else’s picture in return.
Dispatches from Blogistan says that Amazon is experimenting with product wikis. I hope they have better luck with that than the LA Times did with their “wikitorials” experiment. At least Amazon already hosts a culture used to giving feedback (with their reviews feature).
I’m still hoping for a way to aggregate product feedback and reviews from across the blogosphere instead of expecting to find it all hosted on one commercial site.
Aaron Swartz is building infogami in public. So far, it lets you set up a site more or less instantly(junkyard) and edit it like a wiki. The site comes with a blog. Not sure what else it’s going to do. Looks like there are Google text ads down the side. Guess that’s the business model.
Oh, and you can let everyone edit the site or just yourself. I set up junkyard for everyone.
danah boyd has posted her “crib notes” for a talk she gave at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace.
Worth reading for everyone curious (or fretting) about MySpace’s popularity with the young.
The good folks at Participatory Culture have unveiled a key component of their “Democracy Internet TV” platform, the desktop Democracy Player software (for Windows only, so far):
This Windows version, while still in beta, means that we now have a complete set of tools for democratizing online video — and marks the beginning of our campaign to establish a free, open-source video platform.
We’re re-naming the desktop software Democracy player (formerly DTV)…. We hope you agree that open tools for publishing, watching, and sharing video are important for the future of online media.
Interesting trend over on Kos of late. Senators and reps have been posting on Kos for at least a year or two. The first one I happen to remember was from Senator Boxer, and folks just loved her for it. But the frequency of these big-name-posts has definitely been on the rise, especially over the last month. A few recent examples:
During the NSA hearings, Rep. Conyers urged folks to tune in to CSPAN. Over the last week, with the Alito filibuster effort under way, Kerry and Kennedy have both repeatedly posted on Kos, urging action. (The first Kerry post was especially interesting -- he generally took a shellacking on Kos during the election. And now he shows up, says he reads the blogs and doesn't mind the abuse, and just as quick, hundreds of comments form a love parade. Makes you wonder what if anything might have happened had he posted there a year ago October).
It's a fascinating power shift -- senators and reps (or at least, staffers of senators and reps) taking their message directly to their base. Does anyone happen to know if the same phenomenon has been seen on the right? Does Santorum post on freerepublic.com for example?
I’ve always felt (and I said this all over the book) that it was wrong to think that the Internet inherently isolates people or makes them behave antisocially.
A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact:
The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.
Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.
The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.
“There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”
Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers — and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.
It looks like Dan Gillmor is rebooting. Bayosphere didn't work out exactly as he had hoped, but he's got a new project already launched in cooperation with UC Berkeley's J-School and a star-studded cast of advisors.
I wonder if the Pajamas Media guys are watching?
I was trying out Technorati’s new ego-charting feature on my last name and discovered a few sites out there mentioning the book or linking to this blog. For example, Know More Media lists The Power of Many under Blogging Books that Influenced Us, We Media 2.0 lists it under Appendix: Books - Other, and it looks like the person building a community site called Gator Grad Student has posted a number of blog entries about the book: The Power of Many, Alternatives to Meetup, The Dark Side of the Tipping Point, Digital Places and Crossing Communities, virtual vs. physical self, and the [murmur] project, readings, and misc..
I’m blogging from the SXSW Interactive party in downtown San Francisco. It’s still the depths of winter but I can imagine the spring thaw. It’s time to add an SXSW badge to my blog and make my travel plans for Austin, Albuquerque, and Vancouver.
Update: Before I left I saw Min Jung Kim, Renee Blodgett, danah boyd, and a few others I’m spacing on at the moment.
I swear, all the cool kids are at Yahoo now: Susan Mernit's Blog: Newsflash: I'm joining Yahoo!
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.
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 wasnt universal, of course. In 48 CE, Caesars 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).
Micah Sifry wrote up a Rasiej Campaign Post-Mortem analyzing how Andrew Rasiej’s campaign for Public Advocate in New York City managed to fall so short of success despite its embrace of open-source philosophies, techniques, and themes.
Gregory Heller responds in Thoughts on the Sifry Postmortem of the Rasiej Campaign, suggesting that Sifry may be blaming the open-source community for not embracing his candidate instead of truly examining the shortcomings of the campaign itself.
Aldon Hynes, blogmaster for DeStefano for Connecticut weighs in as well with Reflections on grassroots technology driven campaigns.
Disclosure: I am a contributor* to Personal Democracy Forum which is owned and financed by Andrew Rasiej and edited by Micah Sifry. I met Gregory Heller at the last PDF conference, but I do not know him particularly well. I’ve been friends with Aldon Hynes since the Dean campaign.
*Then again, I’m not a very good contributor to PDF. I haven’t posted anything worthwhile to the blog there in several months and I have thus far failed to submit the last two stories I agreed to write for them (but Kate I am working on them, honest!)
I meant to post a link to Free Alternatives to Meetup back in September:
Meetup is a Ghost Town
I checked out the list of largest vegan meetups on Meetup.com and over half of the once active groups are now inactive for lack of an organizer. Meetup seems to recognize this as a problem. I have received several emails from them asking me to step up as organizer to the groups I once belonged to or organized for "just $19/month". They are even offering a 30-day money back guarantee. Hmmm. Let me think about it. No!
I suspect some groups are staying because they don't want to lose members in a transition or spend time setting up a new site for their group that may have fewer features. I hope they will reconsider after Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net launch. Collectively, they are spending thousands of dollars that could be going to much better things.
Whatever they decide, I am confident that new groups will choose to organize their local interest groups on Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net. After they launch, I will be posting information about how you can spread the word about them, so people everywhere can get together to learn, share, organize and support one another in their local communities. With our support early on, these sites are more likely to be able to offer their valuable services to people for many years to come, so stay tuned!
(I posted this with Flock, so I'll have to add a category later I guess. It wants me to put on tags, but I'm not sure how that translates for this blog.)
Reader Nicolai wrote a comment on the blog telling me that I've been tagged (by name) for the first time, adding "how's that for digital identity?" His comment led me back to a review of this book (in Danish) on his blog.
He kindly translated it into English for me:
The power of many
The story about the 1960 American election tells that JFK and Nixon debated on shows broadcasted on both radio and television. The story also tells that Kennedy lost the debate in the ears of the radio listeners. The convincing winner in the eyes of the voters who followed the debate on television was on the other hand Kennedy. Kennedy read and understood how to use the new media - television. He lnew that the media demands other playing rules than those that work on radio.
According to Christian Crumlish the Internet took on the role as the new media during the in 2003-4. And with a purpose of writing a book about some of the new methods and techniques that people use to create virtual communities Crumlish writes among others things about his participation on the Howard Dean campaign.
In The Power of Many Crumlish writes lively and engagingly about the Dean campaign and how they untraditionally took use of the new opportunities given by the Internet in a political context. Their mission was to get voters. And these voters should generate even more voters.
He also writes about different forms of social networks and relationships across geography and generation. And he writes about weblogs. A phenomenon, that floats through the entire book.
...the strange new word "blog" wasn't coined until 1999, the buzz didn't start till 2000, and the first big wave of political bloggers didn't get traction until late 2001 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. (Crumlish 2004:8)It is with this phenomenon (the weblog) that the challenges for future democracy will find its strengths. And with Crumlish' comparisons with the Gutenberg invention of the print press he describes the power that indispensably arises when people are given the opportunity to express themselves. And the Internet technology has opened a new dimension for freedom of expression - it has made it independent of both time and geography.
But it is not all about American election campaigns. Crumlish also airs other tendencies that are possible because of the Internet. Subject such as dating, locality - virtuality, environment, eBay, and pop cultural communities where you jointly can love and listen to The Grateful Dead or read Kurt Vonnegut.
And in continuing the pop cultural talk we are also presented to net marketing/ viral marketing/ WOM. And who other than Seth Godin with his publications on ideavirus among other things is representing this business.
I think Crumlish touches too much in this book. A focus solely on for example the use of the Internet and blogs in the Dean campaign would have been more than worthy of reading. This is also the subject on which Crumlish seems to show the greatest engagement in his writing.
Crumlish still blogs at thepowerofmany.com.
Crumlish, Christian (2004) The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is
Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life. London: Sybex.
Chris Pirillo and his Lockergnome cohorts launch yet another social meta crawler-y tag search engine site. This one's called gada.be. I first looked at it a week or so ago when Chris was showing it around in beta. I guess it's still in beta. So was that alpha? Pre-launch stealth beta? Whatever.
The main cleverness thing seemed to be its handheld friendliness, from the easy-to-tap url to the way a search is coded as a subhost of the gada.be url. The thing also eats and excretes RSS and OPML, so it's jiggy like that.
I haven't really plumbed the depths though, so I'm mostly going on faith here that when Chris puts his energy into something it's usually fairly cool, at least until the bills come due.... (kidding).
Update: One skeptic currently commenting over on Pirillo's blog suggests that the page results are going to look and behave like pay-per-click page spammers, because of their unique URLs. The advice is to have a robots.txt file block bots from the search engine results page. This is probably a good idea, assuming the goal isn't to "have thousands of 'sites' with scraped content and text ads."
Congratulations to Andy Baio (and Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin): Waxy.org: Daily Log: Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree
I'm a day late and a dollar short here, but had to note this.
Yahoo is really getting aggressive about their whole Web 2.0 strategy. A lot of the big names are being gathered under one umbrella.
Speaking of Web 2.0, I'm not doing the O'Reilly conference (busy with work, can't afford it, not comped as press or a contributor, etc.) but I will be at the Web 2.0 Bash (sponsored by del.icio.us, WordPress, wink, Flock, SocialText, Technorati, Odeo, and Flickr) tomorrow night at Swig in San Francisco.
See you there?
Another from the "meant to post this a while ago" files. A fellow named Mike Reining from MindValley wrote me to tell me about their BlinkList service. Mike successfully got my attention by showing awareness of this site (and also You're It), writing to me about MindValley's passion for "how online tools are transforming the social fabric of how people interact, learn, share, and make transactions online."
So how does something like BlinkList differ from, say, del.icio.us or Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0? Mike says:
In my prior history I worked for eBay (on the craigslist deal in fact) and now I have decided to go out on my own to bring some new ideas to market. One of them is on social learning and sharing. I guess it is generally referred to as social bookmarking and social search, but I think that misses out on the "learning and knowledge sharing aspects" that make this field so interesting.
Mike also drew my attention to an interesting review of the BlinkList beta at Blended Edu:
Simply stated, MindValley recognizes that online community hinges on the users ability to easily access their information without frustrating them to the point they won't use the software (a point which is - surprisingly - often overlooked).
...
As you store and tag more content, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what tag you used for similar content. But don't fret! MindValley Labs has come up with a slick way to help you to maintain tagging consistency. Here's how it works: as you add links and other content to your cache BlinkList automagically suggests tags you have already used. This simple step makes it easier to find content at a later date, prevents user frustration with the technology, and allows students to focus on their learning.
Ready for another neat techno-constructivist BlinkList feature? When you click on a tag, BlinkList shows related tags, thereby allowing users to easily find topics and resources related to their search. But wait. There's more! By using the tag filter you can drill down even deeper into the BlinkList community knowledge reserves to locate the resources most relevant to your particular needs.
Looks like a site to keep an eye on.
The Onion, America's Finest News Source, reports: Congress Abandons WikiConstitution:
WASHINGTON, DC - Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.
Over the long weekend I witnessed a flurry of email messages from the network of activist techies and techie activists I'm connected to since the Dean campaign and the work on this book. Some of this coalesced into the PeopleFinder project to help cross-correlate all the missing persons and I'm OK data being gathered across distributed newspaper a and other websites. They are still looking for help:
A few weeks ago, Kent Bye, director of the Echo Chamber project, tipped me off to a new vlog (video [web] log) he's producing. This first episode includes an animation that tries to illustrate the folksonomy concept as well as interviews "about the upcoming media revolution" conducted at the most recent Personal Democracy Forum.
He told me, "I attempt to visually represent the 'folksonomy tag' concept for adding context and meaning to web sites and film sound bites to a broader audience in 10 seconds or less."
Here's his official description:
This is the first vlog episode about an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq - and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions.
Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz and Kent Bye.
If you'd like to have future videos automatically delivered to you, then follow the directions listed in the link above for subscribing to the Echo Chamber Project with either iTunes or FireANT software.
Chris Nagele from Wildbit gave me a head's up about a 35-page report on social networks his company is offering for download as an Acrobat file free of charge: Social Networks Report
He says
My company, Wildbit, is currently working on a social network and community web site. Part of the research to understand and prototype the design involved researching current social networks and defining the key attributes. The result is a 35 page report on the topic. Since you are a leader in the industry I was hoping to get your thoughts on the report.
I've read the report but to be honest I've been too busy to give it the kind of careful attention that would enable me to share any insights. Then again, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to quote myself being referred to as "a leader in the industry" - heh.
If you read the report and send feedback to Tidbit, let me know or post a comment here as well.
I'm in the Saturday morning opening session at blogher, which is about whether women should "learn to play by the rules" or "change the rules."
danah boyd just got up to clarify a misstatement claiming that women don't do social networking as much as men do. danah explained that women and men (tend to) do social networking in different ways.
"Women form dense social networks with fewer people and stronger, more intimate ties. Men tend to spread it around."
Lots of buzz around this week about Marc Canter et al. announcing the GoingOn network, a meta social network that will provide a platform for stitching together existing social network and digital identity systems and standards, or something like that.
JD Lasica interviewed Valerie Cunningham for a better explanation of what's going to be going on, to mangle Marvin Gaye.
Marc also responds to and clarifies some positive coverage at Dana Blankenhorn's Moore's Lore Corante blog.
When I posted about my panel at the Sierra Summit, Philippe Boucher wrote in suggesting we try to arrange for bloggers to meet at the conference or to offer some sort of workshop or hand's on event for people interested in blogging:
Maybe this conference deserves more than a half hour on Saturday about the new media? I was wondering about using this opportunity to have the bloggers in attendance (if there are any) to meet.
I'm not sure what sort of time people will have available, and I don't think I'm personally able to organize a blogger's "birds of a feather"-type meeting. But if someone does organize such a meeting I will certainly attend and would be happy to speak and or help-facilitate.
Philippe goes on:
I also suggested to the organizers a hands-on workshop for people willing to learn about blogging and podcasting by doing it during the conference.
Again, I don't know about schedule or availability, but I'd be happy to contribute to a blogging workshop. I'm still a novice when it comes to podcasting, so I don't think I could anchor a workshop on that but I'd definitely be interested in attending one.
Finally, Philippe asked me, "Is there any plan to record your session for a podcast?"
I'm not aware of any such plan, but I'll find out.
Laura Lemay just sent me a LinkedIn invitation that made me laugh out loud (or LOL), although I realize that it would only be funny to a geek:
#include <linkedinsuckup.h>Picked up a print copy of the Onion in a coffee bar yesterday and saw they had taken the piss out of online social networks (The Onion | 13 July 2005 | Infograph).
Because the link will rot eventually, I stole the graphic, too.
Quoting from Waxy.org Links: News Corp buys MySpace for $580 million:
holy cow
Lots of kids and bands on that site.
The always-insightful How to Save the World blog by Dave Pollard (repeatedly misnamed in my book as "How to Change the World" for I don't know what reason - brain damage, most likely) recently published an entry abstracting seven principles of social networking.
It's one of Dave's shorter posts, too, so don't be afraid to click through!
Here's the short form of the seven principles (but definitely read the explanations to fully grok the big picture):
(via sbpoet in the Well's blog conference)
I'll be speaking at the Sierra Summit on Saturday afternoon from 11:30 to 12:30 PM, on a panel in the Working Smart sequence called "Technology and Organizing: A Civics Laboratory."
The panel features Joan Blades from MoveOn and Zack Rosen from Civicspace as well as myself, so we should have a lively conversation and be able to range widely while keeping things tied down to concrete, practical advice. We'll be up against the ubiquitous George Lakoff so the pressure will be on to keep it lively and to frame our metaphors carefully.
Lazy Independence Day reblogging, quoting from Blog While You Book
NYT: For years, book authors have used the Internet to publicize their work and to keep in touch with readers. Several, like John Battelle, are now experimenting with maintaining blogs while still in the act of writing their books.
Tantek (among others?) has launched a site to promote XHTML-based microformats as a microcontent solution building on existing standards.
(Boy, poking my head into Yahoo 360 sure gets me up to speed on industry buzz quickly. Then again, that's more a function of the social network I brought with me and a bit of currentness - currency - working together).
Anyway, check out the microformats wiki to see the formats being discussed so far, currently including
Other formats, including hReview (I've been looking for a unified review data model for quite some time - so we can make a distributed "epinions"-type network out of the world's blogs), are under discussion as draft specifications.
My Web 2.0 looks like some kind of taglicious social search engine.
As the LA Times seemed to have learned, perhaps editorials aren't the best context for publicly editable wiki-ing.
Wikis seem to work best when used to build a repository of information by people who share a common goal or ethos.
I wrote about this last week at Personal Democracy Forum in an article my editors entitled "Wikis: Productivity or Plague?"
It seems that the wiki got slashdotted, which lead to pr0n being posted (goatse, I wonder?), and the site being removed in response: Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: LA Times WikiTorial Update - vandalized.
(via Nancy White, via Weblogsky)
In the POM book I talk about a technology practice that I refer to as ARM, meaning "activist relationship management," modeled on the idea of CRM (customer relationship management). ARM is big business these days (see Personal Democracy Forum's coverage of the flap over ARM vendor Convio's policies regarding who they will work with as customers).
All of these various *RM concepts can be loosely related together under the heading of GRM or group relationship management. Over on Weblogsky, Jon Lebkowsky is exploring the idea of Weblogsky: Group Relationship Management, which keeps cropping up in the online discussions of activist technology, CivicSpace, CiviCRM, and related topics.
This sounds llike a cool idea (Bright Lightbulb Overhead: LATimes.com Goes Wiki):
I won't believe this until I see it launched and operating unmolested by higher-ups for a good month or so, but barely a month after relaunching a cleaner, freer web site, LATimes.com is planning to launch a wiki to invite public comment and discourse on its editorials.
This will take the form of something called slyly - but vaguely - "wikitorials," according to today's op-ed message from editorial pages editor Andres Martinez....
Via Waxy.org links comes news of yet another feed reader, FeedLounge that offers tagging along with some NetNewsWire-type features, such as saving feed entries forever and flagging entries. It supports all browsers and imports OPML, naturally.
Currently in an invite-only alpha.
The web-based feedreader market is getting crowded. When will they start doing more dynamic attention-y things? There's no way this manual management of feeds is going to scale.
From this post at Am I Patriotic it sounds like plans to develop an open source meeting scheduler to replace Meetup continue afoot.
Sharper eyes than mine have caught Bret Schundler's campaign website compositing images taken from the Dean campaign (Thank God I'm Not a Republican!):
Separated at Birth: Bret Schundler and Howard Dean:
One photo was taken at a 2004 Dean for President rally sponsored by the American University College Democrats in Washington, D.C.
The other photo comes from Bret Schundler's campaign website, advertising Schundler's Reform Gear
Photo Copyright John Pettitt 2003, courtesy CloudView.com
\\
Brad DeLong says "All Schundler needed was ten enthusiastic young supporters and a camera. And he couldn't find them?"
I was going to post this over at Personal Democracy Forum but Kate Kaye beat me to the punch.
Steve Gillmor, a champion of the attention.xml concept, wonder whether there is an inalienable right to not just our own data but also the data describing our "gestures" and the record of where we've spent our attention.
These are not easy questions to muddle through as the urge to monetize Web 2.0 heats up all around us.
Hmm, seems like I could have added a pro-technology perspective to the proceedings (Geodog: A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon):
As long time readers know, I love the People's Republic of Berkeley, foibles and all, and have celebrated its wonderful quirks in my writing and photography for the last 3 years, and even been banned from Adsense for having done so. But sometimes the Berkeley scene and its inhabitants much-lampooned well-meaning but sometimes unthinking do-gooding missionary zeal and neo-puritanism is too much, even for me, and tonight's evening at the Berkeley CyberSalon was an example of such.
I recently read about the Berkeley CyberSalon on Scott Rosenberg's blog, and joined the mailing list based on his recommendation. It seemed like a good opportunity to hear about new ideas in technology as well as a good way to meet other people in Berkeley interested in socio-political issues around technology....
Read the whole thing!
I've become a little more understanding about the lame robotic invitations that are suggested by default by most social network services when you invite a new member. I've been told that providing the user with a canned invitation instead of requiring that the user write their own increases the utility of the invitation service.
At the very least, though, I still regard that moment of sending an invitation to be an opportunity to rise above the common sward and send a personalized note. I recently received a LinkedIn invitation from Mark Glaser that was witty and engaging. I'd have agreed to connect with him anyway, but it was a pleasure to read an actual message rather than a spammy-sounding sub-email type of communique.
Scot Hacker recently sent his wife a generic LinkedIn invitation and learned that it was not particularly endearing (birdhouse.org: LinkedIn Invitation: Decidedly Unromantic):
Every now and then someone sends me an invite to hook up with them on LinkedIn. I generally accept the invites, but have never done much with the service, aside from getting back in touch with a few old Ziff colleagues. Yesterday Amy discovered the site. We didn't find ourselves automatically in one another's networks, so I sent her invite. This morning I hear her reading her email out loud, in a voice dripping with sarcasm:
"You are a person I trust. I'd like to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn. I'm using it to discover inside connections I didn't know I had." And then, "Gosh honey, you're SO romantic."
Marriage tip: When sending a LinkedIn invitation to your life partner, edit the default text before sending.
Quoting from Darknet: The Installments (at Joho the blog):
JD Lasica is beginning to post long installments from his entertaining new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation. First up: The story of some teen film-makers. He'll also be posting new material. [Technorati tag: drm]
With the Nuclear Option's timing in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's hands, there won't be enough warning to send out an email alert the moment he drops the bomb on the Senate. But we can deliver a text message straight to your mobile that embeds a Senate phone number based on your state.
I'm at PDF2005 at CUNY in New York city today. I moderated a panel called "Tools and Ideas for Empowering the Edges" in the morning, so I'm off-duty now, able to participate as an audience member and on the really snarky backchannel chat.
Right now Micah Sifry is interviewing Andy Stern of the SEIU. More comments when I've had time to digest the people and ideas I'm encountering here.
Quoting from Everything is miscellaneous:
I haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to handle blogging the writing of the book. I don't think I want to put a blog at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com (there's nothing there yet because I've had some domain issues) because researching and writing this book isn't an isolated act for me. So, I'll probably blog it here, using the tag "EverythingIsMiscellaneous." Yes, it's long, but tagging it "Miscellaneous" really would be misleading as an external tag.
I wrote my previous book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, completely in public, posting each day's draft. Since I woke up every morning and, Penelope-like, undid what I'd written the previous day, that wasn't a very useful way of getting readers involved. So, this time I'm thinking I'll post drafts of chapters when I think they're readable. And then I will beg for comments.
[Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
I was just talking to a publisher yesterday about some (very preliminary) ideas for what might turn out to be my next book. When the time comes, I will be sure to try to include as open a creative process as possible.
Of course David's concern about how to tag book-related posts is interesting, as it implies a kind of meta-mobius entanglement based on the fact that (I suspect) his book will be to some extent about tagging and categorization itself, so the meaning of miscellaneous is relevant in several ways.
Clay Shirky congratulates his students who developed Dodgeball and have now sold it to Google
Gmail, Orkut, and now Dodgeball all touch this issue. Dodgeball in particular is built on a mix of three different kinds of maps: maps of location (118 rivington St), maps of place (a bar called The Magician), and maps of social environment ("I'm here. Where are my friends?") By mixing them, Dodgeball mingles informational and social aspects of a user’s life into something more valuable than either of those things in isolation.
Andy Baio suggests "some interesting possibilities with Blogger and Google Map."
Quoting from Conversate:
Conversate lets you create instant online discussion spaces. It's simpler, faster, more polite, and less annoying than group emails.... Try inviting friends to a conversation, no login needed. If you're intrigued, create an account, it's free-- you'll get buddy lists and more options.
(via Zephyr)
Quoting from Lucky Friday This Week:
There's a gathering of grassroots-media types and celebration of JD Lasica's new book, Darknet, at the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco Friday evening, 6-9 p.m. Address: 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard.
It's after 5 so I'm now free to announce that John Wiley & Sons has acquired Sybex, the publisher of The Power of Many.
Here's agent Matt Wagner's take on the news (from One less independent?):
The tech book market has been brutal the last few years, so maybe it's inevitable that we're seeing another big acquisition. Word has it John Wiley & Sons is purchasing Sybex...
Andy Baio writes: Upcoming.org gets a wiki
not much there yet, but I'd love some help fleshing it out; feel free to add your feature requests
From the people who brought you Basecamp, here's a new web-based tool for personal information management, to do lists, organizer: Backpack
Gather your ideas, to-dos, notes, photos and files online. Set email and mobile reminders so you don't forget the little things. Easily collaborate with others.
No data lock-in, that's a plus. I want to try this. Right now I'm pretty comfortable with my VoodooPad desktop wiki, but that's not web-enabled (at least not in a way that's practical for me), so this seems worth a try.
Quoting from Some thoughts about extended feeds & microcontent
Do reviews belong in the feed or in the content?
How about calendar events—in the feed or in the content?
If it’s just generated via template, why not both? Or is this where the law intends I should be conservative?
Is anyone working on a Markdown of microcontent?
The first time I heard about BzzAgent was at South by Southwest this year, when I was on a panel about open source marketing and Jason Calacanis brought it up as a negative example, explaining that the agency's methods involved inducing agents to shill for their clients in the guise of ordinary social interaction. Invite your friends over to a barbecue, flip the new Soylent™ brand burgerlike patties on your grill, and casually mention that they are Atkins-compliant and contain fewer transfatty acids than the other leading genetically engineered cow-orker food product, or something like that.
Sounded bad to me, like a cheap parody of honest, enthusiasm-driven word-of-mouth advertising. Then again, Jason has been known to take extreme positions, so I wasn't sure I was getting a full view of this company and its practices.
Then, over the weekend, the blog world was brief... er... abuzz with news that Creative Commons had been taken on by BzzAgent as a pro bono client, an apparent marriage of light and dark. Suw Charman posted in her Strange Attractor Corante blog that this was a revolting development and Dave Balter, BzzAgentfounder hit back in the company blog with Bloggers as Liars. Shoot the messenger, much?
Apparently, BzzAgent sees itself as king of the hill when it comes to offline word-of-mouth and views bloggers as margin online blabbers who miss the big picture and spread lies. Somehow the idea that agents competing for points and rewards might disguise their flacking and shilling as ordinary conversations with their friends doesn't similarly strike the BA folks as dishonest. Frankly, I don't see how any of my friends could maintain their credibility if they were trading on our relationship to win the equivalent of green stamps.
Because Metafilter daddy Matt Haughey is the creative director or something like that for Creative Commons, the controversy got a full airing over there (CC and Marketdroids? WTF?), Suw responded with Apparently I am a liar, CC granddaddy Lawrence Lessig wrestled in public over whether to stick with BA or drop them and thus far I still haven't heard Balter enumerate the twelve alleged falsehoods he claims Charman included in her blog post that kicked off the hullaballoo.
OK, that catches you (and me) up to Sunday. Has anything new happened today?
Update: Balter has apologized to Charman and Corante, and Charman has accepted his apology. Anything else?
Quoting from How to interest more girls in tech careers at Misbehaving:
Jacquelynne Eccles, a University of Michigan psychologist, says that girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view them as solitary pursuits: "In order to increase the number of women in science, we also need to make young women more interested in these fields, and that means making them aware that science is a social endeavor that involves working with and helping people."
See: Why Women Shy Away from Careers in Science and Math (via Mind Hacks)
Frankly, we all benefit if technology is viewed as a social, people-centric pursuit and not just another expression of the lone-genius slash auteur slash mad-scientist meme.
With Yahoo! 360º - Yahoo! 360 Product Blog, the Yahoo 360 team is eating its own dogfood in public, but can any group of people (or Yahoo! Group) have its own blog there, or is this just a custom work-around?
Chris Nolan guested a week or so at PressThink with The Stand Alone Journalist is Here.... Be sure to read if you're interested in the impact of blogging and syndication on journalism.
Today I are one! OK, I've dabbled in journalism before, but it's been a while and it was mostly in the tech trade press. Today my first article has been published at Personal Democracy Forum, Meetup Says Put Up or Shutdown:
On April 12, Meetup.com dropped a bomb on its users: the online group organizing service announced that it would now charge group organizers monthly fees. The notification has forced political campaigns and issue advocacy groups to consider alternative methods for mobilizing their supporters. It's already prompted an exodus among some organizers who have since resigned from their roles managing Meetup groups.
The previously free Web service is widely credited with helping Howard Dean’s Democratic Presidential campaign spread virally, and take its online mojo offline into local communities across the U.S. But now Meetup needs to develop a sustainable revenue stream, and its decision to charge group organizers using the system to schedule and promote local, in-person meetings has been a hard pill for many to swallow.
Go over there and read the rest!
Quoting from All-Podcast, All-the-Time Radio:
A San Francisco radio station is going to start airing nothing but user-submitted podcasts beginning on May 16. The station, which calls itself KYOU Open Source Radio, will broadcast on 1550-AM/San Francisco and the Internet.Submitted podcasts must be 60 megabytes or less in size and can be in any format. The categories on the submission form demonstrate how strange this is likely to be -- traditional fare like news, sports and politics is mixed with over-the-road trucking, sex and wiffleball.
This could be one of the great wheels-off radio experiments of all-time -- at least until earnest liberal San Franciscans fill it with local community news, activism and independent music.
The station sounds like a good opportunity for Jacksonville weblogger Todd Smith, who devotes his site to Americana music and has a Saturday morning show about the music on a local college station.
Was: Telemarketers, do not call my cellphone
Passing this along, seems like a worthy blog meme to spread:
In case you had not heard ... In a few weeks, cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls. Worse yet, YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS ...
To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222.
It is the National DO NOT CALL list ... It will only take a minute of your time and it will block your number for five (5) years.You can also call from your home phone to block calls from telemarketers as well ...
IMPORTANT: You must call from the phone you want to have blocked ... I did it for my home and cell phones ... It took less than a minute .
PASS IT ON ...
For More Info. you can also go to: donotcall.gov
An email message reminded me
John Banks wrote:>Christian,
>
>Reached your site through one of the "recently updated" links at Movable Type.
>
>According to the FTC, the report of cell phones being released to
>telemarketers is NOT true.
>
>So don't be in a rush to spread that virus... er, uh, meme.
>
Likewise see the comment on this post, which points to the Snopes debunking of this false rumor. Sorry for passing it along. I will reevaluate that incoming source of information!
Cell phones help people locate each other at spread out entertainment events like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (the first weekend of which I just attended for the tenth or eleventh time in the last thirteen or so years), but it can be hard to hear what someone is saying into your phone with a loud electric guitar or amplified saxophone or gospel singer's voice in the background.
This year, for the first time, I ended up sending and receiving a lot of text messages from friends looking for recommendations or telling me where they'd be next.
Here are some of the incoming messages
G'morning we're in jazz tent. U? Hot pix 2day? Sure - meet @ the meters Bye - please bring chair tomorrow Hi - danza quartet - econ - seats 4 u in middle G love - avoid! Food - then sacred steel Talking is so 1999 - mebbe see u in the blues tnt I am sitting middle-rght 3rd row Vappie Caught some of irvin mayfield - wow great - now hanging in jass tent
...and here's a sampling of the messages I sent:
Not sure possibly lagniappe Heading to economy hall now We s still in contemporary crafts but in theory s headed to Congo Sq now pix include New Leviathan charles teony fishbone ellis marsalis deacon jon and the Original METERS reunion ! Ok now we are at the jazz and heritage stage watching Charles Teony of Recife Brazil. But soon we are going to Economy Hall for Leviathan. We're getting refreshments and then probably deacon john buddy guy the meters After meters what? Ok how we rendezvous there? We are out on the track roughly between the jester flag and the red black and yellow flag divided in quarters with two maltese crosses, near the stage I wanna hear everybody out there say Zigaboo!
Faithful readers of this site know that I am also a contributing editor at Personal Democracy Forum, a site about how technology is changing politics edited by Micah Sifry and founded by Andrew Rasiej.
That site grew out of a one-day conference in New York last year (also called Personal Democracy Forum). This May 16 will be the second annual Forum and I'll be speaking on a panel, discussing how political campaigns can be savvy about reaching out to bloggers and anticipating the type of coverage they can expect from the living web.
I've added a logo to the upcoming appearances section of this site to remind people to sign up for and come to the conference. It should be great. Head over to Personal Democracy Forum to sign up or read more about the conference agenda.
Headline speakers include Tucker Eskew, Dan Gillmor, Hugh Hewitt, Salem Radio Network, Jennifer 8. Lee, Rebecca MacKinnon, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, Craig Newmark, Andy Stern, and Michael Turk, among others.
See you there?
Steve Rubel celebrates his blog's first anniversary (Happy Birthday Micro Persuasion!). He's accomplished a tremendous amount in one year, and in that time has become my first go-to source for blog news and information. Here's his summary of the year:
Micro Persuasion turns one year old today. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, my readers. It is you, your 2,591 comments and countless links that have made blogging one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Here are some choice cuts of the 1,634 posts I have written over the past year...
- My first post
- Last year I ran a series of Bloggerside Chats with different bloggers, including Robert Scoble. I would love to pick this up again if I get a chance to.
- Robert Scoble and Buzz Bruggeman paid a visit
to CooperKatz last year. I owe both of them a tremendous debt of
gratitude for showing me the ropes. I have learned so much from them as
well as from all of the bloggers I read religiously- In June I conducted a week-long experiment to see if I could survive on a media diet that consisted solely of blogs
- This blog started covering Podcasting last October. It's incredible just how much it has exploded since then
- Of course, this blog has received more than its fair share of attention as well
- Finally, Micro Persuasion has reshaped my job, my employer, our clients and our team
Last but not least I would like to thank my wife, Lisa, for putting up with all of this! Big things are coming in year two - I promise.
I missed the local anniversary party and the afterparty the next day, but the first one got a decent write up in the Chronicale / SF Gate (Hippies, freethinkers and geeks mark two decades of dipping into the Well):
The crowd looked like the stereotype of the Bay Area intellectual and creative community. And, indeed, that's what the Well's community has always been: the writers, artists, geeks, activists and freethinkers who personify the Bay Area.
The Well's tradition of "office parties" long ago established the pattern that some face-to-face ("f2f") contact can greatly solidify a virtual community.
Oh, and here's another take on the anniversary parties from the UK Register by Wellpern <wendyg>.
Over at Hot Points, GoDadddy founder and president Bob Parsons notes that the US 9th Circuit has ruled it OK for critics of a business entity to register "{entity name here}sucks.com" as a domain name, even when the entity's name is a registered trademark.
This evening, Parsons will discuss the ramifications of this on RadioGoDaddy.com:
We plan on talking about how the 9th circuit's recent decision to allow people to register others' domain names (even if they are trademarked!) with the word "Sucks" appended to it (i.e. GoDaddySucks.com) could affect your business and you personally. We'll tell you what you can and should do about it.
An essay I've struggled with writing for Jay Rosen about how the New York Times and other newspapers could become full citizens of the web has eluded me as I continue to mull over the possibilities, but in the meantime, it looks like some folks aren't waiting for the major media to open themselves up coherently and have instead, at least in the case of the Times, taken the blogosphere to the paper.
Quoting from What Blogosphere Says About NYT:
Wow: The Annotated New York Times tracks blog mentions of individual NYT articles.
If the reporters are reading all this stuff, will they have enough time for their actual jobs?
(Via Steve Rubel)
This is a great way to turn a newspaper inside-out. I imagine you could track other things this way too, such as governments and businesses (not as publishing media per se but as collections of topics discussed on the living web.)
I'm wonderin how they are aggregating the articles, though, as I saw a comment on an op-ed by Krugman but not a comment on that comment that also, as far as I could tell, linked to he original Times article, but perhaps it hadn't been picked up yet. Also, I wonderi f people using ther userland partnership method of linking to archived items will find their posts included in the same sweeps.
Scoble pointed me to Why I'm Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope by Darren Barefoot. Some good points in there about why podcasting is not like blogging and won't have the same legs.
Quoting from the term social software (danah boyd), which I meant to post six months ago when it first appeared...
Of course, i still despise the term (sorry Clay) and its (ab)usage.
The term bothers me because the software is helping the hardware mediate between two people engaged in a social interaction. I've always loved 'computer mediated communication' (CMC) because it describes the action and then we can talk about CMC hardware/software and CMC behavior. In CMC, the focus is on the communication with the computer and its role as mediator being a description to the activity: communication. With social software, the adjective is describing our focus: software. I know that the term is used by technologists who build things instead of dealing with social interaction, communication or even hardware, but it still bothers me. I feel as though the term allows us to emphasize the technology instead of the behavior that it supports.
Its usage has grated me because folks use it as though a revolution has happened. We've been building software that can be labeled as social software for a long long long time. Why are we acting like giddy children who just found a new toy? Worse: it's either far to inclusive or exclusive. Is SMS social software? What about MMORPGs? I guess retrospecticely, we’d call them that, but for the most part, we just focus on YASNS, blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and other recent developments.
Anyhow, it's not like i have a better term. I tend to talk about social technologies or social media and i tend to use the term CMC. The problem is that CMC isn't describing the new wave of behaviors which aren’t always about communication. Perhaps i need to use computer-mediated social interaction.
Popular social bookmark site del.icio.us, widely credited with helping to popularize the current tagging craze, has accepted venture capital funding that will enable creator Joshua Schachter to devote his energy to developing the service full-time, as reported by Schachter himself in a post to the [delicious-discuss] mailing list.
Congratulations, Joshua!
Quoting from The LitKicks Board Archive (I interviewed Levi and discussed Literary Kicks in the book):
In January 2001, I was playing around with some Java software at work when I heard the poet Gregory Corso had died. I decided to try this new software out by putting up a Corso tribute board, and this is how the LitKicks boards were born.
The boards grew and evolved into a massive social experiment, often taking on a life of their own. Last July, 684,000 messages later, Caryn and Jamelah and I decided to shut down the boards and redesign the entire site for a more focused, literary experience. We've been getting hate mail ever since. Take, for instance, this charming missive that recently arrived: "You should know that you have singlehandedly destroyed a great community. I could never have guessed that you would commit such a selfish and domineering act to people who were your friends, by which I include myself."
The truth is, we like getting hate mail because it makes us feel like someone cares what we do. But, in fact, it was a very difficult decision for us to change the site, and I guess it was my own techie pride that prevented me from revealing one major reason we had to make this change. By the summer of last year, the board software was falling apart.
Once healthy and fast, the system was choking on its backlog of data, and it could take two or three minutes to pull up a message more than a few months old. In early 2004, many of us tried to read through the old boards to find the best poems and stories to use in the Action Poetry book, and this was when it became clear how bad the situation had become. Any message over a year old had been lost in a cold oblivion, from which it might be coaxed out if the software felt like it. I had always viewed the boards as a literary experiment, but literature is something that endures through time, and the software wasn't letting this happen.
In fact, I work as a web systems architect, and I know how to build scalable community software that can elegantly handle massive amounts of traffic. But LitKicks wasn't built that way. I had never set up the infrastructure required to handle the level of activity we were getting on this site, and by the summer of 2004 LitKicks was a Titanic waiting to sink. If you ever tried to read a LitKicks page and saw a Java error -- well, yeah, that was the iceberg peeking through the hull.
I liked the old boards a lot. There was a creative anarchy there, and a real spirit of fun. But there was also an overriding mood of underachievement, a sort of prevailing "dumb chic" (no doubt inspired by Charles Bukowski, the epitome of dumb chic), that seemed like a creative dead end. Occasional moments of genius cropped up on one board or another, but there were also long stretches of depressing banality. By the spring of 2004 I wasn't sure if I wanted to rebuild the existing site with a different software package or instead come up with an all new format, a new beginning for LitKicks. I asked Jamelah and Caryn if either of them felt remotely satisfied with the boards, and when they both told me they didn't, the decision seemed clear: shake things up, try something new.
The new LitKicks is still "finding itself", I think. The public reaction to the board shutdown was more negative than I'd expected, and I think some people are still warming up to the new format, which is designed to move slower and generate more thoughtful writings and conversations. But LitKicks has been around for more than ten years, and the site is designed to change, to evolve, to do surprising things. The current version is our latest attempt at being what we should be, but we're not going to rest or stop here, just as we've never stopped at any of our previous incarnations.
As for the old boards, I'm happy to tell you that I've moved them all to a brand new archive server, designed to be fast and error-free. Here it is, for all posterity: the permanent LitKicks Board Archive.
Looking back at this vast array of human-generated spontaneous content, I have to wonder, what does it all mean? There are over a hundred thousand poems here, for instance ... but what do they all add up to in the larger scheme of things? How can these poems be read? What significance does yesterday's stream of literary ephemera hold today, if any?
I was very proud when the Library of Congress included posts from various LitKicks boards in September and October 2001 in their web archive of that moment in history. But what about the rest of this huge mass of content? I am really not sure what good this archive is, and for that matter I am still not exactly sure what good LitKicks is. I'd like to hear what you think, and I'd like to know whether or not you think these old boards are worth archiving at all, and why.
I also wanted to explain why I left two of the more popular (but less literary) LitKicks boards out of the permanent archive. It was a hard decision not to migrate Mindless Chatter to the new server. But this board had about three times as many messages as any other LitKicks board, and while most of it certainly was mindless, I really didn't find that much of it was timeless. We had laughs on this board, but you probably had to be there, and you can't be there anymore, so Mindless Chatter didn't make it to the archive.
I felt less ambivalent about my decision not to move the Flames board into the archive. This actually felt good to me. During the 42 months of the LitKicks Boards Experience, I often had to remind writers that the point of LitKicks wasn't to help strangers dislike each other, but to help them like each other. Flames was a fun place (some of my own best posts showed up there, I think) ... but I am not going to pay disk charges to store hatred and misunderstanding. Both these commodities are cheap, and readily available elsewhere.
Anyway, I do have text-file backups of these boards, along with the others, so nothing is lost to posterity. I hope you'll go visit the LitKicks Board Archive in its new home, and I think you'll agree with me that there's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff there. Thanks for being part of it, if you were. And whether you were or not ... hang around, and help us figure out what the current version of LitKicks is supposed to evolve into.
Andy Baio IM'd me this morning to alert me to the new version of Upcoming.org (Upcoming.org: News: Huge Changes!).
Improvements includes the following:
By jove, I think David Weinberger has spun out yet another brilliant idea in P2P backup
I think I'm missing something obvious, but why can't I find a p2p backup system that lets me and a designated buddy swap storage space? I'll give my pal, say, 5GB of storage on my computer if she'll give me 5GB on hers. My computer is pretty much always on, and so is my buddy's. All we need is some basic sw for letting us designate the directories we want kept up to date and for making the p2p connection. Maybe a little encryption and compression. Neither of us guarantees 24/7/365 access, multiply redundant raid arrays, or whatever, but it would help me sleep better knowing that when my house melts, the drafts of that unfinished awful novel will survive.
Does this software — preferably free and open source — exist and I've just missed it? If it doesn't, have I missed why this is a bad idea?
Quoting from Blog and Wiki Best Practices
Infoworld has posted a comprehensive package on the use of blogs/wikis in internal communications as well as for corporate communications/PR. Platforms reviewed include JotSpot, Socialtext and Moveable Type. The package is rich with good information. Here's a summary of the article's best practices. Note how they suggest to plan for leaks. Intel learned this the hard way. Also notice how they encourage companies to support popular bottom-up corporate bloggers. Microsoft clearly is doing this. Cut this out and stick it on your company's break room bulletin board next to your favorite EEOC document.
Quoting from Steve Johnson on books and blogs:
Steve Johnson has a brilliant post on why he doesn't blog his books as he writes them:
The problem for an author is that books are not written the way they are read. They usually take years to write, from original proposal to final proofs; they are rarely composed in sequence; and by the time you submit a final manuscript, you've invariably read every page dozens of times, mostly out context.
So for me at least, the trick of writing a book is somehow shedding all the layered, time-shifted contortions of writing, and somehow recreating what it would feel like to sit down as a newcomer to the book and start reading..
...And private, linear, slow is exactly the opposite of the experience of blogging. .
Read the whole thing if only because it is itself an example of Steve's blend of logic, insight and voice.
I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined entirely online, posting updated drafts every day. That was a mistake. What's the point of reading, much less commenting on, drafts the author is going to throw out tomorow? So, next time, I think I'll aggressively blog ideas as they occur and post drafts of chapters as I finish them. I think. [Technorati tags: SteveJohnson blogs]
This blog started off as a private place for my editors and I to gather notes and references, then it became a place for editorial discussion and a way for me to sift through all my references when writing or rewriting a chapter. I never posted my drafts on line but very occasionally a sentence or two from a blog entry ended up more or less verbatim in the book. When the book came out last fall the blog became a site for promoting the book's sales, and a way of continuing to cover the same "beat" even after the printing presses had gone to bed.
As I'm not yet an influential enough influencer, I will point you to initial impression of Yahoo 360 (danah boyd).
I was checking in with a Yahoo group set up for alumni of a startup I worked for in the dotcom days and noticed someone pointing to his progile at Txters.com.
Looks like YASN, this one geared around enabling free text messaging.
Haven't had a chance to explore this new Microsoft offering, but Crossfader appears to be a site designed to enable collaboration across the net among musicians and music producers:
Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid
In his debut Crossfader session, Paul Miller lays down the inside track about his new album "Drums of Death" a collaboration with Dave Lombardo (Drummer from Slayer). Featuring Chuck D of Public Enemy and Vernon Reid (guitarist from Living Color). This album is – as Paul puts it – "Think of this record as a band made of samples". Layering tracks and reworking drum solos he walks us through his production techniques using Sonar by Cakewalk.
Spending time with Spooky is always enlightening. In these five minutes we also journey through Paul’s thoughts on "experimenting", social computing and Dj’ing as a contemporary art form.
I hope neither Caterina nor Stewart punch me in the mouth for reporting this: Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr:
Nicely written FAQ there. Example:
Are you going to become Yahoo Photos?
No. Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are alot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrized where Flickrization would be good. Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future. Flickr would also suffer from a sudden deluge of LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! omg! so we're going to grow it carefully.
Update: Jeremy Zawodny articulates the Yahoo perspective on this acquisition.
Ben Brown, one of the names I finally met at SXSW this year wrote up a good example of spontaneous social networking on his Intarweb Rockstar blog: Virtual Community Boards, Missed Connections Not Missed, and Ambient Noise
Bonus: Jeff Veen blogged his own comment at the "leveraging solipsism" panel about the best way to continue the conversation, which also points to the benefits of ad hoc solutions over yet-another-signup lock-in solutions.
Unrelated: My wiki is down. (Follow the "about me" link in the home page navigation to see the error message.) Are there any phpwiki mavens who want to help me diagnose the problem? I have no idea what caused it or when it started.
Nancy White did a fantastic job taking notes at various panels throughout SXSW interactive this year. In her write up of my second panel, Are Political Parties Obsolete?, she definitely captured the gist of most of what we were saying up on the stage.
I plan to do a few retrospective posts here once I get home and chew over my experiences a bit more, and I'll be posting about the activist-technology track specifically over at PDF.
Because I'm about to check out of my hotel for my return flight from SXSW, I'm just going to swipe Steve Rubel's Book Editing Wiki Style post from his essential, how does he do it, I remember when I had that level of energy and ethusiasm for blogging, Micro Persuasion weblog:
BusinessWeek reports that Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig is opening up the revision of his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, to public editing this week via a JotSpot wiki. The editable Web page will be the vehicle for people to participate in the revision process, the results of which will be published in print this fall.
In related wiki news, Eastwick Communications has launched a new practice in conjunction with Socialtext called eastwikkers that provides services and technology to organizations that are looking to integrate new-media tools into their communication programs. Also, MS&L has launched its BlogWorks practice. They are the agency working with GM on their blogs. See a trend here? I think there's room for all of us.
When explaining social network services to people I often point out that Yahoo, with its profiles, groups, photo banks, and so on, is already the most popular YASN in the world. Obviously Yahoo recognizes this too and by adding a little blogging secret sauce to meld together their existing service offerings, they are making that share-stuff-with-your-friends network explicit.
See also Yahoo 360 will succeed where many others will fail.
There's an official wiki for this panel that Kaliya is technographing on the screen, but I can't read the URL (but will post it when I get it - ah, here it is: Sx Sw Delib - NcddWiki), but there's another one also being built up at the same time: Deliberative Democracy and Interactive Technology - Lawver Wiki
The session also has an irc channel on freenode (#sxsw-democracy).
Quoting from Nancy White's excellent notes SXSW: Blogging While Black Panel below the jump
Continue reading "choconancy on SXSW: Blogging While Black Panel" »
The day was kind of a blur. I've been taking notes when I've had an adequate power supply for my laptop, and I'll either post them raw or try to clean them up a bit when I get a breather. (There's a few-hour stretch today where I think I can get a little work done.)
My panel with Rob Davis and Jason McCabe Calacanis seemed to go real well. We packed the room, which was good to see. (We were up against Dan Gillmor, so we were worried about that. In the green room, Jason raised his fist at Dan and said "Damn you, Dan Gillmor!" or "Curse you, Dan Gillmor!" I forget which but it was funny.)
Jason is a good provocateur, willing to stake out controversial positions and not worried about turning large parts of the audience (like Mac users) against him. This was cool because it stirred up a lot of shit in the room and left me lots of space to seem moderate and reasonable. I seem to recall a few laugh lines that cracked everyone up, which makes my day, since deep down I think I'm a repressed wannabe stand-up (or sit-down) comedian. We had a lot of great questions from the audience, so there was lively give-and-take instead of dry lecturing from the stage.
I'm haunting the pubsub feed to see if anyone blogs anything about the session because who knows, maybe it was terrible? For instance, I'm not sure we ever defined Open Source Marketing adequately or established that it is anything at all or that if it exists it's really worthwhile, etc. Ping Yee asked a great question, vis a vis the Dean campaign (where we met) about the downside of open marketing. I agreed that there is one and had nothing to offer about how to manage it. I reminded everyone (like we need reminding) that in the election the more traditional command-and-control structures won. Kerry beat Dean and Bush beat Kerry.
If you attended the session and have feedback positive or negative (er, I mean, constructive) please drop by and leave a comment or send me a trackback ping or something. I'd like to learn how to do this kind of thing better, and I'm on another panel on Tuesday, so, as a user interface guy, I'd like to keep evolving the "experience" as we say.
I really enjoyed the session with Craig Newmark and Matt Haughey at the end of the day. They are both low-key modest guys with clean functional websites that kick the ass of most of the flashier more hyped projects out there. They've learned a lot by serving their users, and they both do customer support. Their anecdotes were entertaining and their insights were valuable.
Plus, I finally got a chance to introduce myself to mathowie in person.
For the second night running I opted for music instead of geek-schmoozing. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do career wise - I probably won't be appearing in too many flickr photo streams, but musicwise I was in heaven. Saw the Resentments at the Saxon Pub and they were incredibly good. I'll write more about the music in Austin over in my personal journal.
Tonight I probably should get myself to a good geek party though and press the flesh. When I got back to the hotel last night there was a buzzy little thing going on in the bar, with danah, Steve Champeon, Calacanis, and other familiar faces milling around, but I was just too tired from the two-and-a-half hours of music and the late barbecue dinner at Ruby's, and I was missing my baby, so I spun through the bar once and then hied myself up to my room to call home before hitting the sack.
Quoting from Eyebeam reBlog - SXSW Report: Ben Walker on 'Net Censorship in China
Weblog: Eyebeam reBlog
Source: SXSW Report: Ben Walker on 'Net Censorship in China
Link
Yesterday at SXSW: a presentation on blogging and censorship, with Hossain Derakhshan, prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger, and Benjamin Walker, radio host and Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow, who just got back from China last week. Hot on the heels of this March 4 New York Times article on censorship of blogs in China, he refuted what he defined as several misconceptions of the western media on how the Internet is being used there.
Misconception 1: We in the west assume that millions of Chinese are searching for information to aid their revolutionary struggles.
Truth: Most Internet users in China are looking for the same thing most Western users are looking for. Porn.Misconception 2: Information from the outside gets blocked at the national level, especially on oppressed movements such as Falun Gong.
Truth: Chinese get flooded with unwanted email about this and a lot of other things, and just like users in the west, they consider it spam.Misconception 3: There are 30,000 to 50,000 "Internet police" who do nothing but monitor people's email, web surfing, etc.
Truth: This is a number invented by officials for official propaganda missives, aimed at the national media, not Western reporters, who nonetheless take up information ministry press releases as legitimate and use them as source material.Misconception 4: Only the most tech-sophisticated kids know how to use proxies to get beyond the firewall and onto "banned sites."
Truth: Lots and lots of users regularly use proxies to not only get to more content, but to avoid extra pay-per-service charges. (Although, apparently even this does not manage to evade the highly effective national censoring of porn content.)Misconception 5: Censorship is all happening at the government level.
Truth: Censorship is more prevalent at the personal level, with bloggers omitting or removing references to certain ideas or issues in order to avoid trouble with the authorities. Service providers in China also must cooperate with the authorities on screening for certain words and phrases and intervening with those who post them, but the active hand of the government with individuals is rare.According to bloggers Walker interviewed, the Chinese blogosphere is evolving, with bloggers carefully testing the openness of the system. There are different levels of censorship--new tools might help users move towards freer use of blogs for more sensitive topics. For example, on Google China, blogs are starting to rank higher than official web sites on searches about "city reconstruction," a phrase that signifies development in the countryside. It's a significant shift in information resources, that points at the potential for bloggers to reveal more of the truth about life in China to each other.
All very interesting to me -- I've been reserved in my trust in the "blogosphere" to foment social revolution in places like China, where it seems like it was too easy to stop up the pipe -- a view definitely influenced by what I've read in papers like the Times. Walker's POV is that we need to look a lot deeper than what mainstream press is reporting about blogs, the Internet and China.
(Posted by Emily Gertz in Global Culture - Art, Music, Fashion, and Travel at 04:11 PM)
Steve Rubel seems to have evoked a response from AOL PR about the draconian new AIM terms of service, in the comments to his AOL's TOS Change Sparks PR Crisis entry at Micro Persuasion / MicroPerfusion:
UPDATE: AOL PR is listening and they chime in via comments to this post.
The blogosphere is buzzing this morning over a major privacy change to AOL Instant Messenger's Terms of Service. The change is sparking outrage because of this quote...
Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.
If I were working with AOL, I would call a huddle this morning to get out there talking about this with a blog and/or other means. The hasn't started covering this yet. They can start to turn the car around if they act now. However, it may soon be too late. Houston Chronicle veteran tech reporter Dwight Silverman already has it up on his weblog.
Quoting from sxsw: leveraging solipsism (Liz Lawley, who once again took much better notes than I did)
Unfortunately, two of the original three speakers for this panel—Stewart Butterfield and Peter Merholz —couldn’t make it today. Jeff Veen is moderating, and Tantek Çelik, Don Turnbull, and Thomas VanDerWal are the participants.
Jeff Veen starts by framing the context, since the title is…well…somewhat oblique. He points out that tools that help us manage information are becoming more socially aware. del.icio.us, for example, which allows you to discover people as well as information, and to discover information based on people rather than simply topics. Last year social networks were all the rage; but he felt that tools like Friendster were like yearbooks—fun and useful for showing off who you know, but that’s a short term activity that doesn’t sustain long term interest. It gains ongoing attraction once you add in the kind of value-added media that tools like Flickr (and, I’d add, last.fm) provide.
He makes an important observation—what’s most interesting here is the blending of public and private. That needs more elaboration, I think it’s a key concept. He also talks about the need for more interoperability between these systems. Can travelocity, for example, know where he is and share that information in useful ways with other systems I’m on (like flickr, for instance).
Thomas VanDerWal is up first, and discusses personal views of information. Too much online information is ephemeral—so we end up emailing things to ourselves, copy and pasting into new documents and losing context. We need a way to get back to information we’ve seen. (Reminds me of Microsoft Research’s “stuff I’ve seen” approach to searching.)
He says that we “get lost early” in the information around us, and ask how we can get to “findability” in our own information spaces? del.icio.us, for example, allows us to name things in ways that make sense to us. But how do you tie different personalities together? How do we jump between disciplinary vocabulary boundaries?
Our current tools don’t support us well. (His slide is titled “that synching feeling”) Synchronization frequently makes mistakes and overwrites inappropriately. We need a “mothership of information” to tie together our various devices and collections of information.
How do we build a “personal infocloud”? Many requirements. It has to be portable (or ubiquitous), the access appropriate to the context, organized in a way that makes sense to the user in the context they’re in.
External storage and management is important. We need smarter aggregation, attention.xml for everything on your own hard drive as well as the online sources we’re following. What’s important? What should I be focused on? Need standard formats for being able to pull information in and organize it. Aggregation only works when information is in a recognizable format.
(“Unbolding” as a constant activity; great term.)
The next speaker is Don Turnbull from UT Austin’s School of Information. He opens with a great line: “I’m from the university, and I’m here to help.” Launches into an interesting discussion of tagging and folksonomy issues.
Turnbull poses some key questions related to folksonomies:
- How do you get people to cooperate?
- How good can the tags be? Can you find things you wouldn’t have found? but more interesting, can you browse through categories you never would have thought of (like the “me” tag, or “whatsinyourbag”)
- Is there a point where we stop tagging? where we feel we don’t need to tell the system anything else about us? (for example, he himself has tagged thousands of movies on netflix “mostly because I go to a lot of faculty meetings and we have wireless access…”; is there any point in tagging more?)
- What about changing interests? You buy a gift for someone on amazon, and your recommendations are skewed towards it for a while. How can you tell recommender systems “I’m not interested in that any more?” [my note: last.fm handles this pretty well]
- There are still lots of people not using these systems; this is a small slice of the information world
He raises some issues related to tagging, as well, such as the potential for spamming and gaming, the inherently explicit nature of tags (not always a good thing), and the value of tags being easy-to-parse and analyze plain text.
Then he moves on to social and community issues related to tagging and sharing of data:
- Who controls the sharing? And who controls those controls??
- anonymity vs community (and privacy issues related to this)
- free riders—people who never tag, just browse
- what constitutes a community? are personal relationships necessary? do they grow out of the information sharing, or define with whom you share information?
(Ack! I want his slides! I’m missing a lot!)
Talks about all the implicit metadata that could be added to explicit tags, such as “i bought this,” “i own this,” dwell time, clicks, chatter, etc.
He ends with the concept of “don’t fence me in” - we need tag mobility across systems, (flickr, email box names, amazon ratings), a common api for tags, and the ability to move between desktop and server-based views of our data.
The last speaker is Tantek Çelik from Technorati. This is a much less theoretical, much more “look at our cool Technorati tags” presentation.
He says “Anybody can be their own delicious.” — But this misses the point, I think. the value of delicious isn’t just your own bookmarks or even your own tags, it’s the collaborative filtering and discovery. He says that technorati’s approach allows you to own your own data—but the user owns his or her own data on server-based sites, too; it’s easy to import/export and backup. The value to me is in cross-user data, and new ways of thinking about things.
A questioner mentions open space technology—how can we do that virtually? How can we extend the conversation in this room beyond the borders. Panel member (can’t see who) says “that’s why I maintain a blog.”
Tantek says that things like using the technorati tag for sxsw2005 in a blog entry provides “unprecedented” aggregation, but this is exactly what trackback provides. O’Reilly did this last year by allowing people to trackback to conference session pages.
A few more questions, and I’m off to eat. I’m starved! More later from the Malcolm Gladwell keynote this afternoon.
(A meta comment about sxsw: it’s hard to get called on to ask a question; that’s where IRC really helps, but it’s surprisingly underutilized here. Too bad.)
Mark Miller is hatin' on SXSW:
SXSW, at least the Interactive part, is not any fun. You have several people here, trying to be a "techie", yet failing miserably, with such panels as, "Bluffing your way through CSS", et cetera. Also attempting to talk about the "blogosphere". And then you have just in general the publications and such of SXSW still trying to be "cool" and "grassroots". It's a big corporate stunt. If they'd admitted they were a big corporate thing, that'd be fine. But they still try to delude themselves. A $275 ticket is not "cool" and "grassroots". And of course they still have volunteers. Saddening.
Quoting from So Many Great Women at SXSW
From left to right: Me (Caterina Fake), Emily Davidow, Emily Gertz, Adina Levin, Mary Hodder.
I'm here in Austin at SXSW Interactive, as is misbehaving.net founder Liz Lawley (who is sitting right in front of me). There are a lot of great women both in attendance and speaking on panels. This is a great thing to see, especially after a talk I did in Munich where the audience and speakers, aside from our very well selected group (thank you Jochen!), consisted almost entirely of men in suits, and was followed by a Playboy party, replete with Playboy bunnies!
Quoting from sxsw: eric meyer on emergent semantics (Liz Lawley), I noticed that her notes on Eric Meyer's session bear directly on the tagging discussion we're having in the solipsism panel now:
He talks about microformats for solving specific problems, generally expressing a human-understandable semantic definition using xhtml markup (e.g. rel=nofollow). Then he uses the example of colleges paving well-worn walkways ("pave the cow paths"). Acknowledges that there’s an opposing view, but dismisses it as wrong. But I'm not sure that "herd mentality" always derives the best possible answer. (It's not hard to find examples to support my concerns in current politics…) I think he should acknowledge that there's a need for deriving patterns from trusted networks, not just global populations.
The specific examples he provides include not only nofollow, but also CC license link annotation, and XHTML Friends Network (XFN) "metrolling," Technorati "VoteLinks," and hCard.
I'm baffled by the lack of discussion of folksonomy in the context of emergent semantics. That’s genuinely emergent, as opposed to the examples being provided here. Most of these strike me not as emergent, but top-down, created and implemented by a relatively small group of people; the fact that they’re not coming from a standards organization doesn’t make them any less deterministic.
Why the emphasis on "met" — this strikes me as a not particularly useful thing. And it prioritizes geographic proximity and, to a large extent, wealth. If you can’t afford to travel to conferences, you become excluded from the "met" network, and marginalized if that becomes a significant factor in trust.
Ah... a brief reference to what he’s calling "free tagging," but goes back to Technorati, saying that rel="tag" provides a necessary definition of tagging. But why should Technorati be defining meaning in this space? Again, that's the antithesis of emergence.
An audience member asks about how to make large collections more accessible (like library books). This is exactly where free tagging makes so much sense, but he goes back to seeing this as a format construction issue.
Jason is the head of the company and he handles the tech support for their products(Leave it Behind > Brian Bailey)
Hmm, very similar to Craig's commitment to customer support.
Oh, and other ways to follow SXSW on the web include the delicious tag, the Technorati tag, and the flickr tag.
Quoting from terry storch @ fellowship church - SxSW: How to make big things happen with small teams... because he took great notes. By the way, found this post via the PubSub feed for SXSW that Scoble set up.
Weblog: terry storch @ fellowship church
Source: SxSW: How to make big things happen with small teams
Link: http://www.terrystorch.com/2005/03/sxsw_how_to_mak.html
How to make big things happen with small teams
Jason Fried, President @ 37signals
http://www.37signals.com
http://www.basecamphq.com
http://www.tadalist.com
Book: Defensive Design for the WebJason was by far the best speaker that I heard today. Jason is a very charismatic communicator that also knows what he is talking about. Jason is the president of 37 signals, a web design and software development company. 37 signals would best be know for Basecamp, a web-based project management tool.
4 keys to making big things happen with small teams:
1) reducing mass
2) making things manageable
3) lowering cost of change
4) staying out of debt (design, code, and cash)here is Jason’s outline-----------------------
small has big advantages
the customer is closer
less distortion
less middle/muddle
everyone on the front line
change is easierhire the right people!- passionate and happy
well rounded
quick learners
good writers
trustworthyact your size
don’t try and be a big company
less formalities
less mass
less fear
more flexible
more change
more freedomembrace constraints
less people, more power
less money, more value
less resources, better use
less time, better timebuild half a product not a half-a** product
say no by default
listen to the product
ignore details early on
improve what you have
decisions are temporaryless software
lower cost of change
less room for error
less support required
encourage human solutionsget real, start with the UI (user interface)
there is nothing functional about a functional spec.
start designing
start prototyping
start experiencing
start changing
rinse and repeatmake most decision JIT (just in time)
scalability (don’t build for it until you need it)
admin interface (don’t spend time on admin side)work on the next most important thing
is this it?
if not, what is?
are we doing it?
if not, why not?celebrate small victories
iterate
celebrate
etc, etc.feel the hurt
builders support it
chefs become waiters
shared annoyance (developers need to support it!)publicity amplifiers
get your message out!
feature food- people want to talk about it...
promote through education
30 day major upgrade
transparency=trust
bloggletags: sxsw | jason fried
what is a tag?
George is listing his planned schedule - good idea!
Here's mine:
Some tough choices there!
A quicky (I'm at SXSW and am scanning my aggregator in the lull before the storm: Quoting from Peopleweb: Mark Pincus has a vision
Peopleweb: Tribester Mark Pincus has a vision. It's kinda open source ad tags, only for people.
Mark writes:
"as more people take on 'open' identities online, that can be crawled, found and linked to with bits of semantically organized data like 'profile', 'about me' or 'my tribes or groups', there will soon be an ability for search engines to organize people into relevant groupings...(snip)
...imagine a future where the network acts as one database. you will tell the web that you are single and what your dating criteria is. your dating profile will only be shown to those people."
Amazing how tagging and search can transform everything so quickly.
A quicky before heading to the airport this a.m. Check out the new version of the CivicSpace site: Free, open source tools for building thriving online communities | CivicSpace
Note to self: Don't end up in one of David's photos of oblivious digital hipsters.
Quoting from The unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005 | davidnunez.com:
Ditto for parking yourself in the hallway with the laptop. I always found that very sad. I think I may take a picture this year to remind myself how sad it can get: Seeing a row of geeks on the floor, clicking away, lost in the ether, as tons of very interesting and very real and very Right Here and Now people walk by. Potentially fun or even lucrative people connections squandered by the minute.
Be honest with yourself: how critical is it that you are online Right Now? Are you online to show off? To show that you are a hipster digirati? Can't it wait until you get home or at least until you finally crash at your hotel room that night?
(via George)
Quoting from The Internet Gap - by Micah L. Sifry (from Personal Democracy Forum)
Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap."
Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues:
And the web-only kind of activism has a mixed track record at best. At first, MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest seemed like a trailblazing concept. Until you saw the God-awful ad that won, and realized that, like most MoveOn initiatives before or since, all that energy was simply being dumped into a rat hole. Just how credible and useful are online polls when your guy wins with 90% of the vote? And using a chat room or posting a comment on a blog is not in itself a productive political act; for one thing, you could be out talking to undecideds instead of preaching to the online choir, and secondly, in the blogosphere, quality matters more than quantity. A thousand blogs echoing the WaPo/NYT line will never be as effective as fifty blogs providing an interesting and original alternative voice, probing for weaknesses in the MSM Death Star.My two cents: Like most debates about the relative merits of different political strategies, this one is colored indelibly by the fact that the Republicans won. GOP e-activists are also doing a good job of presenting themselves as the most net-savvy, most concerned with pushing power to the edges of their network, etc.
Jon Udell's got another wonderful "screencast" up: The on-demand blogosphere.
I've been a fan of Jon's since he was narrating his content-management system learnings for Byte Magazine. These days he's pioneering a bleeding edge that the rest of us will get to only when it doesn't require customizing one's own interface to the degree he's willing (and able) to do so.
So, his reports are like dispatches from the future and when he says we're moving in a direction, I trust him.
Is anyone else using this screencasting medium the way Jon is?
In Define "Journalist", Scot Hacker says:
At the J-School, we've been exploring the question of whether bloggers are journalists for a couple of years, in both classroom experiments and in conferences that have drawn fascinated/scared journalists and the blogging elite from around the world. The question can often be boiled down like this: Journalists may argue that "if it's not edited, it's not journalism" -- a...
Over at Personal Democracy Forum (my other, other home), Chris Nolan takes Tapped to task for privileging "professional" journalists over the online variety: TAPPED Out:
Please God, would someone – anyone – make the people with salaried journalism jobs stop trying to draw a line between what they do for publications that appear on paper and what people like me, working almost entirely on-line do? Will I – will any of us - live long enough to see the silly caterwauling about subsidized punditry, fund-raising and partisan bickering die down to a dull roar? It's nothing more than a convenient disguise for salaried journalists to use to assure themselves that their station in life is secure from the rabble in its pajamas. It's short-sighted and silly. And everybody knows (or ought to know) it.
Chris's perspective is particularly valuable given that she has at different times inhabited both sides of the street.
I'm headed off to Austin next week to attend South by Southwest Interactive for my first time, something I've been meaning to do now for a number of years.
On Sunday, March 13, from 3:30 to 4:30 pm I'm on a panel called Open Source Marketing: The New Unwieldy / Unlimited Product Publicity.
On Tuesday, March 15, from 11:30 to 12:30, I'm on a panel called Are Political Parties Obsolete?.
I believe I'll be signing copies of my book (you know, The Power of Many?) immediately after the Tuesday panel.
The conference ends Tuesday but I'm sticking around an extra day for an Activist Technology miniconference on Wednesday featuring many of the movers and shakers in the political / activist / technology world.
Of course I'll be blogging the conference both here and at Personal Democracy Forum.
In his Fresh Books Blog (Do you need an agent in the tech book market?), literary agent Matt Wagner points to a discussion about agents, how they earn their 15% and how useful they are in today's business climate, taking place on the weblog of Joe Wikert, an editor at Wiley (Agents: Do You Need One?.
It's a fascinating discussion and well worth having. The living web is clearly disrupting hidebound traditional publishing infrastructure and while there may always be a role for go-betweens, it would seem obvious that literary agents are themselves due for a reassessment of their role and how they can best give value to the publishing process and be compensated for their skills, contacts, and advice.
Disclosure: Matt Wagner is a former agent with Waterside Productions, Inc. and I am currently associated with that agency, both as an agent and as a writer. (My agent at Waterside is Margot Maley.)
Seb Paquet points us to this International Symposium on Wikis, currently in the midst of a call for papers and presentations.
Should be interesting. Perhaps I can come up with something to submit.
Quoting from The great FEC scare.
This interview with FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith, warning that political bloggers may soon be subject to draconian regulation as a consequence of McCain-Feingold, has been linked to from all over the blogosphere.
I'm frankly not sure how seriously to take it, because in all honesty I don't entirely trust any "news" story bylined by the guy who made up the "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" story (and, later, boasted about having done so). A basic technique of the modern Right is to enlist the libertarian impulses of decent people in the service of policies that actually serve to consolidate power in fewer and fewer hands, and lots of libertarians have shown themselves to be entirely user-friendly in this regard. Not being an expert on the intricacies of campaign law, I'm not entirely sure all this alarm about Imminent Regulation Of Weblogs (film at 11) isn't just a con designed to undermine support for any limitations on the latitude of the ultra-rich.
Assuming the story is legit, though, Nathan Newman, as he so frequently does, talks sense.
The FEC is making noises to limit the speech of blogs in the name of campaign finance reform. Josh worries that this "would mean the end of what this site and so many others on the right and left do."
Only if we follow the rules. I won't. Free speech is worth fighting for and the best way to do it is to refuse to be silent. There are a lot of bloggers out there and that's a lot of people to throw in jail if they all pledge to defy the rules.
I think most campaign finance rules restricting contributions are worthless and lead to idiotic proposals like this one. This is a good place for the insanity to stop. The more bloggers who pledge to defy the FEC, the less likely they are to move forward.
I'll take that pledge.
Count me in... if it comes to that.
Quoting from FEC May Regulate Blogging - by Michael Bassik at the Personal Democracy Forum blog:
Bloggers and online-only journalists might have to report their hyperlinks, articles, and postings as in-kind political contributions. This according to a CNET interview with Bradley Smith, one of the six FEC commissioners.
Talk of a potential rule change follows a Federal Court decision last year, which was discussed in detail on PDF last month.
Smith states:
The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.
Man, that's crazy talk! How is this going to work? It seems like an insane can of worms. How do you value an in-kind contribution of this type? This could turn the political blogosphere into a litigation-happy zone. Stay tuned.
I'm making my plans for SXSW and getting tips from experienced attendees like George aand Austin residents like Sarah about what to do. Sarah reminded me of the 20x2 event (20 speakers, one question, two minutes each). Looking over the participant list I recognized a few names right off the bat (Dave Shea, David Galbraith, Nick Finck - all people I know only by reputation although I did meet David once in passing at a bloggers' dinner in SF a year or so ago), but I realized that I wasn't familiar with the website listed after David Galbraith's name: wists.com
So, I went to check out wists.com and it's another social networking tool in beta. This one seems to be geared toward creating and acquiring lists, such as wishlists and bookmarked items, and sharing them with other people. If you copy anyone else's items, you are considered their friend. That's as much as I've figured out so far and I'm not sure I even got that part right. I'll keep poking around and see.
I imagine a number of people will be announcing or launching sites at SXSW (or ETech, which is at the same time). I'll be flogging my book of course, but I'll also be pointing people to Mediajunkie, my digital media agency, and to Monkey Vortex Radio Theater, another project I'm into up to my neck.
Quoting from Could Social Networking Save the World?
Rob Paterson has penned a long and extraordinary article suggesting that social networking tools, building on a foundation of finding and connecting and relating tools including weblogs, could be used to cut out the corporate and government middlemen everywhere, usurp the existing economy and power authority, and create peer-to-peer networks that would run everything.
Um, OK. That sounds a bit, well, utopian, but I'll bite. I do agree that peer-to-peer relationship management has the potential to disrupt the pharaonic hierarchical approach to organizing just about everything that our corporations and governments and most other institutions inherited from feudalism and monarchy, but I see these changes happening gradually (despite the oomph of the word "disrupt") and I don't expect top-down organizations to vanish quietly. There will probably always be some role for command and control, but it may have to justify itself on a case-by-case basis if other modes of organization gather steam.
But don't take my word for any of this. Read Rob's article and then read Dave's analysis to get a much more complete overview of the topic.
One of the two panels I'm speaking on at this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference (in just under two weeks), is on the subject of Open Source Marketing, with Firefox as a case in point.
To prepare for the panel, I've been doing some online research and I'll be posting the links here mainly for my own convenience.
The first such link is for a manifesto at ChangeThis (via MicroPersuasion), called, appropriately enough, What is Open Source Marketing?
I'm continually impressed by the thinking and writing of Stephen Downes, who was also, I believe, the first person to perform Blogistan Pie before a live audience.
In the abovelinked post, Community Blogging, Downes explored some ideas about how a self-organizing community of bloggers might subvert the dominant power-law dynamics.
Highly recommended.
Quoting Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger:
First chapter posted on our corporate blogging book
We've posted our first chapter over on the Red Couch. Steve Lacey already praised it. Thanks! Bob Wyman, founder of my favorite blog search engine, Pubsub.com, wonders if the book will still be useful by the time it's published.
Yes, what is the tradeoff between public open source vetting and timeliness?
Quoting from Introduction to Activism on the Internet:
John of Social Design Notes has built an excellent resource in “An Introduction to Activism on the Internet”, touching on key issues like the role of geography and gender in access, privacy and anonymity, and current topics like advocacy tools, and blogging. Timely, accessible, and attractive.
Checking my ego feed in my news aggregator yesterday I saw that two bloggers had posted reviews of the book. The first, Scot Hacker, a personal friend and longtime web colleague, liked the book quite a lot, calling it "an exploration - at turns straightforwardly journalistic, nearly stream-of-consciousness, and scholarly - on the transformative power of online communities," and he selected the following quotation from the book to illustrate his comments:
On first discovering online journals, most people find them puzzling, a paradox. Who would put their private diary online? ... Omigod, my mother read my blog! Indeed, there are countless stories of people who misjudged the effects of putting their thoughts and ideas into the public domain and who lived to regret the confidences broken, the parties offended by their snarky comments, their exposed secrets. In time, though, anyone who continues the exhilarating tightrope walk of online self-examination will manage to cultivate that gray area between public and private that seems just personal and revealing enough to draw in readers and invite scrutiny but that still holds back what truly belongs out of public view entirely.
The second, Andrew Sinclair, holds a nearly opposite view, finding the book lacking in insight and analysis and too heavily reliant on buzzwords and feature lists.
(He also thought our cover ripped off David Weinberger's Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. I tried posting a comment on his blog but it has not appeared, so I may have failed. In it I explained the my publisher actually hired two designers to come up with cover ideas - a highly unusual investment of resources for any publisher - and that we all liked the final cover design the best, but that any homage to Weinberger's book's cover was strictly coincidental.)
While of course I prefer positive reviews, I welcome any and all feedback on my books and other writing, as I strive to improve and meet the needs of my readers, so thank you Scot and Andrew.
Almost posted about this here first but instead filed it over at Radio Free Blogistan: Kottke at the mercy of his readers.
Interesting test of the "power of many" to support the blogging work of one.
Quoting from There are Feeds and Then There are Feeds
And about a year ago, I started adding Technorati watchlists, as well as Feedster and Pubsub search feeds, and del.icio.us, Furl and flickr feeds on tags, and looking up terms on Blogpulse and Bloglines, to see who linked to my blog, wrote about key words I cared about or were on a topic, project or company I was tracking. Sometime last summer, I realized that more than half my 300+ feeds were search feeds - key words, URLs and in some cases other focusing information like say, the middle 50% of bloggers based upon inbound links....
Then, after a while, I started reading all the search feeds first, and a few bloggers' feeds, but the rest of the single blog feeds have become less important. Often, I see those bloggers' (whose single feeds I subscribe to) posts in my search feeds, because they do blog on those topics I care about, though not all their posts are on those topics fit those search criteria. With a finite amount of time, increasingly defined information needs, and a desire to raise the signal to noise ratio, I rely more heavily on the search feeds, than other traditional RSS feeds that send me a single blog's or legacy news feed.
Jay's book is entitled Gatekeepers without Gates and if it's anything like his wonderful weblog, it will become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the press and the impact of the living web on the media in general.
(Announcement: PressThink: Publishing News at PressThink)
I haven't taken this software out for a spin yet, but WikidPad (WikidPad - wiki notebook/outliner for windows) appears to be fairly similar to my favorite OS X application, Voodoo Pad.
I find the wiki format to be a convenient and addictive way to take notes and link together lists and work in progress.
In A Liberal Long March? at Greater Democracy, Jock Gill calls for a sort of Gnostic Liberal movement to revitalize the left (although to my mind his emphasis on disintermediation seems to point more to the Protestant Reformation than to Gnosticism).
How ideologies grapple with heretical views may be instructive here, though it appears we're at the beginning of an inquiry here and not near its conclusion.
Personal Democracy Forum is hosting a State of the Union BackChannel Chat, Tonight:
We will be using "A Really Simple Chat" (ARSC), the simplest way we know of to do group chats. Unlike other chat tools, ARSC is a program that lets anybody with a Web browser -- any browser -- join in a discussion and see what other members of the group are typing.To join in, anytime after 8:30pm (Eastern) go to http://fwiki.com/pdf, pick a nickname for yourself, and enter any password you like. It's easy to add your own message; simply type it and hit "enter" to send your message to the group.
Participants are asked to identify their party sympathies in order to maintain a strife-free discussion:
You will see a choice of three chats to enter: "Democratic-leaning," "Republican-leaning" and "Free for all." We've created those three rooms to allow people to self-select what kind of conversation they'd like to be part of. Please respect the other participants in the room; disruptive or obscene posters will not be tolerated.
Random tangent: The United States Constitution tolerates political parties the way a prison warden tolerates race-based gangs.
Bridgepoint Health, a health care complex in Toronto, has a web page where people can send messages to residents. Most residents don't have Internet access, but inbound webmail is printed out for them.
This came to my attention because a regular on the Copyediting-L e-mail list went offline for a couple of days. When other regulars started inquiring about his whereabouts, we discovered he had been injured in a fall and is in a live-in rehab facility for a couple of months. In less than two days, listmembers had organized dozens of goodies and messages to be sent in a variety of ways, including offers to provide a refurb laptop or PDA (declined). Cards, calls, and gifts came from Japan, Israel, Australia, and all over North America—all from people this man had never met.
In the midst of the flurry, one member said that it reminded her of the saying, "None of us is as smart as all of us."
Hoder, who blogs in English and Persian at Editor: Myself says Orkut and Yahoo Messenger have become political footballs in Iran (Orkut, a hot political issue in Iran):
In no other country but Iran you'll hear politicians use "Orkut" and "Yahoo Messenger" in their sentences.
Nasser Nassiri, a radical MP last week called for a ban on Orkut and Yahoo Messenger, both extremely popular among Iranians, and suggested the parliament will start work on a bill to officially ban them. As always, the reason was to destroy the ethical foundations of the society.
Now another radical but connected MP, Emad Afroogh, who is the chair of the cultural committee of the parliament, has officially denied that they are going to ban Orkut and Yahoo Messenger.
However, people's comments have it that the Iranian Telecom has already filtered Orkut. OpenNet initiative guys have confirmed it in an email to me.
What a lovely dysfunctional and chaotic country Iran has become.
The diagram that illustrates research into the romantic entanglements of an entire high school look remarkably to my eyes like molecular chains. I realize that some of that is a matter of choices about how to visualize data, but comparing the smalelr groups to the giant daisy chain (the popular kids?) really gets across the idea that these smaller units link up to create the bigger ones.
I'd be interested in seeing a time factor introduced to these shapes. Also, shouldn't there be some free-floating single atoms as well? (It's been a while since I was in high school, but aren't there always some people in any given year without partners?).
In tomorrow's Sunday Times, writer Steven Johnson discusses a program called DEVONthink and the general improvement in personal note-taking and idea-management assistance emerging in today's tools and user-interface advances (Tool for Thought):
But there's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated - particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them - there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.
(Note: There is no unrotting link available yet for the above article.)
As I've mentioned many times around here, the Mac program Voodoo Pad is currently the state of art for my own ad hoc, mostly text-based note-taking and mind mapping software. Blogs play a part for me as well, and I'm trying to get wiki and civicspace-style community sites going as well to provide similar knowledge accumulation for different sized groups of people (along with other communication and analytical and action-oriented services).
OK, I admit that Who Banged Who is just a slick parody, but is it really all that far-fetched?
I was syndicating the feed from my Upcoming public event calendar using the same blog plug-in I use to syndicate blog headlines nad descriptions, but my approach wasn't generating proper links for the events. Then I noticed that George Kelly was using a service called RSS Digest to accomplish the same thing with properly functioning links. So I've gone ahead and updated the template.
The design of the sidebar box is raw, but at least it's more functional now.
2nd Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice / DIAC-2005:
May 20 - 22, 2005
The Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice / DIAC 2005, will bring together software developers, social science researchers, and practioners of online deliberation for three days of presentations and workshops on the Stanford University campus in May of 2005. Following up on an earlier conference, "Developing and Using Online Tools for Deliberative Democracy", held at Carnegie Mellon University in June of 2003, we would like at this meeting to discuss the possible creation of a new society for online deliberation with an international membership, to support cross-disciplinary scholarship, principled design, and informed practice in the use of online environments for group deliberation and democratic participation. This conference is also the latest in a series of conferences on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC), presented in association with the Public Sphere Project (a CPSR Initiative).
Om Malik quickly tamps down a virally spreading rumor: Why Google Is Not Doing VoIP
former FCC chair Reed Hundt has written a mixed editorial/primer on the topics of frequency, spectrum, and licensing. The link is to a copy of the piece on the site of San Francisco radio station KCBS; I stumbled across it while trying to track down a story reported on air this morning, in which several Blackberry users said that it is "better" to e-mail someone in the next office than to get up, walk over, and talk to them.
Newspaper mentions of blogs this weekend:
The "baring souls" article provides a few case studies of how some people prefer to deal with tragedy (from the death of a spouse to the Indonesian tsunami) through impersonal, nonmediated means.
* I guess nobody told them we all stand around the printer these days.
The Blog Blog answers Jeff Jarvis's question ("How would you tag yourself?"):
That's a tough question. So far all I can up with is watches TV, seems sort of high, A Jewish Lexington Steele, hungry, snowflake (I used to teach high school in Brooklyn), and Gina's husband... But in the new world, I guess I had better tag myself before my shrink does it for me.
what's the technorati syntax for tagging this post as related to folksonomy? ...also, do i keep using categories and add technorati tags ...and and where do delicious and flickr fit in? ...and ...and ...and finally, note the decay in value as i failed to link to splendora.
Quoting Tagging at Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us
Technorati's new tags page has been getting lots of play in the blogosphere.. since it went live Thursday. It's a brilliant idea, matching tags from Del.icio.us, Flickr and blog post categories as they come through RSS feeds, and then displaying those photos together with posts that match. Of course, tags like
are big because people have that as a category for their blog posts... as are other categories. David Weinberger noted that blog categories aren't really tags, because they aren't usually granular the way tags often are, and so there are results like this, or
or whathaveyou because people want broad general buckets to put posts in, and with a post categorized as "general" on a page on their blog, in that context, there is a kind of meaning that is lost on a page like Tags. But still... the two sets of tags along with broader categories together produce very interesting results. Also, the photos are beautiful and make the pages far more engaging to read than when they just had text. Searching for interesting serendipitous meanings that occur while glancing between the two types of information is really fun.
There is also a fourth way to get Technorati's Tag page to pick up information, and that is to use a rel='tag' link. This is done by putting a Technorati link (transparent, so other blog companies could use the links, but still proprietary to Technorati) around some words. The words the tag goes around do not become the tags. Rather, the tags are picked up in the link.. so in this example the bolded word is the tag Technorati's system picks up: < a href="http://technorati.com/tags/tag rel="tag" >words wrapped by tag href link< /a>. (note there are extra spaces in this example.. if you want to cut an paste this, remove the space just after each < so they function correctly). Though I don't think these tags will get used a lot, relatively speaking, because as the blogosphere gets bigger, the bloggers overall become less technical and won't have a clue what this is, and they shouldn't. The answer is probably that Technorati and the other blog companies should cache posts, and let users tag them on their sites as they read them.
What I'm wondering about is how quickly the spammers will figure this all out, and use it to their advantage. Currently, even though I block comment spam across my blogs, and know that Technorati, Feedster, PubSub et al, as well as Google, don't log comments or at least comment links because of the spam problem, the comment spammers try ever increasingly clever tricks. They might leave 500 comments in a hour (like I wouldn't notice) each with a different IP address, a different URL they want linked to for google juice, a different return email address, different products. All in the same blast. Removing them is automatic, but if they are clever, they'll figure out just how to get one or two through.. and if I believe I've gotten them all, they've succeeded with just a couple.
I posed the tag-span question to a friend at technorati via IM on Thursday and they indicated that since they block spam blogs, they'll block spam tags, too. Fair enough. But in this case, there are three systems, not just Technorati, that need to block spam, and with these three, the possiblity exists that partial spam could be cleverly spread out across the three, in order to come together to equal a spam situation. How long til the spammers figure this out and use it to their advantage across these different sites?
I could see a spammer putting up a photo, relatively benign and not at all spammy, but with specific tags that matched a blog post, with links to spam sites, and tags designed to match the photo tags, but not look very spammy on their own. Then, with some coordinated tagging through Del.icio.us, so that those blog posts matching the tags from photos matching the Del.icio.us links, the blog posts and photos would show up together in Technorati Tag page results. Depending on the goals of the spammers, and their cleverness, it might be very hard for individual systems by themselves to see the entries as spam, or to use the community moderation on any one system to realize what is happening. It would be in combination that the information from all three systems would constitute spam.
Part of the problem I think is in the nature of the spamming, which gains exposure through short windows of time, and has value even if a very very small percentage of viewers actually click the links or see the words. Since the Technorati pages would only show posts and photos for a short period, hours maybe, the spammers could succeed with regularly changing information. Recently, I've been getting comment spam (blocked of course from appearing on the front end of my blogs, but I can see it on the back end) for hand cream, and pet food (like we didn't learn anything from the first bubble...) from what appear to otherwise be legitmate companies that are just looking to capitalize on something they perceive as providing value even if it doesn't really. It's not just mortgages and porn. It might be harder to recognize than we think because spam is changing, and spammers are very very clever.
Disclosure: I used to work at Technorati, and I'm friends with many of the folks there.
technorati, flickr, del.icio.us, folksonomy, web, spam, Weinberger, clever, handcream, pet food
Just had to pop this link in here, also from Powers' Burning Bird blog, as it goes to the heart of my sense of how we should all be (in general) helping each other and building up our knowledge stores in the moments of realization (Self Documenting Technology):
Danny Ayers points to a Jon Udell article about dynamic documentation managed by the folks who use a product, rather than relying on stuffy old material provided by the organization making the software. In it, Jon writes:Collectively, we users know a lot more about products than vendors do. We eventually stumble across every undocumented feature or quirk. We like to maintain the health of the products we've bought and we're happy to discuss how to do that with other users.The problem is that vendors, for the most part, do a lousy job of encouraging and organizing those discussions. Here's an experiment I'd like to see someone try: Start a Wikipedia page for your product. Populate it with basic factual information....
Quoting from I, URL:
My first exposure to the concept of a 'federated identity', or a digital identity or ID if you will, was when I had to obtain one of the first Microsoft Passport identities in order to access the material I needed to finish my book, Developing ASP Components. I was pleased with the concept, then, because it would give me a way to sign into all the Microsoft sites I visited and only have to remember the one username and password.
I was quite fond of MS tech at the time, and focused almost exclusively on this vendor in my writing. However, if you had asked me, then, whether I would input credit card information and use Passport to sign on....
Dave sez
Dave: "Open the pod bay doors please, Hal."
and it gets me thinking. Where is TV Guide for podcasting?
Lazyweb: please cause there to be an excellent blog or wiki or folksonomically smart taglicious place online I can consult to help me filter which podcasts I might like to hear (so far I've never listened to one).
In theory, in a distributed way, my feed subscriptions are already doing that for me, but podcasting is so fresh that it would benefit from aggressive sifting and ways for people to champion or promote there casts.
Isn't there a huge opening there for something with the focus of Matt Haughey's PVR blog and the beat-coverage of pick-your-favorite Denton franchise?
Quoting from Big podcasting news
I went to WNYC today to tape an interview with Bob Garfield on vlogging for On The Media and they told me the big news:
This week's On The Media will be the first NPR show - maybe the first major radio show anywhere - that will be podcast.
Cool.
OK, so you're down with blogging? Great? What's your wiki strategy? Blogs are great because logging, chronological entry-making, suits the temporal rhythms of the web, a medium more like music than, say, photography. Like a river, the web is always changing.
So a wiki is kind of like a dam that enables you to accumulate "water" in a lake. The collaborative nature of wiki complements the temporal nature of logging. The philosophy of reader-edited pages is in tune with the immediacy of the web. The various wiki syntaxes represent another hack at taking the HTML out of the writing the web.
Bits and pieces of these concepts, judiciously melded, suit different environments. Of course you don't want j. random public editing your company's intranet. Wikis can have authentication and privileged users, etc. The question is how to bring these advantages into your enterprise to maximize the benefits while minimizing the harmful aspects of disruption.
Quoting from Year of the Enterprise Wiki (Ross Mayfield)
Jon Udell calls 2004 The Year of the Enterprise Wiki, or at least when Enterprise Wiki stopped sounding like an oxymoron. I happen to think this year is the big one, but that’s my job. Jon looks to the future:
As the Wiki phenomenon enters its second decade, it’s hard to predict just how the technology will evolve. Two things seem certain: Wiki culture will continue to thrive, and enterprise users will continue to seek lighter, easier collaboration tools.Jon also discovers the marriage of wikis and folksonomy. Socialtext has been tagging since early 2003, before Flickr and del.icio.us took it in great directions, we just call them categories.
Quoting Simon Willison's Some notes on Wikipedia:
I've been driving myself crazy with coursework over the past couple of weeks, and since it's always good to have something to take your mind off things I've also been spending a fair amount of time lurking around the beautifulWikipedia. Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:
- It's not just Wikipedia any more; there's also Wiktionary (a multi-lingual dictionary), Wikibooks (developing open content books on various topics), Wikiquote (quotations), Wikisource (a repository of public domain source texts), Wikispecies (a biological species database), Wikicommons (free images and other media) and Wikinews (a new Wikipedia-style news site). Not to mention the huge numbers of projects in other languages.
- You can view live stat graphs of the Wikipedia squid cache servers and see an overview of the status of all Wikipedia servers.
- Last year's drive for donations was mostly spent on new hardware, and a detailed list of hardware orders is available.
- Wikipedia's awesome TeX engine for presenting mathematical formulae may soon be expanded to support rendering of musical scores, SVG graphics, chemical formulae and more, thanks to the brilliant Wikitex module for MediaWiki.
- Wikisource has a bunch of stories by H. P. Lovecraft!
- Wikipedia's Periodic table links to detailed descriptions of every single element.
- Live recent changes feed is a page that shows edits to Wikipedia in real time. It works by keeping the HTTP connection to your browser open and sending updates packaged as JavaScript calls (I think this is the same trick used by CGI:IRC).
- The channel #enrc.wikipedia on irc.freenode.net carries a bot-produced live feed of recent changes to Wikipedia. Edits occur so frequently that the bot had to be split in to five to avoid being flooded off the channel!
- Wikipedia has a huge vandalism problem, but malicious edits are cleared up so fast that you'd be hard pressed to spot it.
- The Wikimedia foundation has an attractive quarterly newsletter, the Wikimedia Quarto. September's issue includes an interview with Ward Cunningham.
- Wikipedia provides a great way to sharpen your language skills; not only does Wikibooks have guides to teaching yourself French and German (among others) but the multi-lingual versions of Wikipedia provide excellent practise in reading comprehension. Compare the English and French entries on Bath, for example.
- The Wikimedia foundation recently received a small grant to develop a series of children's books.
The deeper I dig in to Wikipedia, the more amazed I become. I see it as more than just a collaborative encyclopaedia; it's a testament to humanity's ability to work together for the greater good. I guess you could say I'm in WikiLove :)
Update: Fixed links, thanks to corrections posted in the comments. If this entry had been a wiki page, people could have fixed them themselves...
Quoting Simon Willison's Some notes on Wikipedia:
I've been driving myself crazy with coursework over the past couple of weeks, and since it's always good to have something to take your mind off things I've also been spending a fair amount of time lurking around the beautifulWikipedia. Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:
- It's not just Wikipedia any more; there's also Wiktionary (a multi-lingual dictionary), Wikibooks (developing open content books on various topics), Wikiquote (quotations), Wikisource (a repository of public domain source texts), Wikispecies (a biological species database), Wikicommons (free images and other media) and Wikinews (a new Wikipedia-style news site). Not to mention the huge numbers of projects in other languages.
- You can view live stat graphs of the Wikipedia squid cache servers and see an overview of the status of all Wikipedia servers.
- Last year's drive for donations was mostly spent on new hardware, and a detailed list of hardware orders is available.
- Wikipedia's awesome TeX engine for presenting mathematical formulae may soon be expanded to support rendering of musical scores, SVG graphics, chemical formulae and more, thanks to the brilliant Wikitex module for MediaWiki.
- Wikisource has a bunch of stories by H. P. Lovecraft!
- Wikipedia's Periodic table links to detailed descriptions of every single element.
- Live recent changes feed is a page that shows edits to Wikipedia in real time. It works by keeping the HTTP connection to your browser open and sending updates packaged as JavaScript calls (I think this is the same trick used by CGI:IRC).
- The channel #enrc.wikipedia on irc.freenode.net carries a bot-produced live feed of recent changes to Wikipedia. Edits occur so frequently that the bot had to be split in to five to avoid being flooded off the channel!
- Wikipedia has a huge vandalism problem, but malicious edits are cleared up so fast that you'd be hard pressed to spot it.
- The Wikimedia foundation has an attractive quarterly newsletter, the Wikimedia Quarto. September's issue includes an interview with Ward Cunningham.
- Wikipedia provides a great way to sharpen your language skills; not only does Wikibooks have guides to teaching yourself French and German (among others) but the multi-lingual versions of Wikipedia provide excellent practise in reading comprehension. Compare the English and French entries on Bath, for example.
- The Wikimedia foundation recently received a small grant to develop a series of children's books.
The deeper I dig in to Wikipedia, the more amazed I become. I see it as more than just a collaborative encyclopaedia; it's a testament to humanity's ability to work together for the greater good. I guess you could say I'm in WikiLove :)
Update: Fixed links, thanks to corrections posted in the comments. If this entry had been a wiki page, people could have fixed them themselves...
Andy Baio says (in Shirky's response to Danah Boyd on the recent Wikipedia debate):
Clay on Danah on Clay on Sanger; a great debate
Definitely an interesting discussion but I wonder if we are making a category error here. Talking about wikipedia in terms of its authoritativeness seems a bit like mistaking the NCSA What's New page circa 1994 for the Internet as a whole.
I expect a proliferation of collaboratively created sites, some more some less like wikipedia. Niche communities will probably build their own resources.
Wikiness in general is setting a new standards for fluidity of online documentation and the negotiation of consensus realities.
Nothing wrong with trying to build the Tower of Babel, mind you, but each one of us contains multitudes and there are branches and forks down every path.
Quoting from Are You Reputable? by Jed Miller (blogging at Personal Democracy Forum):
Media research company Bacon's Information says it will be watching "the most reputable online news blogs" in order to help their subscribers "determine the possible impact on business decisions and company reputations."
The Bizwire announcement doesn't specify quite how they'll decide who's reputable. But clearly this is a sign that the race is on--not to decide who's reputable, but to decide who will decide, and how.
Can the blogosphere withstand reputation brokers, or are decentralized, emergent systems of trust the only ones truly safe from Blairs, Murdochs and more innocent forms of group-think and false report?
It ain't April Fools, so I'm assuming Om is correct with his web excloo at Om Malik on Broadband: Six Apart to buy Live Journal:
The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and could be announced sometime later this month, according to those close to the two companies. If the deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5 million users. It also gives the company a very fighting chance against Google's Blogger and Microsoft's MSN Spaces.
Quoting from Electronic Business - Blogs for business? - 1/1/2005 - Electronic Business - CA489801:
The hullabaloo surrounding the blog has obscured what it is. It's not complex—it's simply a Web site that lets its owner (and anyone to whom that owner gives permission) post comments, links to other Web sites and documents, all without being proficient in HTML. Imagine opening a browser window and being able to access e-mail, presentations and spreadsheets relating to a project, all in one place. Like any other Web site, it can be password-protected.
(via Micro Persuasion)
Meanwhile, New Communications Forums has two "blog university" conferences coming up to promote the same ideas and applications of skills to the workplace.
(via the Future of Work mailing list)
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, blog readership went way up in 2004. A January report using November data says:
This spring, Lawrence Lessig will try to get his 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace updated by wiki for paper publication later in the year. He's inviting volunteers to serve as "Chapter Captains"; Lessig will donate his advance and royalties to Creative Commons. (Link via The Volokh Conspiracy.)
Reading Building an Address Book as a Modern Web App, I see that deus x has brought up another major facet of the personal social-network web app I'm speccing out in my mind:
So, in the spirit of pico-projects, I've started building that address book application I mentioned awhile ago and I want to start writing about it as I go.
First off, hopefully you'll notice the quick diagram I threw together in OmniGraffle. This is a sort of rough sketch of the loosely-joined architecture I want to explore with this thing.
- Data: This is where address book entries live.
- Model: A set of objects encapsulating the data, this is how address book entries will be accessed.
- REST API: Model objects exposed as resources identified by URI, serialized and deserialized as XML, and manipulated by GET / PUT / POST / DELETE methods.
- XSLT Filter: XML data produced by REST API calls can be first passed through XSL at a given URL before being served up as a response.
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript: Thanks to the XSLT filter layer, the XML vocabulary used to describe address book entries can be transformed into user interface presentation.
- HTTP: Everything happens via HTTP...
- Web Browser Client: ...and everything is viewed in a web browser.
Now, I call this a loosely-joined architecture because I want to stress that you should be able to swap out just about any part of this whenever you want.
Want the Data to be in MySQL? Fine. Want it to be in flat files? Fine. Just make sure the Model can cope while maintaining a consistent interface for the REST API. Want to change the user interface in the browser? Great-- ideally, all you have to do is change some XSLT files. I'm writing everything from the XSLT Filter down to the Model in Python. Don't like that? Fine. Rewrite it all in Perl, and hopefully everything from the XSLT up to the browser will still be useful to you.
At some point, you might even want to ditch the browser for a native desktop client. Fabulous! Just ignore everything past the REST API and HTTP, don't use any XSLT in the Filter, and use the API and XML directly.
I don't think any of this is particularly revolutionary-- although I thought it was when I first saw Amazon Web Services doing some of this, and I hope to throw a little GMail in as well. I hope that this will all be useful as I muddle through explaining what I'm doing. In the meantime, you can see me getting the stage set as I start checking things into my Subversion repository over here:
In The Graphing Calculator Story, the author explains how a useful software utility for the Macintosh PowerPC was developed (almost) entirely by stealth:
I view the events as an experiment in subverting power structures. I had none of the traditional power over others that is inherent to the structure of corporations and bureaucracies. I had neither budget nor headcount. I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked. Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.
It illustrates that traditional corporate heirarchies aren't always necessarily the best way to leverage resources.
Quoting from Susan Mernit's blog:
Ever see someone you know get really famous for what they've accomplished?
It's definitely happening to Craig, whose Craigslist has the media marveling. The latest story, in Newsweek, has a clever pix of Craig with "Where the Wild Things Are" fuzzy feet.
Quote: "...The list is a sleeping economic giant that's already dishing nightmares to ticket scalpers, employment brokers and publications that live by classified ads. "
More you know where.>
Quoting from The Long Tail the book and the blog:
Chris Anderson is writing a book about The Long Tail which started as one of my favorite articles that he wrote for Wired. He has also started a blog about the Long Tail. The original article is online at Wired.
Books We Like is trying to build a community of book-recommenders, and offers price-comparison shopping for recommended books.
This is a good step in the direction of collabortive review communities. I often want to write about a book I'm reading on my blog but I'm frustrated by the impoverished data structure (cue Marc Canter, et al.).
Christian posted a long quote from the Berkman School living-web wonkfest last week. At that, Kerry online honcho Zach Exley told everyone that Kerry-Edwards focused too much on means and not enough on ends:
The Democrats had no shortage of goatee-chinned web designers, but they were trounced by the Republicans' superior top-down organization.
"The difference between the approach of the left in general, and the Republicans, is that the left was more interested in just putting cool software up. The idea was to put up the tools and let people use them."
He derided net evangelists who believed that the answer was 'let's come up with new ways of talking!'
"The belief was 'let's get 5,000 people out there and they'll talk to each other. but to put a president in office we need to get people organized and trained." In the end, he said, a field organization was far more valuable than blog blather.
First, Exley is criticizing others for something that was his responsibility. Second, the article says he credits the Republicans' top-down system for their field organization; does that make sense? (It might be the reporter's error rather than Exley's.) But third and most importantly, this misses two very large boats:
The process of us masses (yes, "the masses" is appropriate here) taking over control of political discourse and decision-making is inexorable. If we could plot "the extent to which the country is driven by a tiny oligarchy" on a graph, the absolute value would still be low; but disintermediation—the living web effect—is increasing the slope representing the rate of change.
(I had scribbled most of this when I saw the quote, then sat on it because of other priorities. When Kos posted, "People like Zach [...] never truly understood the power of many"—emphasis obviously added—I decided maybe I wasn't being unreasonable after all.)
Joi Ito fills up his Orkut dance card, wonders what happens after "game over" (The edge of Orkut):
I just got the following message on Orkut.
Limit reached for number of friendsPartially because I was getting sick of social networks systems, partially because they were trying to be "exclusive" with invite only and partially because it was easy, I took the policy of saying yes to every friend request that didn't look like a fakester. Now I've found the edge of Orkut. According to Orkut, you can only have 1000 friends. I guess that's OK compared to the 150 or so for AIM. This error message reminds me a bit of real life. I know need to forget someone every time I meet someone I want to remember because I'm having a buffer overflow on my people recognition memory.You have 1024 friends. You can only have up to 1000 friends. Before you can add more friends, you need to remove friends.
Quoting from Greensboro sees birth of new alternative media:
A new kind of alternative press is emerging in Greensboro. The writers are local people who publish at their own Web sites. As individuals, these bloggers offer reporting and commentary that is useful, provocative and addictive. Collectively, they are building what could become the most important information channel to hit town since television arrived just after World War II.
These days I get almost all of my national and international news from the Web, with print providing some depth and analysis, and television good for live coverage and big-screen video. That model may be in the early stages of replicating itself at the local level.
It all starts with your neighbors, dozens of whom are now publishing the online journals called weblogs. They write what they know and what they see and what they would like to see....
When we both get a moment free I'm going to interview Dan Gillmor about his new venture for the Power of Many weblog. In the meantime, this interview in
Quoting from OhmyNews International gives some insight into what he's got in mind:
One of the great things about the democratization of media is that people can do their own projects. Certainly people on the right felt that mainstream media was controlled by the left - which I disagree with - but that's how they felt. They have every right to build an audience and that's what they did, they built an audience. So we're just going even further with the grassroots kinds of things. Blogs are almost a descendent of talk radio, in a sense.
... [N]ow we have this new possibility of doing all kinds of experiments with what you already understand so well - which is that people out at the edge of the networks have a lot to contribute and that's what is going to be so much fun.
Quoting from Digging 43 things:
The 10 minutes I was going to spend on the 43 Things beta from robot coop turned into 45 somehow.
This list-maker from a new company formed by a bunch of Amazon's personalization wizards has a social network aspect and a team or groups component that are both cool.
I'm especially entranced by the highly usable and clean interface, courtesy of 37 Signals.
Josh Peterson, one of the creators, had some interesting things to say:
3 out of 4 of the first members of Amazon.com's personalization team work at The Robot Co-op, but we've built some other interesting projects too - like newsbot.msn.com or allconsuming.net. We definitely think about recommendations and personalization - and started of thinking about some of the most interesting data we could imagine. We think we've come up with something really interesting by focusing on things people want to do, and helping to pull together (in loose form) resources that might help them discern their goals and achieve them.
We thought a lot about building a complex system that is based on simple technologies. This is true for how we built Amazon's personalization systems as well. 43 Things is very open ended to allow all sorts of emergent behavior to develop - both from users and the system itself. We are also unapologetically aspiration-al in our outlook. What we love about sites like flickr or craigslist is that they go to the trouble of being useful before trying to make you use them. We really have very little idea what the path will look like for 43 Things, but we built it so it could useful for many purposes. Evolving is exactly what we see 43 Things doing as it finds an audience and practical applications. We are optimistic, in part, because in sharing the simple idea of 43 Things through Twinkler, we saw over 200K users build lists of goals over 2 weeks through word of mouth alone. Hopefully the release will prove useful and interesting as well.
As a list maniac, I'm pleased to see this and curious how long I'll stay interested--persistence is always one way to judge lasting value.
(By the way Susan, my newsreader still thinks your weblog is called "an.")
draft notes in progress (based theory of publishing entire process):
i am "saddened" to quote Tom Daschle to feel that I must mention that VoodooPad isn't paying me to blog about it!*
VoodooPad.
You put your brain in it.That's the short explanation. If you are familiar with Wikis, then go ahead and delete all this text and get started- this is your homepage, have at it. However, if you aren't already familiar with what a Wiki is, here is the slightly longer explanation:
You've got too much on your mind. Little snippets of information, phone numbers, contacts, meeting info, research, everything. VoodooPad helps you out by providing a single document to store all that information, and then again by providing various ways to access that information.
In VoodooPad a document is made up of multiple pages, much like a website. In fact, VoodooPad can be thought of as a self contained website, and like a regular website VoodooPad provides hypertext links from one page to another. But here's the really cool part- unlike a regular website, you can edit every little bit of text on these pages.
Making links in VoodooPad is super easy- select a word or phrase and choose "Link" from the Edit menu or Toolbar. VoodooPad will take you to a new page where you fill in the details. Go back to the previous page and you'll see the text you selected earlier, only now it's highlighted and blue just like a link on a website.
So don't be afraid to edit the text on this page. In fact, we want you to. As soon as you are done reading, delete everything on this page add your own spin to it. This is your document's homepage, this is where it all begins.
The foundation of VoodooPad's existence is a special type of website called a "Wiki" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki for a great example). Typically to create a new page in traditional wikis you would mash two words together like so: NewPage. When this happens the wiki will create a "potential link" out of it. A potential link is a link to a page that doesn't exist yet, but when clicked on a new page is created and anytime the mashed word is found again, it turns blue and underlined just like any other link.
VoodooPad goes further than that though. You can also drag and drop images, urls, files, and applications into VoodooPad and they will be linked and ready to be brought forward. Control VoodooPad via AppleScript, export to the iPod, and apply rich text formatting other Wikis can only dream of.
So that's the slightly longer version. If you need help or are looking for further instructions, choose "VoodooPad Help" from the help menu, or visit http://www.flyingmeat.com/ for more information.
Until you have purchased VoodooPad, there will be a limit of 15 pages per document (unless you are using VoodooPad Lite- then you are home free! But also without out all the great features.). We think that is plenty of room to try out VoodooPad and decide if you would like to purchase it. And when you are ready, visit http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/ to buy yourself a copy!
links to earlier entries about voodoo pad
glossary entry
arthur saying he's just starting to get it
the amber analogy: if it exists you go to it; if it doesn't, you create it by going there.
threatens to swallow all my other systems, or learn to talk to them i hope, because it's a much better interface to my info and records than the desktop filing cabinet b.s. i'm so sick of.
wishlist:
another question:
equivalent for Windows?
that keyboard shortcut evangelist ibm guy at berkeley conf (blogon?)
Quoting from Washington Post Examines Citzen's Media
Big day for citizen journalism. Peg notes that Leslie Walker writes in today's Washington Post that several notable ventures have launched or raised money this year to create local news sites online in which readers contribute all or most of the news. Profiled...
Although my personal life wouldn't permit yet another east coast trip at this moment (I was there in the summer and the fall and I'm headed there for the holidays as well), it sounds like the Internet 'n' society conference going on at Harvard this weekend would have been a nice one to make it to.
Then again, it's been thoroughly eventblogged by many of my favorite bloggers du jour, so I am drinking it in vicariously through my newsreader.
Here's a big chunk 'o Weinberger:
Quoting from [VBB] BridgeBlogging
The part of the conference that most excites me is about to begin. Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon and the Open Society Institute have created a track that has pulled together bloggers from around the world. The aim is to see what we all can do to help blogging spread, particularly in parts of the world where voices most need to be heard.
Ethan says that we're here today to talk about blogs as bridges, borrowing Hoder's metaphor from yesterday (blogs as windows that give you insight into someone's world, blogs as cafes where people can talk together, and blogs as bridges). There's something big happening, Ethan says.
We each introduce ourselves, all 60 of us. We are bloggers from Iran, Iraq, India, Kenya, China, Prague, Malaysia...as well as online activists and other bridge builders. This is a wonderfully diverse session.
Ethan: Our aim is to try to figure out how to be Hoder. "Hoder is to some extent responsible for why there are 75,000 Persian bloggers online."
Omar from Iraq talks about the importance of blogging as a way of routing around propaganda. Then he talks about how the open comments from around the world on his blog helped his nephew "If I visited America a year and a half ago, I would have felt llike a stranger. This time I feel like I'm with friends, and that is the greatest gift I can think of."
Mohammed from Iraq says that blogging is person-to-person. "Through blogging we can spread love, more than separate by hate." "The media just want to create hate. But I have a different story." He says that, for example, the newspapers play up an American soldier punching an Iraqi but don't say that people go up to American soldiers and shake their hands.
Q: Who can get access to the Net in Iraq?
A: Just about everyone.Chalu Kim (China): Do you also blog in Persian?
A: No. But we're going to be talking about a Arabic language blogging tool today.
Rebecca: Big issue. Today we want to talk about how bridgebloggers can help bridge the translation gap.
Jeff Jarvis: It's important to do both. Writing in your language builds community. Translating gets the story out.Blackfive says he's a military blogger. He never thought of himself as an activist, but his blog grew to include raising money for homecoming, wounded soldiers, and advocating for particular bills.
Q: How do we get a sense of what it's like to be in the military in this conflict?
Blackfive: That's a main reason people come to the site. Obvoiusly, bloggers can't give away "operational information." That's where the censorship comes in.Jarvis: What stories do you have of blogs forming bonds?
Blackfive: Email and blogs have brought us closer together. There's a huge inter-service rivalry. Even within the services. So it's really important to get beyond that. There's not a lot of interaction between Iraqi bloggers and the military, but there is between Iraqi and American civilians.Ethan: We're seeing a lot of bridging to Americans. Can we open up the conversation to be more international? Jeff, what's going on in Malaysia?
Jeff Ooi: Malaysia has given itself a mandate to enter the first world. Bloggers ask if their governance model is the right one. There are two blogging spheres in Malaysia, one written in our language and the others written in English. Blogs are aggregated at Petaling Street. "Blogging is not going to work if you have to do it alone. You have to hold the hands of the newcomers." Broadband penetration is only 1% but we're trying to do build bridges and renew the country.
Ory: What percent read from within your country?
Omar: Many of the people who read our blog from outside of Iraq are Iraqis.Jeff: Malay bloggers don't get much notice because they're not googleable. [There's some discussion of why that's so.]
Q: The assumption with a bridge is that there are two level grounds. But that's not the same wth the Internet. Even if everyone has access in Iraq, I'm sure that's stratified by gender and education. in Iran, 3-4M out of 68M have access to the Internet. So, are blogs replicating the stratification?
Ethan: One of the obstacles to blogging in W. Africa is that there's great conversation on talk radio. But there's room for blogging as a way of recording stories for history.
Hoder: How about posting pre-revolution diaries so people can understand what had happened in the same places and same cities. [Great idea. I've been re-reading 1984 and one of the scariest bits is the way history is forced down the "memory hole."]
Omar: Both the media and blogs in Iraq are newborn. The Iraq media doesn't know that there are blogs.
Jeff: I was threatened with jail for something I blogged, and it helped that it was covered for 4 days on the front page of a leading newspaper.
Rebecca: We've seen Chinese bloggers blogging in English, and translating the English responses into Chinese, but the Chinese conversation that that engendered didn't get brought back into English.
That's just a piece of a piece!
I suppose wiki spam is inevitable. I've set up the wiki part of this site to be fairly open to changes to encourage readers and visitors to interact, but now for the second time a spammer has dropped a bunch of links to some Chinese websites onto the pages (Recent Changes).
It's not hard for me to roll them back, but clearly they won't stop, so soon I'll have to escalate and only allow registered users to make changes, hampering the openness of the site.
I suppose this blog needs a "dark side" or "tragedy of the commons" category now too.
I think Jeremy Zawodny's onto something big here. I'll have to add a link to my "why not tag everything" post too, because I think it's part of the same picture (Email and Browser URL Extraction and Search via a Personal del.icio.us):
A few minutes ago, I needed to send a note to Russell about Yahoo Desktop Search. Specifically, I had to find a URL for an internal site that he wanted to see. But I couldn't remember what the URL was or who sent it to me. All I knew was that it was in my e-mail inbox. Somewhere.
So I ran a quick grep (command-line search) for "http:" and got a big list of URLs and URL-like things from my inbox. I was able to further refine the search using the word "desktop" and found the URL in no time.
A moment later, a realization struck me:
I do this a lot!In a sense, URLs are just another type of e-mail attachment. Someone can either send you the content directly or they send you a URL to the content.
What I really need is a tool that acts like a personal del.icio.us that's automatically fed from the combination of URLs embedded in e-mail messages as well as my browser history. It could keep a database of those URLs, count the frequency with which I visit them as well as how often they appear in e-mail that I send or receive. And if it provided the ability to tag and annotate the URLs, all the better.
In fact, if it was like a private "satellite" version of del.icio.us that had the ability to check with the larger public del.icio.us that'd be even better. The idea being that for public URLs which end up in my local (private) database, I could still benefit form the collective tagging and annotation efforts of those in the outside world.
I can imagine a second generation of this system that goes a step further: fetching the web content that each of the URLs points to, storing a cached copy locally, and indexing it just like a traditional web search engine might. Bonus points for integration with something like the Slogger extension for Firefox, so that it doesn't have to store duplicate data.
If I had a copy of the source code for del.icio.us handy, I could probably get the first cut of this going in a day's time. That might be a day well spent.
In my mind I'm trying to tie all these things together into something I currently call by its codename, Mizzen. More about that when it gels or I get the slideshow put together or a venture started or a job implementing it for someone.
Quoting from "We the Media" Author Has New Venture at Personal Democracy Forum (by Micah L. Sifry):
The biggest news I have to report so far from Harvard's "Votes, Bits and Bytes" conference is that Dan Gillmor--one of the first mainstream journalists to get the new dynamics of Internet-powered democracy--is quitting his job at the San Jose Mercury News to start a citizen-journalism project. (If, however, you're a reader of Dan's blog, you already know this.) Dan isn't saying a lot about his new venture, as of yet. But he did tell me that "as the guy who kind of 'wrote the book' on this, I couldn't do otherwise." He's hoping to demonstrate to the burgeoning world of freelance bottom-up citizen-bloggers that some of the principles and practices of professional journalism have value, and that a useful synthesis can be created.
Giving up a technology column and blog at a daily paper, with all the perks and advantages that implies, is quite a gutsy move. But I think Dan is right to sense that big changes are underway, and that he can play a valuable role helping to nurture a new kind of journalistic ethic for all of us (not just the credentialed professionals), and that the best way to do that is by striking off on an independent path. Best of luck, Dan!
Quoting Matt Haughey (A Whole Lotta Nothing: Don't just read the news, make it):
A few months ago, I was thinking about all the questions I wished I could ask someone that helped develop the TiVo user interface, and then I realized there was nothing stopping me from just emailing and asking. After a bit of friend-of-a-friend networking, I got in touch with the Director of TiVo User Experience, and got ten questions I've always wanted to ask answered. I posted the full interview here on PVRblog.
If you remember the old six degrees phenomena, anyone is 6 hops or less away from you. In the age of email and social software, I bet it's more like 4 hops or less (Margret was 2 hops away). If there's a lesson for other webloggers here, it's this: if there's something you've always wanted to ask one of your idols or you have an idea for an interview you'd like to see, there's nothing stopping you from tracking the right person down and getting the answers you wanted. I urge you to give it a try someday.
Quoting from Is Flickr the Next Media Giant?:
Wired News: When bombs went off in Jakarta, Indonesia, in September, CNN.com readers weren't the first to know. Instead, members of Flickr, an online photo service, were among the very earliest to see pictures of what had happened.
"There were photos on Flickr before even any news stories," said Caterina Fake, a Flickr co-founder. "Within the hour, three Flickr users who happened to be in Jakarta had uploaded photos."
Quoting from The trust network at dinner with an author that I didn't know (in Scobleizer):
How do you learn to trust/like/love someone new in your life?
Tonight I was at a dinner of about a dozen people. I was asked not to blog the dinner. But, I only knew three of the people there. Now, these were people who I REALLY TRUST. Folks who are leaders in industry. Who've been very successful. Who have helped me out a lot. People who I would invite over to sit on the Red Couch without a moment's hesitation.
But, that left a bunch of people at the table that I didn't know. That I didn't trust.
One guy, sitting next to me, taught me how trust in groups works. He didn't know he was teaching me anything. I just watched how the rest of the table interacted with him.
This was a person that several people at the table obviously liked. I watched their body language. I watched how they listened to him. I last saw this behavior when Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, spoke at Gnomedex. I turned to look at the audience and they were hanging on every word. Barely breathing. They were in a hyper attentive state. Eyes very focused. Breathing shallow.
So, anyway, I saw one of the three people who I knew walk over to the guy sitting next to me. Say "I've been such a fan for years."
One of his answers during dinner let it slip that he was an experienced author. Had written several books. I still didn't know his name, but by the end of the night I had transfered all the trust/love/adoration that the rest of the table had for my dinner mate to him too. I found myself becoming a fan and I didn't even know what kinds of things he wrote. I just knew it had to be good the way my already-trusted friends were treating him.
When I left the dinner I still had no clue who this guy was. I had shared a dinner with him and only knew him as "Greg the author that my friends really loved."
So, I rushed home, opened up my search engine, and searched on his name: Greg Bear.
What lessons does this have for blogging? Well, if three bloggers I know link to someone or something and say gushing things I'll be highly likely to follow along too.
But Scoble, I thought you were asked not to blog the dinner?
Dave's Picks: Seeing What's Next, by Chris Christensen et al, The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson, and, from the S+B list, Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (available for free download, but if you can afford to buy it for your library, please do). Christensen's book, the follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution, explains how to predict the future of your industry and anticipate future needs and competitive threats. It's basically a book on how to do good research, with an eye on the future rather than the past. On the technology side, my favourite this year is The Power of Many, by Christian Crumlish, a great primer for those who want to know how to use (and how not to use) the Internet and its social networking technologies to improve networks and connectivity.
The whole piece, which is a response to Strategy + Business's list, is worth reading (and saving), if only for the insight it gives into the influences Dave synthesizes in his cutting-edge analysis of sustainable economic practices and right living.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have started a blog called The Red Couch on the MSN Spaces platform and are using it to write a book together with the collaboration of their readers.
Quoting from Waxy Links:
Froogle wishlists added to Blogger profiles: that's synergy, people!
Quoting from Emerging Media Audiences: The Culture of Connectedness:
This blog is about the intersection of tech-enabled social networking and emerging media audiences. Technology is pulling together personal networks of people for more persistent connectedness and giving them tools for creating and sharing content. Meanwhile, most media companies are grappling with how to capture and keep enough mind- and time-share to make a profit from target audiences. What is the connection between these trends?
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):
Continue reading "Yet another must-read blog: Operating Manual for Social Tools" »
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 dont think theres any question about it. I mean, I think they were willing to walk away from it on election night. I think they wouldnt 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 whats there and try to, you know, at least count every vote. Make sure some of this stuff didnt 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:
I wonder, though, whether browser-based bookmarks really make sense anymore? I'd just as soon log everything in a web-accessible place, whether self-hosted or in an aggregrated space like 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.)
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.
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):
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
*and sometime at the site you're actually on another domain, mediajunkie, but let's not get into that right now - I just broke the mediajunkie.com domain trying to fix it, and then I figured out what to do, so I'm restoring it and it should be all good by the time even the geekiest nerd has bothered to read any of these footnotes.
^ as opposed to x-pollen.com/many or many/wiki/newpom.php or anything else to which the preferred domain name may in the future resolve.
(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?
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.
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.
Topix.net comments on how general search engines still don't do a good job of keeping up to date with incremental changes (most likely by scanning webfeeds) in The Daily Internet:
The kind of searches I regularly do on Feedster and Technorati just aren't available on Google. No amount of fiddling with the advanced search options, rooting around on their labs site, or searching for obscure options will scan incremental new material from half an hour ago. Yahoo search seems to have surpassed Google with some advanced features, but they don't have an effective reverse chronological "sort by date" either.
I was IMing with Dave Sifry last night (we're both in New York for the RNC - he's credentialed with CNN and I'm going commando). He showed me the new Election Watch 2004 page at Technorati.
It tracks rising and falling mentions of sites, offers blogger commentary of various ilks side by side, and now includes some interesting charts that graph comparisons of site mentions (georgewbush.com vs. johnkerry.com, etc.).
Dave has the rundown on his personal blog:
Continue reading "Technorati revamps its politics section for the RNC" »
According to AP via CNN, Olympians are prohibited from publishing their own stories and pictures. In fact, CNN's headline said "largely barred from blogging", but that implies that preventive measures are being taken; in fact, the IOC says that it hasn't done anything to enforce the ban.
Athletes may be the center of attention at the Olympic Games, but don't expect to hear directly from them online -- or see snapshots or video they've taken. The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other Web sites. An exception is if an athlete has a personal Web site that they did not set up specifically for the Games.
The IOC's rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists -- and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first. ...
The Olympic guidelines threaten to yank credentials from athletes who are in violation as well as to impose other sanctions or take legal action for any monetary damages. But [an IOC] official said the IOC has yet to take any action against an athlete. The IOC distributed the policies to each country's Olympic committee in February.
The story provides only one example of athletes writing firsthand accounts of their time in Athens. Many sportswriters, some spectators, and even a radio announcer, are blogging the games; are athletes writing or photoblogging?
Here are the main heads from Stuart Henshall's Manifesto for Social Networking Required at his Unbound Spiral blog:
- It's my Network
- I own it.
- Social networks should empower people.
- I am my own hub.
- Ease data exchange
- My Blog is Better at Networking
- Create Markets for Connectivity
- Adopt user centric models Encourage Face to Face
- Integrate with IM / VoIP
- No to Accelerated Spam
Recommended.
[...] Man may not be a political animal, but he is certainly a social animal. Voters do respond to the cues of commentators and campaigners, but only when they can match those cues up with the buzz of their own social group. Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users of heuristic shortcuts, either. But they are not just random particles bouncing off the walls of the voting booth. Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors. For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.
That it is hard to persuade some people with ideological arguments does not mean that those people cannot be persuaded, but the things that help to convince them are likely to make ideologues sick - things like which candidate is more optimistic. For many liberals, it may have been dismaying to listen to John Kerry and John Edwards, in their speeches at the Democratic National Convention, utter impassioned bromides about how "the sun is rising" and "our best days are still to come." But that is what a very large number of voters want to hear. If they believe it, then Kerry and Edwards will get their votes. The ideas won't matter, and neither will the color of the buttons.
I'm pretty stuck on Louis Menand's "The Unpolitical Animal" in this week's New Yorker
In the about page at haughey.com, Matt Haughey explains how he wrangled phpwiki into shape to present an elegant, functional, standard-compliant site.
I have even lower standards.
I just want to get the wiki pages currently at x.erio.us to look like the rest of the site, and the templates that create phpwiki pages appear to be distributed among a thousand php files as far as I can tell.
Matt, any suggestions about how to build pages that are mostly plain HTML but summon the necessary php up in the proper newshole for the wiki features?
(Social network note: Matt and I have never met, though I have been a fan of his for quite some time, and I believe I passed him waiting in a drinks line at the first evening of the BlogOn event and we now have a mutual friend in Jessamyn.)
I'm heading to New York this Saturday night so I can cover the Republican National Convention for this (and a few other) weblogs and then, after the Labor Day weekend, help support the official publication launch of the book.
The book will be available in stores starting September 1, but we are timing the publicity release for just after the Labor Day weekend. I'll be in New York at least all of that week, available to do media interviews, signings, balloon animals, and scary-clown photography
Om Malik reports that Technorati has taken a(nother?) round of VC funding: Om Malik on Broadband: Technorati gets fed VC dollars
Over on the wiki tip, Ross Mayfield's been blogging about SocialText's successfully completed round of funding as well.
Remember, as soon as everyone catches on to blogs, you can hit them with "do you have a wiki yet?"
Continue reading "More support for tracking the living web" »
Tantek emailed me to point me to some responses to Clay Shirky's mockery of XFN. I've been meaning to post a follow-up, since my headline was so snarky, and I've been busy working on this website and preparing for my trip to New York for the RNC and it's been getting away from me, but I promise to right the record soon.
In Weblogsky: Divide and Subtract, jonl, who sent me my first invitation into Multiply, contemplates leaving it entirely:
Finally, today, I decided that Multiply really does suck, so I killed some of my data there and tried to find a way out. Finding none, I posted this image as my headshot (and you're welcome to do the same):
In Many-to-Many: XFN Relationships Clay Shirky convinces me that XFN is wack. But can we just pick a model and let people experiment with it? I don't care if it's FOAF or XFN or PeopleAggritude or whatever.
What's the best way to build out and model the part of my network I want to be partly exposed online?
Extra credit question: What was it that was originally proposed as the "simplest database that could possibly work"?
Uh, I should have noted before today that I am speaking at N-TEN : 2004 San Francisco Regional Conference tomorrow (Friday, August 20), on the topic "What is Blogging and Why Should I Care?" or something to that effect.
I;ve got to do a better job of alerting the public about my upcoming speaking events, especially if I can get copies of the book there in advance of the September 1 publication date.
I am adding the event to my upcoming.org feed, but I need to move that upcoming events from the blog page to the calendar page.
Also, need to fix the broken graphics and the unclosed HTML tabs and ask Dierdre to design some more subelements, like quotes within quotes, bolder heads, major side links, etc.
Don't think I want to keep using the Multiply calendar, so I've got to add the RNC to Upcoming too.
While discussing Multiply on the Well, I was prompted to spew out my current thinking on digital identity and portable networks and what I wrote earned a "Nice rant, dude" from bumbaugh so I've included it here for the archives:
Now that review copies have been sent out to the first wave of media we are starting to get calls for in-studio appearances in New York around the time of the book's launch (September 1).
So the book tour is going to start there in New York in the end of August. I'll stay in the city through the Republican National Convention and then probably return home for a San Francisco book party and some down time at home before heading off to Austin in October and D.C. later that month, right before the election.
I've found in the past that planning my travel publicly works well. People who can see that they'll be in New York in early September can let me know in advance and we can try to hook up for socializing or for work, as the case may be.
And to file under Eating our own dogfood, I've posted the transcript from a chat with two guys from EFF-Austin who've offered to help me plan a book release party in Texas (davesnunez and jonl) on the book's wiki.
Apparently there's yet another social network manager now. I received an invitation to join it from 3 people so far. Two of them are male, one isn't and has never evidenced an inclination to be identified as such that I'm aware. The invitation read:
Molly has added you as his contact on Multiply so he can better stay in touch with you, and he told us that he is your Online Buddy. To see Molly's Multiply home page, or start your own, please go to the following address to confirm that he is your Online BuddyMy reaction was basically the same as Biz Stone's: "Hellooo Computer"
(More at MetaGrrrl: Is Multiply simplifying the world? Maybe in one sense...)
(via let's test the robustness of this system, shall we?, a Multiply post by Rebecca Blood)
Keith Hampton has announced the launch of i-neighbors, a set of free web services for neighborhoods in Canada and the US inspired by the research into the connection between virtual and f2f communities done by himself and Barry Wellman.
With their software you can
- Meet and communicate with your neighbors.
- Find neighbors with similar interests.
- Share information on local companies and services.
- Organize and advertise local events.
- Vocalize local concerns and ideas.
More at Blog.org: Virtual Communities Archives: Neighborhood virtual community software launches...
Cliff Figallo, whom I've met via the Well and our blog conference there (likely to "graduate" from being an independent conference to a featured conference, next month, if current trends hold) is blogging his experience trying to use LinkedIn for business networking, in a Blogger-driven site called Working Linkedin.
The development of social networks on the Web touches countless aspects of our everyday lives. With instant access to people of similar mindsets, near or far, we can readily form partnerships with more people and in more ways than ever before. It's now possible to use Internet tools to organize a rally, energize a political campaign, arrange a date, join a support group, or sell a product, as naturally as we use a phone.
eBay Acquires Minority Interest in craigslist
Craig's take on it seems to be that it's pretty benign.
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. This sounds big. Let's keep an eye on this.
Update: Commenters on Craig's blog seem to be wavering between hopeful worry and cries of "sell out." My sense is that Craig's idea of checking his own power is deeply correct, but that perhaps the consequences of trusting the individual involved (who sold his "equity stake" to eBay) weren't fully foreseen when the original plan was executed. Again, I'd say this bears watching.
Disclosure: Craig Newmark wrote the foreword for this book and I interviewed him a number of times while writing my analysis of the living web.
Brian Dear wonders who is behind Multiply (brianstorms weblog: Multiply? Subtract 1.):
You know what? A customer should not have to search high and low to find out simple things like this. Of all the kinds of web businesses, SOCIAL NETWORK businesses really owe it to their customers to share some of their information about themselves. I mean, be real - how is a company going to start being trusted by customers without their knowing a thing about who's behind it?
I joined the network myself as it's kind of my job right now to stay on top of these things, but I haven't invited nybody in for exactly the reasons Brian mentions. Why is it so hard to find out who is behind the business? Why not more transparency?
Online Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions is "a survey report focusing on how companies and other large organizations are using community and collaborative technologies."
(via Nancy White)
Routledge has published an academic tome called Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal Through the Internet:
Taking a multidisciplinary approach that they identify as a "cyber-realist research agenda," the contributors examine the prospects for electronic democracy in terms of its form and practice - while avoiding the pitfall of treating the benefits of electronic democracy as being self-evident. The debates question what electronic democracy needs to accomplish in order to revitalize democracy, and what the current state of electronic democracy can teach us about the challenges and opportunities for implementing democratic technology initiatives.
Wow, $85. Looks like it's targeted at the university market.
Idea for new category: library.
JonL just invited me to join Multiply, which seems to involve social networking, photo sharing, blogging (journaling), a calendar, a place for reviews and recipes,a nd something called Market (I've only started poking around).
Here's my barebones page there: telegraph.multiply.com (xian was taken!).
Looks like an ambitious play, leapfrogging Flickr (although I have no idea how good the photo sharing is and I gather there isn't chatting, so scratch that) and combining a number of other social-network tools of the moment.
On the other hand, YASNS-fatigue has set in for me, and I can hardly be bothered to fill out the extensive multitabbed profile forms. If it could import output from elsewhere, even open source feeds such as a FOAF document or an XFN file, that would be great.
I'll have to poke around to see if they're reinventing the wheel on calendaring, reviews, and recipes, as well. Must... do... some... reporting (starting by asking JonL what he knows about this site).
Multiply's a pretty good name. I'll give them that. And any site that gives you a vanity subdomain has at least one clue.
Uncredentialed bloggers at the RNC now have a headquarters to work from (MyDD :: NYC GOP street bloggers):
the venue is called the tank, and it's located at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater, about a 15-minute walk NW of Madison Square Garden.
the proprietors of the tank have generously offered to open their internet connection and allow bloggers to use the tank as an ad-hoc headquarters.
they will have both wireless and ethernet connections available. i don't know if they will be requesting donations for use of their bandwidth, but i'd certainly recommend that you earmark a few bucks for their tip jar.
...
i will be using the tank as my hub during the convention. i've been recruited to do some street blogging for the majority report during the convention. i know that a lot of you will be going, and i'm hoping that someone reading this entry knows how to set up an aggregator for the nyc street bloggers (kinda like dave did with the dnc convention bloggers). i will be happy to provide the web space if someone with the know-how will volunteer to set it up. also, if you plan on blogging the convention, leave a link to your site so i can start compiling a list for the aggregator.
Zogby Sound Bites! reprints a commentary by alan Bisbort of The Valley Advocate noting that al Jazeera and the bloggers did a better job of covering the convention than the major networks did.
An excerpt:
Before examining this any further, let's take time out for a word from our sponsors: the Bloggers of America, the only news media many of us trust anymore, the only one demonstrably interested in the continued existence of our democracy. Without people like Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and Bill Scher at Liberal Oasis, we'd be sunk. Their fair and balanced coverage of the convention, and pretty much all other political events of the past three years, has trumped the combined efforts of the "professionals" in the Fourth Estate, who sit around pondering comfort levels.
I've curtailed reading American newspapers, stopped watching American news programs. All I need to know about the priorities of the nation's news networks is this: During the Democratic convention last week, Al Jazeera, the Arab world's leading news network, offered five times more live coverage than either ABC, CBS or NBC, and twice the live coverage of all three networks combined. Think about the disgrace in that fact. Arabs are more informed about American democracy than American voters.
Party for America isn't the only organization out there trying to use social bonding as a building block for political engagement and activism.
There's also Drinking Liberally, which is geared towards younger adults. Their slogan is "I only drink with liberals."
Maybe someone needs to start an analogous 12-step program?
Erin Aubry Kaplan takes a look at the DNC and notices the prominent role played by African-Americans there as well as the reluctance to address some long-simmering issues with the party in that community (in LA Weekly: News: Bringin' Da Funk):
The biggest elephant under the Boston big top, almost bigger than the economy and Iraq, was Florida. The Florida vote theft that turned into the national-election theft in 2000 was the first great crime of the century. But the Democrats dared not pursue the crime or the criminals, because it overwhelmingly involved black voters and was therefore too racial for comfort or political expediency. Yet Florida cost the Democrats everything - the presidency, for starters - and Florida is precisely why Bush is in office now and screwing things up all over the world at an astonishing rate, and why everybodys blood was boiling last week. But it was boiling only in hindsight, which meant Democrats could not talk about Florida without talking about their complicity in the crime by keeping silent. Only in the midst of iterating anti-Republican peeves did convention talking heads raise the Florida issue, and then somewhat gingerly; besides being generally avoided as a black thing, it was surely too "negative" and potentially divisive to pass muster with DNC officials and scriptwriters, who were determined to stay on that message about a united front.
(via the Media conf on the Well)
Somewhat related: I seem to recall a lot of African-Americans - on the stage at least - at the last RNC. Will we be seeing that again? (I'm heading to New York in September to cover the RNC, although I haven't, thus far, been credentialed to cover it as a blogger. Perhaps some news organization would like to credential me?)
Dave Johnson from Seeing the Forest has posted a two-part convention retrospective and promises "more to come."
I've been remiss myself, but I plead visiting family. It's just hard to write long entries about politics and activism when you've got two incredibly darling two-year-olds asking you to draw pictures for them.
I do have a backlog of posts to make, though, and should get through them in the coming week.
Most of this chronology is recounted in Chapter 2 of the book (after all, I interviewed Kos and Jerome Armstrong gave me some crucial last-minute insights and corrections* when the chapter was in galleys), but Kos's brief history of his site is well worth reading to get the story from the horse's mouth.
A few choice excerpts:
There was once a group of political afficionados who hung out at various political forums -- starting with Delphi Forums, then moving on to ones run by a guy named Orvetti. When Orvetti closed shop, they all moved over en masse to Political Wire, which at the time had comments. But in the runup to the 2002 mid-terms, Taegan got sick of the constant flame wars in his comment threads and he shut them down
So everyone headed on over to Jerome Armstrong's MyDD, which is where I entered the picture. Digging the site (which I had found via Buzzflash), I decided to start up my own election-themed site, Daily Kos.....
I had learned my lessons from Political Wire and MyDD's community failures, and immediately shut the door on the Republican commentors who had destroyed the previous sites' communities. I zealously worked to create a "safe zone" for liberal political junkies, despite howls of "censorship" from both liberals and conservatives, and the community grew....
But even back then, the site was no longer about me, it was about the community, discussion, and debate....
OK, this post should bring up the new design (although a few of the links are still not active yet).
We've had stealth mode for this site, then the soft decloak, then the informal prelaunch, and now we're just about ready to launch the site. Review copies are going out this week so it's time to spruce up the site with a design that reflects the book cover. (There will be one more big milestone in September when the book is published and we launch the publicity effort.)
I still have some unposted material from the DNC, including a phone interview I did with a "sex worker" who wasn't able to get anywhere near the convention because of the security cordon. After the four days of nonstop work, sweat, and drinking, though, I had to sleep a lot and take a little time off. This week I'll finish up with my retrospective convention blogging and post an essay on what I think the convention was "for" over at Greater Democracy, where Aldon Hynes did a great job of chronicling the onsite blogging experience last week.
Cam Barrett thinks the
convention blogging could have been a great deal more directed as well as more participatory. He was consulted early on but apparently most of his suggestions were not acted on.
Brian Dear has some photos and a brief write up from Dan Gillmor's Book Release Party.
Seems worth noting that it almost doesn't seem worth noting that Kerry plugged johnkerry.com in his acceptance speech. Was a time, that would have seemed a novel thing.
Alan at The Command Post did a little local reporting around an anarchist protest today:
Here's something else I found interesting: the protest was not organized ... it just emerged from the morning ether. Seems there's a local organization that was giving out free breakfast and dinner to people in from out of town to protest, and it was at this breakfast that the assorted anarchists, Greens, and Radical Cheerleading Squad members ginned up their event.
So there you go: Open-source protesting.
Rerminds me of the time anarchists rioted on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, after flooding into San Francisco for an anarchists convention, which sounds like an oxymoron to me. Do they call the place to order? Who decides who gets to speak when? Do they have their own process, a sort of Roberts Rules of Disorder?
Scot Peterson of eWeek interviewed me on Monday and filed a thoughtful report today: Bloggers Make Their Presence Felt at DNC.
In stringing together my quotes, I think he was forced to manufacture some connecting words, and the result is a somewhat awkward rush of words that nonetheless reasonably represents my motormouth way:
Perhaps the most useful part of the bloggers' presence at the DNC is the ability to put a face with a name to bloggers who are used to living only online. One is Christian Crumlish, author of the forthcoming book "The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business and Everyday Life," and creator of [among others] three separate blogs - The Power of Many, Radio Free Blogistan, and Edgewise.
Crumlish embraces the notion that blogs are here to stay, but not that they will be the end of mainstream journalism. "Blogs are a medium of influence more than a mass medium," he said. "It's interactive, reciprocal, what the street is thinking, a kind of collective unconscious. A sign that someone else is thinking what I'm thinking. I'm still a news junkie. I read the New York Times and other traditional media, [and don't expect to] get breaking news from blogs."
....
Most bloggers don't make a living managing their blog, but do so as part of their real-world jobs or to augment their profession. As Crumlish explains, he's a writer whose blogging "reinforces" what he does for a living.
Maybe for scoops this week, we should be paying close attention to the people who are both "real" journalists and "real" bloggers, people like Micah Sifry.
Speaking of whom, meeting Sifry (he and Dave each refer to each other as they're their [spell much? --ed] "smarter brother") has been one of the highlights of this event for me, only exceed I think by the pleasure of Tom Burka's company - sometimes you meet people and instantly feel like you have always been friends.
Anyway, namedropping aside, Sifry, M. peels back the curtain to show us the untold story of what's really going on at the convention.
Hmmm, didn't see anything about analysis of corporate sponsors and other money sources on Fox, CNN, NBC, etc.
Wow, the D triple C and SpeakerPelosi.com really put on the dog for us bloggers. A great restaurant. VIP treatment (meaning, open bar for bloggers). Good music. Pretty decent swag. Most of all good company based around a core of people who are sharing a bonding experience, a kind of trial by fire. I tell you, if I do this again next time it will be much easier. The first time doing anything is always hard, but it's important to do hard things, to be willing to try and fail and make mistakes in public. Elsewise, how will you grow.
Now, where are the photos? I loved the Atrios nametags most people were sporting. I met E.J. Dionne (wow!), and Eric Alterman (eh!). I met Trippi and Granny D, two heroes of mine.
Standing around outside the restaurant after 2 am trying to figure out where to go next, I noticed another dirty little secret about bloggers: Bloggers smoke! (Well, not all of them/us, of course - mainly the young ones who haven't experienced creeping mortality yet.)
How come Matt Gross and Matt Stoller won the iPods? That's it, I'm changing my name to Matt.
Did the DNC really fire Stoller from their blog for posting a pre-speech "where's the beef?" entry at BOPnews? For reals? That's crazy! Come on, DNC, do you get the living web or don't you?
Saw jjg and Rebecca Blood. Waved my book around a lot (and let Micah Sifry take off with one of my two copies because he has by far shown the most enthusiasm about the book among many people who've been very kind and shown a lot of interest, and because he's about to go on vacation and told me he thinks the book would make "perfect vacation reading" [get me a blurb, Micah, and my publicist will send out a press release {Trippi agreed, in principle, to give me a blurb too and we had one of those "authors comiserating moments" when he complained that he was given very little head's up from his publisher to get praise quotes for his take on the rise and fall of the Dean campaign, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised}]) and a lot of people thumbed through it, scanning the quotes and admiring the fine quality of the paper and the universally loved cover art.
I'm still putting together the list of people who've requested review copies. If you're one of them, be sure to email me and I'll try to accommodate as many reasonable requests as I can.
Bob Jacobson called the bloggers here at the DNC "irrelevant" in comments on this entry: Good analysis of convention blogging @ Radio Free Blogistan.
My reply:
Well, everything's predictable in hindsight. Dan's analysis is the first I've seen. (David Weinberger agreed with me that he nailed the concept of event blogging.) It's one thing to say "anyone could have written that." It's another thing to write it and sign your name and publish it online.
Second, blogging may be irrelevant to you, but it's a strawman to expect blogging to provide a coherent narrative to an inherently chaotic circumstance. I wonder if anyone really expected that?
At best we can contribute to the kaleidoscopic perceptions by witnessing the events and attesting to our own perceptions.
Finally, check the Afro-Netizen post Liza links to today and tell me that blog entry is irrelevant, when the networks didn't bother to broadcast Obama's speech and the newspapers here in Boston the next day featured a canned "Ted Kennedy leads the attack" summary on the front pages.
Jerry Springer came up to the blogger section and Kos introduced me to him. Everyone flocked around to have their pictures taken with Jerry. Jerome snapped this one of me:
That's Jesse behind me, Kos to the right, and a disgruntled looking "serious photographer" in the back.
Trolling around the first floor looking for interviews I passed Sam Donaldson giving an interview to a local radio dj. Without being too obvious, I tried to look at the marmoset that lives on his head. I thought for sure it was a rug but now I'm thinking it really may just be an outrageous combover, or a toupé designed to look like an outrageous combover.
Anyway, as I got close I heard him trotting out the same old tired interpretation: "There's no suspense. There are no floor fights." (Paging Jay Rosen.)
The radio jock was eating it up. He asked if Donaldson might tell him some stories of exciting conventions he'd covered in the past, but I don't think that line of questioning went anywhere, because as I was walking away I heard Donaldson had changed the subject to "shove it."
Dave Johnson from Seeing The Forest (hey, Dave, weren't you going to send me an essay on political language?) makes a very good point in his entry entitled Read Bloggers Next Week, Too!:
I think the best stuff from the bloggers will be next week. Too much is happening, and I know that I need time to digest. But there is a LOT coming from this. I feel it. All those things that just MAKE me need to write are happening, and I'm working on some good stuff to post here.
So I think that NEXT WEEK is going to be the week to really read bloggers. I have started understanding that bloggers are going to be able to contribute something very valuable to this process, for the same reasons they did with Dean, and with the electronic voting problem and all the other things we have forced into the attention of enough of the opinion leaders and public to make things start happening. There really IS something about what we're doing that allows us to have a perspective that you are not going to get from the press or the party or the professional punditry.
(Oh, and Dave, I won't be in the hall today, so email me if anything good is going on this afternoon before 4!)
First, a reminder that I'm blogging this convention in a number of different spaces. One way to see everything I'm publishing on my own servers is to go to my monolog aggregrated blog.
I had big plans to make it to the California delegations breakfast this morning, to hear Boxer and Feinstein among others, but after catching the last 73 bus to Belmont at about 1:30 last night (a girl had puked in the back, and when we started moving she woke up and ran to the front to get on the 71 bus - the driver said, "oh, sure, throw up on my bus and then ride in his.") and several nights of three hourse sleep, I got up today, showered, and realized that if I didn't go back to bed I would die. My head was pounding, I was sweating, and I was weak in the knees.
Now it's nearly four hours later and I'm still at critStock's house in Belmont, but I feel much more human.
Time passes quickly in the hall. Before you know it you've missed several meals and forgotten to drink any water. It's also (of course) noisy and chaotic all the time. Picture three circuses going on at once.
Needless to say, this is not the ideal writing environment.
Oh, for an assistant and an editor and a copyeditor and an entourage.
Did I say that outloud?
I'll need to head downtown to get my credentials again soon, but I think before rushing into the hall today I'll find a nice (relatively) quiet cybercafé and try to clear through my backlog of notes from yesterday.
(I'm getting some gentle complaints from readers along the lines of "blog more." Please remember that a lot of us are blogging - I can't do it all myself. You'll get your best view of the experience by looking through many sets of eyes.)
It's too bad David Weinberger didn't hold out long enough to hear Michael Moore speak, because (yes, yes, I will post a summary soon - it's very noisy here in the hall and Jerry Springer is schmoozing with the bloggers) Moore made the point that polls of "likely voters" might not accurately predict the turnout in this unusually politicized time.
It's actually cool to be into politics, now, was one of his points.
He talked about Dale Earnhardt endorsing his movie and he argued that a liberal progressive majority exists in this country, noting that 54% of the public now thinks the war in Iraq was a mistake.
Weinberger has an anecdote that lends some support to this view of the heightened degree of awareness of and interest in politics today:
The cabby and I got to talking and he offered that Carter's speech had been magnificent. He pulled from the cab's sun visor a scrap of paper on which he had written a favorite phrase from the speech: "...we cannot lead if our leaders mislead." Wow, I thought to myself, if cabbies are writing down their favorite phrases from the Convention, we're doing really well.
After getting my credentials this morning and eating some Thai food for lunch, I hopped in a cab with Aldon Hynes and David Weinberger and headed across the Charles to a rally for a group called Campaign for America's Future which seemed geared toward inspiring progressive youth to support the Democrats and not stray into the Nader camp.
There was a huge crowd waiting to get in but we were whisked inside with our press credentials and got inside the room pretty easily. It was packed full, standing room only, with a huge press gaggle waiting for Moore to show up. He was late ("on Michael Moore time") and some of the journalists were ignoring the current speaker to yak loudly on their cell phones about how they were about to give up and leave.
Howard Dean gave a wonderful speech, perhaps a preview of his address this evening, that was incredibly well received and eventually reached a fever pitch (although with no insightly screaming). He exhorted everyone to get involved in the process beyond simply voting.
Dean also touched on the Theresa Heinz "shove it" tempest in a teapot, noting that the reporter who she said it to worked for a Richard Mellon Scaife funded paper. Perhaps as one feisty character to another, Dean said:
Kerry's gonna win this just because of his wife. Isn't she great? Let's hear it for Theresa Kerry. Tell it like it is, baby!
This got big cheers.
Robert Reich gave a good speech on the economic sleight-of-hand practiced by Republicans, and Karl Pope from the Sierra Club gave a strong speech as well, but it was clear that the audience was on tenterhooks waiting for Moore, and he delivered the goods.
I'm going to do a separate post on Moore's speech because there were so many quotable bits in it. It was perhaps one of the best politically oriented speeches I've ever heard in my life, and he had the crowd in the palm of his hand.
Liberal Oasis reports on the blogger breakfast, picking up on the contrast between Walter Mears defense of journalistic ideal of objectivity vs. Howard Dean's observation that these days opinions masquerades as news on the front pages of some of our most prestigious papers.
Dean also made it clear that he really gets it that the significance of blogging to politics is the two-way nature of the communication, not simply the ability to communicate directly with voters, routing around the corporate press or even the much-heralded fundraising breakthroughs pioneered by his campaign.
(Dean even cited McCain's success raising money via the Web after his surprise victory over George W. Bush in 2000 as an antecedent, something I touch on briefly in the second chapter of the book.)
Oh, and between a charming interview with a Harvard Crimson reporter and my posting of this entry, Al Gore's just been giving his low-carb speech. From up here it seemed to hit many of just hte right notes - touching on the still-raw sore of this party's electoral debacle in the last election mostly with gentle good humor and questioning the veracity of the show of moderationthe Republicans put on at their last Convention.
When bloggers were credentialed a lot of people pointed out that this was a first, and someone snarkily commented something to the effect of "uh, there weren't any blogs in 2000."
Of course, that isn't true. Even the word blog was already around by then and there have been blogs for at least ten years.
Furthermore Ken Layne blogged both conventions in 2000. (Ken has some suggested story angles for bloggers at the convention..)
I've posted a bunch of my patented "blurry but that's so it looks dynamic" photos, mostly from the second breakfast this morning in a photo album site.
I'm still in the process of giving them informative names and captions, but since it's up already I thought I'd link to it.
Meanwhile, Tom Burka scooped us all with his definitive coverage of the breakfast.
(I'm also about to post a photo that includes the elusive Atrios over at RFB.)
Matt Stoller took a bunch of us down to the Democratic News Service bullpen to meet Chris Casey, who will attempt to broker brief interviews with VIPs us. This place is a zoo. It's actually calmer and more relaxed inside the seating area than out in the halls, where people are being herded in groups and prevented from exiting elevators on the wrong floors or otherwise wandering into areas they are not credentialed for.
Last night I saw Kerry at Fenway and although I slept four hours after arriving in the morning I ended up staying awake until about 3 am east-coast time - so much for my brilliant plan to defeat jet lag.
This morning I went to two bloggers' breakfasts, one with Henry Waxman (for progressives) and a more formal one presented by the DNCC, featuring guest speakers such as Kerry's swiftboat vet endorser, Barack Obama, and Howard Dean (who gave a well received speech - this was my first time seeing the man up close). I'll summarize my notes from those meetings as soon as I can.
Since then I've been interviewed by several news outlets pursuing the "bloggers gone wild" angle and I've also been helping most of the Mac users get themselves onto the flakey wifi here in the hall. Now that I'm connected I'll keep updating all day.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out what the story is.
Advanced binding copies of the book arrived at Sybex today. xian, if you don't get one at your hotel, call me.
--Pete Gaughan (editor)
Taegan Goddard points to three places to keep up with convention bloggers: Political Wire: Tracking the Convention Bloggers
Unfortunately, I don't think Dave Winer's aggregrator includes any of the blogs I'm writing for at the convention (aside from the Greater Democracy group weblog).
I'll be trying to figure out the bus route from Belmont to the T and then getting as close as I can to Copley Square before I have to get out and walk the rest of the way to pick up my credentials and make it to the two bloggers' breakfasts this morning.
Burnt Orange Report covers Saturday's Democray Fest pre-convention gathering of "Howard Dean delegates, 'shadow' delegates like us who are officially John Kerry (etc.) delegates but Deaniacs at heart, and other hardcore volunteers and Blog for America commenters."
At Eschaton, pseudonymous blogger Atrios* questions whether there's anything newsworthy about bloggers credentialed to cover the convention and whether it's likely that bloggers will unearth any news:
I mean, if you'd prefer hear me announce the basketball game instead of Bob Costas, then you might enjoy it, but I'm not sure what other kind of value added there is.
So, anyway, hopefully it'll be fun for me but I don't know quite how to make it fun for you. I have some ideas, but I won't really know how well they'll play out until I get there.
I myself have wondered about this. Will I justify my presence in the Fleet Center? Will I add any value to readers' experience of the convention or the election race? We'll see.
Atrios does note that the whole bloggers- are- they- journalists- or- not newshook misses the potentially more interesting point that we the bloggers will be watching the rest of the media do its work up close and personal.
Dan Gillmor's upcoming book from O'Reilly, We the Media now has a weblog.
Looks like I'll be interviewing Dan for the Well's public Inkwell conference in October.
Susan Mernit has the deets on the big CNN plus Technorati story.
Dave Sifry will be providing expert commentary, mined - I gather - from the Technorati data set. w00t!
I'll be at BlogOn this evening and tomorrow, and at the blogger's dinner tomorrow night at Pyramid Brewery in Berkeley.
Next week I'll be blogging the convention, mostly here but at other blogs as well, including Greater Democracy.
In early August I'll be in New England, touching base with my old-money posse.
In late August I'll be at a San Francisco regional nonprofits-and-technology conference (the details are still to be worked out).
In early September I'll go to New York for labor day, my sister's birthday, the Republican Convention, and the launch of the book.
In October I'm doing an interview on the Well.
All of this needs to go on upcoming.org and then I need to fix the links in the bottom of the last column of this blog.
BeyondVC: Influencing the influencers:
If I were a startup, one great and cheap way to build buzz and excitement is through the blog community. I call this "influencing the influencers." Think about it - many of the more well known bloggers are also well known tech journalists, industry pundits, VCs, and technology executives. Forget about using the traditional PR route - if you can get these influencers to write about you on their highly targeted blogs, others will hear about it, write about it, and generate links to it. There has been much discussion about measuring the value of blogs but at the end of the day it is all about being influenced by a trusted source. Each blogger has his own unique audience that trusts his/her opinion. Many of us try and buy products and services based on trust and recommendations. This is no different in the blog community. A number of web 2.0 companies have already leveraged the blogosphere to generate buzz....
(via smernit)
I've been insanely busy (once again) preparing for the convention and the conference later this week and the blog dinner and the promotional efforts for my book that I've bookmarked about 73 addresses I've been meanin to blog about and will probably just donate them all to delicious eventually.
For anyone interested in politics and media, Susan Mernit's list of collaborations she'd like to see this year is a must read:
2004 Election coverage-- What I'd like to see
We're just a week away from the DNC, and nothing in the online news space looks very fresh or very different - yet. Six months ago, I wrote two articles for the Digital Edge of the Newspaper Association of America about the 2004 elections and online news sites. One piece focused on the ad side, the other on the edit. In both, site managers and editors discussed what the kind of coverage they hoped to offer for the 2004 race.
None of it seems to have happened.
With the idea it is time to get with the program, here are some things I'd like to see news organizations do[.]
I wish I had more to add at this time, beyond saying that Mernit may be about two years ahead of her peers.
The New York Times editorializing about the Democratic National Convention's press-credentialed bloggers in
Conventioneering.com, wonders if this will result in a cooptation of bloggers' fiercely independent cast:
. L. Mencken is said to have guffawed and slapped his thigh in delight at times as he would write about a typical day at a presidential nominating convention. Those long-ago times are enviable for their unpredictability - eons removed from the scripted conventions that will soon be offered to the nation once more as lean cuisine for thought. All the more reason to hope, then, that this year's one potentially risky innovation - accepting dozens of free-form online bloggers as accredited convention journalists - may lace the proceedings with fresh insight and even some Menckenian impertinence.
People who think the mushrooming world of wannabe polemicists and their Web logs, or blogs, is merely a high-tech amusement should talk to Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican.
In Web lore, bloggers are credited with relentlessly drilling Senator Lott after he expressed segregation-tinged nostalgia for the Strom Thurmond presidential campaign, a story that the major news media initially missed. Mr. Lott was subsequently forced to quit as majority leader.
Beyond its power as a source of news and commentary, the Internet has proved itself to be the ultimate fund-raising tool. Bloggers can be crass and biased, but politicians no longer scoff at their rich online realm. Hence the red carpet at the conventions - at least for some of them.
The Democrats, needless to say, are already paying for their venturesome invitation. They received applications from 50 bloggers and later announced there was room for only 30. Conspiracy theories are already abounding on the blogs of the disinvited. Such is Web life. We do wonder whether a blogger's buccaneer self-image will suffer from having to wear a garish credential necklace just to watch conventioneers as they mainly say, "Nice to see you!" to each other. Will bloggers be tamed into centrism? Or, like Mencken, will they gleefully report that the convention's main speechmakers are "plainly on furlough from some home for extinct volcanoes"? Log on to find out.
I am one of the bloggers chosen to cover the DNC, as noted here and at a number of my weblogs. I've going to set up a "conventionology" category at any of the weblogs where I might comment on the DNC and then pull together a single RSS feed with anything thus tagged. I'll post the link to that single feed when it's ready. (I have to either build it as a template in MT or generate it from PHP and mySQL directly - anyone want to help with the latter exercise?).
I don't think my views will be tamed by this experience but I will try to report on everything I see and experience from the perspective of someone who does not come from inside the beltway.
Flickr visioneer Stewart Butterfield writes (in the Feed Thickens) that a proposed standard based on RSS will enable photos and photo sequences "spliced" into the in-line context of a weblog.
Sites such as Upcoming.org and Tribe.net are proving out a first round of web services that increasingly show up on weblogs (such as Ross Mayfield's tribe feeds in his sidebar, or my upcoming feed on this weblog's home page).
So far, Atrios's Eschaton and Kos' Daily have most visibly bundled small donations from blog readers on behalf of Democratic causes.
According to The New York Times > Business > G.O.P. Hopes Web Sites Will Be a Link to the Small Donor, the Republicans are now offering a 30% commission to blog donation farmers.
The living web weighs in.
I've been given a press credential to blog the Democratic National Convention.
Now this is one useful colophon.
By the way, a huge supreme thanks to Pete Gaughan, who has been blogging the heck out of this space while I've been going through the throes of finishing the book (it's at the printer now).
Pronounce gaw-hen (or, as I like to think of him, Pete Gone - that would be his beatnik/spy name), Pete is one of the greats as an editor, a thinker, and an aficionado of personal publishing, social media, and the living web. His enthusiasm for this subject matter, tempered by a keen sober eye for unsupported leaps of faith, made this book possible. Without him: nada.
Pete isn't officially supposed to blog the book, although he is permanently welcome to post here and I'm hoping he continues as long as we all mutually feel that it's a good use of one of my publisher's most valuable resources (Pete's time and his mind).
So, thanks Pete, for everything. I haven't thanked you enough. Take a bow. You've had to box a few rounds with one hand tied behind your back and even then you're one of the best at this.
I'll get more prominent bylines into the design pronto.
I'd like to invite other guest posters to the blog as well. Any suggestions? Requests?
I can't hear you!
Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber reminds us that "the study of online communities is one of the oldest topics explored by academics about the social aspects of information technology use." She links to several pertinent journals and articles, and of course most of those concentrate on virtual communities, not the interaction of virtual and real. But one article in particular [PDF] includes helpful history of what might be called mediated revolutions, from 1848 to 1968 to 1989.
In Integrated Web Design: Social Networking - The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age, Molly Holzschlag presents an up-to-date overview of online social networking, blogs and syndication, FOAF and XFN, and geomapping.
The article is exerpted from or promotional for her similarly named book from New Riders intended to help web designers and developersand communicate better, align their goals, and work together more effectively.
Oliver Willis posted recently that he received a signed advance copy of Joe Trippi's new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything.
I must say, I'm impressed with how quickly Trippi managed to put this put together and I look forward to reading it.
Scott Rosenberg posts a head's up about a new weblog by Mitch Kapor, Bart Decrem, and Joe Costello:
Mitch Kapor, Bart Decrem and Joe Costello have launched an interesting new group blog called ob4 - Of, by and for - for musings, discussion and debate about democracy in the aftermath of the Dean campaign. (It also seems to be a sort of prototype testbed for a new edition of the open-source content management system Drupal being developed by CivicSpace Labs - evolving out of the experience behind the DeanSpace software.)
According to The New York Times, John Kerry set a single-day record for campaign contributions via the Internet: $3 million on Wednesday, June 30. Of his $180 million so far, "Mr. Kerry has raised more than $44 million through mail and phone solicitations and more than $56 million over the Internet this year" (the balance presumably coming from face-to-face fundraising events). Kerry's campaign manager is quoting as saying, "The strength of the small donor has helped level the financial playing field with the Bush campaign," which has raised $213 million.
Wired News reports that Affinity Engines is suing Google, claiming that code for Orkut.com was copied from their inCircle product.
The headline says it all: Apple's preview of its next OS, "Tiger," includes RSS aggregation built-in to its Safari browser. Apple may have found the magic phrase that popularizes newsfeed aggregation: "Personal News Clipping Service."
The University of Minnesota has posted an anthology on blog research, Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs:
This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.
Articles include "Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project,", "Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere," "Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing," and "Personal Publication and Public Attention." (Hat tip to Liz Lawley on Many-2-Many)
Mike Bazeley at the San Jose Mercury news writes today about authors open texts online for others to edit.
He focuses on J.D.'s experiment posting his chapters for Darknet (blogged here by Pete a few weeks ago), but he and I spoke earlier this week and he mentions me at the end of the article:
Annalee Newitz interviews Christopher Filkins (also featured in two chapters of POM) about his ideas for an open-source dating network in Wired 12.06: Cracking the Code to Romance.
Salon article [ad-view required] covers SNSs, saying, "The new social software turbo-charges friendships, sexual hookups and the business of human relationship -- and could turn our lives into an open book."
Alex Havalais points out that Orson Scott Card had a character blogging back in 1994:
"I've been studying history," Peter said. "I've been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world..."
- Peter Wiggin in Ender's Game, on why he is beginning to blog.
A guest blogger at Many-to-Many reports that the "Chinese government just launched a new website for people to report on what officials describe as illegal or unhealthy information on the internet. [...] The Chinese authorities are once again using a strategy which mixes intimidation, uncertainty, and divide and conquer techniques to create fear and distrust among people, therefore forcing internet users to censor themselves online. (If one wants to know more about how censorship works in Chinese society, you can read an excellent article written by Princeton professor Perry Link.)"
I'm doing author review of the glossary draft now (the book's appendix) and I'd like to hear suggestions from readers about terms we left out or improvements in definitions. I'm such a geek that I often forget which words sound strange to normal people. I want people reading the book to be able to flip to the glossary any time they encounter a word like "meme" or "blog" or "ping" or "wiki" and get an explanation without losing their momentum in the chapter they're reading.
I am about to update the Glossary section of the book's wiki so that it tracks with the current draft of the book. (I'm putting each definition on its own page so that they can grow in the future into encyclopedia-type entries, but I wonder if using the HTML definition-list/term, definition-list/definition would be semantically more meaningful, plus should I worry that the sage's like to say that "wiki is not a dictionary"?)
If you'd like to suggest a glossary term, you can post a comment here or propose it on the wiki. (To edit the wiki, simply sign yourself in with a WikiName - mine is ChristianCrumlish; no password required. This will give you the ability to edit nearly any page in the wiki, including any part of the glossary.)
Right now the book is listed on Amazon (Amazon.com: Books: The Power of Many: How the Living Web is The Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life.
Unfortunately, the book's search summary profile says it's out of print, and the detail page says it will be 304 pp., and softcover, when in fact it's in press for September, more like 250 pp., and hardcover (with a dust cover).
I had an author portrait taken for the dust-jacket flap last week (by Robert Birnbach) and it's all starting to seem strangely real.
(The ISBN is 0782143466.)
As soon as the Amazon listing is fixed I'll make the link from the book's cover image on this site into a link to the Amazon page for buying the book (using my xpollen-20 affiliation code).
Bob Jacobson from Activist-Tech, Grassroots something, and the WELL passes along this article (IT on the Campaign Trail) from CIO Magazine's June 1, 2004, edition, calling it "State of the art reporting on the two campaign's IT efforts."
The 2004 presidential race may well hinge on which party most effectively exploits data mining tools to get out the vote.
...
In this year's presidential election, political operatives are relying more than ever on CRM-type systems to comb voters' histories and demographic data to find those supporters who will vote for and perhaps contribute to their cause.
To paraphrase James Carville, "It's the database, stupid."
The business blog Cutting Through reports conversations with a client... [quote reformatted for space]
And do you know which element of all this grabbed their attention the most? Wikis.
Which coincides with the volume of postings on wikis over the last few weeks in and around the blogosphere. There is definitely movement afoot e.g., Seth Godin, Business Week, Amy at Contentious. And finally A Penny For has recently created a wiki to capture business blogs.
The post continues with a list of some basic benefits of a wiki for the unfamiliar.
The early history of the Electric Minds online community founded by Howard Rheingold (running from 1996 to 2000 is preserved at the beginning of a conference on the current site that keeps the history up to date.
The period from '96 to 2000 covers the boom/bust sine wave so many starry-eyed wired people at the time experienced (you know, when the buzzword-du-jour cycled from portal to community and back).
I didn't know about the NITLE Blog Census until I stumbled across it in a Feedster search that turned up this eWeek article:
Blogging is the hottest thing on the Internet since, well, the Web browser. This is not news, as just about everybody who spends time online is maintaining a blog, regularly reading and contributing to a blog, or knows someone who is maintaining or regularly reading and contributing to a blog. And blogs are everywhere. The National Institute for Technology & Liberal Education Blog Census has logged about 1.9 million Weblog sites, 1.2 million of which are in English.
What is news is that bloggers and blogging are killing journalism as we know it. This is scary but not necessarily bad. I'll try to sort it out.
Party for America, a partisan group that builds on what was learned running houseparties and organizing other neighbor-related voter awareness activities in the Dean campaign by veterans of the East Bay for Dean grassroots organization (now East Bay for Democracy), is looking for a project manager to help with a web service development project.
Continue reading "Party for America seeks project manager" »
Via Jon Lebkowsky: a civic-service twist to Google e-mail:
As seen on eBay - we've gots 'em. Nine brand new, shiny, gmail invites are sitting in my inbox waiting to further dilute the value some people are apparently willing to assign to this...
15 invites given away
5 invites open
Donors: [...]It's not free, however. If you're interested in one, comment here and let me know what you're willing to do for it. Not to me (though I am more than ready to trade for a few good massages), but to someone else. A random act of kindness, maybe? Work in a soup kitchen? Help out at a needle exchange? Or maybe you're doing that already - you'd be the ideal recipient.
Susan Mernit and Mary Hodder have unveiled the BlogOn 2004 conference, scheduled for July 22 and 23 at Berkeley, bringing together business, media, and technical people interested in blogging, social media, social networks, syndication, and related topics (you know, all that "living web" stuff).
Here's Susan's writeup and here's Mary's.
Sponsors appear to include Six Apart, Knight Ridder, and Microsoft. The Haas School of Business is hosting the event. (Mary does interdisciplinary work that overlaps with the business school, the journalism school, and the information science department - Mary, please correct any misstatements!)
I'm on deadline (way past!) ... more later.
Doc Searls points to a great piece by Russell Beattie on why Silicon Valley is living in the past and facing backward. Read it all; here's just one bit:
I first noticed that the leaders of Silicon Valley are *still* behind the times when I saw the line up for O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conference. Not a single member of telecom industry there and only one session that talks about telecom - and its focus is VoIP. Are you kidding me? Anyone who doesn't realize by now that the Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by mobile devices must be living on, well, here in the U.S.
Today, Lawrence Lessig declared e-mail bankruptcy, saying he was going to stop trying to get caught up on replying to his backlog. A colleague says, "This is Larry coming to grips with becoming a public figure, and recognizing he can't relate to e-mail in the way he did when he was just a law professor," but Lessig apparently still doesn't really "get it": he still plans to respond to all future e-mails.
Two posts turned up this week about proportions of male and female bloggers and blog-readers: Joho the Blog: Girls keep out? is entirely about it, and Political Animal: The Blogosphere... mentions it in addition to things like average education level.
This topic has been done to death for years, and there's a group blog on women in tech for the very reason that there are differences. But like so many iterations of this subject, these two posts miss the point: men and women blog in much closer numbers than they think, but the styles and (especially) topics of interest diverge sufficiently that it's easy to be misled if you only eat your little slice of the pie. So analyzing gender differences in a tiny subset of "blogs"—say, across a single blog as in the Joho item, or across a single topic such as politics as in PA—is not terribly useful even when the boundaries are well-stated, which they weren't in these instances.
The Joho item is all about tech blogging, and the PA item is all about political blogging. Hey, folks: men (and whites, and the highly educated) are overrepresented in politics and computer technology; it shouldn't be news that they dominate political or tech blogs. The PA item cites the recent Blogads survey that says 21% of blog readers are women. Thank goodness folks in the comments pointed out that Blogads is skewed toward high-traffic, political, and ad-bearing blogs.
Apparently many of these posters missed misbehaving's link to a recent Georgetown thesis, Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers: "Contrary to prediction, the results indicate that there are more gender similarities than differences in blog use." (Again, a small slice of blog reality... but at least the boundaries were clearly stated.)
Update: This post generated reaction and discussion in two posts on Misbehaving, including an apology and clarification from the post's author.
Those of us at W3C who have been working on this each saw a hole that Atom fills, whether it's a simplified publication model, a more accessible means of getting to the core content of a site, or a great way to ease users into the upside of the semantic Web. And we think Atom should be in an environment where it can cross-pollinate with Web specs like XHTML and RDF. (Though that doesn't mean going back to RSS 1.0 at all.) I think that what we offer over IETF, all told, does meet Tim's better-than-10% criterion.
(via Scripting News)
WirelessUnleashed is a new group blog (Kevin Werbach, Andrew Odlyzko, David Isenberg, Clay Shirky), funded by Microsoft, that "advocates freeing up low-frequency spectrum globally for wireless broadband and unlicensed applications."
ZURL claims to be "the last URL you'll ever need." This implementation of the Open Directory taxonomy is gussied up as a Yahoo!-style deeper-and-deeper heirarchy, but with far too few categories—the top level is currently only Business, Cities, Companies, Drink, Health, Hobbies, Law, MLB, Medicine, NBA, NCAA, NHL, News, Olympics, People, States, Technology, US Soccer, and World. "Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web." (hat tip to Susan Mernit).
Mark Glazer notes that Craig Newmark often appeals to "nerd values" when explaining what makes craigslist run so well: OJR article: 'Nerd Values' Help Propel Tiny Craigslist Into Classifieds Threat.
I think we are seeing a transition in the internetworked world from geek values (arrogance, insiderhood, impatience with nongeeks) to nerd values (Craig suggests that as a "recovering" nerd he is sensitive to the need to include people who aren't socially adept on their own).
In Many-to-Many: Who owns a weblog's content? over at Many-to-Many, Seb Paquet inquires into ownership issues in the age of collaborative authoring.
Sites that provide statistics on worldwide Internet access and use (many sites and sources are listed on dmoz):
A claim that "roughly" or "about" 10% of the world's people have Internet access seems safe. (We have no category for "intro" or "frontmatter", it seems. Probably a good idea.)
Though focused on online communities and written/populated mainly by hackers, Meatball wiki represents a fascinating resource for anyone studying how communities function in general and particular what tends to happen online and what patterns and anti-patterns are worth noticing.
For example, here's the current entry on the anti-authoritarian personality type. I also just read a great piece on the Court Jester role (one I tend to identify with myself.)
Let's Talk America is "a nationwide movement that will bring Americans from all points on the political spectrum together in cafes, bookstores, churches and living rooms for lively, open-hearted dialogue to consider questions essential to the future of our democracy." Its website has "Find/Host a Discussion" functions, prominent promotion of "the Democracy in America Convention, August 19th-22nd in Springfield, Illinois," and the promise of more features such as "downloadable discussion guides, tools that let you find events in your area or post one of your own, and an online voter registration system." Let's Talk America is a co-venture of several civic organizations and apparently is funded by The Institute on the Common Good at Regis University. (Hat tip to Jon Lebkowsky.)
Joi Ito is profiled in an AP story in USA Today, which of course has to define "blog" for its readers. "Most of the blog services are free so far. But once blogging gains acceptance as a self-publishing medium, business opportunities such as advertising and premium photo-sharing services should emerge."
Chris Nolan's blog has me addicted instantly, incisive, opinionated, well informed nonstandard political opinions, an acid wit, links by the tumbril. Her blog's design looks just like Craig Newmark's - did he help her get set up? I should ask him.
Recently, she asked the money question about Howard Dean and Iowa:
With all the chapters rewritten and the glossary nearly done, and the promotional publicity effort ramping up, I spent some time over the weekend trying to crisp up the design of this weblog a bit. I may have overdone it. The middle column is rather narrow in Safari. I'd welcome design feedback. I'm aware that some of my template syntax is jerry-built at best.
I'd also like to work out the problem of getting true domain aliasing working with http://thepowerofmany.com/ - right now permalinks still rely on my underlying x-pollen.com/many site, and that's the address people are bookmarking and adding to their blogrolls. It would behoove my publisher, who owns the brand of the title, to make it work better (else risk reinforcing the author's own x-branding).
What else? I don't know. Tell me what looks wrong in your browser or which jargon to rewrite as succinct plain English or if you're having trouble understanding this website, the book, the wiki, their topic or how to read the entries in the blog, the earliest of which were posted in late December of last year.
I'm going to post something to my Orkut friends group to see if that brings any beta traffic. The site's actual launch can really wait till the book is in reviewers' hands (late July), but for now we can kick the tires. I'll ask Blogistan readers to wander over and give feedback too, and etc., and the rest.
Hossein Derakhshan writes in his English weblog on Iran, technology and pop culture, Editor: Myself, that the judiciary in Iran has begun a "widespread crackdown on many medium or small sized ISPs" there.
Explaining why an upcoming blog ging festival in Iran is important, hoder writes:
[I]t has a big government organization backing it which spends a big amount of money on these kind of events.
There are workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions planed for it and on their website they have interviewed the IT Minister and some other officials. I'm sure it attracts a lot of people and attention.
But the thing is that while the judiciary has started a wide-spread crack-down on many medium or small sized ISPs, and given their religious and political concerns, I guess the whole IT industry in Iran is in real danger in short-term. (I really don't know why the recent crack-down has been ignored by the western media)
The hardliners are very sensitive to radical anti-religious and anti-government websites. Also the student protest anniversary is to come in July 9th and like every year, they are going to fully control or close every possible channel of incoming information to Iran again, say Satellite TVs, Internet access, VoIP phones, etc. They usually become paranoid at this time of the year.
So the blogging festival is important in that it helps correct the bad image that the computer-illiterate judiciary officials and other religious groups have about the Internet. (Internet in their eyes is nothing but sex + radical anti-religious activism + espionage)
Many, among IT professionals and journalists, are seriously worried about the fate of the Internet in Iran, especially since the hardliners are coming to power.
Looks like I hadn't linked to Marc Bernstein's popular essay yet. Marc credits the term to Dan Chan of Daypop, btw.
(via my blogging-related outboard backup brain, A List Apart: 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web @ Radio Free Blogistan)
I envy Shirky his steady voice of reason. He's got a good look at user empowerment and the potential for experimenting with greater self-rule in virtual environmnets, particularly games, in his latest writing, Nomic World: By the players, for the players.
Inspirational quote:
This would fulfill the libertarian fantasy of no coercion on behalf of the group, because no one would ever be asked to assent to rules they hadn't voted for, but it would also be approximately no fun
Generally, most followers of RSS and weblogs and syndication and the living web consider that the RSS tipping point has already been reached. There is mass buy-in to the approach.
Even Atom advocates generally view Atom as simply a flavor of the broader RSS concept (regardless of what the letters stand for, point to, denote, or connote).
It looks like Dave Winer has launched a site called Really Simple Syndication to put the broadest possible stamp on RSS as the name of this new idea, and most especially to start talking directly to users instead of getting bogged down in the insider cant of other developers and ubergeeks.
His post from over the weekend could be viewed as a kind of manifesto for RSS in general and RSS 2.0 in 2004 in particular:
- A format.
- Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.
- Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.
- Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.
- Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.
- Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters - that distribute news and opinion in RSS.
- Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.
- A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.
The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.
RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It's big. A lot bigger than a format.
This is the inaugural post for a new website devoted to the community of people who create and use RSS. It's just a beginning.
Let's have fun!
# Posted by Dave Winer on 5/29/04; 3:54:55 PM
So the race is on to brand this next big thing (we like to call it "the living web" of course) and Dave is putting his money on RSS. It's got a lot of memeshare, for sure, and the site is a classic "eat your own dogfood" response to a challenge. This is Dave at his best, if you ask me, and by clicking through here, I suppose you did.
Not sure anyone else can edit anything yet. I'd love to build the book's community around the wiki and not Orkut or something....
Jon Garfunkel writes at Civilities.net about his ideas for Replacing Spam with Social Network Emailing:
When you sign up for an organization ... you should be able to specify your "captain". This is the person who will email you, call you, and be responsible for your involvement. You may pick the person who brought you into the organization in the first place. You may pick the actual precinct captain. Or you may look at the list of people volunteering to be captains, and pick the most attractive one. Up to you. That's democracy. That's how real estate companies work. Big brand, personal agent.
The giant leap forward is that one should only get contacted by their captain - and not get spammed by the head office. If may be "zero cost" to send out hundreds of thousands of emails, but it's also zero benefit if the emails. It's more effective to send the captains, who can send it on to their teams.
Daily Kos has launched a wiki called the dKosopedia where Kos community member can collaborate to build a free online political resource for progressives.
(Note: The Power of Many interview of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is coming up soon.)
Speaking of manifestoes (manifestoi?), here's the crux of a brief manifesto about how participating in Usenet had affected my writing style which I posted to alt.usenet.manifestoes back in 1995:
After launching myself that first time off the edge of the branch into usenet, writing in an immediate way, closer to real speech in all its burlesque baroque improv potential, it has now become painful for me to craft these laborious tech-writing sentences I sell, all of which might as well say "press F7" ... even thinking of it drags the sentence down.
Nancy White of Full Circle Associates has started an Online Interaction & Community Blog.
(via Seb at Many-to-Many)
"ePodunk provides in-depth information about more than 25,000 communities around the country, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, Pottstown to Podunk. Our listings also include geocoded information about thousands of parks, museums, historic sites, colleges, schools and other places across America."
I suppose to bootstrap an open network around this book, this site / blog should both have the names from the sidebar in a FOAF file and in XFN link tags in the head, right?
Obviously, that can wait till I'm done (re-)writing....
Doc Searls of Cluetrain (and Linux Journal) fame, reports on the growth in importance of the living part of the web:
Publishing 2.0
Chad Dickerson at Infoworld says
Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal.
During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks.
Feels like a tipping point to me.Me too. It isn't just RSS that's getting huge. It's that more people are getting their Web services without the complicating container we call a browser. What we're stating to see is another Web, alongside the static one we browse like the aisles in a store, or the stacks in a library, looking for finished goods to read or buy. This other Web isn't served up the same way as the one we've been browsing for the last eight years. We see it in a news aggregator, or a blog, or a message on a phone, or a search through an engine that only looks for fresh goods. Yes, you can see it in a browser too, but it's different in kind from the static stuff. Most importantly, it's live.
(Emphasis added.)
Doc likes the Technorati name for this phenomenon ("the world live web" and credits hearing it from the first time from his son):
I first heard the best name for this other Web a year ago, from my son Allen, who called it the World Live Web. I was talking to Phil Windley about it yesterday. Here's what Phil wrote:
Why is RSS important? Because it says "here's what's changed on the Web." When I started building Web sites in 1993, it was very clear then that people visit sites that get updated frequently. That's still true. Now, however, we have a new tool, RSS, that tells us what's changed. I no longer have to limit my reading to sites I know get updated frequently. Instead, I get pinged whenever sites I'm interested in change. That's a fundamental shift in what the Web is. In fact, its something brand new.It's still framed in publishing terms. We still "author," "write" and "post" things called "journals" and "pages." But there's a big difference, and that's currency. The Wide Web is archival. the Live Web is current. That the Live Web also archival doesn't make it any less current, either.
(He then goes on to say that he thinks the RSS brand has meaning at that the Atom one doesn't really suggest anything and that Dave Winer's proposal to merge them is magnanimous, given that RSS has reached this tipping point. I tend to agree with those who consider the concepts already merged. People will think of Atom as a type of RSS, or just lump the ideas together because they are so similar, although Atom also incorporates an API analogous to the Metaweblog API also pioneered by UserLand.)
Yet another article that has to define "blog": Reuters says Microsoft's Gates touts blogging as business tool at Microsoft's annual CEO Summit:
The growth in the number of blogs, and those who read them, however, is attracting greater attention from businesses as a means to communicate more directly with their employees, partners and customers. That's due in part to the way that blogging has driven the adoption of yet another technology, called Real Simple Syndication (RSS), which allows blog readers to track freshly posted information without having to browse through a long list of home pages. Instead, many subscribe to RSS feeds on blogs so that they can read them on desktops as they come in. Gates described to his audience, which included Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and other top business executives, how blogs worked and suggested that they could be used as a tool for businesses to communicate with customers. ...
Microsoft, which has already amassed more than 700 employee bloggers talking up its products and software in development, is embracing blogs and RSS technology because they are yet another potential threat and opportunity, said Joe Wilcox, analyst at Jupiter Research. Since blogging, and many of the tools needed to post blogs, can work independently of Windows, they could be used to draw away from Windows-based software, similar to the threat posed by Netscape in the early days of the Internet, analysts said. "If I'm Microsoft and my fundamental goal is to sell more copies of Windows, then I might want to get involved in that," said Wilcox, who also has his own blog called "Microsoft Monitor". ...
Instead of RSS, however, Google is also promoting a rival syndication standard called Atom. Microsoft last year targeted Web search as key strategic area and has challenged Google's lead in the market. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly working on a search function for information stored in personal computers.
JD Lasica has published a report on how the RIAA has gotten the FCC to consider adding an "audio broadcast flag" on digital radio, to limit or prevent listeners from copying or distributing copies of radio broadcasts. (Lasica also summarizes himself, with a few additional links, on his own blog.) "Cheryl Leanza, deputy director of Media Access Project, a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C., says the recording industry is afraid of the Napsterization of digital radio."
David Weinberger is blogging from the Personal Democracy Forum in New York...
along with about 150 other people for a day of non-partisan discussion of how politics may be changing, particularly because of the new global connectedness. The conference organizer is Andrew Rasiej, who I almost met when he was with the Dean campaign.
I'm in the Bloggers' Corner, the front left of the auditorium where the power strip is. To my right is Jeff Jarvis. To my left is David Jacobs. Behind me, Anil Dash. In front of me, David Isenberg.
Bloggers' Corner? ... Notable bits so far:
How to Save the World author (and knowledge-management expert) David Pollard reveals that a "major US book publisher" has approached him about writing a book with the "rather unwieldy working title of The New Entrepreneurship: Stepping Stones to Joyful Success: Making a Living with People You Love on Your Own Terms.
I'd read it!
The blog world has been basking lately in the glow of verteran journalist Bill Moyers' endorsement (in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air). Here's what he said (lifted from Techjournalism):
I think the Internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Payne and others, you could have your own press. ... After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others' politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in America in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophony, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history.
Should have blogged this when it first appeared. David Neiwert, the freelance journalist and author behind the extraordinary Orcinus weblog published a manifesto for a media revolt earlier this month.
He first explains why he thinks such a call to action is needed:
As the conglomeration and consolidation of the mass media has proceeded apace through the past two decades unchecked, that independence has largely vanished or become effectively strangled, and with it a responsible treatment of the public interest by the nation's press. The traditional media filters have instead become bottlenecks, preventing information that is in fact vital for the public well-being from ever reaching them -- oftentimes for reasons that are trivial and puerile, not to mention geared toward the manipulation of the media in the service of corporate powers and their agenda.
The blogosphere is a direct result of those bottlenecks. Information is now flowing around them through the networks of dissemination that blogs have become.
Blogs represent, in fact, the real democratization of journalism, which traditionally has always been about the work of keeping the public duly and properly informed. Stories and vital facts now no longer need go through the New York Times and NBC News in order to gain wide distribution. Blogs can effectively reach as many people as several large city dailies combined. And the network of their combined efforts represents a massive shift of data around the traditional media filters.
Blogs can also be terrific means for organizing, particularly for putting together a concerted response to political and media atrocities. One need only survey the ability of blogs to affect real-world politics -- their role in bringing about the fall of Trent Lott was just a start -- to understand that their power can readily extend to reshaping the media, since they represent in themselves a kind of citizens' solution to needed reforms in the media.
To bring that about, two things are needed: 1) A recognition that this power exists, and 2) Organizing in a thoughtful and effective fashion to wield it.
Then he puts his keyboard where his mouth is and sketches out a ten-point program. I will summarize here but the entire entry at Orcinus should be required reading for anyone interested in blogs, disintermediation of news and information, and participatory journalism (note that Neiwert is a former Republican and an unabashed anti-Bush partisan):
- The well-being of American democracy ultimately depends on a well-informed electorate. As such, the role of the media in keeping the public properly informed is not merely vital, it is sacred.
- Over the past 20 years, American media have been in a state of serious decline insofar is it lives up to the responsibilities of this role.
- The nature of these declines produced a string of travesties in the past decade and more
- This degradation of the media, and its concomitant failure to keep Americans adequately informed, culminated in the attacks on American soil by Al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.... The media, to no one's great surprise, have never even begun to confront their own culpability in this disaster.
- When George W. Bush sidetracked the resulting "war on terror" into an invasion of Iraq -- a nation that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks -- by waving evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the public's face and suggesting that any dissent was akin to treason, the media utterly failed in its responsibility to examine the claims seriously and to treat them skeptically.
- Coverage of the 2004 election has already begun to resemble the travesty of 2000, focusing on trivial (and mostly concocted) personality traits.
- Americans have had enough. Like Howard Beale, they're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Unlike Beale, however, their revolt against the media Powers That Be will be neither manic nor futile. It will be organized, rational, factually sound, unintimidated and, in the end, constructive rather than destructive.
- This revolt will be organized strategically around two realities: 1) Previous tactics in the efforts to reform the nation's media have largely failed or faltered.... 2) Though this is a revolution against an evolved status quo, the spirit it represents beckons to a return to civic-minded journalism that enshrines the diversity of voices in American media; it is, in fact, more traditionalist in orientation than radical.
- The Internet -- and in particular, blogs -- will be the cornerstone of the strategy this media revolution will follow, though of course all means are important participants. Indeed, the reforms are intended to reach every facet of American mass media: newspapers large and small, television, film, radio, books, and of course the Internet.... Blogs are, above all, uniquely democratic in nature. Anyone can blog.... Blogs are also uniquely self-correcting in a way that eludes most other media; if false information is disseminated, it doesn't take long before it's eviscerated by other bloggers.
- There should be no naïvete about the nature of what we are up against. This is a revolt against a national discourse that has degraded into a puerile swamp of innuendo, smear, and dishonest reportage.... When they natter about "character" or "likeability," we should talk plainly about policy and what happens in the real world.... It's fair (if a concession to diversionary tactics) to fight back with facts, but never fair to resort to twisting or omitting: that's what they do. Cutting corners just to score political points is a Pyrrhic victory. If this is a revolt about integrity, then it will fail if it does not embody integrity itself....
Undertaking this task means hard work. But it has become clear to us as citizens, in an age when fear and terror rule our body politic, that what is at stake here is the soul of democracy itself. To save it, no labor should seem too great.
(via JD Lasica)
In JD's New Media Musings: The cool kid of micropublishing, JD Lasica includes a long quotation from PR Week's interview with Gawker Media's Nick Denton. Here's the choice bit that JD especially highlights:
The only time, in traditional media, when you get to express yourself is when you're 60 and no longer have any opinions that speak to the person you once were. Blogs allow those types of writers to circumvent the usual journalistic training program. It allows them to have the voice they have when they're young, without having it knocked out of them.
Seth's Blog: Five years from now...:
Assume that:
Hard drive space is free
Wifi like connections are everywhere
Connections speeds are 10 to 100 times faster
Everyone has a digital camera
Everyone carries a device that is sort of like a laptop, but cheap and tiny
The number of new products introduced every day is five times greater than now
Wal-Mart's sales are three times as big
Any manufactured product that's more than five years old in design sells at commodity pricing
The retirement age will be five years higher than it is now
Your current profession will either be gone or totally different
What then?
(via Buzzmachine)
Nice new analogy by Britt Blaser: Strawberry Roots Activism.
Your front lawn is dependent on you for seed, feed, water and weeding, each seed pushing out just a few blades for us to admire. Rhyzomes, like strawberries and crabgrass, are more creative. Once started, they shoot out opportunistic runners which put down roots in hospitable circumstances. If the new plant prospers, it puts out multiple runners, and so on. Strawberry roots activism may be the future of politics.
... Any campaign that wants to attract rabid support must give each potential supporter the power to connect substantively with the campaign and to accept all supporters' opinions on substantive issues. ...
There were several policy professionals working for the Dean campaign. They taught me that policy professionals hate the idea of the voters expressing their explicit policy preferences in a way that politicians must acknowledge and, perhaps, respond to. ...
(link via Weblogsky)
This chat from the GeorgeWBush.com website gives some insight into Republican grassroots organizing efforts.
At lunch yesterday, George Kelly asked me if I was going to write about Bush's social network in my politics chapter. That is to say, his father's rolodex.
Art McGee of Virtual Identity sent around this announcement for The Planetwork Interactive, June 5-6 (and 7), 2004, San Francisco, CA, USA:
Join Ben Cohen from True Majority and other leaders of online activism, MoveOn, Act For Change and the Dean Campaign, for two days of intensive InterActivity!
This largely self-organizing interactive forum for innovators from information technology, and civil society leaders explore how social networks, the internet and information technology can help create a socially just and ecologically sane world.
The majority of the event will be drawn from the self-organizing process. We are holding half of the time and space open for an InterActive process designed to
promote communication, dialog and networking.In addition, a dozen topic proposals will be selected from among those posted to the InterActive site by participants before the conference for scheduled half hour presentations on the program. Topics are expected to span a wide variety
of Planetwork themes:Social Networks and Civil Society
The New ID Commons Technical ProtocolEnvironmental: Proactive Responses to
Global Warming & Mass ExtinctionDigital Democracy: Civil Rights & Civil Liberties
from the DMCA to Touch Screen VotingAlternative Economics: Online & Offline Strategies
Complementary Currencies, Electronic barter & beyondIndependent Media from Blogs and RSS to DV and TiVo,
new technologies for independent networked newsThe Real-World Game: Bucky's Spaceship Earth meets Sim Earth
a multi-player online game using real data to model future
scenarios
Major Themes:Social Networking for Social Good
The Identity Commons framework is emerging as a first implementation of a digital identity protocol which promises to make possible new levels of self-organization and cooperation between social networking sites and throughout civil society. Both technical and social issues surrounding the implementation of this new protocol will be considered in parallel and inform each other at this critical moment.
Internet Activism
The Internet has already changed the landscape of political power as the Dean campaign, Move On, True Majority and others have demonstrated their ability to raise money and mobilize political voices online. The event will bring together leaders of Internet Activism in this election year, Ben Cohen from True Majority, MoveOn, the Dean Campaign, Act For Change, Get Active Software. Social networks may represent the next frontier of Internet Activism.
Augmented Social Network:
Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet
(via the Deanspace - now Civicspace announcement mailing list)
In The Syndication Sky is Falling! Mark Nottingham disputes the idea that the polling-for-updates architecture at the heart of RSS and Atom and other syndication / pub-sub / webfeed formats (the living web's answer to "push") inherently won't scale:
Wow, I guess I should remind the folks at Google, Yahoo, CNN and my old colleagues at Akamai that what they're doing is fundamentally flawed; the Web doesn't scale, sorry.
I guess I'll also have to tell the people at the Web caching workshops that what they do is futile, and those folks doing Web metrics are wasting their time. What a shame.
... I do mean to pick on the general notion that the Web can't scale enough for syndication's purposes; the Web provably does scale, and like gangbusters.
Robert Scoble has seen the future, and it left him "uncomfortable":
First, there's tons of reports on the blogosphere about NextFest (read them here on Feedster.com).
What was wrong?
1) Not much practical value. More on that in a second.
2) Microsoft and Apple weren't there. Big mistake. The crowds were huge and they were VERY tech savvy. Just the kinds of crowds that Microsoft should be marketing the Tablet PC, the Windows Media Center, Xbox Live, SmartPhones, OneNote, and InfoPath to. I met tons of developers, including many .NET and Linux guys . [...] The fact that Microsoft wasn't at an event like this was embarrassing.
3) It was too crowded. ...
Dan Gillmor has the latest on Zack Rosen's doings:
With the help of a local venture capitalist, Rosen and several colleagues are bringing the "DeanSpace" online collaboration software they created for the former presidential candidate to a wider civic audience.
Called CivicSpace Labs (www.civicspacelabs.org), their venture is building a software platform for activists. They envision a powerful and easy to use "grass-roots organizing tool kit" that gives people ways to organize campaigns and then connect with like-minded activists.
While CivicSpace is intended to support progressive and politically left-leaning organizations at the outset, the code will be openly available as time goes on.
Anne Collingwood wrote to Phil Wolff, asking how to apply the power of the Internet to the presidential campaign: "Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized?" "Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others?" and a handful of similar exciting questions. Phil didn't answer, but there's one comment that's a solid start; and the questions themselves provide fodder for thinking about "what is the living web, and how can we use it?"
From Rev Carr on the Deadwood Society mailing list:
Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 13:58:18 -1000
Call for Chapters-
Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music CultureEdited by Michael D. Ayers, New School for Social Research, New York City
Call for Chapters
There is no doubt that the Internet has the ability to shape and transform the art fields. The popular culture art forms- Film, Television and Music have found their specific homes in cyberspace, but out of the big three, music has found the most controversial space to say the least.
In the post MP3 scare[*], this volume seeks to examine the role of cyberspace in the cultural production, creation and transformation in the way which society consumes and uses music in its various forms.
This volume seeks to examine music and cyberspace, utilizing theoretical perspectives from cultural studies, sociology, cyberculture studies, feminist perspectives and media studies
Suggested submission topics include, but not limited to:
- How cyberspace challenges/confirms traditional production of music cultures
- Online music (sub)cultures vs. Real Life (sub)music cultures
- Musical genre manifestations online
- Theoretical perspectives on the digitalization of music
- Theoretical perspectives of consuming music through cyberspace
- Case/Comparative studies of fan groups and fan identity in cyberspace
- Quantitative studies on downloaders
- Artist/Audience Interactions online
- The Political Economy of Digital Music
- Politics of Digital Music
Chapters should be submitted in Microsoft Word format, 12 point font, double spaced. Essays should be in the range of 7500 - 10,000 words with references in ASA style.
Send submissions and inquires to michael.ayers [at] manhattan.edu
[*] It could be argued that we are now entering in a "phase two" MP3 scare with the recent RIAA threats on suing individual file sharers.
While tracking down some Meetup data, I found this Bentley College survey from January that analyzes Wesley Clark's supporters and their use of Meetup. Beyond the Clark demographics, it says, "Clark attendees were more likely than Dean attendees to find out about the December Meetup through Internet sources. Just over 20% of both groups mentioned an invitation from someone they knew. In October, Dean attendees also reported more personal invitations to their first Meetup." Any other research yet on who uses Meetup politically and how?
File under the snake eating its own tale:
unmediated: The blog tool you really want
And yes, I put Pete's name in the headline on purpose. The design of this site needs bylines because people are crediting me for stuff that Pete is posting.
While I wrestle with deadlines and the throes of finishing a book, Pete has been doing an amazing job of keeping this blog hopping. He deserves credit for his work. More than just the developmental editor of the book, he is the co-originator and one of the main co-conspirators in the assemblage of the entire project.
OK, back to Chapter 6 copyedit review....
Dave Pollard, at How To Save The World, posted a list of functions he wants his blog to have, such as "robust commenting" and "access to rest of personal 'filing cabinet'". He then scored its success at each:
This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost.
My benchmark for this scorecard is my father. If I could explain to him how to use a blog feature over the phone, it gets a 'green' score. If my brother, who lives a few blocks away from him and is an engineer, could set it up for him so he could use it, it gets a 'yellow' score. If it's not available at all, or unfathomable to novice users even with help, it gets a 'red' score.
Pollard explains each of the 20 features he's after and finds that only one rates 'green'. His sidebar also has lists of what blog readers and blog writers really want to see more of. (What a week over there; Pollard's blog is that wonderful kind of place where a critique of "knowledge management" can live side-by-side with kids jumping on trampolines and an Atkins diet for dogs.)
Clay Shirky has again put good phrases to a phenomenon (Moblogging from the front and the new Reformation): we are learning to live in a "fully disclosed culture."
I remember hearing about the security efforts being put into place around delivery of Ken Starr's Whitewater (Lewinsky) report as it was delivered, and thought "Why are they bothering? It will be in the web in 48 hours..." I was wrong, of course — it was on the web the next day. Now I hear that military officials are debating whether to release other photos with evidence of American torture of Iraqis, and I wonder again why they are bothering. If the images exist, they will be released. It's a fantasy to assume that they can re-assert control of the spread of images by fiat. ...
At a guess, filtered versus unfiltered information, in many settings and particularly around control of audio and visuals as opposed to words, is going to precipitate the same sort of conflict [as the Protestant Reformation]. (The music industry is a canary in that particular coal mine.)
... [I]t's a safe bet that we are entering a world of "That will kill this." We just don't know what parts of society "this" refers to yet.
A group blog named unmediated "tracks the tools, processes, and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution." (They used the verb "reblogged by", which makes me start to wonder about terms for this kind of site, which PoM is also: "manually operated aggregator"?)
Researching why she's getting so many Friendster invites, danah boyd discovered that teenagers are mobbing the system by claiming to be much older, often seniors; it looks as though 69 is the most popular age. "I'm stunned that Friendster was so vigilant in going after Fakesters because it was ruining search and they weren't viable customers, but they ignore the Fakesters that could open them up to hefty legal suits. ..." Friendster made such a big deal about phony identities that it chased off its core audience, but it has left these kids alone: "It seems as though [Friendster's] efforts to configure the users didn't work so well."
Look who's the first result on Google if you search for "the power of many" or even just power many.
In addition to the formal peer review from Lucy Hodder (and Liz Lawley for some of the earlier chapters) I've asked a number of people in the book's "community" (such as it is) to review chapters informally and just send me notes instead of detailed interpolations.
Wrestling with deadlines (Chapter 7 is due in as a second revision today), I haven't managed the informal peer review process well. Pete have volunteered to step in, but I still must remember to send Pete names, email addresses, and chapter requests.
I also need to make bylines in this blog because people are crediting Pete's amazing blogging latel y to me, which isn't fair to Pete.
Plus, I need sort out my feeds in teh sidebars, add recent comments and recent trackback pings, technorati hoo-hah, and so on. (Once the next few chapters are in.)
Also, desperately need a wiki.
A Sybexian just joined MoveOn's list and received their welcome message, which I post here for archive and quote purposes:
Dear friend,
We just wanted to take a moment to welcome you to the MoveOn network and tell you a little bit about MoveOn.org.
Linklogging about Zack Rosen: he has started up Progressive Pipes (ppipes) to aggregate e-mail news from liberal causes, campaigns, and candidates. (Earlier PoM entry about Rosen's plan to build groupware and other development for nonprofits is here.) As Outlandish Josh put it, "Juggling 33 progressive mailinglist subscriptions so you don't have to."
As many have noted, JD Lasica has posted chapters of his forthcoming book to a wiki. I didn't get around to blogging this for a couple of days, however, until Mary Hodder wrote the blog entry I wish I had written: "How very au currant. Participatory book editing. Napsterization approves. Prrrrrrrr."
But on the substances of the thing... First, the process. Lasica is using a belt-and-suspenders approach that doesn't strike me as very au courant, inviting comments through e-mail, blog, and wiki. He writes:
Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television will detail the rise of the personal media revolution and the escalating conflict between entertainment companies and individuals using the power of digital technology.
I'm nearly done writing it, so we're at the stage where it's time to bring in "the former audience," as Dan Gillmor puts it, and invite the blogosphere to participate in the book's editing (before it makes its way to its final editor).
Ross Mayfield at Socialtext was kind enough to set me up with a wiki last week. Don't be scared -- wikis are very cool new collaborative workspaces that let people edit and contribute to a work in progress.
Check it out at the Darknet wiki. Much of the book has to do with participatory media, so I hope many of you will join me in this experiment in collaborative editing.
For those who prefer just to leave comments, I'll also be posting the chapters to my new Darknet blog.
Certainly, being open to multiple modes of work and communication is part of eating one's own "living web" cooking. But I have to wonder whether manual effort will be needed to reconcile these modes. I hope for his sake that Lasica has automation for integrated the various types of feedback; combining queries and edits from multiple document versions—let alone multiple document types—is among the most inefficient things I do as an editor. After just a week, there are no comments on the blog and few wiki changes; most of the wiki edits consist of the addition of hyperlinks, which won't help Lasica's bound book at all. One new sentence of great substance helps Lasica's narrative a lot, but because most wiki edits are identified only by user number, that could even be Lasica doing a little rewriting. (Professionally, I do appreciate the visitor who edited "where" to "in which".)
I also find it interesting that both Gillmor and Lasica are inviting such participation when their work is so polished. They say they are releasing "draft" chapters but both are really revealing close-to-final manuscripts—at the very least, these are third or fourth rewrites. The next great step in participatory authoring (as opposed to editing) will be when someone is willing to share a version of their work that really is a first or second draft.
And finally, there's the content of Lasica's book itself: Excellent. The first three chapters have incredibly compelling anecdotes (such as a long telling of how three kids completely remade Raiders of the Lost Ark) and many insightful quotes on both the cluelessness and purposeful hypocrisy of media companies.
I just discovered a blog called Cutting Through. The guys who run it say about themselves:
We run a marketing & technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK. A lot of our work is now centring on using social software technology to reduce information problems in business. So this blog is designed to share our knowledge and first hand experience.
...but the tagline says more about the blog content: "A live case study to show how to cut through the information and technology clutter." They started out with entries on the how-to of blog tech and of website promotion, but they have moved on chiefly to metablogging, social software, and wikis for businesses, quoting A-listers such as Blood, Scoble, and Searls.
And it was only from this blog that I learned that David Weinberger has a version of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined blog for kids!
This great line by David Weinberger (commenting on an idea for a self-forming, mesh-based Wi-Fi network) can apply to so many realms of human experience that it reaches the level of Truth:
The old paradigm of top-down network provisioning is so fragile that just one garage-based genius - surrounded by an open source community - could implode it. Exciting.
Jon Lebkowsky points to a Doc Searls presentation on open source and "do-it-yourself IT." It has some real gems, among them bits on the meaning of "public" and "private":
The deeper battle is between metaphors. Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and "content." Techies see the Net as a place — a commons — where people can make culture and do business.
(Lebkowsky's coauthor, Mitch Ratcliffe, blogs "The book, Extreme Democracy, is almost done and is, we hope, really Something Useful.")
Mary Hodder has blogged her notes from the Cal panels on "living with the genie" (Thurs. eve with Kurzweil and Rheingold), virtual communities (Fri. morning with Newmark, Mernit, Kos, and Pincus), big/little journalism, and so forth throughout the "China's Digital Future" conference. Notable bits on copyright/copyleft, Net-technology, Chinese politics, and the primacy of culture over governing documents.
Stevin Berlin Johnson suggests that criticizing his book for its personal approach isn't, let's say, as fruitful as some other avenues of criticism he considers more legitimate.
Second of today's Cal panels: Disrupting the News Industry Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism. Panelists:
I attended two panel discussions this morning at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. This is the first-ever meeting of the fellows of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism; today and tomorrow they will continue as a conference on China's digital future.
First, this morning, Revisiting Virtual Communities: The Internet's Impact on Society and Politics. Panelists:
![[Caruso and Kurzweil]](http://x-pollen.com/many/seen/telekurzweil.gif)
I'm blogging this from Living With The Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, an exciting star-studded, deep-thinky conversation introduced by Michael Pollan, moderated by Christina Desser, co-editor of the Living with the Genie title that inspired the panel (idea for promoting this book in the fall or next spring?), and incorporating Denise Caruso, Mark Schapiro, and Ray Kurzweil (via 2D telepresence).
Met Justin Hall after reading his journalings since the mid '90s.
Shacker is webcasting.
Spoke briefly with J.D. Lasica (been working on his Dark Net book) and Scott Rosenberg (working on his philosophy of programming/software book?), and am keeping an eye out for Mary Hodder.
Who's for dinner afterward?
Howard Rheingold, admits to an enlightenment-era bias
Richard Schapiro is pointing out that the laws governing the technology of shipping were established in the 18th century.
I know this is random.
I am posting pictures via TypePad. They should soon show up at Mr. Spontaneous.
Richard Rhodes couldn't make it for personal reasons.
Lawrence Lessig is well known for making the argument that looser copyright laws allow for a huge amount of derived creativity, and that this, in turn, earns more money and fame for the original works. He has once again put his money where his mouth is by making his latest book available for free. He's hardly the first (or even most successful) author to give his book away for free electronically, but today's New York Times: Practicing the Liberty He Preaches reports (links added):
Lawrence Lessig wants to make intellectual property more widely available. So he has decided to offer some of his own at no charge.
His new book, "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity," is available online, free. But a bound version from Penguin Press costs $24.95 (list).
Since the book's publication on March 25, 21 editions of the free digital version have been created. Among them are two volunteer efforts: a collective project in streaming audio (akma.disseminary.org/archives/001253.html) and another in HTML (www.easylum.net/book/view/12), with handy links that explain details in the text like who Ub Iwerks was (a master animation artist for Walt Disney). ...
Mr. Lessig said he was gratified that remixes of his book had popped up (free-culture.org/remixes), although it took some getting used to. "I confess when it first happened, I had to take a deep breath and reconvince myself of the principles here," he said.
The book is available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded in PDF format from the book's site, FreeCulture.org, or from LegalTorrents.com. (The NYT article says it can also be downloaded from Amazon.com, but I can't see how.) (Hat tip to Rachel Boyce.)
Sébastien Paquet has a wiki-enabled page to list sites and blogs and such doing research on social software. He also has "a wiki page to help find a promising strategy for enabling a self-organizing directory of research weblogs."
Ross Mayfield put up an "open post" based on an oversimplification: a two-by-two categorization of social software. (The JPEG matrix is here, the post is here ... and of course, this being Mayfield, the wiki that springs from the starter post is here.) Social software tools, sez the chart, can be implicit or explicit (Technorati vs. Friendster), and designer determined vs. user controlled (portals vs. blogs).
Mayfield reports that "Lee LeFever won the perfect pitch competition by highlighting the unique property of weblogs to capture context." The purpose was to explain the value of enterprise blogging, and LeFever's excellent three grafs are posted in their entirety.
Liz Lawley points to notes by Heather James about online etiquette in wikis. (Academic links and provence given by Lawley are abbreviated here.) James writes, "Wikis don't offer technical solutions to social problems; rather, wiki technology encourages or even forces the contributers to define and manage their rules of etiquette and behaviour. Through this process of consensus building, a culture is created that allows for a more complex set of interactions which is neccessary for people to manage and construct mutual understanding."
The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism invite all to a series of panel discussions April 29-30 at UC Berkeley on how technology and the Internet are changing American society and the human experience:
Living With The Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery
Thursday, April 29, 7 pm (Pimentel Hall)
Howard Rheingold, Denise Caruso, Ray Kurzweil (by remote), Richard Rhodes, Mark Schapiro, and Christina Desser
Revisiting Virtual Communities: The Internets Impact on Society and Politics
Friday, April 30, 9 am (North Gate Library, corner of Hearst & Euclid)
Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Markos Moulitsas Zniga, and Mark Pincus
Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism
Friday, April 30, 10:30 am (North Gate Library)
Dan Gillmor, Vin Crosbie, Neil Chase, Ken Sands, and Bob Magnuson
The panels are free and open to the public and no RSVP is necessary. For details, go to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism site.
These panels are followed Friday afternoon by a two-day conference on the Internet's impact on China and Asia. That conference also is free and open to the public.
Capitol Advantage provides services and tools to coordinate mass lobbying:
Building action-oriented communities is no small task. Capitol Advantage has helped organizations educate and inspire their supporters since 1986.
Capitol Advantage provides the tools and technology to engage and enlist your supporters in the campaigns that are important to your organization.
No other company has delivered more messages to Congress. When your organization needs to step up and influence legislation or public opinion, we're the only ally you'll ever need.
They promote an "email relationship manager" called Capwiz™ ERM for communicating to large numbers of people. Their site has, among others, sections for "Web-based grassroots solutions," "election guides," "our content on your site," and "personal engagement tools;" that last category points to another C.A. site:
On Congress.org, visitors can take advantage of the full suite of tools, services and content that Capitol Advantage has spent nearly two decades developing and mastering. Use our ZIP code search engine to sort through pages of biographical information on national and local elected officials or candidates for office. Similar functionality is available for locating local media, bills and legislation, rules and regulations open for public comment, and much more.
Molly Holzschlag has written about web design, markup, and interactive media for many years. Now she writes (Integrated Web Design: Social Networking - The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age) about how the living web (without using that term) is connecting people in real ways:
The interaction between community, computers, and society is now being referred to as "social networking," and it's making a lot of heads turn. But what is social networking, really, and what does it mean to web technologists? In this compelling article by Molly Holzschlag, you'll learn what social networking is, which languages are emerging to support it, and what it might mean for the next generation of web design and development.
She describes blogs and YASNSs, puts she also more weight on geographical mapping than most commentators on these topics.
In an essay that starts out about Gmail, Tim O'Reilly pulls together the disparate phrases that are groping at where computing is headed: small pieces loosely joined, the world of ends, IOS, the Internet as OS, software above the level of a single device, and even "one ring to rule them all."
The Gmail question, to me, is being framed wrongly. "Gmail is a huge privacy threat" misses the point that Gmail is not so very different from any other digital service. To me, berating Google—and only, or even primarily, Google—for its terms of service, data mining, and potential for abuse makes it that much easier for MSN, Yahoo, and hundreds of other firms to hide in the bushes doing the same things. Those who strongly object to Gmail are apparently putting zero value on the fact that Google has been the least offensive, most responsible major online provider; O'Reilly says, and I agree, that there is some value in this. I don't value it enough to ever sign up for Gmail myself, but someone who's currently in the clutches of Hotmail should think objectively about whether Gmail's TOS are really worse.
But the more important part of O'Reilly's article is saying that the Internet will become the OS; that Internet companies will (even if you choose to believe they don't already) hold terrifying powers; and most importantly, that where we thought this "network is the computer" thing would lead toward the world of ends, toward distribution, toward decentralization, the trend is actually toward centralization. There will be multiple companies competing in this new space, yes—and multiple trial-and-error over which apps or services will work best in the new paradigm—but, as Rich Skrenta showed, each company, app, and service can accumulate much more power over people as they accumulate the CPU cycles. O'Reilly's words: "once storage and bandwidth become cheap enough, a more tightly coupled, centralized architecture is a real alternative, even on the internet."
I've been working so many angles trying to get onto the floor of the Democratic Convention when I'm forgetting that my book comes out September 1 and we should do a big thing at the Republican Convention in New York later that month!
I should go back to Princeton and look up the rich folks I used to know. Some of them probably are connected to the Republicans now. none of my ragtag lefty friends are going to be any help there. I don't think John Perry Barlow is even still a Republican.
I'd love to have my father audioblogging the Republican covention into my $15 Best Buy microphone (Labtec?) for Edgewise, for that matter.
First sentence of t his Howard Rheingold article (from October 2003) says it all: "It has taken 10 years of talk about new media for a critical mass to understand that every computer desktop, and now every pocket, is a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, and organizing tool - and to learn how to use that infrastructure to affect change." Convergence is small-er-ing journalism, reviving the town square, and producing political miniparties.
And yet, as Rheingold wrote even earlier, the critical mass and new media aren't cure-alls. "There is no market for solving social problems", and "Throwing technology at problems can be helpful, but the fundamental problems are political and economic and rooted in human nature. ... A tool is not the task".
Another Many-to-Many post by Ross Mayfield: He notes Jason Kottke's post titled "I think we should probably stop calling [RSS/Atom] syndication". Feeding, threading, and aggregation are all attractive features of RSS, but they're not necessarily syndicating. However, says Mayfield, "I'm not brave enough to venture a new term for Syndication, but unless one is found, there is a lot of explaining to do."
Ross Mayfield has posted to a wiki the chapter he's contributing to O'Reilly's Extreme Democracy. (Haven't had a chance to read the chapter or follow the links yet, but Mayfield's pages look worth exploring in depth.) As he puts it in a post at Many-to-Many, "Along the way, collected some links that may be of interest about wikified books, ranging from Wikipedia's Wikibooks Portal to the distributed proofreading project."
Mary Hodder provides another reminder that it's the people, and their behaviors, that matter, not the tools they use. She's talking about blogs and journalism, but one of her analogies is:
BTW, in case you're wondering, this is a blog. Yes, folks, Napsterization. Just a blog. In case you were reading this and didn't know. But frankly it could just as well be done with some other tool. The point is, now our tools (and practices) are about interchangeable parts and air-compressor nail-guns instead of handmade hammers and nails.
Which made me wonder whether, in most human activity, tool change 'just happens'; only in a minority of cases does anyone raise a fuss at the time. Making an exception for occasions when a tool replaces a human (steam engines for laborers), it seems that most progress in tool choice is only commented on well after the fact.
I've always loved woodworking, though until my parents moved into a new house I hadn't actually done much of it. But I've built things since then. And a year or two ago, I started watching some "reality" home-improvement shows, such as Trading Spaces. The team rolls up with their macho trailer, sets up "Carpentry World" in the driveway, hauling out lumber and sawhorses and table saws and safety goggles. There are tools everywhere, and toolbelts; but there are no hammers on the show. The pros don't even think about this. Yes, every couple of weeks we get a laugh at the expense of some homeowner who has never seen a pneumatic tool before. But the people who really do the work don't miss hammers. They don't keep them around for special occasions or for "small" jobs. The important thing is to get the nail driven as accurately as possible with as little effort as needed—hence the nail gun.
The important thing is to get the information disseminated quickly—hence the web page and the e-mail. The important thing is disintermediating the conversation— hence the blog, the wiki, the IRC or texting channel.
A couple of linked posts that have been delayed while I was ill...
Berkeley's danah boyd explains how personal feelings of vulnerability should be given priority when analyzing systems that lend themselves to data collection, privacy invasions, and security failures. Where YASNSs, browser-trackers, search-trackers, ISPs, and the like all meet creates "ickiness"; we're not comfortable with Google + A9 + Dodgeball + Friendster building the dossier on us any more than we were the gov't doing so, but the commercial version is more extensive, more invasive, and yet harder to avoid because it is so insidious, has so many apparently "good" uses. People designing systems and tools must go beyond password protection: boyd says we must "Encourage them to minimize vulnerability in their design, not simply protect privacy."
Wow. I'm started to get really excited about this book. I'd better finish it! So many people still to talk to, no pun intended.
This cover impressed my father, who spent most of his career in the New York printing game and has seen several waves of graphic design styles come and go.
This is just a comp, by the way, with stock art. So it's not final, but it's close and I think the fonts are set.
Lately, my more popular (Googlejuicewise) weblogs have been under assault from spammish inane comments from Stepford social communities.
I guess Bayesian cuts both ways.
Note to self: Make upcoming.org feed for Power of Many -esque events (such as the Democratic National Convention, the GiftHub conference mentioned in my previous entry, Waterside, and so on.
Gift Hub: Conference Invitation/Agenda
(Linklogging till deadlines are met...)
Clay Shirky is interviewed in the Gothamist, and he has (as usual) the definitive insight into what this whole nanopublishing "thing" is about:
[Q] Blogs: beloved little observations grouped sequentially. I'm almost afraid to ask the question but what's your brief take on where all this blogging is headed?
[A] It's headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what's important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
Already blogs are used for groups of teenagers to bitch about their lives, as on many LiveJournal sites; to track gossip, politics, and tech trends, as with Gawker, Wonkette, and Gizmodo; as an adjunct to political campaigns; and as a kind of giant distributed OpEd page. Too much for one little word.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
The interviewer assumes that Shirky has "seen the future", which seems a safe bet. In response, Shirky does mention the FCC and the Web, but notice that mobile phones come up twice. Shirky is, as usual, brilliant on almost everything; his intuition on fashion is impeccable, even if his execution of it isn't. And because it's New York, the comments even include a second opinion on Shirky.
Is the term "orkward" going to catch on? No sign of it doing so yet... (That's not fair to the link blog entry, which is really very interesting and in which the coinage is a tiny aside.)
David Weinberger (JOHO the Blog: The truth about why I hate Friendster) has "fake but worthy reasons" and "real but unworthy reasons" why he doesn't like "artificial social networks (ASNs)":
I am a member of Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke, Flickr, Orkut, and DeanLink. Friendster aims at dating, LinkedIn at business contacts, Spoke at sales team efficiency, Flickr at photo sharing, Orkut at who knows, and DeanLink at enabling Dean supporters to organize local events. I am equally active in all six, even though one of them is defunct, which tells you exactly how active I am.
The only one I liked was DeanLink, and that was because I wanted Dean to be elected president. All of them suffer from the following problems, to one degree or another. ...
Beyond his look at why ASNs are no good, he also mentions FOAF and LOAF, and he finds them good:
LOAF is a new proposal for making available information about social networks. It encrypts your address book and makes it accessible to others. The most immediate application is in fighting spam: If I receive a message from someone not in my address book, LOAF (which stands for nothing, although List of All Friends seems to be catching on) can see if it's coming from a friend of a friend. ...
FOAF and LOAF add value to the Net, enriching it with voluntarily disclosed information about who we are and who we know. In this they are unlike Artificial Social Networks that capture the conversations between us but make them inaccessible to other applications. ...
Dodgeball.com is not related to kickball. It's a site that allows you to alert your acquaintances to your whereabouts by cell-phone text message. A feature in Time Out New York magazine calls it a "Friendster/Citysearch hybrid". It has other geography-related features: get the address of a venue, or find, for example, all Ms. Pac Man machines within a 10-block radius of a given landmark, again on your cell. It's available in NYC, Boston, L.A., Philadelphia, and S.F. (Via apophenia.)
Gift Hub is a site to facilitate giving with a grassroots civic purpose ("responsive philanthropy"?). "As a volunteer and friend of philanthropy I try to connect idealistic donors with resources that may be helpful to them." ... "Ideally, the site will help good people find each other to do good things not only for themselves but for the causes we support." (Link via Loose Democracy.) From the Gift Hub FAQ:
Q: What is your purpose?
A: To create an open space where advisors, givers, and activists for grassroots organizations can meet to discuss ways and means, as well as ends in view.
Q: Is this space open to all grassroots organizations, whatever their politics?
A: Yes, but think of it this way. We are all fans, say, of baseball, but to be a fan is to have a passionate rooting interest in a particular team. Same with civil society. We support an open society and favor particular causes, and encourage you to do the same.
New York Times: One-Doorbell-One-Vote Tactic Re-emerges in Bush-Kerry Race says that local effort is back in vogue.
After decades of playing poor relation to television advertising, grass-roots politics has become a campaign star this year, as many political pros predicted it would be in the aftermath of the Bush-Gore face-off of 2000. And today it ranges from old-fashioned shoe leather to Web technology that can make a precinct captain of anyone with a computer.
It is a matter of adaptation, or survival of the most flexible. With the country still so sharply divided that political analysts figure as few as 10 percent of voters are undecided, each side is fighting to find and bring out every last one if its voters, and persuade the "persuadables," too. That means competing door to door, computer to computer, Web site to Web site. A ground war to complement the air war.
"It's funny; it's in vogue," said Steven Rosenthal, a former labor organizer now directing America Coming Together, one of those new tax-exempt groups in pursuit of a large Democratic turnout. "Some of us have labored in the trenches of grass-roots politics for a lifetime and fought with the party leadership for more resources," Mr. Rosenthal said. "Now it's the thing to do." ...
"We're going to find every Bush voter, we're going to call them, we're going to write them, we're going to knock on their doors, and when the day comes, we're going to physically take them to the polls," Ralph Reed, coordinator in the southeast for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said to those meeting in Macon a few weeks ago.
Be sure to read all the way through the second page, where phrases like "niche communications," "527," and even "palmtop" are defined in Times-reader-level language.
In 1967, Stanley Milgram developed the "the small-world method" or "small-world experiment", which became popularly known as the "six degrees of separation" hypothesis—"the idea that every person in the United States is connected by a chain of six people at most", according to a 2002 Wired article about efforts to prove Milgram's claim. Like so many other aspects of human existence, the online world has adapted and adopted the concept ("hijacked", perhaps?); many people are trying to prove the six degrees limit through e-mail. But in fact Milgram's original experiment (which was also technology-limited: participants could only hand-deliver a paper message) was too small to draw conclusions from, and even if it were conclusive it demonstrates that the people involved were not as connected as Milgram imagined.
Judith Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks found that:
The N.Y. Times quotes her as saying, "Instead of showing we live in a small world, it really shows the opposite. Ninety-eight percent of people can't reach anybody." As USA Today puts it, "Instead of the 'small world' Milgram proposed, the research suggests we live in a 'lumpy oatmeal' world, says Kleinfeld, populated by a few very well-connected wealthy individuals, with everyone else not so well connected."
PC Magazine cited a lot of data on how people are getting campaign info via the Internet. They named the Pew Internet & American Life Project, but those data are in a report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Last Saturday at the Univ. of San Francisco, the Computer Science dept. tried to establish the biggest-ever ad hoc supercomputer... flash mob computing:
FlashMob I was very successful and a lot of fun. Over 700 computers came into the gym and we were able to hook up 669 to the network. Our best Linpack result was a peak rate of 180 Gflops using 256 computers, however a node failed 75% through the computation. Our best completed result was 77 Gflops using 150 computers. The biggest challenge was indentifying flakely computers and determining the best configuration for running the benchmark. Each of the 669 computers ran Linpack at some point in the day.
The event included loot and was, of course, followed by a LAN party.
Basic Internet marketing teaches us that your email sig is the place where you should be mentioning and linking to whatever it is in your life or portfolio that you most primarily ought to be promoting at the moment. Modern mail programs make it easy to have multiple sigs so that you can revert to your favorite quotes or whatever with your friends, but make the default sig the promotional one. this would include "Kittens looking for new home" or "I'm looking for a new job" type messages.
I believe the subtitle is locked now, so I updated it here on the blog and in my sig. Also, the thepowerofmany.com domain is pointing here, which means I need to tell my blog software to report a new root (home) address, and that I can start announcing the site more widely, and that my sig can use the official URL instead of the underlying x-pollen/many location.
So here's what I'm using as of now (it's too long, though, probably won't wrap well in replies - we'll see):
Please to eagerly anticipate my new book, The POWER of MANY, in which I examine ... how the living web is transforming politics, business, and everyday life! In bookstores September, preorderable soon, contact me for an August review copy, ... blogging now and until we figure everything out at http://thepowerofmany.com/
Mr T in AZ over on Kos is compiling a list of books for progressives here. Be interesting to see what they come up with and what portion of them are informed by the last year's events.
From Publisher's Weekly, a note about MoveOn's book (from Inner Ocean Publishing; links added). Perhaps it's worth noting that networking or marketing online always has a slight hazard of turning off potential customers or partners who aren't wired?
Grass roots has trumped big media--at least for the moment--as an e-mail marketing campaign for MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change has enabled the title to knock Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies off the top spot on the Amazon.com bestsellers list.
An e-mail, sent in waves over the past few days by MoveOn to a mailing list that has more than two million addresses, urges members to buy the book and "push it to #1 at all booksellers." The group tries to balance the desire to reach the top spot on Amazon with the need to avoid alienating offline booksellers. The e-mail urges members to ask for the title at their local bookstore, but also provides a link to Amazon.com.
What a week this is already turning out to be in the metaworld:
A bit from that review:
... This yearning for universal mathematical laws to govern the behaviour of human beings has burdened the west with all sorts of harmless and less harmless nonsense, from phrenology to economics. It now finds a champion in Philip Ball in this long book.
Ball's argument is that this time, it's different, guv. In other words, mathematical and statistical physics has attained such a sophistication that its insights into the behaviour of particles of matter can be transferred to the mass behaviour of human beings, whether investing in the stock market or racing for the exits after a fire at a football ground.
In addition, and sotto voce, Ball tells us that society in mass has now become so mechanical that human beings really do resemble atoms of physical matter interacting with one another through forces of attraction and repulsion. ...
All people are googled, but some are more googled than others.
Tangent: Speak truth to interfaces. The tyranny of the nerds is ended. The time of the helpful loving nerds is dawning. The new category I made to catch these rendom thoughts isn't called random thoughts. Every time to ask me to type in a box I'm going to write what I want and not necessarily what you want me to write.
I propose a new word to describe people who live at least to some extent on the Internet: peeple. I'll explain later.
<smallerer>I learned how to play Yellow Submarine on my tenor uke this morning.</smallerer>
Newsweek writes about Google (which owns Blogger), so of course bloggers write about Newsweek writing about Google.
And here's the Newsweek article: "Let's face it—it's good to be Google. Every minute, worldwide, in 90 languages, the index of this Internet-based search engine created by these Stanford doctoral dropouts is probed more than 138,000 times. In the course of a day, that's over 200 million searches of 6 billion Web pages, images and discussion-group postings."
However, mainstream media about Google is too twentieth-century for most bloggers: a search on Google for "newsweek google trackback" gets nothing recent; same in Technorati gets 0 results.
I think we should set up a table in the demo room at the Waterside conference next month for this book. Can we get one of them outsized cardboard glossy cutouts with a mockup of the cover, and some preorder forms?
Dan Gillmor has an update on what Zack Rosen is up to:
The campaign is over. But Rosen tells me he's going to push ahead with what he started, aiming to create an open platform that others can use.
He says he's gotten venture-capital funding from a California firm that looks for public-interest investments. He and his team would, he said, build a "groupware tool set" that included content-management, mail list and forum posting, blogging and much more. Initially, the goal was to create an analogue to Yahoo Groups, the online service that lets non-techies set up mailing lists, but to aim its functions at political campaigns. In the long run, he said, the goals were much more ambitious:
"To establish a permanent foundation that can spearhead social software development projects for nonprofit organizations. ..."
I can't find a transcript (or even a mention, for that matter) of Joe Trippi's interview with Lester Holt (MSNBC, March 21 or 22?). But a Newsweek article on Trippi, Dean, and the Net shows up at MSNBC: Dean's Net Effect Is Just The Start (it sticks to politics).
Janet Murrays Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; xian, I have a copy if you want to borrow) is a bit dated but covers a lot of online-creativity ground, from MUDs to serial group writing to VR. She writes (link added):
With the advent of the VCR, a new branch of literature has arisen in which actual scenes from the broadcast programs are reedited into new stories. Kirk and Spock, whose friendship is a centerpiece of the original series, have been reinterpreted as lovers through the magic of videotape. This textual poaching, as media critic Henry Jenkins has called it, has become even more widespread on the World Wide Web, which functions as a global fanzine. Although some copyright holders have protested, fans have little trouble obtaining digital images and even digital video clips from their favorite series, which they put to their own use on personal Web pages.
By the way, it's "pon farr." "pong far" is what happens when you can't reach the controller.
craigblog: first review of 24 hours on craigslist
(I have to reboot my computer, so I have to close about 400 browser tabs, so I have to blog some of them so I can find them again later.)
I'm finally down with the wiki way. I get it. It's light years beyond. It's most of what I've been waiting for.
And VoodooPad is amazing (for OS X users only, sorry), a desktop wiki app. When I finally got that it was easy as a wiki but native to my desktop environment and thus not sluggish or otherwise crippled, I rejoiced. Then I wished it could synch with a public or private web wiki.
It asked me to pay after I created 15 pads. Pretty smart, I was hooked. More importantly, I want to pay them. Sure, I could delete a few minor pages and eke the free period out a little more, but I want my $20 (okay, $19.99) to go to the people woh made this thing so they'll keep up teh good work.
That's the thing about the power of many. It's not that money is going away. Money is a very useful technology. But the tyranny of money is ending. We've figured out that many beats money every time. In a more gift-oriented economy, I pay for things I value, because respect each other and negotiate fairly (it's much closer to being a fair market). You don't have to pay me to advertise yuor product or service. Just make it good and useful. Just solve a problem for me. Just give me one gadget that can do what I used to need two gadgets to do, and I'll tell people about you for free. But I (as always) digress.
I'm doing this whole second draft of the book in VoodooPad, I'm telling you. 'll have to put the crappy Word formatting back in before I hand chapters back, yes, I know.
I think in the long run blog software is dead, as a bloglike template in a wiki would do all a blog does and more, but this is still the short run and blogs are very important and the logging idea is here to stay.
Someone must remind me to spell out the new protocols for cell phones I've worked out (law: waste no time!) in another blog entry. See blogging is still important. Not dead yet.
But wikis are easier and the masses are crying out for what William Burroughs called the philosophy of Do Easy.
To a nerdy kid like me from the '70s, the recent Cheaper by the Dozen remake left out the best part of the book - the fact that Gilbraith (?) was an efficiency expert. And his method was to find the laziest guy in the factory and watch what he does and then teach everyone else to do it. The twelve redheads, the high jinks, they are cute but they were not the point of the story (to me).
More on this later, I have a chapter draft due.
I think we can safely log any themes or motifs in Chapter 1.
Though I have a chapter overdue from first-round development (Chapter 4) and I'm supposed to be calling Bill O'Reilly's press secretary at FOX, I find that this past week I've been spouting themes left and right.
Mostly in conversation, answering questions like "What is your book about"? It all starts coming out. And it needs brainstorming, and email and even this blog are inadequate for all of us to discuss it together. We need a group whiteboard thing like the Schwarmanizer that Laramie Crocker (a Berkeley musician - "Little Black Box," etc.) built to Dan Robinson's (eVol*? CTO?) spec or.... a wiki.
I am finally starting to get wikis, because of VoodooPad, which presents the convenience of the wiki model in a latency-free (desktop) environment using familiar (Mac OS X, in this case) interface conventions.
I started using it for brainstorming and realized that it's going to absorb my to-do list and my address book and my scratchpad.
Wiki is the killer app, in a way.
Have I mentioned that anyone who wants to post to this blog should just get in touch with me (I'm an open source person) and ask? If I know you, I'll definitely say yes. If I don't know you, I'll probably say yes if you are sincerely interested in contributing and not trying to sell* something**
*besides my book... in the immortal words of Susan Mernit on seeing the soft launch of this blog (and I am trusting my sense that she will not mind me quoting a private email message - if you do, smernit, just let me know and I will redact immediately), "what's the biz model"? Right now the business/self-sufficiency mission of this blog and the rest of this site is to sell the book. If we succeed and the book is considered a success, this blog and related sections will be free to continue covering the beat.
**particularly anything associated with hate or shame.
OK, back to best practices. I want a brainstorm list of themes that must weave through and be addresed in all revelant chapters and which may affect the flow of presentation of ideas.
Just posting a lot of brief blog entries such as
makes for a tedious playback experience later. Better a whiteboard/wiki approach, as I mentioned. I am debuging phpwiki and will probably get it going here soon, at which point I can build a list in public and accept open-source improvements in the remaining time.
Also, then I can focus on the next draft of Chapter 4 without the nagging feeling that there's something that isn't getting tracked properly and the awareness that in a few hours people won't be working too hard on the east coast anymire.
Note to self: Add textile or smartypants or the new markdown filter for easing rich-blog-authoring.
Technorati has exposed its new beta redesign as its default look and unveiled a new slogan:
Search the World Live Web
Jonas Luster (whom I know primarily as jluster on #joiito) provides a pretty deep starter bibliography on the topics of social networks, social networking, and social network analysis.
Password protection is off, we're grabbing the domain name, and I've started dropping hints on other blogs.
Just set up to ping a bunch of sites on update. In addition to the Movable Type recently updated page and the usual weblogs.com and blo.gs suspects, we're also pinging the following servers every time we update:
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rcs.salon.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
Next I'll set up the categories to receive and display incoming pings.
Wired News reports that RFID tags have uses beyond retail:
In order for the elderly to live at home longer, however, CAST believes seniors will have to sacrifice much of their privacy. Doctors and nurses will need to use RFID and other sensor technologies to keep tabs on them more frequently.
Some of the marginal "See Also" stories related to this one:
A Penny For is running its second Business Blog Book Tour, modeled on the Virtual Book Tour. Something to mention in the business chapter—and perhaps also to add to the PoM marketing plan?
More evidence that human interaction cannot be reduced to Boolean algebra (or binary math, or quantum physics, or any other course in the catalog): Clay Shirky writes,
Behold RELATIONSHIP, a vocabulary for describing relationships between people.
I don't know if I'm the one to shoot these particular fish in this particular barrel, since both mme. boyd and Herr Weinberger are more eloquent than I on the subject of of making the tacit explicit, but this thing is self-critiquing.
Here, just in case you were wondering, is how you should be characterizing your relationships with one another:
friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf, spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith, knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation, closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith, employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf, grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf, participantIn, participantDescribing relationships with a controlled vocabulary can sound credible right up to the moment you see the vocabulary, but this thing is a mess. ...
Steven Berlin Johnson's latest title, Mind Wide Open, is climbing the bestseller charts.
I used to joke that SBJ was my nemesis, the way he successfully went from the popular Feed magazine to his current big-idears book-writing and magazine/web-journalism career.
I saw a remaindered link at Tom Coates' blog and took the test:
Thanks for taking Match.com's Ph.D.-formulated Physical Attraction Test, a revolutionary development in the world of relationships. This scientific system will help you narrow your search for those who are truly compatible with your physical preferences.
Below is the summary of your report. To view your complete test results, click here.
Or click here to search for single Match.com members who you'll find physically attractive.
Favorite Qualities
- Your photo choices suggest a woman over 55 is probably getting a little old for your tastes
- You seemed interested in dating a woman at least 30 or older
- So-called "Ecto-Mesomorphs," with narrow chins and nicely angular faces
- Light brown hair
- Wavy hair
- Straight hair
Favorite Looks
There's a reason why you can't keep your eyes off a beauty pageant. We describe a lot of the women you found attractive as "Beauty Queens," because of their flawless beauty and winning smiles. These women usually have long, shiny hair setting off a face that is either rectangular or heart-shaped. They have very feminine features like thin noses, big eyes, and full lips, conveying a strong, confident look rather than looking delicate or fragile. Even though they look like the "Girl Next Door," they tend to look mature for their age and lack the "cutesy" appearance of more "girlish" women. Although very popular to look at, most men are sort of intimidated by this type, which is probably why only 1 in 3 (31%) say they specifically seek out these women.We'd guess your first crush was on a "Tomboy." You also seemed to notice the healthy, active, and all-natural look, which was a common thread among your photo choices. Their sun-tanned faces are usually either long and narrow or square-like in shape. Either short or long and straight, these women don't invest a lot in big hairdos or wear a lot of makeup. They don't need to, since their good looks come across even hanging out on Saturday in a baseball cap. In fact, this is one way you (and the other 1 in 10 men (12%) who like this type) can find her.
Favorite Face Type
Faces known scientifically as "Ecto-Mesomorphs" repeatedly caught your eye. Women express this type in two ways. One version has a rectangular face shape that is long and narrow. The other type's face shape is often compared to a diamond or a heart, because it is wide at the cheeks and then has a sharply angled jaw. Ecto-Mesomorph women have either delicate pointed chins or chins that are slightly squared-off or rounded at the base. This "classic" face type is one of the most idealized for women and can be found on most movie and music idols. These women also tend to have lean, but shapely, builds when they're young. About 57% of other men especially prefer women with this face type.
Compare your results
Tell your friends to take the test and then compare your results, or for more details, visit http://attraction.match.com.P.S. You've received this email because you requested to have the Physical Attraction Report summary delivered to your inbox when you took the Match.com Physical Attraction Test. You will not receive additional mailings such as this in the future. If you have questions, feel free to contact Customer Care directly.
At culturekitchen, Liza Sabater notes a post by Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker to the nettime-l mailing list called The Limits of Networking that seems to address the "echo chamber" flaw. (Not quoted due to this disclaimer from the mailing lists's sig-statement: "no commercial use without permission".) The entire thread can be found at the nettime-l web archive.
Here's Liza's prefacing comment:
I'm going to have to shell out the money for your book.
This is one of the best, and I mean, BEST pieces of political theory I have read in years. It could not have come at a better moment, since my work as an independent schooling advocate is a direct result of my use of the Internet --and a lot of my colleagues in the movement, just like I, are making it as we go. To have ideas of strategy and tactical intervention articulated in this manner is just precious.
How's that for preemptive self-recrimination?
The Might of the Living Web
Joe Trippi and Scott Heiferman shared Wired's Rave Award in the "Political Force" category (ceremony at the Fillmore Monday night).
The usual subspects are there according to Joi Ito, who's on the panel. He also notes that SXSW is blogger unfriendly.
Susan Mernit set up a blog called morph specifically for participants in and commentators on the American Press Institute's Media Center's MediaMorphosis conference, (a new one.) The other day she invited a number of non-attendees via email to drop by and post comments if interested.
There's a whole world of forums/boards for graphic artists, where they swap and critique art, most commonly with Adobe Photoshop images, Macromedia Flash animations, or 3D stills or animations from Alias Maya or Discreet 3ds Max.
In a lot of cases, the art is collaborative or competitive. The biggest genre for this is Photoshop Tennis. To "play" PT, usually some parameters are agreed on first, such as file format, time limits, or even artistic theme. One person creates a Photoshop file, then sends it to a second person. That player alters it—whether minimally by touch-up, or extensively, even perhaps throwing out the entire image and starting over—and returns the file. This back-and-forth can go on haphazadly or for a prearranged number of rounds; the end result is more than just a single image but an artistic sequence.
Just as no two artists are identical, no two art matches are the same either. The participants can range along the spectrum from collaboration—agreeing on a common theme, subject, motif, or purpose—to competition, with each trying to outdo the other in a demonstration of digital-art "chops."
Although Photoshop Tennis developed and evolved spontaneously in several places, Coudal Partners, a Chicago design house, is where PT was finally formalized in a significant way. (Coudal also has one of the best freakin' blogs on the planet, right on their home page, but nobody knows about them outside the graphic design community.)
Here are some sites where collaborative art is made, or where the gallery sections include extensive community comment and critique:
The collaborative art trend eventually led to a book, Photoshop Secrets of the Pros, which teaches Photoshop techniques through the medium of Photoshop Tennis matches by 20 designers and artists.
Auren Hoffman has been getting a lot of requests for referrals from LinkedIn and wrote this summary of a month's worth of requests recently.
Linking to Gillmor's book made me realize that we really don't have "journalism" as a topic anywhere. Not that it's necessary—as always, where's the "effective, public, real-world action" component?—and we're not a book on blogging, but both journalism and blogging probably merit mention per se and not just as means or adjuncts in the major topical divisions. I categorized Gillmor in Chapter 1, because that seems like the only place for it. Other ideas? (Update: re-placed to Chapter 9, as "meta" material is falling into there.)
And whenever we do find a place for journalism, we should mention Correspondences.org:
Think of this as a "newspaper out of the box" where everyone can contribute. We're building a portal for reporting of events by participants and commentators covering all aspects of events around the world, locally and internationally: politics, business, economics, technology, medicine, media and culture.
Some good insights from Peter Merholz and Anil Dash reported in hiphopmusic.com: Fear and Glowing at the Orkut Launch Party.
Also, found via the same source (Waxy.org links), someone who is mapping the social networks in Shakespeare's plays.
A few days ago,Jen Golbeck, a Ph.D. student in computer science sent this message to her friends of friends at Orkut:
Christian > Dan > Jen 3/9/2004 from: Jen to: friends of friends subject: Social Nets: Obligated to add friends?message: Hi,
It seems to me that a lot of friend connections here are made because we feel obligated to reciprocate when someone adds us to their list. I want to make this claim in a paper, but I need some evidence. If you have a second, I have a form that just asks how many friends you have on orkut and how many of them are on your list only because you felt obligated to add them.
I appreciate the help.
Thanks,
jen
The same day, Clay Shirky contrasted two (or more) friendship-handshaking models by discussing recent changes at Friendster and Orkut in YASNSes get detailed . He notes that the more fine-grained, pseudo-nuanced gradations of friendship require a lot of maintenance work and seem to only give value to the owner of the network, and also that passively ignoring friendship requests models real life more accurately than a challenge-accept/deny model.
He also points to LiveJournal as a good model and claims that "Those who do not understand LiveJournal are doomed to repeat it, badly."
The discussion that follows is spirited, with Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp (the Flickr people) challenging many of Clay's conclusions.
BTW: The Orkut message in the previous post told me it was coming from "clay." At first I wondered why Shirky was sending out a press-release for Blue Digital.
Clay Johnson, late of the Dean campaign, just sent this press release to his "friends" and "friends of friends":
Christian > Clay 3/11/2004
from: Clay
to: friends of friends
subject: Dean Internet Team Launches Blue State Digital
message: WASHINGTON, D.C.--Key members of Howard Dean's internet team today launched a consulting firm to bring their expertise to Democratic candidates and progressive political organizations. Blue State Digital, LLC, will use the tools and expertise that Howard Dean used to raise more than $50 million and organize hundreds of thousands of volunteers to help Democratic candidates, advocacy groups, and non-profit organizations nationwide empower their people."Howard Dean changed politics," said Clay Johnson, Blue State Digital co-founder and lead grassroots software programmer for the Dean campaign. "He proved that the Internet can not only raise tremendous amounts of money, it can also empower and engage people. We are here to help candidates and organizations harness this power to win elections and create positive change."
By combining years of experience in technology with a deep political knowledge and passion, the people of Blue State Digital will provide clients with cutting-edge tools and techniques to tap the enormous fundraising, communications, and organizing potential of the internet. Blue State Digital will offer clients tools, services, and support that are right for them -- not a cookie-cutter solution.
For more information:
Blue State Digital, LLC
(202) 250-3420
Over at Napsterization, Mary Hodder notes that a number of writers who are seeking input from readers on their blogs for works in progress (this, by the way, is an approach that we are thus far too timid to try).
This vaguely open-source approach enables the writer to incorporate the feedback and suggestions of many minds in advance of publication.
She includes links to Dan Gillmor's draft introduction and first chapter from Making the News, J.D. Lasica's blog entry Looking for feedback on book chapters, and John Battelle's Searchblog, a book companion, and Jay Rosen's Weblogs: An Extremely Democratic Form of Journalism, a draft chapter from the upcoming O'Reilly Extreme Democracy collection, which is itself adapted from the most popular post from his PressThink weblog so far, "ten things radical about the weblog form in journalism."
A year ago, Dan Gillmor—reporter and commentator at the San Jose Mercury News—posted a book proposal and outline (to be published by O'Reilly; includes an abstract of each chapter) for Making the News: What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer (Editor, Producer, Etc.). Yesterday Gillmor posted drafts of the introduction (2500 words) and first chapter (6600 words). He's requesting comment on the draft text:
My editors and I are most interested in your immediate feedback on:
- What's missing—that is, a topic or perfect anecdote that absolutely has to be included.
- More important, what's wrong. If there's a factual error I want to fix it before the book is published.
In both cases I'll ask that you send me e-mail at j3@gillmor.com, and please include your phone number in case I need to contact you. Otherwise, feel free to comment on and discuss (or ignore) what you've read in the comment-posting area below.
Chapter 1, "From Tom Paine to Talk Radio and Beyond," starts out mentioning Roosevelt's and Kennedy's deaths and the Al Qaeda hijack attacks, then says the news is being changed by the Internet. He backsteps for the deeper analysis by taking us through Paine's broadsheets, 19th-century muckraking, the introduction of radio, newspapers, I.F. Stone, Berners-Lee, McLuhan, talk radio, Cluetrain, Winer/Manila, and much more. Random highlights:
I think he leans too heavily on "9/11"; one commentor really ripped him on this, and in fact the comments are more critical than I expected them to be. The best line in the comments is also the most revealing: "It's a nicely written piece but that's it biggest failing."
So: another related title, this one about the intersection of blogging and journalism. No sign of it on Amazon, B&N, or O'Reilly's site yet. BTW, he has a chapter on "what happens when the audience is part of the process"—how his weblog affects the book.
Nothing surprising—Kerry and Edwards have profiles on Friendster that look a little calculated, shock horror drama:
Being able to attract such high-profile visitors -- even though it's possible some staffer created the profiles instead of the candidates themselves -- is another positive sign for Friendster, which last fall received $13 million in seed money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The site's appeal only goes so far, however. President George W. Bush declined an invitation to join. A campaign spokeswoman says Friendster doesn't fit in with his Internet strategy. Apparently, Bush is willing to cede the young, hipster demographic.
Microsoft gadget lets you spy on your own life.
SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts by Microsoft Corp., is designed to be worn around the neck. The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights and sudden movements and can take up to 2,000 images in a 12-hour day without the wearer doing a thing.
One day, SenseCam might even respond to other stimuli such as heart rate or skin temperature -- to track medical problems as easily as to record a Hawaiian vacation. And it could eventually link with other technology, such as face recognition to remind wearers when they've seen someone before.
Since Pete has done a good job of tracking back the second superpower meme, I figured we should also continue tracking it forward, as in Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower.
In it, the author looks at how blogging and other forms of Internet community building (obviously working from Moore's re-definition of the 2nd SP) are spreading to the least wired parts of the planet, formerly referred to as the third world.
A few choice quotes (almost at random - the whole essay is worth reading despite the funny characters sprinkled throughout):
Marketers refer to the challenge of selling products popular within a technical elite to the mainstream as "crossing the chasm", phrase coined by Geoffrey Moore in a book of the same name. While marketers have a vested financial interest in ensuring that the mainstream uses products the technorati embrace, it's unclear whether webloggers have a similar incentive to open their community to the wider world. Indeed, the willingness of the first generation of tool builders and users to open their community may be the key determinant in deciding whether these transformations affect only the technical elite or the whole world.
and
If the social software community cares about ensuring global use of their tools and global participation in discussions, we need to take a close look at the usability of our tools by people in other nations. For example, many popular blog hosting services are modestly priced, but require payment online via credit card. This creates an insurmountable barrier for the majority of people in developing nations, who while they may have the means to pay a $5 per month hosting fee (comparable to the costs associated with a few hours access to a cybercafe), but lack the method to make the payment, as credit cards are largely unavailable throughout Africa and much of Central and South Asia. Designers of social software who hope to have a global audience for their products need to start designing those products in conjunction with that global audience.
Dave Pollard's Blogging as Conversation, No Echo Here starts a decision flowchart of which method to communicate with:
but the post's text continues into many supporting examples, related aspects, and musings. What is it that speaker/writers trying to do? Why do reader/listeners read or listen? A digital-age starter piece covering ground that many others have wrestled with—I studied it as Robert Longacre's "discourse grammar." Pollard brings in group conversation and links to Jay Rosen's Master Narratives article, which I've read three times already as I try to wrap my mind around its implications. (Again, link via the Scobleizer.)
One of two products from Howell Development is Syndication Studio 2004, "the worlds first desktop application allowing creation of feeds in all flavors of RSS, Atom and OPML, supporting everything from RSS 0.9 to Atom 0.3."
Putting Control Back Where it Belongs.
Syndication "feeds" are the new means to convey content from source to user efficiently, effectively, and under the exclusive direction of the user alone. Private individual users, on-line publishers, and large multi-national technology corporations alike are desperately searching for an easy, cost-effective solution to the SPAM crisis. Well, look no further. Syndication is the only way out there to completely extinguish unsolicited advertising. Users are downloading feed readers; are you publishing feeds for them to read?
(Link via the Scobleizer.)
The Blogging of the President reports:
On March 7th, Doc Searls, blogger and guru of the Linux Journal is scheduled to be on CBS' Sunday Morning. The subject? The net and the election. BOP's Ellen Dana Nagler was there, at the event where Doc was interviewed.
Which leads back to the original question: what has changed? Has it, a some insiders say, been stopped by the fall of Dean? Or is it, as people such as Dave Winer and others have said - about something deeper than a candidate?
ElizabethSpiers.com: Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated:
Dear people who know me personally, have my cell phone number and my email address (some of whom have even referred to themselves as my friends) yet apparently still can't be bothered to contact me for verification because it would ruin the scoop on your blogs**:
New York Metro experienced technical difficulties this weekend and the URL for The Kicker is not resolving properly (nor are several of the other pages.)
The Kicker has not been shut down.
That's not to say that The Kicker won't be shut down. It may; it may not. Today was Adam Moss's first day and we haven't talked about it yet.
** I'll let Felix and Gothamist off the hook a bit here, because they were re-reporting, but Choire and Nick have no excuse...
A counterexample to some of the utopianism about blog power and virtual community.
My interview with Phil Wolff last week was instructive, in that he made a point of dwelling on the downsides of collective action as much as the upsides.
Scobleizer is back and hasn't lost a beat. (These are metablogging items, not strictly PoM fodder, but hey.) First, Why Robert Scoble blogs:
Chris Prately, who has become one of my favorite bloggers (yeah, cause he was the guy behind Microsoft's OneNote product) asks "why should I keep blogging?" and, taking it further, why does ANYONE keep blogging?
Isn't the answer going to be different for everyone? ...
Now, I won't guarantee that it'll change your life that much, but I believe that the world's most influential and most interesting people (who are often the same) are only reachable via weblogs.
Then, a link to FOAF, now on LiveJournal:
LiveJournal now is exporting FOAF (Friend of a Friend) data. I need to learn more about FOAF and the scenarios it opens up. I still don't get social software. Who's my friends? It's the people I link to. Linking to someone is a far stronger social statement about someone than saying "yeah, they're my friend" to Orkut or Linked Up.
And finally, he goes around the blog-dev world in 80 characters:
Dave Winer is asking for visions of what the future of Weblogging tools and services might look like. I've already seen the future. How can I say that? Because it's already here. The problem is that no one tool has wrapped up what's cool. Let's look ...
Ed Sim is a venture capitalist and explains why he blogs about it. (Link via Scobleizer)
Recently, a number of people asked me why I blog as a VC. Isn't privacy a good thing for VCs? Don't you want to keep the good ideas to yourself? For the past couple of years, I had my own personal blog which I mainly used as a bookmarking tool so I could retrieve interesting news stories and my running commentary from any web browser. As I made the leap to the public blogging world, I really did not know what I would find until I threw myself out there.
So, after my first 6 months or so, here is what I like about blogging. Blogging provides me with an outlet for my views on technology, venture capital, and other current affairs. Yes, like most VCs I am opinionated, and what better way to express them than through a blog. Instead of beta testing a product, I get to beta or alpha test my opinions or thoughts and receive instant feedback no matter how far-fetched my ideas may be. I find this incredibly valuable as a number of people either email me directly or post comments and tell me I am off the mark, on the mark, or point me in new directions to further research my ideas. People send me information about new companies or even their resumes based on some of my current interests. As a VC, this is a great way to have an ongoing dialogue with an active and participatory audience. BTW, any product companies out there should think about using blogs and other technology like RSS to build long-term relationships with their customers and get instant feedback on product direction and features. Secondly, based on my posts, I have built some new relationships by engaging in conversation either directly or indirectly through my blog. Last week at DEMO, it was actually nice to have met some of the bloggers that I regularly read and with whom I share similar interests. Next, understanding the value of the blog, I actively read and subscribe to a number of other people's feeds to learn about the hot topics of the day and to understand what the early adopters are currently thinking before a new technology or idea goes mainstream. I get to listen and participate in on the conversations about the next product or idea that will reach the tipping point as many of today's innovative thoughts gather steam and build momentum through a word-of-mouth or word-of-network manner. Of course, the danger can be drinking your own kool-aid from the blogger community (think Howard Dean-he seemed really hot with the bloggers but did not fare so well in the primaries) so some balance is required here. Finally, it is alot of fun, and I hope you keep visiting and actively commenting either privately or publicly.
Not sure how I found my way to Freecycle:
Membership is free. To join simply click on your city under "Sign up" below. It will generate a automatic e-mail which, when sent, will sign you up for your local group and send you an response with instructions on how it works. Or, go directly to the webpage for your city's group by clicking on your city's link on the left. Can't find your city? It takes about ten minutes to start your own (click on "Start your own" for instructions). Have fun and keep on Freecyclin'!
The Freecycle Network is a project of RISE, Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission includes reducing waste, generating employment training, and fostering cooperation between other nonprofit organizations and the public.
RISE started the Freecycle Network in May 2003 to promote waste reduction in Tucson's downtown and help save desert landscape from being taken over by landfills. Freecycle provides individuals and non-profits an electronic forum to "recycle" unwanted items. One person's trash can truly be another's treasure!
How does Freecycling work?
One rule: everything posted must be free. Whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano, or an old door to be given away, it can be posted on the network. Or, maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself? Respond to the posting directly and you just might get it. After that it is up to the giver to set up a pickup time for passing on the treasure.
Non-profit organizations also benefit from the Freecycle Network. Post the item or items you want to give away and a local organization can help you get it to someone in need.
Who can Freecycle?
As Abe Lincoln once said, "Think globally, recycle locally." The Freecycle Network is open to all cities and to all individuals who want to participate. Freecycle groups are run by local volunteer moderators from across the globe who facilitate each local group - Grassroots at its best!
Google engineer Orkut Buyyokktoken and two collaborators published A social network caught in the Web, a paper about a social network Orkut created at Stanford University called Nexus, in a peer-reviewed web journal called First Monday.
In it, Orkut and his coauthors describe some preliminary findings about connectedness and attribute trends in the network which appears to have been a direct predecessor to Google's already somewhat moribund Orkut YASNS.
Avoid Friendster and its clones, warns security expert:
The 'social network' sites present opportunities for ruthless marketroids and stalkers. Plaxo, the most notorious example Clarke cites, encouraged users to upload their entire address books to the servers.
"Every IP-address, every email, and every social-network relationship that arises appears to be entirely free of any express contractual constraints."
The YASNSes are rife with unsetlling issues of privacy, security, and gradations between public and private.
Note, another service Phil Wolff mentioned during our nearly three-hour interview Monday is called "The Spoke" or "Spoke."
stavrosthewonderchicken verges on tears (of laughter) contemplating the irony of the "nuking the echo chamber" meme proposed for BloggerCon 2 in EmptyBottle.org: Echo and the Bunnymen, asking
Am I missing all the constellations of new voices who haven't gotten linked as a result of what they write rather than who they've met?
(The discussion keys off the question of whether the Dean campaign talked itself into a corner, functioning as a sort of echo chamber or meme machine that turned off all but the fringe true believers and early adopters.)
Christopher Allen, whom I met at the recent blogger/new media dinner event in San Francisco put together by Susan Mernit, Deeje Cooley, and J.D. Lasica, offers his advice to social networking services (abbreviated SNS or YASNS, for "yet another" social network software / system / service), in an entry at his Life With Alacrity blog that flanks his comment on my orkut faux pas from a week or so ago.
On the other flank of his orkut entry is a post detailing some keen observations about hand-crafted FOAF.
Austin Free-Net, a community technology nonprofit, has found blogs both an effective supervisorial tool and a means for communicating to stakeholders and the public. From an article at NonprofitQuarterly.org:
When she encouraged her staff to blog about their work, Sisnett recognized another benefit of nonprofit blogging: She could now easily keep up to speed on her staff's work and the progress of various, concurrent projects. Soon, between the executive director, the technical staff and volunteers, Austin Free-Net had three staff blogs full of updated and archived information that could easily be incorporated into strategic plan updates, VISTA reports, press releases, newsletters and grants. When a colleague, a sponsor or even a journalist needed information about a project or issue, Sisnett could refer the interested party to a blog.
Free-Net's experiments with staff blogging fit a trend developing in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. According to Teresa Crawford, Technical Director at Advocacy Project and a leader in the movement to provide technology assistance to international nonprofits, blogs with an "internal focus" have made it easier for organizations to capture the knowledge of teams and support their collaboration. "Rather than only a linear discussion list for a team," she points out, "individual and collaborative blogs make it possible to see ties among team members and issues they are working on."
More typically, an externally focused blog can transform informal knowledge sharing into a new asset for an organization. Blogs can enliven your group's Web presence and engage clients, supporters and strangers alike in your work. "We think that there is a good chance blogging is a new way to express the nonprofit voice," says Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, a nonprofit organization that puts technology to work for social needs. "We feel we have unique things to say, so we should be saying them." Since October 2003, Fruchterman has been authoring the Beneblog, a component of Benetech's Web site where he has highlighted the work of his organization's staff and partners, commented on legislation affecting his field, documented his speaking engagements and attendance at conferences and described in real-time the impact of world travel on his work as Benetech's executive. "Blogs provide a more immediate form of communication than my quarterly update," he says. "They bring new content to our homepage and give us a chance to bring up ideas and links in a less formal context."
Article concludes with a four-step procedure for "Getting Your Nonprofit Up and Blogging." (Link via Weblogsky.)
Brian Dear has taken an interesting look at the Dean site's running Americans for Dean counters.
Mediachest.com: Organize, borrow, loan, and share books, CDs, DVDs, and video games
Perhaps chapter 8 should tackle other forms of socializing beyond dating, essentially anything that is personal or friendship-oriented, as opposed to professional and business-oriented?
If I haven't linked to Flickr yet, I should have. It's kind of like Orkut but with some actual functionality beyond ghost-town bulletin boards, primarily image-sharing and live chat.
Ed Cone analyzes John Edwards' online effort. He writes that the Web staff is active, serious, and successful (as measured by fundraising and communication)...
But there is no sense here of a revolution, or a movement in which the Internet takes on a mystique of its own. The rhetoric of transformation I heard at Dean headquarters, of power pushed to the edges to create a new type of campaign, is lacking. The candidate, not the online tools, generates the buzz. ...
Edwards recently topped the 10,000 mark in Meetup registrations, up five-fold in the last few months, but still well behind John Kerrys nearly 50,000 Meetup registrants. Myers says he was impressed by Meetup when he first learned of it a year ago, but was ultimately driven to advocate for the service seriously when he saw how it worked for his rivals. What pushed us there is that it worked for other people, he says. Letter-writing and phone calls, coordinated online, have been valuable volunteer activities. Volunteers use the web to communicate with each other, says Winn, doing things like alerting the community to negative stories in newspapers, and coordinating responses to media coverage.
Volunteers have also helped build the campaigns online arsenal, creating tools that facilitate local meetings between supporters, for example. The connection between staff and volunteers is tight. Myers talks to key volunteers like Mike Kasper on a pretty regular basis, he says. I go days without seeing what hes working on, then Im amazed to see what he puts together. Hes been included in every major change weve made. ...
The site is built on Slash, the open-source software that powers Slashdot. Its worked out great, because we can customize it, and grow with it, says Winn. He reads other blogs as part of his job, and reports on them to Myers, who says he has little time to check out the Web even competitors sites.
(Link via InstaPundit.)
Johnson's Mind Wide Open is in Amazon's top 1000.
Doc Searls had a dream about what happens when nobody objects:
... I lay in bed for a long time thinking about what the dream meant. What bothered me about the dream wasn't that a bomb had gone off, but that I had been in a position to stop it and didn't. The problem wasn't the bomb, I realized, or the willingness of somebody to use it; but that I had been passive about it. So had everybody else, I realized. It was like we were all watching a TV show.
Passivism, I realized, is the sickness. And its cure is activism. ...
[In the Sixties,] the institutions of industry and government seemed far more vast and solid than they do today. They seemed connected only to themselves and others of their kind.
It's different now. Large institutions today - church, business, goverment, education, law enforcement, the courts (and crime as well) - are not just connected by the Net, but rely on its open, free and increasingly capable infrastructure. Activism can now be very direct and personal. The threshold of engagement, of organization, of raising and spending funds, is so low it has become negligible for all but the very poor.
Its enemy is passivism, which is maintained by manufactured entertainment, consumed on a massive scale by citizens of civilized countries around the world. The result is stupidity on a grand scale.
Link via Jon Lebkowsky.
Chapter 3 discusses Moore's blog article on "the second superpower". Writing up my notes within that chapter, I compiled a ton of URLs and figured I better make them linkable here:
Physiological needs (currently in Chapter 3; move to Chapter 1?): a 12/29/2003 Yahoo/Dow Jones article about Medtronic CareLink Network and other heart monitor systems has expired now, but here is a Google cache.
When Dr. Philip Adamson was traveling in Spain recently, he logged onto the Internet to see how some of his patients with an experimental heart failure device were doing. Most of the patients - who had entered data from their devices onto the Web via Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT - News)'s CareLink Monitor - seemed OK. But several had pressure readings in their hearts indicating possible fluid buildup, which, if allowed to rise, could end up forcing hospitalization. Adamson immediately contacted them from thousands of miles away and changed their drug therapy. None ended up being hospitalized. ...
The Medtronic CareLink Network is a medical information system that combines the patient's monitor, a Web site for clinicians and a Web site for cardiac device patients and their families or caregivers. The monitor is a device that allows patients to collect information by holding a small antenna over their implanted device. The monitor automatically downloads the data and sends it through a standard home telephone connection directly to the secure Medtronic CareLink Network.
System introduced two years ago, costs clinics $200 per year per patient but reduces office visits for data-download from 4/year to 1/year.
Atrios explains his ad policy and wraps up by comparing BlogAds to the Dean blog.
What the Dean campaign tapped into was a bunch of people who wanted to feel personally invested in a campaign, but hadn't found any way to do that. Too many state and local parties are completely ossified and don't return calls by people offering to volunteer, and are often run by people who don't seem to want any new blood interfering with their little fiefdoms. Between impeachment, Florida, and the Bush administration there are a lot of people new people who decided they wanted to become "involved" but didn't know how. The internet allows a small degree of personal involvement by a large number of people, and they're grateful for candidates who let them feel involved. Haines, who is running to be the nominee in Georgia's 12th, started taking/responding to comments and criticisms. That's smart.
Look, a lot of the internet "personal involvement" is an illusion - and most people know that. Nobody ever thought Howard Dean read through thousands of comments on his weblog, but it nonetheless allowed them to feel they had a wee personal connection to the campaign, and that's all that mattered. The truth is, I think it's relatively easy for a campaign to tap into that sentiment, though not all campaigns will be comfortable doing that - and nor should they try. Blog readers are not your "typical voter" or your "typical Democrat," and not all campaigns/candidates are necessarily well-suited for trying to tap into that particular vibe. But, some are and with a little creativity and not too much effort they might be able to get the little extra money/attention they need to put them over the line in November. And, hey, write me a nice fat consulting check and I'll tell you how to do it... ;)
Daily Kos (among others) reports that, flying below radar when compared with the Dean campaign, blog-network activism on the left scored a victory today when former Kentucky state Attorney General Ben Chandler beat Alice Forgy Kerr in Kentucky's sixth congressional district.
Chandler had been advertising heavily on blogs in the last few weeks and had been singled out by Kos as a belleweather (sp?) opportunity. Joshua Marshall reports that Chandler raised nearly $100,000 with an advertising budget of around $2000 and speculates that the blog medium may be for Democrats what direct mail has been for Republicans: a fundraising channel that suits their base.
Of course it's too easy to tell, but as we're poised here between the endless "what went wrong?" handwringing about the Dean campaign and the incipeint encomiums that are sure to follow as soon as he formally concedes, it's worth noting that this targeted, piecemeal approach may yield rresults more readily than a shoot-the-moon run for leader of the free world.
Martin Kearns dropped by my post at RFB about weblog strategies for nonprofits to submit another interesting website, Green Media Toolshed, a service for environmental campaigns.
Visiting Kearns' Network-Centric Advocacy blog, I also read about a paper from OneNW called Network as Movement. Some key findings:
- The environmental movement is a network that is more than the sum of its people and organizations.
- This movement has invested in too much institutional overhead.
- Organizations need to focus on what they do best, and outsource the rest.
- The majority of local environmental groups work on niche issues and solutions that will never attract large membership bases.
- Funders need to help free the most important of these organizations from focusing on this distraction.
I will get this chapter in today, though I'm onto plan C (A was submit it early, B was submit it by 5 pm, C is submit it before midnight). It's a short-ish chapter, too, as you know, so it's really just that I'm plodding through my notes and outline branches and fleshing out as I go. The utterly unglamorous side of writing. I have to run out tonight briefly for a campaign-related key handoff, but see no problem being done by this evening. I feel close now, but just noticed it was after 5 and I could use a breather, but it's raining pretty hard here, so I'm feeling kind of cooped up.
Online Business Networks Blog Waterside Productions to represent The Virtual Handshake:
ScottAllen (in "Success Stories", "OBN In The News"):
I’m pleased to announce that Danielle Jatlow at Waterside Productions will be representing us for our second book, The Virtual Handshake: Leveraging Online Social Networks to Grow Your Business. Waterside is “the world’s premiere literary agency for computer and technology authors”, having “successfully represented more than 5,000 books to over 50 publishers”. Needless to say, we’re thrilled.
One of the most exciting things about working with Danielle is that, quite simply, “she gets it”. It helps that our connection with her was through online social networking, rather than a traditional query letter. We had a couple of agents interested in representing us from earlier queries last year, but now that our first book is done, and we’re really serious about pitching the second one to a major publisher, we decided to try to seek out an agent who was active on online social networking and would understand how important and timely this topic is, and be represent that to the publishers.
So, we looked for literary agents on our various social networks, and came across Christian Crumlish on Ryze and LinkedIn. Turns out he’s also a user of the #joiito IRC channel, where I occasionally hang out, as well.
I contacted Christian, but he told me he was too busy on his own writing project, The Power of Many, a related book to ours, although with a slightly different focus. He referred us to Danielle as the most appropriate agent at Waterside for us to work with. A couple of e-mails, a revised proposal, one phone call, and we’ve got ourselves an agent. Never sent a “query letter”.
This is yet another success story for online networking in the process of writing our book(s). My co-author, David Teten, and I met online (and have yet to meet in person, btw). If you’re an author and would like to learn more about how to network online in support of your book project, from start to finish, not just for the marketing, take a look at my article, Online Networking for Authors.
An interesting (if difficult) project would be to chronicle and catalogue the proliferation of entities in a sense vying to be the DFA successor organization, self-emerging now in email and irc and phone conferences and face-to-face meetings in California and elsewhere.
I may keep coming back to this entry to list things as I notice them. A few I've seen so far are:
Typical web/research experience: Something reminds me of Luke Menand, one of the best professors of art/literature/culture I had in college and I wonder if I can get in touch with him for this book - I'm sure he'd have some interesting things to say. On the other hand, I doubt he remembers me. I only had him for one semester, and I doubt I made any kind of impression.
Anyway, the search led me to an interesting article about fanfic and slash fiction by David Plotz from 2000
So I surf for his name (it's actually Louis Menand - that's his byline) but he's so widely published that I just get formal stuff and no reminder of where he's teaching now (NYU?). Probably I should be asking around via my personal network and some of the more academicky people I'm meeting these days, Luke Skywalker Is Gay?, in which he explores the idea that fan fiction represents a kind of communal folkloric storytelling in which the legendary icons of pop culture are reclaimed from the private ownership of the commercial television producers.
I first read about K/S slash fiction when I was in college. There was already a scholarly book on the subject hardbound in the stacks. I used to wander around a lot and try to find random stuff. The Internet has only expanded the reach of fanfic and slash.
Too bad, I said to myself, there's no meeting-in-person angle, since that's the hook we're hanging everything on in this book (though sometimes I wonder if that's a mistake...), then I got to this section of the article:
But fanfic turns writing into a communal art, as folk culture has always done. Writing and reading become collaborative. We share the characters and work together to make them interesting and funny and sexy. Write a short story about your crazy uncle and post it on the Web, and no one will read it. Write a short story about Dr. Who, and hundreds of folks will flock to your site. Fanfic writers meet at conventions ("cons"). Thanks to the Internet, writers communicate constantly on e-mail listservs. They invite e-mail responses and crave feedback. MedianCat, who writes Buffy fanfic, says he has heard from more than 400 people about his stories. Of the two-dozen-odd fanfic writers I e-mailed about their work, only one did not respond. (The Internet is also changing fanfic by opening it to kids. Click here for how the Backstreet Boys became literary heroes.)
So just like the post-eTech software-demo CodeCon is happening this weekend for the Cory/Ito crowd (danah told me about it - she's so swamped with her academic workload that she has to miss it - it's $99 so I'll probably give it a miss too), fanfic and slash writers have cons (conventions, from the tendency to add -Con to words to name conventions) of their own. The common thread between the techies and the fanfic writers, by the way, is science fiction (sci-fi, sf), where a lot of this jargon originates.
So, if fanfic authors get together for conventions, can I talk about them in the book?
Salon.com Technology | Politics by other means:
Ed Cone, a North Carolina journalist/blogger who'd written a definitive case study of the Dean campaign, asked, with some disbelief in his voice, "So you had the most formidable campaign communications system ever devised," and yet couldn't say to supporters, "We're in trouble - we need your help"?
"The press is now reading the blog," Trippi replied. "This wasn't a private conversation."
...
Meanwhile, Dean's campaign cannot be simply written off as a burst dot-com bubble. However few delegates the candidate ultimately wins, he long ago changed history. He taught his fellow Democrats, in Trippi's words, "how to be an opposition party" -- and he forced his party to face the gulf between its leaders in Congress, who'd mostly supported Bush's Iraq war, and its voters, who largely didn't. He filled that "vacuum of debate" with a clamor that could not be ignored.
Elizabeth Lawley blogged from eTech on how hard it is to get conference-goers to deal with each other face-to-face
: [Here Pete is the author and I am the editor, MUAHAHAHHAHA, so I added this blockquote from Liz's blog, because it might be the money quote for Chapter 1. - ed.]So, anyway, dinner. It was a great reminder of the real-world rewards of this new electronic community Ive become a part of. Allan and I had a great time talking, laughing, eating, and sharing a bottle of wine. That kind of experience cements a friendship in a way that instant messenger just cant do. I dont use technology for the sake of using technology - at least, I try not to. I use it to enhance the things that I care about in my life - friends, family, my research. Yesterday afternoon I spoke to my kids over iChat audio. I arranged to meet Allan using email and IM. And I participated in great discussions about my areas of research interest during presentations. But all of those spill over into the real world, and I use them to enhance the real world, not replace it.
danah boyd's session/presentation from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2004 can be found online in text form at this location:
4) Finally, how do we create architecture that will allow for regulation through social norms? This is a huge challenge! Sure, we can all think back to MUDs and MOOs where social norms created the boundary cases of acceptable behavior. But we also all know the story of LamdaMOO and why it failed. The code that we build does not currently allow for rich regulation based on social norms. Trolls ruin it for all of us. This is part social problem and part technological problem. If we open our eyes to the social, perhaps we can figure out how to iterate on the technological?
The technology will not solve the social, but each design decision made in the technology affects the social. There is no formula though, no clear algorithm. No social scientist can predict what social behavior will emerge from each technology you build. But we can make sense out of what is going on and we can help you iterate.
The biggest trick in social software is to realize that, just like we can't predict the behavior that users will have, we can't force them into behaving the way we want them to behave while simultaneously giving them freedom to be social. The only thing that we can do is try to understand what is motivating new behaviors and figure out how to adjust the technology accordingly. We must recognize that, for any social software, disparate users will have disparate uses. But like any good city, we have to figure out how to create a live and let live environment, where those who want to visit XXX stores will do their thing without driving the moms with small children insane. You can't kill unwanted behavior without also killing desirable behavior. This is a design challenge, an architectural challenge and a social challenge. And, of course, a business challenge. If we want to make social software that meets the needs of a disparate group of people and not just ourselves, it's time to take up this challenge. Otherwise, we'll spend forever frustrated, failing to understand why other people aren't like us.
Joe Trippi: Q&A with Ed Cone (IT Conversation):
An 89-year-old guy called the headquarters one day and talked to my wife and said that he had been reading the obituaries every day because he was ready to cash it in, and that he heard Howard Dean on the radio that day and decided that he was going to stay and fight. This is true, this actually happened. This guy went out and brought a five-hundred dollar PC. He became the leader of his Meetup in Elsinore, California and became a leader in his community in terms of what was going on and used the Internet. He brought the five-hundred dollar PC so that he could read the blog and then he signed up for Meetup. He actually became the Meetup host in Elsinore California, and this is an 89-year-old guy who had given up. So a lot of these toolsI think the most important thing is how do we use the 'Net? The thing that we're just starting get to it's easy to build 670,000 people who say "Yes, you can e-mail me." and "Yes, I will check the blog", casual members of the thing, the effortIt's how do we build better tools to let them take those tools into the community? How do we make better tools to let them take this straight into their caucus and their area and I think that's one of the things the Dean campaign was still trying work out at the end.
Jeff Jarvis describes a conference that might look like The Power of Many:
I think it's time for somebody to to split off and spawn another conference devoted to the impact of Internet technology on our lives: e, the conference.
Day 1: Media...
Day 2: Marketing...
Day 3: Politics...
Day 4: The world...
Day 5: Education...Add in some BOF sessions on religion and such. Make technology, business models, and social implications a part of every day. Get plenty of bandwidth. Invite smart people. And, voila, you have a window on the future.
In the comments, Heiferman and Ito say they'd attend. Another commenter says, "Start it as a virtual conference/wiki and see where it goes...".
What the Deanies forgot (from The Hill.com) by Ben Goddard.
As reported over at RFB, Joe Trippi has started a new blog at Change for America. Since his first post was given number 6 by the MT software, I poked around a little to see if there were any earlier posts. 1 and 2 weren't there but 3 and 4 were test posts and 5 was a longer test post with a comment (all by DFA blogger/webmaster Niccolo Miele).
They might want to remove the test post! In case they do, here is the contents (I don't know the source) of Blessed Are the Quitters:
just another test entry to fill out the template
"Dear people, my name is Nicco and I'm only here for a few minutes today to encourage you and enlist your personal participation in an intentional act of change and necessary transformation. At the heart of such a proposition is the reality that no change is possible without letting go of something. In other words, you can 't take up unless you're willing to give up .... something.
Now, you might be wondered exactly what I'm getting at. Well, someone here today...shouldn't be. What I mean is that someone among us is not fulfilled to a degree sufficient to justify their staying as opposed to going. If only they would take a bold self-empowering leap and act for the sake of themselves and all of us here today. If only we could surround them with sincere, supportive encouragement and faith in their ability to secure a better future. If only they would QUIT.
That's right. I said it. You heard it. And you know it's true. Sometimes, more often than we are willing to admit, the right thing to do is quit. It is the first step to real change. In our culture, we teach people not to quit. We suggest that it is weakness that makes one quit. On the contrary, it is self doubt and weakness that keeps us from quitting. Quitting is cutting away from the security of the dock and putting out to sea, not to drift but to find the wind, trim the sails, and set a course for what you believe is out there waiting for you.
Just for a moment, ask yourself when was the last time you practiced a good quit. I suggest you reconsider your sens-abilities. Without the ability to quit, you're stuck. Free will? -- No way! But you can reclaim your power; you can rise up on your own two feet. You can demonstrate to yourself and everyone around you that you aren't going to sit down and take it easy any more. You may be half-talented, semi-lame, and somewhat self-deluded, but that doesn't mean your finished yet. You have the power and the power you have is the power to quit. I know you would like to, but you're afraid, unsure, tentative, wary, etc. Don't let that hold you back from your future. Trade in your half-empty glass and seek out a full cup. You deserve. You've been thirsty all your life, but you've relied on others to bring you that always partially filled glass of satisfaction. Stand up. Rise up. Quit!
What is your last strand of reservation tethering you to the berth you occupy? Is it that you are afraid of being -- listen carefully, I'm going to say it -- "a loser"? Don't cringe. The strong among us are all losers, but we're able to cut ourselves away. We want more. And when you really admit it, you're a loser, but you have never let yourself "loose". Free. Wild. Hopeful. Daring. Just quit.
Posted by Nicco at February 4, 2004 01:57 AM
Comments
wow, you're so articulate & smart. why don't you have your own blog?
Posted by: nicco at February 4, 2004 03:10 AM
I just commented on one of Pete's earlier posts The Power of Many: Book competition?, and that reminded me that I wanted to mention the status of public discussion of the book.
The associate publisher told me that it's OK to start mentioning the book in public (on my other blogs, for example) as long as I don't specify the publication month (but he said I can say summer), or other details of the book.
He also said that for now this blog should stay password-protected and its contents not yet made part of the public record for the book (eventually this site should focus on promoting the book). We would probably make this blog public in about a month? I forget the key milestone.
I can live with that, although I do have a sense that we shouldn't worry too much about competition knowing what we're doing any more than we mind looking at what else is out there as we inform ourselves about the ideas. That's just part of my "openness" ethic, in which I think the value of secrets tends to be overestimated.
As I said in my linked comment, of the three of four books that have been identified as competition, each seems to be framing these issues in a different way from PoM.
I suppose other publishers might be working on entrants into this area that we don't know about, so of course I am going to defer to the publisher's wishes. I just wanted to air my own preferences.
Here's a similar story: Someone from East Bay for Dean didn't like that my Oakland for Dean website had links to the local Kerry and Clark sites. I did this in the ethos of "does Macy's recommend Gimbel's?" - trusting the voter/customer to do their own analysis of the available information, and trusting them to come back to your site because of the content and message and dynamism there. I was told, however, that my site is a partisan site and linking to your opponent is "just not done." So, I deferred to their wishes and removed those links.
Joi Ito is soliciting examples for ... Emergent Democracy Worldwide discussion, and the commenters include Craig from Craig's List ("I'm involved with the San Francisco 311 program, which I'm treating as a genuine opportunity to reinvent government. ...they sound real") and Jeff Jarvis from BuzzFlash, who points to Hossein Derakhshan's Editor: Myself blog in Iran and the way it has spawned tens or hundreds of thousands of blogs there.
There are other good examples worth following up in the other comments.
So far, we are talking about international examples (Eastern Europe, Middle East, Asia, etc.) in the main politics chapter, but I wonder if there might be enough material for a separate chapter?
Add Matt Welch to the eTech blog watch list:
Trippi especially, but also some panelists (which have also included good ol' Doc Searls, and Cam Barrett, Dan Gillmor, Halley Suitt, Mitch Ratcliff, and MoveOn.org's interesting Wes Boyd), have used quite a bit of the "we," and "us" and "you." As in, "you really made this Dean campaign possible," etc. (not a direct quote). The idea being (though I'm caricaturizing here), there's just something about Cluetrain bloggy techism, insurgent populist campaigns & left-of-center political positions that go together like peas & carrots. Maybe that's true, but I honestly suspect that it's not. One of the best moments so far came when Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman made the point that some of the more active use of his site has been by dog owners, so they can have their "pug meetups," and chihuahua festivals & whatnot. (Also, he said the fastest-growing sector now are Heritage Foundation groups.) Point is -- this groovy tech business is allowing normal folks from wherever the hell to do what they like, and what they like is not going to necessarily lead logically to what some visionary Silicon Valley folks find to be of pressing concern.
Procedural question for xian: better to put up a new post for this kind of thing, or update the previous post?
Oakland Tribune feature: "Missed Connections" is a craigslist board for people who want to follow up on a random encounter:
Since it began, Newmark has watched Missed Connections grow from 100 to 4,000 posts a week, across the 34 cities the Web site serves. "Like everyone else, I really do hope that it works," Newmark says. "I'm a bit of a romantic." ...
Do the hunters ever nab their elusive bounty? "Once in a while, someone connects. It's just not very often," Newmark admits. "One person has to write it, another has to stumble onto it. It's a long shot. But romance is always a long shot."
In a series of BuzzMachine posts currently culminating http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_02.html#006176, Jeff Jarvis is covering eTech, political media, blogs, and the Dean campaign, but right now mainly eTech.
I wish I was there. Probably 20 of our contributors are there. I could knock out a few interviews a day, but then the people are probably all talked out, but still... it's a tough one to be missing.
An L.A. Times story on Dean's slide mentions more possible competition (emphasis added):
"The messenger exploded, not the message. The message has been adopted in part by other candidates and other causes," said George Washington University professor Michael Cornfield, whose book "Politics Moves Online" will be published later this month. "There are obvious lessons from the Dean campaign, but 'Do not use the Internet' is not one of those lessons."
That book has a December 2003 pub date on B&N and February 2004 on Amazon. Cornfield earlier wrote Democracy Moves Online (March 2002).
Blogging from eTech: Joi Ito, Jeff Jarvis (lots), Howard Rheingold (less), David Weinberger.
apophenia (in "processing trippi"):
What does it mean to have a candidate who can distribute their voices down the Internet channel as well as the TV channel? Everyone gets all excited because the Dean campaign had an interactive communication scheme online. What does that mean? How many people's opinions were changed this way? Somehow, i get the impression that the digital interactive environment allowed those with the same views to talk to others with the same views. This is *great* for support groups, but dreadful for changing the system.
Other early reports back from the pre-eTech "teach-in" also sound somewhat disappointed by Trippi's analysis of the campaign. There's lots of other great stuff in danah's post, including a distinction between digital campaignnng (in the sense of fundraising, media, get-out-the-vote, volunteers, etc.) and digital democracy, but the above quote might work well as an introduction to the chapter I'm submitting today.
In fact, it might be cool to start each chapter with a quote from a contributor and/or a contributor's blog.
S.F. Chronicle: CLICKING FOR CONNECTIONS: After a big splash, social networking sites (both business networking and dating) try to hold onto users.
Social networking, as the industry is called, has enjoyed phenomenal growth during the past year. Millions of Internet users have signed up with services such as Friendster, MeetUp and Tribe Networks, many of which are based in the Bay Area.
But the question remains whether the Web sites can keep users interested beyond the initial few months. After users link up with all their friends and browse their profiles -- then what?
Update: Also a similar article today from the NY Times.
Appears to be named, simply, eDemocracy.
A new site named MySociety.org is trying to develop public-benefit Internet projects:
MySociety.org is a new charitable project from a mixture of the people who brought you FaxYourMP.com and VoxPolitics. Our aim is to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served. For more info on our aims, click here.
From their FAQ:
Q. I'm not in Britain - does any of this matter to me?
A.Yes! Whilst our home country is the UK, we do not see ourselves as limited to it in any way. We will gladly speak to and work with people from outside the UK, and it is our hope and expectation that people around the world will be able to use and adopt the open source tools and services we develop for use in their own countries. We will even consider developing projects based in other countries, if appropriate funding can be found.
(link via David Weinberger's Loose Democracy)
Shirky's piece, linked below, refers to Steven Johnson's stevenberlinjohnson.com: My Theory About Dean's Demise: He Got Fewer Votes Than The Other Guys:
I've been quoted in a couple of places saying that the Dean campaign was more like a system running for President than a candidate, and I think the last month has illustrated the downside of that phenomenon, which is that all that attention paid to the blogs and the Meetups distracted everyone - the media, the voters - from the candidate himself.
In Many-to-Many: Exiting Deanspace, Clay Shirky begins
I wanted to wait 'til today's polls opened to post this, because I wanted it to be a post-mortem and not a vivisection.....
Daily Kos || Dear Terry, here's how to ask the blogs for support... (Matt Stoller, DFA)
I just noticed Brian Dear's comment on one of Pete or Cecil's posts (I only get the email notification if I wrote the post) and it reminded me that one interesting thing about pulling together my own network for this book and asking people for help and relying on people who make a commitment to do something, from participating in a conversation to writing something to reviewing things, etc., all of that is strengthening my relationships with people, and sometimes lately I've felt a bit like George Bailey at the end of It's a Wonderful Life who underestimated his impact on other people and the resilience of his web of relationships but now sees people coming out of the woodwork to help.
My other favorite metaphor for this form of collaboration is the Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence story.
Last month, before Iowa, Matt Stoller recounted some of the early history of the Dean (and Clark) online movements.
David Weinberger has a new Corante blog that's looking into the effects of the Internet on democracy, partly using the Dean campaign as an object lesson.
danah noticed the massive security hole that exposes private email addresses to any friends of your friends: apophenia: orkut pissyness, round 2.
She has other criticisms as well.
But the dating chapter is going to have to deal with some of this stuff frankly, such as this thing someone just forwarded to me: Lessons I Learned From Casual Encounters w4w - w4m
Caterina Fake explains why the backlash against social software among the most thoroughly wired blog technorati elite distracts from the fact that social software tools are useful for people who don't have long-crafted online social presences, in Caterina.net: Continued Enthusiasm for Social Networks.
The CAMPWARE initiative is a project of the Center for Advanced Media-Prague (CAMP), the aim of which is to develop and aggegate open-source software solutions for independent news media organizations. "CAMPWARE intends to provide a platform for collaborative software development, as well as financial support through project-related developments and a fellowship program." They have three main products so far:
We are pleased to announce that the 2.1.4 version of CAMPSITE, Campware's multilingual, Unicode-based web-content-management system for news sites has been released. ...
LOWLIVE is the streaming remote control to on-air FM transmitters. Developed primarily to allow radio transmissions to go on-air in crisis situations with minimal personal risk to journalists and station management, LOWLIVE can be used in any situation where remote access to a sound device is necessary. Audio content for the FM transmission will be delivered over the Internet. Accessing a computer connected to the radio transmitter from anywhere through the web, radio producers can upload their own content from remote for high quality transmissions, or simply relay existing web broadcasts to the remote transmitter. LOWLIVE allows to build continuous playlists or scheduled one-off events. ...
Campware is pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Cream, a free and open-source customer relationship management (CRM) system designed specifically to meet the needs of media organizations. ...
LOWLIVE is the one of the three with a real-world component, using the Internet to get on-air from locations and events where transmission might not otherwise be possible.
CNET covers both sides of the question—the Net alone can't elect you; it's hard to get elected without the Net—but the sidebar reads, "Bottom line: While Dean may not win the race, his success in raising money and awareness through the Internet has proven technology's strength as a tool in political campaigns."
Not much new (though the "so last year" line is good)—but have we already noted XFN "rel" tags?
Social networking sounds like a roundabout term for dating, and in some ways it is. A new Web site, Friendster.com, connects friends of friends in an ever-widening spoke-and-wheel linkage that draws on but goes beyond elements of pioneers Classmates.com and Match.com.
Despite its founder's protests, though, Friendster retains the feel of friends "setting up" friends online.
In some ways, Friendster is already so last year. Tribe.net may be the true friend connector, purporting to connect people looking for all kinds of things in common. A lot of its tribal connectivity has to do more with transactions, however, than sociability.
For Web loggers, XFN—the XHTML Friends Network—enables coding links to other bloggers with a "rel" (relationship) tag. With enough participation, tagging eventually can permit virtual friendship-building.
Also includes name-drop of Meetup, MoveOn, and Freecycle. (Via Online Business Networking Blog. Links added.)
NYTimes feature "As New Hampshire Nears, Few Can Recall a More Frenzied Final Weekend" says,
Bob Mulholland, a longtime adviser to the California State Democratic Party, came to Manchester on a candidate-shopping trip this weekend, and with a friend from the British Labor Party, he managed to sneak into the Dean event through a back door. He, too, expressed surprise [at the crowded conditions]. "I think the Internet has changed crowd-building completely," Mr. Mulholland said.
[via filchyboy at rfb] Wanted: personal social network coordinator:
newyork.craigslist.org > manhattan > admin/office jobs > Wanted: personal social network coordinator last modified: Mon, 26 Jan 12:50 ESTemail this posting to a friend
Wanted: personal social network coordinator
Reply to: job-23123114@craigslist.org
Date: 2004-01-25, 10:33PM EST
Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.Your responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.
Specific duties include:
- approving or rejecting invitations of friendship
- managing a database of usernames and passwords for each of the social networking sites
- sending out friendship invitations
- keeping my social network synchronized; that is, invite friends from one social networking site to be friends in all of the other social networking sites
- handling requests by friends to be introduced to another friend that they might not know
- keeping track of my current likes & dislikes and updating my personal information within each service accordingly
- writing testimonials for friends
- various "damage control" functions when rebuffed "non-friends" become upset due to non-acceptance of their offers of friendship
- continually browsing my friends' 1st and 2nd degrees for potential new friends and business contacts
- participating on any of the sites' message boards on my behalf
Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won't be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, "heavy", or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.
Benefits include addition as my friend in all of the social networking sites I belong to.
Copyright 2004 craigslist terms of use privacy policy feedback forum
Ever the contrarian, over on Many-to-Many Clay Shirky asks Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?
A few choice quotes:
We know well from past attempts to use social software to organize groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the real world. When you're communing with like-minded souls, you feel like you're accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom.
and
When the Clinton campaign used an MIT-furnished e-mail list in the 1992 campaign, they didnt use it socially, they used it as a fast cheap fax, and they used it to help them manage the traditional news cycle. Many of us assumed that this was the crack in the dam, and that online tools would become critical to organizing the voters themselves, first in 1996, and then in 2000, and we were surprised when they didnt.
Finally, when Dean (and Trippi and Teachout and Rosen) came along, we thought This is it these are the people finally making it happen! And in a way they are, by providing the model - all top 3 finishers in Iowa use MeetUp, and they all have weblogs. But the Dean campaign used those things organically, while everyone else is playing catch up. And many of us (self very much included) thought that the inorganic adoption of social tools by Kerry, Clark, et al left them at a disadvantage.
Now, though, Im not so sure. Maybe the adoption of those tools by a traditional campaign is a better way to fuse of 21st century organizing and 19th century Get out the Vote efforts. This would be especially true if these tools, used on their own, risk creating a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that doesnt translate to driving down to the polls in freezing weather.
Marc Canter defends the notion of hosted FOAF-speaking soscial network services in a dispute with those who argue for a more "distributed" approach. He is responding to
Cory Doctorow (Towards a non-evil social networking service) who quotes Foe Romeo (My social network ideal).
In his comments, I suggest that these two goals are not really at odds. The really issue is interoperability between hosted and distributed implementations.
(A note on chapter assignments to blog entries: Many technologies apply to both 7 (business networking) and 8 (dating), so I will log some entries to one category when they could as easily come up in the other. Multiple categories are possible but cumbersome.)
Think I ought to try to interview the Dean Goes Nuts guy? Perfect example of a spontaneous Internet community proposing an alternative narrative frame from the one that the TV-centric media apparatus is offering.
Here's the latest bit of hilarious collaborative creativity: Dean-Reloaded.mpg (video/mpeg Object)
Sunday's NYTimes carried an article ("Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again") claiming that the Internet suppresses the exchange of differing views. Bowling Alone's Putnam is quoted to the effect that the Internet is a tool and the verdict is still out on whether it will be for good or evil. But otherwise all quotes and examples given are on the side of this thesis:
Online political discussion has become so fragmented so quickly that some public policy scolds warn that the Internet is in danger of narrowing the spectrum of debate even as it attracts more participants to it. The same medium that allows people to peruse a near- infinite number of news sources also lets them pinpoint the ones they want and filter out the rest.
Blogger Jack Balkin disagrees:
Unfortunately, this article continues a meme that I have often found among progressive people-- that the Internet is bad for democracy. I think that this view is deeply mistaken. The Internet has its strengths and weaknesses, just like the traditional mass media have. The question is not whether the Internet is good or is bad for democracy. The key question is how the Internet changes the ways that democratic activities of organization, discussion, protest, and decisionmaking occur, and how the code of the Internet can be altered in different ways and different contexts to promote these different forms of democratic activity.
Had a great, nearly three-hour face-to-face interview with Mary Hodder today. We covered a lot of ground and I'll still be digesting what we talked about for years probably. One thing touched on was Orkut. More than once she mentioned blog entries she was partway through writing. She just emailed me to say that she had finished this one: Napsterization.org: Building a Social Network in 48 Hours
Mary would be a good candidate to peer-review the book. I'm thinking it might also be a good idea to get multiple people to each review single chapters as well.
I'll update with further links related to the interview when I have time. Off to a campaign meeting....
I'm interviewing Roger Karraker of 95346.com about the genesis of his site, its intentions, and how it works. We're doing the interview in the context of his blog. Here's a quotation from Roger's answer to my first question:
[Stewart] Brand surprised us all one day by saying that if he had his life to live over that he would want to be the editor/publisher of a village weekly. He thought that would be the most productive role possible.
Ed Cone: Another Internet bubble has popped.....
The Scobleizer has a blog post on a March 29-30 conference on social computing and e-democracy that will include Joi Ito, Steven Berlin Johnson, David Weinberger, Scott Heiferman, Zack Exley, and a ton more.
Got a call from Whitney Otstott, a Corporate Communications Manager in the PR group at Convio, which makes custom-relationship management (CRM) software for nonprofits. They are powering the Avon Foundation's breast-cancer run, and their same "TeamRaiser" software module powers many other walks and similar fundraising events, as well as the "personal fundraising bats" at the DeanforAmerica site.
Whitney is sending me some of their case studies so I can tell her which I'd like to ask them more about, and she is setting up an interview for me with their CEO where I'll try to get a broad overview and maybe some history: how Convio found its way into this niche, and where they see it going.
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training Program recently expanded so that people in remote areas, or in areas where there's not a local chapter, can train for races through an online program. They can still meet up with people on the weekends to practice, but they get their day-to-day coaching online. (A Sybex editor has some contacts at the SF chapter.)
A Sybex editor reports that a group of EastBay-ers who play kickball had been organizing their team meetings and adminsitration online, through the World Adult Kickball Assn. (WAKA). This is apparently huge in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and N.Y.
CNET news is reporting the launch of a personal project by a Google engineer, orkut.com, a trusted-network service similar to Match.com or Friendster. Article has a variety of insider bits about Google's possible expansion into social networking, including "Google itself has offered to buy Friendster, according to sources. Google declined to comment on rumors."
Online registration for my neighbors here in Oakland.
I asked Findory.com News why it was showing me this story:
Why was an article marked * Personalized * for me? Findory News thought you would be interested in the article "Injectable scaffold aids rebuilding of nerves, www.newscientist.com, Thu Jan 22 14:03:12 2004" because you read the following related articles: "Woman has giant tumour removed, news.bbc.co.uk, Thu Jan 22 09:01:52 2004."
Terri Gross interviewed Wes Boyd and Eli Pariser from MoveOn today and mentioned a right-wing advocacy group called RightMarch, run by a William Green, which took out an ad denouncing a MoveOn ad that accused (in the words of the family of a soldier in Iraq) Donald Rumsfeld of betraying his country.
Boyd also said that politicoes view MoveOn's fundraising as equivalent to direct mail except free, but Boyd insisted that it was a two-way (not broadcast) medium they were using interactively to learn from their membership and not just to raise money, although he allowed that it is easier to raise money this way than with direct mail (which he characterized as requiring extreme messages and dire warnings to stimulate people to give today).
A former Dean supporter who posted to the Blog for America that Dean's "scary" concession speech from Iowa had turned him off to the candidacy ended up being quoted in the New York Time today. He elaborates about it in a Daily Kos discussion thread.
We can now start to think about Chapter 2 in terms of outcomes and not just inputs. Dean's finish has to be part of the story; yes, he did a great job mobilizing people in real ways (babysitting, for crying out loud! As the Guiness ads say, "Brilliant!"), but we have to acknowledge that elections, at their heart, are about personalities, issues, and campaign styles. As just one placeholder link among many, here's today's Chronicle:
...Neither Dean nor Gephardt, who spent much of the campaign cutting each other in nasty political ads, was able to stop the bleeding.
...It was a very different Kerry on the stump the past few days. Instead of attacking Dean, he talked about his hope for the future and blanketed the state with ads that featured his war-hero past. ...
I'm sure the good turnout was in part the result of a competitive field, but was it partly due to Dean? Should be on the lookout for analysis:
More than 120,000 Iowa Democrats, twice as many as four years ago but still only one in five of the state's registered Democrats, braved the cold and snow to show up at the caucuses. A Fox News entrance poll showed that nearly half of those surveyed were attending their first-ever caucus.
Full Circle Associates is a consultancy focused on fostering online communities. It offers this Online Community Toolkit as a good jumping-off place for related resources.
Another organizing technique is Power mapping. This was developed originally by Ralph Nader's PIRGs. Here's a good link to the concept: Power Mapping: How to Identify and Contact The Key Individuals who will Help You Achieve Your Goal
Community asset mapping is a powerful organizing tool that involves identifying stakeholders in a community and then trying to find ways to involve them in your organizing campaign. I haven't found one single definitive reference for the topic, but here are a few links that explain the concept further: Asset Mapping: A Powerful Tool for Communities, ACVE - Community Asset Mapping, Youth Action Effecting Change - Mapping Manual.
O'Connell also told me about the pros and cons of the Parks 2001 NYC campaign, and her involvement in its Internet organizing aspect for Partnership for Parks.
Christine O'Connell, from Partnership for Parks in New York, gave me the benefit of her Internet organizing experience with Green Corps, specifically her role and the tactics used in the Heritage Forests Campaign to protect roadless areas in national forests.
In my conversation with Howard Rheingold, we talked about a three-part process, starting from people finding a virtual community in order to address some need, then - if possible - meeting face-to-face to plan activities, and then finally commiting to take some kind of collective action.
We talked about the motivating factors that can encourage people to cross over the threshold of seeking other likeminded people online and Rheingold encouraged me to take a look at Abraham Maslow's theory of a "hierarchy of needs".
Daniel Drezner (a moderate Republican) admits, in This is pure genius, "I confess to being in absolute awe of this Dean campaign tactic."
Roger Karraker is using TypePad and a number of other technologies to host a community site for Forestville called www.95436.com.
Political Wire: Shopping for a President Online:
Political Wire gets a nice mention (though they messed up my name) in an Atlanta Journal Constitution piece by Jeffry Scott. "Shopping for a president online won't change our electoral mechanics; the next president will still be elected by voters going to the polls. But the Internet empowers Americans to circumvent the political machines and barking-dog political analysts to appraise the candidates on their own."
blogforamerica links to an NPR story about Senior for Dean volunteers who have together written over 1500 letters to Iowa voters, in Keep Those Letters Coming!:
This morning National Public Radio profiled Daniel and Marie Riehl of Seniors for Dean, who have sent more than 1,500 handwritten letters to seniors in Iowa. Listen to it here. As Zephyr reported this morning from the People Powered Iowa Road Trip in Iowa:
C.B. told me about a seniors meeting they went to yesterday. One woman brought all the mail she'd gotten that day, all glossy stuff. She held it up and said, "look at all the money we're spending on this -- and then I got this personal, handwritten letter, and it really made an impression on me.""She kept repeating that it was handwritten," C.B. laughed, "it was HANDWRITTEN."
You've sent more than 170,000 letters to Iowa, and each one matters. But Iowa is just beginning. You've shown the commitment to fight for every single and caucus in this election--and no one said it would be easy. We've been piled on by the Washington establishment, the Bush Administration, and the national media, but we're still standing. We're in this thing for the long haul.Let's keep up our momentum rolling, and point your pens toward New Hampshire, and tell them why it's important to join your campaign and vote for Howard Dean. And sign up for Victory Days letter-writing events on January 18 and 25, when we'll be expanding our address list to South Carolina voters.
I had a good phone interview with Howard Rheingold this morning. A nice complement to the chat interview with David Weinberger. Talking to these guys who've done a lot of heavy thinking about social software and virtual community is a huge help in clarifying the important elements of these phenomena. I'll clean up my phone notes and email them to Pete and Cecil, to keep you guys in the loop.
Rob Morse wrote up Kos in today's Chron:
On a modest street in the flats of Berkeley there's a little yellow bungalow behind a shabby fence. It's one of those places you expect to find a pit bull, but instead you find a bright young mayor of a city of about 70,000 liberal activists, writers, kibitzers, kidders and some folks who clearly have a lot of time on their hands.
The city that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs isn't named Berkeley. It's called Daily Kos ("Kos" was Moulitsas' Army nickname) and it's a city in the metaphorical sense, reached by mouse and keyboard. ...
But he messed up the reference to Meetup (note "meet on the Web" instead of "use the Web to meet face-to-face"):
"We convinced Dean that they had to use the meet-up strategy," said the 32-year-old Moulitsas, referring to the process where like-minded people meet on the Web and get together to swap ideas and strategies. "Every time Trippi sees me, he'll point and say, 'It's your fault.' "
Someone in the tech4dean group pointed out this indyvoter.org tech documents site. Apparently, these are people who worked on Matt Gonzalez's (unsuccessful) insurgent SF mayoral campaign.
Meet the Press (Sunday, Jan 11) included a segment where the reporters (Tim Russert, David Broder, Roger Simon, Chuck Todd) explained, defined, and dissed blogs and such. Among the conventional-wisdom memes that turned up:
Amazingly, given his prior comments, Broder treated the Internet with the least disrespect. And at the end of the segment they did come round to the real-life-contact meme:
MR. SIMON: Dean has been accused for a long time of being just an Internet phenomenon, and his response has always been, If you think thats true, come out and see my crowds. You know, the Internet may have gotten 12,000 people to come out to a rally in Washington state, but people actually had to go and do it. They had to leave their basements and push aside their Burger King wrappers and actually get out in life, in public, which some of them dont want to do. And they do that for Howard Dean. His crowds are almost always overflow crowds.
MR. TODD: And this letter-writing thing that you talk about - that was done at the meet-ups, these monthly meet-ups. They write these letters. Theyre handwritten letters. You know, they did a poll, the Dean campaign, to find out how many likely Iowa caucus-goers said that they had received a handwritten letter to ask them to support any candidate; 70 percent said they had received a handwritten letter. Thats stunning.
Jeff Jarvis follows up on Johnson's post, noting that Deanspace (taken loosely as the aggregrate of Dean Internet presence and community tools, as opposed to the specific DeanSpace initiative) has thus far been more about process than substance, and proposes that the next president could appoint a Secretary of Interaction to help people's ideas "bubble up" from the grassroots.
Steven Johnson (founder of Feed, author of Emergence) wonders how Dean's web-presence would translate to a presidency in Internet-Era Democracy.
This reminds me that I wanted to interview Johnson for the book. Onto the list he goes.
In chapter 2, I talk about how the Blog for America functions as (among other things) a virtual "war roon" for the Dean Campaign.
E Pluribus Unum expands on this idea in "Annoy the media. Swing the bat.":
# This mechanism takes the "rapid response" of the Clinton campaign War Room look quaint. Clinton (or more accurately Carville and Stephanopolous) understood that charges must be answered in the same news-cycle in which they were made. They got very good at reaching their constituency through the mainstream news media. Go rent "The War Room," and excellent documentary account of the Clinton campaign of '92. You'll see what I mean.
# The Dean machine goes that one better by bypassing the mainstream media altogether; they don't seek to dominate the airwaves with expensive ads. No, the Deaniacs have their own network, a better way to reach their constituency -- free from bothersome regulations from the FCC, et. al. It evolved, not from the top down like the Bush machine, but rather everywhere, all at once, like crystals forming on an icy windowpane.
Let me put it another way -- in the early 60's savvy politicians understood that television was an advertising medium after all. Buy the time, advertise the message, reach your constituency. That idea transformed political campaigns for the next 35 years. It transformed the two-party system into the one-party system. In other words, unless you belonged to the Television Party, you weren't going to be elected.
To the Deaniacs, the Television Party and its supporting infrastructure (the "mainstream media") is irrelevant; furthermore, they probably hold it in as much contempt as the Bushies do. "Annoy the media. Swing the bat." They coalesced around another technology; the Web. They used the web to help them organize and communicate. And, unlike the mainstream media which relies on one-way broadcasts, the Web is two-way -- send directly to your constituency and receive back directly from your constituency. You bypass all the bothersome layers and gatekeepers in-between.
Academicians have a fancy word for this: "disintermediation." This is what the Internet has meant to the Dean campaign -- the mainstream media has been effectively bypassed and/or removed as an intermediary between candidate and constituency.
It ain't a new phenomenon. Rush Limbaugh figured this out decades ago when he popularized the current talk-radio format. What, after all, is talk-radio except a fusion of radio broadcast technology fused with the two-way channel called a "telephone."
Dean's people (many of them young and very much at home on the Web) are figuring out a new paradigm now. They are popularizing the use of blogs for campaign organizing and fund-raising.
Where right-wing constituencies have dominated talk-radio, left-wing constituencies have an early jump on dominating campaign blogs.
Win or lose, the Deaniacs have pushed political campaigns into the next phase. The 60's paradigm of harnessing the advertising medium of television is now history, it's old school.
Oddly enough, very few in the mainstream media (Frank Rich of the NYT is a notable exception) realize the enormity of what Dean's supporters have achieved. Oh, I know -- conventional wisdom says the Dean is the "techie candidate." I'm not talking about that, because even that misses the real point (as evidenced by a recent poll debunking that silly idea).
Dean is not the "techie" candidate any more than FDR was the "radio" candidate or JFK was the "TV" candidate. Those candidates understood and exploited the technology to carry their message to their constituency. But they still had to have a message that called their constituency to action.
Writing at TomPaine.com, political operative Richard Blow (former editor of George) says Dean is unelectable; what's relevant for PoM is this bit of conventional wisdom:
A lot of Americans read the Bible. Somehow, I don't think that Howard Dean is one of them. 'Netheads may not care, but Internet geeks aren't exactly a big voting bloc. Religious people are.
Should have blogged this when it first appeared. While Everett Ehrlich's WaPo article, Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below (washingtonpost.com) makes the erroneous assumption that Dean is potentially building a third party, his article was nonetheless rather influential when it appeared (it is also rebutted to some extent over at GreaterDemocracy.org).
Here's a key excerpt:
For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates - John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark - are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy. Perhaps that's why former vice president Al Gore's endorsement of Dean last week felt so strange - less like the traditional benediction of a fellow member of the party "club" than a senior executive welcoming the successful leveraged buyout specialist. And if Dean can do it this time around, so can others in future campaigns.
Joan Blades suggested that this Salon article (requires premium subscription or viewing of an interactive ad), MoveOn moves up, by Michelle Golberg, is "one of the best at describing MoveOn."
Note that the Club for Growth, which is making headlines right now with its advertisement attacking Howard Dean's supporters in Iowa as a "tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show," has started its own organization, MoveRight.org, whose name seems to be an homage to MoveOn's.
Since I'm digressing, Atrios wondered how his mirror-image taunt might be received:
Double Standards on Regional Bigotry
Imagine if I ran an ad which went something like "George Bush should take his negro lynching, anti-intellectual, pig feet eating, sister-screwing, wife beating..." before the farmer's wife then finishes the sentence: "... KKK-loving, right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs."
Mine's slightly more over the top than the actual Club for Growth ad, but it's no more incorrect. For some reason it's perfectly valid to make just about any regional stereotype about the Hollywood and Northeastern "elite," (which, we should remember, was just code for "JOOs and Negro-lovers"), but people get all sensitive when one stereotypes the South and Texas. I don't think such regional stereotypes are particularly enlightening or useful, but nor do I think their invocation should provoke the kind of outrage that genuine racism should. But, why the double standard?
Of course, the amusing thing about the Club for Growth ad is how wrong it is - Vermont is not part of the "elite Northeast" to the extent that it exists, it's a small rural farm state.
...for the record, Vermont has precisely two Starbucks for all those latte drinkers to go to.
Aldon Hynes, of Greater Democracy pointed me to a few of his essays, including The Internet and the Large Group: Technological Possibilities in a New Age, a paper presented to the Association of Internet Researchers about how Aldon decided who to support in the 2004 Democratic primaries, and " ... some old stuff about Social Networks and Neural Networks. Random thoughts that I never completely got together.... ".
Mitch Ratcliffe's blog has a New Year's Day post about finding a middle method between the anarchy of plebiscites and the totalitarianism of party hacks. Again, his work is all about politics and not the broader uses that The Power of Many will dig into, but he's on the mark that politicians don't have enough motivation to listen to ordinary voters, and that intiatives and recalls are overreactions to this.
Noted on the Well (and at my breakfast table): More media coverage of Howard Dean and his campaign in this week's New Yorker, and in today's Salon.
In the BlogAds weblog, Henry copeland writes:
I had lunch last week with Ed Cone last week in Greensboro. Ed took the first and most exhaustive look at Dean's Internet Strategy, and lots of journalists have since followed in his path.
We debated whether Howard Dean's Internet tactics might work in local campaigns this year, specifically for the NC campaign of
ChesterErskine Bowles for Senate.I think Ed is right that blogs + Meetup could make a big difference in the NC contest, particularly in a tight race. I agree that a little effort could catalyze dozens of 'Bowles blogs' by June. But I'll stick to my guns on my third argument: well-established institutions and inside players are too often willfully blind to new tactics and technology, particularly when the technology upends the power structure they've built their lives and bank accounts around.
So, no Bowles blogs this year in NC unless someone outside the Democratic apparat pushes them.
During the awkward transition from the Draft Clark movement to a more formal campaign, Stirling Newberry wrote this open letter to the Clark Movement warning about the dangers of taking the grassroots support for granted.
(Stirling still posts to the ClarkSphere blog, as well as to the Blogging of the President site run by Christopher Lydon and Jay Rosen.)
From Eschaton:
I passed up the opportunity to participate in a live Clark Chat (I can never come up with decent interview questions). But, a bunch of bloggers are going to be asking questions of the general and you can "listen in" using IRC at 5PM EST today.irc://irc.forclark.com Read-Only Channel: #wireside You'll need an IRC client like MIRC. Or, I think you can just watch it live on this page.
This paper, by Joi Ito, Emergent Democracy, is another influence on the book and a candidate for inclusion if we do incorporate an appendix of essay-reprints from the Web.
A sign of the times? Welcome to Ex-Deaniacs for Clark!
Stop Howard Dean Now - Don't Drink the Kool Aid (there's also a YahooGroup for this "movement").
The Second Superpower is Jim Moore's influential paper from last March.
Along with Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy paper and Ed Cone's Marketing of the President article, I would nominate this as a candidate for inclusion in toto in the book, if we do decide to reprint essays as part of the content.
Either way, it is influencing my thinking.
Des Moines Register columnist Marc Hansen writes about the handwritten letters Deansters are writing to Iowans at their Meetups:
Dear Howard Dean backer,
Thanks for your personalized, handwritten, single-spaced, two-page letter. No, it wasn't addressed specifically to me. And at first I wondered what was going on - some guy with perfect penmanship and a California return address writing my wife out of the blue. Whom does she know out there that I don't?
But when I gently ripped the letter out of her hands and read it, my mind was at ease. It was obvious, Pen Pal, you were only after her support in the Iowa caucuses.
Since then, I've heard from other Iowans who received the same kind of anti-form letter. Do the Dean people miss anything? Such attention to detail has to be a big reason their man leads the pack as Jan. 19 approaches.
I can't remember exactly what you wrote about your favorite presidential candidate, but I do remember marveling at the time and effort. Even if you wrote the same letter to a dozen of us here in Caucusland, it still beats the standard mass mailing.
A few Iowans might tell you to mind your own business. Some of us hate it when outsiders tell us how to think. We're funny like that. Still, it was a nice touch.
So I thought the least I could do was write back and let you know how it's going on this end.
It's true what the pundits are saying. Yes, they're freezing their laptops off. Yes, Sunday's debate went well for your man Howard.
As the front-runner, he weathered the attack everyone knew was coming. He held his ground. He talked up a storm about health care, tax cuts, free trade and other issues. He showed the usual command.
Joe Lieberman was outspoken old Uncle Joe. Hard-nosed and relaxed at the same time.
John Kerry had a cutting anti-Bush line about actually knowing what it's like to be on an aircraft carrier. Everyone was so busy ganging up on Dean, though, you wondered if anyone noticed.
Dick Gephardt, who's been in Congress since St. Louis was considered the West Coast, talked about the important bills he helped pass and the important people he can call on to help get things done.
Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun were likable yet hopeless underdogs.
Lots of people fell in love with the boyish charm of John Edwards. As soon as the national media figure out he's really only 29, though, he's through.
Which brings me to the meat of this letter. Things are going well for Dean, but they can always get better. Is there any way, for instance, you can thaw him out, loosen him up a bit?
He talks a decent game. If he doesn't really know his stuff, he sounds as if he does.
But whom are we dealing with here? Who is this guy? Give us a glimpse of the man.
The average voter is as interested in NAFTA as the next semi-alert citizen of the free world. But what the average voter really wants to know is what kind of person he's dealing with.
If the trust is there, the free trade takes care of itself. Can we trust Howard Dean?
One of the more telling moments Sunday came when the candidates were asked about the biggest mistakes they've made as elected officials. It's the classic job-interview question. The idea is to take one of your strengths and trot it out as a weakness.
Edwards voted for the No Child Left Behind bill, mistakenly believing, he said, the president would take it from there.
Lieberman said that as a young state senator he was more concerned with the rights of criminals than victims.
Gephardt said he voted for the early Reagan tax cuts.
Kerry failed to defend himself under "withering attack" in the first race he ever ran.
Braun learned the hard way the opposition would criticize her even when it wasn't deserved.
Dean said he misquoted Edwards.
"I wrote him a letter of apology, and I apologize again today."
Not bad, but not as good as Kucinich who, as the mayor of Cleveland, fired the police chief live on the 6 o'clock news.
"On Good Friday," he added, asking whether anybody could top that. "But let's say that in the years since, I have learned a certain amount of diplomacy."
Even though nobody on the panel agreed with him about pulling out of Iraq, Kucinich instantly became more genuine, more likable, more truly human.
You told me, Pen Pal, why Dean deserves Iowa's support. I'm telling you how he might be able to nail it down. Just trying to help.
"Gina in Texas" posted this reply to the Blog for America comment thread (on an unrelated matter, today's NPR radio-only debate):
I emailed a response to the Des Moines Register opinion column by Marc Hansen today. The link was posted in a previous blog thread by anamericanabroad and pointed out again by Larry in Austin, thanks. Click my name if you want to read the piece.
My response started out as a short note, then something happened.... oh well, I guess I needed to get it out on paper. Virtual paper, anyhow! It follows for anyone who cares to read through it--I actually doubt Mr. Hansen will!
Peace
--------------------
Dear Mr. Hansen,I'm one of those out-of-state Dean supporters who is handwriting letters to Iowans. I of course wonder how they will be received, and thanks for letting us know what at least one Iowan thinks about the idea!
We appreciate the "thaw him out" advice too, although it's funny: Even today, we still hear criticism from pundits and politicians that Dr. Dean comes off as _too_ angry or hotheaded. His supporters don't think he's "all about anger." I'm not on the campaign plane with him, but I would say the doc is showing a calmer--one might almost say, "kinder and gentler"-- side to blunt such criticisms.
I realize some Iowans won't appreciate their letters, but I trust that most take them in the spirit in which they are intended: We outside Iowa know that y'all have a huge say in who becomes the Democratic nominee, and we just can't help wanting you to have the views of the nation on a topic of national importance.
I don't know what the California man who wrote the letter to your wife said, but I point out in my letters (I've written seven, all a bit different) that I have never before volunteered in any political campaign. I feel encouraged to get involved, on one hand, by my feeling about the current administration. No, it's not anger, though sometimes I do get angry at some events or pronouncements. It's more like disdain, or maybe disgust... Frankly, the best way to describe it is that I'm appalled, and there doesn't seem to be a noun for that (apallation, appalledness I wonder why there isnt one?).
I feel encouraged to volunteer for another reason: The Dean Campaign itself, which consists not only of "HQ" but of the thousands upon thousands of people of all ages from all walks of life, across the political spectrum: Progressives, Independents, a big cross-section of Democrats, Greens, Libertarians and even a sizable chunk of Republicans fed up with the administration's warping of what they thought their party stood for.
We're a big group, creative, generous with our time and money even when that time and money are already stretched to the limit by our own private lives. We're passionate in our support. "HQ" gives us trust and opportunity to take the ball and run with it, and that empowered feeling is a breath of fresh air for the Democratic Party.
We also, like our candidate, are not perfect, like all other human beings on the planet. But we are in there slogging to collectively out-think, out-organize and, well, "out-inspire" any other candidate. No matter what the outcome in November, we have built and are continuing to build a political community that I believe will be a force to reckon with for many years in American politics. More people, more diversified, more informed, more engaged, more connected.
And connected not just by the Internet, though that is a wonderful tool, but by personal outreach transcending all borders and social strata. People from California and Texas and dozens of other states are not only writing letters, they are getting on buses and planes and driving their cars into the Iowa winter to shake people's hands, talk to them, look them in the eye, connect with them.
We've done it in Arizona and New Mexico as well, and will do it in every state. Doesn't matter if some "expert" has written off the state as unwinnable for Dean or the Democrats; we will be there, largely under the radar of the news media, encouraging people to take back their power: one person, one vote, one newly aware and engaged individual at a time.
Dr. Dean and his campaign have awakened me and many others from our slumber, where we dreamt we would always have the freedoms this country was founded upon, and the opportunities, if we bothered to exercise them, to affect political life. We are ready now to go to work for those freedoms and for a true representative democracy of, by and for the people, with executive leadership accountable to _us_, not just a handful of big donors and major corporations.
The evolution of this movement is continuing, and no one can say for sure what it will look like in a year, or five. It is my belief that the awakened grassroots will thrive. With empowerment retaken and methods learned, we will find more dragons to slay, and I daresay a few windmills at which to tilt. But we will do it together, creatively, welcoming all who want to rebuild America as a ... [post gets cut off here]
Posted by: Gina in Texas at January 6, 2004 03:27 PM
Condemnation of Hitler ad and MoveOn.org.
craigblog: reinventing government? or, am I fooling myself?
Hey, if you're curious, I've just agreed to help the city take a look atthe way SF city departments plan to use information tech to provide bettercustomer service and other stuff.
Specifically, the biggest deal is a problem tracking system for the city.You would be able to report a problem, get a tracking number, and actuallysee that it gets resolved.
I'm also interpreting this as helping city department managers makethemselves more accountable to the people who work for them. (I alwaysassume that line workers know more about their jobs than their managers.)
I'm a little worried that this exercise could be taken as a photo op or something like that... but I'm committed to something much more than that.
Does this make sense?
Observations from the first meeting:
First thing... I wonder "what am I doing here?" That's my inner nerd talking.
The crowd is very ethnically diverse, which might not mean anything beyondthe short run. It does remind me that whatever one does on the Net maynot benefit people without access.
I see a lot of people who are also wondering what this is about, and get astrong sense that people are here out of a vague sense of civic duty. They want things to be better, but have little sense of power.
Some of the more populist folks, including myself, gather together to protect ourselves from unanticipated conservative dangers. We wonder if this is a sting operation designed to separate us from the herd.
I remember the joke about not wanting to know how sausage or law is made.
One reason I'm here is because I trust Mike Farrah, who will either becomethe Leo McGarry or Joshua Lyman for the city. I feel like Toby: I'm the guy who does the thing. Am I fooling myself? Should I dive incompletely, or give myself a day or two off?
More to come ...
Tom Coates has thought a lot about moderating and facilitating online communities:
A few months ago I responded to a site that claimed The Internet is Shit with a reposte designed to illustrate that although our networks might contain difficult and unpleasant material, they also contain enough of value and facilitate enough legitimate and real communities to be able to state pretty conclusively that The Internet is not Shit. Note - not that it's perfect, not that it doesn't have flaws, not that bad things don't go on in it, but that pound-for-pound it's more useful and valuable and community-generating than it is useless or damaging or culture-destroying.
Over the last few days, the post has turned into a bit of an argumentative arena, with various posters weighing with positions on what constitutes utopian rhetoric versus what constitutes a reasonable and rational position about the possibilities of (among other things) online communities. Throughout this article various people - myself included - have stumbled in our logic, presented clumsy opinions and misunderstood each other. Nonetheless, I want to pick up one particular fragment of these arguments - a fragment that I feel strongly about and am prepared to fight vigorously about. It's about the authenticity or otherwise of online 'communities'. At a certain point in the debate, my sparring partner posts:
"We're not talking about abstract information - which is expedited magnificently over the internet - we're talking about flesh and blood people. An actual meeting is far more meaningful than tapping on a keyboard. It is substantially different. Physically congregating with other folk is the same as being on the internet as is reading a book about Tibet compared to actually going there. Or reading a menu and eating the food. You can't reduce and flatten the physical, sensory, emotional, kinaesthetic and social world in that way."Now I'm going to agree with the premise that the particulars of the medium through which people communicate can add a timbre to a community and that they can faciliate certain parts of the exchange more effectively than others. On the other hand, I'd also argue that the qualities of the community space are supprted by the software that they run on, and that quite possibly that software hasn't yet - in the ten/twenty years that it's been being developed - quite achieved the elegance and sophistication that we take for granted in some other social spaces. But the one thing I will not stand for is this sense that online communities are somehow inauthentic because they are unphysical - or that the truncation in social 'signal' somehow reduces them down to a point of uselessness or redundancy. So excerpts from my reply follow:
Your analogies are hideously flawed for a start - if I communicate on the internet or by phone with someone, it's not like a transcript of that person or a decription of that person. You're talking as if whenever you talked to people who weren't present physically (say via the telephone), that what you were actually doing was listening passively to bloody recordings! Of course they're not - it's not bloody radio! People are talking to each other!
Now obviously there are things that you can do in person that you can't do physically online. It's harder to guage someone's mood, it's harder to have sex with them, it's harder to get intonation or a tone of voice. But it's still communication! And the possibility of community still exists! I mean, there are many circumstances in which certain elements of the experience an interaction can be truncated - if you're on a phone for example and can't see the person concerned, or if they're wearing sunglasses so you can't see their eyes, or if you're actually bloody deaf and are forced to lip-read, for Christ's sake! But none of these things stop the possibilities of communication, and none of them stop people being supportive, helpful, useful, friendly or even forming communities through them. I work on the internet, and often my first experience of people is online. Sometimes my only experience of them is online. And yet we can be friends! Most of them have helped me out in some ways in the past, and I've helped most of them out in the past as well. Those I haven't met, I'd like to and those I have I see regularly. But that our relationships have moved sometimes from purely online to a mix of both online and off doesn't mean they weren't real to begin with.
You talk about 'tapping on a keyboard' as if touching keys was the entire point. You're confusing the method of communication with the communication itself. It would be like me saying, "There's a substantial difference between communicating with someone (online) and just causing air to vibrate with your vocal chords". It's trivialising, innaccurate, clumsy and - frankly - stupid.[I should apologise at this point for resorting to name calling in the final line - put it down to frustration.]
There's a lot more to the argument that's worth reading and talking abotu on the post itself, but I just thought I'd ask do people still think that the term 'online community' is necessarily an oxymoron? Do you really think that the fact you're interacting through your fingers dramatically limits the strength of the relationships you can make?
[plasticbag.org]
Like most normal people, I was just having an interesting telephone conversation with a friend of mine (at 2am) about Google, Yahoo, Friendster, on-line marketplaces, approximate searches, and some secret stuff. Along the way I got to thinking about some of the fundamental similarities between Google (those who mapped the relationships among web pages and put them to use) and Friendster (those trying to map human relationships and put them to use).
It occurred to me that Friendster needs FriendRank. Like Google's similarly named dead technology, PageRank, think of FriendRank as a way of providing a measure of influence among "friend nodes" in a social network. Imagine, for example, that Howard Dean wants to convince me to vote for him. He can either advertise in the hopes of reaching me, or he can be a savvy Internet sorta guy and try to use my social network (thru the Internet, of course) to do the job.
At first you might think okay, that's easy. You just need to find the shortest path thru the network from Howard Dean to me. Then you'd figure out who along the way he needs to contact to try to get to me. Well, maybe. Social networks aren't that simple. They don't always use the shortest path--at least not in the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" sense. Often times they use the most well lubricated path. Or the path that may result in reaching the greatest number of people who are "close" to me. Or those that have more influence with me in matters of politics, as opposed to something complete unrelated like cat grooming.
You get the idea. Like PageRank, it's a multi-dimensional measure that could prove to be quite powerful if applied properly. It's like a routing problem with different dimensions involved.
FriendRank would quantify that stuff. It's the algorithm used to find paths of social influence in various contexts, for various purposes, and in varying networks. Or maybe it's the value that algorithm produces for a given set of inputs. Either way, it's the idea that counts, right? Initially. Then comes the implementation.
Now, if you go search for references to FriendRank, you'll see a few. So this term (and idea?) isn't exactly original. But some of the real possibilities just clicked for me about 10 minutes ago, and believe me, this example is the tip of the iceberg. Some of the discussion here is really, really missing the point. So try not to get sucked into that void.
(Yes, I'm purposely not saying a lot of what I could yet. It needs time to percolate...)
On a semi-related note, it's too bad there's no Friendster web service API I can use to get the data needed to prototype this, huh? That could be a lot of fun. Or really frustrating, as most hard problems are... :-)
On the other hand, Friendster is not a necessary component in the equation. (Or Tribe.net, or LinkedIn, or...) It's just damned convenient since it's big and centralized. If I could get access to enough IM buddy lists, blogrolls, and so on, it'd be doable but much, much harder.
Okay, bed time now.
[Jeremy Zawodny's blog]
Derek Powazek, of fray.org and many other community projects, announces his engagement on his personal site: She Said Yes.
Probably want to talk to him at some point.
I had three goals for today:
I expect to write about ten pages a day tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday, mixing in interviews each day as well, so I can wrap up the first draft of the chapter fairly early (target is 35 pages) on Friday.
If some people prove elusive, may need to drop in placeholder notes here and there pending getting some feedback, quotations, insights from those missing names.
Pete:
Donald Wildmon is the founder of American Family Assn, , has a big Action Alert network and is very effective at getting members to communicate to politicians.
Lou Sheldon is chairman of Traditional Values Coalition.
I don't know about TVC's grassroots success or effect, because Sheldon is a very big media hog and gives the impression that his is a one-man show; Wildmon started out that way, and still signs a lot of press releases, but otherwise keeps more to the background now. (Wildmon was originally a Methodist, Sheldon originally a Presbyterian. But both are now much more fundamentalist than those denominations.)
Wes Boyd is, of course, cofounder of MoveOn
townhall.com ("The Conservative Movement Starts Here") reports on
conservatives using Meetup.Other random political groups but without knowing whether they're relying
on digital tools:right:
Christian Coalition (Pat Robertson), Family Research Council (Gary Bauer)
Pete:
Various sites are set up for kids to go and play, chat, learn, build their own webpages. Some also act like personal organizers. A friend pointing me to Kiddo Net led to me finding that they're categorized on Google as Kids and Teens: People and Society: Online CommunitiesOn carpools, all I'm able to find are regional transit sites, like Rideshare Online, not smaller-scale group organizing sites, though there are software makers with scheduling apps for carpools and such.
(FastCompany article from 1999 on organizing busy families but of course, that's two Internet ages ago... though it does remind me about WatchMe! and other sites that let working parents look in at day care centers, something that seems to have dropped off the meme-dar.)
Pete:
Almost every kids' soccer league in California has its schedules (field and referee assignments, dates/times) and tournament data on a website:
CCSL, Yourth Soccer.Little League online, not much more than info.
Tons of companies offer Web site construction and forum/community tech for
sports teams: eTeamz, League Pro, HotStat.
CHARITY: Potential main case study: breast cancer two-day walks. ... keep track of meetings, arrange buddy training walks, enlist donor pledges there.
Pete also wrote
I found the "arts orgs go online" reference that's been nagging me. It's an old program, though, no longer kept up: OpenStudio.
I knew of a couple of Bay Area theater groups that explored this in the late 90s; I remembered it as more "connected" than simply building better websites. The main idea was, if we train some folks how to build sites for their organizations, it'll be part of their brief to go out and train folks at other organizations.
Most of the arts groups that have something actually happening online (beyond informational sites, box office, and perhaps discussion forums) are either digital galleries or basic volunteer sign-up.
Online fundraising for nonprofit arts orgs (Idealist.org is a wider civic-action site).
Resources for arts orgs:
Colo Arts, Oriscus, Amer Assn of Community Theatre,
Network for Good.
Liza Sabater at Culture Kitchen is working on some online arts projects as well.
online chat sessions with local candidates or candidate info
Online help (with audio) for students who failed state testing
Sierra Club. International has a page to let visitors send boilerplate letters to politicians on various topics. N.J. chapter has a Sierra Activist login feature but I didn't test drive it. Source: EnvSite.
OA has find-a-meeting plus info pages
Veterans.net also has an online pager network.
Soldiers Radio lets visitors record a message on an 800 number, which can be played back by soldiers with web access.
Many webrings and chat rooms for veterans...
CyberFeminism: Univ.
thesis project site encourages women and girls to use the Internet for
feminist activism and for finding feminist resources.
Pete wrote:
Another possible case study (though it's yet another big organization instead of a grassroots effort) is the American Red Cross: they use their database to send reminders to blood donors, to schedule appointments at the next blood drive, and to recruit donors to other activities like disaster preparedness training. Blood drives are at GiveLife.org; int'l HQ is at RedCross.org.
moveon.org gets dinged by fox and the WSJ for having a short movie on their site that compares Bush with Hitler. Could be an anecdote re the risks of decentraliziation -- they had no idea the movie was even posted, but folks react as if they'd made the movie themselves.
Bob Jacobson, from Dean Leaders, notes:
Yahoo! Groups : onlinefacilitationIt's amazing how little examined Yahoo Groups are, given their centrality to the Dean campaign.
I did a search and turned up this moderated Yahoo group, Online Faciliation, which I've joined. (I've not yet confirmed.) The messages are rich, plentiful, and from recognized experts.
This looks very good. I recommend other DLs running YGs consider becoming members, also.
Full Circle Associates, organized around expert Nancy White, could be a source of help, although it's a commercial enterprise.
For more general info, I recommend that DLs read WELL co-founder Cliff Figallo's most recent book on online community. Cliff lives in Sonoma County and should be accessible to us for occasional consultation.
Howard Rheingold was the guy who set Trippi off in the first place. He's in Mill Valley, CA, and likewise should be available for occasional help, maybe an online seminar for Dean Leaders: Rheingold Associates
Rodney pointed out this game/chat/virtual world service: welcome to blah! usa.
Aldon Hynes (of Connecticut for Dean and DeanSpace and Tech4Dean and Greater Democracy) outlines some of the principle of Open Source Peer to Peer Democracy at the Greater Democracy group-blog website.
Andy Baio's open, RSS-generating shared event-scheduling service, Upcoming.org.
Eric Raymond's famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay on open-source philosophy is often quoted by people in the Dean campaign's tech corps (and probably the Clark people as well). Rayne of Rayne Today, one of my contributors at RFB, pointed to it as a good template with many political anologues worth exploring.
A reminder to try to contact someone at the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations Network, possibly my old schoolmate Justin Burke, who works at Soros Foundations Network.
George Soros would be a great name to write a foreword, but then again someone like Craig Newmark may have even wider, less politically polarized appeal.
My own essay from Radio Free Blogistan continues to generate new incoming links, from increasingly influential nonprofit- and activist-oriented weblogs, such as this one: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Weblog Strategies for Non-Profits
Mitch Ratcliffe is working with Jon Lebkowski on an Emergent Democracy book project for O'Reailly: RatcliffeBlog -- Mitch's Open Notebook: Some notes on emergent democracy
Ed Cone's hugely influential article, The Marketing of a President covers a lot of the key elements of the Dean Campaign case study (along with the subsequent Wired article, blogged earlier - I'm catching up on the our email backlog of link-exchange that preceded the book proposal).
Howard Rheingold writes,
My name is Howard and I am a Technorati addict
in BlogPulse: More Emergent Stuff, a journal entry at TheFeature (motto: It's All About The Mobile Internet).
Also via Susan Mernit.
PLINK - People Link (via Susan Mernit's blog)
John Robb points out that intentional actions are required, and not just a hub-and-spoke architecture. (via buzzmachine)
David Weinberger (guesting at Many-to-Many) points to a problem inherent to social software:
[R]eal social networks are always implicit. The ones constructed explicitly are always - yes, always - infected with a heavy dose of social bullshit. Its like thinking that the invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because hes your cousin and you couldnt invite Marsha because then youd have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.
A commenter writes re The Decembrist: Dean's Penguin, or Technology and the Nature of Political Interaction:
I think you've identified the real innovation here, namely the decentralization of the campaign. Everything else just a tool to bring it about.
Oddly, the example is a hacked LiveJournal account: SecurityFocus HOME News: Defenses lacking at social network sites
Om Malik's Broadband Blog: My Network, My Way!
The question I have is: why the F**K should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities. They are like BlogSpot that does nothing for my brand equity and in many ways chews me out after making the network connections. Thus what I want is a "Movable Type" of social networking. Blogs took off because it was about one person - me. My social networks should be of my making for me. Lets figure out a way to cut out the middlemen.
At The Blogging of the President: 2004, Sterling Newberry points out that if it were just a matter of Internet presence, Kucinich would be a contender in the presidential nomination race.
Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
(A Clay Shirky keynote from O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference last April.)
Christopher Allen compares Friendster, Ryze, LinkedIn, Tribe.net, and a few other misc. services in his Life with Alacrity blog. He also has a more extensive followup to his earlier post with some comments from others.
My brother gave me the name of a person at Partnership for Parks in NY who worked on green-grassroots efforts there and has some stories to tell about what worked and what didn't.
My friend at Yahoo tells me that Yahoo Personals is one of the companies big moneymaking successes and that Match.com has about 40% of the market and YP has about 35% and the rest have single digits. He says he can put me in touch with the person in charge of Yahoo personals, as well as someone who deals with Yahoo Groups, which seem to be the first choice of a lot of grassroots organizers as a very quick and easy way to set up a mailing list, archive, database, and list of files and links.
Finally, I need to follow up again with Ed Cone. I know we're now talking about me not using a coauthor so I need to go back and see if he really doesn't have the time to help out, as he implied might be the case.
I haven't heard from Danielle yet, btw, so I don't know whether a financial offer has been extended to me yet from Sybex.
I've been spending the last few days sorting through names and sending out preliminary contact messages. I'm aware that I have a chapter due Tuesday, and as long as I can get a grip on what the overall message of the book is (I'm still not really sure what is the essence of what works for community organizing and what doesn't, or what it all boils down to), I don't see a problem getting a draft of the short-ish (10 pp. +) first chapter in by then.
the bubble gets bigger [Waxy.org Links]
talkingpointsmemo has talked at various times about this phenomenon.
more interesting stuff if you click on action items.
fascinating to see how they're pointing people to call talk radio, viral -- using the internet to get folks to carry the message across to a different medium.
PressThink: Politically Significant Cluelessness
Bonus link:
I asked Mary Hodder of UC Berkeley, who has started a new blog on the napsterization of everything, what she knew about patterns in cluelessness. One of her explanations involved providers of a service that, once upon a time, people could not easily get elsewhere or create on their own. When that starts shifting because of dramatically lower information costs, the traditional suppliers are often the last to know. After all, they're still offering the same "essential" service at the same quality.
Sounds like Hodder should be on our wishlist.
After a few half-assed attempts to make FOAF files and read up on the enthusiasts of this genre, I got lost in the thickets of RDF or otherwise distracted and waited for someone to build a nice interface ontop of these useful personal triplet schemas.
Looks like someone did.
Someones rather. So, the second I get a moment free (ha!) I'll go back and start re-reading the documentation and the available wisdom, and reviewing the FOAF explorer site and other people's uses of and extension for FOAF and try to get with the program.
We don't need no stinkin' Friendster!
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